Karl Marx Is Wrong
The White Tiger tells the story of Balram Halawi. A servant who through various circumstances ends up killing his masters, taking their money, and starting a new life for himself in Bangalore. After years of being abused by his masters, Balram finally fights to get out “of the chicken coup” of India’s rigid caste system and enjoys true socioeconomic progress … sound familiar?
Another good movie, Parasite, came out earlier touching on similar subjects, instead now it is a family working under the bourgeois represented by the Park Family. The Kim family — father Ki-taek, mother Chung-sook, son Ki-woo and daughter Ki-jung try to con the Park family out of money, but eventually Ki-taek kills the patriarch of the Park family, hiding to avoid capture by the police. Ki-jung is killed, but Chung-sook and Ki-woo survive with Ki-woo vowing to work hard to get the money to buy the house where his father hides.
Solar Opposites, a show made by a creator of Rick and Morty Justin Roiland, tells the story of an alien family trying to blend in. The show is mediocre except for a subplot that talks about “the Wall.” The Wall is an ant farm where humans, shrunken and captured by alien children for their entertainment, live out their days. Inside the wall a dictatorship has formed, however, a newcomer Tim is able to overthrow the dictatorship. Upon defeating the dictator, Tim and his allies discover the dictator had a way to escape the wall this whole time but hid it, instead using the escape as a way to smuggle food and supplies to control the people in the wall. In a poignant scene, Tim kills his fellow rebellors, deciding to become a dictator in his own right, hiding the existence of the escape for his own advancement.
So there we have it, a Netflix movie, an Oscar winning movie, and an adult-humor cartoon. What do these have all in common? Marxism. Specifically, the idea that the only way the working class, the underbelly, will ever find freedom from the bourgeois is through rebellion. In all these examples, we see this violent rebellion with the killing of the bourgeois masters. In Parasite Ki-taek literally kills Mr. Park. In Solar Opposites, Tim kills the dictator. And in The White Tiger, Balram kills his master Ashok. So where’s the classless, communist society?
In The White Tiger, the end is nuanced. On one hand Balram is able to create a company and find a modicum of success, but the final shot of the movie has Balram gloating about his newfound freedom, escaping the chicken coup, but all the workers in his company stare into the shot, as if begging the viewer to ask, has anything really changed?
In one of the most striking scenes in the movie, after a night in the club Balram’s “masters”, Ashok and his wife Pinky, can be found zooming through the streets of Delhi and hit a young boy crossing the street killing him. Instead of staying back and keeping responsibility, they leave. Balram was forced to sign a statement that said he killed the kid when it was in fact Ashok and Pinky.
Now that Balram has a company of drivers sometimes his drivers also hit children in the street, killing them. Balram makes the point that he takes responsibility for these killing and does not force anything on his drivers. However, Balram’s “responsibility” is using his bribery over the local police to hush up the crime, offering the affected family a large sum of money, and offering any relatives of the victim a job under him. Balram would argue against my view of his actions, exclaiming that for someone like him who has come from the slums the only way to rise is either “crime or politics.” If he wanted to do everything by the book then he would not have had found any freedom.
I agree with Balram’s point in that coming from a system baked with caste-like tendencies, it is nearly impossible to have any upward mobility. However, as personified by the fact that Barlam decides to literally change his name to Ashok, I would argue Balram has become what he once hated. He is now the “master.” Balram viewing himself as some sort of savior of the poor who has escaped poverty is as fanciful as the “socialist politician” in the movie who claims to fight for the poor but take bribes from the very people subjugating their constituents.
This idea of wanting to be those “above you” in class rings true in Parasite. After his father kills his previous “master”, Ki-woo imagines finally getting an education, getting rich, and buying the house that his father now hides in, in effect becoming the master they all lived under. Throughout the movie, Ki-woo and his family imagine what it would be like to be the Park family, going as far as eating their food, trying out the bathroom, trying on clothes. Then we have Solar Opposites where Tim literally decides to become the dictator of The Wall.
And this at its crux is the fundamental problem with Marxism. Specifically the idea of the working class rising up and taking over the levers of power. Karl Marx believed not only in an economic separation between poor and rich, but also a mental separation. The rich born in their status subjugate the poor, who, if given the reigns of power, would create a just society since they know how it feels to be subjugated. As The White Tiger, Parasite, and Solar Opposites show this is not true. Though economically different, the two classes Marx refers to are both human. The lust for power, the ruthless tendency for subjugation, all of it in the bourgeois also exists in the working class. So much so that if the working class did rise up and get the levers of power, instead of creating a just society they would turn around and subjugate the bourgeois both out of anger and out of appreciation for their newfound comfort.
The problem isn’t money. It isn’t any system of government or market. It is the people, us, humans and our nature. We loose perspective so easily when dealing with each other. Just imagine yourself, when you drive and see a large crowd of bikers you think to yourself, “oh those stupid bikers always getting in the way.” However, when you bike in a large group and see a car you think “oh those stupid cars always on the verge of hitting us.” To think that the working class, once given the reins of power would turn back and think “oh I don’t want the bourgeois to suffer like I did, I want an equal society were everyone can enjoy happiness,” is utterly fanciful.
Then what hope do we have at ever attaining a just and fair society? Where there is no class imbalance or inequality. I don’t know, if I did I wouldn’t be here writing cheesy movie blogs. However, what I do know is that movies like Parasite and The White Tiger and even cartoons like Solar Opposites push us in the right direction. The true enemy of progress is complacency and the ignorance that comes with it. By depicting these jarring examples of class imbalance, we are willed to think about these topics and begin questioning our systems and wonder what it would take for us to ever achieve any semblance of utopia. Whatever that may look like.
