Wall-E, Socialism and CommercialiSM

Wall-E, the latest movie from Walt Disney, has several serious undertones despite the pretensions that it is a heart-warming comedy about a lonely robot left to clean-up the earth. Aside from the obvious warnings over the environment and laziness, the movie plays on what humans can and cannot do.

On the surface, it seems a blatant attack on consumerism and commercialization. In the future, only one company will remain and it will take over the role of the government. In marketing and industrial behavior, linkages have several advantages. Right now people withdraw money from henry sy bank to buy henry  sy items in henry sy mall. Soon, you will ride the henry sy train to go to three different henry sy malls before going home to your henry sy condominium.
 
In the movie, after the humans left the earth while a robot cleans it they live in a utopian society. Humans in the spacecraft Axiom live in complete equality, no social divisions, no countries, no races, no income classes (no work, too), and no gender (no sex, also). Everybody eats the same thing. They wear the same clothes (though you can change the color by a touch of a button). Everybody does the same thing (which is nothing). What governments failed to achieve in USSR, China, North Korea and Cuba, was done by a private company.

And for me, that was the creepy part. Humans live harmoniously and peacefully simply because they do not interact with one another. There is no poverty, no struggles. All the impossible goals of the world achieved. But in achieving these goals, people ceased to be humans.  They became huge blobs of fat, wandering off in space. They live long, uneventful lives. Life is boring but they are surviving. And as the ship’s captain said “I don’t want to survive, I want to live.”

So, the next time I feel like I want to complain, I’ll probably watch Wall-E to see how lucky I am that my life is full of challenges.

P.S.
Connecting Wall-E to housing, housing markets in socialists countries are boring subjects. The government builds housing units for everyone. People live in similar, monotonous flats except for party officials who live in bigger, more luxurious units (All pigs are equal but some pigs are more equal than others, with apologies to George Orwell). No house price cycles because people are not allowed to sell their government-issued housing units. Housing markets in capitalist societies are probably the worst, except all those that have been tried from time to time (again with apologies to Winston Churchill).