Thread by @CriticalReikan

I can’t. Tsukasa Shishio ain’t a tankie 😂

To break down the politics behind Dr. Stone, there’re several things I’d have to get out of the way.

1) The ideals of the characters can’t be made in isolation. How they interact with one another and the world around them matter. Social context is important for politics

2) “Communism bad” is hardly a helpful take anywhere. It’s moronic.

3) The subtext of the show is not necessarily an endorsement of any single ideology. It’s a bit more complex than “ooga booga Grunga say bad things are bad”

That being said, the conflict of the plot in Dr. Stone is between Tsukasa and Senku’s clear philosophical differences.

1) Tsukasa is clearly anti-civ and is an authoritarian. Given how he self-declared his own nation as the “Tsukasa Empire”, he’s also a dictator/emperor

Tsukasa also runs tribal communes. Senku’s “Kingdom of Science” does as well. Primitive Communism is the default norm for both Tsukasa’s Empire and Senku’s Kingdom

Given an underlying preconception that keeps Capitalism afloat in the first place is Adam Smith’s “Origins of Barter”, which is rightly called the “Myth of Barter” by David Graeber. Smith states that at some point in human history, we just started bartering with one another

One of the main things that capitalists boast about is a naive notion of “innovation” that brings happiness to ppl via market forces like competition. Unfortunately for capitalists, Senku is not depending on markets, but primitive commune labor instead as a chieftain.

Before becoming chieftain of his tribe, Senku states right at the start of the show that he fully intends to depetrify 7+ billion ppl—everybody no matter what or who they are. Senku is egalitarian, but also hates inconvenience—hence why he doesn’t set up a market

Which posits a question: does markets (and by extension capitalism) make “innovation” better, faster, stronger, etc? Most of the time, no. You do not need private ownership or markets to innovate. Most of the drugs we make, for example, have publicly funded R&D in public unis

Which begs the question: would the scenario in Dr. Stone be the most efficient means of achieving what Senku wants? The answer is: yes. Not having private ownership or markets would be simpler if most are ok with it (which they all are in this scenario)

That being said, how long this status quo can be maintained is entirely up to the writer of the show and the jury is still out on exactly what Senku’s political ideals are. All he cares about is science and human progress—honestly an Enlightenment liberal mindset

Which brings us back to Tsukasa. Tsukasa is not strictly against science, he took Senku’s recipe to depetrify ppl as a necessity. So it begs to question what else he’d consider a necessity. That we don’t know yet. Right now, anarcho-primitivism is as far as it gets for Tsukasa

The main problem w/ labeling Tsukasa as anprim is simply his authoritarian tendencies as well as him being an authoritarian leader for his Empire. It’s basically like saying Genghis Khan is an anprim. Tsukasa’s Empire can be called kinda anprim, but Tsukasa is clearly top dog

We’d have to see much more of his Empire to make a better distinction, but my money is on anarchism being absent and Tsukasa’s society having clear hierarchies everywhere that are enforced with violence most likely

Last note: back to thoughts about Senku’s “Kingdom of Science”, to reach mass production or global scale projects, Senku will, at some point, need to have a planned economy. This is a book recommendation that goes into more depth on what I’m on about

amazon.com/Peoples-Republ…

@threadreaderapp unroll

Here’s the link: threadreaderapp.com/thread/1213189…