Every chapter I stole from somewhere else

In Chapter 18 of Dracula, Bram Stoker offers a brief summary of the villain's identity: 'He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land. If it be so, then was he no common man, for in that time, and for centuries after, he was spoken of as the cleverest and the most cunning, as well as the bravest of the sons of the "land beyond the forest".'

The vagueness allows Stoker to gloss over a detail: Vlad III was the Voivode of Wallachia, a mostly lowland principality to the north of the Danube in present-day southern Romania. Transylvania, where Stoker's count has his home, is an entirely different (albeit neighbouring) region, a part of medieval Hungary. Stoker rightly thought the legend of Vlad the Impaler was too good to pass up, so he fudged his history a bit. And we don't mind because he did it in the service of a novel that presents, despite awkward, overheated prose and reactionary politics, a good story.

You know what's pretty much the opposite of a good story, though? Dracula Untold. Seriously.

In the fifteenth century, Vlad Dracula (Luke Evans) rules the principality of Transylvania [sic] as a vassal of the Turkish Empire. When the Turkish envoy Hamza Bey (Ferdinand Kingsley) demands that 1,000 Transylvanian boys - including Vlad's own son (Art Parkinson) - be turned over to the Turks for training as Janissary soldiers, as Vlad himself was, the Prince is distraught. After his attempt to plead personally with Sultan Mehmed II (Dominic Cooper) fails, Vlad refuses to budge, killing the Ottoman party tasked with bringing back the hostages and plunging Transylvania into war.

Realising he lacks the strength to fight off the Turkish army, Vlad visits the monstrous denizen of a mountain cave (Charles Dance), who lends him his vampiric powers. If Vlad manages to resist the craving for human blood for three days, he will return to his normal human self. If he gives in, however, he will become an immortal bloodsucking fiend forever. Realising he has little choice if he is to save his people, Vlad accepts the wager and turns into a superpowered, if increasingly sinister version of himself.

It would be difficult to argue that Dracula was exactly crying out for an origin story. (Not impossible: I for one would love to see a historical fantasy series set in the fifteenth-century Balkans on TV.) But dredging up the making of a hero has been the fashionable way to rekindle audience interest in washed-up properties since Batman Begins in 2005 (Sam Raimi's 2002 Spider-Man was an origin story too, but saw no need to go on about it). Christopher Nolan's Batman films also gifted us the flawed, introspective hero that's spread like measles throughout corporate filmmaking. It's an approach that works fantastically for Batman, but for other characters - like, it turns out, Dracula - it's potentially lethal.

Combine a cookie-cutter origin story, a dark and brooding protagonist and the burden that Dracula Untold is the first film in the Marvel-aping rebooted Universal Monsters cinematic universe, and you have a recipe for disaster. The franchise angle forces the film to end on a bizarre and awful modern-day scene, while its slavish paint-by-numbers approach causes Dracula Untold to run into a serious problem: namely, that Dracula's appeal isn't as a hero, glum or otherwise. What people pay for when going to see a Dracula film is a charismatic immortal villain. Attempting to tell the story of how a virtuous aristocrat became an undead monster isn't impossible. But it would at the very least require the courage to make your protagonist, you know, evil by the end of the film. Instead Evans's Dracula stubbornly remains the same reasonably decent concerned dad, whether he's celebrating Easter with his adoring subjects or slaking his thirst on the blood of thousands of mooks. Worrying about audience sympathies causes writers Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless to simply give up on character development entirely.

But then, Dracula Untold isn't trying to tell the story of how a monster came to be because, apart from the most cursory of nods, it isn't a horror film. It's a superhero picture, if the shameless and uninspired cribbing from the conventions of the DC and Marvel films of the last decade didn't give that away, and a particularly asinine example of the form: cardboard villains, tedious powers and an adherence to formula so rigid that it chokes whatever life should be there right out of the film. There's even a scene in which silver fills in for kryptonite. In the face of so much formula, who could blame first-time director Gary Shore for falling asleep at the helm?

