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wainwrightjakobshammerlock · 2 months ago

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The Capitalist System in Borderlands: A Essay of Respectable Length

CONTENT WARNING: me being a Filthy Commie (seriously, don’t read this if you like capitalism, because this essay assumes that you don’t), minor Debt or Alive spoilers, minor New Tales spoilers, dumb memes, unironic and genuine enjoyment of Borderlands (shock horror), comparing Borderlands to real life

Part One: HOW ARE THEY DODGING ALL MY ATAKS [sic]

Let me preface this essay with a statement some might consider strong, but others obvious: capitalism is moribund.

I don’t mean this in the millenarianist “ooh, the Revolution is Imminent!!!” way, but in the way of the famous quote by Le Guin (“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings[...]”). All social systems are doomed to become redundant at some point or another.

Again, I don’t mean this in the historical materialist, typical Marxist way. I’m more of a historical naturalist, like Kropotkin and the others. I believe that yes, material conditions do influence society, but humans are beings of culture in addition to substance. The two, ultimately, influence one another.

It’s simply unreasonable to think a giant change in material conditions wouldn’t cause a giant change in cultural conditions. It’s why I absolutely hate it when in fictional universes something massive happens – like, for instance, magic returns to the world – and somehow modern structures of power and commerce survive unscathed (I understand why from a storytelling standpoint – keep the urban fantasy urban and relatable and easy to write, I get it – but hate it from an ideological and philosophical standpoint). You’re telling me they found another dimension, and that didn’t spawn the concept of dimensional solidarism or something?

Following this logic, capitalism in the Six Galaxies, aka the Borderlands universe, should be fucking dead.

Why? Because Borderlands has FTL.

Easy FTL, if I may add. This isn’t 40k where you have to jump through Hell itself to maybe arrive at your destination, or Dune where you need a specialized astral navigator and some special space paprika. Borderlands FTL is downright casual: you press a button on a navigator console, boom (literally, IYKYK), you’re at your destination at most half a minute later. It’s even strong enough to go to other galaxies!

FTL is already something that far surpasses the technology level of our world- a world in which people are already calling capitalism obsolete. But wait, there’s more! Borderlands has other insane technologies that could eliminate capitalism all on their own: digistructing, teleportation, easy genetic modification of living beings including humans, cloning, elemental technology, mining of other celestial bodies...

The Six Galaxies have a tech level that could easily support a post-scarcity society. And yet, they’re still a capitalist hellhole. They shouldn’t be.

Part Two: Objections

The first counterpoint to what I just said is the argument that yes, the Six Galaxies have a tech level that could easily support a post-scarcity society, but so has Earth i.e. our world, and yet capitalism is still alive. This is true. However:

Earth’s main problem is that the fancy tech and resources are not evenly distributed. The Six Galaxies have FTL, teleporation and digistructing, which should solve the logistics problem. Yet, that’s not happening for some reason, and there’s also a deeper issue with this argument that I’ll elaborate on in the second counterpoint.

Imagine if FTL was invented on Earth tomorrow: it’d inevitably cause a massive shakeup in basically all spheres of life. And that’s just ONE sci-fi technology, the Six Galaxies have a critical mass of them! They are so unimaginably advanced compared to us, that to think they’d still practice capitalism is just falling into the capitalist realism trap of being unable to imagine an alternative.

The second counterpoint is that a technologically advanced post-scarcity society would need all that tech to be evenly distributed. This is clearly not the case in the Six Galaxies, with some planets being low-tech and others being high-tech. However:

Technology should’ve solved the disparities long ago, as I’ve said above.

If the continuance of capitalism is due to such disparities, then they should go in the other direction too. What do I mean by this? Let’s compare Borderlands to another sci-fi video game, Rimworld. Rimworld, in some respects, has a higher technology level than Borderlands, but in some it definitely has a lower one. It’s also more grounded than Borderlands, most of the time. It too has an universe filled with worlds of various technological achievements: some of them are downright feudal, others post-apocalyptic, and some are on the level of modern Earth. But there’s also a special class of world called glitterworlds. They are said to be utopian, post-capitalist-if-not-communist societies, and there’s a whole bunch of them. Meanwhile, the Six Galaxies, with a similar technological disparity problem, have absolutely none of those (that we know of), even though they should logically exist! But wait. There’s more!!! Turns out Rimworld has a justification for the massive tech disparity amongst the various scattered planets: there is no FTL! Yep! That’s it, we’ve come full fucking circle baby! Meanwhile, Borderlands has neither the justification NOR the communist utopia worlds (Rimworld also has no confirmed evidence of sapient alien races, everything is either human or made by humans, meanwhile Borderlands has super confirmed sapient aliens, something that just like FTL would cause a giant shakeup in our world but more so in the cultural sphere rather than in the material sphere), which makes no fucking sense!!!

