marxist analysis of ‘the apprentice’ episode one

by Jack Staunton

“the problem of unbridled free markets in an unsupervised market place is that they can reduce all relationships to transactions, all motivations to self-interest, all sense of value to consumer choice and all sense of worth to a price tag.”
Gordon Brown, speech to European Union parliament, 24th March 2009

Readers of the various websites and papers calling themselves ‘communist’ may be aware of the vogue in recent years for reviews of films, novels and TV programmes. These allow the writer not only to connect with ‘the young people’/’real people’, but furthermore to offer a ‘dialectical materialist’ take on the narrative therein and use their training in the works of Lenin and Trotsky to propose what the characters or people involved ought to have done to change the ending. After all, if you think it worthwhile to write a piece on why the workers who established the Paris Commune were defeated (their failure to build a vanguard party…) from the safety of nearly 140 years of history, why not proffer a catch-all solution for how Jack might have survived in Titanic, or how Blofeld might have finished off James Bond?

The best examples of this are the film and video game reviews to be found on the websites of the American groups ‘Monkey Smashes Heaven’ and ‘Maoist Internationalist Movement’, who give timelessly useful analysis such as “The Jokers of the world will never destroy the system. Only communist revolution will destroy Batman and the system he represents once and for all.” or  “Mao taught that the masses make history; the masses are the true heroes. If the oppressed act collectively, they can change the course of history and remake the world. The revolutionary outlook is diametrically opposed to the fatalistic, magical one of Slumdog Millionaire.”

Not to be outdone, The Commune is the first website to feature a properly Marxist analysis of the first episode of the latest series of The Apprentice.