The film borrows extensively from what has come before. The opening scene, for example - in which voiceover narration explains to us scenes of boys being put through gruelling military training that includes a lot of whipping - is a bafflingly close retelling of the start of 300. Frank Miller's anti-Persian tirade provides the backbone for much of what follows, although Dracula Untold lacks the earlier film's full-throated fascist propagandising. Its Turks are mostly uninspired generic baddies, although the ominous crescents on their tents and repeated references to their menace to the capitals of Christian Europe are quite enough, in the age of Anders Behring Breivik, to qualify as grossly irresponsible. The film is, not to put too fine a point on it, racist trash, its obvious brainlessness aggravating rather than lessening its offensive pandering to fashionable prejudice.

Then there's Vlad's leading of the Transylvanian people to the safety of a monastery in the mountains, borrowed among other antecedents from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. It's indicative of the film's gross lack of any sense of scale: the whole of Transylvania seems to consist of at most a couple of hundred people located in a single castle, and the entire war between Vlad and the Ottoman Empire is over in the required three days (in the real world, meanwhile, a medieval army would take well over a month to cover the distance between Istanbul and Vlad's historical capital of Târgoviște).

Nothing in Dracula Untold, in short, feels like it takes place in a plausible approximation of the real world. It looks fake, too: I left the film convinced its backgrounds were entirely computer-generated only to find out it was shot on location in Northern Ireland - a popular filming location in the age of Game of Thrones though not, alas, one famed for its scenic mountain ranges. The cold metallic colour palette chosen by cinematographer John Schwartzman seems an odd fit, too, for the backwoods medievalism the story would seem to require.

It's tired hackwork, is what it is, and the utterly uninspired performances reflect this. Evans tries, but he has literally nothing to work with; of all the people onscreen, only Charles Dance manages to have some fun with a scenery-chewing, genuinely effective performance. Say what you will about corporate filmmaking, but it guarantees at least a certain professionalism. Dracula Untold, alas, has literally nothing to offer beyond that base amount of competence. It's a product so soulless that it's difficult to be upset no-one involved in it managed to care.

The whale-road

Mastodon's Leviathan is one of the greatest concept albums in the history of metal. The band's rolling, driving sound is ideally suited to the sea, a mythologised space if ever there was one. On Leviathan, the ocean is home to ancient sea-beasts, Norse gods and Leviathan himself: the white whale.

But I don't respond to Leviathan out of romantic fascination alone. I grew up in the coastal floodplains of northern Germany, where only a dyke protects us from the sea. When the levees break, as last seen in 1962, the results can be disastrous. (A memorial plaque in the town hall places the 1962 high-water mark half-way up the stairs between the ground and first floor.)

Before there was a dyke system, the coastline shifted radically several times. In a fourteenth-century storm surge known as the Groote Mandrenke ('great drowning of men' in Low German), the area where we now live was torn off from the mainland and remained an island for three hundred years. Small wonder that in those days churches were built on artificial mounds, to provide refuge to people and their cattle in times of need.

The people here were peasants and fishermen, but they were not above deliberately shipwrecking passing vessels by manipulating signal fires. The sea could kill but it also presented opportunity, be it Hanseatic trading (and piracy!) across the North Sea to England and Scandinavia or, in later centuries, the international connections of Hamburg and Bremen. Old captains' houses sometimes have whalebone fences; a twentieth-century church in a nearby town is built in the shape of a ship.

With industrial society the importance of the sea has waned, but its mythic power is undiminished. There are annual windjammer parades and numerous museums and preserved spaces. When I was a child, I adored stories of the age of sail, people heading into the unknown on the far side of the world. Turns out I'm still into that sort of thing.

If your neighbour worships twenty gods: a note on biblical law and religious toleration

Christians are used to seeing secular society - whose institutions favour no particular faith - as a dire threat. To John Piper, for example, '[t]he modern secular world... tries to remove God from his all-creating, all- sustaining, all-defining, all-governing place [and] has no choice but to make itself god'. In other words, a secular society is blasphemous by definition. Against this conservative appraisal, I'll suggest secularism is most fruitfully understood not as a menace destroying western civilisation from within, but as a blessing longed for by those who did not enjoy it, made possible by Jesus' death on the cross.

