Last year, Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan published an article in Al-Jazeera chalking American belligerence toward China up to two factors: an increase in Chinese wages eroding the profitability of foreign investment and the rise of native Chinese industry threatening western monopolies over advanced digital technology, energy generation, automobile manufacturing, biotechnology and robotics. Since western-dominated global capitalism has shown an uncanny ability to offshore capital and relocate investment in low-wage countries, it is undoubtedly China’s threat to monopoly capitalism that has western governments especially concerned.
The ability to export capital and extract profits from the cheap labour and resources in the Global South has been an extremely lucrative racket for the advanced imperial core countries. $152 trillion was transferred from the developing world to advanced capitalist countries between 1960 and 2021.
This racket has worked for centuries, ever since Columbus landed on Caribbean shores. It has evolved from outright theft of land and gold, into more sophisticated neocolonial arrangements which harness sweatshop labour and mine resources for sophisticated products stamped with western corporate logos and sold the world over.
The result has been a river of profits pouring into Europe and the United States, soaking elephantine financial industries and buoying astronomical stock market valuations. But that river only flows so long as the aggregate of advanced technology, patents, licences, designs and money-capital remains steadfast with western corporate headquarters.
China’s entry onto the stage of high value production does not simply add a new player to the game—it threatens to flip over the board. America is staring down hundreds of billions of dollars worth of potentially stranded assets invested in the AI sector alone.
China’s Marxian approach to economics has led them to force-feed their supply chain with an abundance of rare earths and critical minerals, renewable energy, steel, electric vehicles and batteries, artificial intelligence platforms, drones, pharmaceutical products and high speed trains. In a bid to transform quantity into quality, China is converting the lucrative monopoly industries of the past into at-cost utilities for the present. And they are squeezing western corporations out of the global market in the process.
This context is the key to understanding the posture of NATO countries as they pursue rearmament in unison: Trump is demanding a 50% hike to an already-bloated trillion dollar military budget, Canada has signed $100 billion contract for submarines, the UK will dispense an extra £63 billion, Germany has approved a 33% rise in weapons spending, France has committed $500 billion more to its military by 2030—it goes on and on like this. With Russia pinned down by the quagmire of Ukraine, it beggars belief that these trillions of additional dollars are being earmarked to counter threats from Moscow. Western leaders hold their citizenry in contempt when making this claim.
If human society was governed by anything but the ruling class interests that Karl Marx described, the dawning reality of a new global economy would have spurred a movement toward cooperation, integration with the Belt and Road Initiative and major political and economic reforms adjusting to the new landscape. After all, the people of the West could benefit from low-cost advanced technology, public banks, renewable energy and rational economic planning at the highest levels. But the momentum behind centuries of imperial accumulation does not dissipate like the heat of lightning when the clouds break.
So long as warfare and financial speculation lines the pockets of the powers-that-be, ungodly sums will continue to be extracted from the working class and put into the service of a western oligarchy determined to break China’s back. Only then can swarms of cheap labour return to East Asia and US corporate monopolies be assured.
The problems with all of this are legion. What worked yesterday is not always destined to work tomorrow and we are fast approaching a night when tomorrow does not come. Western morality was buried under rubble alongside the bodies of Gaza’s children and the illusion of military supremacy was sunk to bottom of the Persian Gulf. If Iran is the canary in the coal mine, it is clear that all of these billions dumped into offensive weaponry will not yield the surplus required for imperial capitalism to maintain itself.1 In a dialectical reversal for the ages, the quest for self-preservation puts western capitalism on the express path to terminal crisis.
China has been described as the factory of the world and it would be prudent to now call it the world’s laboratory and power plant as well. Never mind that going to war with such a formidable power would obviously be unwinnable and catastrophic—it well could happen given the incredibly low calibre of people running the Occidental show. When it comes to protecting their property, history demonstrates that the oligarchy is always willing to fight to the last working class man. As David Harvey pointed out in The Limits of Capital:
Capitalism is stabilized through the defence budget, albeit in ways that rob society of more humane and socially worthwhile programmes. But the present theory suggests a rather more sinister and terrifying interpretation of military expenditures: not only must weapons be bought and paid for out of surpluses of capital and labour, but they must also be put to use.2
The collapse of the western economy necessarily entails an enormous loss of property on the most rarefied rungs of capital ownership—and this is the good news. If we’re lucky it will happen before an apocalyptic war can commence. Marx wrote that “the violent destruction of capital as a condition of its self-preservation is the most striking form in which advice is given it to be gone and to give room to a higher state of social production.”3 The collapse will not be where the fight for our future ends. It will be where it begins.
Thanks for reading!
In Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014): 40, David Harvey recounts other modes of production that have disappeared by failure to generate surplus. ↩︎
David Harvey, The Limits of Capital (Verso, 2018): 445. ↩︎
Farewell; and if my fortune be not crossed, I have a father, you a daughter, lost.
—Jessica, Act 2, Scene 5.
It is known that Timon of Athens was Karl Marx’s favourite Shakespeare play, due to its powerful treatment of the effect of money on our individual lives. It is referenced extensively in Marx’s Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts and also makes an appearance in Capital. The Merchant of Venice is the runner up for many of the same reasons: it animates Marx’s observations about money, anti-Semitism, the social relations of capitalism, and it earns multiple citations throughout his work.
The Merchant of Venice ranks among Shakespeare’s “problem plays”—it is officially labelled a comedy but the justification for this is mainly the absence of a death toll typical of Shakespearean tragedies. In the Elizabethan era a comedy meant a happy ending; a story without loose ends and where harmony prevails. Like every Shakespeare play, The Merchant of Venice has humorous plot devices. But it is a serious meditation on the economic relations and financial precarity of Renaissance Europe, as illustrated by a cast of duplicitous characters who plunge headlong into an uncertain future.
Venetian Waves
First there is the titular merchant of Venice, Antonio, who has his capital invested in ships importing goods from afar. His friend Bassanio is handsome but cash-poor. He requires a loan from Antonio in order to travel to Belmont and court Portia, the wealthy heiress of the manor. With Antonio’s money at sea, he turns to the Jewish usurer, Shylock, for a loan that he can give to Bassanio. Here we learn that Antonio has often publicly abused and insulted Shylock on account of his Jewish identity. For this, Shylock is willing to forgo interest on the loan but demands a pound of flesh from Antonio should he default. At the same time, Shylock’s daughter Jessica is preparing to abandon her Jewish faith and the legal restrictions that go with it. She steals her father’s ducats and jewelry, elopes with Lorenzo and the pair abscond to Belmont as part of Bassanio’s entourage.
In Belmont, Portia’s deceased father has set up a sort of lottery of caskets that Portia’s potential suitors must win. Despite this, Portia is a woman with a lot of agency in the story which is a pleasant departure from the stifling patriarchal air of a play like Othello. Portia manipulates her suitors to her liking and subtly aids Bassanio to the correct choice of casket so that he wins her hand. She favours Bassanio because she sees him as pliable, lacking fancy hereditary titles or a fortune of his own. We then learn of great misfortune striking Antonio—all three of his ships at sea have met with doom, leaving him vulnerable to his bond with Shylock.
When Shylock drags Antonio to the Duke of Venice’s court to acquire his pound of flesh, Portia arrives in disguise to adjudicate the case. Through rhetorical trickery and technical loopholes, she absolutely devastates Shylock, as he is denied his pound of flesh and is stripped of all his wealth. He is also subject to a forced conversion to Christianity, rendering him socially and economically destitute. She saves Antonio but it is implied that Portia has had a hand in manipulating events when she produces a letter stating that all three of Antonio’s ships had arrived safely to port after all.1 We learn that Lorenzo had an eye on Shylock’s money when pursuing Jessica, just as Bassanio had an eye to Portia’s wealth when pursuing her. Antonio exits the play alone and isolated from his newly-wedded friends.
“On The Jewish Question”
The character that has attracted the most controversy in The Merchant of Venice is undoubtedly Shylock. A Jewish usurer hungry for the Christian blood of Antonio has provoked much discomfort in post-World War II audiences allergic to overcooked stereotypes around moneylending and blood libels. But Shylock is anything but a one-dimensional caricature. Shakespeare endows him with a humanity and honesty that is unique amongst the characters of the play and this makes sympathy toward his plight difficult to resist:
He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies— and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge.2
Although Jews have worn a certain money-grubbing stereotype thanks to the material realities of the Middle Ages, Shakespeare endows Shylock with a transparency of intentions absent in the other characters of the play. He has an integrity that contrasts sharply with Antonio, Bassanio, Jessica, Lorenzo and Portia, who are all prone to degrees of hypocrisy: they marry for money, they engage in theft, they seek loans from those they abuse, they leverage their fortune to manipulate others.3 Shylock points out the hypocrisy of Christian society in general, as attendees of the Duke’s court sit in possession of involuntarily enslaved humans yet cast judgement on his voluntarily signed, mutually agreed upon contract.
It has been pointed out that Renaissance England did not have Jewish moneylenders but they did have Italian ones and they were much loathed: “It was not axiomatic to an Elizabethan theatre audience that Italian merchants were more economically virtuous than Jews; Robert Wilson had a good deal of success in the 1580s and 1590s with The Three Ladies of London, a play that pitted a morally upright Jewish merchant against a thoroughly unscrupulous Venetian.”4
Through the play, Shakespeare reveals that Jews and Christians are at least as equal in ethics as they are in body. In doing so, he renders the foamy saliva and slurs hurled at the Venetian Jews of his play to be completely unjust.
Marx, separated from the Renaissance by centuries, was writing during a period of heightened anti-Semitism in Germany and across Europe. Although he had a rabbinical heritage, his family was forced to convert to Christianity so that his father could evade a ban on Jews practicing law. Like Shakespeare, Marx recognized this social discrimination to be unjust, with anti-Semitism only masking a collective distaste toward the capitalist economy and predatory finance.
Scapegoating as Capitalist Projection
In Capital, Marx twice likens the capitalist seeking the sweat of labour to Shylock seeking his pound of flesh: “Aye his heart. So says the bond.” Marx also delivers one of his most misunderstood lines in Chapter Four: “The capitalist knows that all commodities, however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews, and what is more, a wonderful means whereby out of money to make more money.”
Marx’s reference to “inwardly circumcised Jews” is a direct citation of Romans 2:29 in the New Testament: a Christian, a follower of Jesus, is circumcised by an inward, spiritual cut to the heart instead of the genitals.5 Similarly, commodity production and trade seeks an inner value that will express itself in surplus.6
Surplus value is what Antonio needs his ships to deliver and it is what every capitalist needs to reproduce their class. Marx makes this analogy in order to emphasize the universal profit motive of capitalist commodity production. Marx and Shakespeare converge on the idea that profit-seeking is not some noxious Jewish attribute—it’s capitalism.
By setting his play in Venice, the commercial capital of Renaissance Europe, Shakespeare had foreshadowed the total conquest of commerce over global society. The result is a world where, in Marx’s words: “Money is the pimp between need and object, between life and man’s means of life…Money appears as an inverting power in relation to the individual and to those social and other bonds which claim to be essences in themselves. It transforms loyalty into treason, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, nonsense into reason, and reason into nonsense.”7
As we observe in our own world, so it is in The Merchant of Venice. Marriages, familial bonds, friendships and even hatreds are all mediated by the need of money. With money as our pimp, the reduction of individuals into venal objects can always be justified. Morality is inextricably bound to how we collectively produce and reproduce our lives. It is not the characters of The Merchant of Venice who are amoral—it is the economic system that produces them.
Thanks for reading!
Robin Russin, “The Triumph of the Golden Fleece: Women, Money, Religion and Power in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice,” Shofar Vol. 31, No. 3: 124. ↩︎
For Antonio is full of hubris when he offers a pound of flesh to secure a loan against even Shylock’s advice; Bassanio and Lorenzo seek women to stabilize their financial standing and Portia uses her wealth to misinform Antonio about the fate of his ships, even going so far as to orchestrate a dramatic courtroom standoff where she casually destroys Shylock after a passionate speech about the value of mercy. ↩︎
It is also worth noting that Shylock consistently forgoes profit in order to maintain the prospect of exacting revenge on Antonio for his abuse. Shylock is therefore much less “money hungry” than others in the play—including his daughter Jessica as well as Bassanio and Lorenzo. ↩︎
From the New King James version of the Bible: “He is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter; whose praise is not from men but from God.” ↩︎
Expressed in the formula: M-C…C’-M’ (money to commodity, commodity + surplus value to money + surplus value). The principal sum of money is thus transformed into a greater quantity. ↩︎
Karl Marx, “The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” in Essential Writings of Karl Marx (Red and Black Publishers, 2010): 137, 140. ↩︎
Our understanding of the nature of the universe has received many breakthroughs since Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity during his “miraculous year” of 1905. As the century progressed, a theory of general relativity was sketched out to provide a framework for the movement of matter through the spacetime continuum—testable knowledge employed across a variety of fields today. While relativity is the backbone of our understanding of the cosmos, quantum mechanics was developed in order to explain the behaviour and physical properties of microscopic matter, such as molecules and atoms.
The existence of atoms was proposed during antiquity. In modern times, our knowledge has come to include atomic properties such as protons, neutrons and orbiting electrons that move in waves. Since atoms are the building blocks of matter, atomic properties dictate the physical characteristics of everything we see—and everything we don’t. Relativity has been used to generate precise mathematical predictions about gravity and the speed of objects but quantum mechanics adheres to an uncertainty principle that asserts only probabilities can be known about subatomic movements.
Laws of History
When asked how humans could devise an atomic weapon but fail to develop the political means to prevent it from destroying us, Einstein replied: “That is simple. It is because politics is more difficult than physics.” While humans exist within a space set by biological parameters, our behaviour is subject to endless cultural permutations, psychological dispositions, technological revolutions and political formations. Of all the world’s great thinkers, it was one Karl Marx that delivered a framework for understanding human societies. Friedrich Engels said at Marx’s funeral:
Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.
