Aidan Cornelius-Bell
I’m a social scientist and activist looking to create systemic change that serves the proletariat. I care about compassion, justice, genuine equity, reciprocity and radical social change.
Dear friends,
It is happening here. The polarisation, the extremism, growing xenophobia and racism, anti-intellectualism, hatred, violence and climate-denialism. These are not “forthcoming” ideas in the Australian context, but rather actively festering features of contemporary society. Because of the way content is conglomerated under a singular social media corporation, lots of the proliferation of this kind of thinking is hidden. Algorithmic systems tailor content specifically for the viewer, and they deliberately cultivate extremist views – because extremist views garner more attention. In an “artificially intelligent system” trained on the KPIs of the CEO, it matters not if hate speech, right-wing extremism, and general villainy are promoted. All that matters is the cultivation of “attention”. As the yogi influencers like to put it: “Attention is currency”.
The republican party appealed to the American voting base on two key fronts: they told compelling lies about the significance of the economy and the role of the “others” in preventing its flourishing and they spoke the same hateful language that their supporters consume exclusively online and via fox news. The combination of hegemonic forces, here, manufacturing consent for fascism is a powerful combination. And this is the same combination that the Liberal-National coalition leverage every election in Australia. Look no further than the anti-abortion rhetoric of the LNP at the Queensland state election – and if you were kidding yourself into thinking that Australia is “more sophisticated” and “it couldn’t happen here” you are dead wrong. Australia’s particular cultural configuration around politics means that extremism festers far more quietly than it does in the states, but the increasing prevalence of vitriolic, hate filled, and vile bullshit from the LNP will attract mass voter support.
The problem is, and this is the big one, that the economy is fake. It is a deliberately abstract construct that distracts people from the reality of their exploitation. We discussed this in depth in the last post on mind reader [1]. The source of oppression of working people is capitalism, the capitalists, and their political subclass. The cultural institutions – the (social) media companies, schools and universities, and religious organisations play active yet ever “apolitical” roles in re-perpetuating exploitation and expropriation as natural and necessary. The masking of this – the exploitation of working people – as the “elite” is a cover for fearmongering or racist or nihilistic politicians latch onto to exploit. We know, as a global force of billions, that something is very wrong with our social order. It’s just that the system was designed from the start to prevent access to the knowledge of why the system is so broken. Those cultural institutions? They both inform and reinforce the views espoused by the ruling class. In the classical neoliberal system in the west, for middle-class white-ish able-bodied cisgender hetero kids, the journey goes something like this: born into relative comfort → educated through capitalist epistemology → university graduate → employment in culturally reinforcing institutions and businesses, with moderate if meagre reward affording housing security → the wife stays home looking after babies, and around the cycle goes. Of course, over time, the endless growth demanded by capitalism has eroded parts of that cycle, and with the inherent massive inequality, sexism, ableism and so on required to continue accumulation for the 1% division becomes a necessary tool to keep driving capitalism headlong towards the cliff.
Here, and you can guess where I’m going, the treacherous Australian Labor Party enters the scene. Simultaneously deeply involved in bringing neoliberalism to Australia, and allying with the unions to disempower any genuine revolutionary movement. As with the Democrats in the US, the Labor party is supported by the elite as the veneer of social progress, while true transformation (read: fascism) is supported by the more extreme position of the LNP or Republicans. The ALP’s role in this political theatre is critical to the perpetuation of the status quo. Noting that the status quo is ever more objectionable to anyone with a value system of compassion. While positioning themselves as the “progressive” option, they actively participate in the rightward march of Australian politics. Like the Republican/Democrat ratchet system, ours is similarly pernicious – and worse, because people still think that Labour represents the unions – but these unions only represent bourgeois leadership, not the worker. It doesn’t take much to judge them on their actions – from supporting genocidal regimes abroad to implementing increasingly draconian domestic surveillance measures, from funding military expansion while driving hate for China through stripping workers of their rights while professing a “right to disconnect” (recognition stolen from the Greens) the ALP demonstrate their fundamental allegiance to capital over human wellbeing. The party’s willingness to eject members who speak against genocide illustrates how thoroughly they have abandoned even the pretence of left-wing politics in favour of maintaining the status quo for their capitalist masters.
