I just finished reading (well, listening in audiobook form) through the Dresden Files again. All the way from Storm Front through the new novella The Law. This is one of several essays I need to write about the series, because besides realizing the quality level in this old favorite series varies much more wildly over the course of the books than I remembered, I have gained more insight since the last time, and now I can see the Ideology (TM)(C)(R) suffusing the whole thing. Every story has it, and it's not all bad - but it's worth discussing.
This won't be the essay where I yell about the writing choices I disagree with, or the patriarchal anthrochauvanist cosmos constructed in the series, or take the series to task for its handling of LGBTQ+ issues. It's not the copaganda essay; and there is a gigantic, mile-wide and kilometer-deep swath of copaganda in the Dresden Files. It's not even the one where I lay out the elements setting up Harry Dresden as the stranger-king of the little folk, of Chicago (rivaling the Marcone dynasty), and what that means about his power and the real-life kings he resembles. Those and maybe some others are coming, but there's too much for one essay.
This is the one where I talk about the reason the White Council are the worst monsters in the series, why Mab is a worse monster than anyone thought (especially after the cosmological nature of the seasonal courts and the Outsiders is revealed), why Nicodemus is wrong but not incorrect, and why the Paranet is the only positive societal model in this supernatural world. It's the one where I talk about Mab's resemblance to the IMF, the Unseelie Accords resemblance to the WTO, and John Marcone for President. This is an economic analysis of The Dresden Files, because for basically the entirety of its run, it's set against the backdrop of war, only the first two books being exceptions (and retroactively, not). Carl von Clausewitz would call it politics by other means; Edmund Burke would call it a competitive market. David Graeber might have called it a human economy, but with the violent, impersonal, and calculating aspects of a cash economy embodied in the Fae. And that's where the analysis begins.
The Fae of the Dresden Files are all about Debts and Keeping Their Word. Also keeping you to your word. Not only will they enforce these bargains, the existence of the bargain gives them power to fulfill it, and to enforce it. While they hold a debt, they gain power over the one who owes it. While they owe a debt, their powers are magnified in accomplishing it. We see examples in multiple cases; the most instructive is how Mab interacts with Harry in Dead Beat when acting as the Leanansidhe's proxy versus how she treated him in Summer Knight when she had assumed ownership of the debt Harry had owed her. When commanding repayment of his debt, Mab had the power to negate whatever Harry did to try to escape it, and she treated him with contempt and violence. When responding to his summons as proxy, she answered his questions with none of the aggression towards him, but her ability to answer was limited to what his godmother Lea would know - a scope of knowledge she gained absolute insight into, for the duration. Based on later revelations about the nature of the queens' mantles of power, acting in that role gave her what the series calls a "limited intellectus" of the subject, which is the power to know anything the character considers the question of just by considering it, within the bounds of the power's jurisdiction.
It's not just the Fae whose power comes from promises either. The point is made multiple times in the early series and sporadically later on that broken promises (especially but not exclusively when sworn directly upon a practitioner's power) can bind up your magic and destroy your ability to use it, even as a mortal. The metaphysical definition of free will seems to be tied to this, since the more powerful beings who are said to not have free will can't even intentionally try to violate their agreements or other restrictions - or at least, not without destroying that power which defines them. Or maybe not destroying, but changing its form, possibly into something unusable.
Besides promises, power also comes from life and the creative forces of the world. Living plants and animals? Sources of magic. Living emotions too. Products of the work of intentional beings, especially mortals? Definitely magic there. Is this a labor theory of magic? Yeah, partly. The emotional value of the work and social value of the work seem to especially influence how magical its results can be. Knowledge is also explicitly called out as a source of power, and knowledge - information - is a highly ordered state of matter and energy requiring significant work to establish.
Power is also quantifiable. Harry and Bob are often found working out magical equations which (though not in a way specified to the reader) use explicitly quantified amounts of magic. Harry teaches these formulae to Molly. Mab alludes to doing this kind of math on her own scale. Sigrun Gard runs these numbers for Marcone until he learns to do it for himself. It can be difficult to estimate exact amounts of it in unfamiliar situations or with limited information, and the cost and availability of different things possible through magical power varies greatly from incident to incident, but the existence of discrete quantized units of magic power remains a fact of the setting.
