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Media Armageddons and the Death of Liberal Biopolitics

Majia Holmer Nadesan

Introduction

Disaster films emphasizing post-apocalyptic landscapes dominate the recent cinematic imagination. Public anxieties surrounding the fear of terrorist attacks, global warming, flu pandemics, and fiscal crises are no doubt channeled into these films. Yet, what is unique about the contemporary disaster film is its tendency to emphasize post-disaster survival, rather than exploiting audiences' vicarious enjoyment of apocalyptic spectacle. This chapter argues that the cinematic dwelling within post-apocalyptic landscapes, particularly cannibalistic dwelling, reflects a pervasive but anonymous sense of dislocation stemming from what will be theorized as the death throes of liberal biopolitics. Liberal biopolitics, born in the eighteenth century, is quickly eroding as the population is stripped of value within new calculi for evaluating the wealth of nations. Domestic populations within the United States sense this erosion of their value and significance and therefore can identify with cinematic survivors' efforts to maintain identity and dignity in post-collapse environments devoid of basic principles of sociality. However, the cinematic obfuscation of the forces of collapse may expedite the death of liberal biopolitics by undermining the forms of concerted and directed activism necessary for resisting the onslaught of cannibalizing capitalism. The chapter begins by describing recent disaster films and then moves to explore how disaster films allude to the death of biopolitics.

Disaster Films

Disaster is a familiar theme within Hollywood productions. Maurice Yacowar (2003) traces the earliest disaster films to turn-of-the-twentieth-century productions, such as Méliès's Collision and Shipwreck at Sea (1898) and The Catastrophe of the Balloon (1902). Early disaster films articulated a thematic device that would be replicated across a century of subsequent films in the genre: the eruption of death within scenes of normality (Yacowar, 2003). In 1965, Susan Sontag described stereotyped features of disasters in science fiction films in her now classic essay, “The Imagination of Disaster.” Sontag observed that disaster as fantasy “releases one from normal obligations” while often conveying simplistic moralities that encourage audiences to discharge “righteous bellicosity” (p. 45). Yet, also lurking in science fiction disaster films, Sontag remarked, are the “deepest anxieties about contemporary existence” (p. 47). These anxieties include the “very real trauma of the Bomb” as well as more generalized fears of “universal mutilation and even annihilation” (p. 47).

Although specters of death and annihilation commonly haunt science fiction disaster films, mise-en-scène features are shaped by extant cultural identities and preoccupations. Stephen Kean's Disaster Movies: The Cinema of Catastrophe (2006) offers readers insight into transmutations in cinematic themes and devices since the 1970s. Kean observes that 1990s-era disaster films relied on repetitions of a relatively narrow range of destructive events and scenes, as illustrated by the meteor impacts featured in Deep Impact (1998) and Armageddon (1998). These two films, like similar films of the period, focus on the events prior to, and during, disasters. Disaster presents a spectacle of enjoyment for audiences. However, post-September 11 disaster films were marked by a new sensitivity, leading usually (but not always) to more muted representations of cinematic disasters.

More recently, disaster films released in 2009 and 2010 offer an interesting twist. As John Jurgensen and Jamin Brophy-Warren (2009) write in their Wall Street Journal review, “The new wave of disaster movies and TV shows isn't about staving off the apocalypse. It's what happens afterwards that counts.” Recent films that explore survival after a natural or human-induced apocalypse include Carriers (2009), Children of Men (2006), I Am Legend (2007), Wall-E (2008), 28 Days Later (2002), Doomsday (2008), 9 (2009), The Road (2009), and The Book of Eli (2010), among others. These films are to be distinguished from earlier apocalyptic films that address efforts to cope with anticipated disasters, halt anticipated disasters, or that sensationalize the disaster itself (e.g., 2012, out in 2009).

The last four of the films mentioned – Doomsday, 9, The Road, and The Book of Eli – are distinctive for their emphasis on cannibalism. Cannibalism is not unusual in films (e.g., Ruggero Deodato's 1980 Cannibal Holocaust), particularly in survival films (e.g., Alive, 1993), but the combined synthesis of post-apocalyptic survival and cannibalism is relatively unique. When it does occur, this synthesis tends to involve zombie cannibals (e.g., Omega Man, 1971; World War Z, 2006; I Am Legend, 2007; The Crazies, 2010). Cannibalism by fully human (i.e., non-zombified), post-apocalyptic survivors in cinema is rare. Three notable exceptions include Soylent Green (1973), examining a dystopic, overpopulated future; A Boy and His Dog (1978), a film that implicates cannibalism by a bureaucratized and totalitarian post-apocalyptic society; and The Road Warrior (1981), which features post-apocalyptic Australia. These three films were released within the culturally pessimistic zeitgeist of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which resulted in a number of dark, neo-noir films. Since that time, post-apocalyptic cannibalism has not appealed to Hollywood, perhaps being perceived as too risky, although a number of novels have explored this theme, notably Farnham's Freehold (Heinlein, 2011) and, most recently, One Second After (Forstchen, 2009).

However, the current cultural pessimism that is spreading across the United States has enabled the return of dark, mainstream films (see Pew Research Center, 2010). This chapter will focus on the three recent US films that address survival and (non-zombie) cannibalism in post-apocalyptic worlds.¹ The analysis argues that a change in cultural zeitgeist, rooted in the ongoing collapse of liberal biopolitics, has affected this shift in Hollywood sentiments. Support for this argument is found in the films' latent cultural significations, particularly with respect to featured thematic elements including devastated urban landscapes and debased sociality. The films, it is argued, essentially represent hauntings from an anticipated future that stem from the collapse of Western biopolitics. Each of these films will be introduced before explaining theoretically what is meant by the “death of liberal biopolitics.”

The Road, directed by John Hillcoat, is based on a 2006 novel by Cormac McCarthy, adapted by writer Joe Penhall. Director Hillcoat pressed McCarthy to explain the nature of the disaster that leaves a father and his son adrift in a dead world devoid of plants, animals, and human civilization (Jurgensen & Brophy-Warren, 2009). McCarthy reportedly responded that “it didn't matter whether it was nuclear war or mini volcanoes or a comet” (cited in Jurgensen & Brophy-Warren, 2009). What matters in the film is the struggle for survival and dignity in a collapsed world. The father and son featured in the film navigate devastated landscapes in search of food and hope, all the while struggling to avoid other survivors who have turned to cannibalism. One of the most disturbing scenes in the film focuses on the cannibals' “meat-locker” of starved, naked, suffering humans. When filming The Road, Hillcoat relied upon real disaster footage of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Mt. St. Helens after its explosion, and abandoned industrial areas in Pennsylvania.

