Anti-Pirate Pirates: “The Ideology of Capitalism is Anti-Capitalist”

After having watched the first episode of One Piece, I was reminded of something Mark Fisher said about the ideology of capitalism being ‘anti-capitalist’. In the episode, Luffy is assembling a pirate crew, made up of people who, almost exclusively, hate pirates:

I haven’t seen the anime, but I’m assuming Luffy’s crew are successful to some extent. Their attitude to piracy then, did not prohibit them. In fact, judging from the first episode, it may have in fact been beneficial.

Similarly, Mark Fisher says that anticapitalism is beneficial to capitalism as a whole, since it “promotes debate” which ‘capitalist culture now feeds upon’:

It not only that a cultural object can be opposed to capitalism on the level of content, but serve it on the level of form; one could convincingly go further and argue that the ideology of capitalism is now “anti-capitalist”. The villain in Hollywood films is routinely the “evil multinational corporation” […] Capital, the great ironist, [is] easily able to metabolise anti-corporate rhetoric by selling it back to an audience as entertainment