At the same time, I'll argue that the liberal understanding of secularism is ahistorical and impossible to square with biblical evidence. Here, for example, is the excellent blogger Fred Clark, arguing against the US Catholic bishops' attempt to stop contraceptive services for women:

'It does me no injury,' Thomas Jefferson wrote, 'for my neighbour to say there are 20 gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.' The advocates of burka-logic [sic] disagree. They insist that the very presence of such irreligious neighbors does them an injury - the injury of constraining their freedom to live unperturbed by the constant reminder of such blasphemies.

This quintessentially liberal argument - my neighbour's religious predilections do me no harm, so I have no business constraining him - cannot survive an encounter with the God of the Old Testament. At Sinai God makes a covenant is with Israel as a community to ensure correct religious observance and moral behaviour in the land (Deuteronomy 1:1-14). The Mosaic Law does not offer any room for religious toleration. Indeed the Israelites are explicitly commanded to destroy all traces of Canaanite paganism if they wish to enjoy the land (Deuteronomy 12:1-4).

Contrary to Jefferson, under Old Testament law my neighbour's heterodox religious observance does pick my pocket and break my leg. The Religious Right's notion of 'individual responsibility' is quite absent in the Bible. God repeatedly threatens to punish people for sins they have not themselves committed, 'visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and fourth generation' (Exodus 20:5, Exodus 34:7, Numbers 14:18, Deuteronomy 5:9, and many more). Positively, God considers whole communities more kindly on account of a few righteous people (Genesis 18:22-32, Romans 11:28).

The insistence that Israel is judged as a whole for the actions committed in its midst rather than as individuals is perhaps best encapsulated by Deuteronomy 21:1-9:

If in the land that the LORD your God is giving you to possess someone is found slain, lying in the open country, and it is not known who killed him, then your elders and your judges shall come out, and they shall measure the distance to the surrounding cities. And the elders of the city that is nearest to the slain man shall take a heifer that has never been worked and that has not pulled in a yoke. And the elders of that city shall bring the heifer down to a valley with running water, which is neither ploughed nor sown, and shall break the heifer's neck there in the valley. Then the priests, the sons of Levi, shall come forward... And all the elders of that city nearest to the slain man shall wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the valley, and they shall testify, 'Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it shed. Accept atonement, o LORD, for your people Israel, whom you have redeemed, and do not set the guilt of innocent blood in the midst of your people Israel, so that their blood guilt be atoned for.' So you shall purge the guilt of innocent blood from your midst, when you do what is right in the sight of the LORD.

Here the murderer is unknown and unidentifiable, but the nearest settlement is required to offer a sacrifice in atonement for the sin committed lest it be visited upon their heads. The action, not the acting subject, is the primary term. Nor does the Bible consider the motives of offenders. Distinguishing murder from accidental killings, for example, is an innovation of the ninth century, when earnest scholars attempted to settle matters humanius (more humanely) than the often harsh Church Fathers. (So much, incidentally, for the notion that a concern for human welfare reveals a 'man-centred' world-view.)

We tend to take a modern legal understanding of individual responsibility for granted, but it can seriously distort our reading of the Bible. The concept of bloodguilt - that sin, if unatoned, will return to haunt even those who have not themselves committed it - is accepted by New Testament writers (Luke 11:50-51, Revelation 6:10). Augustine's notion that original sin is passed on through biological parenthood - logically consigning those who die in the womb to damnation - would also be impossible without bloodguilt.

But that isn't the whole story. In the New Testament, God's people are not told to enforce obedience among their nonbelieving neighbours. Indeed the New Testament is marked by disinterest in secular power at best, and outright hostility at worst (Revelation 17:1-6). The death of Jesus at the cross changes everything. From that point onwards, it is not biological descent from Abraham but faith that determines membership in the people of God (Romans 9:30). The ethno-religious boundaries of ancient Israel have been shattered. God's people are now of every nation and tongue, no longer identifiable with individual peoples or states.

