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Capitalism Is Bad
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Many people believe that greed is the root of all evil. Some individuals would take it a step further and go so far as to proclaim "Fuck the Rich!" and demand the destruction of the system that they see as being a Plutocracy that is of the Corporations, by the Corporations, for the Corporations to screw the people over. This trope can come in a variety of forms: Class struggle: Arguably the most well-known form of this in which Capitalism is portrayed as benefitting a small elite at the expense and oppression of the poor and middle class. Black Market opportunism: Possibly the least controversial version of this trope, Corrupt Corporate Executives are portrayed as abusing loopholes or outright flouting the law to aggrandize themselves by immoral means such as drug dealing, contract killing, smuggling, illegal arms dealing, slavery (in settings when/where it is outlawed. See the fifth point for details), and illegal business transactions (e.g. cartels, scamming). Environmental Destruction: Sometimes a Green Aesop is incorporated in an effort to broaden its message in portraying businessmen as blatantly irresponsible in harming the planet in order to make a profit. May overlap with Science Is Bad in certain situations. Religious criticism: Works that have this sort of angle will seek to present capitalism as incompatible with certain religions and in some cases argue it as being a sin against its god(s) and/or basic principles. At the very least, it will present it as amorally "incentivizing sin" by supplying material that is prohibited by that religion's guidelines (e.g. alcoholic beverages, pornography, certain prohibited foods (e.g. pork), etc.). Can be a right-wing attack on capitalism that thinks its market liberalism is too decadent or a left-wing liberation theology example. Racial and ethnic oppression: Somewhat of an outgrowth of the first variety, but with a special focus on the effects of capitalism on certain races and ethnic groups in the forms of slavery, segregation, imperialism, and/or colonialism. Ableism: a more recent critique, similar to Class Struggle and Racial and Ethnic Oppression. Examples of this critique include barriers to employment, lower quality of life, and discrimination, faced by persons with physical or cognitive disabilities. Patriarchy: a feminist critique of capitalism, also similar in theory to racial and economic oppression, which emphasizes the tendency of capitalist societies to subordinate women, as well as gender and sexual nonconformists, relative to cisgender, heterosexual men. Notably a feature of Intersectional Feminism, where it overlaps with other anti-capitalist critiques listed on this page. In this context, capitalism is also seen as sexually exploitative (and usually involves a Double Standard). War as a business: A critique sometimes used as a display of how wars are fought at the beck and call of those with a financial interest in spreading death and destruction, often tying in with ideas of colonialism. Unless they are socialist Utopian stories, works employing this trope will generally be on the cynical side of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism and the villains will typically be categorized as Lawful Evil in Character Alignment. Anarchist works will have heroes in the Chaotic Good sphere as heroic revolutionaries while stories involving an existing socialist nation will firmly paint them as Lawful Good comrades. Though some Lighter and Softer versions of this trope may focus on certain aspects of capitalism, such as consumerism and the policy regarding regulation, rather than condemning it as a whole. More nuanced works with this trope may also employ Humans Are Flawed or Humans Are Bastards being that, after all, businesspeople are humans too, unless they're aliens or a point is made on how the human majority is working-class and moral in the face of the rich decadent few. Use of this trope is no guarantee that the writer understands capitalism and is willing to portray it fairly. Some works invoking this trope have come under criticism for their superficial depiction of capitalism. Terms such as "critique of capitalism" are often used as empty marketing slogans to make works seem more interesting and important than they are. Such terms have been used as such for so long that their use as such is now satirized. Before snarking about some writers and actors employing anti-capitalist messages while profiting from them as being hypocrites, keep in mind that narrative fiction creators are more likely to identify as artists than as businesspeople. And then there's the fact that a) people need to eat and pay bills, and b) capitalism is nearly omnipresent, so working outside capitalism is virtually impossible. In the less popular Marxist sense, however, class is merely your relation to capital, so making money isn't a problem as long as you yourself are a worker and not profiting off of employees. Sometimes represented by The Man. Compare and Contrast with Aristocrats Are Evil and Democracy Is Bad (the latter of which some believe can strengthen people's property rights, and thus enforce Capitalism, in certain situations. Others stress that capitalism is inherently undemocratic when the rich hold influence). Also keep in mind that not every work of fiction that features a Corrupt Corporate Executive is necessarily playing this trope. For example, Rufus Shinra from Final Fantasy VII and David Xanatos from Gargoyles are both unscrupulous businessmen, but the nature of capitalism is never explored in any detail and therefore those works would not count for this trope. However, that will not necessarily stop critics from deriving anti-capitalist messages from it anyways. Not to be confused with Adam Smith Hates Your Guts which is a video game mechanic. See also Chummy Commies. For the opposite of this trope, see Dirty Communists. |
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Shakedown: Hawaii has this its main message, being about every single dirty, underhanded, and predatory trick modern Mega Corps use to skirt around the law and government regulations, making their products worse to cut costs while also inflating prices, creating monopolies, and generally conning and fleecing their customers. Of course, the Player Character, being a Corrupt Corporate Executive, is impressed by these tricks and starts employing them himself to save his failing business. | |
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Fight Club has its fair share of anti-capitalist rants. | |
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This is the main theme of "XS" by Rina Sawayama, specifically mocking Conspicuous Consumption and shallow materialism, all set to 2000s-era pop. | |
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Chappelle's Show: The "WacArnold's" skit satirizes some of McDonald's commercials by showing a young African-American man named Calvin who gets a job at the McDonald's ersatz while the narrator explains the benefits of working at the company in a set of commercials. Though with each commercial, it portrays it in a less appealing manner: one woman who had congratulated Calvin had died from eating cheap, high-cholesterol foods from WacArnold's; his Black majority neighborhood's economic well-being is no better than it was prior to the WacArnold restaurant opening; and Calvin can't adequately care for his family on his minimum wage job. | |
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The hosts of Podcast: The Ride, despite ostensibly celebrating the joys of corporate entertainment and devoting many episodes to businesses and shopping malls, are often highly critical of the corporations that operate them. Jason especially is prone to the occasional Author Tract about the need for stronger workers' unions, and the villains of their "Downtown Disney Ordeal" Story Arc are all wealthy business owners. | |
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Every Day the Same Dream has this theme to some degree in that it portrays residing and working in a corporate society is a dreary, repetitive, and mind-numbing way to live. Though it is also an indictment of the monotony and pressure of society as a whole. | |
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Andor: The tension between the people of Ferrix and the MegaCorp Pre-Mor that has control of their world is very intentionally designed to bring to mind a mining community fighting off strike breakers using deadly force backed by amoral wealthy owners. This is further amplified by the fact that Pre-Mor is in league with the Obviously Evil Empire. Other tenets of unchecked capitalism are also critiqued including a scathing commentary on the prison industrial complex and companies trying to force consumers to buy new products instead of repairing what they already own. | |
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Robo Cop and its remake share this theme, featuring typical Cyberpunk MegaCorp organizations that are very unscrupulous about how they employ their power. Right before Murphy is brutally murdered, he overhears Emil and another thug converse as to why they can't just keep the money they steal instead of investing in the drug trade, to which Emil ends by saying: |
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Runaways occasionally delves into this, given that it's a series about former rich kids trying to survive after the deaths of their supervillain parents. And then there's the "Dead End Kids" arc, where they flirt with supervillainy because they've been cut off from their hideout and they're tired of sleeping in their getaway vehicle. | |
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Reds!: A Revolutionary Timeline, being an Alternate History about a socialist revolution in the US written by a socialist, has this in any depiction of capitalist countries, both in and out of universe. The Fire Never Dies has a similar premise and themes. |
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The Simpsons and Futurama: Both Mr. Burns and Mom are caricatures of evil businesspeople without any morals and are effectively both the main antagonists in these series, both created by Matt Groening. | |
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In his playthrough of Bloodborne, he takes note of how the world design seems to enforce a class separation in Yharnam. Central Yharnam and Cathedral Ward, which are the visibly wealthiest areas in the game, have comparatively few plague beasts; The people there are certainly afflicted, but they remain mostly humanoid, suffering only mild symptoms. The people of Old Yharnam, on the other hand, are all mutated into beasts. He also takes note of the multiple points in the game where the player can knock on doors and hear various mocking lines of dialogue from the inhabitants, which he sees as the wealthy that can afford incense to ward off the beast plague, whereas the player character can't, and has to fight for their life to stay alive. Finally, when discussing Micolash, he outright compares him to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos: a powerful and narcissistic asshole who thinks his scholarly pursuits into higher planes of being are so much more important than the people dying of a plague outside. | |
