In today’s Guardian, Paul Mason argues that you can apply the theories and methods of Marxist analysis to predict the ending of Game of Thrones:

If you apply historical materialism to Westeros, the plot of season five and six becomes possible to predict. What happened with feudalism, when kings found themselves in hock to bankers, is that – at first – they tried to sort it out with naked power. The real-life Edward III had his Italian bankers locked up in the Tower of London until they waived his debts. But eventually 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. Paper money emerged, as did a complex banking system for assuaging problems like your gold mine running dry.

Mason points to some key factors – the bankruptcy of the monarchy, the rising power of the merchant class, the unrest among the vast majority of the population (known as the smallfolk) who are suffering the brunt of the seemingly endless War of Five Kings – which are slowly destabilizing the ground under the Iron Throne.

So far, so good. But here’s where Mason makes a very odd detour and undercuts his entire thesis.

Mason argues that, despite all of these factors, no social change will happen, because of the limitations of the genre:

So what Westeros needs is not an invasion of werewolves from the frozen north, but the arrival of a new kind of human being: they should be dressed in black, with white lace collars, stern faces and an aversion to sex and drink. In a word, Westeros needs capitalists – such as those who frown puritanically at us from Dutch portraits in the 17th century. And they should, as in the Dutch Republic and the English civil war, launch a revolution. But that can’t happen in the secondary world of fantasy fiction. The thinning process can never be allowed to end; it must be perpetual for the conceit of the drama to work.

My jaw falls open at this point. Mason clearly knows that the Iron Bank of Braavos exists, how did he fail to see that those bankers were the same Dutch capitalists he’s looking for to start this revolution into modernity? As I describe in the essay linked there, the Braavosi are small-r republicans in a world dominated by monarchies and aristocracies, and their consciousness of their origins as a nation of runaway slaves has already led them to conduct their foreign policy with an eye to the abolition of that system. Indeed, if we read between the lines of the origins of the Faceless Men, they may have already brought down the Valyrian Empire because the religious cult heeded the cries of the mining slaves underneath Valyria’s soil for revenge against the masters.

Why does Mason think the Iron Bank has provided loans to Stannis? As Tycho Nestoris explains in Season 4’s “The Laws of Gods and Men,” the Iron Bank cares for the truth of ledgers over the truth of heralds’ rolls of genealogy. When, not if, the Iron Bank gets its due, they will have to remake much of Westeros’ economy and society just to raise productivity levels enough that the country can afford to pay its debts. (Incidentally, if you want to read more on exactly how and why the Iron Throne became bankrupt, you might want to pick up this new edited volume and read my essay “Who Stole Westeros?”)

Even more baffling is Paul Mason’s conception of George R.R Martin’s motivations for writing a fantasy novel, which he argues can be explained by the ennui of post-industrial capitalism:

There is a reason so much fantasy fiction adopts the conceit of a feudalism that is always in crisis but never overthrown. It forms the ideal landscape in which to dramatise the secret desires of people who live under modern capitalism. Tolkien’s generation – scarred by industrial-scale warfare – craved the values of heroism and mercy associated with the face-to-face combat of yesteryear. For William Morris, whose utopian socialist novel News From Nowhere is set in a quasi-medieval Hammersmith, the craving was for skill, craft, beautiful individual objects – an escape from the brutalism of industrial mass production. Future social historians, as they look back on the popularity of Game of Thrones, will not have much trouble deciphering the inner desires of the generation addicted to it. They are: “all of the above” plus multipartner sex. 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. Nobody sits at home watching the these dramas imagining they are a mere slave, peasant or serving girl.

So why does George R.R Martin start his book looking through the eyes of a peasant who’s been drafted into the Night’s Watch for poaching, looking askance at an idiot noble officer who’s been set above him by rank rather than merit? Why are his chief point-of-view characters put on the outside of the power center of medieval society by their disabilities (Tyrion), their bastardy (Jon Snow), or their gender (Arya, Sansa, Daenerys)? Why include Davos Seaworth at all, if not to question the social structure that denied him the opportunity to read and, save for a stroke of luck, would have seen him dead on a smuggler’s gibbet? And if Martin is just another anti-modernist in the vein of Tolkien, why would he say this of the great master:

This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles? (GRRM, Rolling Stone, 4/23/2014)

As I have explain over and over again on Race for the Iron Throne, A Song of Ice and Fire is a deconstructivist fantasy series, one that questions all of the tropes about good kings and happy peasants and brave knights and fair maidens. The kings are secondary characters who are more often pawns than players and whose dreams of glory only end in the death of thousands, the peasants are harnessing religious millenialism to inspire revolution, the only people who uphold the values of knighthood are the ones who refuse to become knights (like Sandor Clegane), or who are barred from becoming knights (like Brienne of Tarth), or who were never knights to begin with (Duncan the Tall), and the traditions of chivalry and courtly love are pretty fictions stretched over gendered oppression and domestic violence.

So it may well be that Marxist analysis can predict the end of Game of Thrones. But unless Marxist analysts approach the material on its own terms and really pay attention to what George R.R Martin is doing, they’re not going to hit the mark.