Marx was able to see that humans entered into definite relations of production in order to satiate our biological needs and it is upon this basis that history unfolds. As individuals, we are born into a social structure that precedes our existence and conditions our being. Our families, neighbourhoods, cities, employment, wealth, housing—these are better thought of as social products rather than individual affectations. As Marx put it: “Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.”1
Nature comprises physical material but social relations are to human society what gravity is to the universe. Relations are what channel our energies, shape our matter and mould our consciousness. Marx makes this analogy explicit in Capital when discussing the relative value capitalist commodities: “The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears. The determination of value by socially necessary labour time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities.”2 Social relations—of the economy, the state, culture, family, etc.—are not visible but we feel their pull like we feel the force of gravity.
Fredric Jameson credited Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud with founding “the two great bodies of post-philosophical thought” described “as unities of theory and practice.”3 While history is replete with philosophers offering up static codes of ethics and rigid ontologies, Marx and Freud provided the theories of motion, change and flux that capture the subjective totality of the modern age. We can say that Marxism is the social science equivalent of the theory of relativity, explaining the motion and historical development of society as a whole. And if Marxism is something akin to a macrolevel theory of relativity, psychoanalysis would be the quantum mechanics, the microlevel complementary.
The Individual Singularity
Marx recognized the existence of tendencies directing societies depending on their mode of production. But at the level of an individual—a single CEO or suburban consumer or blue collar employee—we are left with an unpredictable singularity that does not strictly conform to laws of history.4 The economic parameters of an individual are concrete but the habits, taste preferences, customs, personalities, overall health, talents, deviancies and sociability are highly variable and unique to each of us. The society will condition our habits, customs and well-being to a large extent but there are infinite combinations of traumas, predispositions and formative experiences that yield highly unpredictable outcomes at the individual level.
Freud himself had a few detours through medicine and conventional psychology before realizing that many of his patients—branded “neurotic” or “hysteric” in 1800s Vienna—were suffering from afflictions of the unconscious mind: “Our starting-point is the unconscious mental processes, with the peculiarities of which we become acquainted through analysis. We consider these to be the older, primary processes, the residues of a phase of development in which they were the only kind of mental processes.”5
There is a parallel here to Marx’s theories of human society; like an iceberg, there is an invisible mass, an underlying process that manifests what we are able to observe. For Marx, the material world is rooted in processes of social relations, class conflict and surplus value formation. For Freud, our conscious thoughts and, often, our physical health is a latent expression of unconscious memories. Marxism alerts us to the existence of a vast ideological superstructure that expends considerable energy rationalizing the economic base on which we exist. Similarly, psychoanalysis explains that repression hides our unconscious thoughts from our conscious selves: “The essence of repression lies simply in turning something away and keeping it at a distance. Repression demands a persistence expenditure of force, and if this were to cease, the success of the repression would be jeopardized.”6
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was able to take the field even further, perhaps owing to a comprehension of Marx that Freud lacked.7 Lacan described the unconscious as “the discourse of the Other”—a horde of other people we carry in our heads like traits. Humans are thus transindividual beings that cannot be understood in isolation from the society that produced them. This stands harmonious with Marxism. The entire scope of Lacanian theory is too complex to detail here but his three orders of the psyche warrant consideration for Marxists: the imaginary, the symbolic and the Real.
The imaginary is our concept of self which is locked in by the symbolic order, representing a shared collective consciousness of language, law, culture and ideology. The Real is that which resists symbolization and conscious integration. The most common encounter with the Real is the experience of trauma. To be reductive, we can think of our minds as three orders forming a Borromean knot representing the self, society and nature.8
Lacan believed that psychoanalysis could not be placed onto a scientific footing like linguistics or structural anthropology because of flaws with the causal model. The cause under investigation in psychoanalysis is the very subject resulting from that cause: “Science is therefore not yet capable of encompassing psychoanalysis.”9 Marxism, too, is afflicted by similar problems, the narrow horizon of a bourgeois paradigm that seeks to isolate mechanisms of cause-and-effect rather than examine the complete totality of a system. This should be expected within a capitalist mode of production that is fixated on capital accumulation irrespective of the hazards it produces. After all, the existing mode of production “is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it.”10
Toward a Theory of Everything?
Psychoanalysis demonstrates that uncovering unconscious memories, rolling back repression, is the path to rehabilitation and restoration of the individual. In a similar fashion, Marx laboured diligently over three volumes of Capital in order to reveal the underlying mechanics of capital accumulation and ruling class power. Like a revelation of the unconscious, if we understand the motion of capitalism it is then possible to transcend it. By restoring the productive powers of labour under our own conscious control, alienation from our labour can be eliminated and society is made congruent with our human nature. Within this context of an unalienated, post-capitalist mode of production, psychoanalysis will find its proper recognition as a holistic science.
Indeed, Jameson himself once proposed a dedicated institution of psychoanalysis for his hypothetical post-revolutionary society:
We may provisionally call this new institution the Psychoanalytic Placement Bureau, and it will, in conjunction with unimaginably complex computer systems, handle and organize all forms of employment as well as all manner of personal and collective therapies. Mediating between the individual and the collective, the new institution will combine the functions of a union and a hospital, an employment office and a court, a market research agency, a polling bureau, and a social welfare centre. Presumably what is left of the police as an institution will eventually be absorbed into this central agency, which will eventually replace government and political structures equally, the state thereby withering away into some enormous group therapy.11
Jameson’s version of the proverbial dictatorship of the proletariat is admittedly strange and unorthodox but it underlines the potential that a positive union between Marxism and psychoanalysis represent. Physics looks to merge quantum mechanics with relativity for a “theory of everything.” When socialism comes to the West, this can be accomplished by the praxis of Marxism and analysis.
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. One (Ancient Wisdom Publications, 2019), 49. ↩︎
Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (Verso, 2010): 59. ↩︎
David Harvey elaborates on this concept of an individual forming a singularity within Marxist theory in A Companion to Marx’s Capital: Volume 2 (Verso, 2013): 33-4. ↩︎
Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader (W.W. Norton, 1995): 301. ↩︎
The Real, of course, is not entirely synonymous with reality in Lacan’s thinking. This conceptualization has some utility within a Marxist framework however. ↩︎
Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton University Press, 1995): 139. ↩︎
In Capitalism and the Death Drive, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that “revolution is impossible today” because any resistance to the neoliberal order either quickly dissipates or becomes absorbed by corporate mass consumerism.1 Commodified Che Guevara T-shirts come to mind, as do counterculture movements like punk rock and Burning Man.
In the age of social media our personal absorption into the commercial sphere is even more ubiquitous; we put ourselves under surveillance and freely subject our activity to data harvesting and resale. Han writes:
System-preserving power has now taken on a smart, friendly form, and it has thereby become invisible and unassailable. The subordinated subject is not even aware of its subordination. It believes itself to be free. This technology of rule is a highly efficient way of neutralizing resistance.2
In the absence of polling data, this view is likely mainstream even on the left where it is echoed by Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Fredric Jameson and Mark Fisher.3 While nobody would rule out revolutions in economy and culture, it is that all-important political revolution that feels forever achingly out of reach.
It is easy to forget about the movement of tectonic plates once accustomed to the ground under our feet. Even Lenin was once discouraged about the prospects of revolution—with similar doubts over the level of adequate resistance to Russia’s ancien régime. But the absolute monarchy of the Tsar was doomed once industrial production began melting away the feudal relations in countries to Russia’s east and west. This caused Tsarist Russia to lose badly in wars against Germany and Japan. The question of revolution was never an “if” only a “when.”
To understand why revolution is inevitable, we need only turn to one of the most important paragraphs that Karl Marx ever wrote:
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these 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. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.4
For Marx, a social revolution is not simply a change of government, policy or cultural norm—it is a complete change of ruling class. Notice that he does not speak of “adequate resistance” when he lays out the conditions of revolution. Revolution appears as a tectonic economic shift away from the existing ruling class, first and foremost.
This occurred in the West when royal authority and the landed aristocracy became an impediment to merchant capital accumulation. It happened in Russia and China after their industrialized neighbours attacked, pecking at the morass of decaying feudal orders. It happened intercontinentally, across the Global South, as colonial regimes experienced diminishing returns from ransacking the economic productivity of their subjects.
The revolutionary potential of the West has been non-existent for almost a century now. The last time it emerged was during Great Depression. This was when the rapidly industrializing Soviet Union garnered the appeal of unemployed masses and western governments swiftly countered with a barrage of social democratic compromises, including public works projects and social security payments.
The next economic catastrophe will not experience the same social democratic outcome. Liberal capitalism emerged as the political analog to economies dependent on territorial expansion and the steady opening of new markets to capital interests. Almost single-handedly, China is now melting down the western dependency on rent-seeking profits. Vertical integration of supply chains, overproduction of renewable energy, suppression of private financial capital, managed deflation and strategic technological development are saturating the world with low-cost goods and medicines and high quality open source software. The addressable market for western conglomerates is shrinking, evermore reliant on debt and speculation to fund operations. Western governments are flailing, pouring money into the furnace of war and doubling down on fossil fuels in the faint hope of maintaining dominance with atavistic 20th century strategies.
The liberal paradigm cannot conceptualize this technological levelling of the global economic pyramid. It is collapsing inwards like a dying star. Drone warfare has seen ragtag armies grind the world’s mightiest militaries to a halt. Cheap solar panels bring miniature power plants to even the most remote of African villages. Open source A.I. is shredding the U.S. Big Tech profit model to pieces. Multiparty “democracy” has factionalized society into camps of superficial enemies, denying even the possibility of long-term strategic planning. Rampant inflation is quietly brandished as an escape from heaving debt loads handcuffing public and private entities. U.S. dollar dominance is declining with the overuse of criminal sanctions. Social media has turned “free speech” into a vector of weird conspiracies, sensational propaganda and pornography. “Free market” ideology has become the ramparts of financial monopolies and homelessness and hardcore drug addiction.
In short, the social relations of the West are in open contradiction with the new productive forces being unleashed. This is the smoke signal for revolution.
The technological levelling described above means that the liberal order will not be able to rejuvenate itself with a social spending package and a war, as it did during the Great Depression. The rent-extracting platforms of the current ruling class of CEOs and financiers are cracking. When they finally break, the only way out will be a political order that subsumes the new powers of production and seizes the means of finance, construction, resource extraction and strategic industries. Only then will it be possible to fix the underlying mechanical problems hampering our historical progression on a livable planet.
As it disintegrates before our eyes, movements rejecting liberalism will grow. We must embrace long-term planning, direct democratic implements, international cooperation, green development, abundant housing and services, livable communities and expedient public infrastructure. The capitalist ruling class will be supplanted as a political authority or else destitution will result. Some countries have discovered this already and some will take fascistic detours before arriving at the right destination. It is inevitable.
Thanks for reading!
Byung-Chul Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive (Polity Press, 2019): 15. ↩︎
In China today, the fingerprints of American capitalist excess are hard to miss, as the golden arches and the KFCs stand lined up next to Walmart stores. The history of China’s economic development is a pretty simple story as told in the West: Mao’s Soviet-style economy was abandoned by Deng who swung open the doors to western capitalism and everything we see in China today is the mere culmination of decades of market magic. With this story lodged into our heads by so many western journalists, whose understanding of Marx is even less than their understanding of China, it is no wonder why Beijing’s trajectory is wide open to interpretation.
The sequence of human history is one of modes of production. Societies organize around productive forces and, as these forces evolve, so does a new social formation eventually sublate the previous one existing. The Greek polis represents a sublation of Neolithic communal society, just as Medieval Europe represents a sublation of the Roman Empire.1
The process is not mechanical and it has varied wildly depending on the region in question. For example, the capitalist mode of production was concretized only after a significant period of violent primitive accumulation driven by erstwhile feudal merchants who amassed vast sums of wealth at the expense of European peasants, African slaves and New World Indigenous clans. What capitalism has allowed us to do by way of revolutions in technology, science and philosophy, is gain a self-awareness of this historical process and ask the question: if capitalism is a sublation of the feudal mode, what might represent a sublation of the capitalist mode?
The capitalist mode of production has brought with it a material abundance previously unknown to humanity. This helps to explain widespread resistance against any effort toward revolutionary change. On the other hand, capitalism has also carried over imperial tendencies toward warfare, environmental destruction and the deracination of the community. It is these noxious aspects of capitalism that have formed the basis of western populist demands and global revolutionary politics.
Marxism-Leninism emerged from an impoverished Russian Empire long-mismanaged by Tsars wielding absolute power. For the Soviet Union, it expressed the post-revolutionary desire for rapid modernization without the capitalist hallmarks of colonial extraction and working class exploitation. With near-universal public ownership of production, these two aims were largely successful and the USSR experienced an improbable rise to superpower status, all the while providing housing, healthcare, free education and employment to all.
Mao Zedong was obviously heavily influenced by the Soviet experience but he recognized that his China of 1949 was even less developed than 1917 Russia, thanks to the compounded effects of Japanese invasion, civil war and a century of humiliation at the hands of European colonial powers. At its founding, the People’s Republic of China was almost an entirely illiterate, agrarian economy suffering from a massive drug addiction epidemic and in a state of chronic famine.
Mao set his modernization program along the lines of mass literacy campaigns, accessible medicine and large-scale irrigation projects. He recognized the feudal landlord class as a vestige of feudalism and a barrier to progress. That class was eliminated with land reforms. But, as a historical materialist, Mao also saw the bourgeoisie as an important ingredient to Chinese modernization. Adopted in 1949, the Chinese flag even includes a star each for the national and petit bourgeoisie, against a red background representing the revolution.
Soviet socialism was a sublation of Russian feudalism that practically skipped the capitalist mode altogether. But it collapsed under a heavy burden of economic embargoes and repeated military confrontations against combined capitalist powers that had centuries of wealth accumulation under their feet.
Relieved of sanctions in 1979, China has been determined to build socialism in the East along the timescale of how capitalism was built in the West: a period of wealth accumulation and technological advancement that will make it possible to transcend the global capitalist economy. Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, rejected western capitalism and he modelled his own reforms on Lenin’s New Economic Policy.