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Mother's Basement: Geoff caps off "The Roast of Dragonball Evolution" by discussing how the film and its infamously low quality are what happens when a studio produces a movie entirely for capitalistic purposes, with no thought to artistry or creativity. He then points out that the only system that ever could have produced such a terrible film "is the dominant governing force in all of our lives." | |
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In Lodge 49, most of Dud and Ernie's problems can be traced to some greedy prick higher up on the food chain, whether it's the bank that took Dud's home and business to pay off his dead father's debts or the customers who stiff Ernie on commissions and force him to eat the expenses when they underestimate the costs of a piping job. | |
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In Stardew Valley, the closest thing the game has to a driving antagonist is a Walmart Expy that is greedily staking claim to the titular region's resources, dumping polluting refuse into it, working the locals into exhaustion and depression, driving the local mom-and-pop store out of business by using underhanded tactics, and just generally strangling the community spirit. You can side with them, and you can make a lot of money in doing so, but it's thematically discouraged and plus you miss out on a lot of other rewards in doing so. | |
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Borderlands 2: The Big Bad, Handsome Jack, is what happens when an insane narcissist becomes the CEO of an arms-dealing corporation. | |
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Borderlands 3: Katagawa, CEO of Maliwan, killed most of his family to inherit the position, and attacks Promethea as a form of company takeover, which involves slaughtering as many innocent civilians as he can until Atlas is bankrupted by the chaos. | |
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"CAPITALISM MUST CEASE", says a placard in A Study In Reds. Of course, it's part of a dream had by a rural Wisconsin town in which said town is turned into a Soviet commune. | |
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DmC: Devil May Cry literally demonizes capitalism as a plot from Hell. Mundus (a.k.a. banker Kyle Rider) along with his demon underlings control the Human world through debt and keeps humanity complacent through Virility soft drinks and the Raptor News Network in order to use them as livestock. | |
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Glengarry Glen Ross features a firm of desperate real-estate salesmen at each other's throats in an effort to please their uncaring bosses, who insult, belittle and threaten to fire them if they don't increase their sales. | |
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Captain Planet and the Planeteers used the third type of this trope to portray how the results of Unfettered Capitalism detrimentally affect the natural environment. | |
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Fun with Dick and Jane: The 2005 remake is made of this trope, being inspired by the Enron scandal. | |
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This is Jim Stephanie Sterling's opinion regarding the video game industry (especially the "Triple A" major studios), and capitalism in general, with the industry leaders' insatiable greed resulting in various major problems including: Destroying the well-being of the companies' own employees by withholding bonuses on flimsy premises, forcing their staff to do thousands of hours of unpaid overtime as a collective during pre-release "crunch" periods. Promoting horrible and predatory business practices such as gambling lootboxes, cutting content to resell it later, increasing the grinding games require to sell "fast track" upgrades & in-game currency. Using their money and connection to avoid or circumvent regulations and taxes that might be put upon them, with any charitable acts being so insignificant compared to their earnings that they should not be considered as anything else than publicity stunts to appear as good guys and discourage putting regulations or restrictions on them. |
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Discussed at length in the 2014 documentary America. In addition, it is also brought up that merchants and other businesspeople being considered fair game to vilify is Older Than Feudalism, well before The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith was published in 1776. In the documentary is mentioned Tunisian Historian Ibn Khaldun's observation and condemnation of contemporaries of his time who believed that someone who stole something was more "honorable" than someone who traded for an object as they at least had to "earn" their "right" to keep it to by proving themselves in combat. | |
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Lovely People: The story has an anti-consumerist message all while promoting Christian faith as the alternative to it, so it's a definite case of the religious criticism variant. | |
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The Dark Knight Rises has been mocked as an example of both anti-capitalism and anti-anti-capitalism, with Jonathan Chait writing in New York magazine that "What passes for a right-wing movie these days is The Dark Knight Rises, which submits the rather modest premise that, irritating though the rich may be, actually killing them and taking all their stuff might be excessive." | |
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The director of Jurassic World, Colin Trevorrow, has stated this as being one underlying theme in the film, and the Indominus rex represents the worst of consumer and corporate excess. | |
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This is the central theme of Kentucky Route Zero, which is set in the middle of the Great Recession in a decaying section of semi-rural Kentucky. The local Consolidated Power Company has its fingers in every pie through ownership of debt and the local whiskey distillery they own is a debtor's prison that's also an unsubtle Hell allegory. | |
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La Terra Trema: The wholesale fish merchants of Sicily ruthlessly exploit and oppress the poor fishermen, paying them a pittance and leaving them mired in poverty. They will seek to squash anyone like protagonist Ntoni who tries to rise above his station. The narrator describes their fate as "hopeless slavery." This film was financed by the Italian Communist Party as an electioneering tool for the impending 1948 Italian general election. | |
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Supernatural: The Leviathan arc that makes up the entirety of the seventh season (which ran from 2011-2012) is devoted to criticizing certain aspects of American capitalism, particularly the degree of power that Corporations have to influence people (and frequently for the worse). It portrays corporations, when under the control of especially avaricious and domineering Ubermensches such as the Leviathans, as being like parasites who enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of the population and keep them ignorant while doing so. King Leviathan Dick Roman, the leader of the Leviathans, is also a very unflattering portrayal of Corporate CEOs in that he is an unabashedly hubristic Social Darwinist. | |
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Isabelle of Paris is set in France during 1870, and has a lot of commentary on the class divide between the commoners and the Bourgeoisie. In the first episode, Jules critisizes the rich for holding a ball when their country is in the midst of war. His worries turn out to be valid when the ballgoers are then informed that Otto von Bismarck's troops have completely destroyed the French army and are coming to Paris. In episode two, a commoner child asks his mother why the French are fleeing en masse. She replies that the Prussians are coming, and they are doing so to protect their homes and properties. When the child asks if they will flee too, the mother replies that they have nowhere to go, and that them and the Bourgeoisie live in an enitirely different world than them. In the same episode, Geneviève asks Jules why they can't marry, and he replies that since she is the daughter of wealthy landowners, and he is a mere piano teacher, her parents would never approve of their inter-class romance. Thiers chooses to sell out France to Prussia because as a wealthy Bourgeoisie, he owns many properties that he does not want the war to marr. |
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BioShock Infinite: While this game's extremism is about religious jingoism, one of the major power players is Fink Industries, which proudly checklists every tactic of the Age of Robber Barons. Fink uses the city's extreme racism to enslave the working class minorities, pays them in scrip, sends them to ghettoes, and has them bid on temp jobs for the cheapest prices. He even forces them to work in beat with his brother's music for the ego trip! | |
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In Tonight We Riot, the totalitarian capitalist regime is shamelessly oppressing and exploiting the workers and destroying the environment. It is up to the player to lead an army of workers in a revolution to finally seize the means of production. | |
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In Final Fantasy XIV, the Monetarists of Ul’dah are this. The more powerful section of the ruling Syndicate, they pretty much exist to wring out every last Gil out of the poor. If a law is passed, it’s because they can make a buck off of it. It’s also Played With as some members idealize self-sufficiency and actively scold people for trying to throw money at problems. | |
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Overly Sarcastic Productions: Red's video on the Robin Hood legend opens with her discussing her belief that capitalism encourages those with money to hoard it for themselves rather than spend it in a way that benefits others, creating a system that favors a tiny rich elite at the expense of the poor, using footage of Smaug's Dragon Hoard from The Hobbit as an "artist's interpretation". | |
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Every game in the Grand Theft Auto series has some kind of attack on capitalist society. | |
