Comrades,

the Lannisters
have no more gold!

Paul Mason replies to Sam Kriss of JacobinMag

Original text by Paul Mason: http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-
radio/2015/apr/06/marxist-theory-game-of-thrones-lannisters-bankers-sex-
power-feudal-westeros-revolution

Critique by Sam Kriss (reproduced in left column)
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/game-of-thrones-season-five-
marxism/#pq=yt2JTz

Reply to the critique (right) by Paul Mason

It shouldnt need saying, but Marxist
Agreed, its not a joke. But it can form a
theory isnt a joke, a fun technique that critique of imaginary human societies.
can be applied to whatever everyday
My article was inspired by the Greek
phenomenon catches ones fancy.
Communist Partys wooden attempt to

do likewise. I come from a tradition
whose bibles were Perry Andersons
Lineages of the Absolutist State, and
Passages from Feudalism to Antiquity,
and if I am to be accused of revisionism
it should be against this yardstick,
which acknowledges the relative
autonomy of superstructural factors in
the transition from one mode of
production to the next, and sees the
process primarily as one of collapse
and stagnation, rather than voluntarist
supercession by the rising forces of the
next system.
There has been a worrying proliferation I have published a Marxist critique of
of this kind of haphazardness of late:
the banking system.
newspapers are publishing Marxist

theories of pencils, Marxist readings of
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Meltdown-
Taylor Swifts new album, Marxist
The-End-Age-Greed/dp/1844676536
accounts of why men have nipples.
Institutions that would never dream of
printing Marxist critiques of, say, the
banking system, are perfectly happy to
let the children of Karl critique our
dreams.

In the most recent example, the

Guardian has dredged up Paul Mason,
the economics editor for Channel 4
News, to provide a historical materialist
prediction for the upcoming seasons of
Game of Thrones.

Not that theres anything wrong with
that but these people should
remember that Marxism is fire and
danger: the theoretical approach that
not only manages to comprehend
capitalist relations, but proposes the
abolition of those relations.

In other words, its the only joke thats
actually funny. Marxism sees the finely
tuned logic of all currently existing
societies, recognizes the absolute
necessity of every element, and then
pronounces the whole thing to be mad
and stupid. It finally reveals that the
rational world were living in now is in
fact a fantasy world, full of snarks and
grumpkins, as absurd as anything in the
most overblown fictions.


Masons Can Marxist theory predict the
end of Game of Thrones?
misunderstands both fantasy and
Marxism, most of all because it fails to
grasp this important point. Part of its
failure also has to do with its
overreaching ambition in the space
of a short essay, Mason tries to forecast
the future plotlines of Game of Thrones,
account for the fall of feudalism and the
rise of capitalism, and explain why
people living under capitalist economies
enjoy fantasy stories set amid medieval
decay.

Any one of these could quite
comfortably provide enough material
for an entire book; muddled together in
just over a thousand words, they end up
crossing over each other into near
incoherence. (Of course, given the mess

I totally agree that Marxism is both a

theory of capitalism and of its self-
destruction.

No. Marxism, properly understood,

allows for whole elements of the
existing system to be random, the
product of chance, of autonomously
clashing material forces like nation,
class, gender, religion and the human
psychye. Thats what makes it a science
of society and not just of class struggle.
You can see here where we are going to
diverge.

Einsteins e=mc2 paper is one and a

half pages long.

http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/
~nrc25/red/e_mc2.pdf

Nope: theres a clear structure to the

column. 1) Westeros is feudal society in
crisis; 2) that crisis has to be perpetual
because in fantasy the crisis of the
Second World has to be perpetual 3)
Fantasy worlds are nearly always

hes made of all three concepts, this

response will also have to do much the
same thing.)


