Possibilities for Change

Blog Post Marxist Framework:

            Through the Marxist framework of examination we desire to discover narratives which: 1. Perpetuate class inequality 2. Promote normativity (Status Quo) and 3. Create a sense of complacency in the audience. While we recognize that many of the direct and immediate harms shown through these systems appear in the first two questions I feel that the prevalence of normativity as a demand for complacency can actually be far more damaging to our sense of urgency in regards to change. In context the question I want to ask regards the manner in which content and form manufacture consent for the perpetuation of capitalism, specifically in context of the grand narrative deemed ‘Stability.’

            This grand narrative is actually perpetuated through its counterfactual. Throughout the past two decades the genre of doomsday films has taken off. These films display a world which usually possesses the vestige of civilization necessary to show what once was while maintaining a decay that proves civilization’s fall. In Day After Tomorrow (2004) we see the Statue of Liberty fallen, and direct reference to a nation’s collapse. I am Legend (2007) shows a world of human dismay too powerful even for the purest of living beings. The Avengers (2012) shows an estimated $160 Billion of infrastructure damage to Manhattan necessary to solve for the greed of tyrants. Every single one of these films displays a direct destruction of the subject’s safety, a destruction causally linked to the collapse of superstructures around it.

            This lack of safety is not just linked in a physical sense to the collapse of necessary infrastructure for life but is also connected to the identity we feel in connection with the artifacts of a capitalist system. In immediate riots subjects do damage to the infrastructure directly around them. They realize that the destruction of their neighbor’s car in no way impacts the superstructure they critique but they still feel as though the limited access to these symbols of success are nothing more than acquiesces given to placate the suffering majority. In the same way the places like Manhattan, the artifacts like the Statue of Liberty and even the innocence of a domesticated friend all fall prey to the destruction of a society, not even relationship can withstand instability.

            What is at issue then? My contention is that narratives like societal destruction actually encourage complacency within a system because they never suggest that instability is good. It can only be dangerous, a threat to our very goodness. We ignore the fact that change can only occur, for better or worse, when we are willing to step away from the security of a system with known values, set by the price we will pay.