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A Dog of Flanders (1975): Nello and his grandfather live in excruciating poverty and their attempts to climb out of it define a good part of the story. Hans is also a cruel, greedy landlord who desires the Cogez family's wealth, and frames Nello for a fire because he'd rather save money than spend it. He had always been threatening to kick out Nello and his grandfather before that by raising the rent. Nello and Patrasche eventually die because they can't find access to safe housing and food. Alois' abusive father uses his wealth to control his daughter and threatens to have her punished for interacting with a "poor" boy. Ironically, he himself was born poor, but once he became rich he began looking down on them despite the fact that their origins were no different from his. |
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In Jurassic Park (1990), the entire disaster is caused both by Hammond's efforts to cut costs and corporate espionage to secure intellectual property rights. | |
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Every character with a decent amount of wealth in Speed Grapher is a corrupt power-abuser who cares more about money than anything else in the world, several characters give speeches about how money corrupts and kills people and causes wars, many of the Dark And Troubled Pasts involves greed in some way, and to top it off, in the end Suitengu destroys nearly all of Japan’s money, ruining the current and bankrupting the whole country, which will have a negative effect on the world’s economy, and this is portrayed as a good thing. | |
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The Lost World (1995) plays with this, with a nice business owner being a main character, but the evils of InGen still being explored. | |
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The Godfather, especially the second part, was regarded by Francis Ford Coppola as being less about the mob and more about the mob as a metaphor for capitalism. This is most prominent when Michael Corleone boasts of his shares in IBM and Hyman Roth states that the mob is "bigger than U.S. Steel." | |
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Wonder Woman: Tempest Tossed posits that without regulation capitalism is a tool of evil, with the corporate slimeball Chip Drygion intentionally exacerbating homelessness and calling the cops on legal gatherings while buying up housing and the local park and community garden to replace it all with high-end condos as part of his plan to make a profit gentrifying Queens. This is presented as a class struggle that is rooted in racism, misogyny, and greed. Chip is also kidnapping and selling marginalized girls into sex slavery in the area he's targeting on the side. | |
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In his reading of Dark Souls II, he sees the mining in Brightstone Cove Tseldora as a metaphor for capitalism; The Writhing Ruin was first uncovered by duke Tseldora, a spider-fanatic who employed workers to labor in dangerous mines for his benefit. The duke and all his workers are long dead, but the work continues, as the Writhing Ruin has become a force unto itself which turns the workers into literally mindless slaves doing nothing but work to feed a giant spider. | |
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Force of Evil: Nominally about rival mobsters trying to control the numbers racket, but really an indictment of capitalism. (Director Abraham Polonsky was a Marxist.) The "numbers racket" is described in terms similar to the stock market, and it's analogized to gambling. The various numbers rackets are called "banks". Joe's office is on Wall Street, right next to the New York Stock Exchange. People turn to crime to chase the American Dream, and for the sake of money family, brotherhood, and other bonds are cast by the wayside. | |
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Parasite (2019) makes its commentary on capitalism by contrasting the lives of two families: the Parks, a wealthy family living on the top of a hill, and the Kims, a poor family of grifters who live in a half-basement apartment folding pizza boxes to earn money between get-rich-quick schemes. The story touches on many aspects of why Capitalism Is Bad, from how it turns the desperate into criminals, to how climate change affects those at the bottom of society first by contrasting the Parks being barely affected by a rainstorm vs the Kims losing their home and everything in it. | |
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The Asterisk War: The primary villains are the integrated enterprise foundations, a small group of megacorporations that control the world economy, bringing entire countries to the brink of poverty (Lieseltania included), encouraging the unethical treatment of Genestella for its own purposes using the Asterisk Festas to extend their political influence, and brainwashing their own members to prevent any defiance. From what has been seen so far, its only goal seems to be "profit at any cost." | |
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In Sin City, Basin City is terribly corrupt and in the hands of a minority of political and economical elites, especially the Rourke family, who use their power to get away with regular dog-kicking so base, so vile, so monstrous, they don't even know what a Moral Event Horizon is. They get away with most of it, too, until eventually the working-class, downtrodden, impoverished underdog Anti Heroes defeat or murder them. | |
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The Nostalgia Critic in his review of the 1997 film Congo criticized this trope. While the CEO of the company who sent the protagonists on their mission may have been a profit-motivated jerkass, for the most part he neither violated the law nor knowingly left them unprepared. When one of the protagonists shoots down a satellite owned by the company, the Critic replies that regardless of what one thinks of the CEO, it was unfair for her to potentially cause employees of the corporation to lose their jobs just so she could make a political statement. | |
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La Seine No Hoshi is a series set in 1780s France, centering on a peasant girl named Simone Rolland. Her parents were killed because a wealthy Bourgeoisie woman was upset that her dress wasn't as glitzy as another aristocrat's. Many aristocrats are portrayed as Spoiled Brats who don't care about the damage they inflict on the peasant populace, hence Simone becoming a vigilante heroine and righting the wrongs of France's corrupt system. | |
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Modern Times: Charlie Chaplin was a staunch leftist, and the film is perhaps the most clear-cut demonstration of that in his work. The factory the Tramp works at openly dehumanises its workers and tries to find ways so that they can work even more, poverty and unemployment are rampant, and even a normal worker is forced to turn to theft to survive. | |
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Iron Man: The comics play with this on some occasions. Stan Lee and Larry Lieber noticed that all the businessmen in the Marvel Universe, and for that matter comics in general, were those of the Corrupt Corporate Executive type, and thus decided to create a superhero who averted this trope in the form of Tony Stark (AKA Iron Man), possibly to demonstrate that capitalism was not inherently evil but also as a personal challenge for Lee, to turn a war profiteer into a beloved character. Some of the villains that he faces, most notably Obadiah Stane, lack any of Stark's integrity and take advantage of armed conflicts to make a profit. Thus the beneficial and detrimental effects of capitalism can be played up in certain storylines. | |
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Zombidle invokes this trope by having one of the buildings that Bob the Necromancer can build in Hell called the "Corporate Bank of Capitalism". It provides a Money Multiplier. | |
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Renegade Cut: This is a recurring theme in many of his videos, particularly "Thanos is Wrong" or "Late Stage Disney". In his review of The Simpsons episode "Homer's Enemy", he makes the case for an anti-capitalist message. Instead of Frank Grimes realizing that his all troubles were due to problems Inherent in the System and then working towards changing the system, he turns all his ire towards Homer Simpson over things that aren't in his control because he's an easier target than Mr. Burns. |
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Borderlands plays this on both sides. Capitalism is treated as a convenient necessity for the player, as much of the game is driven by your purchases and sales of the equipment you and the people around you need to survive the Crapsack World you're stuck in. However, the main villains of the game are the mega-corporations. Not only did they destroy the galaxy's government in the backstory, they are all paramilitary organizations that enjoy advertising their equipment through violent demonstrations. In this particular case, Dahl left its workers to die on Pandora when they chose to cut losses, driving the survivors insane and turning them into the Psychos you typically fight. Atlas starts out as one of the richest companies in the setting, but it is so riddled with corruption and nepotism that they have to invade Pandora in search of an old legend with a full military force to break even. Borderlands 2: The Big Bad, Handsome Jack, is what happens when an insane narcissist becomes the CEO of an arms-dealing corporation. Borderlands 3: Katagawa, CEO of Maliwan, killed most of his family to inherit the position, and attacks Promethea as a form of company takeover, which involves slaughtering as many innocent civilians as he can until Atlas is bankrupted by the chaos. |
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The background of the Fallout games features hundreds of corrupt corporations, an oligarchic US government, and a nuclear war being fought over oil resources. Just think about who consumes oil for a second. | |
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A Corner in Wheat, a short film from 1909, is about an unscrupulous capitalist who corners the wheat market. The capitalist makes a ton of money and eats lavish dinners, while the farmers who can't sell their wheat struggle and the poor people of the cities can't get bread. | |