Finally, power is fungible. While it's harder to do some conversions than others (Harry is unable to capture sunshine in a handkerchief when he hasn't been happy in years), we see power - and promises associated with it - exchanged both between forms and with other beings. It can be transferred to the queens of Faerie by spilling lifeblood on the Stone Table. It can be exchanged in painful acts of self-destruction between spirits. It can be granted and transferred in the form of promises - of debt.
Quantifiable, fungible, created out of work and life and promises and social assumptions, transferred as debt. Magic is money. Magic power in the Dresden Files works exactly like a currency. It is the money of the supernatural world. It even holds within itself an essential element identified by David Graeber in Debt: The First 5000 Years: violence. Money is made solid in life by the violence that can enforce it; in the Dresden Files, since the money is also the power to do violence, in direct magical transubstantiation, the two parts are the same whole. So let's follow the money, and see where it leads.
The first group that uses magic we learn of in the series is the White Council. Over the course of the series, we find out that the wizards of the council are billionaires. Maybe some of them are in dollars, but in magic power, it's definitely true. This is in comparison to the regular magical talents, and even to the majority of the monsters. In terms of magical power, the entire Red Court of Vampires was worth a fraction of the power of the White Council, maybe a dozen wizards' worth, maybe only a half dozen. They only competed by means of asymmetric warfare; in a direct competition of power on power, a single wizard ultimately wrested their power from them and turned it against them, destroying them all.
The council hoards its power - its knowledge of secrets, its debts to collect and repay, its crafts and enchantments - in a downright miserly fashion. When you analyze what they do in the world, most of the council spends all its time building more capital, using their accumulated power to accumulate more knowledge and power. To secure their monopoly on this accumulation they have the Wardens. The Wardens enforce the Laws of Magic, which aren't actually fundamental laws of the universe but are laws passed by the Council for their own perceived benefit. At first glance, they seem like a reasonable code of justice: don't kill with magic, don't dominate minds with magic, don't shapechange people without their consent with magic, don't summon the dead into the world of the living, don't summon the things worse than demons. Then there's an odd one, don't mess with the flow of time - that sounds like a safety guideline, but if you're caught trying to do it the Wardens will kill you outright just like any of the others.
The game is given away in Turn Coat: the Laws of Magic are designed to restrain the fastest routes to power, and allow the council to stay out of most mortal politics while protecting their monopoly on mortal magic. There is supposedly some kind of corrupting effect of working these kinds of "black magic," but the effects are indistinguishable from the traumatic effects of poverty and being persecuted by a deadly police force, and similarly the traumatic effects of inflicting violence on other people without magic. The story-world even acknowledges that this isn't some special intrinsic thing of black magic; all magic shapes the person wielding it. It reinforces what you do with it, since you have to fully believe in what you are enacting with your will: that it can, will, and should be true. So if you do things out of a place of pain and trauma, you reinforce the pain, trauma, and disordered responses to them. And instead of working to create a world in which mortal magic-users would be able to avoid that kind of trauma and understand what their money can be spent on... that is, how to use their power, the White Council sends the Wardens to kill the ones who lash out in their traumatized state.
The White Council's relationship with mortal practitioners of magic not considered Wizards is exactly like the relationship of the owning class with the working class. The knowledge they gain piecemeal and the power they raise mostly serve the wizards who have more leverage with it. The have-nots are strictly and lethally policed so they can't threaten the haves; wizards are only at risk from the Wardens if they're politically unpopular with other wizards. This ends up being a rather uncritical reproduction of the real world's state of capital, its enforcers the cops, and the masses of oppressed laborers and the unemployed, elderly, children, and the disabled. But like I said earlier, this isn't the copaganda essay; I'll come back to that another time.
I'm running out of steam for tonight, but next installment on this essay, I'll start with Mab and her Accords, and explain how they reproduce a situation already existing in the real world international politics. Butcher says Mab is the patron of predators and doesn't realize how right he is, because the queen of cold calculations is the spirit of the neoliberal international bureaucracy. I'll be touching on the role of the hospitality form of primordial debt theory that Mab and her accords operate on, and parallels between the supernatural nations of the accords and both corporations and nation-states in the real world. And whatever else I can think of.
