Antz (1998) | A Marxist Analysis

This video is a marxist analysis of the 1998 movie "Antz". I explain the symbolism and story of the movie using a marxist framwork.

Transcrip (At least most of it):
The 1998 movie “Antz” follows an Ant named Ze. At the start we see him attend a therapy session. He talks about many symptoms of alienation in the working class. He says that he can’t stand his job, that nobody worries about him and that he feels like he will be alone for his entire life and can’t deal with living in a society that only sees him as a small part of the whole and consideres him worthless.
Those are symptoms of alienation which we can see it in all capitalist countries around the world. It is a depressing reality to the working class that they are seen as replaceable by their employers. Everyone can be replaced, and nobody is valuable on their own in the system we live in. This knowledge looms over every working person and it is the root of many mental health problems like the ones Ze suffers from.
We then see the way the society in the movie is structured. Children are designated into workers and soldiers shortly after birth with the ruling class like the Queen and the General being entirely separate. This tells us that this isn’t a modern capitalist society in which people are forced into their social position by economics or even a fascist society which would rely on propaganda to make people voluntarily sight up for the army.
No, this society is a feudal one. Social roles are given at birth and can never be changed. We know this because Ze’s friend Weaver later says that even listening to someone talking about impersonating a solder is a capital offense which is proof that there is a strict separation of workers and soldiers in the ant hill. We also see many instances of classism in the film like when Princess Bela refuses to associate with Ze after she learns that he is a worker or in the way the general calls the workers weak and rotten.
We also get some glimpses into the way the society operates. We see that there is an overseer around the workers whose only job seems to be to tell others to work harder. We can also see multiple propaganda posters meant to encourage the workers to work harder and more. There are also a lot of military propaganda posters and grand displays of the army which leads us to believe that it’s an incredibly militaristic society.
We get back to our main character Ze in a bar talking to his friend Weaver who was assigned solder at birth. And Weaver just tells him not to think about it too much and to just keep working. This is also what his co-workers told Ze. They tell him to “Think of the colony” and to be happy in his alienated state while serving the whole without thinking about his own needs.
We then see that the princess of the ant hill snuck down to a working-class bar for some reason. Ze then replaces his quest for finding a meaningful job in life and expressing himself truly every working day with the desire to get a bourgeois-ant GF. While she is the class that exploits and oppresses the other ants this does not seem to bother Ze.

[LgitNinjaMonkey]

if you present this movie analysis without the weird animated ant imagery, it sounds like a cyberpunk dystopian story instead of a kids movie lol

[lazard]

its the workers who control the means of production

[guilhermefreire]

You should do one about the robot movie

[Bilboswaggins]

Your channel needs more views this shit is beyond memes it actually feels like I’m being educated on social/political philosophy

[moofoogee]

You’ve done it. Now every time I almost step on an ant I have to make sure it’s not a worker.

[philliplawton]

This is just my observation but if you look at all the worker ants' eyes it's like they get no sleep as they work nonstop. I could be wrong but that's my guess

[asg]

A Marxist Analysis of "Attack on Titan"

Now that will be a fucking long video (and a very interesting one).

[deithlan]

What makes me so sad is the fact that this film totally misinterpreted how ant societies actually work.
I know this can sound silly or funny, but ants actually do live in a kind of communist society.
Every individual has to contribute to the colony. Even the queen (who btw has a very inaccurate name), who’s the only one who can lay eggs and as such must be protected or else the colony ends up dying (there are some species that have multiple queens in a same colony but it’s the same).
Yes, there are “class roles” in some species, but this doesn’t mean that for example a worker can’t hunt or that an allate can’t build, they actually do that and very often. Different kinds of ants in a same colony just mean that there are some that are better suited to do certain tasks, but again this does not mean that one ant can’t do the role of another one.
There are actually some species that don’t have “roles” at all, not even queens (an egg-layer is actually ““voted”” every time the last one dies ; you should look them up, it’s really interesting).
Ants take decisions based on instinct (survival of one’s colony) and on temporary agreements between different members (for instance one ant might tell to a group of other ants that an explorer found a new source of protein and that they should go there, then some may agree and go along and some other won’t).

Ants are actually the reason I became a Marxist. No joke.
I know that their system is not perfect (like for instance, it was once studied that in an adult colony, only like 65% of the ants worked, while like 25% did absolutely nothing and the rest only did things for themselves) but even like this the colony still prospered.
And there’s a reason why ants didn’t go extinct in their ten million+ years of existance on Earth.

[DinoMan]

Can you please do a Marxist Analysis on The Purge Horror Movies. Classes structures are quite shown in this franchise

[samnzimande]

Haha had to search for this kinda video lol, after I watched it and got a grasp understanding that the movie is not just cartoons but something deeper which I’m sure a lot didn’t understand the motive lol.

[joyonyango]

Just found your page today!!! You've got a new subbie 💓

[TTemp]

I just realized the wasps were WASPs weren't they? lmao

[Jefflon_Zuckergates]

Can you do an analysis of Avatar the last air bender

[tobiaswolff]

Past me thought that this was gonna be one big meme. I'm am so glad I was wrong

[rogerforsberg]

One of the great ironies of this film (which I've never seen, but which I learned about through this video from Mme Viki) is that the eminent sociobiologist & the world's foremost authority on "ants" (the biological family, 'Formicidae'), Edward Osborne Wilson, had a wonderful & appropriate quotation about Marxism -- which he considered to be much better suited to ants than to humans...

"Wonderful theory, wrong species" -- by which he meant that it applied much better to 'formica rufa' (the common red ant) than to 'homo sapiens.'

For those very few people who are interested in citations here they are...
Quoted in Quotations for our times: 75 sayings for the modern world; as quoted in The Independent, 23 August 2007, citing The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations

[donovan]

I always loved this movie. It’s clever. I miss clever movies.

[resdaynedessalines]

Ah, imagine if you could have been Z’s therapist instead. I’d watch that movie.