profit, and each stage of this development, starting with the proletarianization of the peasantry during the Industrial Revolution, has provoked the most violent resistance from the exploited. Insofar as progress has brought with it an improvement in the economic and political condition of the classes that produce the wealth of capital, this improvement has been won through class struggle—though it is extremely important that the bourgeois parliamentary state operates in such a way as to produce the appearance that the rights of the exploited have been "granted." The ideology of progress underwrites this operation by suppressing the history of the class struggle and replacing it with a comfortable account of an inexorable and pacific voyage toward universal affluence.

As capitalism's second industrial revolution gets under way, talk of progressexpress a potential anarchy, a possible subversion of the structure. The film is quite clear-sighted about the kind of possibility; there is not a hint of sentimentality, nor any pretence that the return of repressed energies in Tootie are uncontaminated by repression. Consider, for example, her obsession with death (Twain's Emmeline Grangerford in _Huckleberry Finn_ affords a useful parallel in contrast), which is used as an overtly neurotic inflection of capitalist possessiveness; she hoards dead matter ("I'm taking all my dolls—the dead ones too. I'm taking everything!"), and part of the impulse behind the destruction of the snow people is the determination that no one else should have them if she can't. Similarly, the dolls suggest a morbid surrogate family in regard to which her inferior status in