Chicken Run is clearly the greatest Marxist feminist film of modern times

the-end-is-not-the-end:

It’s all about the workers seizing the means of reproduction







I’ve always thoughts this.



1. Problem for the Capitalist Farmer: The chickens aren’t laying enough eggs to be profitable. So what does the farmer do? Decide to turn them into pies. When the workforce is unproductive, squeeze them harder. “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” Chicken Run (2000) is obviously a fore-shadowing of the current period of austerity, where the Capitalist class are reducing the social wage of the working class to such an extent that they will no longer be able to reproduce themselves. Like Moloch in Eisensteins’ Metropolis, Capitalism symbolically devours the very bodies of the working class.



2. ‘Rocky’ the 'saviour’ rooster turns up. Everyone looks to him. He represents the charismatic fraud. Turns out he can’t actually fly, its all an illusion. Put your trust in the workers! The chicken society must avoid the cult of the personality. “Comrades, the cult of the individual acquired such monstrous size chiefly because Stalin himself, using all conceivable methods, supported the glorification of his own person.” Rocky’s influence is essentially benign.



4. It is through collective activity of revolutionary cadres that the Chickens manage to escape.

5. The rats are lumpenproletariat, they steal and connive, but essentially they are on the side of disorder. They are paid with the eggs (labour/bodies) of the chickens.



6. The dogs represent the army and the authoritarian tendency of sections of the working class. They are a paper-tiger (essentially cowardly).

7. HOWEVER, Chicken Run is not dialectically materialist. They do NOT seize the mode of production. At the end the Chicken’s escape to a type of Cockaigne, a Utopia. In a true Communist revolution they would have seized the means of production, and taken over the farm for their own purposes. Capitalism is something we overcome, not something we escape from.



8. Chicken Run is a depiction of utopianism. Its is a failed revolution, a liberation movement, not a revolutionary movement. We should all be careful of this in our own struggles.



/sardonic pomo

(via what-was-e-schatology-deactivat)