A Marxist view of Animal Crossing: New Horizons

[Syt]

https://www.polygon.com/2020/5/12/21247992/animal-crossing-new-horizons-switch-capitalism-marxism-communism-tom-nook-turnip-prices

A Marxist plays Animal Crossing: Why we must eat the turnips

A fun, relaxing game about labor exploitation and the stock market

Animal Crossing: New Horizons has been setting sales records since its release, but capitalism doesn't just factor into the game's own success. The experience of playing the game itself is often focused on the in-game turnip economy, so much so that villagers in the game call it the "Stalk Market."

I'm a total newcomer to Animal Crossing, so this whole thing has been a bit of a confusing trial for me, and that's before I've had to come to grips with an unwieldy economic system. Where could I possibly begin?

Well, I'm a Communist, and there's only one man I trust to help me get to grips with markets and economics. That man's name is Karl Heinrich Marx.

CAPITAL T FOR TURNIP
I'm going to try to make sense of what's going on with all these dang turnips by reading my abridged copy of Das Kapital. I want to figure out why a vegetable fuels so much of Animal Crossing's virtual commerce, and what it says about my in-game role as a turnip-trading capitalist.

We must begin with understanding the value of Animal Crossing's turnip. Marx proposed a way of thinking about how valuable something is called the labor theory of value. He thought that commodities — things to be bought, sold, or exchanged (like a turnip) — are made up of different kinds of values, each a description of different aspects of each commodity.

The exchange value of something is how much of it can be exchanged for other commodities, which is determined by how much labor has gone into creating it, whatever that labor is. In this instance, that labor would be New Horizons character Daisy Mae harvesting and transporting the turnips to your island.

A commodity cannot be something that isn't "useful," though. If you accidentally leave a pack of Oreos near an open flame and they catch fire, there's no way you're going to be able to trade them with somebody; they're useless. That's where use-value comes in.

You figure out use-value by looking at the utility that something has: how it can satisfy people's wants and needs. A bigger turnip, for instance, would have a higher use-value than a smaller turnip, because there's more of it to eat or use however one uses turnips.

But this is all still assuming that turnips are a commodity, which is only true if you trade it. You might have put labor into harvesting it, which gives it use-value for you, but if others can't exchange with you for it, then it doesn't have use-value to them.

For something to be a commodity, it needs to have a potential use-value for anyone. If you bake a cake and eat the whole thing yourself, it isn't a commodity; it just has a use-value. Give or sell some slices to other people, though, and boom, it's a commodity. Create a bakery to do nothing but crank out cakes to be sold to others, and suddenly the gray area is gone: Those cakes are commodities.

The price at which Daisy Mae will sell you her turnips is made up, then, of how much labor she has put into harvesting them, and their use-value, which can vary in this case depending on their size.

The price of Daisy Mae's turnips is always a random number between 90 and 110 Bells, which accommodates for the labor that has gone into their exchange value, and the variation in their use-value depending on their size. We're squarely within the world of Marxist theory, and it's giving us a good way to make sense of Animal Crossing. Things are going well so far!

There's just one problem. What are these particular turnips being used for in the world of Animal Crossing? Their value doesn't come from their nutritional value, because Daisy Mae tells you pretty explicitly from the start that these turnips you're buying from her aren't for eating; they're for selling. Their function as a thing is synonymous with, as the game suggests, stocks. (Hence the "stalk market" pun.) You're buying and selling the idea of the value of these turnips, not so much the physical food items themselves.

But what's the difference? Well ... I'm glad you asked, but this is where things get weird, and capitalism is about to come roaring back in.

THE MEANS OF TURNIP PRODUCTION
Stocks should be a simple idea, but the implementation of that idea gets complicated very quickly, so don't feel bad if you don't really understand how they work on a practical level. For starters, their value isn't necessarily tied to any kind of rational process or logic.

Let me give you an overview of what a stock is, and what it represents. Because again, in Animal Crossing, you seem to be buying and selling the concept of turnips, an abstraction based on the value of a turnip of that particular size on the open market. It's an abstraction disguised as the literal object it's meant to represent.

This is at least a little bit like the way an actual stock works. A stock is, effectively, a little piece of a public company. That's why each discrete piece of stock is called a "share." That doesn't mean the company is run by the government, or the people — just that the public is able to invest in that company by buying stocks.

