the casual critic

#tv #superheroes

Warning – contains spoilers

What happens after the revolution? It is a question that is somewhat of a liability for the Left, with a tradition of unsatisfyingly vague answers tracing back all the way to Marx’ (in)famous quip that his job wasn’t to write cookbooks for the post-revolutionary society. It may therefore come as a bit of a surprise to see this question taken up as the central theme of a series in, of all places, the Marvel universe.

Loki season 2 picks up from the end of Loki season 1, where we saw ‘He Who Remains’ killed at the hand of Sylvie (implausibly the only female Loki variant we ever see), and a sacred timeline shattering into infinite fragments. ‘Our’ Loki finds himself in an unfamiliar timeline, now one of many, and quickly discovers that HRW wasn’t lying about the universe tearing itself to shreds now that the Sacred Timeline is no more. Unbeknownst to the Powers that Were at the TVA, they had a ‘Temporal Loom’ in the basement which had the job of keeping the known universe together. Unable to cope with the manifold new timelines, it is in danger of falling apart, taking the universes with it. It is up to Loki, assisted by like-minded TVA employees, to fix this piece of pseudoscientific technobabble and keep the universe together.

Compared to season 1, the surface level plot of Season 2 is less compelling. The Temporal Loom is conceptually unconvincing, and like most other series dabbling in multiversal physics, one shouldn’t scrutinise the (temporal) logic too closely lest it falls apart faster than you can say ‘event horizon’. Cinematographically Season 2 also leans less into the ‘70s bureaucratic vibes of the first season, instead confining the action mostly to the slightly odd maintenance department and a Star Trek-esque control centre.

Just like season 1, however, Loki season 2 contends with themes more interesting than its unconvincing plot. Season 1 wanted to make us think about the balance between individual freedom and the greater good. Season 2 harkens back to that tension a bit, but shifts its main focus to what you do the day after a revolution. For revolution is what the death of HRW brings about: a complete rupture in how the universe operates, and who is in charge of it.

What season 2 wants to get across is that while revolutions may be difficult, what happens after is harder. Viewers familiar with revolutionary history will find no shortage of familiar challenges that beset the new regime at the TVA. There is the old-guard counter-revolution, led by General Dox and breakaway elements of the TVA, whose numbers for reasons of complex multidimensional physics range between 3 and infinite, but are always exactly what the plot requires. There are opportunists seeking power, represented by the double-crossing Ravonna Renslayer and Miss Minutes. But both of these are mere distractions to the biggest challenge: how to make sure that after the rupture, society (in this case reality as represented by the Temporal Loom) doesn’t fail to reproduce itself.

With reality falling apart around him, the dilemma Loki is faced with is that, if the new order cannot sustain itself, it is better to put the old order back in place, or to let the whole thing burn down and see what rises from the ashes. Loki’s allies at the new TVA, as well as latterly HRW, represent the former view, whereas the latter is represented by Sylvie taking a clear “it is better to die free than live enslaved” line. Caught between these two poles, Loki desperately tries to find a third option that would make the new order viable, but without putting the TVA back in charge or purging all realities but one.

In dealing with this question of whether it is better to have freedom even if it leads to chaos and death, or accept control and sacrifice for the greater good, Loki treats both sides thoughtfully and with sympathy. It would have been so easy to cast Sylvie as the fanatical revolutionary, willing to sacrifice everyone on the alter of ideological purity. Instead, the series shows how for someone like Sylvie, who has suffered enormously at the hands of the old order, it is better to let it all burn down and just see if something will rise from the ashes. For a good part of the season, her position seems more plausible than Loki’s, who is now cast as the reformer desperately trying to salvage elements of the old order to give the new order a fighting chance, but with very limited success.

The season finale resolves the tension through two surprising twists that make for a remarkably satisfying ending. First, after making the entire show a quest for a fix to the Temporal Loom, we discover that regardless of the efforts made, the Loom cannot be fixed because HRW designed it to fail. Turns out his prophecies were less about omniscience and more about his own handiwork. In a move whose logic echoes that of ruling elites throughout time and space, HRW designed the Loom to be a spacetime boobytrap precisely to defeat a revolution like the one Sylvie and Loki accomplished. It turns out the whole search for a version of HRW who might put matters right was a red herring all along.

Yet when all seems lost, it turns out that the way forward is not a technical fix, or even a compromise with the old order. Instead, we see Loki realise that he himself can take the place of the Loom and embrace his facet of the God of Stories, weaving the strands of all the realities together to keep them alive. Downside for Loki: he needs to sit on a multidimensional throne for, most likely, eternity, to keep the show on the road. The symbolism here is obvious: the alternative to either burning it all down, or putting the old ruling class back in charge, is for the revolutionaries (i.e., all of us) to do the constant work to keep the new society alive. Because Loki’s solution is not a single act, but a commitment to actively sustain the new order for eternity. Of course, a real post-revolutionary situation would not have such a singularly neat (if cosmic) solution. But that doesn’t diminish the message that we can have our better world, provided we are prepared to build it every single day after the revolution comes.