The second film to be discussed here, The Book of Eli directed by Albert and Allen Hughes, with Gary Whitta as screenwriter, takes place in a post-apocalypse environment 30 years after some final war. As with The Road, survivors struggle within ruins to find food and water. Whereas The Road is filmed primarily in unremitting gray, The Book of Eli is cast in washed-out dusty browns. What the two films share are cannibalistic survivors who signify the utter collapse of civilization. However, whereas The Road offers no hope for the reclamation of humanity, The Book of Eli suggests this possibility in the form of a Bible carried by the film's main protagonist. Yet, the Bible is an uncertain signifier in the sense that the film explores its instrumentalization by fascist forces. In the end, The Book of Eli sacrifices the savior whose corporeality gives expression to the Word of the Bible. Once codified and bound, this Word is contained on a bookshelf in a hidden enclave of learning. It is shelved, and perhaps forgotten, next to the Torah and the Qu'ran.

The final film addressed here is 9, an animated production by Burton, Bekmambetov, and Lemley (2009), directed by Shane Acker, with the screenplay written by Pamela Pettler. 9 features no humans at all in its blighted, post-apocalyptic landscape. All that remains of agency are mechanical dolls and the carnivorous machines that prey upon them. Using flashbacks, 9 explains the devastation by drawing upon the classical dialectic monster of the machine that turns against its maker. In this case, the machine, which was originally intended for productive use, was appropriated by the military for the purpose of warfare. The machine's inventor subsequently created the mechanical dolls, within which he invested slices of his soul. These animated dolls struggle with one another over how to survive and how to evade the soul-consuming, predatory machines. When making the film, 9's director Shane Acker and his crew visited Los Angeles scrap yards where they found interesting junk, which they then assembled into prototypes for the animated mechanical dolls. In contrast, the carnivorous and more high-tech-looking machines threatening the dolls were simply fabricated in computer animation (Trimble, 2009). The characters in 9 are not properly human but arguably signify human cannibalism since they are human externalizations (i.e., machines) that prey upon human externalizations (dolls) invested with a human soul.

Despite differences in mise-en-scène elements, all three films examined in this analysis share a common focus on the collapse of civilization, defined in relation to liberal, democratic principles of government. The remaining populations in The Book of Eli and The Road have lost organizing principles of social existence other than brute and corporeal power. Population is not a source of fecund energies; rather, population is the basis for ruthless competition. No social contract exists; sociality is reduced to allegiances of fealty to predatory powers. The father–son relationship dramatized in The Road serves only to remind audiences of all that has been lost from the world. In The Book of Eli, master signifiers such as the Bible oscillate between meanings, at times iconic of unleashed fascist power, while at other times iconic of law and order. 9 alone dramatizes friendships, but does so in the context of internal intrigue and despotism born of desperation.

The three films' emphasis on post-apocalyptic survival causes futures to recede, as well as the traumatic kernels of the past events that precipitated collapse. None of the films offers a happy Hollywood ending. Instead, they all dwell upon the struggle for sustenance and some basic level of security in devastated landscapes. The role cannibalistic violence plays in these films is important. Cannibalism is a direct threat in The Road. Predatory violence by machine against machine dominates 9. Cannibalism, fascist power, and cruelty are found in The Book of Eli. Of course, violence in all of its forms pervades Hollywood productions. Yet, there is something distinctive about the violence in these post-apocalyptic films. Violence is not ideologically driven or fetishized, nor is it linked to consciousness-altering madness (as with zombies), but it is driven by depravity born of desperation, as in The Road and The Book of Eli, or by the utter mindlessness found in 9's predatory creatures.

The stories told in a society always reflect aspirations and anxieties, hopes and fears. What anxieties and cultural fears infuse the thematic elements of these post-apocalyptic, blasted landscapes and desperate, hopeless survivors? Moreover, how do the tropes, plots, and landscapes of today's films diverge from the history of disaster films? The films described in this section, The Road, 9, and The Book of Eli, differ from the disaster film genre by their relatively small casts and apparently simple themes. Unlike previous films in this genre, these films de-emphasize the disaster as they are set years after the cataclysm, which is only alluded to, rather than sensationalized. Additionally, the main threats posed to the survivors of the three disaster films examined in this analysis are scarcity (except in 9) and predatory, cannibalistic violence. It is my argument that these two threats serve as sites of condensation for popular anxieties surrounding fundamental dislocations in liberalism as a politico-economic ideology and as a way of life.

Liberalism, the Labor Theory of Value, and the Wealth of Nations

This chapter argues that thematic elements of current disaster films point to a deep sense of trepidation in the US cultural imagination. The zeitgeist has shifted away from optimism for the future, as the foundations of society are perceived to be in jeopardy. The analysis offered by this chapter extends beyond surface expressions of popular dissatisfaction to address a problematic trend within Western liberalism that, arguably, is becoming increasingly evident to the US populace. That trend is the growing irrelevance of the populace for the creation of value. This chapter argues that a nagging sense of the populace's irrelevance is percolating in the collective cinematic imagination of the nation. However, the cinematic imagination functions akin to a collective unconscious: cinematic displacement and condensation mask traumatic kernels of understanding. The cinematic dream-work weaves potent symbols of anxiety and dislocation into a coherent narrative that ultimately obscures the symbols' relations to the crisis of liberal capitalism. This section explores the crisis of liberal capitalism that has dislocated the populace as the source of value. The devaluation of the US population within capitalist calculi of value is leading to what I describe as the death of liberal biopolitics. This analysis will be linked to the films in the subsequent section.

This section is organized by a central contention: it is my argument that liberal biopolitics is tied implicitly to the capitalist labor theory of value. Consequently, the growing irrelevance of US labor (and aggregate consumption) today for the accumulation of capitalist value negates justification for liberal biopolitics within the nation. In order to unpack this argument, it is helpful to return to the birth of biopolitics as it emerged with Western capitalism and liberalism in the eighteenth century.

