Last week I posted an article reviewing the story of Bioshock Infinite. I originally intended that article and this one to be the same, but as I delved into the many plot and character problems in Infinite the story section ballooned into its own article. For all the story problems Infinite had there are some extremely important messages in the game. Some of them are obvious – violent racist dictatorships are bad, okay? – but some of them are not so obvious, perhaps even unintended. The most important message was about Socialism. Bioshock Infinite had the guts to point out the truth about Socialism – that in both its historic forms, revolutionary and oligarchic, Socialism is absolutely dictatorial, insane, destructive, and evil.
In doing so Infinite also reveals the truth about violence, what choosing violence as a means of resistance does to those using it, and the ultimate outcome of violence when chosen. Unlike a lot of games and stories that create an underdog, casts them as “good,” and then ignores what actually happens when the “good” guy/faction uses overwhelming violence, Infinite is very clear about the brutality that takes place when revolutions occur, especially Socialist ones. Violence does nothing but corrupt and destroy.
This article is broken into two parts in order to address Infinite’s two-pronged critique of historic Socialism, in both its revolutionary and oligarchic forms.
Daisy Fitzroy & the Vox Populi – Revolutionary Socialism
There’s already a fight, DeWitt. Only question is, which side you on? Comstock is the god of the white man, the rich man, the pitiless man. But if you believe in common folk, then join the Vox. If you believe in the righteous folk, then join the Vox.
Columbia, the setting for Bioshock Infinite, is a floating city soaring amongst the clouds. But it is founded on the horrific oppression of Black people and Irish people, moreso than even actually existed in the real United States in 1912, the year in which the game is set. In the real world, segregation relegated most Black people to the status of second class citizens in the United States and trapped most Black people in generational poverty. But as terrible as that is, Columbia is even worse with the actual status of Blacks being little better than actual slavery. Technically they are not slaves, but in reality the Columbian government dominates their lives in every way and strictly regulates everything they say and do. To say that most Blacks and Irish in Columbia are poor is an understatement.
All of the Black and Irish people live in Shantytown, which is exactly what it sounds like and which looks like this:
Everywhere people are starving, sleeping on mattresses in the streets, and are begging for food and/or medicine. Everyone is desperate. Everyone is hurting. Everyone is angry. And it is in this place that Daisy Fitzroy, fleeing a false murder charge, builds her army, the Vox Populi – the Voice of the People – and begins her Socialist revolution.
And a bloody revolution it is as the Vox Populi rampage through Columbia killing anyone and anything in their way. Daisy obtains guns from a Chinese gunsmith, seizes control of police flying barges, and uses them to deliver lightning strike incursions as her people seem to hit all of Columbia all at once. The revolution is well planned, well organized, and well thought out. And this is the result:
This frame comes form near the very end of Infinite, after the big final battle. In the foreground is the remains of a giant statue. But look to the left. See how everything is on fire? That is all of Columbia, burning to the ground by the Vox Populi. This is the outcome of Daisy Fitzroy’s proletarian revolution. And she knew it would be this way form the start, she knew that instead of a well led revolution that would carry out surgical strikes against Columbia’s corrupt leadership that what she was doing was leading her so-called “righteous folk” in the slaughter of men, women, and children, to burning people alive and cutting them down like dogs, to the utter annihilation of the entire city. She admitted as much, saying:
Yeah, there’s a war comin’ — you can smell it in the air. Fear. Hatred. People dyin’ every day. But how many more will suffer if we rise up? Violence begets violence, I know this. I’ve seen this. The rational mind argues for a peaceful solution, to find a common ground, but… what common ground is there to find for a father who watches his child bleed out in the street? How do you deny him his vengeance? I know that fire that burns deep inside — I know it all too well. And when the time comes… will I be able to stay the hand?
Stay The Hand
And
Change. That’s what the people need. But sometimes I feel all I have to offer them is blood and fire. The things they done to me… I can’t forget ’em. I was Columbia’s victim — and victimhood begets shame. Oh, what element of human experience is more corrosive than shame? I’m rotted from the inside out. What do I have to offer this revolution except my own dark motivations? When all is said and done, what’s more important to me: the people I want to save — or those I want to murder in their beds?
