Much of what capitalism conditions us to fear in communism is what concentrated capitalism already does: centralise power, narrow freedom, restrict opportunity and preserve poverty as structural necessity.
Much of what capitalism conditions us to fear in communism is what concentrated capitalism already does: centralise power, narrow freedom, restrict opportunity and preserve poverty as structural necessity.
The greatest trick concentrated capitalism ever pulled was convincing the world that its own most destructive tendencies belonged exclusively to communism.
The institutions assigned to solve our deepest problems are sustained by these, the very relations they are unable and/or unwilling to question.
Capitalism does not distribute abundance. It sustains value by distributing differential (as inequitable) access.
A civilisation organised around limitless acquisition on a finite planet turns systemic collapse into a KPI.
Extreme wealth is not proof of independence. The billionaire appears to stand above society, but in reality stands upon it.
Power does not erase wisdom’s serial warnings about the corruption and cruelty that often accompanies extreme wealth; it orchestrates and sustains an institutional matrix to demonstrate why the warning applies to someone else.
Technology at scale preferentially industrialises the parts of human nature that are easiest to measure, repeat, monetise, automate, and weaponise. Those parts are rarely our best ones.
Wealth is not virtue; it is often merely the moment at which exploitation, inheritance, appetite, spectacle, and institutional obedience acquire sufficient polish that the public begins misunderstanding aggregate power as sufficient proxy for strategic wisdom and true moral virtue.
Transnational corporate power does not merely strip-mine the material world. That would be amateur hour. It also strip-mines the symbolic order: trust, language, law, legitimacy, attention, aspiration, fear, guilt, hope, all the warm little mammals by which civilisation convinces itself it is not just a spreadsheet wearing perfume. The corporation no longer sells products in […]
The statistical field is already acting before the subject appears as a moral interpreter. This is the part capitalism prefers not to see, because capitalism tells its favourite story backwards: the individual wants, chooses, competes, acquires, rises, fails, deserves. But the field has already moved first. Exposure precedes intention. Repetition precedes belief. Scarcity, status, threat, […]
What we call progress in modern societies is often narrated with a tone of triumph, as though markets expanding, technologies multiplying, and geopolitical influence widening were evidence of a steady ascent of civilisation itself. Yet this rhetoric quickly dissolves under scrutiny, because the same forces celebrated as engines of advancement are frequently driven by the […]