Uploaded October 2019 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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This is a marxist analysis of "The Bee Movie (2007)".

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Transcript:
The Bee Movie follows the story of a Bee Named Barry B. Benson. At the start of the movie he learns that he is expected to spend his entire life working which leads him to question his purpose in life and triggers an existential crisis. He represents the alienated youth that questions the legitimacy of capitalist production and the purpose of spending every waking day working simply for the sake of production. He is horrified how his life is only seen as one of many and his lack of individuality. This is mirrored by late stage capitalism in which every person is replaceable and expected to work until their death.
Barry tries to find a meaning in the jobs offered to him and finds the Pollen Jocks. They represent a better off part of the Proletariat, what a neoliberal capitalist would call the middle class. While they are workers like everyone else in the hive, they have more prestige. Barry aspires to become one of them in an attempt at leaving the hard life that awaits the other members of the proletariat. This represents escapism from capitalism similar to how a lot of young people dream of becoming rich and famous instead of facing the fact that they can never achieve this under capitalism.
Eventually the pollen Jocks allow him to take part in a mission where he meets the human woman named Vanessa. They meet as she defends him against her boyfriend who wants to kill Barry. The humans in this story represent the bourgeoisie. They profit of the exploitation of the hard-working bees while not considering them as important as seen when Ken tries to kill Barry.
Ken represents a privileged conservative person that views the working class as less valuable than him. Throughout the film we can see him trying to oppose all change brought upon by Barry, we can see the obvious jealousy in him when Bees begin to gain rights similar to him much like how many privileged people oppose change that would help the working class.
Barry eventually takes note of the large-scale exploitation of his people and decides that he wants to do something about it. Vanessa, who represents a well-meaning member of the bourgeoisie, tries her best to help Barry with the liberation of the working class despite the fact that her flower business is build around the unpaid labour of Bees, much like how Friedrich Engels critiqued capitalism while living off the labour of the employees in his factory.
Barry and Vanessa do not attempt to change the system of exploitation with violent means but with legal action. The bourgeois defendant uses the typical arguments leveraged against the working class. They claim that the proletariat is naturally subordinate to the bourgeois and that changing this system of exploitation wouldn’t be fair to those who became rich on the back of the bee’s hard work.
Eventually Barry showcases some of the brutal means of subjugation used by the bourgeoisie to keep the proletariat in check and prevent an uprising which grants him sympathy among the liberal jury which then decides in his favour.
However the reforms implemented after this end up hurting the entire planet as plants stop to be pollinated when the bees stop their work. Some bees even mention how they miss working and having a purpose in life. As Marx predicted the people want to work even if they aren’t forced to.
Ultimately Barry decides that he must reverse all changes he made. The proletariat picks up work again and everything returns to normal. The bees work, the flowers get pollinated and the humans exploit the bees again. The only difference at the end of the movie is that Barry himself has gotten a new job as lawyer.
This represents the tendency of the proletariat to reverse all changes brought by revolution as soon as negative aspects emerge. Instead of building up a better system from the grounds of the failed revolution they revert back to the old system of exploitation. We can see this in all former eastern bloc countries which preferred top revert back to capitalism after they experienced the problems brought upon by Stalinism.
In the end of the movie the bees are back to where they where at the beginning, they have to work their entire lives and humans still get rich off their back. We are told that this is a good ending for the movie even though millions of members of the proletariat are still being exploited for their entire lives. The movie invites us not to think about this though, instead we are supposed to focus on the story of Barry who became a lawyer and thus got a better life than most of the proletariat. He then forgets the struggle and everyone accepts the bourgeois propaganda from before which states that the proletariat is naturally subordinate to the bourgeoisie.