China has not engaged in foreign colonization or the subjugation of other lands. As a Global South country long-preyed upon by the West, they have recognized that their path to modernization must necessarily be different than it was for imperial states. With particular attention to Volumes 2 and 3 of Marx’s Capital, Beijing has instead constructed a public sector designed to capture the surplus value of their capitalist workforce and channel it toward the development of new productive forces.
As Marx described liberal states, the surplus value produced by workers is claimed as rent, interest and profit. In liberal states, the disposal of this enormous surplus is decided by the private whims of financial firms, landlords and corporations—leading to the socially disruptive practice of outsourced labour and the curious phenomena of “dead money.” In addition, the circulation of surplus value in the form of loans, banking fees and debt-financing are tallied as part of the national gross domestic product—despite producing no value whatsoever. This has led the economist Michael Hudson to decry GDP accounting in the United States as “a travesty that credits the financial sector with producing a product, not as imposing zero-sum transfer payments.”2
As a Marxist state, China treats surplus value as a social product rather than a private gain. Because much of the banking, resource, construction and manufacturing sectors are under state ownership, they are able to convert surplus value that is captured in the form of interest and profits and push a dramatic material transformation of the entire country. Where private ownership exists, party cadres operate within the enterprise to ensure compliance with national planning. China’s ability to build at breakneck speed is also facilitated by maintaining an extremely low cost of goods and services through strategic deflation and the “purging of rent-seeking profits” from the economy.3 This conscious suppression of price and profit are virtually unthinkable for a liberal country.
The fault line between China and the West is therefore not one of “capitalism vs. socialism” but “liberalism vs. Marxism.” At this point in history, every country on Earth contains elements of both socialism and capitalism. In liberalism, capital accumulation is treated as an end in itself—and the result is a sprawling financial services sector that cannibalizes national industry in exchange for abstract financial products. In Marxism, capital accumulation is treated as an evolutionary step between industrial capitalism and socialist transformation. The result of this treatment is a country that looks like China.
By compressing surplus value formation into material production rather than financialization, China is betting on a transformation of productive quantity into social quality, one that will eventually lead to a sublation of private capitalism by public socialism. This is not meant as an explicit endorsement of vanguardism, nor is it meant to praise each aspect of Chinese governance or policy decision made by Beijing. We should take lessons from China and adapt them to our own national circumstances. But that can only be done with recognition that their meteoric rise is resultant from the application of Marxist theory at the commanding heights of the economy.
Thanks for reading!
John Bellamy Foster explores the communal aspects of antiquity in “Marx and Communal Society,” Monthly Review, Vol. 77, No. 3: 47-64. ↩︎
Michael Hudson, “Finance Capitalism versus Industrial Capitalism: The Rentier Resurgence and Takeover” in Review of Radical Political Economics, 2021: 12. ↩︎
See: Kevin Walmsley, “Top China execs forecast more deflation and falling profits ahead,” Substack, Nov. 2025. ↩︎
The concept of “laissez-faire” capitalism has been around for nearly 300 years. It was first devised by French Physiocrats who believed that the only legitimate functions of the state were preserving physical security, civil liberty and property. Karl Marx gives both the capitalist state and laissez-faire economics a thorough description in Capital, demonstrating the role of state intervention in capital accumulation, the subordination of the state to ruling class interest and the destabilizing effects that unregulated markets have on mediating class interests.
From the Marxian point of view, laissez-faire capitalism is neither politically feasible nor is it socially desirable—a pattern largely validated by history. To the present, we see a tightening grip of oligarchic capital over the state and societal backlash to international trading agreements, institutional lending, the demise of private sector unions and Western deindustrialization spurred by the free movement of capital. The fetishization of “free market economics” was not always inevitable.
Yet anyone engaged in political discourse today will inevitably come across capitalist supporters espousing exactly these laissez-faire, minarchist type dogmas. The contemporary incarnation of this vulgar libertarianism traces to the Cold War era and the school of Austrian economics. Fascism and Nazism had erupted as outgrowths of distressed capitalist systems in Europe, prompting many anti-fascists to take a socialist turn. Seeking to rehabilitate capitalism’s image, liberal economists like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises re-framed the “capitalism vs. socialism” debate as one of “free markets vs. government planning,” instead of class conflict between workers and elites.
At the time, this Austrian framing served as a sharp contrast to the centrally planned Soviet economy, the capitalist war economies of fascist belligerents and Keynesian policies in the West. By refusing to engage with the Marxist critique of class power, an idealistic conception of unfettered capitalism could drip freely from the pens of Hayek and von Mises—one where any problem inherent to capitalism could be be solved by being more capitalist-y. This idea was later taken up by Ayn Rand and given a romantic treatment at the heart of her hugely influential Objectivist philosophy.
A Free Market Utopia
Although she is often dismissed as an unserious polemic in the academy, it is plain to see why Rand is a great favourite of the ruling class that owns the economy. In The Virtue of Selfishness she lays out her economic brand as “a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism—with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church. A pure system of capitalism has never existed, not even in America; various degrees of government control had been undercutting and distorting it from the start.”1
This formulation was illustrated in novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, where her rugged protagonists—replete with chiseled jaws, angular frames and aggressively Aryan names—are oppressed by bureaucrats and crony capitalists with beady eyes and balding heads. Whereas Marx had shown that state formation is primarily shaped by an ownership class keen on extending its economic power, Rand casts the state as a product of the shiftless masses, the expression of a Nietzschean herd only capable of irrational self-harm and jealous thoughts.
Rand’s worlds are curiously devoid of capitalism’s seamiest actors; sex traffickers, dodgy landlords, financial speculators and predatory lenders aren’t found in her work. There are creative entrepreneurial savants and they agonize against the ubiquitous grain of government leeches, thieving associates and parasitic family members. For example, Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart are despised out of envy over their exceptional talent and competence, which other characters think is unfair and worthy of destroying.
Rearden is subject to staged riots and government blackmail—even his wife attempts to emotionally destroy him and his brother stages a double-cross to infiltrate his prodigious enterprise and sabotage it from within. Taggart, on the other hand, must contend with her own brother constantly undermining her sage decision-making while also seeking to exploit it.
There are also principled objectors who consciously withdraw from economic participation. Genius architect Howard Roark opts for hard labour at the granite quarry instead of compromising his artistic integrity with conformist hacks. Hugh Akston, a renowned philosopher in Atlas Shrugged, chooses to flip burgers rather than see his rational teachings go unappreciated. And brilliant inventor John Galt lays track for a railroad rather than lend his true talents to a deadbeat society.
It’s interesting that Rand, the queen of laissez-faire, devised so many heroes that hold their creative ingenuity above crude market interests—although their integrity seems to pay off in other ways. For example, they are able to manifest rippling muscles without exercise and exert sexual dominance over their lower-order rivals with ease.
Rand stated in her newsletter, “I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason.” Working backwards, it would be irrational for her characters to betray their integrity as that would violate their egoistic virtues which can only be expressed in a laissez-faire society expunged of collectivist ideas. As a result of this reasoning, the climax of Rand’s two novels have her protagonists committing acts of terrorism that force systemic changes to smothering collectivist regimes.
The Ideal Loner
To be fair, these books are a romanticism, and Rand’s characters are deliberately single-gear caricatures. To cite one reviewer who gave Atlas Shrugged a positive appraisal, her protagonists are all “healthy, attractive zealots that put in 80 billable hours a week, drink cocktails and have sex-fests every night.” They incur no moral dilemmas, have had no traumas, no children, no phobias and encounter almost nobody worthy of friendship.
These are idealized versions of people—but, besides Rand, whose ideals do they embody, really? If capitalism is the vehicle of egoism and egoism the vehicle of reason, Rand demonstrates that the only people capable of reasoning a pathway to success are devoid of feeling or want of companionship. The rest of us, subject to the spectrum of human experience and emotion, are doomed to mediocrity, beady eyes and Rogaine in the medicine cabinet.
When we appear as participants in the market, our own complex individuality is stripped down to that of “buyer” or “seller.” Likewise, we can spot a glaring flaw in Ayn Rand’s love-letters to capitalist individualism: it only works when the complexity of human sensuousness and social relations are torn down to the studs. She’s taken the narrow viewpoint of a market participant and has tried to build a comprehensive philosophy around it.
In his climactic speech of Atlas Shrugged, John Galt argues that trade is the object of the mind, and “man’s mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not.” But Rand’s formulation here is too reductionist to be accurate.
Becoming Human
In the process of becoming independent subjects, we can point to language being the bedrock of human consciousness. Language is not traded for but is freely received in a social context. It is a collective product that connects individuals to the cooperative group necessary for survival. According to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, language plugs the individual into the symbolic order and enables subjectivity, transmission of knowledge and abstract thought production.
Through language, a social consciousness acts upon the individual and the individual, in turn, acts upon the social consciousness. Marx and Engels write in The German Ideology: “Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness…for language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. Consciousness is therefore from the very beginning a social product.”
If this seems like a stretch, consider the cases of feral children raised without human interaction. It is clear that consciousness does not develop in the void of language and human contact. Survival is not guaranteed either, unless the child is taken up by a pack of animals. Both survival and mental content must be given at an early age if they are to be utilized later on. Rand’s oversimplification of individuality was first established in The Fountainhead when Howard Roark says in court, “but the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought.” This is literally true but it denies a key aspect of the constant exchange between ourselves and the environment.
There is a social consciousness that exists within the minds of society’s members and it comprises that collection of thoughts not specific to an individual. National borders, social status, cultural norms, the value of paper money—these are all examples of constructs within the social consciousness that do not live or die with any one person. Marx and Lacan posit a social consciousness that begins with language. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung came to similar conclusions about the the collective unconscious, represented by the superego and universal archetypes.
In a book review, Ann Marie Plane and Leslie Tuttle explain that dreams possess a “dual quality” of “individual experience and social claim” that roots “dreamers in the greatest and most charged religious, political and social debates of their times.”2 In other words, the most intensely private thoughts of individuals—their dreams—reveal both the economic epoch and social unconscious temporally in existence. Rand’s insistence that “nothing can be learned about man by studying society” simply doesn’t hold water.3
It follows, then, that the principal struggle laid out in The Fountainhead, “the individual against the collective,” can be rejected as a false premise. One becomes an individual by way of the collective, just as the collective exists by way of the individuals that form it. Marx writes in The Grundrisse: “The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.” In other words, it is working together rather than apart that leads to individual flourishing.
Indeed, one cannot become a writer without readers, a parent without children, a critic without artists, a husband without a spouse, a worker without an employer, a professor without students, a friend without a friend, a buyer without a seller. Rejecting the social dimension of human nature will result in the type of emotional stunting that clearly afflicts the Randian hero. Nathaniel Branden, Ayn Rand’s protege and former lover, picked up on this later in life when he criticized Rand: “You have taught people to repress, repress, repress.”
Toward Socialism
Perhaps a crushingly lonely laissez-faire dystopia is the best possible system for the statuesque workaholics of Rand’s imagination. But for an individualism congruent with human nature, it is a shame that Ayn did not discover Oscar Wilde’sThe Soul of Man Under Socialism. Contrary to Rand, Wilde says that “Socialism itself will be of value because it will lead to Individualism” and this will “disturb the monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.”
Socialism rests its case on the real premise that no person can exist without another, that no human potential is reached alone and no prosperity is achieved independently. While the market flattens us into the one-dimensional traders of Rand’s novels, Wilde says that “art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has ever known.” Art, creative invention and scientific discovery express the full knowledge of human existence and our passion for the universal truths of nature.
Living for others—something Rand denounces as an altruistic evil—is precisely what capitalism requires to function, as billions of workers and consumers toil on a decaying planet for the benefit of a tiny global elite. Wilde: “The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hard upon almost everyone.”
Free and voluntary exchange between people is only possible absent a capitalist class structure that subordinates us to impersonal market forces and positions us into a cutthroat competition against machines, fellow workers and corporate owners. Wilde continues, “were the machine the property of all, everyone would benefit by it. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man.”
The proper conditions that Wilde refers to is a democratic economy of common ownership. Supporting independent creative pursuits under a regime of minimized work days, automated production, the dissolution of “intellectual property” and freely accessible housing, education and health care will never be in the interest of the capitalist ruling class. In capitalism—laissez-faire or otherwise—profit is the object of the economy. Instead, we need individual flourishing to become the object of the economy. That will only be achieved through socialism.
Thanks for reading!
Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (Signet, 1964), 33. ↩︎
Ann Marie Plane and Leslie Tuttle, “Review Essay: Dreams and Dreaming in the Early Modern World,” in Renaissance Quarterly Vol. 67, No. 3: 920-5. ↩︎
Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (Signet, 1986), 15. ↩︎
Nearly everyone has heard the ancient Chinese curse meant to hex foes: “May you live in interesting times.” It is notable for its irony; on the surface, “interesting times” sounds alluring and non-threatening. But what constitutes an age of historical interest is never a mundane era of calm. What makes history interesting is the wars, the plagues, the conquests and the chaos that rupture stability and leave scars for future generations. The saying emphasizes that nobody wants to live through these times, even if they enjoy reading about them.
It is also entirely apocryphal. “May you live in interesting times” is neither ancient nor Chinese nor a curse. Rather, it began circulating in British political circles at the turn of the 20th century before going mainstream in the Anglosphere. The insistence on an ancient Chinese origin is meant to convey a certain banality or cyclicity to the extraordinary modern epoch that succeeded the Middle Ages.
Since Columbus crashed the shores of Hispaniola in 1492 there has been an accelerated rate of change permeating every rung of global society from the royal palace to the peasant village to the hunting camp. Modernity has wiped clean nearly every mode of existence that had previously stood for millennia.
