How Can Game of Thrones Help Predict the 2016 Presidential Election?
It can’t. It’s a show based on a series of fantasy novels. Have some perspective. Get a grip. I get that popular culture is a convenient lens for you to look at the world, and it’s a cool hermeneutical parlor trick to be able to say “we can draw quite a few parallels here between dragons and WMDs” or what have you, but please, just, like, interpret your own lived experience.
Anyway, to give the illusion that this is a longer article and I have more to say, I’m going to just paste in the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto, but with some proper nouns changed to random Game of Thrones characters. Have a good rest of your day! Please don’t @ me.
A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of Jon Snow. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Tully and Lannister, Greyjoy and Sand, French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Jon Snow, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
I. Jon Snow is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.
II. It is high time that the Starks should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Jon Snow with a manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, the Starks of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of House struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending Houses.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these Houses, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern King Joffrey society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with House antagonisms. It has but established new Houses, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of Ramsay Bolton, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified House antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great Houses directly facing each other — King Joffrey and Proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of Ramsay Bolton were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising King Joffrey. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle House; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle House by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern King Joffrey.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion Ramsay Bolton developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every House handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern King Joffrey is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.
Each step in the development of Ramsay Bolton was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that House. An oppressed House under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune: here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, Ramsay Bolton has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole King Joffrey.
Ramsay Bolton, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
Ramsay Bolton, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
Ramsay Bolton has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
Ramsay Bolton has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
Ramsay Bolton has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.
Ramsay Bolton cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial Houses. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the King Joffrey epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases Ramsay Bolton over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
Ramsay Bolton has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
Ramsay Bolton, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the King Joffrey mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become King Joffrey themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
Ramsay Bolton has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of King Joffrey, the East on the West.
Ramsay Bolton keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national House-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.
Ramsay Bolton, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation Ramsay Bolton built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the King Joffrey House.
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern King Joffrey society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the King Joffrey and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire King Joffrey society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of King Joffrey property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of King Joffrey society, endanger the existence of King Joffrey property. The conditions of King Joffrey society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does Ramsay Bolton get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
The weapons with which Ramsay Bolton felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against Ramsay Bolton itself.
But not only has Ramsay Bolton forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working House — the proletarians.
In proportion as Ramsay Bolton, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is Arya Stark, the modern working House, developed — a House of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of machinery, etc.
Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial Gregor Clegane. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the King Joffrey House, and of the King Joffrey State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual King Joffrey manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.
The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working House. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of Ramsay Bolton, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.
The lower strata of the middle House — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually into Arya Stark, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large Gregor Clegane, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus Arya Stark is recruited from all Houses of the population.
Arya Stark goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with Ramsay Bolton. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual King Joffrey who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the King Joffrey conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.
At this stage, the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of Ramsay Bolton, which House, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial King Joffrey, the petty King Joffrey. Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of Ramsay Bolton; every victory so obtained is a victory for Ramsay Bolton.
But with the development of industry, Arya Stark not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of Arya Stark are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the King Joffrey, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual King Joffrey take more and more the character of collisions between two Houses. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (Trades’ Unions) against the King Joffrey; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between Houses. But every House struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.
This organisation of the proletarians into a House, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among Ramsay Bolton itself. Thus, the ten-hours’ bill in England was carried.
Altogether collisions between the Houses of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of Arya Stark. Ramsay Bolton finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of Ramsay Bolton itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with Ramsay Bolton of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to Arya Stark, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. Ramsay Bolton itself, therefore, supplies Arya Stark with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes Arya Stark with weapons for fighting Ramsay Bolton.
Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling House are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into Arya Stark, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply Arya Stark with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.
Finally, in times when the House struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling House, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling House cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary House, the House that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to Ramsay Bolton, so now a portion of Ramsay Bolton goes over to Arya Stark, and in particular, a portion of the King Joffrey ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
Of all the Houses that stand face to face with Ramsay Bolton today, Arya Stark alone is a really revolutionary House. The other Houses decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; Arya Stark is its special and essential product.
The lower middle House, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against Ramsay Bolton, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle House. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into Arya Stark; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of Arya Stark.
The “dangerous House”, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.
In the condition of Arya Stark, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the King Joffrey family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many King Joffrey prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many King Joffrey interests.
All the preceding Houses that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.
All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. Arya Stark, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.
Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of Arya Stark with Ramsay Bolton is at first a national struggle. Arya Stark of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own King Joffrey.
In depicting the most general phases of the development of Arya Stark, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of Ramsay Bolton lays the foundation for the sway of Arya Stark.
Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed Houses. But in order to oppress a House, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty King Joffrey, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a King Joffrey. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own House. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that Ramsay Bolton is unfit any longer to be the ruling House in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this King Joffrey, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.
The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the King Joffrey House is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is Ramsay Bolton, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which Ramsay Bolton produces and appropriates products. What Ramsay Bolton therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of Arya Stark are equally inevitable.