Ideological “flexibility” of supposedly left-wing parties is part of the theatrics that supports an appearance of democracy under contemporary capitalism. As the contradictions of capital become more apparent – through climate catastrophe, growing inequality, and social breakdown – the political apparatus works harder to maintain hegemonic control. Here, parties like the ALP and Democrats serve offer superficial reforms which fail to connect with working people because all they do is perpetuate the same violent, broken, and dispossessive system that brought us here in the first place. While “moderate” parties exist we will never see a challenge to capitalist relations emerge. And currently we have a moderate party led by a fascist, an extreme-right party led by a fascist, and then the Greens whose political messaging fails to align with the workers because they are routinely denied fair representation in the extreme-right wing media duopoly and social media algorithm. Between deliberate intensification of deployment of identity politics, stripped of any class analysis, and the march towards ever more property owning, shareholding, and other economics scum – the ALP, LNP, as with the Democrats and Republicans only aid fragmentation of working class solidarity leaving structural power relations untouched. It’s just one party is much, much, worse in both instances for human rights – particularly at the margins.
Fundamentally, the media landscape, dominated by the extreme right-wing Murdoch empire in Australia, plays a crucial role in manufacturing consent for the ratchet. Ensuring that the LNP can move politics, issues, identity, and so on to the right, ever distracting from the crushing destruction of capitalism, and positioning any real opposition (read: the Greens) as bourgeois they move the goalposts time and again. Through careful curation of “acceptable” discourse, they – and their distant social media cousins – present fascism as a reasonable response to social problems created by capitalism itself. The algorithmic amplification of extremist content concomitantly accelerates these normalised, socialised, perspectives and the holistic process of creating filter bubbles of hatred and division for every single individual in the nation becomes par for the course. Yep, digital acceleration of fascist ideology builds on decades of traditional media conditioning – cheery.
What makes this situation particularly dangerous is how the appearance of choice, between Labor and Liberal, masks the fundamental unity of their commitment to capital behind supposedly differing social reforms. While they may differ on social issues or, perhaps more accurately, the speed at which they wish to implement reactionary policies, both major parties are fully committed to maintaining the extractive, exploitative system that is destroying human and ecological wellbeing. Here, political theatre replacing religion as the opium of the masses, as individualised AI generated slop directs the micro-political battles of fake social media forums flooded with Russian State actors under the guise of “parliamentary democracy”. Don’t get me wrong, the ALP is a better option than the LNP, just as the Democrats are better than the Republicans, but to suggest either party offers any genuine solutions to the 99% is a farce. Reductionist commentators on “both sides” of belonging politics seek only to legitimate this false choice, preventing more radical alternatives from emerging, and maintaining capitalist hegemony – and in cases such as the US, and increasingly in Australia, the rapid installation of fascism over democracy as modus operandi for maintaining the status quo.
As climate collapse accelerates and inequality reaches unprecedented levels, we can expect this drift toward fascism to intensify. People are being told the reason they can’t afford to feed or home themselves is Albanese’s failures in “the economy” – at the same time, their social media feeds show them how migrants and queer people are personally responsible for that situation. The hate, anger and intentional division of the human population of this planet driving Meta’s share-prices ever higher – and “attention is currency” paralleling “line must go up” as the drivers of global destruction, heat death, and the end of any semblance of care for one another. A social contract? Nah, social media, mate. As the ruling class abandon liberal democratic pretences in favour of more direct forms of control and violence, fearing an anti-capitalist awakening amongst a slightly better educated populous, the ALP’s active participation in stripping education, driving hate and division, and attacking worker’s rights only enable the cycle to continue and amplify. Moreover, through expanded surveillance powers, anti-protest laws, and the criminalisation of dissent, we have seen the extremist groundwork laid for overtly authoritarian governance from the LNP at our next federal elections. Unless the working class can develop genuine solidarity and class consciousness to resist this trajectory, Australia’s inevitable march toward fascism will only accelerate. With Albo’s commitment to the United States of Australia, sorry, “working with trump” [2] in a paramilitary alliance we can genuinely see the failings of Australian democracy. Joy.
With a sense of foresight and uncertainty,
Aidan.