Writing near the time and place where the apocryphal Chinese curse first originated, Karl Marx linked modernity’s dizzying pace to the motion of a capitalist economy fed by surplus value:
Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.1
Following Marx’s summation, the curse of interesting times is synonymous with life under the capitalist mode of production. In the present age we have seen our lives revolutionized by smartphones and Ozempic and artificial intelligence and the infinite scroll of social media. Without any new land to discover or national markets to conquer, the economic forces devouring profit have blown open digital universes and pierced the sky with rockets. All this, and there are still those among us who remember a time before the “personal computer” and internet.
Marx correctly diagnosed technological revolution and cultural agitation as endemic to capitalism but he undoubtedly underestimated the market’s ability to distract humanity from our sober senses, our real conditions of life, our relationships with others.
Even with the power to connect billions into direct relations, social media is reduced to a horde of vanity projects. The planetary boundaries for pollution are broken in the heat of smouldering summers. Leading nations have become the geopolitical equivalent of mass shooters. The western economy lives on the edge of a stock market bubble inflating by the day. But should any of this concern you—there’s a pill for that. Interesting times indeed.
Rosa Luxemburg said: “The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.” Overcoming the curse of interesting times still depends on apprehending its root cause; the suicidal logic of capitalist growth and the corporate suppression of human vitality. The current state of class consciousness is strung-out but the potential to connect, to organize, to educate and to inspire has never been more latent.
If virtue no delighted beauty lack, Your son-in-law is far more fair than black.
—Duke of Venice, Act 1, Scene 3.
The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice is a Shakespeare play that carries an echo of the European imagination that lasted beyond Karl Marx’s lifetime. “Moor” was a term used by Europeans to refer to the Muslim North Africans who had conquered and ruled the Iberian Peninsula between 711 and 1492. The Muslim population of Al-Andalus—modern day Spain and Portugal—were quite heterogeneous and did not use the Moor identifier themselves. Even after the Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula, “Moor” was a common European designate applied to continental Africa and the Middle East.
The term was derived from the ancient Roman province of Mauretania—modern day Morocco and Algeria— and it eventually came to denote virtually anyone of a darker complexion. Marx, a German and ethnic Ashkenazi, was nicknamed “the Moor” by friends and family owing to his swarthy skin tone, hair and eyes.
The Moor label—applied to Marx but also by Shakespeare to his Othello title character—is emblematic of European perceptions of race as they evolved through centuries. Since the era of ancient Rome, people of North African, Middle Eastern and sub-Saharan African origin worked and lived in continental Europe. Yet “the ancients did not fall into the error of biological racism; black skin colour was not a sign of inferiority.”1
The ancient world was hardly free of prejudice; individuals were judged harshly according to their occupation, cultural identity or status as citizens. But the concept of race did not exist and physical differences between groups were thought only to be the effects of climate on the human body. This view of race and ethnicity largely held through Europe’s medieval era and into Elizabethan England: “The theory of the humours, the basis of Elizabethan psychology, maintained that men were of different complexions, statures, and countenances of mind and body according to the climate of their birth.”2
Lacking a social construction of race, ancient Rome based their in-group identity on citizenship. And medieval Europe and Renaissance England did much the same thing, only with Christianity as the defining in-group characteristic. This began to change in many parts of Europe during Shakespeare’s lifetime with the advent of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Othello therefore occupies a blurry space somewhere at the dividing line between the western religious sorting of peoples and the systematic racial categorization that would later come.
A World of Sighs
At the open, we learn that Othello has married Desdemona, the daughter of a Venetian senator. Othello descends from a vague “Moorish” nobility but lives as “a Christianized black in Venice” who has risen to the rank of an esteemed general in the Venetian military.3 Iago serves as Othello’s trusted ensign but he has an axe to grind: Othello has passed him over for the position of lieutenant in favour of Cassio. This enrages Iago but he carefully keeps his feelings hidden. With discretion, Iago alerts Desdemona’s father to her betrothal and appeals to him with charged language in order to rouse opposition: “You’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse…I tell you your daughter and the Moor are making the beast with two backs.”4
Desdemona’s father, betrayed by his daughter marrying without his permission, appeals to the Venetian senate to overturn the ceremony. However, the senators are not persuaded. Desdemona had married with full consent and besides, they require the “valiant Moor” to defend Cyprus from an invading Turkish fleet. Iago then embarks upon a set of hateful schemes designed to ruin Cassio’s reputation, snatch money from Roderigo and destroy Othello’s otherwise happy marriage to Desdemona.
Iago holds the crown amongst Shakespeare’s villains because of the sociopathic manner in which he weaponizes the trust that other characters place in him. Eventually snared by his own web of lies, Iago’s malevolent nature is laid bare in the last act before a bed loaded with the lifeless bodies of Desdemona, Othello and even Emilia, Iago’s wife.
There is exceptional wickedness displayed here, as Iago ruthlessly manipulates Desdemona, Emilia, Cassio and Roderigo in order to convince Othello that his wife was unfaithful to him. But interest in Othello lingers due to the uniqueness of Shakespeare’s choice of protagonist. Shakespeare did not invent the character of Othello whole-cloth; he was devised from a “Moorish” character in a short story by the Italian poet Cinthio. Shakespeare’s version leaves open the possibility that Othello is an Arab or Berber noble of some type, but there are also a number of references to Othello’s appearance that suggest a black complexion.5 This was a bold choice for Elizabethan audiences as only an estimated 300-500 Black people are thought to have resided in England over that period of time.
Bootless Grief
Shakespeare takes measures to ensure that the foreign Othello is perceived favourably by his audience. He possesses a Christian identity, his nobility and rank bless him with a majesty of speech and his bravery in battle has earned him the respect of the Venetian ruling class.6 Even spiteful Iago acknowledges Othello’s virtues that would make him a good husband to Desdemona:
The Moor, howbeit that I endure him not, Is of a constant, loving, noble nature, And I dare think he’ll prove to Desdemona A most dear husband.7
When Othello capitulates to jealousy and slays Desdemona, the labour that Shakespeare undertook establishing his merits persuade the audience to interpret Othello’s horrendous act as contrary to his nature. It is Iago’s scheming that appropriates the blame for this crime and Othello’s motivations are not presented by Shakespeare as “different from any white husband.”8 The extremely patriarchal relations of Renaissance Europe are fully displayed in Othello, without question. But despite the use of vulgar language on the part of antagonistic characters, Othello is assuredly not a racist play.
While Shakespeare lived in a time just prior to the establishment of the concept of race, by Marx’s age this terrible social construction had reached a zenith. It is difficult to imagine that a story like Othello could be devised during the Victorian era without being subsumed by the social relations of race. In Capital, Marx asserted that racism and the capitalist mode of production shared a common origin during the age of colonial exploitation:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.9
While Elizabethan society viewed Christianity as a positive civilizing force, by the Victorian era Marx found a Christian society that was completely subordinate to capital accumulation and its accordant crimes:
The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the Earth.10
Destructing the Construction
We can therefore assert that race and racism is a byproduct of economic relations born from the spiral of capital accumulation which early on necessitated colonial subjugation, forced labour and abject slavery. The impoverishing impacts of these economic forces have had profound effects upon global society into the present day, where we remain haunted by these spectres of history. If race is a social construction burnished by the capitalist paradigm then its demolition can only commence with the creation a new economic order.
It was the Nigerian-British poet Ben Okri who said it best: “If Othello did not begin as a play about race, then history has made it one.” Indeed, Othello’s own race is as shapeless as the concept was during Shakespeare’s lifetime. But the aspiration today cannot be a return to feudalism or mercantilism or the harsh economies of antiquity.
Concerning race-based slavery, Marx wrote: “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” Ending the systematic subjugation of labour along racial lines is one step of a larger emancipatory project. A society that does not sort individuals by race is one thing; a society that does not sort individuals by class is quite another.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of universal liberty will be seen through the eyes of a classless people that recognize the interconnectedness of the universe, of humanity, of all things living. Once the predatory fetters of competition are shed, cooperation will prevail by the motto: “The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”11
Thanks for reading!
Frank Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Harvard University Press, 1970): 169. ↩︎
Philip Butcher, “Othello’s Racial Identity” in Shakespeare Quarterly Vol. 3, No. 3: 246. ↩︎
Peter Erickson, “Representations of Blacks and Blackness in the Renaissance” in Criticism Vol. 35, No. 4: 505. ↩︎
Philip Butcher goes as far as saying that Othello is “undeniably black” in “Othello’s Racial Identity,” 247. ↩︎
Russ McDonald writes, “Early-seventeenth century Europeans thought of Moors, Turks and Africans as pagan, but Othello is a Christian, a baptized convert whose Christianity is an important marker of his assimilation into Venice and the values of “civilization.” Russ McDonald, ed. Othello (Penguin, 2016): xxxvi. ↩︎
It seems the right will do anything but name capitalists as their enemy. While “globalism” can mean many things—including recognizing the global impact of local actions—the right tends to use the term as a sort of conspiratorial umbrella with which to shade their centrist opponents. In this vein, a globalist is someone who advocates trading off national sovereignty to a multinational governing body, such as the European Union or United Nations. Previous years have seen fixation with the World Economic Forum and their “Great Reset Initiative,” an alleged scheme to end personal property ownership through mind-controlling vaccines and outright seizure.
From a Marxist perspective, the frustrating aspect of the right wing globalist conception is the truth embedded within it. Globalization is characterized by multinational firms outsourcing employment, corporate-drafted free trade agreements, international warfare and the financial takeover of the economy by hedge funds, asset managers and banks. These trends have been a chimera for the left for some decades now, and past protests in Quebec, Seattle and New York attest.
The membership of corporate clubs like the WEF is drawn directly from the global capitalist ruling class. Meanwhile, international trade agreements like the USMCA and political organizations like the UN and OECD are subsidiary to the reality of global commerce and economic interdependence. In other words, “globalism” is a mental image projected by the actually existing liberal capitalist economic order. The right seeks to alter the image while the left wants to smash the projector.
Incredibly, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels perfectly diagnosed the problem in 1848:
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.1
The “great chagrin of Reactionists” toward globalization during Marx’s lifetime has clearly never gone away—it is the root of the “globalist” slur. Many millions of people around the world rightfully bemoan the loss of local industries and a cosmopolitan economy that rapidly revolutionizes culture. But the right has never wrapped their arms around the problem, as evidenced by reflexive conservative support for corporate-friendly rates of taxation and deregulation that lubricate the globalization machine.
The reason why corporate-funded media and think tanks are so hostile to socialism is because it is the only remedy to what ails the capitalist economy. Unfair trade and the outsourcing of labour and capital is impossible under a system of nationalized finance, rational economic planning, public ownership of strategic industries and worker owned enterprises. Exceptionally low rates of taxation on workers are also possible under a system that allocates public sector surpluses toward infrastructure, as China proves. Facts are stubborn things and capitalism will one day have a final reckoning that puts an end to the contrived “globalist” contention once and for all.
Is political democracy compatible with capitalist economies?
Thanks,
Matt.
[Sent via email]
Hi Matt,
This is a complex question that hinges on subjective definitions of democracy. Democracy literally means “people rule,” derived from the ancient Athenian concept of demokratia. The basic definition is straightforward but the practice has varied wildly along with popular conceptions that are serpentine, at best.
For example, ancient Athenians would dismiss elected representatives as non-democratic and oligarchic by nature. Athens had a direct democratic system that filled bureaucratic posts by lottery and passed laws with an assembly open to all citizens. On the surface, this appears even more in the spirit of “people rule” than what we have today. But when we adjust for the exclusivity of Athenian citizenship, only about 25% of the population was enfranchised since women, slaves and foreigners were forbidden from political participation. For older and more inclusive examples of “people rule” we could look to the consensus-based decision making among many tribal societies.
Democratic models antiquity and beyond only takes us so far, however. The argument could be made that “purer” forms of democracy which developed in the context of a tribe or city-state are simply not compatible in a modern world of teeming metropolises and complex nation-states. There is merit to this argument from a historical materialist perspective.
Consensus-based decision making is a logical outgrowth of highly interdependent individuals that hunted, gathered and sheltered as small communities. Cohesion and cooperation between members was the best guarantor of productivity and individual survival. In antiquity, on the other hand, the exploitation of slave labour was the productive basis that made a caste of citizens in the polis possible. This economic dependency on slavery elevated the role of military conquest and contributed to the confinement of women to the domestic sphere. Citizenship in the classical world was inextricably linked with military service and politics became the sole domain of a kind of warrior caste.
What these historical examples illustrate are models of democracy that arose from economic practicality rather than lofty idealism. The same is true of modern democratic forms, which were spawned by a nascent bourgeois class looking to wrest control of government from the European aristocracy of the 17th and 18th centuries. This is why property qualifications were an important feature of early voting rights across the West, just as military service was an important feature of citizenship in antiquity. Capitalism favours commercial expansion and classical slave economies favoured military conquest, and this is reflected in the democratic forms that each system produced.
A unique aspect of industrial capitalism is the massive leap in productive capacity and potential. This has largely made material scarcity artificial and wholly dependent on access to money as the medium of consumption. Because of this, class struggle within capitalism has produced some benefits for the restive masses, including universal suffrage and a basic social safety net.
Whereas strict parameters used to be put around those who can vote, it is now a case of parameters around those who can feasibly win office and pass legislation. Liberal governments all over the world are managed by financial elites with the ability to fund political campaigns, media networks, lobbyists and public debt. Capitalist democracies therefore achieve the appearance of popular legitimacy through multiparty elections but the actual governing process is nonetheless channelled by elite class interests.
Is democracy compatible with capitalism? If throwing a ballot every few years into a system subordinated to moneyed interests is the working definition of democracy, then yes—democracy is not only compatible with capitalism, it is capitalism’s “best possible shell,” as Lenin wrote.1 On the other hand, if we were to define democracy as “people rule” with popular decision making that extended from the workplace up to specific line-item national legislation, then capitalism is completely antithetical to it. Outside of tribal society, direct democracy is an unrealized ideal that awaits a radical economic transformation to give it shape.
“Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close! I’m the reason why things are what they are.”
—William Golding, Lord of the Flies.
