The World is Never Enough

Whilst watching The Spy Who Loved Me again the other day, (don't ask why I was watching it again, it was just on TV and I couldn't be arsed to get off the sofa or change channels), it occurred to me that James Bond seemed to spend most of the seventies fighting international capitalism.  Which is quite a contrast to the books, which, early on, had a clear cold war focus with Bond opposing communism wherever he found it and the Soviets as the clear villains.  Later, the focus changed to having international criminal network SPECTRE and its leader Blofeld as the main villains.  The  sixties films picked up on this and featured SPECTRE as the main villains, (with the notable exception of Goldfinger, where the eponymous villain was being bankrolled by Red China).  But by the seventies, after brief flirtations with Blaxploitation and Kung Fu, Roger Moore found himself constantly having to foil the demented plans of wealthy capitalists, who had accumulated so much wealth by dubious means that they could construct under water cities and space stations with which to threaten the globe.  Unlike SPECTRE, these billionaires weren't interested in holding the world's governments to ransom, but rather destroying civilisation as we know it and rebuilding it in their own image.  For them, the world was never enough.

All of which seems incredibly prescient, as we now find ourselves living in a world where 99% of the wealth is held by 1% of the population, who seem determined to use their economic power to reshape the world into a 'capitalistic' free-market where the sovereignty of democratically elected governments men nothing and human rights are dismissed.  Interestingly, despite the real world being manipulated by these real life Bond villains, the most recent film featured a rogue ex-agent and as the main villain.  (To be fair,the previous two films did feature a shadowy organisation of wealthy capitalists variously manipulating the global financial markets and water supplies in Bolivia as part of a regime change plot which would result in a government more favourable to international capital.  But they were made before the financial crash, which revealed their plots weren't mere fantasy, so obviously, 'they' ensured the series moved away from such themes for the next instalment).   Getting back to The Spy Who Loved Me, it takes the combined forces of the US, UK and USSR to defeat the plans of crazy billionaire Stromberg and thwart his plans to drive mankind underwater, the better to exploit them for profit.  I can't help but feel that there's a lesson there...