Marxist Viewing of Dune: Part Two

The latest movie adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic novel Dune, Dune: Part Two directed by Denis Villeneuve, has set truly intergalactic box office records, and been globally exalted by movie critics. Dune: Part Two has, of 24 March, hit over US$220 million in the United States domestic box-office, and worm-holed its way to over US$520 million globally. Villeneuve’s latest foray into the harsh world of Arrakis has been critically acclaimed as a masterpiece, with the film compared favourably to the brilliant Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back, while it currently enjoys near-perfect popular and critical reviews.

Dune: Part Two returns us to the story of Paul Atreides, quickly picking up from where Dune: Part One left us, as he enters the harsh desert climate of Arrakis in the company of the planet’s indigenous inhabitants, the Fremen. In the film, the young Atreides must rally the ‘desert power’ of the Fremen, spurred on by his mother Lady Jessica, to have any hope of exacting vengeance against the brutal Family Harkonnen, who butchered his father Duke Leo Atreides and the rest of his royal House in Dune: Part One. The film depicts Paul gradually mobilising the thousands upon thousands of Fremen warriors across Arrakis against the Harkonnen rulers, and eventually in opposition to Emperor Shaddam IV himself, as his prescient visions reveal that his growing power will lead to an intergalactic holy war, much to the initial fear of himself and the revulsion of Chani, his Fremen comrade and lover.

Much good work has been written on Dune: Part Two as an example, or critique, of the white saviour narrative; a demonstration of interplanetary fascistic war; an exposé of brutal colonial violence; a self-aware Orientalist appropriation of a sandbox of non-Western cultures; a piece that deemphasises the complexity and agency of women from Herbert’s original book; a movie that has noted analogies with the current Israel-Palestine war; and a movie that obviously took inspiration from Islamic and North African and Middle Eastern sources but equally relegates this recognition. Now, in preparation for seeing this movie for the third time at the local IMAX cinema, I wanted to do something a bit different before strolling in, and I swapped the 3D IMAX glasses for my Marxist spectacles to try to understand some key themes of this intergalactic blockbuster… spoiler alert! (for both Marxist theory and Dune: Part Two).

Worming into Dune

On the face of it, Dune: Part Two is quite obviously not a tale that focuses on the working class nor is it one that seems to deal with a recognisable form of capitalism. In the movie, there are evidently subaltern and proletarian-type collective subjects who linger on the margins of the action, such as servants for the lords and ladies of House Harkonnen, Atreides, or Corrino, or such agents who are more central to the narrative, such as the indigenous Fremen themselves. The latter of which we will address separately, below. Further, the galactic political economy of Dune: Part Two is dominated by ‘great houses’ in a brutal, feudalistic structure that stretches across the known universe, and does not seem to resemble any type of capitalism we are familiar with. Thus, it seems that more ‘orthodox’ Marxist accounts of Dune: Part Two, which seek to account for how power over means of production determines the relations of production that subsequently lay the basis for class conflict, is inappropriate. Instead, this piece seeks to foreground a Marxist approach to the philosophy of internal relations that conceives the social world, or Dune’s universe, made up of vast interconnections and relations between, and through, people and the objects that they interact with. The idea with this ontology is to understand how every subject and object in a totality, whether that be a world or universe, holds essential relations to other subjects, objects, or structures that determine themselves and their social position in this totality. As a simple and brief example, Paul Atreides is the Duke of House Atreides because of how others relate to him, and how he relates to others, alongside his presumed dominance of productive, military, or social forces that are all partly constitutive of his social position in the Dune universe. The point is that, then, any change in such intertwined relations can bring a rupture to the underlying logic of broader social structures that are made up of these relations, or equally impact the people that inhabit, and are defined by, them.

This philosophy of internal relations may give us a framework for understanding how aspects of the social universe depicted in Dune: Part Two, such as inter-House rivalries and indigenous subjugation, relate to the broader historically given context of that universe, that of a feudalistic totality, which may reveal the logic that structures these relations – and have some lessons for our own time. As such, let us start with the broader, historically given intergalactic political economy expressed in Dune: Part Two, that of the warring Feudal Houses.

