Upstream - Crisis Theory - A Marxist Video Game with David Cribb

Episode Date: August 11, 2016

Crisis Theory is a new video game developed by David Cribb. In this game, you play as the spirit of capitalism. Your one job is to keep the game from falling into crisis for as long as possible. Is it possible? We spoke with David to find out. Crisis Theory was inspired by Marxist geographer David Harvey's lecture series on Capital. It uses concepts like labor power, means of production, primitive accumulation, rate of profit, etc, etc, to help explain Marx's theory of capitalism. It's a great way to learn about Marxist theory — and it's actually quite fun to play. Check it out for yourself here: https://colestia.itch.io/crisis-theory This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, You're listening to Upstream. I'm Della Duncan, and today we're in conversation with David Kribb, the creator of the Marxist educational video game Crisis Theory. Welcome, David. Can you introduce yourself to our listeners? So I'm David Cribb. I'm an undergraduate student from Australia at the Australian National University, fourth year now, studying law and Middle Eastern politics. And yeah, I make video games in my spare time. And yeah, obviously a particular interest in Marxism.

So David, you recently developed an interesting educational video game called Crisis Theory. I'm wondering if you could explain the name and the basic premise of the game. Yeah, sure. So the basic premise of the game is to put forward Marx's theory of accumulation, which in a nutshell, Marx takes the ideas about how capitalism is supposed to work from classical political economists. So having a perfectly functioning market, no monopolies, everyone acting in their own self interest, takes those assumptions, and basically says that if you start with those assumptions, they will lead capitalism inevitably into crisis. So while people like Adam Smith and people on the right would say, start with these assumptions,

you end up with the best possible outcome for everyone, Marx says, no, leads you into crisis. And hence the name, crisis theory. It's the area of Marxist thought which explains why capitalism always tends towards crisis and what form those crises take. So in the game, you play as the kind of fictional spirit of capitalism and you try and stop capitalism falling into crisis for as long as you possibly can. So can you walk through the various components of the game? I know there's primitive accumulation, there's M, means of production, labor power, etc. Can you just walk us through what are the different components that the player is working with? Yeah, so for those who haven't played the game, it's set up basically as a diagram

representation of Marx's model of accumulation. The basic structure being what's called MCM plus, M being money, you start out with money, use that money to produce C, a commodity, and then you sell that commodity for more money than you started off with for M plus. And then that money is then redirected back into the start of the system. So in a bit more detail, the starting point is primitive accumulation, which in Marxist thought basically refers to the idea that you need a pre-existing level of wealth to start the capitalist system. You need money, you need factories, you need land, you need all of that stuff. And Marx basically says that that happens through theft, that capitalists steal land from peasants, they

enclose previously commonly owned land, they plunder foreign populations through colonialism, imperialism, etc. And so in the game, playing as the spirit of capitalism, you start off by hitting the primitive accumulation button a few times, colonizing, stealing, plundering, kind of getting the system going. And from there, you have money and you can start the main process of accumulation. So the money is used to purchase means of production and labor power. Labor power here basically refers to buying someone's ability to work, and you do that by paying them a wage, of course. Means of production refers to just anything other than labor power, which is

necessary to produce commodities. So everything from raw materials to machinery to buildings to whatever. All of those means of production at some point along the supply chain require some extractions from nature for fuel or raw materials or that sort of thing. So buying means of production also has an effect on the natural environment in the game. Then once you've got means of production and labor power, the worker starts to produce a commodity. And they do that via a technology, which basically refers to the method of producing commodities. So this could

mean division of labor, or types of machinery, types of technologies, managerial techniques, anything involved in the method of producing commodities. So it passes through the technology, commodity is produced, that commodity is then sold on to either workers or capitalists. Part of the profit from that sale goes to capitalists to save or spend as they see fit, but the bulk of it is redirected back into the start of the process as money again, setting off the process. So primitive accumulation leads to money. This money is used to purchase labor power and means of production. They're combined through a technology to produce a commodity. The commodity is sold for money and profit. And that's put back into the start, MCM+.

