Thanks for your question.
The Short Answer
The short answer is that discussion of a piece of media falls into the category of consumer action, regardless of the conditions under which it was produced, and regardless of if it was consumed in an authorized or unauthorized manner. At the end of the day it’s your own conscience you have to live with, in terms of whether you feel you can participate in a discussion or not.
The long answer comes to the same conclusion after examining what I see as two primary threads; the nature of industrial production in a capitalist system (in this example pertaining specifically to media), and the nature of discourse within such a system. This is a fascinating aspect of the world we live in so I’d like to use your question to springboard into another essay, primarily about the former thread, as the latter is soooo difficult to wrap my head around in such a way that I can attempt to put an explanation into words.
The Long Answer
Let’s begin by breaking our examination down into a few parts. Apologies if this is rudimentary.
A) What Are the Needs of Life?
B) What Does History Tell Us About How Getting Those Needs Met Has Changed Over Time?
C) What is Capitalism?
D) What is Intellectual Property?
E) Application to the Example
A) What Are the Needs of Life?
In order to continue living, life forms have several fundamental needs. Food, water, air, shelter; if these needs go unmet, life dies. Humans are no different. Plants take in solar energy through their leaves and water & nutrients in through the soil. Some animals eat those plants while some animals eat other animals. The circle of life and so forth. All life obtains their needs directly from nature. The easiest of these to explore further is food, but the following exploration applies to all needs.
B) What Does History Tell Us About How Getting Those Needs Met Has Changed Over Time?
For most of the 100,000 years of human history, humans lived as hunter-gatherers and acted much like any other life form. But about 10,000 years ago people developed agriculture. In doing so, people no longer turned to nature to find food, they could grow plants and raise animals themselves. With this change came the requirement to secure land in order to do agriculture. At that point, cities began to develop as people put down roots.
Those roots ended up giving some people an advantage over others. Those who had more land, better land, land closer to rivers, etcetera, also gathered power at the same time. Their power derived from their ownership over this land and their ability to secure it for themselves, not allowing others to freely use it. This is where the concept of property came from.
For many centuries, this land was pretty much in the power of various monarchies, or complete wilderness under no control. But a couple hundred years ago, prior to the Industrial Revolution — or more accurately in concert with it — came about what is known as the Enclosure Movement.
Property, of which land is the most basic, can be understood to be either Public Property or Private Property. Public Property belongs to all people, so functionally there is no owner. That is the default state of nature. Private Property belongs to a specific individual or group, and they get to control who has access to it. This is not to be confused with Personal Property, which is the stuff a person owns.
Here’s a quick example. Personal Property is the shirt you’re wearing. The factory that fabricated it, the store that sold it, the land where the cotton to make it was grown; these are all Private Property. Public Property is what the world was before it was privatized and access was restricted. Public Property still ‘exists’ in the form of public lands, but nearly all of it is still held in stewardship by governments on behalf of the people rather than being truly Owner-free.
In the beginning all property was Public Property because there was no concept of ownership. The world was used by those who needed to use it. The rise of agriculture began the privatization of property, and Enclosure put the final nail in the coffin.
In a Feudal system, even though land was ‘owned’ by the monarchy, it wasn’t owned in the sense that land is owned today. The monarch would divide up the land to various landlords, but because they couldn’t put the land entirely to use themselves, they had serfs work it for them. A large portion of this land was also considered Public Property that anyone could use for growing crops, for grazing animals, the public square, the public river, and so on.
What Enclosure did was to take all that public land and privatize it all, to declare that every inch of it had an ‘Owner’. Serfs who worked the land not only for the landlord but also for their own sustenance, found themselves no longer allowed to do so. With the increased productivity of the tools of the Industrial Revolution, the land could be worked more efficiently in a large, industrial manner, rather than having a lot of small serfs do it.
What basically happened here is that the relationship between people and their needs changed. Before, humans got their needs directly from nature like all other life forms. Now, with Enclosure, they were no longer allowed to. The privatization of property forbade them from taking their needs from the land because they didn’t own it. Only people who owned land could use it.
While some of the serfs remained to work the Enclosed land, most had to find some other way to get their needs met, now that they were no longer allowed to turn directly to nature. What happened was the rise of more Private Property in the form of factories. The increased efficient output of the land meant that there was a surplus of food. But rather than simply giving it to people, the layer known as Capitalism arose as a barrier between people and their needs. The outed serfs had nothing but their labor power, and there was all this food that needed to be consumed. By employing people in their factories, Capitalists gained a labor force to work raw materials into goods. In exchange, people were paid, and used those earnings to purchase their needs.