Western capitalism emerged in tandem with Western liberalism. Liberalism, as expressed in the founding documents of Adam Smith and John Locke, is a form of political rule that posits and advocates limits to sovereign control over the economy and individuals. Liberalism substitutes the corporeal, centered power of the sovereign over the individual and his/her market transactions with “natural” laws and disciplines. As explained by Michel Foucault in The Birth of Biopolitics, market veridiction – e.g., in the form of Smith's guiding hand – was the regime of truth that adjudicated the correctness of governmental practices under liberalism. Accordingly, liberalism is essentially “indexed to the problem of the market and market veridiction” (Foucault, 2008, p. 56). Markets purportedly permit “natural” or spontaneous mechanisms to set “natural,” “good,” or “normal” prices (p. 31). Within classical liberal political economy, market prices were believed to have a certain, almost metaphysical, relationship to the work performed to produce market commodities. Accordingly, in 1776 Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations:

In The Economics (1857–1867), Marx (2000) commented upon the importance of Adam Smith in defining labor, in its abstracted form, as the source of wealth production, particularly in exchange relations. For classical liberalism, labor power is the ultimate source of exchange value; that is, it is the natural and foundational truth of the market. The capitalists' accumulation of surplus value derives from the objectification of the wage earners' “living labour” (Marx, 2000, p. 400). Wages paid to labor, from the classical perspective, derive directly from the workers' power to command wage levels. Disutility is the term used to describe the condition where low wages disincentivize work. Classical economists believe that wages settle just above disutility (Keynes, 1936).

The market's capacity to adjudicate truth presupposed a special market agent capable of assessing information rationally when selling work or when involved in other types of commodity transactions. Thus, Adam Smith argued that society is fundamentally composed of “commercial” actors: “Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society” (2003, p. 33). Homo economicus is the rational commercial agent of exchange. His (gendered) comparative advantage is embodied in his labor capacity and/or in the labor “stored” in products or coinage he controls. The imagined transparency and competitiveness of this idealized marketplace of labor and goods allows for the most efficient exchange and distribution of societal goods possible.

Laissez-faire is the principle of government that is viewed as allowing the labor and commodity markets to operate efficiently, according to their natural or spontaneous competitive mechanisms (see Riskin, 2003, p. 47). The moral component of laissez-faire derived from Adam Smith's belief that the individual's rational, self-interested market behavior produced the most positive collective outcomes for society, thereby aligning private market interests with public advantage (Smith, 2003, p. 572). The underpinnings of classical liberalism, including laissez-faire and homo economicus, prevailed throughout the nineteenth century despite evidence of the market's failure to distribute resources efficiently or rationally through much of that century, as pointed out so clearly by Karl Marx (2000).

However, laissez-faire did not result in the abdication of state power. Through the vector of a secularized pastoral power, the state assumed greater interest in, and responsibility for, the biovitalities of the population, forging biopolitics. According to Foucault, biopolitics emerged under state mercantilism through the technology of political statistics and the assemblage of police (Foucault, 2007, pp. 278, 315). Biopolitics, a form of power that addresses the biovitalities of human bodies, involved “distributing the living in the domain of value and utility” (Foucault, 1990, p. 144). Biopolitics inherited from the police the objective of ensuring the health of the population and preventing idleness (Foucault, 2007, p. 325). Biopolitics, aimed at the population, was complemented by anatomo-power, which operated on the living bodies of workers and soldiers in order to govern and extract value from their labor power (Foucault, 1990). Although early biopolitical endeavors, such as the nineteenth-century sanitation movement, involved a convergence of private and state authorities, biopolitical practices eventually were adopted as technologies of the self, as individuals endeavored to master hygienic practices of self-government. Still, biopolitics remained essentially a responsibility of state government as the health and vitality of populations were linked to state security and economic prosperity (Nadesan, 2008). Foucault therefore claimed that under the evolving liberal state, the population “will appear above all as the final end of government” with the end being aimed at increasing the population's “wealth, its longevity, and its health” (2007, p. 105).

The historical relations between biopolitics and the demands of capitalist accumulation are fraught with tensions and the former is not reducible to the imperatives of the latter (see Nadesan, 2008). That being said, biopolitics finds its justification in enabling the subject of liberalism, homo economicus, while fostering the economic and political security of the nation. Indeed, Foucault (2007) stressed that biopolitics must be understood “on the basis of a theme developed in the seventeenth century: the management of state forces” (p. 367). It is not surprising therefore that overt tensions between (1) market logics of extraction and accumulation and (2) the health of the population (the totality of homo economicus) have produced great legislative and judicial conflicts for liberal Western states that declare democracy while encoding the logics of property within their democratic documents (see Beard, 1913; Hardt & Negri, 2009).

The great European and US depressions of the 1930s pitted the vitalities of populations against the liberal freedoms of the market while also demonstrating how laissez-faire market failures problematize through fascism the very idea of the liberal state. Recognizing that laissez-faire capitalism tends to result in overproduction (and underconsumption), John M. Keynes sought to temper the business cycle by expanding the state's role in stabilizing demand, through expansion of the public sector and by regulating employment. Keynes's observations that the populace could experience “involuntary unemployment” and that markets often exhibited irrationality problematized laissez-faire assumptions (1936, p. 10). Keynes particularly emphasized the dangers of speculation, which had contributed to the Great Depression:

Keynesian economics employed the state to promote full employment and regulate speculation, while still encouraging a capitalist economy and market system. In the United States, military Keynesianism contributed to union-based manufacturing while expanded social welfare and education spending delivered improved living standards for much of the populace.

Liberal biopolitics thus expanded significantly in the post-World War II era. The intense study and promotion of physical and mental “health” became a defining feature of the post-World War II security state in the United States (and Western Europe) through programs such as free lunch, expanded welfare, social security, and services for the disabled. These programs were infused with power relations and produced resistance from populations subjected to them, especially in the 1960s and 1970s; however, they did in many ways prioritize national vitality, construed in relation to the populace's economic productivity (e.g., consider social security, free milk and lunch programs, head-start, welfare, etc.).

Classical laissez-faire was not, however, completely abandoned in the post-World War II era. Austrian economists such as Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises sought to free economic theory and practice from Keynesian constraints and influence and to liberate the populace from “dependence”-fostering social welfare programs. Yet, it was the Chicago School “neoliberal” economists whose ideas were most fully implemented, first in trial nations such as Chile and Mexico through the leverage of global governance institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. The World Trade Organization, which replaced the post-World War II General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1995, also assumed a role in propagating neoliberal policies by dictating the elimination of Keynesian tariffs and subsidies. The emphasis on export-oriented production in the developing world, coupled with the liberalization of trade and finance, presented economic opportunities to corporations based in the developed world seeking to escape the (perceived) onerous (Keynesian) labor, tax, and environmental regulations of their host nations. Automation and globalization enhanced corporate earnings as the labor disutility rate sank ever lower; however, the most lucrative technology for sheer accumulation involved financial speculation, rather than production activities.

