Lately I have been watching a friend play BioShock Infinite, something to which I paid little attention at the time of its release. At first the setting and the story were attracting me, as they pertain to my field of interest… but later in the story, after acquainting us with an archetypal capitalist, I noticed that the story was getting a little ‘darker’—in a familiar way—and it soon devolved into what I feared: another subplot about how much revolution sucks.
I’ve seen it already in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and Metro 2033, so I know how it goes: first the writers lure you in with a display of the prerevolutionary situation, and at first they portray the revolutionaries positively, but as the climax approaches the revolutionaries go around suddenly committing atrocities without any clear rhyme or reason, nothing can be done to prevent it, ordinary people hate it (so the revolutionaries abuse them too), and the lesson is that revolution is no better than the prerevolutionary situation.
Why do revolutionaries go through the trouble of making revolution? Not because the material conditions (whatever those are) made revolution inevitable, no. It’s because revolutionaries are stupid and unreasonable. Simple as that. That’s probably also why they commit atrocities, and also why they can’t figure out how to keep their supporters without resorting to coercion or violence.
The message, it seems, is an advertisement for conservatism: ‘Yes, we’ll admit that things may be awful now, but no matter how awful they may be, anything else would be worse, so just shut up and do nothing.’ They don’t state it outright—possibly because of how embarrassing it would look—but that is the only conclusion that I can draw. (Otherwise, the only alternatives are either that the writers wanted to subject innocent people to their angsty, immature whining, or they simply wanted to waste their time, both of which would be bafflingly unwise of them.)
Is there anything inaccurate about my observation? Because otherwise, I don’t know why these presumed professionals would suddenly subject us to this lazy and shallow writing.
The expanse is also very guilty of this
Damnit… I had that on my list of sci-fi to watch. Back to trek.
The books are much better than the TV series in terms of the politics and social commentaries, at least in my memory it was like that. I wouldn’t say it’s out and out leftist but there’s some stuff with revolutionary praxis, alternative power structures, looking at the effects of colonialism on the colonized.
Idk if the show is better, probably not since it’s shorter, but the books are literally like the OP wrote, the “leftism” there is mostly Belters being anarchists with socialdarwnism characteristics, including the murderer of billions Marco Inaros having quite big support (he killed poor people on Earth, corpo richies came out unscathed). Actually it’s in the show that Inaros gets condemned even by the more militant groups. There was iirc one anarcho-SR-like armed group in book included that did some vague socialist propaganda, but they were quickly told to be “extremists” and also they had very little pagetime, just two or three mentions.
There are, but the end result of those issues being put on question is always liberalism, individualism and capitalism, like again when the Belters gained selfdetermination finally, they formed nearly monopolistic space transport guild-corporation.