The third counterpoint is... well, they aren’t really capitalist, at least not in the way that we conceive of capitalism.

Part Three: A Unified Political Theory of a Looter Shooter Setting

The Six Galaxies have no central governing body, no state.

There used to be a central government, but corporations overthrew this “regulatory” state in a struggle that so far has no name in the lore, but lasted for around three decades according to the (take this with a bag of salt because it’s the “lore book”) Borderlands lore book.

Since there’s no state, this makes the Six Galaxies be in a state of anarchy (not chaos, the actual definition of anarchy). So this isn’t just capitalism, it’s anarcho-capitalism. Or is it?

Let’s discard the fact that anarcho-capitalism isn’t worthy of associating itself with any other branch of anarchist ideology (fuck off and stop claiming Stirner as your own) for a second and think about the corporations.

They’re not just corporations. Most of them have private militaries, giving them a monopoly on force. Their brands define the lives of many people, and they try to cultivate unique images to set themselves apart from their competitors. The DAHL EULA you accept at the beginning of Borderlands 3 implies that they have their own laws- hey wait isn't that the state all over again?

The anthropologist Brian Morris has critiqued anarcho-capitalists by saying that they “simply replaced the state with private security firms, and can hardly be described as anarchists as the term is normally understood”. The Borderlands universe is that quote put into visible, tangible practice. The corporations overthrew the state, and then they became the state.

This is consistent with an idea that comes up again and again in leftist thought, which is that the state and capitalism exist in collusion. Thus the corporations had to supplant the state (the lore book straight up calls the dominant political system a “corporatocracy”) they destroyed, lest they themselves falter.

Why did they overthrow the state then? Iunno, maybe their state animorphing happened while they didn’t notice. Or maybe, just maybe, this was their plan from the very start.

Another thing to note about the lore book is that it states some corporate leaders ruled more like feudal lords. This is especially poignant in the context of a certain line Miller, a character from Eden-6 says at the end of his sidequest: “[..]Jakobs ain't like all them other corporations. It's a family. We do the work, and they keep us from gettin' killed[...]”. While it was likely supposed to endear the player to the Jakobs corporation, “we work and they protect us” is basically the definition of serfdom. To further drive this idea home, the idea that anarcho-capitalism will inevitably (d)evolve into Feudalism... 2! is an uncommon but known argument against the ideology, as entertainingly showcased in this video by Youtuber Adam Something.

Feudalism, however, has a major problem. As Kropotkin elaborated on in his seminal work Mutual Aid, the beginning of feudalism did not mean the end of “primitive” mutual-aid societies, for example the peasants still mostly governed themselves even though they had their liege lords above them, because said liege lords weren’t often interested in the day-to-day running of society. Even in our modern times, where capitalism has wormed its way into every orifice of our lives like a parasite, mutual aid is still widespread, from unions to food banks to simple everyday friendships and neighborly behavior.

The capitalist system of the Six Galaxies, however, has essentially reverted to the feudalist mode. Space is really big, even with FTL technology, and the corporations simply cannot stretch themselves that thin, especially with their centralized system of governance (to our knowledge, none of them have even a board of directors, it’s just one guy or rarely gal. This makes all the major megacorps autocracies, which are notoriously inefficient at managing large amounts of territory unless they’re backed up by a massive bureaucratic apparatus, and even then it might not be enough; on top of the fact that this also makes them be workplace autocracies, which we all know suck massive ass). They too don’t mostly concern themselves with the day-to-day running of society – but they unfortunately have to, because they abolished- or rather supplanted the state... which is a bad idea, but they made their bed, so now they have to lay in it.