Indeed, within neoliberal states such as the United States and the United Kingdom, the intensification of capital accumulation in the 1980s through today derived less from the enhancement of labor's productive capacities and the sinking of the disutility rate than from the growth of financialization. Financialization occurred within the United States as financial motives, institutions, and elites became increasingly important in shaping the economy in response to the decline in profit margins in manufacturing (see Foster & Magdoff, 2009; Vasudevan, 2008). US banks grew to dominate their domestic economies: by 2010, six US banks held assets in excess of 63% of the US gross domestic (Moyers, 2010). Moreover, innovative financial instruments such as derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, and credit default swaps enabled the financial investment banks and commercial banks (after repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act) to accumulate wealth outside of the circuits of commodity production (LiPuma & Lee, 2004). Bryan, Martin, and Rafferty (2009) claim there is no direct historical equivalent for this new form of financialization, not simply because of the size of financial institutions, but also because securitization and financial derivatives “are transforming capital accumulation” in ways unimaginable by Marx and the classical economists (my italics, p. 459).² Contemporary financialization requires little labor to produce value (see Nadesan, in press).

Financialization in the United States has not only driven out most manufacturing, but it has also shaped the operations of almost every other industry by encouraging monopolization, lean production, and outsourcing (see Lynn, 2010; Rasmus, 2010). US manufacturers had little incentive to invest in domestic labor, or even to modernize their manufacturing capacities at home, when higher profits could be achieved by offshoring production or by downsizing manufacturing by investing instead in financial products and services (see Roberts, 2010). Indeed, over the last 30 years, US and UK corporations that formerly made things – such as autos and lightbulbs – found newly established financial services divisions to reap greater profits, as illustrated (prior to the recession) by the financial services arms of both General Electric and General Motors. Thus, financial logics replaced production ones even within manufacturing (Phillips, 2008).

New vocabularies and metrics circulated within the United States and United Kingdom to rationalize the evolving financialized economies. Keynes's disparaging representation of the financial market as a casino was substituted by the neoliberal “efficient market” theory, which presumes market transparency and rationality (Krugman, 2009). Metrics of national well-being, such as unemployment or wage increases, were de-emphasized by the new authorities of “political monetarism,” which focused only on the stock of money supply while ignoring all other macroeconomic statistics, including unemployment statistics (DeLong, 1999). Thus, neoliberal, supply-side vocabularies and metrics pushed by the Chicago School economists replaced the post-World War II Keynesian emphasis on aggregate consumer demand.

The Keynesian link between wages and aggregate consumption was broken, rendering the earning potential of the populace less relevant to financiers and policymakers alike. Low interest rates encouraged by monetary economists enabled debt-based household consumption in a context of stagnating wages. Greater concentrations of wealth at the top enabled huge luxury expenditures by the wealthiest 10% of the populace. Average workers' wage levels were increasingly perceived as irrelevant to economic growth and wealth accumulation by Wall Street and policy-makers alike.

Simultaneously, corporate stock prices became less dependent upon consumer expenditures. Outsourcing and automation allowed corporate assets to grow (by squeezing labor costs) even if consumption remained constant. Additionally, pension programs and 401ks directed retirement funds toward inflating equities, which promised higher returns than the more traditional safety of lower-interest-earning bonds (Joint Economic Committee, 2000). Finally, as mentioned above, corporations expanded their financial services and partnerships, producing annuity-like steady streams of interest from consumer debt.

These transformations achieved through the neoliberal financialization of the US economy enriched Wall Street banks and investment firms, hedge funds, and the wealthiest US citizens. Contributing to their capacities to acquire wealth outside of production was the expansion of derivatives (LiPuma & Lee, 2004) and new computer-based trading technologies (see Nadesan, in press). Financial traders found that rising stock prices were no longer necessary for financializing corporations or traders to accumulate profits. With the advent of high-frequency trading, market volatility itself produced speculative opportunities to high-frequency traders (see Nadesan, in press). Speculation embraced losses as well as gains as the novel insurance of “credit default swaps” ensured profitability on the riskiest of investments.

The decreased relevance of US labor impacted wage levels, household income, and local communities' tax base. Citizens' earning capacities deflated with fewer union job opportunities and stagnating wages. Simultaneously, public investments in educational and manufacturing infrastructures collapsed in all but the most privileged of areas. Household indebtedness grew.

Speculative or rentier, debt-based capitalism expanded throughout US society as consumer debt was encouraged by the financial services industry (see Phillips, 2008). Debt was securitized into financial instruments such as bonds, derivatives, and collateralized debt obligations that could be sold to unwary investors (see Pollin, 2007). The originate-to-distribute lending model that permeated nearly all forms of credit instruments made debt a highly profitable commodity while distributing “risk” internationally as investors around the world purchased bonds and derivatives created out of pooled debt.

The reinvention of laissez-faire under neoliberalism offered another tempting technology for capital accumulation rooted in the predation upon, and privatization of, Keynesian (social and military) security apparatuses. David Harvey (2005) described a “neoliberal state” whose mission is to “facilitate conditions for profitable capital accumulation on the part of both domestic and foreign capital” (p. 7). In 2008, James Galbraith defined a “predator state” as “a coalition of relentless opponents of the regulatory framework on which public purpose depends, with enterprises whose major lines of business compete with or encroach on the principal public functions of the enduring New Deal” (p. 131). Predatory corporations dictate and “poach” upon public purpose and have no loyalties for nations or populations (p. 131).

The neoliberal, predatory state that emerges in the descriptions provided by Harvey and Galbraith diverges from the frozen, idealized descriptions of the liberal state provided by founding neoliberal thinkers such as Friedrich von Hayek (1991) and Milton Friedman (1962). Yet, current US bailout policies and programs point to a predatory neoliberal state whose mission it is to resolve and remediate (without altering) the problems of governance stemming from neoliberal deregulation, privatization, and financialization. Neoliberal economists have responded to this type of criticism by defending the natural superiority of “efficient markets” and “competitive advantage.” Neoliberal think tanks promoted the market-friendly, debt-based technology of individual micro-enterprise as the solution for growing structural unemployment (Karoly, 2007). From the perspective of neoliberal authorities, what mattered was steady expansion of the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) and credit, not job creation. Government policy obligingly aimed primarily at ensuring steady expansion of the monetary supply (Krugman, 2009). Dissent was subdued by the combination of steady growth and low inflation, despite growing evidence of aggregate demand-dampening economic inequality.