The Quality of Mercy
Well, go back and look at that picture. Look at this one below, which is an excerpt of the city burning. You can see the results. It is all being destroyed.
No, Fitzroy didn’t stay her or anyone else’s hand. She chose to burn everything to the ground. She chose to murder, not just individuals but the entire city as it had victimized her. And her revolutionaries followed her example. Like all collectivists, they could not distinguish between individuals and masses and treated all people as if they were the exact same, slaughtering them all in their beds, in the streets, and everywhere else they could. The entire city was their violator and every person merely a cell within that city, all of which had to be destroyed if they were to achieve their vengeance.
About midway through the game the player character, Booker DeWitt, makes the observation, “The only difference between Comstock and Fitzroy is the way you spell their name.” And, despite the consternation of many fans, themselves almost certainly indoctrinated into a Socialist-lite worldview, Booker is 100% correct here. Comstock, the villain of the game, is a ruthless and brutal ideologue who will murder anyone who gets in the way of his ultimate goal. Fitzroy is the exact same. And despite the way that the DLC tries to downplay this by altering a scene where she was personally threatening a specific child, it doesn’t change the reality that she is willing to, and actually does, burn down, explode, and collapse buildings full of men, women, and children and slaughter thousands of people, no matter who they are, in order to achieve her goal. Fitzroy is a villain just as bad as the main villain of the game. And it is really obvious for anyone who isn’t propagandized into the Socialist myth of class struggle.
Unfortunately, many people today are propagandized into accepting Socialist myths as if they are fact, so Infinite‘s revelations about what Socialist revolutions really are like has been met with outrage from among the public. They simply cannot accept that a Socialist revolutionary would be evil and that a Socialist revolution would lead to such wanton slaughter and totalitarianism.
Some of these people can’t stand the idea that the oppressed could ever be as bad as their oppressors. Socialist indoctrination doesn’t account for human nature and always ascribes morality to the revolutionaries, so the idea that the revolutionaries could be just as horrible as those being overthrown is something that simply can’t be true. Other, indoctrinated into the doublethink of today, can’t accept the idea that those who are the targets of racism could themselves also be racist. Of course the Vox are racist. Levine, who is Jewish himself, made sure to include evidence that the Vox are anti-Semites in Shantytown, which demonstrates the multi-faceted nature of racism. But, unlike what Infinite’s critics claim, the Vox are not racist against White people– a large percentage of the Vox are Irish, they are White. The real problem that all these critics have is that they can’t accept that a Socialist revolutionary would be an authoritarian and attack Infinite for portraying the Vox as such. In this though these critics simply betray their ignorance of Socialism. No less a figure than Friedrich Engels, the co-founder of modern Socialism along with Karl Marx, wrote this about Socialist revolutions:
“[T]he anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they’re talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.”
On Authority
This describes Daisy Fitzroy and the Vox Populi perfectly. They are Socialist revolutionaries carrying out a Socialist revolution to overthrow the ruling class and subject all opposition to their new Socialist rulers through the direct use of authoritarian means. Totalitarianism, mass purges, the open slaughter of innumerable men, women, and children, the use of scalping to terrorize people into obedience to the Vox, all of these are but the Socialist means to the Socialist ends. Violence and terrorism are the tools Socialists use to impose their Socialist rule on the unwilling masses. Authoritarianism is not an accidental by-product of Socialism; Authoritarianism is the intended result of Socialism.
Daisy Fitzroy and the Vox Populi demonstrate this truth brutality and perfectly.
