Quote Originally Posted by Forsaken Lover View Post
I hope you are using the term Marxism in its loosest sense wehn talking about FFVII.

Marx's ideas on capitalism had very specific tones, predictions and theories primarily retaining to communism and how it would be achieved.

FFVII had an evil corporation that ruled the world through monoplizing a valuable resource as well as military might.
This has nothing to do with Marxist theory apart from there being a giant corporation oppressing the workers.

And suggesting FFVII had any sort of radically "in-depth" character lineup is just plain laughable.
I never said it had any radically in-depth character lineup.

Alot of marx's ideas and those of other followers of his are present in the game, I'm surprised you missed it. One is that capitalism replaces the old hidden exploitation with naked, unashamed and blatant exploitation. This is obviously manifested in the fact that Midgar's rich live on top of their poor. This also reinforces his idea that capitalism divides society into 2 distinct camps rather than multiple groups or a hierarchy. In midgar, you're either down in the slums or up on the plate.

Another idea put forth is that it reduces all meaning of what it is to be a human being, reducing man to a machine, no better than the actual machines they work with, a variable of input. Jesse tells cloud all the different sectors used to have names, but no one remembers them anymore and they are replaced by numbers, mathematical representations rather than resulting from linguistic traditions with meaning.

Marx said that the most powerful part of capitalism is that it actually persuades those it exploits that it's in their best interest to participate in society. Many of those living in Midgar's slums express this sentiment, like the man with the TV in sector 5 (i think, whichever one Aeris' house is in).

He also wrote extensibly on how the bourgeouisie branch out from their own nation-states and try to create a world in their own image. Lenin and other Marxists, also, wrote about imperialism which stems from business interests of economic elites. This plays into the war with Wutai, in which they effectively reduced all of the traditions of a completely different culture. They do the exact same to Corel, undermining its deeply rooted cultural tradition of coal mining, and changing them to Shinra's ways. The communist manifesto went into detail on how old traditional industries are destroyed and forcefully replaced with new ones.

He talks about how it creates enormous cities, which draw population from the rural, and make them far more populous than the rural. It concentrates wealth in the hands of the few, and concentrates poverty into distinct areas, which again, goes back to the geographic segregation of midgar.

Many marxists have wrote in the 20th century about what the end result of capitalism will be, especially in the wake of globalization. They stated that all other forms of control, specifically government would be eroded until the distinction between business and government would be no more. This is absolutely inescapable in VII, as Shinra is a company...yet it governs a city and at the same time controls an army. Yet it is an enterprise. The game was especially relevant at the time, as globalization was one of the major buzz words in political discussion during the 1990's.

It's pouring out of so much of the game, I'm surprised you missed it, assuming that you understand what Marx wrote about. I'm assuming you actually don't, since you say it was specifically "retained" (?) to communism and how it would be achieved. If anything, that was the part that Marx wrote the least about. He has so many expansive works detailing every aspect of capitalism, how it operates, how it came about, to the smallest detail, yet the part on how to achieve communism was probably the smallest section of the manifesto.