Based: A Marxist Analysis of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud (2024)
Cloud (2024) follows Yoshii, a factory worker who makes money flipping goods online, often ripping off suppliers and reselling at huge markups. After a few successful deals, he quits his job, moves to a larger house in the outskirts of Tokyo with his girlfriend, and goes all-in on the business. However, his unscrupulous profiteering have also succeeded in instigating a faction of individuals with separate grievances against him to band together online, who plan to kidnap and burn him alive.
Commentators have examined Cloud as a critique of capitalism, which director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has made quite clear, and the specific dehumanising nature of platform capitalism. However, I find the most intriguing aspect (and one I find to be relatively unexplored) to be the relationship between Yoshii and his assistant, Sano.
Yoshii initially hires Sano to be his assistant after moving to his new office-house and treats him with a level of distance and distrust. He forbids Sano from using his personal computer and learning the ins-and-outs of his business operations, despite him expressing the desire to. He eventually fires his assistant when his business begins to tank. But in spite of this abrupt parting of ways, Sano never displays disdain towards his boss, likely one of the few characters in the movie who does not.
Breaking Down Sano
Sano is deliberately made a hollowed-out character, provided with little backstory and motives other than being a young man desperately looking for work in a flailing economy — a plight many can resonate with.
His actions are also exclusively linked to Yoshii’s and without him, he expresses no agency nor desire. He also displays a baffling degree of loyalty to Yoshii as it is evident that the relationship is a one-sided one; his boss does not view Sano with the same importance, only acknowledging him when he coerces his assistant into renting a van for the purpose of transporting goods to and from Tokyo.
When Yoshii is captured by the group, it is Sano that attempts to rescue him, revealing his own shady connections in the process. He manages to track Yoshii’s phone via GPS and solicits firearms from a dealer. For a young man struggling to find work, these are some very resourceful connections indeed.
In an interview with Patrick Brzeski of The Hollywood Reporter, Kurosawa himself says of the unassuming character:
I wanted a character who appears ordinary on the surface but carries an unsettling, almost hidden capability for violence.
It is this hidden capacity for intimidation and violence that is particularly shocking, given his meek and unassuming appearance. This is initially hinted at when he manages to track down, and compel a confession out of, the purported culprit whom smashed Yoshii’s window in the middle of the night.
Much has been said about Masaki Suda’s character being a symbol for the relentless greed of a platform economy. Dropshipping and reselling is arguably the purest example of how profit and value-creation often has no correlation with the actual quality of the good for sale, instead being a product of arbitrage and asymmetric information.
If we take this to be true and extend a Marxist lens to his relationship with Sano, using the base-superstructure analogy it is apparent that his loyal assistant is then the political superstructure that supports the economic base that is the logic of platform capitalism. This is evident as even after rescuing Yoshii, in which the power dynamic could have significantly swung in favour of Sano, their relationship is still dominated by the former.
What is the State’s Function?
Throughout the film, Sano performs two main functions that mirror state power: procurement and the monopoly of violence.
Complex markets depend heavily on vital infrastructure like highways and data centres to compact physical distances and coordinate the movement of supply chains within and across borders. These investments in infrastructure are massive undertakings that often rely on heavy state planning and tax financing, often under the umbrella of industrial policy and goals. His ability to rent a van — and ultimately loan it to Yoshii for an indeterminate period of time — to transport the dubious goods that his boss sells online mimics the state’s ability to procure and mobilise resources in support of market activity.
In times of economic prosperity and growth, the state’s influence can appear invisible, content for the allocative and distributional power of markets to work unmolested. For a large portion of the film, Kurosawa was content to have viewers believe Sano was simply the meek assistant to Yoshii’s daring con artist. However, during times of crisis the state will often step in to uphold market institutions and the market itself from threats.
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This is no more evident than in the climatic final act of the film where the boss and assistant engage in a shootout with their counterparts. The procurement of the GPS tracker and firearms firmly pushes Sano into full “defence” mode, now required to not only support but actively defend the mode of production Yoshii represents.
Despite being nominally outgunned and outnumbered, Sano displays a surprising, tactical competence in firefight tactics. He is able to navigate and dictate the outcome of the conflict nigh effortlessly, coordinating and directing the hapless Yoshii who previously, had never wielded a firearm before. In comparison, and despite some members of the group being competent marksmen, the assailants are never truly able to mount any coherent form of counterattack. Sano thus represents the state’s monopoly on, and capacity for, legitimate physical violence. He is the well-trained, well-resourced police force juxtaposed to the rag-tag civilian militia.
