Capitalism now benefits from having successfully colonized much of the world, and I'd wager the vast majority of users on this site cannot even truly comprehend an alternative ideology outside of theoreticals (me included ofc). And unfortunately, this lack of alternative to capitalism doesn't seem to be considered an issue, or rather, its complete subjugation over the Western world that occupies every aspect of the thinkable is simply taken for granted, no longer worthy of comment. Not only are our every desires are already pre-formatted by capitalist culture, but even anti-capitalist thought has been commodified, pre-wrung through the capitalist wash and spat back out at us as a product to buy.Take Disney / Pixar's Wall-E. It's a film that undoubtedly frames consumerism and corporation as responsible for Earth's ruination. Humans in this world are completely infantilized and have every whim of theirs granted so as to preclude any rebellion. This is not subjugation as it's usually thought of as, but rather the form which invites us to participate in our own self-subjugation; we literally enthrall ourselves in every sense of the word, and it's no mistake that the movie's audience itself is what's reflected in these passive, satiated, and powerless humans. However, this is hardly an act of anti-capitalism that transcends its capitalistic bounds: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us and thus we engage in interpassivity. Unlike propaganda, capitalism does not have to make a case for itself. Instead, it merely has to trick us into believing that the capitalist process depends on a set of beliefs, such that if we don't believe in anything then we are able to not engage in capitalistic beliefs. This has resulted in a distancing of society from ideology, at least on the surface; many people no longer believe in, or take seriously, any ideological premise, and we believe ourselves to then inhabit a post-ideological world. However, ideology does not work this way. Ideology does not care what you think of ideology, it still remains the social reality that we surround ourselves in. It doesn't matter how much distance we put between ourselves and ideology, nor how cynical or ironic we treat it, we are still, and always will be, participating in ideology.By continuing to engage in this interpassivity, we allow ourselves to also continue to engage in capitalism so long as we believe that capitalism is bad. It then becomes harder and harder to differentiate corporate anti-capitalism from authentic anti-capitalism. So what can we do to truly challenge it? What do we do if anti-capitalism has been engulfed by capitalism, and gestural anti-capitalism ends up reinforcing the very thing it appears to critique? Capitalist realism must be shown to be inherently contradictory, that it is an ideology that is anything but 'realistic'.So let us discuss how the idea of 'realistic' has been itself warped by capitalist operations. An ideology can be considered successful when it becomes naturalized, and to be naturalized means to be thought of as a fact rather than as a value. Knowing this, neoliberalism has sought to then eliminate the notion of what a 'value' is such that capitalist ideology can be made into a fact: it does this by pushing a business ontology through which it is "simply obvious" that everything in society should be run as a business, by presenting it as a "natural order" such that what are mere contingencies appear as necessary. The proliferation of privatization since the 1980s would have been considered unthinkable before, and prominently it was the default crisis of NYC in 1975 that jumpstarted this movement. To anyone under the age of 50, try asking someone older what the political-economic landscape was like back then and if any of the current landscape would be thinkable to someone from 1975.This is how capitalist ideology tricks us into believing its reality is somehow 'natural' when it is anything but. This capitalist reality instead suppresses the Real, and one way to fight against capitalism is to uncover that Real. An easy one to point towards is climate change, a very-Real catastrophe that capitalism attempts to suppress by re-directing it back at us as problems you and I can change. By bringing our own grocery bags that we spent money on just to eliminate further waste, by making sure to separate our recycling bins to sort out the vast amount of unnecessary packaging our products come in, by brushing our teeth in the shower just so we can save the same amount of water it takes to grow a single almond, environmental responsibility is psychologically offloaded onto us even if Reality knows this couldn't be further from the truth. Capitalist realism presupposes that any problem can simply be solved by the market, that resources are infinite even if they aren't infinite on Earth and that we can simply expand, infinitely, so long as capital infinitely expands (again, a fantasy which Wall-E presents).But of course, this is all a lie, none of this is Real. It is no coincidence that there is a relationship between capitalism and economic disaster; capitalism, after all, has a need for a constantly expanding market which inherently contradicts any notion of Real sustainability. Neoliberal reforms cannot ever fix this problem, nor any of capitalism's problems, because neoliberalism serves to fuel capitalist realism. It may delay these issues, certainly, and try its hardest to reflect and rebrand and remarket these problems back onto us, and as a result we simply become used to it, this desensitization itself just another function for capitalist ideology.If you have somehow made it this far then 1) I appreciate you reading what is probably one of the longest reviews I'll ever write, hopefully which you understand due to the complex nature of the topic, and 2) you're probably wondering what any of this has to do with I Am Cuba. It seems like many of the reviews for this film bring up the fact that it is a 'propaganda piece' as nothing more than an empty topic of conversation before swerving into its technical merits as somehow 'making up' for said propaganda. This, I hope, is a perspective that by now should be obvious is informed via capitalist ideology which has tricked us into thinking that any other ideology must be flawed because it falls outside of capitalism's "natural order", and that we must maintain cynical distance from any form of sincerity because we have fooled ourselves into believing we exist as post-ideological beings.When, in fact, it is precisely those who exist outside of capitalist realism that are most-equipped to challenge capitalism, something which this film actually does: it opens with a monologue attributed to Christopher Columbus about how Cuba is beautiful, before showing us over the next two hours the ways in which colonial forces ravage the land. How can one make claims of beauty while also destroying that very beauty? How can we romanticize a country while also suppressing it? These are the contradictions inherent in capitalism's claims, the people behind I Am Cuba trying to show that to us and are actually able to believe in and envision a non-capitalist Real because they lived in a time when capitalism had not yet absorbed everything on the outside. Though certainly flawed, there were genuine alternatives to capitalist ideology in the 60s which had a tenable future, futures which Western, capitalist forces would sabotage at every opportunity of course, but futures nonetheless.This is a film which confronts capitalism yet doesn't allow us to mire in interpassivity, its goal not to trick us into performative activism but opts to completely embrace a wholly-separate ideology. We should not be saying "this is a propaganda piece, but...", rather, "this is an anti-capitalist propaganda piece, and..."...oh yeah, and the technical merits absolutely fuck.