Masons central argument is that the
debt and ruination suffered by Westeros
during the War of the Five Kings
provides a fantasy analogue to our own
historys late medieval crisis (also,
confusingly, to the current crisis in the
eurozone). The realm is ripe for a
bourgeois revolution as he puts it,
Westeros needs capitalists but,
because of the limitations of the high
fantasy genre, this can never happen.
The social system in these fictions can
decay, but it never actually collapses.
Instead, fantasy feudalism will pant
through its crisis by finding new land
and resources across the Sunset Sea to
the West.

This argument is brazenly irresponsible,
and not remotely Marxist. Forget the
capitalists: a Peoples Republic of
Westeros is possible, and imminent
but it may well be stranger and more
fantastic than many of us would like to
admit.


To begin with what is sometimes
banally referred to as the real world,
heres Masons account of the crisis of
actually existing feudalism:

Debts accumulated under a corrupt
patronage system, whose sources of
wealth dried up, destroyed the system in
the end. . . . The power of commerce
began to squash the power of kings.
Feudalism gave way to a capitalism
based on merchants, bankers, colonial
plunder and the slave trade.

You may get the sense that theres
something missing here. The old
monarchical powers find themselves

medieval because people oppressed by

economic rationality fantasise about
using pure physical power, magic or
guile to overcome economic rationality.
What I said was that for the Lannisters
to avoid falling they will have to do
what Ferdinand & Isabella did:
discover a new source of gold and kill
the population protecting it. Otherwise
the Dutch/English style fate awaits the
monarchic system.

I am prepared to countenance the

imminent communist revolution in
Westeros. So read on.

Here we arrive at the same logic that

underpinned all Stalinist accounts of
the feudal crisis, most notably Maurice
Dobbs in the 1940s in the so-called
Dobb-Sweezy Debate: the feudal crisis
was caused by class struggle.

http://www.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory
/pdf/WP9406Epstein.pdf

Lets unpick the argument. At no stage
did I suggest the only dynamic leading
to feudalisms decline was the
indebtedness of kings.

In my upcoming book, PostCapitalism, I
advance a five-fold explanation for

with an increasing debt burden that

threatens the stability of society. So the
bankers come to the rescue,
transforming feudalism into capitalism.
Except under a patronage system,
however corrupt, there isnt supposed to
be any sovereign debt.

What Masons describing isnt a feudal
crisis, but a capitalist one. At the
beginning of the medieval period, there
werent any organs of international
finance capital; by the time feudalism
went into its death throes, there were.
Something else happened that laid the
seeds for the emergence of the
financialized world empire.

Strikingly, for something that claims to
be a historical materialist analysis,
theres no mention whatsoever of class
struggle. The real crisis of feudalism
had very little to do with corruption and
aristocratic profligacy, and everything
to do with collective action on the part
of the toiling masses.

After Europes population was
decimated by the Black Death, labor
could suddenly find a decent price for
itself, and when threatened, it had the
confidence to revolt. Peasant revolts
were a near constant during the late
medieval period Germany alone saw
over sixty periods of mass unrest
between 1336 and 1525.

Often the peasants got what they
wanted: high wages, rights to common
land, and leisure time. As a result, the
ruling class found it harder and harder
to extract the surpluses they needed to
keep the system going; in the end, they
made recourse to mercantilism,
enclosure, and primitive accumulation.

The real decline of feudalism was in fact
a moment of incredible opportunity that
was brutally suppressed. Mason doesnt

feudalisms crisis, as follows: (a) the

feudal agrarian system was already in
crisis by the mid-14th century; (b) the
Black Death decisively altered class
relations by creating a labour shortage;
(c) a general crisis of feudalism broke
out in which (d) international banking
networks, which flourish in many
forms during high feudalism (eg the
Knights Templar before the Bardis,
Medicis and Fuggers) create an
alternative, money based economy (e)
money relations begin to strangle
feudal institutional forms ie the
replacement of military service by
mercenaries, the rise of large paid
retinues associated with the concept
bastard feudalism.

This multicausal explanation is only
missing because the Guardians limit is
900 words for my G2 column.

Certainly, at the start of the medieval
period, there were no international
financial organs: but the alternative
cash networks, and trade routes, arise
remarkably early, as does open usury.