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BioShock: Arguably the central theme of BioShock. The setting is a laissez-faire capitalist utopia in a city at the bottom of the ocean, built by industrialist Andrew Ryan (explicitly an Expy of Ayn Rand). Without proper regulation, Rapture quickly turned into a Wretched Hive ruled by Corrupt Corporate Executives and Social Darwinists; the poor were dehumanized and seen as "parasites" (despite doing all the necessary work to maintain the city), and everything became commodified, fitted with a price tag - even breathable airnote In a city that's underwater, worth reminding. When someone with even more ruthlessness and business acumen began to outcompete Ryan in the market, Ryan turned to state power to come down on his business rival, dashing all of his guiding beliefs and sparking a Civil War with Rapture's other business owners. Ryan won the resulting war, turning Rapture into a tyrannical One Nation Under Copyright, and the whole city snapped a few years later with a second Civil War that destroyed Rapture. Though, it should be noted that Ken Levine has said that the theme of the game was more that Humans Are Flawed and extremism of any kind is not beneficial. Bioshock 2: By contrast, the new tyrant Sophia Lamb is a self-proclaimed collectivist, who seized power by organizing a cult of disenfranchised ex-capitalists while she was waiting in prison for Ryan to finally die. Instead of selling the genetic modification drugs everyone has been fighting over, her master plan is to experiment with them until she can transform her daughter into an Ãœbermensch, an ultimate lifeform meant to rule the world. In this case, it is less about what Capitalism does in charge, and more about what non-capitalist rulers can do with capitalism; Lamb is completely hostile to the concept of capitalism, but she has stolen the corporations' means of production, and is using their product in her grand, dangerous, and unethical science experiment. BioShock Infinite: While this game's extremism is about religious jingoism, one of the major power players is Fink Industries, which proudly checklists every tactic of the Age of Robber Barons. Fink uses the city's extreme racism to enslave the working class minorities, pays them in scrip, sends them to ghettoes, and has them bid on temp jobs for the cheapest prices. He even forces them to work in beat with his brother's music for the ego trip! Judas takes 21st-century capitalism to an extreme. An entire colony spaceship has been turned into a giant theme park, with the workers buying into social media while pretending their sub-standard way of life is paradise just because it keeps the lights on. Instead of corporations selling faulty and dangerous products, the employees are the product, suckered into selling their souls for bland, bare-effort T-shirts, and brainwashed to mindlessly worship the CEOs of the three ruling corporations. And unfortunately, this game also portrays the potential side-effects of AI capitalism; AI was so utterly profitable that the corporations eventually gave their central AIs full control. When the protagonist finally snapped, she tried to sabotage the ship's mainframe to destroy the corporations' power - which accidentally drives all of the ship's AIs insane at once, from the worker drones to the piloting systems. |
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In Sorry to Bother You, written and directed by self-professed communist Boots Riley of rap group The Coup, it is revealed that MegaCorp WorryFree's employees (who are on lifetime contracts and receive no pay, but definitely aren't slaves) are being mutated into half-human half-horse abominations. The film presents this as an extension of the dehumanization of workers under capitalism. | |
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Super Mario World (1991) had King Koopa open a fast-food joint, Scoopa Koopa's. The food was addictive, calorie-filled, and had nasty side-effects that turned customers into chickadactyls. Koopa's ultimate plan was to turn everyone into chickens and open a second restaurant to sell them as fried chicken, gloating that you can't be too rich or too evil. | |
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Brazil by Terry Gilliam is a downplayed example. It is more a satire of consumerism than capitalist economics as a whole, though according to Gilliam in an interview it hasn't stopped some conservatives in the United States (who are more likely to be pro-capitalist) from genuinely enjoying it and misinterpreting its intended messages. | |
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The Promised Land depicts the appalling exploitation of workers by factory owners in 1885 �ódź. Mr. Muller builds a palace that he doesn't even live in, just to impress people, while the workers live in squalor and pawn their possessions. A factory magnate essentially forces a pretty girl to go to an orgy. A worker is chewed up by machinery; as he's still twitching with one arm gone and the other still caught in the machine, Karol tells everyone else to go back to work. And at the end, Karol orders his security forces to shoot at the strikers, and a man carrying a red flag is shot In the Back. | |
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In Star Trek the Federation is a post-scarcity, post money utopia. But Depending on the Writer it only explores how this is possible a few times. The concept of how the society is moneyless is that the Matter Replicator technology has reduced all basic necessities as a trivial issue. All problems with resources surround colonies and alien societies, who represent various human issues through Planet of Hats. Except for the apparent voluntary and inconsequential existence of markets in the Federation appearing to be a tolerated "lifestyle choice." Seems the Federation doesn't care whether you accept all their free stuff or not, as long as you're not profiting off other people not having things. So they have money, they just don't allow it to generate socioeconomic disparity. Kind of a "be capitalist at your own risk" mentality. Capitalism as a whole is lampooned through the Ferengi, whose entire theme is about wealth and business. They were first introduced in TNG's "The Last Outpost" and explicitly compared to "Yankee Traders," and on top of other things were also short gremlin-like creatures with misogynistic views. Their religion even talked of bartering and earning a place in a celestial treasure trove. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine featured Quark as a main character and was able to provide a more nuanced take on their culture. He once chided Sisko for looking down on Ferengi when they never practiced slavery or had wars on the same level as Earth because they are toxic to a healthy economy. He also talked to the Prophets, who had little comprehension of linear time or physical existence, and was able to provide a convincing argument over the value of greed and ambition. He talked to a Vulcan and explained the logic of going to war through business terms, if neither side wants war then peace should be available at a bargain price. Later in the series Ferengi started to relax their policies around women because females with jobs will have the opportunity to buy things. |
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Our Daily Bread is about a group of Americans in the depths of The Great Depression who form a socialist-style collective farm. The film isn't excessively strident, but the anti-capitalist message is obvious. At the foreclosure auction, a capitalist fat cat right out of Soviet propaganda—overweight, dressed in a suit, chomping on a cigar—tries to buy the farm, but after the workers silently threaten him with a hangman's rope, he clams up, and the workers buy the farm themselves for less than two dollars. | |
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Flakes features a homegrown cereal bar with its quirky sensibilities versus the sterile corporate copycat installation across the street. As far as the Flakes employees are concerned, the trope is true. The actuality is that both sides come to realize the other has a point. | |
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L.A. Noire has several seemingly legitimate businesses as a front for drug trafficking and massive insurance fraud. It also shows how deep corruption went in Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s, with the police and the mayor turning a blind eye to all this. | |
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Black Mirror plays with this in several episodes: "Fifteen Million Merits": In this dystopian future, people do pointless work to buy pointless things, and celebrity status is the only carrot on the stick. People keep degrading themselves in pursuit of fame, and then when they find fame they realise they've only escaped into another prison. "White Bear": Shows a privatized prison being determined into a nightmare and a woman's eternal suffering being used to make lots of money. "White Christmas": Matt is an amoral businessman willing to send virtual clones into hell in order to make money. "Nosedive": An episode set in a dystopian future where your social media ratings determine everything about you, from your job to your housing to even your priority for hospital treatment. All social interaction in the world is reduced to a game where people exchange numbers, and it makes them behave like shallow sociopaths with no concept of true friendship or decency. "Playtest": Shows how ruthless a corporation can be by literally killing a man and treating it as a business loss. "Black Museum": Shows an amoral businessman using sadists, white supremacists, and torture to make a lot of money. |
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Red Markets: The entire game is a critique of capitalism, with much focus on the hardships forced on the player characters because despite the Zombie Apocalypse, capitalism endures. They still have to earn money to pay for necessities: rent to the enclave they live in, medical bills, etc. All while trying to save enough to retire in a true safe zone. | |
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Neo Yokio: Sailor Pellegrino and Helena Saint Tesoro both have beef with the upper class of Neo Yokio. | |
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In Time: Connects capitalism with social Darwinism in an anvilicious way. Wages are decreased and prices are increased by fiat, meaning the purpose of the system is to Work The Poor To Death at a controllable rate. Note that the film seems to massively fail at economics. | |
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One of the major villain groups in Werewolf: The Apocalypse is Pentex, an immense MegaCorp that is literally run by demonic powers to destroy the world by playing this trope completely straight on every level. While the aims of the leadership are overtly dystopian, most of its employees below the top management think it's just another ruthless corporation—but accomplish its aims perfectly well through "normal" corporate corruption, avarice and ambition. | |
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Salt of the Earth: A portrait of brave, determined miners and their wives joining together to fight against greedy capitalist bosses and their law enforcement lackeys. This was the only American film shown in Communist China between 1950 and 1979. | |
