It “feels corrupt,” explains producer, writer, director, creator Sam Esmail in reference to the world’s credit system. “It feels like a system that wants to keep people in debt, whereas its intention was to boost the economy.”

“There are going to be repercussions [to erasing debt]. It’s just not the way economics works.”

One cannot speak highly enough of the new series Mr. Robot starring Rami Malek, Christian Slater and a cast chalk-full of talent. Framed like arthouse cinema, paced like an Action/Mystery/Thriller combo with plenty of comedic elements, the Wednesday 10 pm television slot on USA Network has never seemed so far away. And I don’t even watch TV.

The show has already done plenty of amazing things in its six episode run.

For one, it manages to capture a glimpse into the hacking subculture, in a way that isn’t boring as fuck. Hackers and critics alike have praised it—a feat nay accomplished since the Wachowski’s seminal 1999 film, The Matrix.

Yes, I just compared them.

One of them most interesting aspects of the show is its realism. Nothing in show so far has seemed impossible. The operating systems and terminal interface commands are completely real. There is no bullet dodging. No leaping between skyscrapers. No overly clichéd slow-motion (although we’ve heard morphine withdrawal, as portrayed in the show, is a tad bit exaggerated).

Politically the show is just as on point. It skillfully portrays the intricacies of social relationships today; relationships between friends and enemies, lovers and fighters, drug dealers and users, workers and bosses. It’s very adept at capturing life for many of us in the year 2015 A.D.

Above all the other praises we can give the series, creator Sam Esmail has managed—so far—to do what very few pieces of art in modern human history have done. Among the loads of additional embedded layers, and glorious Easter eggs, he somehow manages to make room to challenge the haughty power of the people who rule society.

Esmail does not go by way of shrouded metaphors, pure science fiction or any other forms of petty bourgeois coyness. It’s right there in the script, straight up and down. The script line in question even belongs to the shows resident “Morpheus” character, the mentor of our hero. There’s no denying it. Why is the world so fucked up? What controls us, the people and animals we love and everything we care about?

“Money.”



The goal of the characters is simple: to crash the global economic system. But this is where it gets tricky. Can a motley group of anarchist hackers accomplish this alone? Absolutely not.

Well, duh.

Changing society requires at the very least a mass movement. In capitalism there is only one group capable of this—a unified and conscious working class, and they have yet to make an appearance on the show, or IRL (for at least the past 30 years).

Our hero is delusional. He has semi-regular visits to a psychologist who genuinely cares about him and vice-versa.

One of the consistent and reoccurring themes of the show so far has been what is real, and what is not. Therefore it should come as no surprise (to the class conscious viewer) that the attack vector, the very target of Elliott and the rest of the “fsociety” hacker team is fictitious capital. “Credit”.

We live in a decadent society. Characters like Tyrell and Joanna Wellick should make this obvious. But what might be less obvious to some is when human society started taking this trajectory, why it did and what the fuck credit has to do with anything I’m talking about right now.

Since somewhere in the 19th century, capitalism has been going through major “bubble” events, recessions, depressions, about every ten years or so. To quote left communist thinker Loren Goldner:

“We can consider the period from 1914 to 1945 to be just lost decades for capitalism as a system, just more or less permanent crisis, war, reaction, destruction, and so on.

The period from 1945 to the early 1970s, called the postwar boom, can be understood as a period of reconstruction from that earlier period of the 1930′s crisis.

In reality, the postwar boom ended in the mid-1960s but it continued into the 1970s because of credit inflation that created the runaway inflation of the 1970s.

In the mid 1960s, there were important recessions in Japan, Europe, and the United States. And the US and the other major capitalist countries reflated their economies with credit and extended the boom into the early 1970s. But the dynamism was gone.

Capitalism is a system that, as you know, is regulated by what Marx called the law of value. The law of value means that from one cycle to the next, capitalism develops productivity and it makes commodities cheaper. It makes technology cheaper, and it makes wages cheaper, but it can compensate for much cheaper wages because working class consumer goods also become cheaper.

…Because food and other basic necessities became far cheaper, then workers could buy TVs, cars, houses, things that they could not buy before World War I. So in other words, the law of value is cheapening production but living standards up to a point, including for workers, can rise. That’s the postwar boom.

But we can see 1914-1945 as a period in which capitalism was trying to do the same thing that it had done in the classic crisis of the 19th century, find a new foundation for a new expansionary phase. It couldn’t happen in the old way, it couldn’t happen just by a crash, a couple of years depression, and then the new expansion. There were all these institutional geopolitical elements, because Great Britain could no longer be the No.1 capitalist power but Great Britain was not going to just say “Oh, sorry, we can’t be the No.1 power anymore”; they had to be pushed side. And Germany tried to push them aside and the United States succeeded in pushing them aside. So it required thirty years of, as I said before, war and political transformation to create new conditions for capitalist accumulation of the old style.

A similar process has been happening since the early 1970s where America can no longer play the role of the system’s hegemon. The United States can no longer play this role, and nobody else, no other country can really replace it, but there’s a struggle for reorganization of the world system that would allow a new expansionary phase to happen. And I think, like in the 1914 to 1945 period, this cannot happen peacefully. I don’t know exactly how it could happen, I’m not sure it can happen because I think the system is really decadent. But nevertheless that’s the problem on a world scale today.

…For example, in the US, the most decadent country except for England, only about 15% of workforce is now involved in production.



So, of course, the United States is a parasite economy in the world economy. It draws wealth through the international financial system from the other parts of the world, such as the East Asia, Korea, China and Japan.

Which allows it to deindustrialize and have a so-called service economy.

But that service economy is totally dependent on the world continuing to accept the dollar standard and to finance America’s ever-increasing debt pyramid.

Basically the rest of the world produces and America consumes. And they are able to do that because the rest of the world loans America huge amounts of money. Now this arrangement works both ways. Because the rest of the world can have apparently dynamic economic development like in China, they need the US markets to continue to expand. The US can have this parasite role and they get their consumer goods and they don’t have to produce anything in exchange.”

So there it is. Assuming I haven’t lost you, maybe these ideas can help shed some light on the intentions of the “Dark Army”, the Chinese hackers in the show. Maybe this is what creator Sam Esmail was referring to when he mentioned “repercussions.”

“It’s just not the way economics works.”

Jamal Rayyan

8/2/15