Secularism - a society no longer compelled to enforce religious obedience among its subjects, on pain of judgment - is thus made possible by the death of Jesus. When an individual puts her faith in Christ she cannot become his without also becoming part of the people of God; God's covenant is made with his people as a whole. There is no salvation for the individual outside the collective salvation of God's people (which is why I continue to find Calvinism's emphasis on Christ's successful purchase of a definite people compelling). It is because of this ingrafting into the people of God that baptism - a public symbol of membership in God's family - is important. But it no longer coincides with membership in an earthly nation or obedience to a set of temporal laws.

If the potential for secularism was present from Jesus' death onwards, that potential had to remain unrealised in pre-modern societies, which functioned through personal relationships and localised hierarchies sealed and enforced through oaths. Public declarations of political and religious loyalty - which are quite superfluous in modern states - were vital to rulers who lacked the centralised bureaucracy necessary to enforce obedience among their subjects. (For example, a modern state knows who all its subjects are and where they live, something the ancients could not have imagined in their wildest dreams.)

Even the Roman state, often praised for its tolerance, could not solve the problem of religious diversity by becoming secular - atheist as a state - but only by being radically inclusivist, declaring all faiths valid and adding foreign deities to its pantheon. Still, it required that its subjects subordinate their loyalties to the imperial cult, and those who could not comply - Christians, most famously - had to suffer its wrath. Pre-modern societies that did not compel everyone's conversion (the political entities of the Islamic world, for example) nonetheless had to privilege one faith.

It was only with the vastly increased capacity of the state from the French Revolution onwards, and its sweeping aside of motley feudal ties and privileges, that overwhelmingly Christian societies could provide freedom of religion for their subjects without breaking down. Our nonconformist forebears - the very people from whom modern evangelicalism is descended - ardently campaigned and prayed for a secular state that would not exclude them on the basis of religion, and eventually obtained that sweet freedom.

Kim Jong-il memorial edition

So. Farewell, Kim Jong-il. Mourned only by latter-day Stalinists, the Dear Leader inflicted unspeakable barbarities on his people: his love, as Philip Gourevitch says, was indistinguishable from contempt. But besides being a terroristic dictator, Kim Jong-il was also, improbably, the world's most evil cinephile.*

And he wasn't content with passively enjoying his collection of 20,000 tapes and DVDs. No, sir, Kim went out there and made films, none more famous than the subject of this review, the 1985 creature feature Pulgasari. Gojira rip-off though it may be, Pulgasari, in all its glory and inadequacy, remains a weirdly chilling testament to both the horrors and the odd ambition of North Korea.

Kim, who had written On the Art of the Cinema in 1973, was concerned about the North Korean film industry even while his father was still alive. His flunkeys could churn out turgid communist propaganda, but they lacked the grand vision the people's republic required.

Shin Sang-ok (1926-2006) was one of South Korea's most successful directors. With a string of hits during the fifties and sixties - the Golden Age of Korean cinema - Shin was praised even in the North for the 'dedication and faith in the people' his works displayed. When the military regime of Park Chung-hee closed down Shin's studios in 1978, Kim Jong-il saw an opportunity. His agents abducted Shin's ex-wife, the actress Choi Eun-Hee, in Hong Kong, then nabbed the director himself when he went to investigate.

If kidnapping is the sincerest form of flattery, Shin had little cause to appreciate the compliment at first. Making several attempts to escape after his arrival in Pyongyang, he was confined to prison for four years, where he subsisted on grass, salt and rice. It wasn't until 1983 that Shin and his ex-wife were released and reunited at a party organised by Kim. There, the Dear Leader's heir apparent explained his plans. The couple - who soon remarried at Kim's suggestion - were to live in luxury while Shin directed films for the regime, Kim overseeing him as executive producer. The arrangement worked for several years, until Shin and Choi managed to flee to the United States in 1986.

Their most prestigious - and most lavishly budgeted - project was Pulgasari. A giant monster film, Pulgasari grew naturally out of Kim's obsessions: besides gangster films and the Friday the 13th** series, he was also a fan of the Japanese Gojira movies. Korean gwoesu ('giant monster') films, based partly on the Japanese daikaijū tradition going back to King Kong, partly on native Korean storytelling traditions, were already a popular genre in the South. (The film was, in fact, given a limited release in Seoul in 1998, where it bombed.)