For anyone thinking that Putin had overstepped boundaries when he invaded Ukraine, it turns out he was only ahead of the curve. Since that time we’ve had genocidal warfare visit Palestine, a president kidnapped from Venezuela, a starvation blockade imposed on Cuba and a criminal aerial bombardment come to Iran. Multiple crimes, in other words, and committed by successive presidential administrations of the West’s flagship state. No wonder the United Nations Secretary-General recently denounced international relations as a “law of the jungle.”
The Jungle Book
It must be a vestige of colonial history that conjures images of undulating spear tips and blood-stained fur whenever the jungle is invoked. This sort of iconography probably accounts for the jungle island setting of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the story about a group of schoolboys who get marooned during a military evacuation amidst a nuclear war. Initially, the boys are quite “civilized.” They elect a chief, hold orderly assemblies using a conch shell and maintain a signal fire to attract rescuers. But it doesn’t take long for these trappings of civilization to melt away under the tropical heat. Conflict divides the boys when the signal fire goes out and the hunting of a pig arouses primitive instincts, culminating in a spree of orgiastic violence. The aggressive faction of boys consumes the other by way of floggings and outright murder, and they eventually set the island on fire in an effort to flush out their first elected chief.
The great pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus wrote: “Fire of all things is the judge and ravisher.” We see this in Lord of the Flies, with the signal fire representing civilized order and the brush fire representing the desperate plunge into chaos and savagery. Golding possessed a cynical view of human nature that sees people animated by sadistic impulses in the service of selfish interests and power. This is a common position on human nature, also articulated by Chinese legalist philosophy and Thomas Hobbes’ “war of all against all” that characterizes life in a state of nature. Sigmund Freud adopted this position in his later writings as well, asserting the existence of a “primary mutual hostility of human beings” which civilization must tame by setting “limits to man’s aggressive instincts.”1
One commonality between Golding, Hobbes, Freud and the Chinese legalists is that they were all heavily influenced by the demoniacal experience of warfare.2 Witnessing first-hand the human capacity for violence leaves scars on the human psyche that are well documented. Through allegory, Golding asserts that Satan’s captain, Beelzebub—the Lord of the Flies—is not an external supernatural force, but is actually a force inside us, a force within. Freud appeals to the death instinct in order to explain human aggression, similar to Hobbes and the legalists who view aggression as a simple fact of our nature.
Human Nature?
Once that view of human nature is accepted, it is explained that human beings enter a social contract and form civilization as a refuge from our own terrifying base instincts. Violence and corruption in the world can be chalked up to inherently brutal instincts that inevitably infect all of our carefully designed social institutions and best laid plans. Although civilization can never be perfect, it remains the thin red line between orderly society and the violent anarchy of nature.
The only problem with that argument is that it isn’t true. There is real world evidence that rejects the cynics and supports a view that humans are naturally cooperative rather than hostile: in 1965 a group of six teenage boys from Tonga found themselves stranded on a remote Pacific island. Far from descending into an orgy of violence, they built shelter and divided chores. They worked together and planted a garden, hunted feral chickens, collected rainwater in deadwood and rotated cooking duties. They maintained a fire and strummed a makeshift guitar and sang songs in the evenings to lift their mood.
The experience of the Tongan castaways gels with Raymond Kelly’s “Prehistoric warlessness” hypothesis, asserting that conflict and violence between human groups was virtually non-existent up until the Neolithic Revolution.3 That does not mean that there were no instances of homicide or executions within groups—nobody has that answer—but systematic warfare was simply not a feature of the Paleolithic economy that dominated human evolution for hundreds of thousands of years. This is because incredibly low population densities, combined with relatively high natural abundance, provided no incentive for humans to engage in inter-tribal violence.
In our actual state of nature, warfare offered little gain in terms of resources but had the potential to destroy both warring parties with only a few casualties on both sides. It was therefore preferential to seek new territories on which to hunt and gather rather than fight over them. This is what explains human migrations out of Africa and our species’ rapid spread around the globe.
In a footnote, Karl Marx argues that philosophers “must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch.”4 Our human nature in general demands that we eat, drink, breathe, shelter, reproduce, etc. Modern human behaviour, such as language, art, music, abstract thought, planning and tool making arose to meet those needs. We can recognize that the universal behavioural traits of humans could not have been achievable in a Hobbesian “war of all against all” state of nature—every one of them required positive social intercourse in order to become characteristic of our species. It follows that cooperation in the context of low population density and relative natural abundance was the state of nature that defined our prehistoric evolution and are suggestive of “human nature in general.”
Civilization of Corruption
On the other side of the ledger is “human nature as modified in each historical epoch.” While our general characteristics concretized during the epoch of primitive communism, the expression of human behaviour began to vary wildly as environmental changes led to sedentary living, resource scarcity and class divisions that gradually permeating the social structure. The biological demands on human beings led us to developing a potential for many behavioural expressions—including turning our hunting spears on one another. But this potential for warfare and organized violence went unfulfilled until population growth and sedentism made it an economic necessity for one group to defend territory against another. From the Neolithic Revolution onward, a technological arms race and complex division of labour emerged to satisfy our biological needs. The resulting base and superstructure is history.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau rightly scolded Hobbes for taking modern, “civilized” people and ascribing their flaws to nature.5 The philosophical question is this: does human nature corrupt civilization or does civilization corrupt human nature? Marx and Rousseau affirmed the latter, and that is also where the preponderance of anthropological evidence lies. It is not our nature that commands a world plagued by corruption, greed, ecological destruction and warfare. Indeed, our ability to recognize these things as defects affirms a natural revulsion towards them. Although we have the capacity for greed and violence, we also have instincts that lead us toward love, generosity and cooperation.
Resource scarcity has prodded human beings into unleashing some of their worst potentialities. The good news about our current capitalist mode of production is that scarcity has become largely artificial by way of tremendous leaps in productive technology. It is entirely possible to defeat scarcity with a new, cooperative mode of production that finally unleashes our best potentialities. Until then, we are ruled by a Lord of the Flies, but not in the way that Golding imagined. The Lord of the Flies is not an internal, but an external force; an alien process of capital accumulation and rigged market forces that determines our class standing and incentivizes our worst behaviours.
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes:
Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader edited by Peter Gay (W.W. Norton, 1989): 750. ↩︎
Specifically World War II, the English Civil War, World War I and the Warring States period of China, respectively. ↩︎
Raymond C. Kelly, “The evolution of lethal intergroup violence,” in PNASVol. 102, No. 43: 15294-15298. ↩︎
Karl Marx, “Conversion of Surplus-Value into Capital” in Capital, Vol. One. He is specifically critical of utilitarians here, pointing out the utility of human behaviour can vary wildly depending on the mode of production available. ↩︎
Amidst the flurry of travel disruptions, high costs and global conflict, it is hard to see any positives. Is there anything to look forward to in these bleak times?
Sincerely,
Helen.
[Sent via email]
Hi Helen,
In Marx’s materialist conception of history, particular attention is paid to the “objective conditions” of individual life and social being.1 These conditions include available technologies, resources, level of accessible material comfort and productive employment that shape our governing ideologies, happiness and culture. In the present economy we are heavily dependent on oil and gas for energy, fertilizer and plastic byproducts.
This fossil fuel dependency has transformed the resource-rich Middle East into a site of economic competition between great powers. The result is a raging boil of oil money, ethnic strife and a vast quantity of weapons propping up systems of repression, resistance and neo-colonial extraction. What is happening in Iran right now is what happens when the pot boils over, just as it has previously boiled over in Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Sudan, Libya, Lebanon and Syria.
It is important for those of us in the West to appreciate just how much of our perceived progress has relied on managing the conflicts and resources of other nations. The capitalist world order was largely cemented by accident, when Old World European technologies collided with New World resources and societies. But its persistence is consciously maintained by way of corporate exploitation of capital starved countries and military containment of economic rivals. In other words, there is an intrinsic relationship between the riches of one country and the poverty of another.
Having survived the U.S. proxy war with Iraq, Iran became one of those rivals earmarked for “containment.”2 They were systematically marginalized from the global economy with sanctions and surrounded by American military bases. From the American point of view, this containment strategy was largely successful for decades and culminated with massive Iranian protests against the economic conditions of their country. The resulting crackdown only exposed the unsustainability of Iran’s trajectory.
Luckily for the IRGC, Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran allowed them to unleash the full force of their asymmetric power and they exploded out from the box that had previously contained them. Trump is now confronted with the stark reality that he won’t be able to contain them economically or militarily again. He’ll have to either destroy the country entirely or watch it become dramatically strengthened.
The bleak circumstances of war are a heavy burden to bear for this geopolitical competition over economic dominance. But if there is a silver lining to these clouds, Iran has plucked it from the sky and laid it at our feet. They have weaponized the global dependency on oil and wielded it to their great advantage; they have exacted a toll from the genocidal state of Israel; they have exposed limits to American militarism, inspiring defiance from tormented nations like Cuba.
Since the belligerent and cowardly attack on Iran, the world has turned to greener fertilizers, electric vehicles and renewable solar and wind power generation for energy needs. A helium shortage will put the brakes on a runaway tech sector and military-industrial complex. From the ashes of war, we may find the objective conditions of mankind gradually change for the better. Since a hegemonic power cannot sanction the Sun or go to war over wind, the foundation of a post-capitalist cooperative economy slowly becomes concretized.
Henri Lefebvre once said, “History puts its worst foot forward.”3 There is a duality to history, a tendency for progress to be paid up-front in coins forged by blood and fire. Iran is paying that price now in opposition to the oil-thirsty American establishment and Zionist lobby. As allies for a better world, we can always hope that Tehran is the rock where the wave of western imperialism breaks.
Is there a Marxist critique of intersectionality or did intersectionality come out of Marxism?
Thank you,
Lydia.
[Sent via Substack]
Hi Lydia,
“Intersectionality” is one of those politically loaded terms that evokes a lot of contemporary discourse around equity, diversity, inclusion, accessibility and cultural “woke” wars. Because Marxism is a four letter word to many people on the right, people like Jordan Peterson and James Lindsay have described progressive efforts to remedy racism and homophobia as Marxist in nature. This is nothing new, by the way. Environmentalists, feminists, literacy advocates and anti-segregationists have all worn the communist label at one time or another.
“Intersectionality” was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw and elaborated on by Patricia Hill Collins and others to describe the interlocking of social prejudices, economic inequalities and political disadvantages that apply to a variety of historically oppressed people. For example, intersectional theory posits that a Black woman or a gay Asian will confront social and political obstacles contingent on their minority status and independent of economic class.
The concept of intersectionality is reasonable from the Marxist viewpoint. Marx himself observed a variety of race and gender-based discriminations amongst the working class in his own time. In factories, it was found that women and children could be exploited at lower wages than men.1 Amongst the English working class, the influx of Irish were reviled for their acceptance of lower wages and blamed for cheapening the labour market. And for the countries that had enslaved Africans for the plantation economy, Marx warned: “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.”2
Between the premises of intersectionality and classical Marxism, there is an overlapping understanding that class alone does not determine social standing within capitalism. The trend toward DEI hiring policies of corporations, diversity quotas at universities or inclusive on-screen representation is something that could have been predicted by Marx. As capitalism has matured and globalized, it has naturally acquired a more cosmopolitan flavour and more demands are placed on the system from an increasingly diverse crowd of consumers and workers. For this reason many capitalist multinational corporations and Hollywood studios have adopted diversity policies with enthusiasm.
As a result of diversity quotas, “woke” virtue signalling and the absorption of economic migrants by the West, antagonisms have arisen in society between majority and minority factions of workers, bureaucrats and entrepreneurs. Speaking of hostilities between ethnicities, Marx wrote:
This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes…It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this.
One can acknowledge the reality of historical oppression and simultaneously reject liberal remedies that seek to pit man against woman, coloured against white, queer against straight. Discrimination in any direction operates within the ruling class paradigm of artificial scarcity. Instead, socialism posits economic solutions of universal application: socialized housing, public healthcare, full employment targets and freely accessible higher education. Fair trading practices must be developed with Global South countries in order to eliminate exploitation and reduce the number of economic refugees.3
In the long run, it is only an economic base that strives toward universal abundance instead of capitalist profit that is capable of abolishing the social divisions manufactured by history. And that, I submit, is the Marxist position.
The international economy must be one that minimizes global poverty and reduces the demand of people to flee their homeland. Marx understood the challenges of accommodating large numbers of economic refugees in foreign societies and, in the case of the Irish, he attacked the root cause by demanding that Ireland be liberated from the claws of English landlords and capitalists. ↩︎
The concept of civilizational decline has been a staple of the far-right at least since the rise of fascism in Europe a century ago. While the right has always fixed its consternation with fast moving cultural changes and the erosion of “traditional values,” they are ideologically incapable of linking their grievances to the capitalist economic system that constantly revolutionizes our way of life.1 But the first quarter of the 21st century has had the experience of successive wars and economic crises and political realignments against the backdrop of a rising China. The anti-capitalist left has therefore embraced the decline narrative, given the extraordinary challenges of environmental deterioration and affordability amidst a rising concentration of wealth and power into the hands of an elite western oligarchy. Throw in the demoralizing Epstein revelations and a rupture to the political order by a berserk President Trump and even western liberals are acknowledging decline.
If there is one shibboleth of the West that deserves scrutiny at this moment in history, it is liberal democracy. Liberal democracy has been the veneer over western capitalism; a moral ornament obscuring the ransacking of colonies around the world and used to coordinate a unified western response to competition from emergent powers. This has not always been a bad thing—the alliance between liberal capitalist states and the Soviet Union was fruitful in tearing down Nazi Germany, for example.
In the period post-World War II, western liberal countries could lay claim to progressive achievements on the home front—such as civil rights, accessible education and affordable housing—even while supporting many heinousregimes abroad. Free speech and multiparty elections appeared as great strengths under a regime of centralized news media that gave citizens a common information platform, while high union membership in domestic manufacturing ensured a reasonable distribution of profits.