And what about the state? There's a state in the bottom right corner. What's the role of the state in this game? Because there's a small role. yeah the the role of the state is probably uh fairly oversimplified in terms of how things actually work but in the game here it basically functions to provide economic stimulus so uh state investment or any sort of stimulus spending is used to prop up worker demand and capitalist demand in the game obviously a bit of a simplification states very important for setting taxation policies all sorts of market policies but yeah i've kind of put that to one side for the game and so you there's the different components and the player can press different things like the nature arrow to up the different natural resources used or can down the labor arrow, which will struggle is keeping, well, keeping a lot of things

and balance isn't the right word, because it's it's always in flux, but particularly keeping things out of the red. So keeping labor power not too too high, or means of production, not too too big, or nature too too low. So can you explain this part of the game and how this constant challenge of keeping this all working? Yeah. So I guess the kind of overall idea here is that there's a lot of things which need to be right for capitalists to keep making profit. There needs to be a certain level of worker demand. You need to have access to natural resources. And sort of the main central conflict, which takes up a lot of the time in the game, is this one between means of production and labor power. And so the player has the power to change this proportion. But one of the main tensions in the game comes from the fact that

the proportions between means of production and labor power change on their own as a result of various different forces. I mean, the most intuitive way we can think of is political change. So if workers get organized, they demand higher wages, demand better entitlements, then capitalists have to spend a higher proportion on labor power versus means of production. And the potential for crisis in there is that if workers get too powerful, they can demand such a large share of profits that capitalists stop investing. And this is the idea of the profit squeeze crisis. Work is getting so

powerful that capitalists can't profit. An alternate way that these relations change is technological change. It's a bit of a less obvious argument on the surface, but it's really one of Marx's big insights. Essentially, the argument goes like this, that there's a tendency in capitalism towards technological innovation. Marx has his arguments for this, but I mean, even defenders of capitalism would agree with that point. He then says that as a result of this innovation, a higher proportion needs to be spent on means of production versus labor power. That's not entirely obvious at first, but I'll give you a simple example.

So if, for example, a worker is making like 10 shoes a day or something, then you might be spending half of your production cost on raw materials for the shoes, half on paying the worker's wage. If you can technologically innovate and, say, double the workers' efficiency, then they're making 20 shoes a day, you need double the number of raw materials, but you can still pay them the same wage. So the proportion spent on means of production has increased significantly. Obviously, more complex in practice, but the general idea is that, yeah, technological innovation changes these proportions so that

means of production become a larger part of the necessary costs of production. And for Marx, this is a problem for capitalists, essentially because for Marx, only human labor creates value. Like machines don't create value. They're essentially just transferring value that has gone into their production. I can go into this in more detail if you want, but an intuitive way to think about it is I read one analogy which was essentially saying when we go out and fish, water nymphs don't appear and ask for a share of our profits from the fish or anything because we don't see natural resources as having that sort of value.

fish or anything, because we don't see natural resources as having that sort of value. And in the same way, if you imagine a sort of completely autonomous factory, like owned by robots, run by robots, completely autonomous, self-sufficient, there would be no one to pay for the products that are being produced, because we don't see the products of machines as carrying that sort of value. So if human labor is a source of value, and if innovation is meaning that there's less human labour going into the products, then that means with this change, there will be lower and lower profits, which is called in Marxist thought, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. It's a complex argument. I don't think I've really done it justice. But suffice to say, there is evidence that on a global scale, this is happening, that technological innovation is leading to this

fall of profit. And as you say, there are several ways to manage this, that capitalism manages this, and that you can manage it in the game. So yeah, crushing unions, outsourcing, bringing in cheap labour from overseas, all of those will reduce labour's political power and reduce the amount you'll be forced to pay it. On the other hand, if you want to reduce the proportion spent on means of production, you can increase the proportion you get out of workers, you can exploit your workers more, you can create new labour-intensive industries, creative industries, knowledge industries, that sort of thing, or you can expand your labor force. So yeah, this relation between means of production and labor power is pretty central to Marx's overall theory. But yeah, as you say, there are a lot of different

ways for capitalism to manage this relationship. One thing, especially I'm thinking about the nature bar, you continue to be able to develop more extractive processes or find new resources. And I'm just wondering, that is another one where eventually we'll kind of run out globally. What would you think about that? The obvious example of that sort of natural crisis we're facing today is climate change, the sort of reaching limits of extraction from nature. David Harvey, the Marxist geographer, points out that capitalism has faced a lot of different natural crises before. One of the examples he gives is in Britain in, I think, the early 18th century, there was a crisis from scarcity of land in that agriculturalists wanted the land for the production of food and livestock whereas industrialists wanted the land for the production of wood to use in fuel for factories and that was a sort of