In fourteenth-century feudal Korea, the peasants are oppressed by an evil king (Pak Yong-hok). Rebels, led by Inde (Ham Gi-sop) are harrying the king's forces from the mountains. The governor (Pak Pong-ilk) has decided to melt down the peasants' farm tools and cooking pots to make weapons; this leads to a riot in which the village blacksmith (Ri Gwon) is arrested. He's starved into submission in prison, while his fellow prisoners go on hunger strike in solidarity. (It's worth noting the film was made before the famine of the 1990s killed millions of Koreans.) With his last strength, the blacksmith moulds a small figurine of a reptilian monster out of rice, and when he dies his spirit lives on in the creature.

Soon, the blacksmith's daughter Ami (Chang Son-Hui) and her brother Ana (Ri Jong-uk) discover that the figurine is alive, and hungry: having devoured Ami's needles, it begins eating all the available metal at the forge and turns into a rather cute child-sized creature ('Little Man' Machan, a Japanese actor and former midget wrestler). Pulgasari - the name of the creature, after a legendary monster - saves Inde from execution by the king's forces and joins the rebel army. The task facing General Fuan (Ri Riyonun) is to stop the gigantic beast through increasingly implausible schemes before it helps the ragtag bunch of rebels overrun the whole country.

As in most gwoesu films, the monster appears early and receives a great deal of screen time. Kim clearly decided nothing but the best would do, thus guaranteeing the only reason anyone outside North Korea ever saw Pulgasari: the monster was created by the legendary Toho Studios, the home of Gojira. By guaranteeing safe passage, Kim managed to convince Nakano Teruyoshi to sign on as special effects director, while Satsuma Kenpachiro, who'd played Gojira before and would do so again, was the man in the monster suit.

Satsuma gives by far the best performance in the film. Compared to the overacting of Ham and Chang (on whose distraught face Shin lavishes countless close-ups), Satsuma manages to convey a range of emotions using body language alone (the other actors seem to have redubbed many of their lines). But he's overshadowed by the terrible monster design (it's sort of like Gojira, only with horns and worse in every single way) and the too-obvious special effects trickery. Pulgasari is virtually never seen in the same frame as the actors, except when human-sized, but I'd love to see the six-foot needles they must have used for an early scene.

Pulgasari is revolutionary propaganda: the monster creates a fictional scenario in which agrarian communism triumphs over the evil of feudalism. But there are rather sinister undertones to this superficially simple narrative. In the course of the film, Pulgasari increasingly overshadows the human characters both literally and metaphorically (Inde, our ostensible protagonist early in the film, is eventually killed by the king's soldiers in a throwaway scene). What's more, any 'faith in the people' is rather undercut by the fact that they're shown to be quite helpless until bailed out by a hundred-foot reptilian monster that singlehandedly accomplishes the liberation mere human resistance couldn't.

For this reason it's tempting to read the film as a fictionalised version of the DPRK's founding myth, with Pulgasari as a metaphor for Kim Il-sung. In that case the film's ending becomes even more intriguing. After killing the king and establishing a peasants' republic, Pulgasari - who, recall, turns swords into sustenance without going by way of ploughshares - begins to consume all the metal in the land. Soon the peasants are forced to offer Pulgasari their pots, pans and tools. Realising that the monster is unwittingly destroying the people, Ami convinces Pulgasari to turn to stone (or something like that: the ending is terrifically unclear).

It's otherwise a watchable film: not good, certainly, but Shin's work is competent at least, and the scene of Pulgasari's creation is really quite beautiful (if hindered rather than helped by the soundtrack, a very 1980s combination of synthesizers and traditional Korean music). The martial arts choreography, too, is efficient even if it never shines (the hundreds of extras are real-life North Korean soldiers, apparently). But beneath the feel-good propaganda of Pulsagari, a Stalinist horror lurks.