A 2005 Citigroup document highlighted in Michael Moore's (2009) film, Capitalism: A Love Story, illustrates the increasing irrelevance of the populace, in terms of both their productive and consumptive capacities. The October 16, 2005, document, “Equity Strategy: Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances,” describes a world “dividing into two blocs – the plutonomies, where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few, and the rest” (p. 1). The United States is a “key” plutonomy characterized by

The productive and consumptive capabilities of populaces within plutonomies cede in significance to the wealth accumulated by the few through technology that replaces workers, financial “innovations” capable of accumulating wealth outside of production (e.g., through securities transactions), and through overseas colonial exploitation of resources and labor.

The populace's loss of value within economic calculi is highlighted in an article posted May 18, 2010, at the popular web page, the Economic Collapse blog. The article, titled “The Declining Value of Work,” authored by Michael Snyder, argues: “Thanks to rapid advances in technology, and thanks to the globalization of the work force, the labor of American workers is rapidly losing value.” In contrast to disposable workers, corporations continue to accumulate value by leveraging their monopolization over required commodities (e.g., food), by deriving value from overseas labor, and most significantly, from financial speculation.

The great financial crisis that began in the winter of 2007 shook neoliberal foundations and accelerated the problem of structural unemployment that had been developing since the dot.com collapse. Suddenly, deregulation and speculation were out of vogue among populist pundits. The past great moderation was reinterpreted as a bubble. Even mainstream commentators began questioning neoliberal, laissez-faire logics, including the ontological status of homo economicus (see Roubini, 2009; Thoma, 2009).

Members of the populist, libertarian right have joined the populist left in their criticism of the financialization of the economy and the growing power of the military–industrial complex. The libertarian right's suspicion of the state extends beyond liberal Keynesian thought promoted by figures such as James Galbraith, but converges with the left-of-center critique of the role of financialization in eroding the US industrial base and the growing power of what the libertarians term “crony capitalism.” For instance, libertarian Alex Jones of Prison Planet offers a conspiracy narrative of an elite group of financiers striving to create a new world order. Libertarian-inclined financial web pages decry the death of the republic, debt peonage, and deindustrialization, even while they reject social welfare redistributive apparatuses and promote a nostalgic and phantasmic vision of the nineteenth-century United States where individual labor and enterprise resulted in success.

Libertarian and leftist narratives of the economic and social changes wrought by neoliberalism adopt distinct vocabularies and promote different solutions to the financial crisis that began in December of 2007. Despite these differences, both narratives explain the transformation of capital accumulation in relation to the ascendancy of financialization, deindustrialization, and the growth of monopolistic and predatory capitalist interests whose lack of national identification enables them to operate globally and largely impervious to nation-states' regulatory apparatuses. Both groups share a disturbing sentiment that the population no longer serves as the primary basis for capital accumulation, nor for the determination of national wealth. Both groups share Max Keiser's concerns that the United States is being transformed into a “neo-feudal gulag economy” (Keiser, 2010).

Liberal Dreams, Liberal Nightmares

The ascendancy of neoliberal logics of financialization and the growth of predatory capitalism have wrought profound material changes to the economic configurations and social institutions that formerly characterized the United States of the mid- to late twentieth century. Together, these forces have dislocated the foundations of liberal biopolitical apparatuses. How might this dislocation, and the anxieties that it induces among those who must navigate its precarious material conditions, manifest in the realm of cultural production? This section explores how cinematic themes and tropes in The Road, 9, and The Book of Eli register and refer indirectly to the anxieties and fears of a dispossessed populace.

The Ambiguity of Collapse

The first theme shared by all three films is the ambiguity surrounding the source of collapse. All three of the films' narratives begin in a post-collapse landscape. 9 and The Book of Eli offer oblique references to devastating wars responsible for the collapse, but the point of, and parties to, these wars are obscure. The Road offers audiences few insights into the nature of the disaster. The thematic ambiguity surrounding the sources of collapse resonates with the uncertainty US citizens feel about the causes of the financial crisis that is currently wreaking havoc upon the nation. The nature and operations of the securitized bonds, credit default swaps, and derivatives held responsible for the financial crash are difficult to understand; indeed, they were designed to be unintelligible to all but the people who designed them (Taibbi, 2009a).

The financial crisis wrecked the economy – as evidenced by massive job losses, foreclosures, personal bankruptcies, and mounting hunger – without bombs, invasions, or civil insurrections. Growing unemployment headlines in the media beginning in 2009 were one of the most visible symptoms of decline. Drawing on reports by economists, the press began reporting a sharp decline in the civilian workforce (Evans-Pritchard, 2010).³

Declining income produced mass personal bankruptcies, which reached records not seen since immediately prior to the tightening of bankruptcy standards in October 2005 (Wilson, 2010). Perhaps the clearest symptoms of the recession were the growing home delinquencies and foreclosures. TransUnion, a financial and credit analysis organization, found national mortgage delinquencies jumped over 10% at the close of 2009 (TransUnion, 2010). TransUnion observed that the final quarter of 2009 constituted the twelfth consecutive quarter of rising delinquencies and anticipated that 2010 would lead to even greater delinquency rates. By May 2010, 14% of US mortgages were over 30 days delinquent or in some state of foreclosure (Hoak, 2010). The home foreclosures resulting from these delinquencies produced media spectacles of tent cities, media reports of overwhelmed homeless shelters, and a general increase in visible rates of homelessness on the nation's streets.

The spectacles of empty, foreclosed homes, empty strip malls, and abandoned real estate developments, particularly in the West and Southwest, resonated with disaster films' depictions of urban collapse and devastation. Media accounts of squatters' occupation of empty properties paralleled the cinematic depictions of survivors seeking shelter in the dilapidated, empty buildings of post-collapse societies. Even in affluent neighborhoods, the decay of foreclosed homes was detectable. Empty, declining buildings and untended gardens were specters of collapse that could not help but contribute to a climate of insecurity and generalized anxiety. The cinematic representations of such contexts eerily aligned with the aftermaths of the housing bubble.

Confusion reigned in the real world as it did in the cinematic universe of post-collapse societies. Collapse in the real world seemed inexplicable, but also irrefutable, as reports of cliff-diving tax receipts and municipal and state fiscal crises dominated headlines. Public employees – those Keynesian defenses against collapsing private demand – received pink slips daily, a phenomenon figuring prominently in media newscasts. The twentieth-century security state shuddered as states and municipal entities cut social and public safety services. Food insecurity, that specter of need supposedly vanquished by the security state, emerged once again, a shadow of the terrifying starvation conditions represented in post-collapse cinema. By 2010, one in eight US citizens relied on food stamps (Abbott & Hill, 2010). Food banks were stretched to the limit and anticipated shortages with ongoing demand increases. Public schools witnessed greater demands for free lunches, straining school lunch programs nationally (Bjerga, 2010). Recession gardens captured the public imagination, although much of the populace no longer had the skills and know-how to grow produce (Sutter, 2009).

