Philosophy, Marx And The Matrix

In 1999 The Matrix was released. In it, the protagonist Neo (Keanu Reeves) is approached by a mysterious group of leather clad rebels who invite him to pass from the world of illusions into the real. Neo takes the 'red pill' and is reborn into the reality of Earth 2199. Humanity has been enslaved by machines originally created to be their servants. Each person exists motionless in a womb-like pod whilst 'the matrix', a simulation of Earth 1999, is pumped into their consciousness as they are exploited as a power source

Anyone who has had even the briefest flirtation with philosophy will know that this film gives a spirited stab at presenting philosophical ideas to a mass audience. Fans of the The Matrix rejoice at the philosophical dimension to the film, but conversations often reach dead ends when one attempts to look beyond the appearance of an intellectual film and asks precisely what philosophy the film draws upon and what exactly it has to say about it.

What if I told you that The Matrix masquerades as a clever film when in reality, it gets the philosophy it was trying to present totally wrong? What if I told you that the film inadvertently lends itself to being interpreted through the lens of Marxism?

This article offers you the red pill in understanding The Matrix. It will show you how the directors tried and failed to present the philosophical ideas of Jean Baudrillard. It will then demonstrate that a Marxist perspective offers a much more fruitful and appropriate interpretation. It is worth mentioning at this point that the film contains more philosophical ideas than this short article will cover. I anticipate that some of you by now will be grinding your teeth in frustration at the fact that I haven't mentioned Plato or Descartes yet. Yes, the film does present a parallel to Plato's cave analogy and it does also present Descartes 'evil demon' theory - but I am aiming here to shed light on what is less commonly known about the film.

The most significant philosophical idea presented in The Matrix is the metaphysical distinction between appearance and reality: the questions of 'what can be said to exist?' and 'is reality more than we perceive?'. Western philosophers since Plato have debated this metaphysical topic and the Wachowskis try to mirror French postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard's contribution to the debate.

Indeed, the directors tried to get Baudrillard to work as a consultant on the film (an offer that he declined) and in the film's opening we see Neo pulling a hollowed copy of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulations off of a shelf in his apartment. In an earlier version of the shooting scri pt, Morpheus even refers to Baudrillard by name.

So what does Baudrillard have to say on the distinction between appearance and reality? Well, in order to understand that it's best that we pay a quick visit to Friedrich Nietzsche, a controversial philosopher who had a profound impact on postmodern philosophy. Nietzsche rejected the whole Western tradition on the question of the distinction between appearance and reality out of hand. He wrote that 'the apparent world is the only one' and argued that philosophers like Plato who argued otherwise were merely futile speculators.

Baudrillard falls in line with Nietzsche here - he rejects the categories of appearance and reality themselves. He notes that as binary concepts, 'appearance' and 'reality' stand and fall together. To use the concept of 'appearance' is to invoke the distinction which one claims to reject. For Baudrillard, the real and the imaginary are assimilated as one. In his view, there is no appearance and reality as we are unable to distinguish between the two. He offers a new category - the 'simulacrum'.

Now, that position is totally opposed to what we see in The Matrix, where there is a clear distinction between the real and the unreal. So where does Marxism come into all of this and how does it offer a philosophical perspective appropriate to interpreting The Matrix? First of all, Marx's distinction between 'ideology' and 'science' mirrors the clear cut distinction between appearance and reality that the Wachowskis present.

In his view, mainstream economists and media outlets offer a fake view of capitalist society which is presented as fact. They maintain that people are free, that they enter work out of their own free will, that the markets offer a level playing field and that the system is fundamentally pragmatic and unexploitative. In Marx's view, these ideologies are only appearances and they can be likened to the illusory computerized world of 'the matrix'.

For Marx, though, there is a real world to be discovered beneath this illusion and he held that his 'scientific' political economy was the red pill which would reveal it. The ideas of Herbert Marcuse on ideology also mirror the distinction between the illusory and the real that the Washowskis offer. He wrote in One Dimensional Man (1964) that daily experience hides the irrational reality of capitalist society. He is concerned with consumerist ideology which, in his view, permeates everyday experience, it is inescapable. An advertisement for a car, for example, is not only an advertisement for a car but also an advertisement for the capitalist status quo. In his view, we are continuously immersed in capitalist ideology which comes from all directions.

Marcuse' descri ption of ideology matches up neatly with Morpheus' descri ption of 'the matrix'. "The Matrix" Morpheus says "is all around us, even in this very room. You see it when you look out the window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work..." So far I have zoomed the lens of analysis into the issue of appearance and reality, but The Matrix presents many more themes which lend themselves to a Marxist reading.

One of these is the control of humanity by machines. Workers in Western societies are increasingly under the surveillance and control of machines. UPS drivers carry handheld devices which track their every move, data entry clerks have their every key stroke recorded, manual labourers often have a cheap CCTV camera aimed at them which projects their work (or their lack of it) into the foreman's office, and so on.

Another dimension of this idea is the concept of human beings used being the source of life for these machines. Marx, when looking at a newly industrialised world, could see that workers were becoming merely another component of the factory machinery.

"... labourers" he wrote "crowded into the factory are organised like soldiers. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine".

At his time of writing, workers were being increasingly abstracted from what they produced. Artisans who used to craft their work became machine operators who mass produced products to be sold back to them. Then, as now, many jobs turned people into 'coppertops' as even their labour is considered to be just another commodity.

"Labour power is a commodity... neither more nor less than sugar. The former is measured by the clock, the latter by the scales."

Marx' ideas on how workers relate to the products that they produce can also help us to interpret The Matrix. You will remember the scene where Cypher sits at a simulated restaurant table with Agent Smith eating filet mignon. He is seeking to defect; he is seeking another chance as a coppertop. Marx wrote that as consumers, we fetishize products that we buy, in other words that we are blind to the fact that they are made by people just like us. We may hear that out Nike Blazers are produced by other workers suffering in Asia, but we buy them just the same. Cypher is well aware that the steak he is eating is brought to him by a legion of coppertops but he is more drawn to what the workers produce than the workers themselves.

To round things up, though the Wachowski's presentation of Baudrillard is as hollow as Neo's copy of Simulacra and Simulations, their film cannot be said to display only artificial intelligence. Indeed, when we take some of Marx's ideas into account, as well as thinkers who followed in his tradition like Herbert Marcuse, the womb-like pods stacked to great heights which keep humans in captivity in The Matrix start to look more like office cubicles in a skyscraper structure. The filet mignon that Cypher eats with Agent Smith begins to remind us of how our attachment to material possessions (like televisions and DVD players for instance) blind us to how their production means the often brutal exploitation of our fellow human beings. And the presentations of human beings as coppertop batteries who have become slaves of the machines which were created to be servants may remind cause us to think of ourselves as we sit down in our computer chairs at 9AM for another days work, or as we procrastinate on our smartphones which log our every move to target us with more advertisements.