Murakami on Capitalism

This is a slight digression from life in Japan, but Murakami is Japanese, so I think it still counts J.

I’m reading Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami right now. I haven’t read anything by him in a while, and it was part of a small section of English books in my high school’s library.

I won’t get into the plot or the story – if you’ve read anything by Murakami it’s really hard to explain any of it anyway – but early in the novel he writes a couple of pages about capitalism that really struck a chord with me. I read it multiple times, and enjoy it for a number of reasons.

It doesn’t feel like it’s bashing capitalism, just presenting it in a way that makes a great deal of sense to me. I also like that even though this book was published in 1984, what it has to say rings as true today as it did almost 30 years ago.

I’m including the passage here in its entirety because I think it’s interesting, worth a read, and it’s my blog so I can do whatever I want J. Give it a read and let me know what you think. More on Japan soon…

Clint

That’s advanced capitalism for you: the player making the maximum capital investment gets the maximum critical information in order to reap the maximum desired profit with maximum capital efficiency – and nobody bats an eye. It’s just part of putting down capital these days. You demand the most return for your capital outlay. The person buying a used car will kick the tires and check under the hood, and the conglomerate putting down 100 billion yen will check over the finer points of where that capital’s going, and occasionally do a little fiddling. Fairness has got nothing to do with it. With that kind of money on the line, who’s going to sit around considering abstract things like that?

            Sometimes they even force hands.

            For instance, say there’s someone who doesn’t want to sell. Say, a long established shoe store. That’s when the tough guys come out of the woodwork. Huge companies have their connections, and you can count everyone from politicians and rock stars to out-and-out yakuza in their fold. So they just call on the boys with their samurai swords. The police are never too eager to deal with matters like this, especially since arrangements have already been made at the top. It’s not even corruption. That’s how the system works. That’s capital investment. Granted, this sort of thing isn’t new to the modern age. But everything before is nothing compared to the exacting detail and sheer power and invulnerability of today’s web of capitalism. And it’s megacomputers have made it all possible, with their inhuman capacity to pull every last factor on the face of the earth into their net calculations. Advanced capitalism has transcended itself. Not to overstate things, financial dealings have practically become a religious activity. The new mysticism. People worship capital, adore its aura, genuflect before Porsches and Tokyo land values. Worshipping everything their shiny Porsches symbolize. It’s the only stuff of myth that’s left in the world.

            Latter-day capitalism. Like it or not, it’s the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there’s fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there’s formal and then there’s casual; there’s hip, there’s cool, there’s trendy, there’s snobbish. Mix ‘n’ match. Like pulling on a Missoni sweater over Trussardi slacks and Pollini shoes, you can now enjoy hybrid styles of morality. It’s the way of the world – philosophy starting to look more and more like business administration.

            Although I didn’t think so at the time, things were a lot simpler in 1969. All you had to do to express yourself was throw rocks at riot police. But with today’s sophistication, who’s in position to throw rocks? Who’s going to brave what tear gas? C’mon, that’s the way it is. Everything is rigged, tied into that massive capital web, and beyond this web there’s another web. You throw a rock and it’ll come right back at you.