Break the Wheel

The Iron Bank

This post is a tangent to Red Frog's Tyrion the Liberal (8/30/2017) which I recommend you take in before proceeding here although there would be no law against reading them reversed. However you wish, dear reader. In any case please be warned that both here and there be Spoilers! Not that I myself believe in spoilers but I'm told that some of you are quite orthodox on this point. I have no intention of sparing such readers beyond this paragraph. Indeed, I will attempt, before I am through, to spoil season 8 as well.

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Enough filler. Let's begin with dragons. Red Frog notes that George Martin has said that the dragons are the equivalent of nuclear weapons. On this point and its implications I will be silent once I explain why. I am putting dragons, along with dragonglass, Valerian steel, three-eyed ravens, red witches, faceless men, and whatever else I have left out into a box labelled Magical Devices.

Magic, I have no doubt, occupies a central place in Game of Thrones. And it certainly tempts the viewer to subject the story to a Jungian reading. There is one magical element that I will get to later, the resurrection of the dead. But, for the most part, I am going to attempt a political economic reading. One that I hope will also shed some light on the dead.

Now that Daenerys and her crowd have landed at Dragonstone the story has been unified in the Westeros theater. Until this season it has been laid out across three economic zones; feudal Westeros, the Dothraki steppes, and the slaveholding merchant cities of the Essos coast. Under Daenerys the Dothraki and the slave army have uprooted and transferred the surplus of Essos, at least as far it can be expressed militarily, into Westeros. At season end the Greyjoy fleet and the Golden Company are offstage and sure to reappear in some form but the players of the Game are now all assembled within the Seven Kingdoms.

This geographic unity testifies to the social identity of the contending forces. We have come to love the Mother of Dragons as an amalgam of Spartacus, Lincoln, and Lenin but her claim is to a feudal throne on the basis of an aristocratic bloodline. Her military has an imperial character, uniting nomadic and slave armies, but it has no class basis now that it has crossed the Narrow Sea. If the contending houses, as we are led to believe, are historically based on the War of the Roses we might want to cast Dany, with her army, as a sort of Lord Protector and final two seasons as something of an English Civil War.

But I am, instead, insisting on the economic identity of Houses Targaryen and Lannister, equally expressions of a landed nobility living from the surplus of an invisible peasantry. If our story is to end with a victory for The Stormborn it could create a unified imperial state spanning Essos and Westeros but it will not "break the wheel".

Which brings us to the dead. Here is the real contradiction in the Game. The history of The Game of Thrones is one of murder and slaughter. None of the houses shrink from it and they all depend on it to maintain power. In such a system the maimed and the vengeful will accumulate but, above all, the dead will pile up. In our own world of reason and light the dead are no longer visible but in Westeros they persist. Immune to cold, to fear, and to hunger they are perfectly suited to the long winter to come. In addition, they are organized. If anything in this story points to a political economy beyond the feudal it is the army of the dead.

George Martin, Benioff, and Weiss are unlikely to leave us with a future of great promise. Think of the fate of Ray, the warrior turned septon, who nursed the Hound back to health (The Broken Man, season 6). It is not an optimistic writer who will immerse us in the Middle Ages. Stories of heroes with swords will always be with us. But in this world a man who lays down his sword in the spirit of co-operative labor is hung without mercy. In this world, where commodity production is unheard of or ignored, the working class is absent but I suspect that it is represented structurally by the army of the dead.

My prediction for the final season? I'm short on Daenerys and on Cersei. I'm long on the Iron Bank and on the white walkers.