Dear friends,
I accidentally engaged with some US election coverage in the last 24 hours. Amidst flitting between various streaming services, noticing how absolutely appalling US news actually is – dripping with hegemony, the one resounding quote that has stuck in my brain like a shard of glass is: “people voted for Donald Trump this election because above all else, rights issues notwithstanding, they knew the economy was more important”. I mean what an absolutely ratshit interpretation of the platform Trump was running on. Results be damned, there is absolutely nothing in the republican party that signals “good economic management” rather, they run the economy into the ground, punish working folks, destroy the environment, and revoke liberal rights through overactive and deeply “involved” government. I don’t even FEEL like doing analysis today, but let’s go anyway:
The media’s portrayal of the economy as both a natural phenomenon and supreme metric of societal wellbeing represents one of the most successful deployments of manufactured consent in modern capitalism. Through relentless coverage of stock markets, GDP figures, and corporate profits – metrics that predominantly measure the wealth accumulation of/for the 1% – corporate media convinces civil society that their existence is inextricably linked to these bullshit numbers. This manufactured narrative serves a dual purpose: first, it obscures the fundamental reality that “the economy” is simply a set of human-created social relations designed to exclusively benefit the ruling class, and second, it provides cover for right-wing parties to enact policies that further concentrate wealth and power while stripping rights from workers – as mentioned, this is how we have arrived at fascism in 2024. When media conglomerates trumpet the “expert economic management” credentials of Republicans or the Liberal-National Coalition, they deliberately mystify how these parties’ policies of tax cuts, deregulation, and austerity serve only to accelerate the upward transfer of wealth while destroying social protections.
This ideological sleight-of-hand creates the conditions for an accelerating cycle of exploitation and dispossession – he literally said he was going to make their lives hard [1]. Right-wing parties, backed by corporate media’s economic mythology, first target society’s most vulnerable – attacking welfare programs, workers’ rights, and protections for marginalised groups (if they ever existed). The bourgeois “middle class,” conditioned to believe these attacks won’t affect them, support or remain silent about these initial assaults on civil society. As wealth becomes increasingly concentrated among the 1%, this same process inevitably comes for the petit bourgeois. And we’re already there folks, people on $250k household salaries are “doing it tough” and those idiots think the Liberals or Republicans will save them. Their scabbed labour rights, social welfare safety net, and “self made” economic security are steadily eroded while they continue desperately clinging to the fantasy that they too might one day join the capitalist class. The media’s role in manufacturing consent for this process cannot be overstated. By continually promoting the fiction that right-wing economic policies serve the common good, rather than acknowledging them as instruments of class warfare, they help ensure the 99% remain divided and unable to recognise their shared interest in opposing capitalism’s inevitable acceleration toward fascism. If you haven’t noticed it, it’s because the water around you is just shy of a rolling boil, yes, you are a frog.
The corporate media’s self-reinforcing cycle of degradation exemplifies the inherent contradictions of capitalism’s drive for ever-increasing profits at the expense of quality and truth. Or frankly anything resembling a human value – as vapid narcissism and bitchy bullshit skyrocket in popularity. While media conglomerates consolidate power and market share, their commitment to actual journalism steadily erodes. Replaced by cheaper content mills, inflammatory opinion pieces masquerading as news, and recycled press releases that require minimal investigative effort. This “enshittification,” in Doctorow’s parlance, accelerates as media outlets chase engagement metrics and advertising dollars rather than pursuing meaningful reporting. The resulting death spiral of journalistic standards creates a vacuum where actual news should be, increasingly filled by sensationalism, manufactured outrage, and thinly-veiled propaganda that serves the interests of the ruling class while further mystifying the real operation of power in society. Identity politics, here it is, with all its disgusting paraphernalia. Through this process more and more right wing, anti-human, and anti-ecological propaganda grips civil society, the manufactured consent around “the economy”, enables media outlets to increasingly abandon even the pretence of critically examining capitalism, quality of living, and what is really happening to people at the margins. Because unlike the latter, the former uncritical repetition of corporate talking points makes the line on the stock ticker go up. Stop the ride – I want to get off.
The algorithmic amplification of extreme content through social media platforms then supercharges this degradation of public discourse. As engagement-driven recommendation systems push users toward increasingly inflammatory and ideologically extreme content, the Overton window of “acceptable” discourse continuously shifts rightward. What begins as standard corporate propaganda evolves into increasingly unhinged conspiracy theories and overtly fascistic rhetoric, all while maintaining the foundational lies about “the economy” and “good economic management” that justify continued class warfare against the 99%. The social media giants, themselves massive corporations driven by profit imperatives, have zero incentive to address the radicalising (or indeed neutralising) effect of their platforms - instead, they continue optimising for enagement, washing their hands of the consequences. This creates a feedback loop where traditional media, desperate to compete for attention in the algorithmic attention economy, further degrades their own standards to match the extremism being amplified online. The result is an ever-accelerating race to the bottom which serves to fragment and confuse civil society (again, identity politics) while reinforcing capitalist hegemony through increasingly crude and violent means. And even the left are utterly confounded by this, repeating back utter bullshit from the ABC, 7, 9 and 10. Propaganda has won, folks – and it’s greatest success is that it has successfully masked the death of its own planet. Truly capitalism and its hegemony is cancer of the most savage variety.
