For those of you who don't know what one's "thumos" is, it is an ancient Greek concept that was believed to be the seat of what can best be described as righteous indignation. So a way to read the title of this post in common parlance would be, "I am filled with righteous indignation!"
My wife and I recently watched a film titles "In Time." It was a decent film for what it was, but it was nothing special. For those of you who don't know the film takes place some time in the future, in which all human beings are genetically engineered to die at the age of twenty-five. How does the world deal with this fact? By converting the world's currency to "time." You are paid in "time," you buy food with "time," and when you run out of "time" you simply drop dead on the spot, but so long as you have time you can live forever. The main character lives in the slums and is given about one-hundred years of time by a man and is then pursued as he is suspected of theft. I'll try not to spoil the ending, but because this post involves many of the things in the film I may fail.
First, it must be said that I cannot recall the last time that I have seen such bald-faced anti-capitalist rhetoric in a film produced in the "mainstream." The analogy is incredibly poignant, and it was very obvious to me, but I would imagine that many people just didn't catch it. But anyway, onto some of the things in the film that set my thumos ablaze.
First there is the fact that time is both money and one's life. The lower class if forced to work simply to get by, and never have any money to spare. Does this sound familiar to you? It should. Were it not for the American Welfare State many members of the lower class would simply die. They are constantly fighting to stay above water, and a simply breeze can knock them off, and they would end up on the streets or dead were it not for welfare.
Second, the cost of living. In the film the cost of living rises with a fair amount of regularity, and it is later revealed that this is done to both keep the market from crashing due to there being too much "time" in circulation, but those in charge of these markets make it very clear that they also do this to keep the members of the various classes in their place. "Oh, you folks just saved enough money to move up in society, well the price of food just went up, so too bad." Now i have to admit that the manipulation of the cost of living in this film is an extremely exaggerated form of what we see today, but the fact remains that the capitalist power structure must do these kinds of things to prevent a complete collapse of the system.
This idea also feeds into the unemployment levels that are fundamentally build into the system so as to keep the working class in competition: when there is a lack of work people will work for less and take any job they can get. In addition this keeps the working class from rallying as they are constantly in competition with each other for work. I recall reading an article a while back about how, despite the fact that people were finally starting to go back to work, many of them were taking jobs that paid them less than they had before the global economy nearly collapsed. The disparity in the distribution of wealth expands and the working class gets left to rot.
Lastly, and this will probably spoil the ending, but by this point I doubt you care, is the fact that this film actually got me on board with a Marxist revolution. At the end of the film the main character and his companion bring down the system by flooding the market with millions, if not billions or trillions of years worth of time, and by the end of the film my thumos was roaring hotter than it had in a great while. (Sorry, I just love that phrase, it has been hailed as "The greatest thing I have ever said," by many of my Greek classmates.) The parallels to America were so clear that I couldn't help but want to actually go out and do something about it, which is a first for me.
The reason why this is such a significant turn for me, though it must be said that I am by no means entirely sold on the idea of violent revolutions bringing about communist states, is because previous to this I was wholly committed to my idea that communist states could develop slowly, over time, through democratic change in an industrialized, capitalist state. (If you want more information of this read the last portion of my senior thesis, which I have posted on this blog.) Revolutionary Marxist is something that Lenin and Mao participated in, and if you have read my thesis you know that I find the majority of their work detestable as it throws out many of the foundations of Marxism to make way for a Vanguard Party. They're doing it wrong. However, after watching this film I took some time to think and I finally came to the conclusion that a Marxist revolution was entirely feasible in the United States: the basic conditions are more than met, meaning that I would still be following a hard-line Marxist position. This is quite a big occurrence for me.
Anyway, I'll wrap up by saying that "In Time" was not a terrible film, but more importantly it caused a rather tumultuous change in my position on Marxist revolutions. It's 9PM, and I don't want to drag this on, besides, I'm sure if you are reading this you already go the point of this post, so I don't need to drag it out in a conclusion.
As a final note, I discovered that I am only one class short, my thesis course, of a philosophy degree. However, my paperwork for graduation in May had already been submitted, so I am starting work on another thesis, grounded in Classical Greek, over the summer, that I will use to complete my thesis class as independent study in the fall, after which I will receive a second degree, all of which required me to re-apply to school. I will, of course, post that paper here. Expect it to be a comparison Aristotle's and Marx's views on human nature, filled with lost of Greek that you won't be able to read, as well as plenty of Feuerbach and Hegel. Political Theory/Philosophy, it's the best.