Today that regime has changed. Private sector unions have fallen off a cliff and the digital age has turned media consumption into a “Choose Your Own Adventure” story. In a dialectical reversal, yesterday’s free speech and partisan competition have become forces that propel their own demise: conspiratorial misinformation, foreign subversion, online mobs of neo-Nazis, unchecked corporate power, the ascent of dictatorial right-wing populists into office. While smartphone apps and AI models rush out like a waterfall, public infrastructure is achingly slow to build. In Canada it can take 41 years to cut the ribbon on a simple light rail transport—to say nothing of badly needed doctors, schools, energy generation and bridges. The refusal to scrutinize liberal democracy out of some fear that its only alternative is dictatorship must be admonished because capitalism has already put us on an openly authoritarian trajectory with accelerating speed. If the democratic veneer that the West has placed over its society is no longer compatible with the communications technology and global economic structure in existence today, then it is high time to say so.
Washington’s Warning
In his farewell address, the first president of the United States foresaw exactly why liberal democracy would cease to function. George Washington argued that partisanship would fragment the common interest into competing factions. A citizenry that identified with a political party rather than the country would lose its principles; they would fail to identify policies affecting the common interest and concern themselves only with gaining power at the next instance. Political parties turn society against itself and create countries within countries: “Thus the policy and will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.” In the partisan political environment, Washington said, jealousies prevail and a “spirit of revenge” takes over, clearing the way for “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” to take over on the back of “foreign influence and corruption.”
“I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat.” George Washington warned that partisan animosity would destroy national unity and invite the foreign subversion of national interests.
The body politic is now terminally ill with the viruses that Washington identified centuries ago. Liberal societies divided by political allegiance has turned the digital space into a playground for foreignactors. While weaker countries like Georgia and the Philippines are sites of proxy wars between East and West influence, the president of the United States openlyaccepts foreign bribes and Canadian separatists collaborate with agitators from the U.S. government. Elections have turned into sports matches where the politicians are the players, the voters are the fans and corporate CEOs own the teams.
The Brexit referendum was dominated by Britain’s wealthiest individuals and the OECD has already acknowledged that capital interests have saturated public discourse through industry-funded think tanks, lobbying and direct corporate political advertising. Representative government is powerless to reverse these trends because it is baked into the system; whoever holds power has necessarily benefitted from the existing framework or they wouldn’t be in office. Major reforms therefore hold little incentive but face massive pushback from an elite minority eager to retain its influence.
Contemporary liberal governance aligns with Washington’s description of “a frightful despotism” that negates the common interest in favour of permanent minority rule. In Canada, pollution reduction measures have been rolled back while oil companies have received billions in new subsidies—despite a two-thirds majority favouring clean energy and climate protection. A full three-quarters of Canadians give failing grades to their government in assisting with the cost of living crisis. The Canadian government does not possess the tools to meaningfully direct economic outcomes and the majority of people are plunged daily into the hazards of the market. Meanwhile, Canada’s central bank receives no input from labour or consumer stakeholders and the CEO-drenched Business Council of Canada has emerged as the prime minister’s top advisor.
When majority opinion is fragmented between multiple elected parties, it is only economic elites who maintain consistent influence through successive governments. In the United States, this is especially true; studies analyzing popular opinion and political legislation have concluded that average Americans “have practically zero influence on government policy.”
On policy, Democrats, Independents and Republicans agree with each other far more often than not. Large majorities in the United States favour public health insurance, ending the embargo of Cuba, ending mass incarceration, avoiding confrontation with Iran and Venezuela, reducing military expenditures, cutting support for Israel and adopting a pro-Main Street economic approach. Yet this is ignored by administration after administration resulting in rock-bottom public trust in government. As little as 17% of Americans trust their government “to do what is right most of the time.”
A United States that was subordinated to the popular will of Americans would immediately be a gentler, more sustainable global power with an economy that doesn’t cannabilize its own people for profits. But a government anchored by popular opinion would hurt margins across multiple industries—which is a red line for the capitalist regime. Partisan competition therefore exists to exploit wedge issues and keep the democratic majority as far from power as possible.
Toward a People’s Democracy
In The State and Revolution, Lenin described liberal democracy as “the best possible political shell for capitalism” because it allows corporate oligarchs to establish their power “so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois democratic republic can shake it.”2 The western dictatorship of capital donned respectable attire for the purposes of winning hearts and minds during the Cold War. But since the dissolution of the Soviet Union it has shed its clothes once again.
Although the People’s Republic of China is derided in the mainstream as an authoritarian country, their decision-making process gathers more input from their citizens than most western countries do. Through online platforms, opinion polling, surveys, telephone hotlines and direct elections of local officials, the people of China give their local governments long lists of actionable items and provide guidance to the strategic Five Year Plans that have modernized their country at warp speed. This does not mean many aspects of the Chinese political system would be palatable to western society but it does expose the arbitrary criteria by which one country is deemed “democratic” while another is smeared as “authoritarian.” After all, if the “democratic” label can apply to a country that grants its citizens zero input in legislation and locks up more of its own people than any other in history, what good is the label?
The object of liberal democracy represents a major barrier to class consciousness, even among the left. A misplaced faith in this unworkable system has led to disastrous outcomes for the economic security of western workers; for the debt loads of governments; for slums of the Global South; for the biosphere. This is not a world designed by the democratic majority. To earn the label of democracy, the West must rethink the utility of career politicians making decisions on behalf of the population. Corporate influence must be ruthlessly suppressed and a public sector economy servile to the material wants and needs of the democratic majority must be constructed. With the commanding heights of the economy under public control, fertile ground for cooperative enterprises can finally be laid.
If a one party state is a bridge too far, we should consider alternative power structures that could exalt the great mass of working people over special interest groups. For example, power could be vested to non-partisan people’s assemblies chosen by lot. Such assemblies would supervise the bureaucracy and hire expert panels that implement the laws and economic plans determined by direct referenda. It is this, direct democracy, that reconciles the people with their government instead of alienating them from it.
Contrary to the musings of thinkers like John Stuart Mill, the “tyranny of the majority” is not a historical reality. Every tyranny in history has rested on minority power and the forfeiture of rights to elites. Capital interests have co-opted the democratic title and deformed the concept beyond recognition. But liberal government must be viewed as an enemy in the struggle against elite power. As Marx and Engels said, “the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.”3 As things now stand, that “battle of democracy” has yet to begin.
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes:
Recalling Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto (Arcturus Publishing, 2017): 37. “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.” ↩︎
Vladimir Lenin, “The State and Revolution” in Essential Works of Lenin: “What Is To Be Done? And Other Writings (CreateSpace, 2012): 382-3. ↩︎
When the U.S. government purchased Louisiana from France, they secured a land stretching from present-day Montana, through Oklahoma and terminating at the Gulf of Mexico. However a new dispute opened with Spain concerning the southwest boundary of the formerly French territory: Texas. The Americans felt that they had acquired the territory as part of their deal with France but Spain maintained that it was them who had control over that land. The Spanish sale of Florida to Washington was meant to settle the Texas issue and the U.S. government formally relinquished its claims as part of the transaction. But American settlers on the frontier had other ideas.
Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821 and was quickly recognized by the United States. Initially the two countries enjoyed friendly diplomatic relations, with the Treaty of Limits affirming Mexican sovereignty over Texas and other western territories, including present-day Arizona and California. Within this cordial political atmosphere, American homesteaders were invited to settle in Texas and help to stabilize a fragile Mexican economy. What they received was an unruly population with little respect for Mexican sovereignty, much less Mexican people or customs.1 Tensions came to a boil when Mexico abolished slavery in 1829. As many American settlers had brought slaves with them, they would have faced a loss of property if the Mexican law was enforced. Instead they took up arms, kicked out Mexican authorities and demanded to be annexed by the United States.
Early Aggressions
Mexico warned the U.S. that their border treaty would be nullified if they annexed Texas. The Mexicans undoubtedly misunderstood the expansionist spirit of manifest destiny, having been fooled by prior friendly relations with Washington. The resulting Mexican–American War dropped the full brutality of U.S. superiority down on Mexico like the hammer of Thor: boys were shot for sport; churches were desecrated and Catholics murdered; women and little girls were stripped naked and assaulted in unspeakable ways; entire villages were razed by fire.2 The barbarity only halted when the U.S. military occupation of Mexico City forced the surrender of 55% of Mexican territory.
The Mexican–American War was not any kind of dark chapter in the history of U.S.–Latin America relations. On the contrary—it set the mould. With the conquest of new territory stretching to the Pacific, American commercial interests began to reach down the coastline and into Central America.
The western appetite for bananas and other tropical commodities brought US capital into contact with a new swathe of Latino peoples—and it went about as well for them as it did for the Mexicans in years prior. The ravaging of Mexico proved to America, with its powerful industrial economy, that it could act with impunity toward its less-developed neighbours to the south. Their capital and guns afforded them enormous power over a region that lacked both.
Warfare is defined as an “open and declared armed hostile conflict between nations.” The Banana Wars of the early 20th century carry an unfortunate title because they were not wars—they were repeated molestations of vulnerable populations by an imperial power.
When Haiti and the Dominican Republic fell into debt, the US deployed artillery, machine guns and naval ships. They stole the national gold reserves, turned government finances over to New York banks and gave American corporations free access to land for sugar plantations run by forced labour. When a nationalist insurgency threatened foreign property in Nicaragua, marines arrived to quash the rebellion. They proceeded to take over government finances and established a military base to suppress future anti-American revolts. When Washington decided to build a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, they backed a secessionist movement that would pull the small, pliable country of Panama from the lands of Greater Colombia. When abhorrent working conditions on American-owned sugar plantations in Cuba sparked civil unrest, thousands of marines arrived to protect the harvest and suppress anti-American agitation.3 When plantation workers in Colombia protested payment in coupons rather than cash and demanded a six day work week, the United Fruit Company massacred the strikers. In Honduras, United Fruit kept workers’ movements at bay by paying off presidential candidates and funding right wing militias. This combination of efforts made the corporation the most powerful entity in the state.
The Dictatorships
The advent of the Cold War brought American hegemony over Latin America to new heights. With the US military in confrontation with communist forces in Asia and Europe, covert action and special operations were relied on in the Western Hemisphere. Across Latin America, torture chambers and CIA-trained death squads blossomed alongside a growing number of brutal right wing dictators aided by Washington. Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela all suffered visits from oppressive regimes that consolidated power and murdered their opposition under the cynical guise of “anticommunism.” Even modestly progressive and liberal-democratic movements were snuffed out in many of these countries, as elections were overturned and American corporate interest reigned supreme.
This was the Latin America that confronted a young Che Guevara as he embarked on his notorious motorcycle journey across the continent. On his trip he witnessed the the cold and hungry conditions of mine workers in Chile and the faces of poverty in Peru, people who “go on living only because it’s a habit they cannot shake.”4
Guevara correctly understood that the division of Latin America into “unstable and illusory nationalities” made the region ripe for exploitation and US domination.5 He saw this domination first-hand in 1954 when living in Guatemala, where an elected government proposed land reform for its farmers. Soon afterward, it was overthrown by American bombers in order to install a pro-United Fruit Company dictatorship headed by Castillo Armas, a CIA asset who murdered thousands of people. This experience proved the futility of representative democracy in the face of powerful corporate interests.
Having been marked for execution by the homicidal U.S. puppet in Guatemala, Guevara fled to Mexico where he met Fidel Castro and joined the Cuban revolutionary struggle. Cuba was also ruled by a pro-US dictator at this time and he oversaw routine executions of political opponents and a Cuban economy where American corporations controlled approximately 40% of sugar production, 90% of mining concessions, 100% of cattle ranching, 80% of utilities and had a monopoly on imports. Additionally, the corruption of the Batista regime allowed the American Mafia transform Havana into a drunken cesspool of gambling and prostitution.
With striking lucidity President John F. Kennedy admitted:
I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime.
The success of the Cuban revolution saw the re-appropriation of national property and the destruction of casinos by throngs of empowered Habaneros. The revolution went on to deliver universal housing, healthcare and education, restoring dignity to a despoiled country. However, the antagonism would re-emerge in the form of a suffocating economic blockade and countless coup attempts.
The Debt Racket
The end of the Cold War brought more liberal governance to Latin America but they were saddled with debts carried over from the era of military juntas. From this situation came America’s next racket: the “Washington Consensus,” which was little more than a set of neoliberal dictates devised by western financiers for nations held in debt bondage.
Mass privatization, austerity budgets and easy American access to cheap labour and resources were the hallmarks of crisis financing in the 1980s and 1990s, pulling in countries such as Argentina, Chile, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico and Venezuela—resulting in La Década Perdida (the Lost Decade) of stagnant economies and soaring inequality. In other words, the Washington Consensus represented another hegemonic “push from the United States” for “trade agreements favourable to the United States…The free flow of capital that these trade agreements were designed to foster has only benefitted the rich nations and the wealthy classes.”6 Derivative of these neoliberal policy prescriptions is a migration crisis and the 21st century “pink tide” of elected progressive governments throughout Latin America.
From the Banana Wars era to the present day, we can see that Che Guevara was proven right: liberal democracy in exploited countries is too weak to uplift the great majority and a lack of regional solidarity has made it easy for the United States to run roughshod over Latin America. In terms of real purchasing power, the region has been economically stagnant for 50 years, with examples of worsening poverty and shrinking middle incomes over that time. The pink tide movement was driven back by “soft” coups in Brazil and Bolivia, corporate pressure and repeatedattacks from Washington on Latin American progressive heads of state. One pink tide country which resisted coup attempts and foreign subversion was Venezuela under Hugo Chavez.
In a span of 14 years Chavez was able to double school enrolment, make literacy and healthcare universal, raise access to safe drinking water from 82% to 95%, build 700,000 homes, return one million acres of land to indigenous people, reduce malnutrition from 21% to 3%, and cut unemployment and infant mortality in half. His government accomplished this through a program that forcefully eschewed liberalism in favour of participatory democracy at the neighbourhood level, worker-owned enterprises and nationalization of resources and services. For these successes, the United States delivered to Venezuela the same verdict that Cuba received decades ago: economic strangulation, with the harshest measures arriving in 2019.