Infinite also does an excellent job of revealing Socialism for the secular, atheistic religion that it is. Dr. Carl Jung, in his book The Undiscovered Self, explained the fundamentally religious (and hence irrational) nature of Socialism, saying:
The State has taken the place of God; that is why, seen from this angle, the socialist dictatorships are religions and State slavery is a form of worship. But the religious function cannot be dislocated and falsified in this way without giving rise to secret doubts, which are immediately repressed so as to avoid conflict with the prevailing trend towards mass-mindedness. The result, as always in such cases, is overcompensation in the form of fanaticism, which in its turn is used as a weapon for stamping out the least flicker of opposition. Free opinion is stifled and moral decision ruthlessly suppressed, on the plea that the end justifies the means, even the vilest. The policy of the State is exalted to a creed, the leader or party boss becomes a demigod beyond good and evil, and his votaries are honored as heroes, martyrs, apostles, missionaries. There is only one truth and beside it no other. It is sacrosanct and above criticism. Anyone who thinks differently is a heretic, who, as we know from history, is threatened with all manner of unpleasant things. Only the party boss, who holds the political power in his hands, can interpret the State doctrine authentically, and he does so just as suits him.
…Whereas the man of today can easily think about and understand all the “truths” dished out to him by the State, his understanding of religion is made considerably more difficult owing to the lack of explanations. (“Do you understand what you are reading?” And he said, “How can I, unless some one guides me?” Acts 8:30.) If, despite this, he has still not discarded all his religious convictions, this is because the religious impulse rests on an instinctive basis and is therefore a specifically human function. You can take away a man’s gods, but only to give him others in return. The leaders of the mass State cannot avoid being deified, and wherever crudities of this kind have not yet been put over by force, obsessive factors arise in their stead, charged with demonic energy – for instance, money, work, political influence, and so forth. When any natural human function gets lost, i.e., is denied conscious and intentional expression, a general disturbance results.
The Undiscovered Self, pgs. 17, 45-46
This describes the Socialist revolutionaries of Bioshock Infinite perfectly. Like real world Socialism, the Socialists of Infinite are a fanatical religion. We of course see absolute fanaticism in the Vox Populi. The Vox’s willingness to slaughter and kill at Daisy’s command or in her name make them the worst sort of zealots. Just because they’re atheists and reject both Comstock’s religion and, apparently, all others, doesn’t mean they have given up religion. The first time we visit Shantytown we see a street preacher named Brother Love preaching what sounds like a typical street corner sermon, except he is preaching the good word of Daisy Fitzroy.
Brother Love even holds up a holy book, one that mimics the holy book we see among Comstock’s followers. Except where Comstock’s book is called The Word of the Prophet and contains his supposedly holy writings, the Vox’s holy book is The People’s Voice and it contains Fitroy’s writings. Brother Love promises that Daisy will upend the evil society of Columbia, throw down all the wicked, and fix all the problems that the people face. She is their Messiah and Savior, the Redeemer who will judge the wicked and bless the faithful.
All this is more evidence that Booker is correct when he says that Daisy and Comstock are the same. Socialism is a rabid secular religion promising to create Paradise on Earth by destroying all who would not accept its dogmas.
Jeremiah Fink – When Socialists Are In Power
You see, a company is like Noah’s Ark. You have the lions, whose purpose is to keep order amongst the lesser creatures. Then you have the cow. The beasts of burden. Now, they provide meat, milk, and labor. And then, well, there are the hyenas. The troublemakers. Who only serve to rile up the cattle.
Fink is portrayed as a “ruthless capitalist” who sees human beings as objects and is supposed to be Infinite’s critique of capitalism. The way that he exploits his workers and crushes their humanity, forcing them into lives on unending poverty and misery, is supposed to be a warning about the dangers of “unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism” and an example of the evils of “American capitalism.” And he certainly looks the part, dressed as he is in a three-piece suit complete with top hat. If you don’t know anything about capitalism, and most people don’t, he probably even sounds like what you imagine (or have been told to think) a capitalist sounds like. He is vain. He is arrogant. He is evil. His last name even means someone who is a strikebreaker and a police informer. The guy is literally a mustache twirling villain.
But he isn’t a capitalist.
