Will Marxism Go Mad After the End of the World?

Dark Angel, opening sequence (2000).

The June morning those terrorist bozos whacked us with an electromagnetic pulse from eighty miles up. You always hear people yapping on how it was all different before the pulse. Land of milk and honey blah, blah, blah, blah, with plenty of food and jobs and things that actually worked. I was too young to remember, so, whatever … The thing I don’t get is why they call it a depression. I mean, everybody’s broke … but they aren’t really all that depressed. Life goes on.

—Max Guevara

Two forgotten TV shows. One is Dark Angel; the other, Electric Dreams. The former appeared on the Fox network in fall 2000 and marketed Hollywood’s most bankable director, James Cameron, as its marquee producer. Cameron also directed the show’s pilot episode. Electric Dreams premiered on Amazon in spring 2018 and attempted to reproduce the success of Netflix’s near-future sci-fi anthology Black Mirror. William Gibson’s cyberpunk inspired the former; the latter drew directly from the paranoid, mid-century science fiction of Philip K. Dick. “Autofac,” the eighth episode of Electric Dreams, takes place, like Dark Angel, in a world that follows the collapse of conventional capitalism.

In Dark Angel, the economy of the key capitalist nation, the United States of America, crashes after terrorists detonate (on June 1, 2008) an electromagnetic “pulse” that completely fries banking information stored by computers. Suddenly, no one knows who has money, who owes money, who is owed money, and who has no money. This confusion plunges the US into an economic malaise that’s compared to a Third World nation.

In “Autofac,” a nuclear conflict erupts between top capitalist nations, bringing the world as we know it to an end. But at least in the US, the production of consumer goods continues despite the incineration of all the standard supports of the market-centralized economy: government agencies, the army, schools, and all the related institutions that Louis Althusser famously and correctly identified as the “ideological state apparatus.” What remains in “Autofac” is a corporation resembling Amazon that cannot stop producing and distributing apparel and appliances to the tribes in the emerging Disaster Eden. But this production, which is completely automated, and is ever-hungry for resources, only increases the pollution of an already over-polluted world.

Dark Angel is set in Seattle in 2019. The city shelters a young fugitive who was bioengineered by a military organization, Manticore, that appears not to be connected to a state but clearly was once a part of the US Army. (Manticore is much like the Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout, a postapocalyptic TV series that premiered on Amazon in spring 2024. Fallout is based on a video game of the same name and is a mix of Gattaca, with its retrofuturism, and Michael Haneke’s Euro-bleak Time of the Wolf. The fictional Manticore and Brotherhood of Steel reflect, in many ways, the very real military corporation Blackwater.) The soldier name of Dark Angel’s fugitive is X5-452; her street name is Max Guevara, an obvious mix of Marx and Che Guevara. She is played by a racially mixed Jessica Alba.

The main character in “Autofac” is a young woman whose name, Zabriskie, gestures to Michelangelo Antonioni’s second English-language film, Zabriskie Point, which is partly set in Death Valley, California. Whereas Dark Angel locates its postapocalyptic revolutionary consciousness in Kantian cosmopolitanism, “Autofac” locates its own in a counterculture inspired by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. In this respect, “Autofac” recalls the off-grid hippies in Robert Kramer’s 1975 documentary Milestones and, more recently, in Sara Jane Chiro’s film Lane 1974. Zabriskie was, before the nuclear war, the CEO of a tech company that turns out to be Autofac; in the aftermath, she is the brains behind her tribe’s effort to bring down the factory that keeps producing unwanted things. Juno Temple plays Zabriskie.

The cyberpunk subculture consisted mainly of the hipster class; the counterculture consisted mainly of the hippy class. Both presented a challenge to capitalism that was different from conventional class struggle. In The New Spirit of Capitalism, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello designated hipster and hippie resistance as cultural, and traditional forms of resistance (demands for higher wages, health care, and the like) as social. In our world—the world after the second decade of the present century—the hipsters and hippies of Dark Angel and “Autofac” are economically expressed by the gig economy and the health-food industry, respectively. In these TV shows, the two groups are confronted with the same problem: the reanimation of capitalism after its apparent death. But this reanimation takes different forms. The capitalism that survives in Dark Angel has the appearance of a zombie; in “Autofac,” that of Frankenstein.

The hipsters in Dark Angel are led—and in some cases, directly funded—by a moral billionaire, Logan Cale (Michael Weatherly), who hacks what remains of the mainstream media to post reports on corrupt leaders and police officials. The hipsters have no idea that the problem they are faced with in a gutted Seattle is nothing other than the zombified form of capitalism that emerged after Nixon delinked the US dollar from gold in 1971, thereby effectively ending the capitalist system established in 1944 by the key figure of the Bretton Woods conference, the American Keynesian Harry Dexter White. (This episode in US economic history is called “the Nixon Shock.”)