The value of those stocks hinges not only on how much money that company is making or losing at the moment, but also on public opinion and speculation about that company's possible future performance. The value of a stock can show how well or poorly a company is doing right now, but that value is also influenced by how people think the company will be doing later.

A company making huge profits by selling cars, for instance, may not be worth much if we have reason to believe we'll all be using public transit in the near future. But that may a good reason to buy stock in companies that sell trains or buses, even if they're not making much money right now.

Buying and selling stocks successfully is part guessing game, part luck — and often, part outright manipulation of the market or access to privileged information about what may happen in the future. The more power you have, and the more information people are willing to share with you, legally or otherwise, the more advantage you'll have in the stock market. And the stalk market.

Now, the stalk market is missing something that real stock markets rely on: There isn't necessarily a company whose shares are represented by the turnips. If there were, the sheer instability of its stock prices would make it a bad bet; very few real-world stocks are this volatile on a day-to-day basis.

But we can still look to Marxist economics to figure out what turnips represent in Animal Crossing. We just had to do a lot of table-setting to get there!

'IT'S ALL MADE UP' —MARX (PROBABLY)
Marx thought stocks belonged to what he called "fictitious" capital. Capital, generally, is money used specifically to buy things that you intend to sell again. There's "real" capital, which is money that's invested into the physical means of production (think factories, farms, workers, etc.), and "financial" capital, the actual currency that you use to buy things. So what, exactly, is fictitious capital? Well, this guy can kinda explain it, to start:

https://youtu.be/HEaVXFXm5Wg

But let's get into the weeds a bit farther. If a company's owners want to raise capital in the forms of both real and financial capital, they can get investors to give them cash and access to facilities by offering shares of the company in exchange.

Those stocks effectively function as IOU slips that promise the investors a share of the company's surplus-value, money it makes from buying something cheap and selling it for more. A share in this situation is used as a sort of currency, based on the idea that the thing being purchased for the value of the stock will cause the value of the company to rise, causing the value of the stock to rise.

If I'm making cakes, and I buy a bunch of ingredients in bulk by offering shares of my cake-baking company, the idea is that I'll be able to buy cake supplies, increase their value by making cakes with them, and sell those cakes at a profit, causing the value of my company to go up — which causes the value of each of those shares to go up.

But the stock itself is fictitious capital: It has value, but that value could go up or down based on literally any number of factors. This is why Marx considered fictitious capital to be meaningless; the rules that determine its value are often arbitrary, and easily exploited by those who already have money, information, and power.

The capital that stocks represent is entirely hypothetical until they're sold for actual currency. Marx considered their value "wholly illusory." Stocks are ideas, a way to turn something real into something abstract so value can be more easily manipulated. The hope is that people buy stock of a company that creates surplus value from the money brought in by selling that stock, and everyone involved in the buying and selling of the stock profits.

Where does that surplus value come from, though? How can a company buy something for one price and then sell it for a higher price? Something needs to have happened to that product in order to increase its value — and that something is labor. Labor, skilled or otherwise, is what turns ingredients into cakes, airplanes into an airline, or ... turnips into stocks, apparently?

To simplify a very complex topic: The lack of labor's participation in the profits they help create is one of the things that leads to ridiculous situations in which waiters in a restaurant don't make enough in a day's wages to afford a meal there, while the owners of the restaurant may not need to ever even show up to continue raking in the profits.

You buy turnips from Daisy Mae for 90-110 Bells apiece, and sell them for up to 660 Bells apiece. That's a lot of surplus value, and you're the main beneficiary of those profits, despite not putting in much of the labor yourself. You're benefiting, as the one who bought and sold the turnips, based on the speculative forces of the stalk market, and not on the labor you put into growing or harvesting the turnips in the first place. You begin the game as a normal human being, and the in-game economy rapidly turns you into Matthew McConaughey.

Marx thought that this surplus value simply represented the capitalist class underpaying the workers for their labor, and specifically, that the cost at the point of sale was the true value of the labor put into the commodity.

You are, at a distance and indirectly, using the money that should be going to Daisy Mae to make more money for yourself instead. You're the middle-person, creating very little direct value, but taking the lion's share of the money made possible by the folks doing the work itself.