You see, capitalism isn’t just a word you use to mean, “when people make money in ways that I don’t like.” Capitalism has four defining traits: people are able to buy/sell/trade their goods and services free of government regulation or control, individual private property is protected, entrepreneurship is allowed to flourish without state restraint, and laws of a nation or place do not violate the rights of the individual. Without any one of these foundational elements you don’t have capitalism. The existence of some of these traits but not others in a society doesn’t make that society capitalist. For example, if people are allowed to own property but the economy is heavily regulated, so entrepreneurship and markets are choked off and controlled by the state, then the resultant economy is not a capitalist society and the ills of such a society are not produced by capitalism.
The question is, what do we see in Columbia? Do we see a society where the four traits of capitalism exist or do we see a society missing some or all of those four traits?
The answer is clear – not only does Columbia not have protection of individual rights (as seen in its racist and segregationist society), but entrepreneurship is quashed in Columbia while markets are not free from government control but are heavily regulated with state chosen winners and losers. Everything in Columbia seems to be produced by Fink from the Sky Hooks, Vigors, all vending machines, all security drones, and all the weapons everyone uses to the cyborg monstrosities called Handymen and the gigantic robotic Songbird. Thanks to his close relationship to Comstock and the ruling elites, Fink holds a state granted corporate monopoly over everything. There are no businesses which do not either rely on Fink to survive or which are not owned by him directly. And it is questionable if individuals have any private property rights. Black people and the Irish certainly don’t and it is likely that the Northern European Whites of Columbia don’t either as the government seemingly can do whatever it wants, including seizing property at will. None of the essential, foundational traits of capitalism exist in Columbia in any form. Yes, there is business, but it isn’t Capitalist in any form.
Therefore, Columbia is not capitalist. And the economic and political systems portrayed in the game are not capitalist. No matter what the writers intended or its fans believe. To continue to assert otherwise is simply to insist upon ignorance in service of one’s own prejudices.
Alright then you ask, if Columbia isn’t capitalist, then what is it?
Simple, it is Socialism in action.
How you ask? How can Fink’s corporate monopolistic monstrosity be Socialist? Because monopolistic monstrosity, large corporations dominating all of society and using their state granted power to exploits, abuse, and oppress the common people, is always the outcome of Socialism in action. Yes, that isn’t what Socialists want, it isn’t what they say they want anyone. But it has been the outcome of every society that has embraced Socialism. It turns out that Socialism is as bound by the Iron Law of Oligarchy as all other forms of government. Revolutionary Socialism, once the revolutionaries come to power, always transforms into Oligarchical Socialism.
Oligarchal socialism allows for the current, ever-growing concentration of wealth and power in a few hands — notably tech and financial moguls — while seeking ways to ameliorate the reality of growing poverty, slowing social mobility and indebtedness. This will be achieved not by breaking up or targeting the oligarchs, which they would fight to the bitter end, but through the massive increase in state taxpayer support.
America is moving toward an oligarchical socialism
The outcome of Oligarchical Socialism is a society where corporate elites (like Infinite‘s Jeremiah Fink) use the power of the state in order to maintain their economic dominance in exchange for providing higher tax payouts to the state and higher wages to the public, which provides further taxable income to be used to finance social programs that provide for state sponsored education, healthcare, housing, labor, agriculture, etc. – in short the Socialist’s laundry list of demands. By doing this the elites maintain their positions and power without ending up like Lois XVI in 1793. The result of Oligarchical Socialism is Neo-Feudalism, as seen in the test case of California, often hailed as the most “Progressive” state in the United States:
What California is creating can be best described as oligarchic socialism, a form of collectivism that combines hierarchy with “equity,” regulation with oligopoly, and progressive intentions with feudal results.
…Once the exemplar of upward mobility, California has the fourth highest Gini Inequality index in the nation (behind New York, Connecticut, and Louisiana), and experienced the fifth largest expansion of inequality since 2010, according to American Community Survey data. Amidst the unfathomable wealth of the oligarchs, it suffers the country’s highest rates of cost-of-living adjusted poverty, the worst housing unaffordability in the continental U.S., and a devastating shortage of mid-skilled jobs. African Americans and Latinos do far worse in terms of income and homeownership in Los Angeles or the Bay Area, the latter of which has become among the most segregated places in the country.