Gramsci’s observation, living in prison in fascist Italy, that hegemonic power operates through cultural institutions rather than just direct coercion finds perfect expression in today’s media landscape, where the gradual degradation of journalism serves to mystify rather than illuminate power relations. The genius of modern hegemonic control lies in how it has transformed what should be instruments of democratic accountability into tools that actively undermine class consciousness – not through crude propaganda, but through the subtle erosion of the intellectual frameworks needed for critical analysis. At least in Gramsci’s time there was high quality leftist opinion being written (L'Ordine Nuovo always becomes Ordine Nuovo). When media outlets normalise increasingly extreme right-wing positions while simultaneously degrading their capacity for substantive reporting, they create exactly the kind of ideological conditions Gramsci identified as necessary for maintaining bourgeois control: a civil society that lacks the analytical tools to recognise its own subjugation while actively participating in reproducing the cultural conditions that enable it. This realisation is what Gramsci helped Italians achieve, and capitalism has been running from crisis to crisis since to claw us back to fascism. Naturally, this goes some way to explaining why attempts at building counter-hegemonic movements so often struggle, they must first overcome not just specific false beliefs, but the systematic degradation of the very capacity for critical thought that the modern media ecosystem engenders.
Chomsky’s model of manufactured consent, here in its newest formation, encompassing new and more insidious forms of control in the digital age, aids our analysis further. While the basic filters he identified - ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and anti-communism/fear - remain operational, they now function within an accelerated system of algorithmic amplification that makes their effects both dizzyingly more powerful and harder to resist. The “worthy ” versus “unworthy” victims dichotomy he identified operates at hyperspeed, with social media algorithms rapidly determining which stories receive “attention” and which are buried, while the economic pressures of the attention economy ensure that even nominally independent media outlets ultimately serve power rather than challenge it. The genius of this system lies in how it appears to offer more choice and diversity of viewpoints while actually narrowing the range of acceptable discourse – exactly the kind of sophisticated propaganda model Chomsky theorised, but operating with a speed and efficiency that would have been unimaginable when Manufacturing Consent was first published.
Between manufactured consent, right-wing hegemony, and rapidly disappearing human rights – not to mention a burning planet - the fetishisation of the economy stands strong as “the only issue that matters”. Women dying because they are denied life saving care? No worries, but shit the economy is down 0.000000001% today we need Trump! Just kill me now. “The economy” depicted constantly as something so beautiful, special, and important and simultaneously utterly superior to human life and labour represents capitalism’s ultimate victory in rewriting our ontological relationship with reality. What Marx identified as commodity fetishism has evolved into something somehow more grotesque. Not just the mystification of social relations between people as relations between things, but the elevation of abstract economic metrics above human existence itself – what. is. happening. When politicians and media figures speak of sacrificing lives to “save the economy” during crises, they reveal the true nature of capital’s grip on our collective consciousness: a system so deeply ingrained in our way of thinking that even basic survival instincts become subordinate to maintaining the flow of profits to the ruling class. And the whole thing is predicated on lies. Lies that the Liberals, Tories or Republicans are better “economic managers”. Lies that the sacrifice of “a few women” or “a few Mexicans” is worth it to save “the economy”. Lies about the economy being a real thing. The utterly perverse prioritisation of abstract numbers over human life is the system now. Capital’s need for endless accumulation has dropped any pretence of serving human needs – we’re here for their money, and apparently we’re fucking grateful.
With the currently increasingly shockingly concrete chance of a second Trump presidency, the capitalist death cult is in the headlights – just think back to 2021, Trump’s eagerness to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives to maintain stock market numbers during the pandemic? That’s the right’s comfort with openly advocating death for profit - whether through COVID denial, climate change denial, or dismantling healthcare access. It’s, why do I have to keep saying this people, mask-off capitalist sociopathy. If “the economy” is so godly and significant, why does it demand literal human sacrifice? And the capitalists, their cultural institutions, and most of your friends and neighbours serve as its eager priests and proselytisers. “Line must go up” is now more important than human survival. We see the full realisation of Marx’s warnings about capital’s inherently anti-human nature. Its just operating at a scale that threatens the continued existence of our species – and worse, the entire ecology of the pale blue dot.
