Elysium depicts a near-future Earth in which the majority of rich and privileged humans have migrated to an orbiting space station which gives the film its title. The city-state hogs the advanced medical resources of Earth, leaving the people on the planet below in a perpetual state of lawlessness and impoverishment. Matt Damon stars as Max Da Costa, a former criminal who, while doing dangerous work, is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation, giving him just five days to live. He soon obtains an exo-suit to augment his failing body. It’s then discovered that Max has data hidden in a chip in his brain that can, in theory, alter the computer systems running Elysium, which will benefit all the people who don’t live there.
But that’s my point - under different economic systems, investors have a similar reach. Since you’re requiring the anti-capitalist message to be unique to capitalism, and capitalism has no unique features, there can’t be any anti-capitalist art, right?
Well there’s definitely unique features. There just aren’t any in the description of the movie that I read.
Can you list some? As I’ve already said, I am not aware of any features that define capitalism which aren’t also present in some other economic system.
I think it might have been in another thread where I was trying to come up with some. I think the stock market’s way of giving more vote to people with more money is a particularly capitalist fail.
Isn’t that arguably how every system has worked? Say we’re going back a couple centuries - power mostly lied with banks and those who already had money, since their loans were important for many businesses. Look for example at the Fugger family - incredibly rich bankers with control over much of the European economy, and they were literally venture capitalists in the 15th & 16th century. Money has always given people leverage, the stock market is just a codified form (that still isn’t fully equal due to different kinds of shares, so really no different from previous power structures).
Yeah, I pretty much agree. Every system has a manner of “be subjected to the process or the weather”.
So there literally can’t be anti-capitalist art, as capitalism has no unique defining features, and only art focusing on those features can be anti-capitalist, right?
I mean, you can attack capitalism with an irrelevant argument and call it an attack on capitalism, but it won’t be a very good attack. It’s like me trying to say Johnny Cash songs are bad because he’s ugly.
Saying capitalism is bad because the people in charge are abusive doesn’t help in pointing out why we shouldn’t use capitalism. Kings and whatever communist leaders are called can also be abusive and it’s not because their system is inherently bad.
My point is that a weak argument can hardly be called “the greatest anti capitalist movie”.