Monday, April 17, 2023

Economic Revolutions in Isekai

Anime that are talked about as being about Economics in all genres tend to be the ones that seem the most Pro-Capitalist, largely because Market Liberals Get-Keep who gets to be considered an Economist.  The Anime that are the most Anti-Capitalist don't really get into the actual weeds of Economics, Capitalism is just a Machine that people feel very angry emotions in opposition to.

But this can often feel the most pronounced in Isekai and other Fantasy Anime of this Isekai era.  Whether it's the nation building Isekai like Realist Hero or the Japanese Gordon Gekko character of High School Prodigies, or just the unforeseen consequence of starting a small business like in Ascendence of a Bookworm.  The notion that introducing Capitalism into a Feudalist Society is a necessary part of "Modernizing" it is a recurring theme.

And the thing is it's a theme a lot of Leftists aren't even fully prepared to disagree with, because the Marxist Analysis of History also maintains the assumption that Capitalism was a necessary improvement over Feudalism.

Now I have come to grow suspicious of the kinds of Socialists who think Capitalism is objectively worse then Feudalism because certain reactionary objections to Capitalism often get wrapped up into such narratives.  The question of which is worse or better between those two Class Based modes of productions doesn't really have a simple answer and is besides the point because the goal should be to make something new.

What I have come to really object to about the Marxist analysis of history is the assumption that you can't go right from Feudalism to Communism, that Capitalism needs to come first for Industrialization and so forth.  Sometimes people argue the failures of the Bolshevik Revolution came down to trying to apply a Marxist approach to Socialism in a society that hadn't been Capitalist yet.  But the thing is the Bolsheviks were operating under the assumption that they had to do Capitalism first, they were simply trying to Speed Run it, and the Mensheviks would have mostly been the same.

I believe the Socialist Revolutionary Party are the faction that should have won the Russian Revolution because they had ideas for how to truly make a Communist Society out of Tsarist Russia without needing to do rapid rushed industrializing first.

There were also Communist theorists and philosophers well before there were Liberal/Capitalist ones, Communist Revolution was proposed at the height of Feudalism by John Ball.  In fact Communism is a truly Ancient idea thanks to Zeno's Republic which was a response to Plato's Republic and Laws whose ideas were basically where Feudalism came from.

So I'd really like for a change to see an Isekai where the modern visitor to a still Feudalist Fantasy world leads it directly to Communism with no Capitalization necessary.


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