#tv #fiction #SF

Notes & suggestions

• Vincent Bevin’s If We Burn is a very good overview of (quasi-)revolutionary movements in recent years that were more in line with Sylvie’s approach of burning the old world down without worrying about what might come after.
• Ursula K. le Guin deals with the question of what makes a good revolution and how it is then sustained both in The Dispossessed and the related The Day before the Revolution.

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#books #nonfiction #history

A saying often incorrectly attributed to Joseph Stalin tells us that whereas the death of one person is a tragedy, the death of millions is merely a statistic. While often used cynically, it describes a genuine phenomenon that we find it easier to relate and emphasise to the misfortunes of individuals, and that death or suffering on a large scale becomes literally incomprehensible to our minds. Yet in his book ‘Late Victorian Holocausts’, author Mike Davis fuses statistics and tragedy to describe how the combination of recurring droughts and integration into the capitalist system inflicted a colossal human cost on regions we now call the Global South.

Late Victorian Holocausts centres on a series of famines across the globe that occurred between roughly 1876 and 1902, with many different parts of the world affected simultaneously. One strand of Davis’s book is to identify the El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) as the climatological driver of crop failures in areas as far apart as Brazil and China. Yet the main strength of Late Victorian Holocausts is Davis’s investigation of how these naturally occurring phenomena were catastrophically exacerbated by the forcible integration of countries into the world capitalist system, either directly as colonies like India, or otherwise through dependency on credit or as the result of war, as was the case with Brazil and China.

After all, Davis points out, the ENSO has been a natural phenomenon for centuries, yet the famines of the late 19th century were of a scale hitherto unimaginable. Davis persuasively argues that, rather than bringing benefits to these countries, integration into the capitalist system fatally weakened their resilience to droughts and other natural disasters. Subsistence farming gave way to cash cropping, with peasant farmers left destitute and without locally grown produce when global prices collapsed. Mechanisms of resilience, such as China’s ‘eternal granaries’ or arrangements of mutual aid in India, were broken down because the market deemed them ‘inefficient’. And even where food was produced locally, integration into the world market meant starving communities saw their produce exported overseas where it could gain a higher price. Nor was this just the unfortunate effect of impersonal environmental and economic factors. Late Victorian Holocausts shows that at every turn, rigid pro-market ideology defeated even the most lacklustre compassion. Especially in India, British colonial administrators deployed openly Malthusian policies, forced marching thousands of starving peasants into work camps, where they had to ‘earn’ rations that were smaller than those provided in Nazi extermination camps.

The descriptions of the impact of famine and imperial policies are where Davis’s brilliance comes through with cold fury, but they are also the ones I most struggled to read. I often found myself having to put the book down for a while simply to process the staggering scale of human suffering inflicted on the world’s poor and marginalised. Late Victorian Holocaust relentlessly documents the death tolls resulting from the famines: regions where 95% of the population starve, canyons filled with skeletons, casualty numbers going up to the tens of millions. It is statistics returned as tragedy with a vengeance.

Yet Late Victorian Holocausts is not simply a polemic. If anything, it is rather academic for a work of ‘popular’ non-fiction. Descriptions of emaciated children sometimes sit incongruently next to tabulations of rice production in northern Chinese provinces. Overleaf from the ideological insanity of 19th century economic liberalism we find a detailed history of ENSO events. The sheer amount of detail can make the book somewhat inaccessible at times, and I was rather surprised there wasn’t more of a conclusion to tie it all together at the end. Instead the book finishes in the way it makes most of its argument: with three in-depth chapters on the long term impacts on India, China and Brazil. Yet while the argument comes through well in the detail, I did think this rather left it to the reader to fully connect the four distinct parts of the book.

Nonetheless, I strongly recommend Late Victorian Holocausts to anyone interested in world history, or who wants to understand why the world now looks the way it does. I cannot pretend it was a pleasant read. The book has no patience for vague notions that ‘colonialism was bad’, and mercilessly confronts you with the actual brutality of it. It most certainly obliterates any notion that peripheral nations somehow benefitted from benevolent integration into the world capitalist system: the railroads were never there to bring civilisation, but to carry away the grain. Hence it makes for essential reading in our times of culture war where the Right vocally claims that ‘Empire was good, actually’. The millions upon millions of starved Indians, Chinese, Brazilians and others would surely argue otherwise, had they actually lived to tell the tale.

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