C) What is Capitalism?
This is the basic form of Capitalism. It simply isn’t the exchange of money for goods and services, nor is it simply the presence of a market. What makes Capitalism distinct is the relationship between labor and capital. With nearly everything made into Private Property, people have nothing of their own except their ability to work, their labor power. They have to put that to use to generate Capital, which they can then exchange to get their needs met.
Here’s the main problem with that system, and why it’s unethical and dangerous. Since people can’t simply get their needs from nature, they have to sell their labor power instead. That requires their labor power to be of value to someone who wants to purchase it. In other words, a person has to prove themselves. They have to prove that they can work, they have to prove that they have value, they have to prove that they deserve to live. Because without that proof, they cannot exchange their labor for capital, they can’t exchange that capital for their needs, their needs go unmet, and they die.
That’s the main problem with Capitalism. It forces people to prove that they deserve to live. Anyone that can’t do that is believed, by the system, to not have value and to be better off dead. Needs that were once obtained directly from nature were now enmeshed into a system where monetary value was required on order to obtain them. Ordinary people didn’t own any land, so they couldn’t grow the food they needed. They had to instead convert their labor power — their life force, in other words — into Capital that could then be traded to meet their needs.
The Capitalist system doesn’t care about life, it only cares about its own functionality because that’s all it can care about. A system doesn’t possess a heart, a mind, a soul. It’s only a concept, an idea. It cannot feel, it can only function by the framework that constructs it. It can’t care at all, it can only follow the rules that guide its framework. A fish with gills has to extract oxygen from the water, it cannot function any other way. What the fish wants to do it irrelevant. Likewise, Capitalism requires the extraction of Capital from labor, that’s its basic functionality. Asking for an ethical Capitalism is like asking for a massless object, for eyes without color; it’s literally impossible.
Now, our world does have various kinds of welfare to try to take care of people who cannot prove that their labor has value. Children, the elderly, people with disabilities, etcetera, but this welfare system also demands that people prove they deserve it. They have to prove that they can’t work due to age or illness or injury and so forth. The burden of proof hasn’t vanished, it merely shifted to make people show that they can’t work, rather than that they can. It provides an ‘acceptable exception’ under which someone has to fall in order to receive the benefits.
D) What is Intellectual Property?
Intellectual Property is another form of Private Property. Rather than land or factories, it concerns things that are less tangible. Ideas, methods, stories, media, and so on. This things have been determined to have value to the Capitalist system and have been Enclosed in much the same way land was Enclosed. For most of human history the stories and ideas shared didn’t have owners. Myths, tales, histories, how to farm, how to make a shirt, how to dig a well; these didn’t belong to any person, but to Humanity as a whole. They may have had creators or originators, but they didn’t have Owners. With the rise of Capitalism, Owners were also created. Because Capitalism seeks to Enclose everything, even stories and concepts were Enclosed as Intellectual Property.
Land can be physically restricted from use by those who don’t own it with fences, walls, and — most importantly of all — force. Violence, in other words, in the form of Law and the State. The State — a country, a nation — holds a monopoly on violence. They’re the only ones with a right to be violent through the use of soldiers and police, and they enforce that monopoly with violence itself. Though soldiers have been around for a long time, police are a relatively new invention. They exist, not to protect the public as they want you to believe, but to protect Private Property.
Police arose at the same time as Private Property, and in the United States of America in particular, with slavery. Slaves were the Private Property of slaveowners, and police were basically invented to keep them enslaved. But they also existed to protect other forms of Private Property as well, and to make sure they they remained private. This was the impetus for the American Colonies rebellion from England. The Private Property Owners — mostly slaveowners — of the colonies wanted the freedom to own their Private Property without interference from the English Crown, which still wanted to maintain their power, which they felt slipping away in the evolution from Feudalism to Capitalism. That’s why the Founding Fathers were able to claim to speak for freedom while still owning slaves. It wasn’t freedom in the sense of every human having fundamental worth. It was a fight between one group of wealthy white property owners against another group of wealthy white property owners. A close examination of any of the myriad of documents produced during that time will prove that truth, with a glimmer of lip service paid to a greater understanding of freedom.
The violence of the State is also employed to protect Intellectual Property rights. Piracy — which is the internet colloquialism for copyright infringement — defies that Privatization of property. It’s a crime invented to maintain the privatization of intangible property. There are theoretically infinite copies of Intellectual Property, so in order for it to be kept Private, there has to be a mechanism to artificially limit supply, which comes down to determining who has permission to access. It’s a concept that was originally invented because book publishers in Europe were getting upset that book publishers in the US were making copies and selling them themselves instead of importing from the continent. Actual writers and other creators had nothing to do with it, and were only retroactively protected, and now serve as a shield behind which corporate entities hide when they claim that copyright is for the protection of creators. All copyright does is serve as another chain binding people to the Ownership model of Capitalism in which all property is Private Property.