*In a world where Michael Bay and Eli Roth continue to find funding, that's saying something.
**I, of course, prefer the morally much less objectionable Halloween series.

Bull of the University of Nottingham, Against Rod Thornton

As you've no doubt heard, our university has suspended Rod Thornton, a lecturer in the School of Politics, for writing an article that ruthlessly exposes the university's lies and bullying during and after the 'Nottingham Two' affair in 2008. When the Guardian and the BBC ran the story, the university released a statement claiming Rod Thornton 'defamed' his colleagues with 'baseless accusations'.

I'm sure you're thinking what I'm thinking: lame. That's the best they could come up with? 'Defaming'? Clearly the art of vigorous denouncement without engaging in debate has suffered since the good old days. They need help. So here's a suggestion of how the university ought to have attempted to suppress legitimate whistleblowing - with apologies to Pope Gregory XI:

Bull of the University of Nottingham, Against Rod Thornton
The University, servus servorum sapientiae, to her beloved children the students of the University, in the diocese of Russell, grace and benediction.
We are compelled to wonder and grieve that you, who, in consideration of the favours and privileges conceded to your student body by the University, and on account of your familiarity with the Code of Discipline, in whose sea you navigate, by the gift of knowledge, with auspicious oar, you, who ought to be, as it were, warriors and champions of the orthodox faith, without which there is no economic growth, - that you through a certain sloth and neglect allow tares to spring up amidst the pure wheat in the fields of your glorious University aforesaid; and what is still more pernicious, even continue to grow to maturity. And you are quite careless, as has been lately reported to us, as to the extirpation of these tares; with no little clouding of a bright name, danger to your careers, contempt of the laws of this land, and injury to the faith above mentioned. And what pains us the more, is that this increase of the tares aforesaid is known in London before the remedy of extirpation has been applied in the School of Politics where they sprang up. By the insinuation of many, if they are indeed worthy of belief, deploring it deeply, it has come to our ears that Rod Thornton, Lecturer of the School of Politics, at the University of Nottingham, Expert in Terrorism (would that he were not also Master of Errors), has fallen into such a detestable madness that he does not hesitate to dogmatise and publicly preach, or rather vomit forth from the recesses of his breast, certain propositions and conclusions which are erroneous and false. He has cast himself also into the depravity of preaching heretical dogmas which strive to subvert and weaken the state of the whole University and even secular polity, some of which doctrines, in changed terms, it is true, seem to express the perverse opinions and unlearned learning of Rizwaan Sabir of cursed memory, and of Hicham Yezza, whose book is extant, rejected and cursed by our predecessor, Sir Colin Campbell, of happy memory. This he has done at the University of Nottingham, lately glorious in its power and in the abundance of its resources, but more glorious still in the glistening piety of its faith, and in the distinction of its sacred learning; producing also many men illustrious for their exact knowledge of the Code of Discipline, mature in the gravity of their character, conspicuous in devotion, defenders of the Management Board. He has polluted certain of the faithful by sprinkling them with these doctrines, and led them away from the right paths of the aforesaid faith to the brink of perdition.
Wherefore, since we are not willing, nay, indeed, ought not to be willing, that so deadly a pestilence should continue to exist with our connivance, a pestilence which, if it is not opposed in its beginnings, and torn out by the roots in its entirety, will be reached too late by medicines when it has infected very many with its contagion; we command you with strict admonition, in virtue of your sacred obedience, and under penalty of the deprivation of all the favours, indulgences, and privileges granted to you  by the said University, for the future not to permit to be asserted or proposed to any extent whatever, the opinions, conclusions, and propositions which are in variance with good morals and faith, even when those proposing strive to defend them under a certain fanciful wresting of words or of terms. Moreover, you are on our authority to suspend the said Rod, or cause him to be suspended. Besides, if there should be, which God forbid, among you opponents stained with these errors, and if they should obstinately persist in them, proceed vigorously and earnestly to a similar removal of them, and otherwise as shall seem good to you. Be vigilant to repair your negligence which you have hitherto shown in the premises, and so obtain our gratitude and favour, besides the honor and reward of the Management Board's recompense.