This means that unlike real-life capitalism, and despite the presence of FTL technology, it’s theoretically 100% possible to run away from the Borderlands brand of capitalism. Just cut yourself off from the ECHOnet and all other galactic networks so they don’t find you and build your dream ancom collective in some backwater meteor belt!

Thus, I propose two names for this particular variant of capitalism (I can’t decide which I like more):

malignant capitalism: The capitalism of our world is often called “late-stage”, and that reminds me of the way cancer progression is classified. Here, capitalism is a tumor that’s beyond late-stage. It’s grown far beyond the bounds of the organ that spawned it and began to “metastasize” across the stars, until it had sucked the body-state dry. But real-life parasites evolutionarily know that they can’t kill their host, because that will prevent them from reproducing. Real-life cancer, despite behaving in a parasitic manner, doesn’t know this - but this sort of cancer does. It had to grow over the original organs (monopoly on force, nationalism, law) in order to prolong its own existence – or maybe some of its cells just spontaneously mutated back into functional somatic ones.

zombie capitalism: This sort of capitalism should be dead. It should be really, really dead. And yet, somehow, it still walks, like a zombie. Or to put it another way: The body, the state and its functions, allegedly dead, is piloted and steered around by the necromantic magics of capitalism that killed it, because it’s still useful beyond death, dammit, and maybe killing it wasn’t that wise of an idea. Unfortunately, zombies in fiction are often slow and very easy to kite.

Part Four: Thog Don’t Care

So the capitalist system in Borderlands is stupid and doesn’t make sense, okay. But does that matter?

The capitalist system doesn’t make much sense in our world either. Automation and information technology have rendered it obsolete; many of its tenets and rules are illogical; it’s also straight up inefficient.

By exaggerating it and exposing those failings, Borderlands makes for an effective satire. Because that’s what it is at its core: more a satire of our capitalism than a cohesive world with its own rules... though I wish some people, including Gearbox, treated it as the latter more often, because it’s kinda fun to think of it in that way. When you do, you realize just how fragile its capitalist system is, and by extension you realize just how fragile our capitalist system is, and how ridiculous “anarcho”-capitalism is as an idea, and why serfdom is cringe.

Afterword

Of course, the capitalist satire that is Borderlands isn’t... perfect. It’s good, but definitely not great.

My issue isn’t that it says “capitalism is bad!” and stops there, because satire/grotesque is meant to point out the failures of a society, not necessarily give answers to such failures. It’s that it seemingly has a dim view of human nature. In a world of violence, it’s impossible to resist it and those who do are branded as fools both in and out of universe (Dr. Dhar, for instance). Redemption and forgiveness are virtually never an option, but bloody revenge is always. Bandits, a.k.a. those who slip through the cracks of corporate authority, become violent criminals whose associations are solely based on force, even in places where they aren’t based on prison populations – and even then, the real-life criminal world strictly enforces the doctrine of tit-for-tat (“don’t rat me out and i won’t rat you out either”), the same that cooperation in nature is based on! Sure, you see glimmers of friendship between individuals, but basing a system on anything but competition and hierarchy? Hogwash.

Indeed, the conspicuous absence of minor communist polities in the Six Galaxies I mentioned above is... definitely still not a solved issue. You might say that the corporations kill them whenever they appear – which is a reasonable assumption, I mean just look at real life – but as I said space is big and there’s definitely at least some communes that might be hiding out there.

Also, if they do kill them, then that begs the question: why do they let Vladof exist? I mean, they’re spouting socialist propaganda, that’s their entire shtick! Sure, the propaganda is fake, but considering the fact that the Elites of Eden-5 consider basic charity to be space communism, I wouldn’t be surprised if the rich people of the Six Galaxies sought to censor everything left of hardcore capitalism – meanwhile Vladof is out there, giving the proles ideas. (My personal theory is that Vladof is a puppet corporation, with all of its shares owned by the other members of the ruling oligopoly, so that the money their workers spend on “weapons of the revolution” ultimately circles back to them. This is also why Vladofs have such a high fire rate, despite ammo wasting being the last thing you want to do in any insurgency: it’s to squeeze out more money for the true owners of Vladof.)

#my post #borderlands #text post #communism #anarchism #jakobs manor metas #my ramblings #this is 2.5k words but i promise its worth reading #headcanons #sort of ig

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