E) Application to the Example
Let’s take all that history and now apply it to the particular example of Anime. Anime, in most cases, is produced within an industrial framework. There are Capitalist companies that employ the labor of various workers on order to produce a product that can be sold. The revenue from that sale comes into the company from consumers. Part of that is used to pay expenses, one of which is payroll to those employees. What’s left over is considered ‘profit.’ This is true is pretty much any industry.
What needs to be understood is that ‘profit’ is the value extracted from workers that isn’t returned to them. Most labor theory regards this as a form of theft. If a worker produces $100 worth of labor in an eight hour day, but is only paid $10 an hour, then they’re only receiving $80. The remaining $20 is value that they produced that they are not compensated for. They produced that labor, but are not paid for it, the company keeps it. That’s why it’s considered theft.
Whether they are freelancers being paid per cut, or employees paid by the hour, or drawing a salary, Anime workers — like workers in every other industry — are not returned the full 100% of the value they produce, even taking other expenses into account. This is true in any industry; look at fast food, Walmart, Amazon. Those are giant companies; in many American states Walmart is the largest employer, but they are notorious for having the lowest pay. This is not a coincidence, it’s the two sides of the coin. Those companies are the largest and wealthiest because their workers receive a low pay.
Now, how does money actually flow from consumer to worker in the anime industry? A consumer buys a graphic novel or pays for a streaming service. That money is distributed to all the different companies that have a hand in the jar. Some of that then proceeds to payroll.
But! For most of those workers, the revenue earned isn’t pertinent. An animator paid to produce a cut — a sequence of animation — earns the same amount no matter how much value that cut produces for the company. A popular show, an unpopular show, they get paid the same amount. The conceit is that if something is popular, the company has more money to invest in future work. But there’s no mechanism to force them to do that, there’s no mechanism to force them to hire that animator again. They have an incentive to do so, but there’s no requirement. When you buy anime, the people who produced it already got paid. You’re not funding the past, you’re funding the future.
The counter to this argument is that — for novels and Manga in particular — some workers receive a royalty from sales. This is true. The refrain is to ‘support workers by buying what they produce.’ Support the Anime Industry by watching legal streams. Support Manga artists by buying their books.
However! This produces a separate set of problems. If a manga is popular and sells a lot, the creator makes more money. If it’s not, however, they don’t. If an artist can’t entice people to buy their work, then they’re not making money. They still have to prove that they deserve to live, but that burden has now shifted from the employer directly to the public. A creator dependent on revenue is at the mercy of people spending money regardless of if that revenue goes directly to them via royalties or is filtered through the traditional corporate revenue to payroll system.
This entrenches the Capitalist system by making people dependent on it for their needs no matter what. If an animator isn’t making enough animating, they could produce an artbook, but it still requires people to buy it. They could even take direct commissions, but that still requires people to buy them. The burden of proof never goes away, it just takes on different forms. This is what the ‘support the artist’ refrain fails to appreciate. Capitalism requires people to prove that they deserve to live. If they can’t sell enough to support themselves, then it’s their own fault for not being good enough.
But even if a worker did receive 100% of their produced labor value, it doesn’t stop them from still having to prove their worth. If they stop working, they stop earning. An animator has to keep animating. A manga artist has to keep drawing. They have to keep selling product in order to make money, royalties or not. If it stops selling, the money stops coming in, they can’t pay for their needs, they die.
That’s why the idea of Piracy, of copyright infringement, is a distraction and mostly irrelevant. Yes, if something is consumed without paying for it in the authorized way, the money doesn’t enter the system. But it’s exactly the same if people abstain entirely. Zero dollars go to Oda if someone reads an unauthorized scan of One Piece, but zero dollars also go to Oda if a person doesn’t read it all. He has to keep proving that One Piece is worth reading in order to keep making money. If everybody suddenly decided to stop reading One Piece, he’d go broke like any other worker who can’t prove their value to the Capitalist system. The only difference is what society determines is acceptable or not, and right now society says that it’s not okay for an artist to starve if people take their work without paying, but it is okay for an artist to starve if no one wants their work at all. For every Oda, there are thousands of other Manga creators that only sell a few copies of their work.