In the parallel cinematic world of post-apocalyptic disaster films, survivors live in blasted landscapes incapable of sustaining life. Production is impossible in these devastated imagined worlds. The lands are depicted as infertile, incapable of supporting plant or animal life. Homeless survivors trudge through dilapidated highways and city streets, seeking occasional shelter from ruined buildings as they trudge forward on their respective missions: to reach the coast in The Road, to save an acquaintance in 9, and to reach some unknown destination in The Book of Eli. Survivors must rely on the detritus of former civilizations for their survival. Once again, survival is a struggle and scarcity dictates the conditions of the living.

Although US citizens did not face blasted landscapes in the wake of the financial collapse, they did increasingly confront evidence of the nation's slowly eroding infrastructures. Falling bridges, failing and vulnerable electrical grids, and polluted public waters captured media headlines. Viral epidemics such as swine flu that threatened to result from factory farming bred concern about the nation's food supplies. The film Food Inc. (Robert Kenner, 2008) sensationalized the health perils of the pesticide-ridden, petro-dependent global food-supply chain. Peak oil loomed as the US military warned of oil shortages by 2015 (Macalister, 2010). Closely following, mass-mediated environmental disasters – including Hurricane Katrina, the Asian tsunami that devastated parts of Indonesia and India, the Haitian earthquake, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the earthquake and tsunami that leveled parts of northern Japan and left the country with a major nuclear catastrophe – dramatized the unregulated forces capable of felling societies and the impotence of governments. The twentieth-century belief that rational science had tamed the uncontrollable chaotic forces of nature was revealed as false.

Simultaneously, the natural world appeared increasingly “at risk” from the seemingly suffocating and life-denying activities of civilization. An endless stream of ecological problems seemed to take on increasingly catastrophic proportions: desertification caused by agriculture eroding arable land, clean water sources degrading and in decline, and pollution threatening the biosphere. The United Nations warned that the world's ecosystems were at risk of “rapid degradation and collapse” (Knight, 2010). Oil dependency, in particular, began to be experienced as suffocating life in the spectacles of environmental destruction wrought, for example, in Canada's oil sands and within the Gulf of Mexico as a result of the oil disaster there, the scope of which was incomprehensible. What emerged was a picture of the cumulative effects of the conditions and practices of twentieth-century life as itself posing a catastrophic threat to the biosphere. Environmental threats rendered human life a threat to life itself, surplus human life seeming to choke the life of the planet. Post-apocalyptic disaster films registered this bleak vision of reality.

Cannibalism, Debt, and Vampire Squids

Life chokes life, just as debt accrued during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was perceived as sapping contemporary vitalities. US citizens struggled to remain solvent, as falling incomes and long-term unemployment exacerbated escalating debt levels (see, e.g., Borie-Holtz, Van Horn, & Zukin, 2010). Sovereign (i.e., government) debt ballooned as bailouts and FDIC takeovers of zombie banks and insurance companies continued unabated. Fears of market-swallowing governments seized economic conservatives. Fears of debt peonage to ruthless corporations or foreign governments (i.e., China) took hold among liberals. The critical financial press warned of predation by the cannibalistic products of late twentieth-century financial innovations.

Rolling Stone magazine's crusading reporter Matt Taibbi reported quarterly on the excesses of US investment banks, particularly Goldman Sachs, a financial firm accused of deliberately swindling funds from clients and the US government alike (in the form of securities fraud and bailouts through AIG) (see, e.g., Taibbi, 2010b). For instance, Goldman and J. P. Morgan indebted local municipal entities and school districts by selling interest rate swaps that ended up exponentially increasing the interest rates these public entities were forced to pay on their debt, resulting in bankruptcies, raided public pensions, and/or higher local taxes (see, e.g., Taibbi, 2010a; Tavakoli, 2010). Goldman and other investment banks also sold synthetic collateralized debt obligations to public entities, which they subsequently betted against (Dugan, 2010).

The capacity for investment banks to drain public entities was not restricted to local municipalities. In February of 2010, investment banks shorted Greek bonds and used credit default swaps to bet that the nation of Greece would default on its debt. These actions caused investors to pull out of the Greek market, hampering Greece's efforts to raise capital by causing interest rates for Greek debt to skyrocket because of rising credit default rates (Schwartz & Dash, 2010). Investment banks' predation illustrated how financial profit-making that boosts national GDP can simultaneously drain national vitality by crippling public entities. In July of 2009, Taibbi aptly described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money” (Taibbi, 2009b).

In post-apocalyptic disaster films, the metaphor for these insidious real-world forms of financial predation was cannibalism. In The Road and The Book of Eli, starved survivors lose their moral bearings and turn to human predation. In 9, a soulless, predatory machine imbibes the spirit animating the mechanical dolls who struggle for survival. Cannibalism is a means for survival at the cost of sociality, that foundational value of humanity.

Cannibalism occurs also in the popular US imagination as the state assumes control over the operations and risks of the market sector. The discourse of the autonomous and self-regulating market has been a fixture of the US cultural imagination since at least the eighteenth century. State socialism is, in the mind of the average US citizen, equivalent to state fascism. Hence, the state's acquisition of market firms is viewed as a form of threatening cannibalism, even when state control is seemingly necessitated by the systemic risks produced by an institution's insolvency. Strangely, this fear of state cannibalism seems to outweigh the fear of the vampire squid and other predatory corporations that strive to control the state in order to feed upon public largess (e.g., through regulatory capture and bailouts).

This fear of the cannibalistic state stems, no doubt, not only from the cultural fetishization of free markets but also, simultaneously, from the fear of constricting government deficits. The public has been conditioned by decades of shrill warnings from fiscal conservatives about the smothering dangers of federal deficits despite the US dollar's status as the global reserve currency. Randall Wray argues persuasively in Understanding Modern Money that this fear of deficits stems from a tendency to equate sovereign financials with household financials. Wray contends that this equation is not only false but dangerous, because decades of empirical analyses link federal surpluses with recessions. The sovereign, according to Wray, can create money without issuing debt, and, unlike banks, which exercise the same option, the sovereign need not back money creation with reserves of any form. Wray's account of modern money gets at the integrally socially constructed nature of value. Yet, the account of sovereign debt that circulates in business periodicals and the popular press reinforces the interpretive framework and calamitous fears of fiscal conservatives, thereby reinscribing a view of money that will lead the state to select austerity in social spending, since military spending is untouchable. Popular assumptions and government reactions to fiscal deficits increase the sense of dislocation experienced by the population.⁴

Surplus Populations

In recent disaster films, population is not a fecund source of libidinal energies. Populations primarily signify scarcity, rather than productivity. The biovitalities of the population signify only unmet needs. There is no production, only scarce consumption opportunities. The population has no value. In order to understand this devaluation of the productive capacity of the population it is helpful to return to the historical specter that haunted liberal political economy, poverty through overpopulation.