What Venezuela and Cuba represent is an expression of defiance in the face of 180 years of unbroken US hegemony in Latin America. For this reason, they are admired by a great many people who “personally suffered under US-sponsored military dictatorships that dominated much of the region” for decades.7 The kidnapping of Chavez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, is an attempt to force compliance with the pillaging of Latino resources that American corporations feel entitled to. Cheering this move is fatally wrong, even for opponents of socialism: if Venezuela and Cuba are the backlash to United States interventionism, it follows that another intervention could make the situation much worse.
What the United States has done to Venezuela will perpetuate the familiar cycle of political violence and economic dependency—the breeding ground for anti-American resentment—serving nobody but the corporate lobby. The best moments in US–Latin America relations occurred when America expanded the realm of sovereignty rather than crushed it: the turnover of the Panama Canal to Panamanian authority and FDR’s short-lived Good Neighbour policy of non-interference in the region. As long as Latin American politics remains a reaction to American doctrine, the Western Hemisphere will not be free.
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes:
The irony of this development in Texas compared to present-day complaints over immigration should not be lost on anyone. ↩︎
See: Stephen Carney, The Occupation of Mexico (Government Printing Office, 2016): 20, 37, and Peter Guardino, “Gender, Soldiering, and Citizenship in the Mexican–American War of 1846-1848” in The American Historical Review, Vol. 119, No. 1: 43. ↩︎
Louis A. Perez Jr., Intervention, Revolution, and Politics in Cuba (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012): 98. ↩︎
Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey (Ocean Press, 2003): 41. ↩︎
Predictions may be a fool’s errand but there is always some low-hanging fruit. Democrats will sweep midterm elections, Canada’s prime minister likely obtains his coveted majority government and plastic pollution continues to worsen. Marxists understand the relatively low stakes of these surface-level tendencies. The world we are living in is one where power has long been consolidated by an elite corporate class; yawning economic inequalities and corrupted liberal democracies are only symptoms of this fact. I do not foresee any challenge to ruling class power in the near term, which means that the direction of 2026 has already been set.
For all its Trump-related pandemonium, 2025 did not really move the needle away from trajectories previously established. Inflation continued to eat away at pocketbooks around the world. Russia and Israel aggressively redrew the maps of their respective neighbourhoods. China held on to its massive gains in global exports and new technologies. The Western world, including Canada and the European Union, have once again proven politically adrift without the tide of American leadership. The artificial intelligence economy—buoying the world’s stock markets by hype—has turned flat without reaching any clear tipping point. Venezuela has invited condemnable aggression from Washington and this is the fate of any Latin American country daring to exercise sovereignty over their national resources.
With the big stories of 2025, you’ll notice there was not a lot that was new; events have all unfolded around past momentum. Even an objective change, like US tariff polilcy, has only accelerated the existing trend of Western decline relative to a rising East. Populist movements demonstrate a world clamouring for catharsis but 2026 won’t be the year to deliver it. That is because the economic forces at play tell a story of near-term easing rather than escalation. Inflation is slowing down. AI investors have begun to exercise caution amidst talk of a bubble. The prospect of a Russia–Ukraine ceasefire signal the willingness of both to prioritize economic repair over military objectives. And the erraticism of the Trump White House has only spurred China to stay its course while the West begrudgingly flounders. The fate of Venezuela’s Maduro government may be an open question but, whatever happens, it will be a movie we have seenbefore.
The tense stability which looms over the globe this January does not portend any major improvement. Financial strain, environmental deterioration, warfare, oligarchic power, political impulsivity and social unrest will all continue to simmer under the heat of the recent past. The ancient Greek philosopher Anaxagoras said that to “separate off” elements from one another takes a revolution.1 Likewise, the West will need to “separate off” its current ruling class in order to realize a change to its set trajectory. History shows us that revolutions do not occur unless class conflict reaches a raging boil. Although we will be waiting past the new year for that, let’s raise a glass to 2026 and try our best to enjoy the simmer.
For those of us in northern climes, there really is no better time of the season than Christmas. Egg nog and turkey, the heat of a crackling fire, that royal pine scent. It’s the high point of winter where cold weather and snow brightens the atmosphere; reflecting twinkle lights and hanging drapes of candy cane red.
On the calendar of the secular West, Christmas is the most important holiday, spurring entire industries and price indexes. For all the bluster of church bells and the “war on Christmas,” you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a doctrinal Christian holiday bastardized by secular affectations. But it isn’t.
A Saturnalian Christmas
The date of Christ’s birth was never established by religious scripture. Without a date, celebrations by early Christians would have been impossible. December 25 was chosen by Pope Julius I sometime around 337 AD and it accomplished two things. First, it projected mystic divinity to the life of Jesus. As he was widely regarded to have been crucified on March 25, it followed that the Annunciation must have occurred on the same day; a perfect nine month pregnancy puts baby Jesus snug in a manger on December 25. Second, this date coincided with the existing pagan holiday of Saturnalia, making for a tidy Christian cooptation of an existing Roman landmark.
Little is known about early Christmas traditions—if there were any at all to speak of. Birthdays were not nearly as significant to ancient and medieval people as they are now. But from the Middle Ages, it is apparent that Christmas had much more in common with the Roman Saturnalia than it did with Catholic ritual: a multi-day public revelry of drunken stupor and feasting, when slaves could be free and peasants could be lords and all rules of the social hierarchy were flattened. In fact, the traditional 12 days of Christmas was so sinful and disorderly that the very first “war on Christmas” was actually waged by American Puritans who attempted to ban the holiday by levying fines against those who observed it.
Whether Saturnalia or medieval Christmas, we see in both instances a holiday that was religious in name only. Rather than piety, what they really provided was a temporary release to the tense social hierarchy and class system. This was the occasion when Roman slave masters and medieval landlords would grant privileges and gifts to their subjects, solidifying the economic order with community cohesion. The multitude of free days dedicated to communal partying is practically unthinkable to modern economies, which generally only grant about ten statutory holidays throughout the entire year—let alone 12 for a single event. But for the largely agrarian economies of pre-capitalist Europe, there was not much work to be conducted during the winter months.
Capitalist Christmas
Although the Puritan Christmas ban during the 1600s failed, the advent of industrial capitalism granted them their wish. The spread of urban factories, industrial mining, shipbuilding yards and textile mills throughout the 1700s scrambled the established agrarian economy and muted the raucous 12 days of Christmas. People were working 16 hours a day, six days per week. Owing to such dreary working conditions in the Anglosphere, by the 1800s people “hardly took notice of the holiday at all.”1
Describing the capitalist thrust toward exchange value and profit realization, the geographer David Harvey wrote: “The monetization of everything appears to be an unstated evolutionary law of capital.”2 The history of Christmas is clearly an example of this capitalist tendency. Whereas the old Christmas posed an obstacle to capitalist accumulation, the new Christmas would facilitate it. The community that made that debaucherous, 12 day Saturnalian binge possible was pulverized by the crushing weight of industrial machines and thirst for survival wages. As Marx said, “where money is not itself the community, it dissolves the community.”3
Shared holidays are a kernel of communal human nature and social labour that have found cultural expressions for all of known history. What we find with Christmas is a tradition that was melted down by the Industrial Revolution and reforged with a capitalist skin. Christmas trees were the first seasonal item to be put up for sale in towns and cities across North America, as the German custom gained widespread popularity after the arrival of migrants. Christmas tree decorations then followed suit, spurning the seasonal sales of street vendors. Printing presses were the next to cash in on the season with the marketing of mass produced Christmas cards that could be sent via public mail delivery. The social nature of Christmas cannot be denied here; Christmas trees for family enjoyment and public display, cards purchased for friends and family across North America. The gift was the next logical expansion of the Christmas commodity ecosystem.
From an economic standpoint, the Christmas gift represents the ruthless commodification of social life under the guise of selfless giving to loved ones. Gift giving within a capitalist framework effectively exploits our cooperative nature for the realization of private profits. The costs do not have to be paid up front. Canadians are expected to carry $6.1 billion in post-holiday debt entering 2026. Last year, 36% of Americans took on about $1,100 in debt to finance Christmas and Brits collectively raised £1.1 billion in holiday debt. For many, it is so much easier to go into debt than it is to say “no” to their children.
Enter Santa
The most recognizable symbol of Christmas isn’t Jesus—it’s Santa Claus. On the surface, it appears absurd that the birthday boy, the King of kings and Lamb of God, would be overshadowed on his special day by a plump, sleigh-riding elf from the North Pole. It makes sense only when considering the history: Christmas was never a particularly religious ritual and modern Christmas is largely a capitalist construction that drives commodity sales.
Santa Claus is a composite figure based on 19th century American storytelling and Dutch interpretations of Saint Nicholas, or Sinterklaas. He was not invented by marketeers but his legendary association with gift giving to children made him the perfect marketable Christmas vehicle to drive sales. Attempting to turn Jesus into a piece of marketing would be heretical to the religious and exclusionary to the secular. But Santa; Santa can appear in Coca-Cola advertisements and department store parades. Santa can sprout like mushrooms in December at malls across a continent. The consummate salesman of Christmas, Santa can even get ripped and work the Target store.
Whereas previous modes of production often brought producers and consumers into personal relationships, what happens in the capitalist marketplace is the relation of prices, brands and objects against one another. The production process itself is concealed as “consumers come to form a relationship with products instead of the people who make them.”4
Likewise with Santa, whose mythical veneer belies a fetish: by projecting the generosity of Christmas onto an elf, we distance ourselves from the credit cards and labour that perpetuate the myth. Santa is the symbol of overconsumption under a cloak of charity. After all, he is only as generous as we are willing to spend. Yet, when we are acculturated into the Santa myth we recognize that the gifts he procures come from Santa’s workshop rather than a toy store or Amazon delivery. We are alienated from production and bound to superficial mass consumption—and we acknowledge this fact by our refusal to impute these qualities onto Santa, whose elves intimately handcraft gifts from wish lists.
The intimacy is important because this is what grows through the cracks. Despite the commercial creation of Christmas, the communal feast lives on. It is the social quality of Christmas that gives it a heartbeat—and that cannot be purchased at the department store.
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes:
“Christmas in 19th Century America,” History TodayVol. 45, No. 12. ↩︎
David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse(Verso, 2023): 79. ↩︎
Too much of the political conversation is centred around distribution. For the left, this means steeper rates of progressive taxation and social spending. For the right it is the inverse, lower taxes—particularly at the high end of the wealth pyramid—and reduced social spending. The specific rates and policies have shape-shifted over the years but this dichotomy sets the parameter of political debate in the main. But it is a shallow dichotomy which provides tremendous benefit to the economic elites because it does not lay a finger to the seat of their domination. Let’s remember, how the pie gets sliced is almost irrelevant next to who owns the oven.
If there is one Marxist teaching that is conveniently taboo in mainstream discussion, it is that wealth and power exist first and foremost as economic relations. After Jeff Bezos’ joyride into suborbital space, the first people he thanked were his employees and customers who unwittingly “paid for all of this.” Of course, if those same people had a choice as to where their generated surplus was allocated, they probably wouldn’t sign it over to the vanity project of an eccentric billionaire.
It is the economic relationship between Bezos and his employees that puts a material surplus squarely on his lap to play with. This relationship gives him command over market conditions and a vast army of labour, as well as a grotesquely outsized political sway. It is a Herculean task to pry this surplus from his lap with taxation because liberal governance grants enormous influence to “job creators” by way of the corporate lobby and political donations.
Marx said “to be radical is to grasp the matter by the root.”1 While taxation rates help to manicure the lawn, the enormity of problems posed by global capitalism demands an entire re-seeding. Progressive forces must apprehend the relations of production that first give rise to the corporate capture of government, the K-shaped economy, environmental destruction, the state of perpetual warfare. By transforming the economy from one that is authoritarian and competitive into one that is democratic and cooperative, matters of distribution and political equality resolve themselves on the new terms.
A Catalogue of Crises
Taking inventory of the problems that have plagued our capitalist society for decades, we see worker-owned enterprises (cooperatives) present themselves as a panacea. Waste and environmental decline, crisis-level mental health outcomes, community loss, job insecurity and high costs of living are a few that spring to the foreground.
On environmental outcomes, there is a structural benefit to workers owning their own workplace. The owners are not impersonal investors from gated communities afar, but members of the community in which they operate. Cooperative economic relations encourage superior environmental stewardship because worker-owners are more likely to avoid polluting their communities and the planet than impersonal investors and owners.
Multiplestudies demonstrate the pro-social tendency of cooperatives to prioritize environmental goals, reduce waste and allocate resources efficiently—especially when compared against capitalist firms. As one example, a cooperative bank in the UK was able to reduce downstream emissions of clients by 70% by providing financing for renewables, energy efficiency upgrades and carbon offsets.2
In terms of mental health and community, the accelerated decline of both are not unrelated. It should be no surprise that a chronically-online society increasingly devoid of face-to-face interactions is manifesting symptoms of a “loneliness epidemic,” negatively affecting local communities and individual well-being. The negative mental health symptoms we observe today validate the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm’s five fundamental needs for mental well being: relatedness, rootedness and unity, transcendence, sense of identity and frame of orientation.
Because of democratic decision making and a shared destiny amongst stakeholders, cooperatives offer the individual a community unto itself and create a vested interest in civic participation, addressing each of Fromm’s fundamental needs. The superiority of this model compared to capitalist corporations is reflected in higher rates of job satisfaction and happiness at work. At a national scale, widespread adoption of the cooperative model would enhance social cohesion, community engagement and improve productivity.
Artificial intelligence and automation are frequently cited as factors aggravating conditions of employment insecurity and precarious work. Productive technologies should not be feared, though. Workers that own their firms are incentivized toward technological efficiency and practical AI deployment because it saves labour time without impacting income. There is a longstanding capitalist contradiction regarding technological progression: employers covet it for the productivity gains, employees fear it over the ensuing layoffs. When employees become owners, this contradiction is resolved.