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Red Dead Redemption plays with this, showing how the industrial revolution hitting the dying wild west has more than a few consequences. | |
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Who Moved My Soap is narrated by a Corrupt Corporate Executive who openly talks about how corrupt the world of Wall Street is and frequently encounters fellow businessmen and expects to encounter many more in the years to come. | |
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The running theme of Cruelty Squad is that practically everything bad can be traced back or otherwise linked to capitalism. The Cruelty Squad that the player character is part of a gig economy-like business, but instead of delivering food or providing ride sharing, they're a Professional Killer. Death Is Cheap at just 500 bucks thanks to machines allowing Resurrective Immortality, which permits an irreverent attitude towards the value of life and permits groups such as Cruelty Squad to get away with the atrocities and cruelty that they get away with: Stealing organs from people you killed and selling them on the stock market is completely acceptable, socially. Hell, one of the levels puts you on the receiving end of a Cruelty Squad hit, and you're supposed to shrug it off and come back to work the day after. The NPCs who promote biocurrency, a mockery of cryptocurrency, all fit on the scale of Jerkass to derangedness. The game makes multiple allusions to real-world failings of capitalism and real-life capitalists being awful people. |
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Several songs written by The Stupendium have this as a message. "The Fine Print", based on The Outer Worlds, is presented by the Halcyon Holding Corporation essentially saying, "We can do what we want because we control your job and you are under our contract, so get working." | |
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Haunting Starring Polterguy: Until the day of his death, poltergeist Polterguy is just a normal '90s teenager. He dies because the Sardini Company sells crappy skateboards just for profit without regard for safety and life. | |
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Master Detective Archives: Rain Code is about an evil MegaCorp known as the Amaterasu Corporation that ended up overtaking a city known as Kanai Ward and corrupting it, turning it into a crime-ridden dystopia under complete control by the Amaterasu Corporation, with Tyrannical Town Tycoons as the leaders, showing the consequences of unrestrained corporate greed. | |
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Jennifer Government: In many ways the Anti-1984 (read about that one above), in which a dystopia exists by way of powerful corporations seeking to aggrandize themselves and have turned the United States government into a puppet to serve their own purposes. Its condemnation of libertarianism is so over the top (especially going out of its way to present John Nike as the worst kind of person in existence to make readers come to a conclusion) that it seems like self-parody. | |
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WALL•E: Rampant consumerism encouraged by a Walmart Expy turned One Nation Under Copyright brought about such ecological destruction that Earth had to be evacuated due to literal skyscrapers of garbage. The humans living in orbit on the Axiom are little better, essentially living as overgrown children who basically exist to eat, lounge around in boredom and buy things whenever prompted by adverts. When the Axiom goes back to Earth at the end, the humans adopt a Solar Punk-style society which is healthier for them and for the planet. Director Andrew Stanton has gone on record for saying he didn't intend for this. | |
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In the last season of the cartoon based on the comics, Granndad was driven into prostitution, corpse smuggling, and actual slavery by his own blind, irresponsible consumerism, and the manipulative usury of his plutocrat landlords, the Wunclers. Pissing on the poor seems to be an actual pastime of Ed Wuncler's; he once trapped a little girl into wage slavery in a lemonade stand, by promising her a pony. All of this bleak horror is Played for Laughs. | |
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Parodied by The Future, a rather hypocritical group of communists from Hail, Caesar!. As communists, they see capitalism as an oppressive system that takes their good work as writers and gives them nothing for it. This doesn't stop them from not wanting to redistribute their ransom money evenly, or letting their Soviet bosses get all the money for their labor, or from listening to a professor who says the best way to fight capitalism is to try and obtain the most wealth as possible, a capitalist mindset. The whole philosophy is presented as humorously contradictory, except when Eddie Mannix hears a big actor using it to bad mouth the studio after all it sacrificed to rescue him and secure his career. Mannix slaps the actor silly and makes him realize that all the hard work people put in to make a movie is not just to drive some system, it's worth something. | |
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In Jurassic Park (1993), Ian Malcolm sums this up when criticizing Hammond and his Jurassic Park experiment by pointing out how he created something and the first thing he did was turn it into a business venture | |
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Jupiter Ascending practically hits the viewers over the head with it. To name but one example, the three villains Jupiter must face have explicitly inherited vast amounts of wealth from a business that literally requires exploiting human lives, while Jupiter herself is a working-class undocumented immigrant who scrubs toilets for a living. | |
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The message of "The Hand That Feeds" by The Crane Wives is that capitalism promises workers "the great American ruse" while exploiting them in turn, until they are too tired to fight the system and become cogs in the machine, and the workers have nothing left to lose by taking care of and standing up for themselves. | |
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The Purge and its sequel The Purge: Anarchy show this in an oblique way, with the rich being the only ones that can afford proper security during the titular event, and the rich paying for hitmen to do the purging for them (and even auctioning people to kill) in the sequel. It's established early on in the first film that the establishment of the Purge brought about full employment in the US because the unemployed homeless were the most vulnerable target of it. How exactly that works is never elaborated beyond "it's working." The later franchise entries show it most certainly isn't, but the New Founding Fathers spent a lot of money to astroturf its popularity and feasibility. | |
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The earlier Ratchet & Clank games include some strong satire, whereas more recent games starting with Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction onwards avert this. While the companies that make the weapons that the protagonist and many other people (including villains) use aren't actively malevolent, they are certainly apathetic in regard to the destruction their customs cause after they've paid for them. In fact, the series is actually the Trope Namer for MegaCorp. Starting in the first game, everyone who is capable of helping the heroes progress on their journey requires bribes to do so, they follow the famous superhero by watching all of the tacky ads he was paid to star in, and it turns out that he's a washed-up failure helping the bad guy for cash. In the second game, MegaCorp plays numerous ads showing how hilariously uncaring they are about the safety of their customer or employees, and their base is located at the centre of the galaxy, meaning that the entire galaxy literally rotates about this one corporation. The fourth game has the heroes being forced to compete in a gladiator gameshow for cash, while the main antagonists are a former hero who sold out for the money and a Corrupt Corporate Executive more concerned with the revenue he can get for commercials and merchandising of the heroes he is forcing to kill each other. | |
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Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is about a family that emigrates to California, having been told there's lots of lucrative job opportunities. Once there, they find out that there's a surplus of workers, and their salaries are systematically undercut until they earn barely enough to live to return to work the next day, living "like animals"; they become de facto slaves. Things get even worse once they start earning even less than that. And while their children are starving, food is being destroyed before their eyes to drive prices up. The workers are understandably upset at this state of affairs, hence the title. | |
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They Live!: This film was made by John Carpenter to criticize the effects of the Reagan Administration on American society in regard to the increase of materialism. This ranges from the mundane (the heroes are blue-collar workers rendered unemployed and homeless by deindustrialization) to the fantastic (the capitalist class are literal parasitic aliens). | |
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Capitalism: A Love Story by Michael Moore sets out to argue against capitalism as its writers understand it, going as far as to equate it with sin. | |
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The capitalist Magog Cartel in the Oddworld franchise is notorious for creating industries that are spectacularly unsafe and ruinous to Oddworld's natural ecosystem, and for treating the employees little better than slaves (to the point that, when a Cartel abattoir begins making a loss in the first game, the Bad Boss decides to butcher the employees and sell their meat as a new product line). Sekto, the Big Bad of spin-off game Stranger's Wrath, isn't part of the Cartel, but he is a Corrupt Corporate Executive; he plans to dam the River Mongo and use its water to manufacture Sekto Springs soft drink, which deprives the Grubb tribe that live near the river of their livelihood. | |
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The Bible presents usury as sinful, which, if read strictly, literally indicts the entirety of the modern capitalist system (it's hard to imagine banking and stock brokering without interest — not that it necessarily can't be done, but it will end up looking quite different to what we're used to). Though as with many Bible teachings, there are various ideas on how this should be interpreted. In any case, the Bible stories do rather clearly condemn materialism and greed, with even Jesus using a whip to drive out the moneylenders from the temple. | |