But the peasant and worker revolts
that punctuated the general crisis of
feudalism in the back half of the 14th
century cannot be seen as either the
main source of capitalism or the driver
of the systems downfall.

To be categoric: there was no
opportunity go Route One to a
millenarian communist society in the
16th century. The material basis for
such a society did not exist. By the time,
in the 17th century, we get communist
ideologies within both the Dutch and
English revolutions, we have societies
based on trade, conquest and proto-
capitalist agriculture. However much
we sympathise with Winstanleys
Diggers it was not them but the
proletarian-based Leveller movment in

seem to acknowledge this.

Instead, he connects the late medieval

crisis with what in fantasy theory is
known as thinning. As he explains:

In modern fantasy fiction there is
always a crisis of the system: both of the
economic order and of the auras of
power the magic that emanate
from it. There is, in literary theory, even
a technical term for this critical point:
thinning. In their Encyclopaedia of
Fantasy, John Clute and John Grant
define thinning as the constant threat
of decline, accompanied by a pervasive
mourning and sense of wrongness in the
world.

But this thinning is required by
narrative convention to be constant and
pervasive. Fantasy worlds are allowed
to have dragons and witches, but never
real progress:

Westeros needs capitalists . . . But that
cant happen in the secondary world of
fantasy fiction. The thinning process can
never be allowed to end; it must be

East London, with its aim of radical

democracy, that represented the
radically possible within the English
bourgeois revolutions.

I am happy to acknowledge that the
millenarian communist movements
were brutally suppressed.

I would have been, had I a time
machine, a Leveller, not a Digger and I
am very happy to have been witch-
hunted in the right wing media for
laying a wreath at the graves of the
three Leveller soldiers executed by
Cromwell at Burford.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/
features/8915901/next-up-on-
newsnight/


OK, so is thinning in fantasy fiction
analagous to the crisis of feudalism?

I think it can be shown to be so: ie, not
merely a literary convention, but one
originating in the modern worlds
romanticism about feudalism.

Nowhere do I say that the real is
rational and fantasy otherwise. Indeed
what I am trying to do is apply
materialism to the interesting question:
why is medieval-shlock fantasy fiction
so attractive to late-capitalist people?

However I am prepared to accept that
my analysis of class forces in GoT may
be wrong. In the first place, my
knowledge of the story is based only on
the TV series. I think I will get round to
the books when I have read every 19th
century novel and every Greek tragedy
in their original language. And every
car manual.

So I am prepared to accept that the
Braavos bank might be more clearly

perpetual for the conceit of the drama

to work.

For Mason, fantasy is always irrational,
and reality always makes sense. This
claim is dubious at best. To begin with,
his analysis of the current alignment of
forces and powers in Game of Thrones is
just flat out wrong.

The revolutionary peasants and their
dream of a New Jerusalem are in full
force the Brotherhood Without
Banners haunts the countryside, fiercely
communist and full of monotheistic zeal.
And the capitalists Mason dreams of,
dressed in black, with white lace
collars, stern faces and an aversion to
sex and drink, are already here.

Its the Iron Bank of Braavos: in the
latest season, theyre revealed to be the
ones financing the secretly bankrupt
Lannisters; theyre the ones who bail
out Stannis after a string of nasty
defeats and internal schisms; and its
hard to believe that this city of runaway
slaves isnt keeping a close eye on
Daeneryss progress further down the
Essosi coast.

When the Braavosi greet each other,
one says valar morghulis, the other
valar doeharis. All men must die, all
men must serve the motto of necrotic
capitalism. They dont care about
legitimacy or primogeniture or the
divine right of kings. They care about
the numbers in their ledgers. If they
have to restructure the entire Westerosi
economy to get their money back, they
will. A war-ravaged realm is perfect for
primitive accumulation; the rise of
fantasy capitalism is already underway.

based on the Dutch than I thought

which simply means that a Braavos-
inspired capitalist revolt is a more
likely outcome, and it is they as the
Dutch not the Lannisters surviving
like the Spanish monarchy who get to
find the New World.