The complaint against copyright infringement is mainly championed by corporate entities because it directly impacts their bottom line, a bottom line that depends on property remaining private, them owning that property and controlling access to it. The fact that workers are also impacted is because of how they’re forced to participate in the system to get their needs met. It pushes the burden to meet people’s needs from the company to the consumer and blames them if it doesn’t happen. It’s an abdication of the responsibility towards workers that corporate entities took on as a condition of the Enclosure of Private Property. It refuses to allow people to meet their needs directly, but also refuses to meet their needs itself unless the condition of ‘prove you deserve it’ is met.
It’s the underlying framework that people have to prove that they deserve to live that makes Capitalism such a problem. It deprives people of being able to get their needs met from nature directly, forces them to convert their labor into a desirable form that Capital can exploit. They receive a portion of that to trade for their needs, but even if they received 100%, they still have to convert their labor and they still have to trade it for their needs. That underlying framework remains.
Conclusion
To conclude, what this hastily assembled examination means is that the Capitalist system persists regardless of if you consume an authorized or unauthorized copy of a piece of media because the system by its very nature is exploitative. There can’t be an ethical Capitalism because the framework relies on the foundation of people having to prove that they deserve to live, even if workers receive 100% of the value they produce.
Piracy — copyright infringement — is a symptom of the disease that is Capitalism because it is Capitalism that Encloses Public Property and transforms it into Private Property. Return all of human creation to the public domain where it rightly belongs, and piracy will vanish entirely because the concept of Ownership and Private Property no longer exists. To truly eliminate piracy entirely then the one and only one to do that is to eliminate the concept of ownership and private property. Anyone who calls for the former but not the latter is calling for a crackdown so that Capitalism can tighten its grip even more. It will never support workers beyond the most basic level of allowing them to continue to have their labor exploited. To think otherwise is to engage in delusional belief.
At the same time, if you pirate something without also taking down this system, all it really amounts to is saying “I want this thing.” You can’t justify poor working conditions as a reason to pirate without making material changes to those working conditions. What has to happen is for an alternative way of meeting people’s needs outside of Enclosure, outside of Capitalism. Once people can get food, water, shelter, without having to exchange their labor for capital, then all property can revert back into being Public, Intellectual Property included. It’s only privatized because the Capitalist system requires Private Property to function.
Some people could make cases for copying a tool like Photoshop because it gives people a tool with which they can create, or scientific information locked away in paid journals because it could be used to solve a pressing environmental or medical problem and so forth. But that falls into the ‘proof’ scenario where some things are more deserving because of being perceived as more valuable. It doesn’t overturn the framework, it just provides ‘acceptable exceptions,’ like the welfare model.
However, that’s not to say that nothing can be done. Even if overturning Capitalism entirely is a daunting task, there are ways to fight against it. Labor activists have done so for over a hundred years and have won victories like minimum wage, maximum hours, safety regulations, and so on. Those are the examples that I cite in the original piece, and they have to be approached as a citizen of the human race, not as a consumer because consumer action is limited to working within the system’s framework.
That was the point of my original piece. The refrain of ‘support workers’ is usually framed as ‘buy stuff,’ which is a consumer action and won’t impact meaningful change. In no industry will giving more money — and therefore more power — to Capitalist Entities like corporations help improve working conditions. Fast food companies grew to mammoth proportions in the twentieth century. Walmart grew incredibly during the 90s and 2000s. Amazon exploded in size during the 2000s and 2010s. All of this happened because more people were buying what they sold, which gave them more money. At the same time, workers in those companies have notoriously low pay and poor working conditions. That happened because more money and power was given to the companies, and it took herculean efforts by workers and labor activists to make even small changes happen. There’s no indication that any industry would be immune from that, and animation is no exception. In no world can pouring more money into an industry improve working conditions in that industry because that is antithetical to the Capitalist framework.
In order to impact meaningful change — making conditions more bearable while we work towards an alternative world where people don’t have that they deserve to live by converting their labor into Capital that can then be traded for filling needs — the kinds of actions that need to be taken are citizen actions like what I indicated in the original piece.
To circle back to your question, I restate the short answer, which is where this has been leading to all along. The actions of an individual consumer are largely irrelevant to the function of the system. Participation in discussion of any media, regardless of working conditions, regardless of if that media was consumed in an authorized or unauthorized manner is a personal matter that really only depends on the conscience of the individual. It’s each person’s individual choice how to engage as a consumer, because it’s the actions taken as a citizen that will make the difference.
I hope that wasn’t too long-winded, but your question provided me an opportunity to summarize a number of things I’d been mulling for a while so thank you for that.
