Anti-Capitalist Comics That’ll Make Bruce Wayne Hang Up His Cowl

El Pais wrote about comics written from an anti-capitalist perspective:

All humans laugh, cry, eat, sleep, and love. Although most of their day is spent on another universal activity: work. As such, complaints about work are widespread, across the globe. Too many hours, stress, demands, sacrifices, and various other things. Since its triumph, neoliberal capitalism has repeated that there are no alternatives. Lately, however, a simple option has emerged to question it. Or to understand the rules and dark sides of the game we all play. Just read one of the many comics about economics, exploitation, and other workplace injustices that are being published right now. It turns out that another world is possible, at least in comic books.

On this, no doubt, the medium’s specialists and contributors have long made it extremely vulnerable to exploitation by political ideologues, whether intentionally or not. Now, the paper and its writers are only perpetuating the damage by lionizing this kind of approach.

“We have to understand economics for ourselves, or we’re at the mercy of any charlatan,” warns writer Michael Goodwin. He himself has contributed his two cents: first, he delved into decades of treatises and thinkers; then, in Economix (2012), he summarized in comic strips — with illustrations by Dan E. Burr — what he had gleaned: theories, practices, and pitfalls of the last two centuries of development. There, one discovers that even Adam Smith, enshrined in history as a champion of the free market, denounced the “rapacity” of the magnates and urged caution regarding their legislative proposals. Or one reflects on a society that is democratic in its structures but “dictatorial” in many businesses.

“Every public problem or decision is economic. In the U.S., the rich have basically bought the institutions. If we had structured the economy differently, they wouldn’t have been able to. It was our choice. Or it was never presented to us in those terms,” Goodwin notes.

Economix does indeed do this. And it eliminates the excuse of excessive complexity: now understanding — or perhaps outrage — is within everyone’s reach. Like the recent graphic novel adaptation of Capital and Ideology (2024): the original 1,248-page volume can be daunting even for admirers of its author, Thomas Piketty. But Claire Alet and Benjamin Adan’s graphic novel has condensed it to 176 pages. The ideas of the new guru of social justice are presented in simplified, though no less insightful, form. And certainly, more accessible.

This is also seriously flawed. There’s also only so many public problems that are ideological, and Mr. Goodwin is lecturing us that finance and economy are the issue here? Very cheap, and the way they make use of “social justice” so casually is telling of where this is going. And then, they even go out of their way to obfuscate the issues involving communism:

…Kanikosen, by the Japanese artist Go Fujio (2023), adapts a double death story into manga: the communist writer Takiji Kobaiashi denounced the forced labor on board fishing boats in his country in his 1929 novel of the same name, but it cost him his life, due to police torture in 1933.1

Now just how is forced labor not connected in any way to communism? Or why are they making it sound like communism is an innocent ideology, despite the millions of victims who perished under its tyranny? There was only so much slavery conducted by communists, and they obscure all that? This is most embarrassingly bad. Something else they don’t make clear is that communism is obviously not the only bad ideology that could exist in the world, and chances are that, if Japan had been dominated by Islam at the time, it wouldn’t even appear in this puff piece. So what are they trying to prove? And then, near the end, the author of Economix says:

“There are many options. We don’t even have to imagine them; we just have to look around. Social democracy works much better than unregulated capitalism according to practically any metric,” Goodwin points out. There’s one recommendation that, in a way, sums them all up: slow down, put on the brakes… even stop. Even if it’s just for a while, to read a comic.

And that’s supposed to allude to socialism, right? When you mix it with that, democracy is bound to fail badly. It’s bad enough they’re whitewashing communism, among goodness knows what other ideologies that have totalitarian structures. This only adds insult to injury, and even gives comics a bad name. It does make clear though, that we need more comics by better artists and writers who can stress the positives of capitalism, why socialism is a failed ideology, and even why communism isn’t the only bad form of totalitarianism that ever came about. But don’t expect El Pais to cover comics with better perspectives, unfortunately.

Originally published here