Because to come back to the main
problem: the fucking gold is running
out.

And because this is an inconsistent
economy medieval yet with a fully
functioning, and non-subcultural
banking system if the gold runs out
they are in deep trouble.

They need new sources of liquidity
much more urgently than Henry VIII
did when he raided the monasteries, or
Elizabeth I when she authorised piracy
and colonial plunder in the Atlantic.

As to whether Daenerys revolt
becomes the tool of the Braavos proto-
capitalists, it would then depend on its
politico-economic function.

So lets accept the Braavosi are a race
of proto-capitalists: they still need to
execute a revolution within Westerosi
feudalism because by creating them
as a nation of renegades, George RR
Martin externalises the breakup
dynamic, whereas for real life
feudalism it was integral.

This brings us to a point Perry
Anderson rightly insisted on, as against
the Stalinst theorists of feudal crisis:
that the crisis of the system leads to
stagnation; that the new system grows
on contact with the outside world; that
only after a prolonged period of
breakdown to the new relations of
production, and technologies arise to
produce early mercantile capitalism.

So even if I have under-estimated the

Braavosi, the question remains what
will bring dynamic new property
relations to Westeros? It seems to me
the Braavosi are too symbiotic with the
feudalism of the Five Kings to do it on
their own.
More fundamentally, though, Mason
Heres where it gets interesting. I
misunderstands what thinning actually completely accept that thinning in
means. From the Encyclopedia of
fiction is the collapse of fantasy into
Fantasy itself:
reality. Or another way of putting it is:

the collapse of pre-modernity into
The Secondary World is almost
modernity.
constantly under some threat of

lessening, a threat frequently
But that means, sadly for I am in that
accompanied by mourning and/or a
trade thinning is something an
sense of wrongness. In the structurally
economics (or technology)
complete fantasy, thinning can be seen correspondent could report on.
as a reduction of the healthy Land to a Tolkiens books are one long story of
parody of itself, and the thinning agent technological decline.
ultimately, in most instances, the

Dark Lord can be seen as inflicting
For me, as a materialist, the prevalence
this damage upon the land out of envy. of this trope in fantasy consciousness

a world in which there is always
Thinning isnt a question of crop yields decline but never collapse must have
or the amount of gold on trading ships
a material being.
from Lannisport. Its not something a

TV economics editor could file a report On reflection, our readiness to resort to
on (The malignancy of the Dark Lord
the crisis of feudalism meme for our
rose to a six-year high at the close of
fantasies of lust, mass death and
trading yesterday . . .). Its an
vengeance probably comes from
essentially textual phenomenon, the
several sources.
collapse of the imagined fantasy world
into symbolic reality.
Namely (a) it is the most recent

transition story: there are more and
J. R. R. Tolkiens Middle-earth is
better historical sources for the
supposed to be an autonomously
collapse of feudalism than for the
existing fantasy world but at the
collapse of antiquity; (b) the transition
same time, its our own world in its own from feudalism to capitalism makes
distant history. Thinning is a process of historical sense it does not, largely,
disenchantment, the slow dying off of
result in the mutual ruin of contending
magic and wonder: after Sauron is
classes but instead in an evolution; (c)
defeated, the elves and wizards leave
there is something moder modern
Middle-earth for the Undying Lands,
about feudal-era human beings than
and the scene is set for the Age of Men in those of antiquity. Its the dead eyes
which we all still live.
phenomenon: the statues of antiquity,

as Kenneth Clarke pointed out in
This process is not too different from the Civilisation, are soul-less. Even the two-
rise of instrumental reason with the
dimensional figures drawn in medieval

capitalist revolutions, the industrialized

clearing out of monsters and spirits. Far
from drawing a strict line between
fantasy and reality, thinning integrates
the world we know into that of the
fantasy. It reveals our thoughtlessly
accepted reality to be as textual and as
essentially fictional as Mordor and the
Shire.