…The loss of factory, energy, and food related jobs does not much impact Palo Alto, Marin, or Malibu but could spark a rebellion in the less favored parts of the state. This conflict could become fraught once market cycles change and interest rates, as seems inevitable, rise again. The one percent—who pay roughly half of the state’s income taxes—won’t always have such great years, and with the middle and working class in decline, it’s hard to see where the money will come from to support the burgeoning welfare state.
Fully Oligarchic Luxury Californication
Oligarchic Socialism reduces the common man to the status of a serf. He is forced into poverty by government policies that undermine economic growth and general prosperity, but which fund the Socialist welfare state and enforce the socialistic ideals of the political rulers on society. As a result the common man becomes a state supported beggar, reliant upon it for both his bed and his bread, which in turn also ensures his loyalty and obedience. After all, if the welfare programs end so does his ability to eat. In such a society the power of the state increases endlessly as the people trade their liberty for enough scraps from state social programs to survive. On the other end, corporations become tools of the state through which it acts. All those politicians aren’t going to build their own windmills, install their own solar panels, or monitor the lives of people personally. They’ll delegate that role to the corporations and businesses whose owners will gladly accept the massive payouts given given them to carry out the state’s orders.
Thus you have a modern day Neo-Feudalism develops where those with political power rule over every aspect of society, with corporate lords who carry out the will of the politicians, the middle class common peasants who are forced to do the work providing the money that funds the system, and the lower class serfs who are entirely dependent upon it and whose class grows with every passing year.
There is another name for this system of oligarchy that Socialism produces. One many of us may be familiar with. Dr. Daniel Chirot, after discussing how scholars were having a hard time understanding the development of politics and economics in Socialist nations or projecting the likely course such nations were going to take, explains it thusly using the example of Socialist Romania:
I would like to propose that a fairly obvious, and familiar political model exists which not only explains some of the direction toward which internal communist politics are moving, but which also tells us something about the future evolution of whatever “socialist” states may eventually come into being. This is “corporatism,” sometimes called “fascism.”
…When there is talk of “socialist” revolution in the Third World what is implied? In terms of ideological pronouncements, what is normally meant is a combination of nationalism, anti-capitalism, and a pro-development, industrializing policy. A. James Gregor has shown that on the whole these stands are not inconsistent with the fascist ideologies of the earlier part of the century. (1968: 1974) But if one were obliged to point to a society that has actually developed along these lines, it would be difficult to find a clearer case than Communist Romania or several other communist states. It is therefore useful to look at a case such as Romania in order to judge the possibilities for that kind of development in the Third World.
The fact that Romania has come to resemble a corporatist society, and that it is likely to move further in that direction in the future, is important, because it suggests that this will happen in other, newer socialist revolutionary states.
Corporatism, Socialism and Development in Romania, pgs. 2, 16-17 PDF version
The product of Socialism put into action in the real world is not Communist liberation. The end product of Socialism is Fascism. Oligarchic Socialism is just another way of saying that Socialism, whether Revolutionary or slowly developed through democratic means, always ends up in the same places. Authoritarian means produces totalitarian ends. Socialism becomes Oligarchy which becomes Fascism.
Bioshock Infinite‘s Columbia is a corporatist society, one where the ruling elites maintain power in the name of the people, structure society according to strict ideological guidelines, and organize society and all workers through a system of state ensured monopolies ran by politically connected social elites who then strictly run the lives of the people for the “common good.” The outcome of this is mass suffering, especially for the people forced to do most of the work – Columbia’s Black and Irish populations. Like the real world results of Oligarchic Socialism (and Socialism’s final product – Fascism), as we see in the real world examples of California and Socialist Romania, those in Columbia who are most in need are those most crippled by the system. They are reduced to the status of serfs and slaves in a Socialist monopolistic system which they are told repeatedly is for their own good. That this Socialism looks so much like slavery to us while we play Bioshock Infinite only makes sense. Socialism is literally slavery.