Capital's Doppelgangers

“The Peaky Blinders,”Seasons 1-5

This BBC/Netflix series is one odd duck – edgy, violent, politically involved and quite hostile to the British secret service.  Pounding British rock and folk music is used in each episode – even Black Sabbath doing ‘War Pigs.'  At its center is a charismatic Birmingham gangster and Romani gypsy Tommy Shelby and his family – Polly, Arthur, Ada, John, Finn, Michael, along with their wives and husbands.  There was a real gang in Birmingham called the Peaky Blinders – named because their hats came to a peak over one eye.  But the real Peakys were penny-ante criminals in the 1880s, not these hardened and brilliant murderers of the 1920s.

Here they come, walkin' down the street...

The reason is nearly every man in the series survived World War I in one way or another, so they know military skills, guns, bombs, tunnel-digging and the like.  Grenades and machine guns are no stranger to them, nor is digging bullets out of flesh. They have a class hatred for those officers who did not fill the trenches and sat in the back lines, and solidarity among themselves because of the war.

The Peaky Blinders go from gambling and fixing races at horse tracks to running gin and whiskey even to the U.S., then on to owning factories and producing vehicles for the English military, trying to launder their gains into legitimate businesses.  Tommy gets himself elected to the House of Commons as a Labour Party member, even while trying to smuggle opium to the U.S.  Born on a canal boat, Shelby ends up in a massive manor house in the country.  Everyone else in the family gets a big house too, though they still go back to the gypsy caravan at times.  In the process the thug Tommy Shelby becomes an agent of the British crown working for Winston Churchill.  He informs on the Birmingham Communist Party, though he has a close relationship with some of its members, including his own sister.  He also informs on the IRA and lastly on the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, an aristocrat and founder of British fascism.

In a sense, this is similar to the series “Deadwood,” which shows the progression from crime to capitalist success – primitive accumulation even in the 1920s.  The effect of the October 29, 1929 market crash on the Shelby’s wealth is severe, which shows to what extent they were integrated into the larger capitalist economy.

Oswald Mosley - British Fascist doing his best Hitler

The series involves conflicts and compromises with a Jewish gang in London; a war against an Italian gang in London and later, the U.S. Mafia; against pro-fascist Ulster Protestant gangsters from Scotland; against local rivals.  These bloody conflicts lead the Shelbys to suffer bouts of depression, PTSD, drinking, rifts, anger and deaths.  Almost every scene involves a glass of Irish or Scotch whiskey and later, cocaine and laudanum.  The British secret services (Section D – and the Economic League) blackmail Tommy into killing for them.  The latter protect Mosley from the gang’s attempts to assassinate him, as Section D sympathizes with the fascists.  A deal with some arrogant White Czarists to smuggle military tanks out of England for the Russian civil war has the finger prints of British intelligence over it.  It almost gets Tommy killed, per usual.

Tommy believes in nothing but making money, but he also has a soft spot for the Birmingham working-class.  He funds two orphanages, eventually gives equal raises to his male and female workers and ‘allows’ the Shelby women to play a large role in Shelby Co. Ltd’s deliberations, especially Polly, the ‘gypsy queen.’  One of the local Communists marries his sister Ada and he ends up trying to protect him.  There are certain current references – an obnoxious priest who is a pedophile; Mosley’s platform is stated as ‘Britain First!’ much like Brexit; a solidarity for the British working class, gypsies and Jews against prejudice.  The British General Strike of 1926 is portrayed evenhandedly.

The head of a Jewish gang in Camden Town, Alfie Solomons, speaks in a thick cockney accent and rakes anyone over the coals hostile to Jews.  He’s hilarious.  “Littlefinger” Lord Baelish from GoT shows up as a killer for the Shelby’s and prospective husband to Polly.  Adrien Brody appears as the sinister leader of a Mafia hit squad and Sam Neill as an ominous Ulster-based intelligence detective.

“Peaky Blinders” is another glorification of the anti-hero typical of modern gangster films.  Tommy is handsome and well-dressed, appearing in the same dandified golfer’s cap, 3-piece suit and watch fob in nearly every scene, as do the rest of the Peakys.  He sleeps with every woman he wants. He is also thoughtful and sometimes kind, but bosses everyone around constantly.  Violence is his métier for ‘making people listen’ - which he has to do frequently.

The glorification of human and clever gangsters is an on-going theme in many capitalist films and television shows.  In fact this theme is so overwhelming as to be deeply significant.  The handgun pointed at someone’s head (frequent in this series) seems to be the star prop of our degraded capitalist culture.  This bloody fascination breaches normal money-grubbing.  It appears as the dark side of the same ‘legitimate’ economy that the rich dominate every day – its shadow, its almost literal doppelganger – hinting that crime and capital are inextricably combined.  The difference is the obvious violence, a violence hidden under normal capitalist functioning but always there beneath the surface.  Churchill’s embrace of the Shelbys cements this link.

As Al Capone said:  "This American system of ours, call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you will, gives each and every one of us a great opportunity if we seize it with both hands and make the most of it."

But it is more than that.  It advertises a route out of the under-class for the poor and downtrodden to essentially rise in class status - even if you have to use violence.  Criminals sometimes dress well to announce their higher role, as the Peaky’s do.  In the old days, both gangsters and businessmen wore suits, which is telling. When the criminals side with the majority, as in marijuana or booze provision, they become heroes. Even robbing predatory banks or casinos seems heroic, as everyone with their head on straight hates banks and knows casinos are a con. (See 2016’s “Come Hell or Highwater” about robbing modern Texas banks.) Thuggery and crime are glamorized to the indigent, to immigrants, to the outcast in place of social revolution. This glorification of crime is in essence a social and material diversion for a part of the working class.

“At the base of every great fortune is a great crime” seems to be the link, a saying first suggested by Honore Balzac from “Le Pere Goriot” in 1834 but later reported on at a London dinner in 1912. This was followed by many similar quotes afterwards, including in “The Godfather” and in C. Wright Mills’ “The Power Elite.”  Of course Marx also understood this idea, as his theory of ‘primitive accumulation’ makes clear.   Balzac’s exact translation was:  “The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.”    Which is exactly how the Shelby family function.

Other reviews of streaming series below, use blog search box upper left:  “Game of Thrones,” “Deadwood,” “The Golden Age,” “Treme,” “Fargo,” “Damnation,” “Bad Cops,” “Mayans,” “Rebellion,” “Handmaid’s Tale,” “Comrade Detective.”

The Kulture Kommissar

November 29, 2019