Nintendo and Revolution - For workers around the world

Dada a necessidade de tornar disponível os textos do Movimento Marxista-Nintendista para trabalhadores de todo o mundo de modo a reforçar o princípio do internacionalismo proletário, o Comitê do MMN decidiu disponibilizar essas obras em outras línguas. O texto a seguir é o primeiro de muitos textos a serem traduzidos para outras línguas

Due to the need of making the texts of the Marxist-Nintendist Movement for workers around the world so that we can reinforce the principle of proletarian internationalism, the Committee of the MNM decided to made these works available in other languages. The following one is the first of many texts to be translated into other languages.

Nintendo and Revolution

Thinking that scientific research and technological development can still become material well-being for mankind is at least an anachronism. This mentality can refer to a moment in history when capitalist accumulation could minimally create some progress for society. But the productive forces of humanity don’t grow anymore. Now, capitalism only reproduces itself at the cost of the destruction of humanity, and the crisis of the production system is also the crisis of the entire superstructure necessary to maintain it and everything that it has produced - and here I refer to the death of the bourgeois culture . The example of research for the development of games is very representative. Consider a PS3, the newest of the last bastions of international capital and sign of the supposed welfare state of bourgeois society. However, who produces them? The whole industry of mature capitalist countries (Japan, in the case of Sony) bases its production in countries of later development, where the lowest development of productive forces and the primary stage of working classes allows a higher rate of extraction of surplus value - China, Singapore and Taiwan, for example. By cents for hour, Asian workers in semi-slave condition, similar to the British in the nineteenth century, produce the videogames that will be consumed in developed capitalist world. And all the research in gaming industry and high technology production are going to increase the value of goods and the total of machines that produce it. That means fewer hours of social work necessary for production and, consequently, due to the capitalist social division of labour dismisses proletarians whose work becomes unnecessary and increases exploitation of those who remain.

All technological advances, thus, mean only increasing the exploitation of the working class and, especially, the thickening of the huge mass of unemployed sentenced to complete barbarism in which is sinking the bourgeois world: the urban chaos (Sao Paulo has 60 square km of slums), the widespread misery, destruction of nature (and must be noticed what the industrial development has meant for this: 2007 will be the warmest year in history). This is the result of capitalism in decay. In the words of Marx: the more the value of the world of things increases, the more the value of the world of men is decreased. Well, it’s a question whether it is possible in any case to justify that capitalism spawns through the destruction of the planet and mankind. As for the culture in whose name this mode of production could do it, it´s even more absurd. How to defend the capital in name of the bourgeois art, cultural production of bourgeoisie, all long ago dead and buried? The bourgeoisie no longer has a historical project, doesn’t have anything of minimally progressive, and is limited to consume the corpse of a culture dating from its time of plenty; all it does is a grotesque parody of that already. For example, which dramaturg surpassed, in subsequent decades, the work that Oswald de Andrade had made on 20s and 30s? What is done today in any field of culture is a joke of bad taste when compared to the vanguards of the twentieth century. And it is not different with the video games. Every generation that happens increases parody. All games go to a ridiculous realism, the powerful image of the most moderns consoles moving closer to becoming the most sensitive imitation of the world, increasingly a mere mirror of reality and becoming each time more and more far from a hammer to break it. The shortcomings of the last Winning Eleven are not surpassed, and no matter how his aesthetic approaches to a real game of soccer, every day seems more distant the moment when we can say that the original International Superstar Soccer was exceeded.

It's like comparing what a Glauber Rocha or a Godard made in the 60s with what the blockbusters films today. The bourgeois art is dead , and we consume its corpse. However, in the field of culture, you can see remnants of creation that point to the future. Nintendo, vanguard of entertainment in previous decades, for example, creates the Wii (not for nothing originally baptized as Nintendo Revolution), which breaks with the way standard joystick – which Nintendo itself elevated at full potential, and that, despite the presence of the same old pictures of their platforms (Mario, Donkey Kong, Link - still to be overcome), raises the prospect of resuming the evolution of the videogames that goes idle since the age of 128 bits. More than a project-specific video game, Nintendo shows that it is possible a new culture, a new form of entertainment. But this project is completely unachievable within the limits of bourgeois legality. How to enjoy these video games in a world where every day there is less employment, and where those who still have a work, are increasingly spoiled by the Capitalist System? For decades this kind of social division of labour slows down the development of productive forces. It is no longer possible for us to perform all the potential of art and entertainment, unite them for life, while the capitalist mode of production continues to exist. This is the Marxist-Nintendist principle.