With sorrow and love,
Aidan
just, look at everything he’s said. ↩︎
Dear friends,
What the heck do I have in store for you today? Well naturally I have been enjoying pop music and thinking about the “climate” that the youth of today are experiencing. Okay, so, I can’t exactly claim to be vibin’ with the zeitgeist but I can give you a copy-paste of some song lyrics:
They say these are the golden years
But I wish I could disappear
Ego crush is so severe
God, it's brutal out here
Let’s go hard, or go home, straight out of the gate. The contradictions of youth culture under capitalism present themselves starkly in the simultaneous valorisation and exploitation of “youth rebellion”. Just think about popular (youth) culture. What begins as authentic resistance [1] – in music, art, fashion, or digital spaces – is rapidly co-opted by capital and transformed into commodified aesthetic facsimiles stripped of transformative potential. You only wanted to participate in consumption, right? The process is depressingly predictable: genuine expressions of alienation and resistance emerge from young people’s lived experience of capitalism’s brutality. As quickly as they are ideated, they are sanitised, packaged, and sold back by corporations that profit from the discontent. From punk to hip-hop to digital countercultures, capital demonstrates an remarkable ability to hollow out youth movements and render them safe for consumption. Amazing. This also dovetails with our previous discussions of mental health and wellbeing, where commodified versions of self-care leap into frame to obscure any authentic sense of wellness [2].
As we know, commodification of revolutionary thought serves a dual purpose for the capitalists. First, it neutralises genuine resistance by redirecting revolutionary energy into consumerist channels – indeed, why organise when you can buy a mass-produced sweat-shop t-shirt with a hot slogan on? Second, it creates new markets and opportunities for profit extraction from the very demographic most likely to challenge capitalist hegemony. Don’t you hate the built-in anti-revolutionary spirit our society has cultivated? With this spirit, young people’s natural inclination toward rebellion and reimagining social relations becomes nothing more than another vector for accumulation. Rebel, reintegrate, retain, reform, “you’ll vote for the Liberals when you get older and are sensible”. What a joke of a narrative. Except it’s worse, because as those who may have been rebellious reach stardom – and clusters of other characteristics come with the territory, here – they become the very oppressor and commodifier they sought to destroy with music, art, and restive communications. The marketing department works undertime, because the expropriation is being done by the counter-culture to itself. Capitalism’s predatory nature so infects our ontological perceptions that this predatory, vicious, and anti-human behaviour is completely rationalised. Even in those who believe they are “changing the world” – rather, lateral violence, peer-aggression and other treachery emerge. And yet, capitalism remains utterly indifferent, as it continues to grow like a cancer identifying movements, gutting them, and capitalising on each new expression of discontent. Forever forestalled from developing into something threatening to the hegemony [3].
From this twisted epistemology, a range of psychological (or, I suppose, epistemological) responses emerge. From the ruling class’s increased interest in employing bona fide psychopaths, to the role of social media in manufacturing vapid narcissists, there’s a capitalist benefit to personality disorders that make treating psychological issues much less interesting for the corporate bottom line. But this isn’t the only expression of despair and exhaustion at capital. Indeed, the psychological toll capitalism has manifest in an epidemic of anxiety and alienation. This is particularly acute among younger generations facing unprecedented precarity in their material conditions – and straight from the mouths of my 19-something-year-old students, this is a real fear. And it is far from accidental – the very mechanisms of capital depend upon maintaining a permanent state of insecurity and atomisation among the working class. In particular amongst younger people, to manufacture fear, division, distress and disengagement – this, again, forestalls revolutionary potential. And in answer to this, every aspect of life has become commodified and subject to market logic. Capitalist ontology strikes again. Even our most basic needs become sources of constant stress. Housing insecurity, crushing student debt, gig work, and the collapse of traditional career paths create a perfect storm of psychological warfare against (young) workers. I still, though my students laugh, consider myself one of those.
Importantly, the growing use of psychological warfare against the working class to continually manufacture divisions, social disorders, and anxiety and fatigue is relatively novel, at least in the historical materialist sense. Some recent psychological research demonstrates how precarity and exploitation create “the privatisation of stress” – where systemic issues manifest as individual mental health crises [4]. Studies consistently show rising rates of anxiety and depression among young people [5], with researchers highlighting how economic instability and the gig economy create persistent psychological strain [6].
