/lit/ - Literature

>>13115511
>>13115542
don't read too much into it, it's just my own sense that the greatest enemy to any capitalist system has always been itself. read enough Freud-Marx stuff and you will come to understand how much the idea of repression plays a role in our thinking, then read Deleuze and Land afterwards and see what happens when those limits are inevitably and disastrously transgressed. the result is meltdown. even the film itself is a monument to it, it reflects the massive overconfidence the Japanese had in their own economic bubble in the early 1990s. they had money to burn in an almost literal sense and they produced one of the greatest cinematic pieces ever made, that being the film we're talking about.

capitalism is, like democracy, the best workaround we have for resolving infinite needs and demands into the public spectrum, but it is the nature of the psyche always to expand and overgrow and transgress its limits, even at the cost of the polis. it's those kinds of moments that will change the way one looks at the phenomenon as a whole. you can't Stop Capitalism in today's world any more than you could Stop Feudalism in the high middle ages. Feudalism eventually does stop, in a way, as a result of a whole host of factors, even if under the rule of tech-comm billionaires today a neo-cyberpunk future feudalism doesn't seem all that unlikely. history does repeat itself like that. the point is that our system too is likely to change over time, but not by any kind of meme ideological form that only guarantees that everything you hate about capitalism only reproduces itself under another name, by another process.

the CCP does capitalism today. so does the Islamic world (with the caveat being that they can't lend at interest, so political power figures more heavily). and China has to squash its own enterpreneurial class by making everything state-subsidized. so even there they'll do authoritarian state capitalism, it just won't be as capitalist as one group would prefer, or as statist as another would prefer. the takeaway here is that the thing you are calling capitalism bears more resemblance to that experimental neurovirus that afflicts Tetsuo than anything, and in the end it winds up stopping itself only through a kind of cataclysmic meltdown, which is at least one theme of the film, among many others. it is to be hoped that *balance* comes to be understood as being preferable to negation (because good luck with that). capital is in a sense both the apocalypse and the remedy, but the really important stuff goes on at the level of human nature - which includes our proclivities to both altruism and insanity. 'tis but an accelerator.