Something very different is happening
with Game of Thrones. At first, its just a
historical drama on an unfamiliar
geographic terrain. The supernatural is
alluded to, but most characters seem to
maintain an attitude of Enlightenment
skepticism. There are dragon skulls in
the worming crypts of Kings Landing,
but theyre only bones, relics of a time
before the thinning process reduced
everything to mere power play.

But then the unthinkable occurs: magic
starts to come back. As the new season
dawns weve seen dragons and demons,
faceless men and fire gods, elfine
creatures in weirwood trees and the
armies of the undead. For all the social
collapse, its not the land itself thats in
decay, but rather the comforting
falsehoods about a rational society.

The fantastic elements of the secondary
world are stronger than ever; theres a
continual process of thickening. Just as
the forces of finance seem ready to turn
the Iron Throne into a sponsored tourist
attraction and plant dark satanic mills
among the sacred groves of the old
North, all the old numinous powers
come roaring to life.

Near the end of the fourth season, the
Iron Bank provides Stannis with a
massive bailout. Instead of using it to
march on Kings Landing, he goes to the
Wall to defend the realms of men
against the White Walkers.

art have souls. Christianity interposed

itself, and all fantasy fiction is
essentially post-Christian in its view of
morality, humanism, free will etc.

However, the thickening process in
Game of Thrones is real. That is, the
supernatural world is getting bigger: it
is encroaching, via dragons, and via
whatever is coming over the wall from
the north.

I had, perhaps mistakenly, interpreted
the more dragons, more wierd stuff
trope as the author filling in,
progressively, the gaps in the logic of
the world he has created.

But one valid interpretation would be
that the enchantment represents the
irrational forces capitalism calls forth;
the spectre haunting Europe the
working class at the head of a populist
revolt.

By this schema Sam Kriss conclusion
that Westeros is incipient capitalism
and the supernatural is its proletarian
nemesis would be logical.

A revolution in which the White
Walkers, dragons and sea monsters
unite with the yeoman peasantry and
freed slaves to bring down Westerosi
financial feudalism is, indeed, an
alternative I had not adequately
considered.

Its a kind of literal manifestation of the

process Marx describes in the
Communist Manifesto: the bourgeoisie
drowns holiness, strips haloes, and
reduces all mystical relations to cold,
rational monetary calculation. Marx, it
must be remembered, entirely approves
of this; believing the end of capitalism
has almost arrived, he uses the
Manifesto to bury and praise it at the
same time.

Except at the start of the Manifesto,
communism appears as a specter (in
the first draft, a frightful hobgoblin).
Jacques Derrida famously identifies the
specter, or revenant, as that which
comes back is communism just a
return of the mystical forces of the
failed late medieval revolutions, that in
turn sweeps away the bloodless
rationality of the bourgeoisie? This idea
is complicated further: Marx compares
the capitalists to the sorcerer who is no
longer able to control the powers of the
nether world whom he has called up by
his spells.

Capitalism is a monster more
uncontrollable than any mere dragon,
and a succession of bourgeois
economists have tried and failed to rein
it in. In Capital, Marx spends some time
discussing the properly supernatural
elements of the capitalist system: the
bodiless phantasm that is exchange
value, the topsy-turvy nightmare of the
autonomous commodity.

Its a process that runs counter to the
thinning of fantasy literature rather
than skimming away the magic to leave
us in a boringly mechanistic universe, he
peels away the veneer of rationality in
things to show that the magic never
went away. The end is the same: its
difficult to ever conclude that our world
is fully real.

Like Jorge Luis Borgess Tln, the

thickening effect in Game of Thrones is
already becoming visible in our world.
More newborn girls are being named
Khaleesi than Betsy, Imogen, or Nadine.
Nerds who would once babble at each
other in Klingon are now putting in long
hours learning Dothraki or High
Valyrian. Surely it cant be long until
our own dragons start to hatch.