Rodrigo’s lyrics (circling back, lol) capture this contradiction – the simultaneous pressure to be grateful for youth while that very youth is being commodified and exploited. The line “who am I if not exploited?” reflects a devastating awareness of how capitalism shapes identity formation itself. If we consider that capitalism so fundamentally shapes how we think, who we are, and what we are able to become (i.e., privilege) we start to see identity development as intrinsically connected to the conditions of the market (at least amongst the working class), where stable identity formation is systematically undermined by market demands for constant reinvention and “flexibility”. Theorisations about identity precarity abound [7], but ultimately these new economic challenges manufactured to ensure the working-class keeps fighting each other, rather than for liberation, trigger significant developmental difficulties in creating coherent self-narratives amid constant economic instability – this is both a good and bad thing. Identity tied to values rather than production – win. Identity tied to instability, grief, fear and doubt – loss. And that’s the chasm we stand over particularly as new generations enter the “workforce” and are exploited, fucked over, and manipulated by despots, sociopaths and narcissists top to bottom.
The commodification of youth mental health itself represents yet another dimension of this exploitation. The same system that creates mass anxiety and depression then profits from selling individualised “solutions”. As we’ve discussed previously on mind reader, therapy apps, wellness products, and self-help guides that frame structural violence as personal failing – all this delusionally peddled as “we can think ourselves out of materially-created distress”. Meanwhile, genuine collective responses to psychological suffering are undermined by the continued reinforcement of atomisation that creates the crisis. The isolation that Rodrigo captures: “I don't stick up for myself” becomes both symptom and perpetuating factor of capitalism’s psychological warfare. Maybe I’m giving Olivia’s words a little too much meaning. Okay, let’s zoom out a bit.
The neoliberal imperative to continually reinvent oneself as an entrepreneurial subject, to treat one’s identity as a product to be optimised and marketed, only deepens this alienation. How many times have you been told in a seminar by an over-paid under-qualified marketing “guru” that you need to “build your personal brand”? Yet any acknowledgement of privilege, cultural capital, disability, and so on – i.e., the material basis for any stable sense of self – is systematically undermined. The ever proliferating bullshit jobs, meaningless bureaucratic labour, and psychological torture exacted upon us only ever serves to further separate workers from any sense of genuine purpose or connection to our work. Meanwhile, the atomisation of society and erosion of collective institutions (publics) leaves us to face these struggles in isolation, each person expected to bootstrap their way out of systemic problems through individual effort and “resilience”. Sweet – but we haven’t even arrived at the gnarliest end of this.
Perhaps capital’s greatest ideological victory has been convincing us that systemic problems require individual solutions. The self-help industry, wellness culture, and various forms of “lifestyle activism” perpetuate the fantasy that we can individually optimise, mindset-shift, or purchase our way out of capitalism’s contradictions. And people vehemently believe this – to their very core, the fact they’ve never tried illustrates the contradictory nature of this bullshit. All this does is enable militant individualist thinking, particularly on the part of the middle manager – forever suggesting a “wellness retreat” to their burnt out staff, while they manipulate, psychologically torment, and otherwise screw over their employees all while ignoring their conditions – I don’t know any worker with the expendable capital to purchase a wellness package, let alone get approval to attend such a retreat. Naturally, psychopathic middle management are more than adequately remunerated for such farcical “healing”, but can’t recognise their own twisted psychological issues in the first place. Of course this then culminates in the redirection of potentially revolutionary energy into an endless cycle of personal development and consumption that poses no threat to existing power relations. Hegemony protects its own. The very notion of personal success under capitalism has been constructed in opposition to collective liberation – we are taught to view others’ advancement as competition rather than solidarity.
This individualist framework obscures the fundamental truth that no amount of personal optimisation can resolve contradictions deliberately foundational to the economic system itself. The economic system to which we are collectively, the 99% of us, literally slaves. A worker cannot mindfulness-meditate their way out of exploitation, nor can ethical consumption choices address the fundamental unsustainability of capitalist production. The promise of individual solutions serves as a pressure release valve, allowing people to feel they are “doing something” while leaving structural power relations untouched. Real transformation requires collective struggle and the development of class consciousness – precisely what individualist ideology works to prevent. The path to liberation cannot be walked alone – but they’ll happily tell you it can, because the “middle class’s” demented existence is just amplifying and redistributing their own pain onto others around them. What a cool group of people.