Though the hipsters—the most prominent of which is the military-grade transgenic Max—are committed to the billionaire hacktivist’s mission to impose a social order with checks and balances, destroying what remains of capitalism is not even considered. “Life goes on,” to use Max’s matter-of-fact words. The US can continue as a Third World country, in the sense that, say, Zimbabwe could become a First World country. Up or down, negative or positive—nothing, in essence, changes. All that the electromagnetic pulse did was increase the number of dirt-poor Americans from around 10 percent to around 95 percent. And the only major consequence is that the US is no longer the promised land. That’s now found up north. The Canada of Dark Angel, which has apparently maintained its social-democratic programs, becomes for Americans what the US is for working-class Mexicans and Central Americans today.

And now we come to the heart of the matter. The hippie resistance to Frankenstein capitalism in “Autofac” has, when closely considered, far greater revolutionary potential than anything that can be found in the forty-three episodes of Dark Angel, a show that amounts to transferring 1970s New York City to Seattle, an emerging tech hub at the end of the twentieth century. The hippies of “Autofac,” unlike the hipsters of Dark Angels, are actually at war with capitalism. It is not a matter of “life goes on.” It is a matter of: How do we get these machines to stop? Here we enter a conception of capitalism that hits upon a neglected school of Marxism, one that began with Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky’s book Studien zur Theorie und Geschichte der Handelskrisen in England (yet to be translated into English). This school was then processed negatively and positively1 by Rosa Luxemburg in The Accumulation of Capital, and was later introduced to mainstream economics, with limited success, by one of the founders of post-Keynesian economics, the Polish economist Michał Kalecki, in his 1933 essay “Stimulating the World Business Upswing.” This school of Marxism focuses on capitalism’s self-determining machinic logic.

“Autofac” certainly reflects the conventional Marxist analysis of capitalism, which recognizes that at its heart, the system is about things and not people. But Tugan-Baranovsky, a member of the Legal Marxist school that formed in Russian at the end of the nineteenth century, took this concept of capitalist inhumanism to its conclusion: it can continue as is until the end of time, without humans, precisely because it is just a machine.

Tugan-Baranovsky writes:

If all workers except one disappear and are replaced by machines, then this one single worker will place the whole enormous mass of machinery in motion and with its assistance produce new machines and the consumption goods of the capitalists. The working class will disappear, which will not in the least disturb the self-expansion process [Verwertungsprozess] of capital. The capitalists will receive no smaller mass of consumption goods, the entire product of one year will be realized and utilized by the production and consumption of the capitalists in the following year. Even if the capitalists desire to limit their own consumption, no difficulty is presented; in this case the production of capitalists’ consumption goods partially ceases, and an even larger part of the social product consists of means of production, which serve the purpose of further expanding production. For example, iron and coal are produced which serve always to expand the production of iron and coal. The expanded production of iron and coal of each succeeding year uses up the increased mass of products turned out in the preceding year, until the supply of necessary minerals is exhausted.2

One of the first great theorists of post-liberal capitalism, Rudolph Hilferding, called this, in Finance Capital, “Marxism gone mad”:

[Tugan-Baranovsky] arrives at the curious conception of a system of production which exists only for the sake of production, while consumption is simply a tedious irrelevance. If this is “madness” there is method in it, and a Marxist one at that, for it is just this analysis of the specific historical structure of capitalist production which is distinctively Marxist. It is Marxism gone mad, but still Marxism, and this is what makes the theory so peculiar and yet so suggestive.3

This is the future laid out in “Autofac.” The machine can go on, whether or not the world has ended. Why? Because, from the beginning, capitalist expansion depended not on meeting needs but on expanding production. Economics as Frankenstein: reanimation for the sake of reanimation. But there is a twist. Amazon’s adaptation of “Autofac,” directed by Peter Horton, makes a leap that’s not found in Dick’s original story. The machines continue, yes. But the humans, the flesh-and-bone consumers, are gone. What does the factory do? We learn by way of Autofac’s customer-service robot, impressively played by Janelle Monae: it expands production by transforming consumers themselves into machines. And so production and consumption are one and the same thing.

Even Philip K. Dick didn’t see this coming. In his story, machines continue as machines, and humans as humans, and what humans witness at the end of the story is machines making machines. (Also, in Dick’s story, the machines actually do provide useful things, like milk. This is not the case in Amazon’s version: its machines only provide nonnutritious things like Air Jordan sneakers.)

At the end of Electric Dreams’s “Autofac,” a post-human realizes a truth that even the Soviet Union missed, but that was captured by its most prominent director, Andrei Tarkovsky, in his film Stalker. Capitalist production cannot be separated from its form of consumption, and therefore its destruction requires the annihilation of a “Marxism gone mad.” The hipsters in Dark Angel are permanently stuck in the gig economy.