Banksy's funny/grim 'Simpsons' intro

Banksy's paintings on the Israeli apartheid wall

Last night in the US the latest episode of ‘The Simpsons’ was on telly, featuring an intro storyboarded by the famous graffiti artist Banksy.

Personally I have mixed feelings about Banksy. If you’ve never heard of him he’s an artist who conceals his true identity to allow him to continue painting on walls illegally around the world, which is cool. However, I think it’s a bit unfortunate how he’s become a cause célèbre for the international group of pseudo-radical hipster dickheads. He’s done very well out of his celebrity, making plenty of money from selling pieces and coffee table books. But he’s still capable of moments of pure subversive genius, a bit like the work he did on the Isreali apartheid wall a couple of years ago. And giving him control of the couch gag was inspired.

The result is an incredibly dark picture of working conditions in the Asian sweatshops that produce US mass culture. The Simpsons has joked about the conditions for the workers who produce the animation for the show before, but this gave us a vision of a bleak Dickensian hell where children sat producing individual stills for the show.

As yet I haven’t been able to find much of the inevitable right wing backlash rearing its head (I’ll update the article if any nutters say anything funny), but we’re sure to be soon hearing the inevitable claims that this is a ridiculous depiction of real working conditions for Korean animators, and that actually we’re helping them by giving them jobs etc. etc.

The fact is, this is an extreme, satirical examination of the fact that The Simpsons is outsourced to South Korea. But nevertheless, most of the most popular US animated shows (including Futurama, King of the Hill and Family Guy) are made there for a reason: you can get away with paying people a lot less than they would in the US. Korean animators are doing a very skilled job for low wages. Before The Simpsons (which is often perceived as a left leaning show) was produced there, it was made by the animation firm Klasky Csupo, run by the Hungarian Gabor Csupo who once told the LA Times:

“I’m never going to sign with a union. If they vote for it, I’m just not going to hire them.I’ll lay them off and take the work to Hungary. I’ll take it to Japan.”

Ironically, it’s when the sequence moves to the most brutally surreal level of satire that it actually gets more accurate. After the animators we see workers producing Simpsons merchandise, shreadding kittens to make stuffing for Bart dolls, sealing boxes with the tongue lolling from the severed head of a dolphin, and punching holes in DVDs with the horn of a starved, miserable chained unicorn.

Chinese Honda workers on strike earlier this year

The power of this is that it’s obviously exaggerating for comic effect. But the reason we’re laughing nervously as we watch it is that most of us now somewhere in our where we’ve shoved the uncomfortable knowledge to our subconscious about how much of the stuff that surrounds us every day is produced. Mass consumer culture for the overdeveloped world today rests on the super exploitation of workers in places like Korea and China. Workers are locked in factories that become also their homes/prisons, are paid slave wages, and hundreds of thousands die every year as a result of work related health problems.

The bit of hope at the end of all this comedy grimness is that there is light at the end of the sweatshop tunnel in the shape of the growing union militancy in China. Bypassing traditional unions which are often in the pockets of bosses, workers have been organising independently, producing high profile strikes at companies like Foxconn, which makes iPods and iPads for Apple, as well as at Honda manufacturing plants. There’s a staggering level of protest in China: in 2004 alone, there were, according to the conservative estimate of the government, 74,000 “mass incidents, or protests and riots.” All the more reason that the model of mass consumption capitalism, which is destructive both of the global ecosphere and of human beings, can’t last much longer: the people it relies on aren’t going to take it much longer.