Skynet is the inevitable result—what Marxists call a
final contradiction
—of the convergence of two dangerous trends caused by capitalists’ control of the development of technology. The contradiction is
final
because there is no solution to be found to the problems it creates within the existing economic system, and thus what follows must be either a change to a new economic system or the utter destruction of the human species. Through this sinister portrayal of Skynet, Cameron seems to support Marxist conclusions that the capitalist system has unsolvable and inherent contradictions that threaten all humanity.
“Hasta la Vista, Baby”: James Cameron’s Tech-Savvy Marxism
Cameron’s
Terminator
saga has one last significant similarity to Marxist philosophy and economics. Marxists believe that most technology, regardless of the purpose for which it was designed, can be reclaimed for human liberation. Technology
itself
is not necessarily destructive. Rather, the use of technology for profit is destructive. Similarly, Cameron does not critique
technology itself
. Instead he shows that even Terminators, developed to be efficient killing machines and nothing more, can be reprogrammed, or perhaps humanized, to free humanity from machine rule.
Each of Cameron’s movies has a Terminator, controlled by Skynet, as its primary villain, but the latter two have reprogrammed T-101s defending the leaders of the human resistance. In
Terminator 2
, young John Connor first forbids “his” T-101 to kill people, a reversal of the role it was created for. Throughout the film, John tries to help the Terminator become more human, including reprogramming it to learn independently, gain a sense of humor, and understand emotion. For example, midway through the film, John and the Terminator break Sarah out of a mental ward, and Sarah lectures John for putting himself at risk:
Sarah: It was stupid of you to go there. . . . Goddammit, John, you have to be smarter than that. You’re too important! You can’t risk yourself, not even for me, do you understand? I can take care of myself. I was doing fine. Jesus, John. You almost got yourself killed.
John: I . . . had to get you out of the place. . . . I’m sorry, I . . . [he starts to cry].
Sarah: Stop it! Right now! You can’t cry, John. Other kids can afford to cry. You can’t.
Terminator [seeing John crying]: What is wrong with your eyes?
At this point, the Terminator does not understand human emotion. At the end, however, when the Terminator sacrifices himself to prevent the development of Skynet, John is crying. The Terminator touches his tear and says, “I know now why you cry. But it is something I can never do. Goodbye.” The Terminator’s fresh understanding of emotion is a clear metaphor for the ways in which technology can be humanized. Cameron holds technology itself to be neutral, but its development, control, and use in the capitalist system make it dehumanizing rather than liberating. Still, even the most destructive technology can be programmed to support human liberation.
But what is Cameron’s idea of human liberation? The world of the future is controlled by a vast Terminator army, seeking daily to destroy the remnants of humanity. The ground is littered with human skulls and corpses. Mankind is completely subjugated, and those who haven’t been killed are forced to work for the machines to clean up the bodies. This is the world that John Connor wants to liberate humanity from, but Cameron doesn’t give us clear indications of what might replace it.
Perhaps this uncertainty is something we can live with, since a revolution is the first order of business. Marx urges us to reject a world in which private ownership is fiercely protected by the force of militaristic governments. Since everything is privately owned but most people do not own productive technology, access to the things we need requires paying money to the owner-capitalist. And of course we’re all required to work for some other capitalist in order to have money to live on. While employed, laborers are subject to both managerial control and the limited range of options that machine technology creates. In short, daily living requires people to sell their labor time to a capitalist for
less
(often drastically less) than the value of the things they help produce; the other options are to starve and die, or to steal and risk punishment by the state. Being employed is hardly liberating, since it necessarily submits workers to domination in the workplace by managers and machines. But Marx also believed that these conditions would spur the global working class to rise up to fight in order to ultimately establish a classless society, a society without “haves” and “have-nots” in which one class is not allowed to live off the labor of another. As Marx famously said, a communist society that fits this description would be governed by the slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
13
Both Marxist philosophy and Cameron’s films end with the implication of opportunities for the oppressed. The people can reject the dilemma of either being forced to work subject to control by machines, or being killed by destructive technology created by capitalism. The future for both Marx and Cameron is envisioned as emerging from a long and bitter struggle for victory and a more humanized society with technology that alleviates the worst conditions of living and liberates us to pursue paths freely chosen.
Cameron’s human resistance shares a close parallel with the Marxist prediction of the revolution of the working class, showing us that people won’t go down without a fight. Simultaneously, he doesn’t show us what the better world of the future will look like. Perhaps Cameron is saying that for now at least, the point is the struggle itself. Can we take back our world from the warmongers, from those who profit from human need and human suffering? I don’t know the answers. . . .
T4
hasn’t come out yet. But even if Cameron’s
Terminator
films do not analyze the world for us, they do show us a way to
amend it
. There is no future utopia, but there is the promise of a successful revolution. Perhaps that, too, comes from Marx. After all, Marx also famously said that “philosophers have only
interpreted
the world, in various ways; the point is to
change
it.”