Better, eh? They really ought to get some papal scribes to smarten up their public relations effort. But seriously: the circumstances surrounding all this (for which please read Rod Thornton's paper, 112 pages long though it may be) stink to high heaven. It is unfortunate that our university, which prides itself on its allegedly open, democratic culture, should seek to attack its own students and lecturers and attempt to suppress dissent. We have a management culture that rewards loyalty and punishes heresy, one that disdains to follow its own procedures - it was a moment of grim amusement for me when Rod Thornton in his paper became the third person I know of to independently call the university 'Kafkaesque' in print. We can't let them get away with it.

Economic apotheosis, with reference to South Park

In the South Park episode ‘Margaritaville’, Randy becomes a preacher, explaining the Great Money Disappearing Event to a rapt audience:

We have become lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of the Economy! There are those who will say that the Economy has forsaken us! Nay! You have forsaken the Economy! And now you know the Economy's wrath! O thoust can shop at a sporting goods store, but knowest thou that the Economy will take away thy Broncos' cap from thine head! Mock the Economy without fear! Thine own stockbrokers... now lie dead by their own hand and thou knowest that thy stockbrokers did not fear the Economy! Well here we are, my friends! You have brought the Economy's vengeance upon yourselves! … We must all wear sheets instead of buying clothes that need detergent! Instead of cars that take gasoline we can get around on llamas from Drake's farm! Instead of video games that take batteries and software, our kids will play with squirrels! We must let the Economy know that we are capable of respecting it! No more needless spending! The Economy is our shepherd. We shall not want.

Modern society, whose elites pride themselves on their rationality, has made ‘the economy’ into a god. Not an ever-kind and smiling one, mind you: this one puts the Greek gods to shame in its fickleness. Economists, who are its priests, cannot predict its actions; governments cannot tame it; its victims must bear its wrath cheerfully as the vengeance of a power beyond comprehension. And yet ‘the economy’ is fundamentally a set of relationships between human beings: it is man-made. Where does this mystification come from?

According to Nicos Poulantzas, the concept of the ‘free labourer’, who owns nothing but his labour power,

generates the relative separation of the State and the economic sphere… a separation which underlies the characteristic institutional framework of the capitalist State, since it maps out the new spaces and respective fields of the State and the economy. This separation of the State and the space of the reproduction of capital is therefore specific to capitalism: it must not be understood as a particular effect of essentially autonomous instances composed of elements that remain constant whatever the mode of production. (State, Power, Socialism, p. 18.)

In feudal society, by contrast, producers owned (that is, lived on and tilled) the land and the tools, so extracting their product involved the direct application of legitimate state violence; and the guy who took away your produce was quite obviously the same person that ruled you politically. I want to suggest, however, that there is a different approach to the question of why ‘the economy’ appears as a thing capable of action in capitalism. The explanation, I think, lies in capitalism’s capacity to produce periodic crises.

We tend to accept as given that economic crises happen; despite the protestations of bankers and politicians, everyone knows that the next crisis is certain. In that environment, it is difficult to remember that internal crisis was simply unknown in feudal society. Since commodity production was only a tiny proportion of overall economic activity, there could be no crisis of overproduction; since finance in the modern sense hardly existed and was only employed by a narrow sector of society, financial crises were also impossible. Crises of confidence could not occur where economic activity was not based on investment and information travelled very slowly, preventing panic. The feudal economy’s need for natural resources was insignificant compared to the enormous appetite of today’s productive sector, and hence no supply crises could occur. Thus internal systemic crisis was impossible as long as capitalism as a mode of production was restricted to a small part of the urban population. The feudal economy was not based on explosive growth, but could exist in equilibrium.

Not, of course, that feudal society was incapable of crisis per se. External crisis not only existed, but could have harrowing consequences. Droughts, floods, excessively cold winters and other natural disasters easily led to famine. The low productive surplus feudalism generated often resulted in large loss of life in such crises. External crises could profoundly affect social relations, of course. The Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century killed so many English peasants that the position of the remaining peasants vis-à-vis the nobility was immediately strengthened by the shortage of labour power. King Edward III cracked down in 1351, laying down laws to limit peasants’ gains. The Black Death led to a wave of migration to the cities and the creation of opportunities for women, as economic sectors previously monopolised by men opened up because of mass death.