Classical liberalism viewed the population as a source of value insofar as populations adapted their numbers and characteristics in relation to the natural properties, ebbs, and cycles of the market. Homo economicus' prudence and moral restraint are exercised in no area as important as his/her fecundity (see Greene, 1999). Classical liberals believed that excessive population growth produces poverty by driving down wages and by creating scarcities. Unchecked poverty threatens security. Yet, the remediation of poverty through the state's redistributive efforts violates the natural operations of the market and the property rights of citizens. Thus, the classical liberal solution to the problem of poverty is found not in the state but in the dynamics of population (Bland, 1973). The population must secure itself from pauperism by controlling its fecundity in relation to the market's labor needs. In reality, starvation, disease, and war curtailed what “prudence” could not.

The Keynesian-inspired state sought to intervene in the Malthusian dynamics of population and markets by tempering market downturns and by engineering demand. The state proactively enhanced the productive capabilities of the populace through social welfare biopolitics aimed at ensuring adequate and accessible food, education for all, and some minimum level of healthcare. Keynesian-inspired biopolitics never obliterated surplus populaces, even within “advanced” economies, but it did soften the impact of capitalism's tendency for overproduction with vast “safety nets” such as unemployment insurance, food stamps, and jobs-training programs. The Darwinian laissez-faire market was thus tamed by a state that viewed the populace (i.e., aggregate demand) as an important foundation of national vitality.

The idea that the US population might pose problems for national vitality was perhaps first outlined in the post-World War II era by US President Richard Nixon, who introduced a “Commission on Population Growth and the American Future”:

This Malthusian concern about population outstripping job and resource availability directly called into question the willingness or capability of the Keynesian state. Malthusian fears were fanned by this acknowledgment and by the emergence of an environmental movement that challenged the liberal premise and promise of infinite growth and expansion. The explosion of neo-noir films in the 1970s, such as Soylent Green and A Boy and His Dog, reflected growing cultural pessimism about the virtues and sustainability of the modern liberal state.

Despite the eruption of cultural angst in the 1970s, the vast majority of the US populace has long been unwilling to confront its own Malthusian anxieties because the nation's foundational narratives deny the possibility that personal initiative might go unrewarded. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Rambo helped suppress the dystopian projections of the 1970s. Malthusian fears were contained and displaced by collective cultural fantasies that defined the poor and unemployed as Darwinian misfits, who were responsible for their plight due to their culture of poverty and lack of adaptive skills. Malthusian fears have also been projected upon foreign populations whose (purportedly) unchecked fertility is seen as threatening scarce resources. In this fashion, the Western world is absolved of blame for the pressures of overpopulation; simultaneously, the developing world is implicated in dystopic predictions of the planet as a postindustrial wasteland, characterized by heat, chronic food and energy shortages, and unchecked disease (McDougall, 2010). The US cultural imagination also displaces Malthusian fears within the iconic form of the illegal immigrant. Anti-immigrant xenophobia in states such as Arizona must be understood in relation to these suppressed and displaced Malthusian anxieties. At base, the suppressed fear is less about illegal immigrants taking jobs desired by citizens than it is about the citizens' fear that there exist no living-wage jobs for them to take.

US news reports of growing unemployment and underemployment within the United States have ruptured precisely those fantasies that previously contained Malthusian anxieties (see, e.g., Borie-Holtz et al., 2010; Goodman, 2010; Wessel, 2010). News reports detailing the desperation of middle-class unemployed workers strike fear in the hearts of wage earners across the nation. News reports of unremitting, escalating demands upon food banks and state unemployment funds threaten the foundations of the US fantasy of universal prosperity for the prudent and well educated. News reports of strained public finances threaten the omniscience of the Keynesian state.

The emergence of public discourses that acknowledge the widespread existence of surplus populations within the United States point to, and represent a dislocation of, the (Keynesian) biopolitical regime that has prevailed since being instituted in the post-World War II environment. It is the argument of this chapter that this dislocation stems not, as capitalists would have us believe, from some intrinsic and unavoidable necessity. Rather, the argument made here is that through regulatory capture the Keynesian state is being forcibly undone by rent-seeking capitalists who no longer view the populace as relevant to the production of value. Thus, the remaining social security apparatuses – including Medicare, Social Security, and federal funds for state unemployment and disability programs – are under frontal assault while Congress contemplates corporate tax cuts and individual estate tax reductions for the richest US citizens. Today, capital has largely forsaken the labor of developed economies and, with the implosion of the debt bubble, can no longer extract ever more value in the United States through debt servitude, because of massive deleveraging and credit defaults. Consequently, biopolitics that is not tied to privatized acts of consumption among the ever-diminishing middle classes (i.e., for-profit health and wellness) loses salience within established and emerging Western plutonomies. Austerity – the death of liberal biopolitics – “solves” the fiscal challenges of sovereign entities from the point of view of a form of capitalism that has forsaken labor. Within the United States, therefore, states and local governments are being forced to cut services to the poor, the disabled, and the young, precipitating a crisis in liberal biopolitics as programs aimed at enhancing education, health, and well-being are axed. The intensification of human labor is sacrificed on the altar of rentier capitalism.

It is noteworthy that two recent, popularly oriented books make similar arguments. The first is Arianna Huffington's Third World America (2010), which provides a glossy analysis of the demise of the American dream. The second is Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's (2010) Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – and Turned its Back on the Middle Class, which examines the public policies and programs that allowed the rich to cannibalize the rest. These texts, I believe, illustrate the populist coming-to-consciousness of a new zeitgeist of dispossession and marginalization that is echoed and amplified in recent post-apocalyptic disaster films.

Conclusion

The stories told by a society reflect fears, anxieties, and nightmares in addition to aspirations and idealizations. Disaster and apocalyptic films in general allude to, and project, societal tensions and anxieties. This chapter has argued that early twenty-first-century films like 9, The Book of Eli, and The Road inscribe lurking, but inchoate, suspicion that the general populace of the United States no longer is perceived as vital to, or for, the production of wealth by policymakers and societal elites. A new zeitgeist is birthed within which the population of advanced Western economies ceases to calculate as a nexus of value. The telos of liberal biopolitics ceases to exist in nations that have forsaken the labor theory of value.