I honestly don’t even have solutions thinking today. I’m just constantly struck by how utterly demented and dehumanising “work” is in 2024. How have we not progressed past this, folks? Has everyone just been asleep at the wheel?
In real solidarity,
Aidan
Gramsci, A. (2007). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (Q. Hoare & G. Nowell-Smith, Trans.; Reprinted). Lawrence and Wishart. ↩︎
Fisher, M. (2011). The privatisation of stress. Soundings, 48(48), 123–133. https://doi.org/10.3898/136266211797146882 ↩︎
though this is often blamed on “technology” nebulously: Twenge, J. M. (2020). Why increases in adolescent depression may be linked to the technological environment. Current Opinion in Psychology, 32, 89–94. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.06.036 ↩︎
Petriglieri, G., Ashford, S. J., & Wrzesniewski, A. (2019). Agony and ecstasy in the gig economy: Cultivating holding environments for precarious and personalized work identities. Administrative Science Quarterly, 64(1), 124–170. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839218759646 ↩︎
c.f. Hancock, P., & Tyler, M. (2025). Precarity, identity, and the meaning of cultural and creative work. In P. Hancock & M. Tyler (Eds.), Performing Artists and Precarity: Work in the Contemporary Entertainment Industries (pp. 83–95). Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-66119-8_7; Nelson, J. (2018). Identity performativity and precarity. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(14), 1522–1523. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1461395; Pichler, S., Kohli, C., & Granitz, N. (2021). DITTO for Gen Z: A framework for leveraging the uniqueness of the new generation. Business Horizons, 64(5), 599–610. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2021.02.021 ↩︎
Dear friends,
I spent a little of my time today listening to other contemporary Marxists [1] – and then wondering about how to add to some aspects of their argument/s. In particular, in the interview I’m referencing, there’s a piece on meritocracy, capitalists, and innovation. Because interviews suck there’s too much pressure on the thinking and I think we’re robbed of Blakeley’s authentic response. So, I wanted to think about my own views on this, and how this might fit in the historical materialist but also intersectional approach we bring to mind reader together.
For Marx, innovation under capitalism represents a manifestation of human creative capacity - what he terms “species-being” - twisted and alienated through capitalist relations of production [2]. This twisting, and subsequent alienation, is what we here when the mainstream parrot: “Musk invented the electric car”. Worker’s natural drive to creatively transform nature and society becomes subordinated to capital’s need for constant revolutionising (read: reduce cost) of the means of production. This revolutionising, while represented as technological progress, serves only to deepen worker alienation and exploitation through increasing the organic composition of capital. The capitalist class mystifies this process, presenting innovations that emerge from collective social labour as the products of individual genius entrepreneurs. As Marx notes in Capital directly: “The social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves” [3]. This fetishisation of innovation mirrors the broader commodity fetishism that masks real social relations under capitalism. Hot.
Social Reproduction Theory reveals how innovation in care work, community organising, and social reproduction has been systematically devalued and appropriated under capitalism [4]. Women, particularly women of colour, have developed sophisticated systems for maintaining and reproducing labour power - from childcare networks to mutual aid systems - only to see these innovations commodified and privatised by capital. Indigenous knowledge systems, developed through millennia of sustainable relationship with land and community, face similar dynamics of appropriation and/or erasure [5]. Traditional ecological knowledge, sustainable agricultural practices, and communal governance innovations are first dismissed as “primitive,” then stolen and patented by corporations when profitable. This represents a double exploitation - both of the original innovation and of the reproductive labour that maintained and developed these knowledge systems across generations [6]. The capitalist drive, then, to enclose and commodify all spheres of life thus produces a dual crisis – of social reproduction and of ecological sustainability. And at the nexus of race, gender and class this exploitation and expropriation is particularly devastating, and obvious. This brings the weight of hegemonic enforcement – any crack in the belief that capitalism is the “only way” is a threat, so racism, sexism, ableism and so on are deployed.
Okay, with some theory in our back pockets, let’s pivot, slightly, to “innovation” in contemporary times.