The idea of legitimacy in particular is interesting. Despite both sides* operating outside the law, only the kidnappers display any fear of consequence and repercussion from law enforcement. Sano, on the other hand, acts with all the assurance of a man who wholeheartedly believes that justice is on his side. He is, after all, simply helping out his boss in his time of need.
(*Here I’m referring to Sano alone. Yoshii does display fear of being exposed for his morally duplicitous ways.)
The Enabling Force of State Power
Ultimately, because the state superstructure rests upon the economic base, it is ultimately directionless without the logic of capital to provide a guiding hand. In Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), he outlines how
[the] relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
In the film, this is evident from Sano’s constant subservience to his boss even when power appears to shift in his favour after the shootout. He tells Yoshii to “[keep on] focusing on making money” and that he would “handle the rest”. By working together, the former promises the latter that he could have anything, “[even] things that can end the world”. In this situation, the state might be playing a more involved role, actively intervening to defend Yoshii. But ultimately, this is simply in order to allow the dominant mode of production to continue unmolested.
Using the law and the threat of violence, the state determines what social norms and scripts are encouraged and permissible, and what are not (forms of social consciousness). State power is thus crucial to the perpetuation of the capitalist mode of production as it can be wielded as a weapon to break up organised, anti-capitalist movements.
The fear of punitive action by state authorities is what individualises the group of assailants, causing group cohesion to break down according to their degree of anger towards Yoshii (the capitalist mode of production). Those with no personal connection to him as an individual were the most hesitant to get caught or reveal their identities, whereas those with personal grudges were willing to throw away their lives in order for revenge.
What matters in Cloud is not only that the state can punish, but that its threat pushes individuals to see grievances as personal rather than structural. The assailants weigh risk in isolation rather than as part of a shared position within platform capitalism’s supply chain. This break down of group loyalty mimics the failure of the working class to look past their differences and recognise their shared status as exploited labour, complicated by the growth of highly-paying, white collar jobs that blur the boundary between exploited labour and aspirational middle class.
This is not to say that state power is responsible for this failure, merely that the threat of punishment alters the decision calculus such that only the most downtrodden are pushed to take action.
Parasites in the Superstructure
Kurosawa’s warning is not limited to the world of e‑commerce. Capital is now consolidating long-term control over the political superstructure via defence and surveillance contracts, meeting and amplifying state agencies’ own demands for more powerful tools to police borders, wage wars and manage populations.
As immigration and security bureaucracies seek “advanced” analytics platforms and autonomous weapons, investors pour billions into the firms that build them, locking in a cycle where state demand and capital supply reinforce each other; every new system purchased imbues the state with greater capacity for violence in defence of those very markets. In Marxist terms, this is capital shaping both the content of state demand (what is bought, from whom, and for what ends) and the trajectory of the superstructure, so that new organs of coercion arise exactly where they are most useful for defending accumulation rather than for resisting it.
Firms like Palantir, Anduril, or the US “Big Five” defence contractors have embedded themselves deep within state infrastructures, from immigration enforcement and battlefield targeting systems to national health data platforms. In February 2026, Palantir secured a $1 billion agreement with the Department of Homeland Security, as CEO Alex Karp publicly urging ICE’s critics to “protest for more Palantir” rather than less, powered raids, family separations and increasingly controversial targeting systems used in conflict zones. Arrests outside its offices in New York and San Francisco have changed nothing about the contracts themselves. These firms’ business models depend on opaque surveillance, long‑term government contracts and the outsourcing of core public functions to private actors whose commitments are to shareholders and geopolitical power, not democratic oversight.
We should not (ever) expect private sector interests to willingly forgo exploitative profit-making. However, Marxist theory also calls into question the hope that state power will effectively act as a counterbalance to the whims of capital.
Cloud thus is a warning about the danger of how predatory forms of capitalism can inhabit and steer state power, much like the trematoda that settle inside a host snail and repurposes its body. Today’s data and defence firms offer states the capacity to manage populations, conduct wars and preserve exploitative markets with minimal public scrutiny. We must now wrestle with what it means to live in those times.