The labor theory of value was a central tenet of capitalist logics for almost two hundred years within Western societies. However, the economic stagnation of advanced industrial societies spurred expansion of a form of rentier capitalism (Pollin, 2007) that enabled unprecedented levels of capital accumulation by wealthy elites from a relatively smaller pool of debt incurred by a general populace facing declining and/or stagnating wage levels. Financialization, as this form of rentier capitalism has been dubbed, produced vast speculative, debt-based bubbles that masked growing economic inequality and declining economic opportunities for at least two decades, particularly within the United Kingdom and the United States. The collapse of this bubble has led to the further impoverishment of the working class and has compromised the employment and consumption of an increasingly tenuous, fragile middle class. The incredible and unprecedented transfer of wealth that resulted from the financial crisis when governments assumed the losses of the corporate sector has further impoverished a populace faced with fiscal conservatives' demands for austerity targeting government-supported education, health, and retirement programs. To the degree that they are successful, such calls for austerity signify the state's abdication of the telos of population, the abdication of liberal biopolitics.

Structural unemployment and underemployment face a populace who can no longer rely on Keynesian demand engineering programs, ranging from education to social safety nets. The hollowing out of the manufacturing sector and the collapse of the finance/real estate/insurance economy (FIRE) have produced an epochal deleveraging that threatens to persist for years. What remains of liberal biopolitics is attacked by elites and righteous deficit hawks who see little to no value in the populace. The population's ever-decreasing consumptive powers mean that the logic of aggregate demand ceases to resonate. The environmental benefits of declining consumption in advanced Western economies matter little to a bereft populace instructed to equate conspicuous consumption with the good life. Furthermore, the incidences of erratic weather triggered by climate change signify a more terrifying narrative of nature that had been bound and domesticated by the now-compromised ideology of science as progress. The state, that former paragon of Keynesian virtue, has been revealed to the populace by the terrifying forces of financialization and nature combined as corrupt and ineffectual. Fear, anxiety, and a sense of dislocation permeate the popular consciousness.

The populace has declining value, or at least its value has declined within financial calculi. Its productive and consumptive capabilities have been rendered unsustainable by the crisis of a rentier capitalism that produced value through complex, abstract securitization processes. The populace now senses its declining relevance within the financial regime of governance that dominated the nation for the last 30 years. Yet, efforts to articulate this inchoate sensation are confounded by the technical vocabularies of financialization and the inability to enunciate the dynamics of the macro-level processes impacting individual lives. Accordingly, Kevin Rudd (2009) comments on the significance of the financial crisis in relation to its impact on the populace:

Although Rudd contends that the significance of events such as those experienced by the populace over the last two years is rarely acknowledged directly, it is the contention of this chapter that the significance of these events is being pondered in the collective consciousness of the nation in the form of a new genre of disaster films.

However, although the popular cinematic imagination expresses the senses of dislocation and disenfranchisement experienced by the populace, it can also contribute to deliberate efforts by financial and political elites to obscure the causal dynamics responsible for the crisis. As encouraged by cinematic representations, the crisis is therefore experienced in relation to inexplicable forces and agencies. Efforts to impose intelligibility on largely opaque relationships and dynamics have the unfortunate tendency to amplify the agency of petty sovereigns and tyrants. This tendency can be found across films in the forms of the cannibals in The Road, the local petty tyrant in The Book of Eli, and the soul-sucking carnivorous machine in 9. This cinematic focus on petty sovereigns parallels the “real-world” vilification of financial authorities and Wall Street titans. While petty sovereigns do bear responsibility for harms, their scope of agency has been enabled by the matrix of systemic dynamics and relationships that produced the conditions of responsibility for the crisis.

Personification of agents of collapse in the form of petty sovereigns can result in a mystifying nostalgia. The time before collapse is cleansed, its inequities purged in the collective imagination. Post-collapse survivors therefore demand a return to a world that never existed. In particular, in the wake of the financial disaster, there has been a resurgence of demands for a return to a form of laissez-faire, competitive capitalism that never existed as envisioned. Slavoj Žižek (2009) described a similar dynamic at work in the former Soviet republics, the populations of which began to engage in vehement, anticommunist rhetorics and policies. Žižek argued that the populations of these nations, many of which were themselves subjected to harsh austerity measures, erroneously blame communism for capitalism's failure to deliver its much-praised lifestyles to the majority of the populace. “In other words,” he asserted, “the newly born anti-Communists don't get that what they are denouncing as perverted pseudo-capitalism simply is capitalism.” In a similar pattern, the sophisticated zero hedge blog fans (zerohedge.com) and populist, low-brow Tea Party movement fail to recognize that what they perceive as the bastardization of free-market capitalism really is how capitalism operates when freed from strict regulatory oversight and constraints.

Capitalism, as regime of production based on the inequitable exploitation of value, created this crisis. Capitalism set the conditions of possibility for the rise of predatory, petty sovereigns and institutions. Capitalism produced the conditions of possibility for the dispossession of the population. And capitalism, that system that produced a biopolitics aimed at enhancing the productive capability of the population in order to extract surplus value, has also enabled clever entities and agents to devise strategies for acquiring wealth outside the traditional circuits of capitalist production through the expansion of rentier financialization. Post-apocalyptic disaster films like The Road, The Book of Eli, and 9 register the profound sense of dislocation experienced by the populace as they confront their superfluousness within a new social order cannibalized by finance capitalism.

NOTES

1 Thus, Doomsday, which is set in the United Kingdom, will be excluded from this analysis.

2 Bryan, Martin, and Rafferty (2009) do contend that financialization can still be analyzed within Marx's analysis of capitalist development in relation to the commodification of risk (p. 459).

3 Peck (2010) reports pessimistically in the Atlantic that:

A report on labor utilization by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University (Sum, Khatiwada, & Palma, 2010) describes the contraction of the labor market:

This report argues that blue-collar and young workers are disproportionately impacted by unemployment and underemployment. Elizabeth Warren (2008) argues that nearly the entire US middle class has been imperiled by the financial crisis, a sentiment supported by Pew Research Survey results released in March of 2010:

4 This fear of fiscal deficits was exacerbated by the crisis in Greece. Greece ceded its monetary sovereignty in order to join the European Union. Hence, after speculators attacked Greek bonds by shorting them, Greece was forced to raise interest rates on its bond sales, thereby precipitating a sovereign debt crisis in the rollover costs of existing, maturing bonds.

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