Disney's the lion king: a Marxist perspective

The driving force behind the history of the Lion King is class struggle. If you read between the lines, the lions represent a sort of neoliberal (Democratic party) politics that emphasizes respectability while implicitly endorsing violence. The mode of production in the pride lands is clearly a capitalist analog, with a ruling class of lions that own "everything the light touches" in this case the land, representative of all of the means of production. The herbivore class work this land in the form of grazing, which the lion class exploits through literal consumption of the (proletariat) herbivore class. The power struggle between neoliberalism and fascism is played out between scar and mustafa. Scar uses the discontent of the petty bourgeoisie, the hyenas, to facilitate an overthrow of the liberal lion order. The hyenas are used to maintain order in the animal kingdom, and while they benefit from the system of exploitation (they too eat meat), their desire to end their particular form of exploitation, without questioning the mode of production, shows that hyenas are fundamentally not revolutionary. Scar's revolution is a classic fascist revolution, which uses the interests of the petty bourgeoisie to capture state power and intensify exploitation in order for them to capture the same wealth as the lion class. Without the power of the hyenas, scar's government would have quickly fallen, and only by taking advantage of the class antagonisms between lions and hyenas is Scar able to seize power. The eventual devastation of the pride lands shows that hyena fascism is the highest form of the carnivorous capitalism. By contrast, Simba flees and encounters two radical leftists, Timon and Pumbaa, who have essentially established a workers paradise where carnivores like simba do not have to eat herbivores, and instead can consume bugs (although this itself could be considered problematic from an ecological perspective, within the confines of the film, bugs are not shown to be sentient.) The means of production, the land, and the fruits of production, the bugs, are collectively owned. There is no exploitation, and there is no state. Up until this point, the movie sends a rather revolutionary message, and I was always frustrated as a child when Simba made the decision to leave. Simba's class interests prevent him from becoming truly revolutionary. He, like Debuisson in Der Auftrag, is unable to fully divorce himself of his class interests. The last act of the film shows how Simba abandons the revolution, leaving the workers paradise to restore the liberal lion order, with its same exploitations and class antagonisms that led to the rise of fascism in the first place.I'm relatively new to Marxism so let me know if I was off base anywhere. Honestly it started out as a joke but the more I thought about it the more plausible it seemed. via /r/communism https://ift.tt/3adiYvI