Interplanetary Feudalism

The inter-galactic political economy of the Dune: Part Two universe is clearly feudalistic. The political apparatus is defined by the dominance of ‘Great Houses’, such as the Atreides and Harkonnen, under the signorial power of an Emperor. Notables in these Great Houses establish their own ‘fiefdoms’ on entire worlds, such as that of Arrakis, and there appears to be warrior classes in each House who are obliged to provide their military power to the ruling nobles. Other signs of feudal formations are the return of trade ‘guilds’, such as the unseen space guild that has monopolised transport, or even those of mentats, like Thufir Hawat, or Suk doctors, such as Yueh. While the hidden existence of the public held corporation CHOAM that has monopolised all trade, under the directorship of the Emperor, further suggests that there is no system of capitalism operating in Dune: Part Two.

While it is not remarkable that our current historical formation has given way to a different formation, what perhaps is surprising is that it appears the Dune: Part Two universe has regressed to feudalistic organising structures. However, thinking further on these structuring relations not only unfolds our investigation into how the Houses relate to the sub-altern, such as the Arrakis-based Fremen (addressed below), but allows us to reflect on how our own neoliberal, capitalist social-economic structure could metamorphose into a feudalism like that of Dune: Part Two.

Prominently taking up this argument (minus the reference to Dune) is Yanis Varoufakis, whose most recent book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism argues that the emergence of cloud technology, the enclosure and privatisation of the internet, and the heavy flow of central bank money post-2008, has sparked an epochal shift. Varoufakis makes the point that we all collectively serve the big tech giants for free by creating content, providing data, and other virtual surplus value, in huge networks of value generation that is not tied to any means of production. This service then allows us to ‘live within their kingdom’. This new ‘Technofeudalism’ is argued by Varoufakis as being the new historical formation, which will become more acute as the global economy shifts towards the generation of virtual surplus value that is more and more disconnected from ‘real’ production.

Projecting our current formation of Technofeudalism into the future, the next technological revolution that is widely predicted to transform the underlying social relations is the introduction of Artificial Intelligence. Now, this is where the connection with Dune: Part Two becomes interesting. In the world of Dune, thousands of years prior to the movie’s setting (the movie is set approximately 20,000 years from our own time), there was a ‘Butlerian jihad’ against all ‘machines-that-think’; an imperium-wide revolt that destroyed computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots. Linking our Technofeudalist society, as per Varoufakis, to the Dune universe, we can hypothesise that its’ structures had deepened and became hegemonic worldwide, eventually creating the possibilities for space travel and interplanetary colonisation. Then, due to the alienation, deprivation, and social conflict that technofeudalism would entail on a universe-wide scale, the offending technology was destroyed through popular revolt as the intergalactic feudal political structures remained. Hence, we are left with Emperors, Dukes, and Great Houses without the technological fetishisation – maybe Emperor Shaddam IV is a distant, future relative of Mark Zuckerberg?

Indigeneity on Arrakis

The goal of the Imperium on Arrakis, the eponymous planet of Dune: Part Two, is to harvest the planet’s unique spice melange that vitally powers intergalactic space travel. The relation, then, between the Feudal Houses and the planet of Arrakis is one of extraction, which clearly resembles the real-world imperialism of our own colonial powers across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The depictions of the indigenous people on Arrakis furthers the obvious comparison between the Dune timeline and ours; the Fremen people appear culturally similar to traditions in the Middle East, their language is heavily based on Arabic in the Dune book (though the movie scrubs this influence), and their religious beliefs are inspired by Islamic practices (though again, this was much more obvious in the book, with the movie erasing these).