Furthermore, worker cooperatives have demonstrated greater staff retention and job security, even in times of economic recession. Whereas capitalist firms often have an express fiduciary duty to prioritize the interests of the investment class over their workers, worker-owners are far more likely to set funds aside in periods of strong economic performance in order to stabilize incomes during periods of weakness. The structural difference between conventional corporations and cooperatives also sees workers accrue greater employment benefit coverage for their families and up to 80% above-market pay. A comfortable living wage is the demonstrated norm in mature cooperative formations.
In one stroke, the cooperative model alleviates almost all of the civilizational problems pressing so hard on us today. Even political polarization, drug addiction and crime could be expected to crash downward with increased community building, financial security and social cohesion amongst the population. Rather than pitch socialism as a stoic alternative, cooperatives offer a visible pathway to transcending capitalism altogether; a world where wage labour is viewed as dimly as serfdom or slavery is right now.
Laying the Soil
But it is never so easy. For the apologists of capitalism, the usual retort is something along the lines of: “Nothing is stopping the formation of cooperatives right now. The market will decide if they are the superior model or not.” This falsely assumes some kind of fair marketplace where the best ideas, products and formations inevitably rise to the top. In reality, we live within a global system that doles out multi-trillion dollar subsidies to capitalist firms each year. Publicly funded and well-endowed schools of commerce glisten on campuses wherever a university is to be found. Banks raise low-interest debt and investment for hedge funds and publicly-listed companies, while giving relatively draconian terms to small businesses—and even worse for cooperatives, which are often denied loans.
Rosa Luxemburg described cooperatives as “small units of socialized production within the midst of capitalist exchange.”3 Worker owned enterprises must compete with conventional firms in the capitalist market but they do so with far less tools at their disposal. While they offer enormous pro-social and environmental benefits, this does not count toward GDP or rate of profit—the only measures of capitalist value, even in a world on fire.
The struggle to breathe under an avaricious economy thirsty for profit account for many of the shortcomings of the cooperative movement, including cases where wage labour and outsourcing is resorted to. But this does not mean cooperatives are a dead-end, they just have the wrong substrate. The history of capitalism, too, is pockmarked by failed attempts of merchant-run cities and bourgeois revolutions to shed their aristocratic chains, only to lose momentum and become subsumed again by dominant feudal relations.4
Socialism will transcend capitalism in the West when a future revolution applies the lessons of China’s nation building state-owned enterprises and public planning; when the unimpeded direct democratic rule of the people has been won. Once community and environment take their place among the measures of wealth, new economic relations between associated producers and consumers can be organized. As Karl Marx said:
If cooperative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united cooperative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production—what else would it be but communism, “possible” communism?5
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes:
Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Second Ed. trans. David McClellan (Oxford University Press, 2000): 77. ↩︎
Melissa Scanlan, Prosperity in the Fossil-Free Economy: Cooperatives and the Design of Sustainable Businesses (Yale University Press, 2021): 261. ↩︎
Will Trump’s past association with Jeffrey Epstein take him down, as it did to Prince Andrew and Peter Mandelson in the UK? Who else might be involved and why is everything so slow to come out? I’ve been hearing about Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell for years but have only followed the story over the past year.
Respectfully,
Robert.
Hi Robert,
It is impossible to judge whether the full magnitude of the Epstein ring will ever emerge. When this story first made headlines, it seemed plausible that the crimes were only the work of a perverted billionaire who used people like Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Bill Gates and various Hollywood celebrities to shield his reputation. Since Trump was returned to the White House he has made blunt attempts to suppress the Epstein story—even labelling it as a hoax. Predictably, this tactic has backfired and instead made Epstein an even greater object of scrutiny.
Setting the prurient details of the pedophile ring aside, the number of prominent people that Epstein had personally met and spent time with is strange. Over the summer, Chris Hedges recorded an illuminating podcast with Nick Bryant, the investigative journalist who first published Epstein’s contact list and flight logs. They cover the obscure relationship that Jeffrey Epstein had with Ghislaine Maxwell, his mysterious source of wealth and the possibility that he was an intelligence asset running a honeytrap operation. The “friendships” that Epstein was desperate to make and his connections to the Israeli government certainly add weight to that possibility.
The political ramifications are fairly straightforward. Trump’s proclivities are well documented and long-known at this point. It is unlikely that his involvement in Epstein’s crimes will move the needle for anybody unconvinced by prior evidence. Outside of the Trump cult, don’t be surprised to see a few more heads roll as more details about Epstein’s past associations come to light.
The meaning of Jeffrey Epstein should not be partisan scorekeeping. These are crimes committed against flesh-and-blood working class children whose victimization was enabled by capitalist class power. Intelligence asset or not, it is no coincidence that Epstein first accessed wealth before building a sex trafficking ring. Mark Fisher once described capital as “an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labour is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.”1 As capitalism turns both nature and humanity into venal objects, those who live by the labour of others are the most ripe to feel entitled to the bodies of workers and their children.
The crimes are obscene but that is not why it runs in the collective consciousness. What the Epstein saga and other conspiracy theories reflect is a deep-seated insecurity that we have about our position in the hierarchy of capitalist production. The glaring lack of justice for working class families preyed on by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell is an illustration of class domination; an economy where labouring bodies transform the world into a playground for the rich.
Most of us dread the deadening of the body and will do anything to avoid it. About the deadening of the soul, however, we don’t care one iota.1 —Epictetus
As the earliest human societies emerged conscious from nature egalitarianism was a common characteristic. Economic surpluses were minimal and production of material needs relied on a nakedly social effort. The psychologists David Erdal and Andrew Whiten suggest: “Egalitarian behaviour patterns evolved because…individuals became so clever at not losing out to dominant individuals that vigilant sharing became possible, and this was the most effective economic strategy in the circumstances in which Homo sapiens evolved.”
In the prehistoric era of hunter-gathering, or primitive communism, there was no incentive to hoard resources, ideas or technology. In fact, doing so would have carried detrimental consequences to the individual, the group and the wider species. Resources and technology were freely shared between groups and individuals, and this type of cooperation facilitated the dominion of humanity over the globe. The free exchange of ideas and resources during this era fall into the categories of gifts between tribes, reciprocal exchange between kin and petty barter between individuals.
After ecological pressures provoked the Neolithic Revolution, humanity had to grapple with sedentary living and the production of an economic surplus above what was needed to reproduce the population. In the presence of surplus, our tendency toward cooperation and egalitarianism became inverted and economic classes formed which laid claim to different points along the production and distribution ladder. In a dialectical reversal of epic proportions, the prehistoric aversion to domination gave way to the slave economy, the most oppressive economic system known to history.
Ancient Rome was so saturated with unfree labour that little distinction was made between working citizens earning a wage and slave labour owned by a master. Slaves commonly held managerial roles, conducted business and apprenticed in skilled trades. Selling oneself into slavery was an attractive means to escape poverty. In such an economy, it was the narrow band of elite slave owners who absorbed the surpluses of antiquity.
Dawn of the Market
Both enslaved and wage labour transitioned into tenant farming during the late decline of the western Roman empire. Feudalism was a sort of synthesis between the enslaved labour of Rome and the social organization of the Germanic tribes. Meanwhile, Christian idealism began to permeate the superstructure of medieval Europe. Since most of the population was tied down to agricultural production on plots of land, merchants took on an important role in the circulation of goods. Markets were held at regular times and places throughout Europe, giving prospective buyers and sellers of wares notice to prepare. Merchant guilds coordinated the movement of imports and commercial profits became a pathway for non-landholding Europeans to capture a piece of the economic surplus of the feudal era.
Medieval commerce was sublated by the capitalist system as it began to develop after 1492. After peasants were shook loose from ancestral farmland and piled into cities, permanent shops replaced the market squares and merchant banks funded New World pillaging expeditions. We see a point in history where labour, surplus production and capital break free of physical boundaries. This economic transformation created the foundations of science, Enlightenment philosophy, the modern state, monetary system and, of course, the idea of the free market.
“Free market” is defined by Britannica as “an unregulated system of economic exchange, in which taxes, quality controls, quotas, tariffs, and other forms of centralized economic interventions by government either do not exist or are minimal.” It’s interesting that free market fundamentalism—or laissez-faire economics—arrive on the political scene around the same time as socialism does, during western industrialization.
As noted in the first paragraph, human beings evolved with an aversion to domination and preference for some modicum of economic and political egalitarianism. The adoption of sedentary living and the creation of economic surpluses within a class hierarchy threw back much of the formal cooperation of hunter-gatherers but it did not eliminate the collective want of freedom. Cooperation and freedom from domination is hardwired into our evolutionary history. This is visible in slave rebellions and peasant uprisings, as well as religions preaching liberation of the spirit. What capitalist modernity offers is a chance to concretely understand society and create the necessary political and economic conditions for liberation.
Socialism v. Markets?
For socialists, liberation involves a positive action: the organization of workers to overthrow the state and create a new government that lays hold of the economic levers of power. This would allow society to democratically create the material conditions needed for individual flourishing. Free marketeers are the inverse of this, socialism’s negative correlate: cut the government to a minimum and remove political authority from economic levers. The great promise of the free market is to provide “social order without institutions, claiming not to be one itself.”2 The premise here is that a market of self-interested individuals is the best allocator of goods and services for the whole of society. The market represents true capitalism, and true capitalism only exists where state authority ends.
Voluntary exchange between individuals would certainly be a feature of any pro-social economy. For this reason free market fundamentalism can sound attractive. But it brings forward serious problems owing to the rock-ribbed power imbalances embedded within the capitalist economy. Every class society has featured an elite class which posits a state to protect property and safeguard economic interests and capitalism is no different. In his history of capitalism, Jürgen Kocka writes:
State formation and the origins of financial capitalism were closely connected, and the nexus provided a way for prosperous urban citizens in high finance, a small elite, to establish their influence on politics while simultaneously making their entrepreneurial success dependent on powerful rulers and their shifting political fortunes.3
This is a situation that continues to the present day, with the powerful corporate lobby and central banks that fuse financial capital to the state apparatus.4
Assuming that the Siamese twins of state and corporate power could be surgically separated, the benefits are not clear. The capitalist market is not like the reciprocal exchange and gift economies of our prehistoric ancestors. It descended to us from authoritarian ramparts, by way of colonial subjugation, race-based slavery and violent ethnic cleansing. No wonder that the capitalist market is a bare-knuckled fight in which each participant must attempt to end the day with more money than they began it with.
Even for a bourgeois economist like John Maynard Keynes it was apparent that the accumulation of money had bound society to “pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful human qualities into the position of the highest virtues.”5 Under such conditions, scams are incentivized, price gouging is profitable, environmental stewardship is burdensome, stock swindles are rife and labour appears only as a costly appendage to production.
Stamping the capitalist market with the title of “free” does not dress the window much either. Engels pointed out the logical fallacy of the “free” aphorism when critiquing a proposal to repackage Germany as a free state: “Taken in its grammatical sense, a free state is one where the state is free in relation to its citizens, hence a state with a despotic government.”
Once the great mass of people is subordinated to market forces by way of survival, the market is free to act on them in despotic ways. The workplace is a totalitarian encampment where using the bathroom and eating lunch are objects of scrutiny, the threat of termination hanging like the sword of Damocles over the necks of employees.6 Meanwhile, bills accrue. Small businesses collapse under the weight of competition. Houses are seized by debt obligations and families go hungry by price shocks. In the absence of income, the free market pushes desperate participants into drug peddling and sex trafficking. Art and corporate advertising become salacious performances demanding attention from a tired population on the go. Sterile escapism is rampant. Information deteriorates to the standards of minds made lazy and politics is a bloodsport. Every stripper pole, inside trade and contract killing can be rationalized so long as it pries away a profit. When Adam Smith likened the market to an “invisible hand” he failed to mention how often it would punch us in the face.
Past the Paradigm
The multitude of social ills kicked up by a despotic market which commands labour and demands consumption is the reason why the free market utopia is a mirage, at best. Even a conservative thinker like John Gray adroitly pointed out that cultural conservatism is not compatible with free market, laissez-faire policies.7 The conservative rebellion against corporate diversity policies and global trade are examples of misalignment between the capitalist market and traditional values.
If the political theatre is the stage of class conflict, the current tug-of-war between interventionist modern liberals and the protectionist populist right wing demonstrates that there is no room in the troupe for free market fundamentalists. The market has already blazed a trail for mass migration, menacing technologies, medical bankruptcy, sky-high utility prices, the outsourcing of decent jobs and hollowing out of public infrastructure. All that’s left to do is fight amongst the wreckage left in its wake.
The capitalist paradigm has only cemented over a scant 300 years of human history. Capitalism has visited humanity with a progression out of feudalism but its market is neither efficient or rational, as the swelling expanse of global slum dwellers, overflowing landfills and microplastics in our bloodstream attest.
What is needed is not the expansion of the capitalist marketplace but its sublation: a pulling forward of our latent cooperative instincts into a universal exchange that rewards economic actors according to the satisfaction of human need rather than profit. In such a post-capitalist market, the gift economy and reciprocal exchange reappear. Rewards accrue to the doctors curing cancer; the innovators shortening the workday; the oceanographers detoxifying our waterways; the engineers constructing comfortable housing and transport for all. For humanity to have a future we must not oppose the current paradigm but go beyond it.
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes:
Epictetus, Discourses and Selected Writings (Penguin, 2008): 15. ↩︎
Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (Verso, 2010): 293. ↩︎
Jürgen Kocka, Capitalism: A Short History (Princeton University Press, 2016): 43. ↩︎
David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Verso, 2018): 321. ↩︎
Keynes as quoted in David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse (Verso, 2023): 83. ↩︎
David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (Verso, 2010): 176. ↩︎
John Gray discussed in Jameson, Valences, 463-4. ↩︎
