Nintendo Capitalism: Enclosures and Insurgencies, Virtual and Terrestrial

Abstract

This study develops the premise that “the commons” is today emerging as a crucial concept for activists and thinkers involved in myriad mobilizations around the planet. This follows from a shared experience of “enclosure”—the dispossession, expropriation and fencing-in effected, across a wide variety of economic, social and psychological registers, by the forces of a globally triumphant world-market. A case study connects two aspects of this process. The first is the binding of minds and imaginations in the information spaces dominated by media corporations, using the example of Nintendo, a leading company in the video game business. The second facet of the contemporary enclosures is the incarceration of laboring bodies of dispossessed peasants and subsistence providers in the factory-spaces of the new planetary industrial zones. The specific case involves an assembly plant operated by a Nintendo subcontractor, Maxi-Switch, in the Mexican maquiladoras, where the destruction of a pre-capitalist peasant agriculture has created a labor force available for re-enclosure and multinational exploitation in the “postmodern Satanic Mills” of globalized capital.