The Fremen are fierce fighters that constantly disrupt the extraction of spice by the ruling Harkonnnens, with the Fremen using spice as part of their diet and a central substance to their religious and cultural life. Then, if the Fremen are so problematic to the imperialists, why do they not simply destroy them? Of course, in Dune: Part Two, several Harkonnen members make loud threats to simply do just that. However, the relation between the Imperium and the Fremen is not purely a one-way extraction; the Fremen presence is vital on Arrakis because they are central to the continuance of spice itself. The Fremen’s stewardship of the gigantic worms, known to them as Shai Hulud, whose presence is fundamental to spice creation, and the Fremen’s own gathering and refinement of the melange, ensures that the Imperium is equally in a dependent relation with this sub-altern collective. Borrowing from Foucault, this insertion of Fremen bodies throughout the spice creation process is a form of biopower that can be controlled. Through the Imperium’s utilisation of deception and religious indoctrination to foster consent, and the application of brute coercion when that fails (Gramsci’s tools of hegemony), the intergalactic empire mitigates their dependence on the Fremen through the typical technics of colonial power familiar to our own time. The prescience of Paul Atreides, in the form of a white saviour trope, understands the dependent relation of the feudalistic Imperium on not just the spice itself, but equally upon the Fremen; and this is why Paul’s militant mobilisation of the indigenous Fremen against the Harkonnen’s quickly brings down the entire Imperium.

This is my Desert. My Arrakis. My Dune.

The over-dependence on spice as a central resource in the known universe in Dune: Part Two is not only intensely destabilising for the feudalistic political economy of the Imperium, but also illustrates the rapacious relations between Dune’s future humanity and the ‘external’ nature. Indeed, the underlying philosophy that provides the foundations of the Imperium’s approach to nature is strikingly similar to our own. The ontological, Cartesian dualism of Human/Nature has informed our understanding of the relations between humanity and nature during the Age of Capital, which has meant that capital has greedily metabolised the ‘free gift’ of ‘Cheap Nature’ across the world – up to a point where in 2024, the earth is on the parapet of untenable global warming, mass species death, and the end of life itself. What we see in Dune: Part Two is that the transition to Technofeudalism in the not-too-distant future and the opening of space travel has temporarily erased these ecologically destructive tendencies and contradictions of capital, geographically displacing them to all know corners of the universe.

Without reformation, the feudalism that has then persisted in Dune: Part Two over the course of thousands of years, which still sees the ‘Human’ as entirely separate to an external ‘Nature’ (which the Fremen are often categorised into, as most indigenous populations have in our time), has depleted the entire ecology of the universe. The violent extraction of spice from Arrakis is a case-in-point, with increasingly destructive sandstorms and unliveable conditions, but we also see evidence of this on other planets, too. Such as the Harkonnen home world of Giedi Prime, which has had such brutal industrialisation that the level of photosynthesis is catastrophically low, artistically captured in Dune: Part Two with infrared, black-and-white monochrome shots of the planet.

Similar to our own time, in the Dune: Part Two universe there is no recognition of the importance of the deep, intertwined relations between humanity and the nature that surrounds us. The Fremen live in the harsh conditions on Arrakis and have not only survived but thrived through an intense, respectful interconnection with the natural environment that they live within – this is not an external connection, but fundamentally an internal one between Fremen and the planet. In Dune: Part Two, the life of the Fremen within the desert is dismissed by the Great Houses, evidenced by the Harkonnen’s referring to them repeatedly as ‘rats’; and similarly to our time, indigenous ecological knowledge gained through living with the land has been equally disdained and violently rejected by colonial practices and knowledge forms. The story of Dune: Part Two reminds us of the fundamental, internal interconnections that we have with nature and the world around us, which is not separable from the political, social, and economic practices that we have chosen to determine our, rapidly deteriorating, livelihoods.

Removing my Marxist spectacles at the end of Dune: Part Two, I am struck with the resonance that the movies’ messages have for our own historical juncture. Particularly, the importance of a philosophy of internal relations does not diminish, despite the vast scale on which the inter-galactic story of Dune unfolds. Seeing our potential, post-Technofeudalistic future in Dune: Part Two, reminds me that we also have to ‘think’ the present, past and speculative futures together as an integrated, internally-related whole, if we have any chance of addressing the various poly-crises we are faced with. In the words of Lady Jessica, Reverend Mother in Dune: Part Two:

‘You cannot see the future without seeing the past’.