inherent tension from scarcity of land which was only really resolved by switching to coal as a power source But of course, we're now facing another natural crisis arising out of that earlier decision. So yeah, even if you can sort of mitigate these natural crises, only going to create problems further down the track. And the game does a great job of demonstrating those internal contradictions within the system and how when things, you're managing them for a little bit as the spirit of capitalism, but then they become increasingly chaotic and harder to avoid crisis. It just gets faster and faster and faster. And so I'm wondering, is it possible to win the game as the spirit of

capitalism? No, not really. I probably wouldn't be a very good Marxist if I made that possible. The best you can do really is survive for as long as possible. But I suppose at the same time, it's not really possible to lose the game. Even if you fall into crisis within it, that doesn't necessarily mean the end of capitalism has arrived or anything. I mean, capitalism has faced all of the crises depicted in the game. Effective demand crisis in the Great Depression, natural crises, which I talked about a bit, profit squeeze crises around 1970s in US and Western Europe, potentially hasn't faced a tendency of rate of profit to fall crisis yet, but we may be heading in that direction. So the mere fact of falling into crisis doesn't mean that capitalism's collapsed or anything.

It just means there's an opportunity for some sort of change there. And when the player does come into a sort of crisis, one of the ones that you mentioned at the bottom of the screen, it says something like capitalism hasn't died yet, but there's the potential for a revolution. Is that what it says? Yeah. Revolutionary moment or something. Yeah. Yeah. Pot says uh yeah revolutionary moment or something yeah yeah potential for a revolutionary moment so yeah i just thought yeah there's almost like maybe part two of the game which is well what would create that revolutionary moment what would be that you know or what are the ways that that those revolutionary moments are encouraged or discouraged

kind of in a similar way like technology or that kind of thing. So there's almost like a, it leaves you hanging there. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's sort of one of the just big questions needs to answer. Like, obviously, political organization is one of the major things, needs some sort of political organization, which has answers to the problems which are raised by any of these crises. What form that takes, I know it kind of depends on, yeah, what form the crisis takes. And I guess one of the advantages of thinking about it in this sort of Marxist way is that

we can at least sort of vaguely predict the contours of the crisis and potentially, yeah, plan for how to react to them. What if there was a button on the game in the beginning that was, you can play as a spirit of capitalism, or you could play as a spirit of neoliberal capitalism? What would be the difference? Oh, wow. I would probably say not really that different. I mean, at the sort of, this is really like the core function of capitalism here, the core way in which capitalism creates profit, at least according to Marx. The change in neoliberalism is probably more one of the sort of tangential changes in

relations between labor and capital and those sort of things, which are represented in the game. It's more a relation of complete free market capitalism versus some sort of liberal Keynesianism or that sort of thing, not really changing the fundamental relations that are represented in the game. So what inspired you to create Crisis Theory? You've mentioned that you're a Marxist, but I'm wondering what's kind of your inspiration, your background, and what you're hoping to achieve with it? The immediate inspiration and the inspiration for the layout particularly was from David Harvey's lecture series on Capital, which I definitely recommend to anyone if they're

interested in this. It's all free, all online. But more particularly, as I was reading through Capital and looking through David Harvey's lecture series, I thought, yeah, this would be really suited to a video game. It's sort of a naturally occurring difficulty curve within the game. The more capital you have in the system, the faster it accumulates, the faster it moves around, faster it circulates, the more likely you are to end up in crisis. So the longer you play it, the more difficult it becomes. That's sort of classic video game design right there.