It might now be possible to explain why
people enjoy fantasy stories set in some
version of a feudal society. Mason tries
to do the same thing, but the result is
unpersuasive:

[Feudalism] forms the ideal landscape
in which to dramatise the secret desires
of people who live under modern
capitalism. . . . Trapped in a system
based on economic rationality, we all
want the power to be something bigger
than our credit card limit, or our job
function.

We have creditors, we want kings.
Except Game of Thrones constantly
undermines this idea: its kings arent
just cruel and stupid but powerless,
trying to bat away rapacious financiers
and ghoulish monsters with both
flapping, ineffectual hands. Its a
strange detour into the language of
desire and latency, a kind of iekian
maneuver that seems to indicate an
argument thats run up against its own
limits.

Feudal society wasnt really grand, and
capitalism isnt really rational. Its just
that the medieval period was the last
time that all the mystical creatures that
hid in the dark places of society were
known, named, and understood.

Now, outside of Marxism, theyve
clouded themselves once more in an

But I oppose a revolution led by

dragons, wights, sea monsters trailing
behind them the small folk of the
land, even if they ditch Daenerys along
the way.

Such a revolution would have nothing
to do with the horizontalist vision of
the Multitude pulling down capitalism
by refusing to reproduce it. It has
everything to do with the Stalinist
model of revolution practised between
1944 and 1947.

Nothing in the writing of Sam Kriss, in
Idiot Joy Showland, suggests s/he is a
Stalinist. But the supernatural powered
dragons and snowmonsters seem to me
a lot like the T34s and Sturmoviks of
the Red Army, trailing behind them an
unorganised mass of badly trained
peasant soldiers to impose the planned
economy on above, onto a shattered
East Europe.

No. For Westeros to go communist will
need the self activity of human beings,
not dragons.

But heres where I think Sam Kriss may
have a point.

There is no materialist account of
human liberation other than the one
that leads from feudal and pre-feudal
societies, via capitalism, to abundance.

impenetrable gloom. Reading the

finance pages in any newspaper is a far
more baffling experience than delving
into the most arcane of ancient
grimoires. We enjoy medieval fantasy
because in some way it helps explain
our own demon-haunted world.

It can also give us hope for the future. A
properly materialist reading of Game of
Thrones can only conclude that, as a
matter of historical necessity, in the fifth
season the White Walkers will burst
through the Wall, the dragons will
break free from their petulant queen
and her cloying white-savior complex,
strange sea monsters will turn the
Braavosi banking houses into heaps of
rubble with a sweep of their vast
tentacles, and all will unite with the
smallfolk of the land to dethrone all the
bickering pretenders, melt the Iron
Throne into tractor parts, and build a
new and better society.

And maybe one day, in the not-too-
distant future, when Marxist theory is
no longer needed, people will enjoy
telling each other fantasy stories set in
that strangest and most mystical of
eras, a time of malign magic and
crushing poverty the early twenty-
first century.

For historical mateiralists, what

Westeros needs is not White Walkers
but (a) trade, (b) the rule of law (c) a
finance system and ultimately (d)
machines that manufacture things
rather than just spitting out flaming
arrows.

No historical short-circuit is possible
because only capitalism can produce
the kind of human beings that can
liberate themselves.

In the old, Leninist viewpoint those
people were workers. In the new,
horizontalist scheme they are the
networked individuals who actually
watch Game of Thrones.

For a materialist, all fantasies of a
short-cut to the liberated society
from feudalism to communism were
just that: fantasies.

From Gerard Winstanley to the Russian
narodniks the project always requred
the intervention of an outside force.

But now I think about it, as Sam Kriss
points out, such a force exists in
Westeros and is growing.

Perhaps the re-wierding of the world,
and its thickening, is an advance
signal that the ultimate deus-ex-
machina is about to save Westeros
from 500 years of capitalist
development.

Perhaps magic will set Westeros free. If
not it will have to be the slow-grinding
forces of economic development and
humanism which is all I was saying in
the first place
Paul Mason, 10 April 2015
P.S. And yes, modern capitalism sucks.