Such crises have much in common with capitalist crises. Both strike suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, and destroy livelihoods and fortunes, leading to a decline in living standards and in many cases to starvation and death (be it directly or indirectly, through ‘structural adjustment’). Both tend to lead to political polarisation and a rise in tension and. Both, in short, rapidly destroy the lives their stunned victims were accustomed to and create a new, much more unpleasant reality. But of course there is a key difference between the two. The sort of crisis that could ravage medieval society was caused by acts of God. Capitalist crisis is man-made: indeed natural disasters tend to create wonderful opportunities for capitalists rather than impoverish them. The former sort of crisis was caused by the mode of production’s vulnerability to external events; the latter kind is inherent in the mode of production itself.

That difference, it seems to me, neatly explains how ‘the economy’ became a sphere of life quite distinct from others – politics and everyday life. The inexplicable natural disasters that befell medieval society were attributed to God; but since, at least officially, economic life is man-made and God has no hand in it, he cannot be held responsible. The system can inflict punishment all by itself. Thus begins ‘the economy’s’ reign of terror as it smites its terrified victims. We must propitiate the economy and treat it well, or expect awesome vengeance.

Of course, in reality ‘the economy’ is an abstraction from sets of social relations, productive and commercial. Mystification, the elevation of the abstraction into a godlike being (alienation), serves dominant interests because it denies individuals’ and classes’ specific roles and responsibilities. Blame the bankers? Not if Bob Diamond has anything to do with it. Failure is an orphan, and when crisis strikes it can only be ‘the economy’ that somehow malfunctioned. Economic crises become as natural as the seasons rather than being, as they should be, associated with a particular form of society – one that can be overcome.

The non-existence of ‘the economy’ in pre-modern society also points us to what will happen to this strange god if an alternative form of life is attempted. For, as people begin to take control of their own lives, as the profit motive is removed, production is for use rather than profit and crisis disappears, ‘the economy’ will lose its dreadful power and, like all false gods, will wither away.

Feeding upon majesty

This is less an argument than a musing. In Hamlet 3.3.7-23, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz explain how protecting the King of Denmark from Hamlet's schemes means the salvation of the whole realm:

GUILDENSTERN We will ourselves provide.
Most holy and religious fear it is
To keep those many many bodies safe
That live and feed upon your majesty.
ROSENCRANTZ The single and peculiar life is bound
With all the strength and armour of the mind
To keep itself from noyance; but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests
The lives of many. The cess of majesty
Dies not alone but like a gulf doth draw
What's near it with it; or it is a massy wheel,
Fixed on the summit of the highest mount
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortised and adjoined, which when it falls
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh but with a general groan.
(Edition: Thompson and Taylor, London: Arden, 2006, based upon the 1604-5 Second Quarto Text)

This is a brilliantly expressed example of the literature that pictures the king's body as microcosm and allegory for the state and nation. Here the king's body underpins those of all his subjects, and the end of the monarchy ('the cess of majesty') spells national doom.

It strikes me that while there are medieval antecedents for this, the supremacy of the monarch in this passage really goes beyond anything that would have been considered acceptable in the middle ages. A medieval monarch's position, while instituted by God, even rhetorically required the support of his nobles, freemen and of course the Church. The early modern exalted position of the monarch, however, sidelines or subordinates (see, for example, the king as head of the Church in Protestant countries) these earlier actors.

Moreover, this elevation of the monarch was connected to a massive growth in the state, which did not truly exist before the late middle ages. Standing armies and hosts of civil servants (arguably petty-bourgeois wage recipients) marked the numerical growth in the state, which from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century greatly expanded its administrative and repressive capabilities. This coincides, of course, with the beginnings of a mercantile and later manufacturing bourgeoisie in the towns and the creation of the first, commercial colonial empires. Why is absolutism linked to the decline of feudalism and the growth of the bourgeoisie? Please do recommend reading and share your thoughts.