14
Maybe that’s what Cameron is ultimately trying to say.
NOTES
1
If you think this idea that James Cameron has Marxist themes in his films is absurd, I recommend the following excellent article: James Kendrick, “Marxist Overtones in Three Films by James Cameron,” in
Journal of Popular Film & Television
27, no. 3 (1999): 36-44. A good reader for those who are interested in studying Marxism further but don’t know where to start is Robert Tucker’s
The Marx-Engels Reader
, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978).
2
To Marx, the value in goods comes from human labor, and the value of human labor power equals their means of subsistence; that is, workers only need to labor enough to meet their socially determined and natural needs. If they work to produce value beyond that, their labor is
surplus labor
, and the value produced is
surplus value
.
3
For example, as I write this in the fall of 2008, Congress had just recently passed a $700 billion bailout for finance capitalists in response to the recession that they caused, which primarily provides security for their investment, instead of building infrastructure, creating jobs, or providing subsidized housing—and all paid for from the nation’s taxes. It’s as though the capitalists were Terminators, disrobed and demanding the clothes of the working citizens.
4
Karl Marx,
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy
(New York: Modern Library, 1906), 21.
5
Marx argues for this in
The German Ideology
: “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production . . . [and] as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate their production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch”; Frederick Engels and Karl Marx,
The German Ideology
(New York: International Publishers, 1970), 64.
6
For Marx’s theory of alienation, see the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
, especially the section on “Estranged Labor,” in Karl Marx,
Early Writings
(Wiltshire, Eng.: Penguin Classics, 1992).
7
Marx notes in
Capital
that “the laws, immanent in capitalist production, manifest themselves in the movements of individual masses of capital, where they assert themselves as coercive laws of competition, and are brought home to the mind and consciousness of the individual capitalist as the directing motives of his operations”; Marx,
Capital
, 347.
8
For a very different view of where technology is heading in Cameron’s films, see Jesse W. Butler’s chapter in this volume, “Un-Terminated: The Integration of the Machines.”
9
Engels and Marx,
Manifesto of the Communist Party,
in
The Revolutions of 1848: Political Writings
, vol. 1, ed. David Fernbach (Wiltshire, Eng.: Penguin Classics, 1992), 69.
10
Engels and Marx,
The German Ideology
, 80.
11
For an analysis of the tendency of capitalism toward militarism, see Rosa Luxemburg,
The Accumulation of Capital
(London: Routledge, 1951), chap. 32, and Paul Baran and Paul M. Sweezy,
Monopoly Capital
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), chap. 7.
12
See Marx,
Capital
, part 4: “The Production of Relative Surplus Value.”
13
Marx,
Critique of the Gotha Program
, part 1, in
The Marx-Engels Reader
, 531.
14
Marx, “Concerning Feuerbach,” in
Early Writings
, 423.
PART THREE
CHANGING WHAT’S ALREADY HAPPENED
8
BAD TIMING: THE METAPHYSICS OF THE TERMINATOR
Robert A. Delfino and Kenneth Sheahan
That the human spirit will ever give up metaphysical speculations is as little to be expected as that we should prefer to give up breathing altogether, in order to avoid impure air.
What is the meaning of life? Do I have free will? Does God exist? Some of the deepest philosophical questions are, like these, metaphysical.
Metaphysics
, roughly speaking, is the branch of philosophy that deals with the ultimate nature of reality. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE) called metaphysics “Wisdom” and said it studied the deepest causes of things.
2
Perhaps this explains why metaphysics is always surrounded by controversy and why it has been attacked in every age, including the present.
3
Yet the fact remains that humans are addicted to metaphysical questions, as the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) suggests above. We simply cannot stop thinking about them. Movies like
The Terminator
thrill us, in part, because they put flesh, blood, and special effects on metaphysical questions. Really, would you rather read what Aristotle has to say about the nature of time or watch Arnold Schwarzenegger travel through time and blow up everything in his path in 5.1 surround sound?
4
Movies can bring philosophy to life in a way mere words cannot. Many things happen in films that are impossible in the real world, or that at least
seem
impossible. So we must often suspend our disbelief to enjoy a film. Still, there is only so much disbelief we can suspend before a movie starts to bother us. For example, finding a flaw in the storyline itself will often detract from our enjoyment of it—at least to some degree.
Unfortunately, from the perspective of metaphysics, there are two serious flaws in
The Terminator
. These pretty much ruin the storyline, either because they contradict elements of the story or because they make the story much less believable. No doubt some of you will accuse us of being too picky, but we ask you to reserve judgment until you hear our arguments. No matter what you decide in the end, we are pretty sure you’ll never look at
The Terminator
the same way again.