I don't know if you've got this question before, but what if you were to design this game for a different system? Either, you know, I mean, socialism, but there's, I mean, there's many different ways you could design it. But I'm wondering, have you thought about kind of doing like a, what, what could be a different way once people have played this and get the sense of, wow, the spirit of capitalism leads to crisis? Well, yeah, I have been thinking about that. I guess the problem is, it's pretty hard to know where to go still. I really enjoyed your podcast on the sharing economy, by the way, because it actually talked about alternate ways of organizing these things, which tends not to be the case with most Marx marxist stuff it's more just kind of critiques

of capitalism in terms of what a socialist game would look like well it'd have to be entirely different because the pursuit of profit would not be the driving force behind things but beyond that yeah it's kind of hard to know yeah and i was thinking when i was playing it the one thing that would definitely change is the workers would be able to control the labor and the means of production and and more of that and then yeah maybe the state would play a different role but yeah it was it was fun after playing it a little bit you could kind of ask these other questions of what would be different or what if we had a more of a circular economy with nature where we gave back, you know, or, you know, this regenerative, you know, relationship with nature?

Well, I suppose one alternative way to do it would potentially do it as some sort of online game or something where people have to cooperate as the workers and essentially make these economic decisions rather than just kind of the individual spirit of capitalism. Yeah. And then the other thing is the way that you've done it on the video game is so clear and partially because it's the systems theory perspective of it. You know, it's the different components and how they work together. And, you know, some people would say, well, but, you know, life isn't that mechanical and that kind of thing. So it's actually more complex and there's, you know, other types of relationships and there's qualities not just numbers and there's emergence of things and things that come up that you probably couldn't articulate

in a game so it's almost like you know how would you then bring bring something from a systems game perspective to this kind of more lifellike you know even some people would say a living system or a being well i suppose yeah one of the easier ways to do that would be just to bring people into the system i think it's entirely possible to imagine and there have been a couple of like marxist communities online who've set up things within various multiplayer games online like trying to create these sort of societies and see what potential conflicts would arise, how you would deal with them, that sort of thing.

But I suppose, well, yeah, it's sort of a double-edged sword. Either you go with the clear, understandable systems theory sort of approach and risk losing all this complexity, or you go with something which sort of can potentially miss some of these bigger trends. Well, I definitely think this game should be in economics classrooms everywhere. Have you gotten pretty good reception and people saying, well, I'm going to use this in classrooms or as a teaching tool?

Yeah, I've actually got quite a few emails about using it for undergraduate courses and so forth. So yeah, it's been up for question. So are you seeing, you know, a lot more of this kind of questioning and this kind of playful exploration of what is capitalism and why isn't it working and what else could we do? Well, yeah, I think you're definitely right that there's definitely a lot of people very upset with capitalism failing to deliver on any of its promises, but I suppose I tend to be fairly pessimistic when it comes to any sort of radical political change. Although, as I said, the sort of knowing that one of these crises is going to come around again in the near future gives sort of some level for hope in that, you know, there's going to be the sort of political environment for

this change sometime down the track. In a broader sense of these sort of games re-envisioning society and so forth, I think, yeah, that's definitely got to happen. Because for so long, the kind of opposition has just been there is no alternative. And having various sort of games rethinking these, potentially socialist video games, socialist worlds being represented, that sort of thing. That's probably a pretty great way to get rid of that myth. And as you graduate, do you have any kind of plans or other projects that you're working on? Well, like right now, I've got plans for another game I'm working on, which is kind of bringing together some of Guy Debord's stuff about the society of the spectacle.

kind of bring together some of Guy Debord's stuff about the society of the spectacle. So about how capitalism sort of tends to commodify the entirety of experience as a way of finding new areas to make profit. Combining that with the work by a guy from Seattle University about how video games kind of have this meritocratic bias built into their structure. Sort of, yeah, combining those two together to look at the sort of economic and ideological function of video games within capitalism, and probably a few other minor projects along the way as well in the style of this one. Wonderful. Well, where can people learn more about you and maybe follow up on games in the future as well as where

can people play crisis theory best place to keep up to date with what i'm doing get in contact with me is probably on twitter at colestia3 if people are interested in playing this game it's available for free on itch.io and indie game stand both yeah indie gaming websites and there's also yeah a bunch of other kind of left-leaning games that I've made available on those pages as well. Wonderful. Well, thank you. Thanks for having me. You've been listening to an Upstream interview with David Kripp. For more of our episodes and interviews, please visit upstreampodcast.org. Stars blooming from our boats that break To the morning we run

To shoreline Calling us to speak of serenity Waves under the earth and rocks Casting ghostly shadows Tall like diamonds As we set fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea