Cyberpunk 2077: An Odyssey through Capitalist Hellscapes

Originally published on The Commoner, 30 June 2023. Shared using Creative Commons license. Feel free to support The Commoner via their Patreon here.

While this review of Cyberpunk 2077 will include some spoilers about the start of the game, it will exclude much of the later plot, especially the ending(s). Still, I will examine some parallels between the game and the real world.

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Cyberpunk 2077 (2020), produced by the Polish company CD Projekt Red (with a market value of over $3 billion), is an enjoyable and incisive role-playing game (RPG) set in a deeply dystopian future. As its title suggests, the game blends such classic films as Blade Runner, Terminator, and The Matrix with video games like Deus Ex, Max Payne, and Grand Theft Auto. Its sequel, Phantom Liberty (2023), is highly-anticipated. Stunningly, with a budget of over $300 million, Cyberpunk is the most expensive game ever made. Indeed, the game’s photorealistic graphics themselves require the latest hardware, which is often costly, and usually environmentally destructive. Unlike newer games like Terra Nil (2023) that promote “climate positivity” and meditativeness in the face of global warming, Cyberpunk is a satirical odyssey depicting virtual class struggle in capitalist hellscapes. For this reason, as Thomas Wilson Jardine warns in his review of the game, its players run the risk of undergoing interpassivity, or the sublimated experience of revolutionary struggle, in place of actually organising for liberation.

Thematically, Cyberpunk has some crossover not only with Tonight We Riot (2020)—a revolutionary street-fighting game developed by Means TV—but also with ‘Duke Smoochem’ (2022), a surrealistic and irreverent fan-produced modification (or “mod”) of the PC game Duke Nukem 3D (1996). ‘Duke Smoochem’ is set in the present-day UK, dominated by the Conservative Party and stricken by COVID-19. Developer Dan Douglas explains: ‘I see Duke Smoochem as both a documentation of, and rebellion against, an increasingly absurd country, packaged as nostalgia.’ Indeed, it riffs on the satirical violence of ‘Thatcher’s Techbase,’ a Doom (1993) mod based on the premise of fighting off the late Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s resurrected demon. Yet, in contrast to the tones of ‘Duke Smoochem’ or ‘Thatcher’s Techbase,’ which are ‘silly and slapstick,’ Cyberpunk is more serious and grim-dark. That being said, these games function as ‘powerful piece[s] of protest art.’

Cyberpunk’s Anti-Capitalist Odyssey

Cyberpunk is set five decades from now in Night City, which is located somewhere in northern California. In this ultraviolent, hyper-capitalist metropolis, everything is for sale, the Night City Police Department (NCPD) is privatised, and the weapon-manufacturing conglomerates Arasaka and Militech compete for market dominance.

If players choose their protagonist ‘V’ to be a ‘corpo’ character, they will start in a prologue as a mid-ranking employee in Arasaka’s counter-intelligence division. During this sequence, one almost immediately encounters the company’s overpowering visual propaganda, aimed at instilling pride at its having supposedly ‘prevent[ed] mass riots in San Francisco’ in 2071 and ‘secure[d]’ a corporate summit in Jakarta in 2076. Meanwhile, the player’s interface monitors productivity alongside fluctuations in the stock market in real time. Just after one’s psychopathic boss impulsively assassinates several board members of the European Space Council by remote control, V is sent on a dangerous mission to eliminate this boss’s superior in the Arasaka hierarchy.

If players choose to be a ‘nomad,’ V and their comrade Jackie Welles bribe border guards to smuggle contraband into Night City, provoking violent retaliation from corporate agents. As a ‘street kid,’ V is arrested by the NCPD while stealing a luxury car for a petty crime boss.

When the game properly begins, whatever class one chooses, V and Jackie rescue the moribund Sandra Dorsett, who had been captured, sedated, and placed on ice by the Scavenger gang (who notoriously exploit their victims for the latter’s cyber-implants). To aid Sandra, an aggressively militarised Trauma Team promptly arrives in a flying ambulance, with guns drawn (see below). In parallel, V soon confronts the sad fate of the sex worker, or ‘doll,’ Evelyn Parker, who is sold by her boss to a shady ‘ripperdoc’ known as Fingers, who then in turn sells her off to the Scavengers. Players can decide how to react to these disturbing revelations, whether by sparing such abusers, or avenging their victims.

With rifles trained on V, the Trauma Team arrives to provide emergency medical services to Sandra Dorsett at the start of Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt Red)

As in Deus Ex and other cyberpunk-themed games, this RPG allows one to play at being a ‘red detective’ who uncovers the atrocities of capitalism. For instance, when reading one of the multitude of ‘shards’ of textual information that can be discovered from fallen enemies or hacked computers in Night City, V learns of an exchange between a Militech officer and his superior, whereby the former requests authorization to open fire on striking workers who are not ‘responding to orders.’ Along similar lines, to protect corporate interests, the NCPD’s arsenal includes not only officers and SWAT teams, but also cyborg sentinels and elite airborne ‘MaxTac’ squads. As rackets ‘struggl[ing] for as great a share as possible of the surplus value,’ gangs and megacorporations alike compete in Night City for territory, arms, resources, labour, and political power. In keeping with Gramscian theories of hegemony, media throughout the Night City environment reinforce conservative-authoritarian messages about the need to obey the authorities and dedicate oneself to work.

Although its main story line is constant, no matter whether one starts as a ‘corpo,’ ‘nomad,’ or ‘street kid,’ Cyberpunk 2077 still allows for some variety in gaming experience. As with other RPG’s, players can choose to focus on physical strength and skills with weapons of different kinds, stealth and reflexes, hacking abilities, ‘coolness,’ or some combination of these attributes. They can also upgrade themselves, craft arms, and install different augmentations as they gain experience.

Besides its stunning graphics, the most unique aspect of Cyberpunk is its plot, which features physical and mental illness; the horrors of capitalist oppression, war trauma, and medical experimentation; and femicide, suicide, and mortality. That being said, these grave themes can be seen as variations on established cyberpunk media models, or as deepening and expanding the same. Either way, the in-game chance of pursuing a virtual heterosexual relationship (as a cis-male V) with the desert nomad Panam Palmer, and the recurrent motif of the “damsel in distress,” may re-entrench heteronormative and patriarchal values. Panam, after all, is reminiscent of Lara Croft, the heroine from the Tomb Raider games and films, who is known worldwide among “gamer bros” as a sex symbol.

Still, several LGBTQ+ cybersexual experiences are possible in the game. Among others, players have the choice to erotically proposition both male and female ‘dolls’; build a romance (as a cis-female V) with the hacker Judy Alvarez; and/or bond homosocially (as a cis-male V) with Johnny Silverhand, who is an anarchistic conscience and mentor played by Keanu Reeves. Moreover, this bond with Johnny may take on genderqueer and trans* dimensions, if one chooses a cis-female avatar at the outset. Arguably, this inclusion of possibilities for virtual, LGBTQ-inclusive sex-positivity is unique, among RPG’s, to Cyberpunk 2077. Still, this is not to downplay or ignore the transphobic messaging from Cyberpunk’s social media team, or the game’s trans-exclusive tying of gender to a binary choice on voice within the character creator, much less the casually white-supremacist in-game depiction of the  Haitian street-gang known as the “Voodoo Boys.”

Two of V’s closest confidantes: Panam Palmer (left) and Johnny Silverhand (right) (CD Projekt Red)

That being said, V’s relationship with Johnny—a former rock-star with the ‘Samurai’ band, trenchant critic of ‘corpos,’ and notorious insurrectionist—is intriguing. Silverhand is a brotherly figure who encourages V to think and act evermore boldly and radically. He inspires V to join in a ‘people’s war’ on the system. If players choose a cis-male avatar, these intimate political ties can take on homoerotic dimensions reminiscent of the comrade-love between a Samurai and his page, known as kosho. In parallel, while associating with Panam, V can also assist her collective, the Aldecaldo Nomads—who live outside Night City in a desert settlement powered by solar panels and windmills—in defending their autonomy against gangs and corporations alike.

Ultimately, the game’s main storyline can end in many different ways. While I will not spoil these endings here, to Thomas Wilson Jardine’s point, some certainly are post-modern and nihilistic. After all, before Cyberpunk even starts, players see a disclaimer from its creators, who clarify that they do not ‘endorse, condone, or encourage any of the viewpoints’ they’ve inserted into the game—a compelling and highly aesthetic journey into the “grim-dark” dimensions of capitalist hells!

Real-World Parallels

Regardless of CD Projekt Red’s disclaimer, Cyberpunk is a form of speculative fiction, akin to “cli-fi,” that projects existing infernal trends into the near future. It is a ‘second world to our ‘prime world’: a stark warning about the combination of ‘hyper-concentrated power and wealth,’ together with advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence and futuristic weapons. The game ceaselessly illustrates the dangers of corporate domination resulting from monopoly capitalism, echoing the “privatised imperialism” advanced historically by the English Royal African Company and East India Company.

The horrors of capitalism are reflected in Cyberpunk in the violent competition between Arasaka and Militech, the privatised police force, and in workers having their brains scanned for what George Orwell called ‘thought crimes’—when they are not shot down for demanding their rights. As with other examples of dystopian sci-fi, Cyberpunk foreshadows some of the more frightening possible consequences of the adoption of so-called “brain interface devices.” It thus anticipates how the U.S. Federal Drug Administration just greenlighted Neuralink—a company owned by Elon Musk—to begin clinical trials for brain implants on humans.

At the same time, Cyberpunk dialectically promotes the heroism of proletarian rebellion and insurrection. The Aldecaldo nomads symbolise exilic autonomy from the system of exploitation, in an echo of the Zapatistas and the Rojava Revolution. While V can choose to fight against gangs and corporations alike with a view to opportunistically wresting social control from them—as is preached by Marxism—players can also aim to take virtual direct action against capitalist and bureaucratic domination, in line with anarchist principles.

The armed protagonist V of Cyberpunk 2077 looks on at anti-corporate graffiti (CD Projekt Red)

Conclusion

So does Cyberpunk 2077 promote interpassivity, the phenomenon whereby a ‘piece of media performs our anti-capitalism for us’? That is a very real possibility. Yet, another possibility is that engaging with media about dystopian futures like Cyberpunk may not only nourish the radical imagination, but also encourage revolt. Along these lines, it is significant that, within a sector notorious for burning out developers—including in the very making of Cyberpunk itself—video-game workers have begun organising the industry’s first unions.

In terms of proving or disproving Wilson Jardine’s hypothesis, one way forward might be to perform social-research studies into the game’s effects on some of its players’ attitudes toward capitalism on the one hand, and any organising efforts they might have been involved with before, during, and/or after playing it, on the other. Such a model could also be applied to other games, books, TV shows, and films. For instance, there might be a comparative political study of players of Cyberpunk, Tonight We Riot, Deus Ex, and ‘Duke Smoochem.’ Another possibility would be to compare attitudes toward capitalism and commitment to organising projects among players of these violent games, versus those of more meditative, peaceful games, like Terra Nil. Some things to think about, Samurai!

A holographic koi procession (CD Projekt Red)

On Internationalist Socialist Solidarity and Anti-Imperialism

Presentation at Left Coast Forum panel on imperialism and anti-imperialism, August 25, 2018

In light of the fate of the Syrian Revolution, which has now nearly been crushed entirely by the bloody counter-revolution carried out by Bashar al-Assad together with his Russian, Iranian, and Lebanese allies, there has been renewed debate on the global left regarding the meanings of imperialism and anti-imperialism, and the political implications these carry. Many authoritarians claiming leftism cross-over with the white-supremacist right’s open support for the Assad Regime by denying its crimes and overlooking the (sub)imperialist roles played by Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran in Syria, focusing exclusively on the U.S.’s supposed opposition to Assad’s rule.

This tendency is a worrisome development, suggestive as it is of a red-brown alliance (or axis) that is not consistently anti-imperialist or internationalist but rather, only opposed to U.S. imperialism. It also fails analytically to see how the U.S. has increasingly accommodated Assad’s ghastly ‘victory,’ as reflected in Donald Trump’s cutting off of the White Helmets in May and his non-intervention as Assad, Russia, and Iran defeated formerly U.S.-supported Free Syrian Army (FSA) units of the Southern Front, reconquering Der’aa, birthplace of the Revolution, and the remainder of the southwest last month. In stark contrast to such approaches, today we will discuss militarism and imperialism from anti-authoritarian and class framework-analyses.

Toward this end, I want to suggest that Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation’s definition of imperialism is apt: from their Point of Unity on Internationalism and Imperialism, “Imperialism is a system where the state and elite classes of some countries use their superior economic and military power to dominate and exploit the people and resources of other countries.”¹ This brutal concept applies clearly to contemporary and historical global practices which since 1492 primarily Western European and U.S. ruling classes have imposed onto much of the world, from the trans-Atlantic slave trade—this month marks 500 years—to colonial famines, genocide, military occupation, and settler-colonial regimes. Yet, more controversially among many so-called leftists who adhere to a ‘campist analysis,’ whereby the world is split up into competing military blocs,² this concept of imperialism and its related concept of sub-imperialism can also be applied to the contemporary practices of the ruling classes of such societies as Russia, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, otherwise known as the BRICS. According to Rohini Hensman in her new book Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism (2018), the “pseudo-anti-imperialists” of today can be divided into three categories: tyrants, imperialists, and war criminals; the neo-Stalinists who openly support them; and Orientalist ‘progressives’ who focus exclusively on Western imperialism, to the exclusion of all other considerations, such as the agency of Middle Eastern peoples, as well as the realities of non-Western imperialism & sub-imperialism (47-52). For those to whom the concept may be unfamiliar, sub-imperialism is defined in the Marxist theory of dependency (MTD) as a process whereby a dependent or subordinate country becomes a “regional sub-centre,” unifies “different bourgeois factions by displacing internal contradictions, develops a “specific national and sub-imperialist political-ideological project,” forms and advances monopolies, and simultaneously transfers value to the core-imperialist countries while also exploiting materially and geopolitically weaker countries for the benefit of its bourgeoisie.³

The central military roles played by Putin and the Islamic Republic in rescuing the Assad Regime from defeat in the Syrian Revolution—and, indeed, their joint responsibility for the overall murder of 200,000 civilians and the forcible disappearance of over 80,000 Syrians in this enterprise over the past seven years, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), and as confirmed recently by Assad’s mass-release of death notices for detainees—thus starkly demonstrate pressing cases of imperialism and sub-imperialism on today’s global stage, yet in contrast to the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians just across Syria’s southwest border, it is apparently eminently controversial among U.S./Western neo-Stalinist ‘leftists’ to acknowledge the reactionary, authoritarian, and yes, (sub)imperialist functions served by Vladimir Putin and the Islamic Republic in propping up Assad,⁴ a neo-fascist who does not just rule over a ‘dictatorial regime’ but rather heads an exterminationist State, as the Syrian communist Yassin al-Hajj Saleh observes, and as the death toll attests to. According to Saleh:

“I do not talk about Syria because I happen to come from this country afflicted with one of the most brutal ruling juntas in the world today, nor because Syria is under multiple occupations while Syrians themselves are scattered around the world. Rather, I speak of Syria because the Syrian genocide is met by a state of global denial, where the left, the right, and the mainstream all compete with one another to avert their eyes and formulate cultural discourses, genocidal themselves, to help them see and feel nothing.”

The Russian Defense Ministry just announced on Wednesday, August 22, that 63,000 soldiers have fought in Syria in the past three years, while in June, Putin announced that Russian troops were “testing and training” in Syria so as to prevent a similar situation arising in Russia proper. (Does this sound to anyone like Dick Cheney talking about Iraq?) Hence, in light of the effective occupation of Syria perpetrated by Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and other Shi’a militias (e.g. Liwa Fatemiyoun) to prop up the regime, taken together with their attendant contributions to what Saleh calls the Syrian genocide—a counter-insurgent reaction which others have termed ‘democidal’—it is my view, and I believe that of my co-panelists, that several of the struggles against Assad, Putin, and the Islamic Republic of Iran form critical parts of the global anti-imperialist movement which by definition resists militarism and regional and transnational domination and exploitation. If human rights are the “tribunal of history” and their end (or goal) the construction of an ethical and political utopia,⁵ these regimes, in parallel to Western imperialism, are on the wrong side of history. In accordance with the conclusion of Hensman’s book, democratic movements like the Iranian popular revolts of early 2018; the ongoing Ahwazi mobilizations for socio-ecological justice; those of feminists and political prisoners in all three countries; and Russian Antifa, among others, demand our support and solidarity as socialists. Of course, anti-imperialist forces should continue to oppose established Euro-American imperialism and settler-colonialism—“the main enemy is at home,” as Karl Liebknecht declared in 1915, denouncing what he termed the ‘genocide’ of World War I⁶—together with the neo-colonial crimes of allied autocracies such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in Yemen today. Liebknecht’s statement notwithstanding, we must recall that he in no way supported the Tsar or other imperialist rivals of the German State, but the Russian Revolution instead.

Therefore, a truly humanist form of anti-imperialism today cannot exclude the Syrian, Russian, and Iranian regimes from critique and, it is to be hoped, support for organization toward their ultimate demise.⁷ The atrocity-denialism engaged in by many self-styled ‘progressives’ and ‘leftists’ in the West when it comes to the Assad Regime, as identified by Leila al-Shami and others, is abhorrent. If we really believe as internationalists and egalitarians that each human life has equal dignity and value, we must play no part in it.⁸

For our own sake and for the sake of the global revolution, too, it would behoove us to examine the actual affinities between the Trump Regime and Putin, which span allegations of collusion or conspiracy during the 2016 election to Trump’s very obvious servility before the former FSB chief at the Helsinki Summit of July 2018, besides Trump’s aforementioned withdrawal of U.S. support for the Syrian rebels, a move that may well have been coordinated with Russia as an affirmation on Trump’s part of Assad’s ghoulish campaign to retake the entire country.

Appendix:

The red-brown axis certainly has its precedents: the historian Marko Attila Hoare has correctly diagnosed several self-described Euro-American ‘anti-imperialists’ as being ‘left-revisionists’ who reject the orthodox Western view that holds Serbian nationalism to be the primary aggressor in the Balkan wars of the 1990’s that led to the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Muslim Bosniaks and Kosovar Albanians, as reflected in the so-called leftist intellectuals and publications (Noam Chomsky, Diana Johnstone, CounterPunch) who effectively supported the embattled ultra-nationalist Serbian president, Slobodan Milošević, for his ‘resistance’ to the US/NATO, thus betraying their campism where we should expect humanist solidarity with those victimized by Serbian expansionism.

Rohini Hensman argues as an alternative to established pseudo-anti-imperialism that we pursue and tell the truth; critique ideologies that delegitimize democracy and promote authoritarianism; reaffirm the morality of resisting oppression and proclaiming solidarity with the victims of violence; place internationalism center-stage; and consider reforms to State sovereignty in light of mass-slaughter and the absence of democracy.

Notes

1This definition differs somewhat from Lenin’s definition of imperialism as “the monopoly stage of capitalism,” whereby the merging of big banks and industry exists inevitably alongside “a colonial policy of monopolist possession of the territory of the world.” It does not contradict Lenin’s subsequent redefinition in the same text: “Imperialism is the epoch of finance capital and of monopolies, which introduce everywhere the striving for domination, not for freedom. Whatever the political system, the result of these tendencies is everywhere reaction and an extreme intensification of antagonisms in this field. Particularly intensified become the yoke of national oppression and the striving for annexations, i.e., the violation of national independence (for annexation is nothing but the violation of the right of nations to self-determination).”

2Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), World Workers’ Party (WWP), World Socialist Website (WSWS), Max Blumenthal, Rania Khalek, Vanessa Beeley (actually fascist), Seymour Hersh, “Revolutionary Left Radio,” Glenn Greenwald, and others.

3Adrián Sotelo Valencia, Sub-Imperialism Revisited: Dependency Theory in the Thought of Ruy Mauro Marini, trans. Jacob Lagnado (Haymarket Books: Chicago, 2017), 67-8.

4By BRRN’s definition, above; also cf. Rudolf Hilferding, cited in Lenin’s “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism”: “European capital can maintain its domination only by continually increasing its military forces.”

5Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights (Hart Publishing: Oxford, 2000), 380.

6“International proletarian class struggle against international imperialist genocide is the socialist commandment of the hour.”

7See Asr Anarshism’s open campaign to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran.

8See the conclusions of a lab working for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which confirm use of sarin gas from regime stockpiles in Ghouta (2013), Khan Sheikhoun (2017), and Khan al-Assal (2013). According to OPCW findings, it was chlorine, not sarin, that was used in the chemical attack on Douma, Eastern Ghouta, in April 2018.

At Left Forum 2014, “Confronting Global Environmental Catastrophe: Anarchist Analyses of Collapse”

I will be on a panel with Sky Cohen and John P. Clark at this year’s Left Forum, to be held at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.  It will be taking place on the third day of Left Forum 2014, 1 June, at 3:40pm in room 3.78.  Our discussion is entitled “Confronting Global Environmental Catastrophe: Anarchist Analyses of Collapse.”  An abstract follows:

“Anarchist and anti-authoritarian analyses of the multidimensional crisis being propelled by capital, patriarchy, and the State are greatly relevant to any consideration of the prevailing reality for the Left and planet Earth in 2014 and beyond. At present, the profound crisis of monopoly capitalism is seen reflected in the ecocidal trends it engenders that tend toward its own destruction: nuclear disasters, seemingly ceaseless mineral-extraction operations, the sixth great mass extinction event, and unchecked climate catastrophe. Would it be possible for a revolutionary subject to emerge within this undoubtedly catastrophic hegemonic milieu—and if so, how? In the realm of aesthetics, surrealism promises a shock character to disrupt the operations of the existing life-world—a tradition seen as well in insurrectionary and social anarchist visions. In what way might the force of the traumatic Real of ecological collapse lead to the emergence of a large-scale, self-conscious, highly mobilized movement for liberatory social transformation—or, indeed, tend toward its very antithesis? This conversation among three anarchist thinkers will discuss the depths of the prevailing environmental crisis and examine and critique possible strategies to be considered by anti-authoritarian leftists confronted with this difficult situation.

We will surely be addressing the charge of catastrophism as well as discussing the problems of the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet and the ongoing California drought, among other disconcerting environmental realities, all while framing these issues within a solidly anti-systemic analysis.  Registration (required for participation at LF) can be done here, with online discounts ending on 25 May.  Hope to see you there.