TURNING NEW HORIZONS INTO A MARXIST UTOPIA
This is all a bit ... silly, though, isn't it? It's just imaginary numbers generating made-up money inside a video game.

Marx had no idea what a Tom Nook or a Bunny Day was. But he did have an idea of how things could be better: communism, a proposed model of a stateless, classless, moneyless society that operates on the basic tenet of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need."

So, all we need to do is figure out how we get there from where we are. We don't want to keep exploiting Daisy Mae's labor, do we?

First off, Nook needs to go. He's actually a cool dude — the Bernie Sanders of Animal Crossing, if you will — a wealthy man who owns a few properties, but he'll give you financial support and shelter without expecting any return anytime soon. He spends most of his profits on an orphanage, anyway.

Regardless, Nook represents the capitalist class, a group of people who, regardless of their individual proclivities, are systematically antagonistic toward the working class. Tom Nook chooses to be a great guy, but what about all the other rich tanukis out there? Not all of them might be as charitable. To deal with this, Marx proposed a transitional period between capitalism and communism called the "dictatorship of the proletariat."

The word "dictatorship" might have you a little bit concerned there. But in the way that Marx uses it, dictatorship simply means "absolute control," not "absolute control by one person."

A dictatorship of the proletariat is where the working class collectively has absolute control over the means of production. This would mean that Agnes, Blaire, Felicity, and all the other villagers inhabiting your island would be in control of the farmland, the workbenches, and even Nook's Cranny. There'd be no capitalists waiting to swoop in, sell their goods and labor for an inflated price, and keep the money for themselves.

A worker's state run by anthropomorphic animals? Again, not quite. While Marx initially envisioned workers taking over the state apparatus to nationalize industries and centralize the economy, he retracted that idea later in life, in favor of local self-government and minimal national functions.

That was because when the Paris Commune carried out the former setup, it was easy for the French to step in and replace positions held by elected workers with their own men, quickly degrading Paris back into a capitalist society. So even if Tom steps down and you decide not to resell turnips, what's keeping anyone else from trying the same thing?

The interconnectedness of New Horizons' countless player islands is a solid basis for that "minimal national functions" stuff, so all that needs to be done now is to turn it all into communes.

If, say, you were a democratically elected "commune infrastructure administrator," instead of you more or less owning the island and exercising absolute control over how it's laid out, not a lot would need to change functionally in the game. Except, perhaps, the introduction of town meetings where everyone voted on whether you could get planning permission to build a house extension or a new cabbage patch.

It would be a lot less fun, but I have to be brutally honest: Marxism is rarely a joyful exercise for capitalists used to living off the work of others.

Which is a whole other issue. Historically, attempts to enact a communist society have had ... mixed success at best, and while many nation-states have described themselves as Communist in tendency, there hasn't yet been a completely stateless, moneyless, classless society. Not one calling itself Communist, at least. While we're talking about more of a theoretical framework than trying to liken the situation in Animal Crossing to any real-world socialist state, we don't want to ignore the oppression, starvation, and work camps of some dictators who wielded Marx's ideas like a sword rather than an olive branch.

Equally, we have to remember that Marx was a philosopher, not a dictator himself. Remembering the bad that's been done by people who claimed to champion his ideas doesn't mean we don't also remember the incalculable bad that's been done by people who champion capitalist ideals, too. So, think of this essay as a philosophical thought experiment, rather than an insistence that Animal Crossing: New Horizons would've been better with Stalin at the wheel.

But what about the turnips? At first, while the wave of sociopolitical change washes over the whole world of Animal Crossing, each island branch of the stalk market should be seized by the commune and operated as a means of generating capital to invest in the town, collectively.

But eventually, even this must be abolished if we're aiming to transition into a classless and moneyless society as well as a stateless one — we can't allow an apparatus of markets to incentivize wealth gaps. Turnips will have to renounce their status as fictitious capital, and return to their traditional career as food.

To save the proletariat, to abolish the bourgeoisie, we must make the radical decision to eat the turnips.

The most important lesson you can learn from this little dive into Animal Crossing and Marxist socioeconomics is that the stock market is dumb, money is fake, and if Karl Marx were alive today, I bet he'd say exactly the following: Question the system, live as equals, and eat the turnips.

:marx: