• chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 days ago

      Maybe a little bit, but everything after the beginning of the movie seemed to take place in more of a monarchy situation where roles and resources are allocated directly by the ship/colony leadership and the only apparent economy was the black markets for drugs and extra rations.

      • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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        5 days ago

        The book is pretty clear on themes, and fascism is only distinguished from a truly absolute monarchy in the respects you mention by their laws of succession.

        Fascism, btw, per Mussolini and Gentile, is the merger of state and corporation. At at least a small scale it will absolutely try to function without a market and pay its workers directly with necessities while using the withholding of such as both punishment and means of persecution.

        • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          4 days ago

          They said capitalism, not fascism, I can see how the movie is being critical of fascism, but the primary setting seems distinctly un-capitalist to me.

          • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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            4 days ago

            Same end goal.

            Just an FYI: the book also describes the fate of a colony world called Galt that gets genocided and consumed by a hyper-capitalist’s clone army. The logic is simple. He wants more clones, and the best source of more biomatter fit for making clones is human bodies. He’s also been told all his life that he’s a superior life form, so what use is anyone “lesser?” It doesn’t matter that the Galtists consider themselves “rugged individualists”, they are less thans and therefore useless beyond making his numbers go up.

            The book and setting is not shy about criticizing capitalism’s commodification of human life and disregard for suffering. It’s the entire point of how Expendables are treated, lol.

            I don’t doubt that a movie had less time to make some of the themes more obvious, but they’d have had to completely remove the concept for it not to be clear.