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From Hell takes an extremely dim view of Victorian England, with a specific focus on its massive class divide. The comic's version of Jack The Ripper is essentially the worst aspects of the Victorian Era (and by implication the sections of British society and politics that romanticize it), and one of his murders is cross-cut with a poem read at a socialist meeting about the oppression of the proletariat. The comic is also quite cynical about the possibility of any kind of working-class uprising, instead implying that people are ultimately too stupid, evil, or lazy to overcome self-interest and actually build a better world. | |
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The Boondocks: Capitalism is portrayed as detrimental force on the lives of everyone, with the exception of a white elite, especially on the black community in keeping it in perpetual poverty unless one decides to go "acting white" (though "acting black" isn't seen as being wise either). To add to this, Huey Freeman frequently quotes Karl Marx to back up his opinion. In the last season of the cartoon based on the comics, Granndad was driven into prostitution, corpse smuggling, and actual slavery by his own blind, irresponsible consumerism, and the manipulative usury of his plutocrat landlords, the Wunclers. Pissing on the poor seems to be an actual pastime of Ed Wuncler's; he once trapped a little girl into wage slavery in a lemonade stand, by promising her a pony. All of this bleak horror is Played for Laughs. The necessary condition towards upwards mobility isn't "acting white" ("acting black" is perpetually shown to be synonymous with "acting like a damned fool") so much as "affecting a very narrow set of status-quo-abiding behaviors and beliefs". Successful lawyer Tom Dubois needs to act a very specific kind of white; he can't act like any of the Wunclers (especially not the one who "acts black"), or like a redneck, or anything like that. The criticism against him doesn't seem to be that he's a Category Traitor, but that he's fettered, impotent, and perpetually insecure. |
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Little Shop of Horrors: The creators of this off-Broadway musical have said that it is about how "power, greed, and the pressure of capitalism to corrupt" society as represented by the Audrey II plants claiming to offer fame and fortune in exchange for being fed human blood. The 1986 film based on the musical makes it Lighter and Softer by downplaying this message and omitting the ending of the musical in which The Audrey II plants grow out of control and consume everyone in the city of Skid Row, New York and with the rest of the world eventually following in this fate. | |
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Bioshock 2: By contrast, the new tyrant Sophia Lamb is a self-proclaimed collectivist, who seized power by organizing a cult of disenfranchised ex-capitalists while she was waiting in prison for Ryan to finally die. Instead of selling the genetic modification drugs everyone has been fighting over, her master plan is to experiment with them until she can transform her daughter into an Ãœbermensch, an ultimate lifeform meant to rule the world. In this case, it is less about what Capitalism does in charge, and more about what non-capitalist rulers can do with capitalism; Lamb is completely hostile to the concept of capitalism, but she has stolen the corporations' means of production, and is using their product in her grand, dangerous, and unethical science experiment. | |
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The Outer Worlds hilariously deconstructs the Gilded Age in the same way Fallout hilariously deconstructed The '50s, so every criticism and stereotype of out-of-control capitalism is taken to the logical extreme and Played for Laughs. Edgewater, the First Town, is run entirely by Spacer's Choice, even the security detail. One of the guards who you meet in a cave outside of town was wounded when his shoddy company-made pistol misfired into his side, and if aided by the PC he will warn them that he'll get reprimanded for accepting medical attention from a non-company source. The town itself has a huge graveyard which is owned by Spacer's Choice and so the families of the deceased have to pay rent to keep them buried there; if the fees go unpaid then the remains are exhumed and unceremoniously dumped into a nearby ditch. | |
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Chronicles of Darkness: Mage: The Awakening: Capitalist ideology is a tool of the Chancellor, an evil god of wealth and scarcity. Its ultimate goal is a world of venal materialists who treat everything, including other people, as commodities and can be easily controlled through their own greed. Changeling: The Lost: The Pearl Satraps are a Changeling Prestige Class who operate on the simple belief that everything can be bought and sold. Their Oathbound Powers require them never to turn down an offer for trade — the heinousness of the offer merely adjusts their asking price. |
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In Cube, one character, who worked as a contractor designing the exterior shell of the titular Cube, suggests that the mysterious, elaborate structure that tortures and murders random civilians is a massive pork barrel project created to act as a huge wealth creator and shift public money towards corporations. | |
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Okja shows its ruthless capitalists through the shady side of the food industry and how it mistreats animals. | |
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Panopticon's Kentucky and Collapse in particular, but a lot of his early work qualifies ("Flag Burner, Torch Bearer" is probably actually the most explicit about it). | |
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Dyztopia: Post-Human RPG: Zetacorp, the leading corporate power of the nation known as the Sovereign State of Zeta, treats the impoverished terribly by bribing the Church of the Vessel to exclude their communities from protection from demons. The son of President Zazz, Detritus, notes that there are many homeless people despite the country having enough money to house them, and wonders why the government would be so inefficient on this issue. Crow's bonding events imply that the real reason for enforcing poverty is to force more people to work for Zetacorp as Hunters if they want to survive. Zazz also conquered Vulcanite not because he needs their resources, but to deny the people access to these resources and hold their power plant hostage to control them, showing the imperialistic tendencies of capitalism. Finally, Zazz's endgame is to create an apartheid state where humans reign supreme over non-humans, and capitalism is his tool for enforcing this hierarchy by forcing non-humans into poorer areas. The insurance company, Mine Co, recommends a painkiller known as Pix, but they use their connections to make sure it's overprescribed so that people get addicted to it even if they don't need it, all to make a profit. They then sell additional medicine for the symptoms of Pix, making money off the problem they created. |
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Leverage: The tagline is literally "The rich and powerful take what they want. We steal it back for you.'' The Leverage crew is not above working within capitalism to subvert its negative effects, but many fans have interpreted the show as having an anti-capitalist message. One episode, "The Low Low Price Job" has a pro-union message. | |
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The central theme of Daemon. Unlike other works listed, it shows a successful anti-capitalist revolution and society developing. | |
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The setting of Disco Elysium is in Revachol, a city on an archipelago that had previously undergone a communist revolution, causing a coalition of capitalist powers to overthrow the revolutionary forces in an invasion that was, at the least, sufficiently destructive that the district of Martinaise is still full of ruins and craters from artillery shells fifty years later, and every character that was present for the invasion recalls it as brutally violent. The capitalist coalition has since kept strict military and economic control over Revachol by designating it a "special economic zone", profiting heavily off the local industry through tariffs, while only offering the Revacholian population little in the way of civil liberties. | |
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Epic Rap Battles of History: The battle between Karl Marx and Henry Ford unsurprisingly has Communist Marx call out Ford on how his legacy amounts to treating workers like crap and accelerating climate change all in the name of the almighty dollar. | |
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Sarah Z: In her video essay on Idiocracy, she argues that many of the problems of the world of 2505 can be blamed less on human stupidity and more on huge corporations like Brawndo manipulating and corrupting a complacent society through buying out entire government agencies and using their wealth and power to get their way at the expense of the public good until everything is falling apart and no one is really benefitting anymore, not even the people supposedly in charge (who themselves have become just as incompetent as the rest of the populace). | |
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This is a staple of The Pop Group's songs and Mark Stewart in general. As "We Are All Prostitutes" puts it: | |
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American Psycho is about very young investment bankers that live a carefree, extremely boring life while putting on a façade of work. Their entire existences revolve around status symbols like designer clothes, expensive watches, and getting reservations in highly fashionable restaurants. They are so conformist and same-looking that they keep confusing each other for others. The protagonist uses his money, his resources, his connections, and his anonymity to brutally abuse and murder people, especially of the Disposable Sex Worker and Disposable Vagrant types (probably). | |
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Greed: When self-interest becomes excessive and exceeds the limits of moral boundaries. Though the line between reasonable self-interest and greed will be deliberately blurred by those that are especially hostile to capitalism. | |
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Jurassic Park: In Jurassic Park (1990), the entire disaster is caused both by Hammond's efforts to cut costs and corporate espionage to secure intellectual property rights. The Lost World (1995) plays with this, with a nice business owner being a main character, but the evils of InGen still being explored. |
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In Eclipse Phase the most overtly capitalistic societies are the corporate puppet-state Planetary Consortium, and the somewhat less-than-ethical anarcho-capitalist Extropians who allow indentured servitude in contrast to their other Autonomist allies (especially the Anarchists). | |
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Doctor Who: "Oxygen" is set aboard the mining space station Chasm Forge, controlled by an unnamed corporation that maintains control of the oxygen supply by only allowing it within employees' personal space suits and vents any unauthorized oxygen into space in order to "keep prices competitive", and which is prepared to execute its own workers because their mining operation has stopped being profitable. The Doctor makes numerous derogatory comments about capitalism and the idea of controlling the oxygen supply for profit throughout the episode, and at the end alludes to the fact that what occurred aboard Chasm Forge will one day spark a revolution that will cause intergalactic capitalism to collapse... until humanity finds another great mistake, but that's another story. | |
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Changeling: The Lost: The Pearl Satraps are a Changeling Prestige Class who operate on the simple belief that everything can be bought and sold. Their Oathbound Powers require them never to turn down an offer for trade — the heinousness of the offer merely adjusts their asking price. | |
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The Wire: David Simon has said mysterious smuggling kingpin The Greek represents capitalism, as an amoral force willing to change allegiance to pursue whatever pays best for the least trouble. Similar commentary can be seen with Stringer Bell and his attempts to turn the drug game to work more like corporate America, and Marlo Stanield, who very similar to The Greek is motivated by money and personal power without regard to others, including business partners. In the fifth season, The Baltimore Sun is reeling under a acquisition, where the new bosses lay off most of the senior reporters and tell the remainder to "do more with less". One understated Greater-Scope Villain of the series is real estate developer Andy Krawczyk, whose urban renewall is driving working class people out of their old neighborhoods, and turning old but still usable industrial infrastructure into condominiums. | |
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Snowpiercer uses the stratified sci-fi society of the titular locomotive as a metaphor for the inherent inequality in capitalism and how it commodifies human lives under false pretenses. Its ending carries one of the most striking anti-capitalist messages of them all, with the characters deciding that a system so grotesque and exploitative as the train (I.e capitalism) cannot be allowed to exist and thus destroy it wholesale. | |
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The Girl From Monday: The film takes aim at the drive to commodify things, having a monopolistic corporation ruling a future US determined to turn a profit off everything imaginable. | |
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Judas takes 21st-century capitalism to an extreme. An entire colony spaceship has been turned into a giant theme park, with the workers buying into social media while pretending their sub-standard way of life is paradise just because it keeps the lights on. Instead of corporations selling faulty and dangerous products, the employees are the product, suckered into selling their souls for bland, bare-effort T-shirts, and brainwashed to mindlessly worship the CEOs of the three ruling corporations. And unfortunately, this game also portrays the potential side-effects of AI capitalism; AI was so utterly profitable that the corporations eventually gave their central AIs full control. When the protagonist finally snapped, she tried to sabotage the ship's mainframe to destroy the corporations' power - which accidentally drives all of the ship's AIs insane at once, from the worker drones to the piloting systems. | |
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In Atlantis: The Lost Empire, the Big Bad Rourke is a sadistic mercenary who actually describes himself as an "adventure capitalist". Granted, all he is motivated by is money, which is why he leads the expedition. Then, just to get even more money, he steals the only thing that allows the Atlanteans to survive (a giant blue crystal) and tries to bring it to the surface to sell it. Some people see the film as being anti-capitalist because of him. | |
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In AKIRA, the Colonel doesn't think too highly of Capitalists and their dystopian Neo Tokyo. | |
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Mother India is a critique of usury: a family of peasants goes into debt to pay for a wedding, and the moneylender later alters the terms of the deal so that they only ever make enough money to pay the interest. Then things get worse. | |
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South Park, a series with an admittedly Libertarian-leaning, tends to invert this trope whenever it should crop up: The series averts this (or, at the very least, downplays it) in Gnomes. The episode presents Harbucks Coffee as a company, like any other, that started out small, but because of positive quality, was able to grow into a powerhouse corporation. The executive running the place isn't even evil; he's just forced to resort to petty tactics to compete with small-business owner Mr. Tweak, who manipulates the minds of the general public (many of whom already don't trust corporations) into taking his side. A Very Crappy Christmas argues that (even if the town mayor is the one pushing it) the blatant and overdrawn commercialism of the Christmas season is what makes it so special. Without it, the holiday season either passes by without notice, or becomes all about peace, love, and togetherness. Which is boring. This trope is also played with, but ultimately subverted, in Something Wall-Mart This Way Comes. While the newly-opened superstore Wall-Mart is portrayed as a sapient Eldritch Location that exists only to corrupt and devastate towns across the country economically and socially (to the point of turning South Park into a ghost town, and driving its regretful creators to suicide), the physical personification of the store itself admits greed and desire is what keeps it alive and prosperous; in other words, capitalism isn't inherently the villain, but a lack of personal responsibility and blind consumerism is. This apparently goes over the heads of the adults, who come to this conclusion, but in trying to support a small, mom-and-pop store, end up turning it into a successful corporation, which they decide to burn to the ground. Despite the subversion, South Park did show the Full-Circle Revolution nature of businesses, which were shown with the underhanded tactics of Tweak's coffee store and Randy's utilization of Amazon-esque online delivery for his marijuana farm before taking over other family farms and murdering Winnie The Pooh just to be a sole Marijuana distributor in China. As the show has shown that the small businesses would one day become the mega-corporation (or become dominant in general) and eventually planning a stranglehold against the same businesses that it once belongs to. South Park's stance could be more accurately described as "rent-seeking is bad." If a business is a villain, it's typically not because it sells products to try to make money, but because it attempts to lobby local government to help stamp out the competition. Tweak and Randy are both guilty of this. Ditto the cab drivers in "Handicar", who attempt to spend resources trying to shut Handicar down, instead of attempting to compete fairly by making their own product better (a thinly veiled parody of the how the ride-sharing tech company Uber has experienced backlash from local European governments being lobbied by taxi unions). |
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Atlas Shrugged seems like an unintentional example in a very different way than the others on this list: billionaires that also happen to be geniuses go on strike, taking all their technology and trade secrets with them, resulting in mass death, chaos and starvation throughout the USA. She portrays them as justified in doing so, though, as up until that point they had to work under intrusive regulations that not only kept them from getting anything productive done but are being manipulated by hypocritical politicians and Corrupt Corporate Executives to line their own pockets at the expense of those willing to do honest work, whether rich or poor. | |
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Monopoly is a classic example, by portraying capitalism as inevitable wealth inequality. Capitalism there progresses by the accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, and the progressive and inevitable bankruptcy of each player, and that the winners owe much more to chance than to strategy or personal industry. Also worth mentioning that the original creators of the game said that criticism of the contemporary laissez-faire that existed when it was originally released was its intention. Though people who did not live through the Great Depression tend only to see Monopoly as an escapist game about being able to fantasize about being wealthy businessmen. | |
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The Fire Never Dies has a similar premise and themes. | |
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While Keldian mostly stick to various science fiction tropes, they do occasionally go into this territory. Specifically they tend to target the "War as a Business" aspect of it with songs such as "Blood Red Dawn" being perhaps the most on the nose out of all of them. | |
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The LEGO Movie: This trope is played with. President/Lord Business, whose name by itself invokes this trope, has several posters/screens emphasizing obeying President Business (particularly buying products made by his company), as well as the surprising suppression of creativity, or then at least his standards of perfection. The city of which Emmet is a resident of are portrayed as sheeple who blindly accept such a plutocratic society, which would be consistent with Socialist and other Anti-capitalist propaganda. However, it is actually invoked in-universe by Finn, of which Mr. Business is an Expy of his father (AKA The Man Upstairs) and is a criticism of the latter stifling the former's creativity due to conflicting with Finn's father's perfectionist ideals. | |
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TB Skyen is firmly anti-capitalist, which frequently shows in his analysis, particularly of Soulsborne games. In his reading of Dark Souls II, he sees the mining in Brightstone Cove Tseldora as a metaphor for capitalism; The Writhing Ruin was first uncovered by duke Tseldora, a spider-fanatic who employed workers to labor in dangerous mines for his benefit. The duke and all his workers are long dead, but the work continues, as the Writhing Ruin has become a force unto itself which turns the workers into literally mindless slaves doing nothing but work to feed a giant spider. In his playthrough of Bloodborne, he takes note of how the world design seems to enforce a class separation in Yharnam. Central Yharnam and Cathedral Ward, which are the visibly wealthiest areas in the game, have comparatively few plague beasts; The people there are certainly afflicted, but they remain mostly humanoid, suffering only mild symptoms. The people of Old Yharnam, on the other hand, are all mutated into beasts. He also takes note of the multiple points in the game where the player can knock on doors and hear various mocking lines of dialogue from the inhabitants, which he sees as the wealthy that can afford incense to ward off the beast plague, whereas the player character can't, and has to fight for their life to stay alive. Finally, when discussing Micolash, he outright compares him to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos: a powerful and narcissistic asshole who thinks his scholarly pursuits into higher planes of being are so much more important than the people dying of a plague outside. |
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Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom also plays with this, with dinosaurs being captured and sold to corrupt crime lords for million. | |
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The Men Who Built America: This History Channel miniseries focuses on the history of the United States from the late nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century known as the Gilded Age. While it recounts the innovations that came about from the enterprises of Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan, it also shows the social unrest of the workers of those companies who endured economic hardships. The captains of industry were apathetic towards the plights of their workers and viciously sought to assimilate as many smaller companies as possible to snuff out competing businesses. They also certainly had no problem, to paraphrase J.P. Morgan, "buying a president" referring the Presidential election of 1896. However the last episode of the miniseries subverts this by portraying the beneficial effects of capitalism when it focuses on Henry Ford successfully challenging the legality of the Trusts' claims that his attempt to start his own automobile company infringed on their rights in court and his creation of the Model T, an automobile that middle-class consumers could afford. |
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American Psycho much like the book it was based on. | |
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Mage: The Awakening: Capitalist ideology is a tool of the Chancellor, an evil god of wealth and scarcity. Its ultimate goal is a world of venal materialists who treat everything, including other people, as commodities and can be easily controlled through their own greed. | |
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Josie and the Pussycats, of all films, could easily take this message, given the huge amounts of Product Placement (that no one seems to notice), a massive brainwashing scheme to make kids and teens buy stuff they don't need to keep the economy going, the suppression of free will and opinion in favor of conformity, and the US government being in on the brainwashing plot. Even the film's antagonists could be recognized as victims of the system who've taken on their current roles and appearances to atone for their perceived "failures" back in high school. | |
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Rage Against the Machine: A staple of many of their protest songs. | |
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The Most Epic Story Ever Told in All of Human History: A running theme through the series, directly called out by Epic-Man himself on most occasions, though other characters arrive at similar conclusions through their experiences too. | |
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The Lorax (1972), heavily based on the book of the same name expands the narrative of the story. An entrepreneur named the Once-ler finds the Truffula Trees and begins hacking them down. He uses the tufts to create "Thneeds", a thing that is considered the most useful thing you could ever buy. The Lorax, a small orange creature, emerges from the trees to tell the Once-ler to stop cutting down the trees and destroying the environment, but the Once-ler defends his actions as creating a product, creating jobs, creating industry, and if he didn't... well clearly someone would do so anyways, right? The Once-ler is not treated as an out-and-out villain, just a business man who doesn't care about the damage he's doing because he sees it as "progress" and society praises him for it... until the last Truffula Tree is cut down. Because of the long time it takes to replant, his industry is now bust. In the current day, the Once-ler lives in a tall shack on the edge of town, lamenting his lack of foresight and dissapointment in himself, giving a seed to a young boy in hopes to inspire the next generation to do better than he did. | |
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Cyberpunk 2077: Exaggerated trope by design. Ridiculously violent advertisements plaster every wall, mountains of garbage litter the city and its landfills, the environment is a wasteland due to unchecked exploitation and frequent nuclear wars, the local gangs are funded by corporations to keep the streets poverty-stricken and disorganized, and politicians have completely bent the knee to corporate interests.note The only politician in the game willing to show a spine has been brainwashed, potentially by rampant AI. The series makes it clear that mega-corporations stopped being about 'greed' a long time ago, and became altars of worship for cruelty, slavery, and sheer narcissistic pride. If there's something both short-sightedly 'profitable' and a crime against humanity that generally enslaves people in the long run, it will be in this game. The corpos don't want more; they want all, and they're willing to burn the world down (through literal brainwashing) to rule over the ashes. | |
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Rurouni Kenshin: An early incident delves into this with the conflict against Kanryu Takeda. Kanryu is an "entrepreneur" who has learned about western capitalism and seeks to spread it about in the setting of Meiji-era Japan. The business he runs specializes in opium, which has had a detrimental effect on the local area but nonetheless, Kanryu has profited and thus continues to provide it to meet the demand to make himself wealthier. In addition, he treats his employees Megumi Takani (his chief Opium maker) and the Oniwaban group with no shred of dignity and even attempts to kill all of the latter with a Gatling gun just so he could kill Himura Kenshin (who at this point was seeking, along with his friends, to rescue the kidnapped Megumi when she sought to escape to turn her life around) in the process. | |
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In Horizon Zero Dawn, the extinction of all life on Earth is caused by out-of-control machines mass-produced by a weapons manufacturer whose CEO became the richest man in history. There are references to violent military campaigns carried out in order to secure valuable commodities ("conflict coffee"). | |
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Desperate Acts Of Capitalism doesn't state this outright, exactly — but it does just about everything short of. The show chronicles the foolish, bizarre, unethical, and illegal things that companies do in their attempts to make money — as well as depicting how often those attempts crash and burn spectacularly. | |
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YuYu Hakusho: Capitalism is indirectly examined in the form of the unfettered self-interests of morally corrupt businessmen, known as the Black Book Club, to use demons to benefit themselves at the demons' expense. During the Dark Tournament arc, demons fight against each other in order to get a wish granted by the Human ran committee and to entertain their immoral human sponsors as they casually gamble large amounts of money. When the human businessmen aren't gathering them for the Dark Tournament, they summoned (via human psychics), captured, and bought demons to be kept as slaves (of whom some female demons are implied to be kept as Sex Slaves). One businessman in particular, Gonzo Tarukane (the founder of the aforementioned Club), kidnapped the innocent snow maiden Yukina due to her tears producing rare jewels and tortured her physically and emotionally to get them and sell them. In the absolute worst case, the Black Book Club tortured and slaughtered the demons in their possession to bathe in their blood as part of the Festival of Vices to entertain themselves. In the succeeding Chapter Black arc, Shinobu Sensui used all of the aforementioned actions that occurred via capitalism to make his case as to why Humans deserved to be destroyed off the face of the earth. |
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The titular Charles Foster Kane of Citizen Kane is a deconstruction of the ideal American businessman, who genuinely wants to use his money well and help the working class, but is endlessly frustrated by a system that makes real change impossible. His desire to help is also called out as patronizing, and the idea of the working class helping itself by organizing is held up as a positive alternative. The film ultimately concludes that success under capitalism is corrupting, as Kane remarks that he "could have been a great man if [he] wasn't so rich" and the ending reveals that Kane’s last moment of true happiness was a boy living in a run-down shack in the Colorado wilderness before he inherited the fortune that led him on the road to fame and wealth. | |
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The villain of Kirby: Planet Robobot is the owner of a MegaCorp that seeks to terraform Planet Popstar and roboticize the inhabitants in the name of profit. | |
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Often the moral of any given Well There's Your Problem podcast, where profit seeking leads to cutting corners or adopting Awesome, but Impractical solutions. | |
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The villainess Viper in Marvel comics (usually a Captain America enemy) thinks capitalism is evil and oppressive, favoring a vaguely defined anarchism instead. Though as with most comic book characters, this element of her characterization varies Depending on the Writer. | |
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