Innovation emerges fundamentally from workers – from our daily struggles, creative problem-solving, and collective knowledge built through practice and necessity. The working class, through our direct engagement with production and society’s needs, naturally develop new ways of thinking, doing, and being. This is an organic development (more on Gramsci in a moment). This innovation “from below” (in capitalist terms) stems from workers’ intimate understanding of processes, materials, and social relations. Our innovations tend toward genuine solutions that benefit the collective rather than extracting profit. Whether it’s teachers developing new pedagogical approaches, nurses honing better patient care, or factory workers improving safety protocols, the working class continuously innovates to make work more efficient, safer, and more humane.
Under capitalism, however, worker innovation is systematically appropriated and alienated from its creators. The ultimate gaslight. The capitalist class, through intellectual property law, management hierarchies, and employment contracts, “legally” steals these innovations from workers. Patents are filed in the company’s name, not the workers. Improvements to processes are codified as corporate property. The creative and intellectual contributions of workers are rendered invisible, while the fruits of our innovation flow upward to shareholders and executives who had no hand in their development. This theft of worker innovation mirrors the broader extraction of surplus value under capitalism. What a cool system we all consent to and participate in – and yet we wonder why there’s misogyny, racism, xenophobia, gaslighting, narcissism...
The capitalist class has pulled the ultimate con, warping our understanding of our own innovation through hegemonic control of media, education, and culture. They have constructed a mythology where lone genius entrepreneurs and visionary CEOs are the drivers of progress. This narrative erases the collective nature of innovation and the essential role of publicly funded research, worker knowledge, and social cooperation. Instead, we’re fed stories of brilliant billionaires working in garages (Tony Stark who dis?), when the reality is that most major technological advances come from massive teams of workers building on generations of collective knowledge.
Painting this in a concrete example, let’s take our mate Elon Musk – a most egregious example of this innovation theft and mythmaking in recent history. Tesla’s “unique” technologies were developed by an engineering team early on, Musk simply bought his way in with PayPal wealth and then forced out the founders – alleged engineers and workers replaced with a capitalist. SpaceX relies heavily on NASA research, technology, and contracts while Musk takes credit for the work of thousands of engineers and scientists. And, in case that wasn’t enough, his acquisition of Twitter showcases perfectly how billionaires use accumulated wealth to seize and destroy organisations in order to better push extreme-right political agendas. Musk’s increasing shift toward far-right politics, from amplifying conspiracy theories to supporting anti-democratic figures, demonstrates how concentrated economic power breeds capitalist hegemony, division, distraction and other anti-human traits endemic to capitalism’s virus.
Through his carefully crafted public image as a “genius innovator”, Musk exemplifies how capitalists claim credit for the collective achievements of workers. His companies have consistently undermined worker organising efforts, violated labour laws, and maintained dangerous working conditions while he amasses unprecedented personal wealth. The cult of personality around Musk serves to mystify the real relations of production and innovation, presenting him as a techno-king while thousands of actual innovators remain nameless and exploited.
The notion of meritocracy under capitalism is high on the list of insidious myths. The idea that wealth and power flow naturally to the most capable, innovative, and hardworking individuals is a farce – one which denies class privilege and the mass human suffering under capitalism. This fiction ignores the reality that success under capitalism correlates most strongly with initial advantage - inherited wealth, social connections, and structural privileges. While capitalist ideologues trumpet the “efficiency” of the free market in allocating resources and rewarding merit, the reality is that planned economic activity - whether in large corporations or state institutions - drives most major innovations and technological advances. The majority of foundational research and development that enables private profit is funded by public institutions and performed by salaried workers, not entrepreneurs seeking “market opportunities” – we couldn’t, as workers, even if we tried, we’d starve first, or have our work stolen.
The mystification of innovation under capitalism represents, in Gramscian terms, a key battleground in the war of position between capital and labour [7]. The hegemonic narrative of lone genius inventors and visionary tech entrepreneurs serves to maintain capitalist control not just over the means of production, but over our very understanding of human creativity and progress. This cultural domination is sustained through what Gramsci termed the “intellectual and moral reformation” - where capitalist values become common sense through the work of traditional intellectuals [8]. However, this hegemony is never complete or stable – and importantly never represents liberation, even with moderate reforms applied. Worker innovations, Indigenous knowledge systems, and feminist practices of social reproduction all represent forms of counter-hegemonic knowledge production that challenge capitalist claims to innovation. The emergence of open-source technologies, mutual aid networks, and community-based solutions points toward alternative modes of innovation based on cooperation rather than competition. The task for organic intellectuals today is to make visible these counter-narratives and connect them to broader struggles against capitalist appropriation of collective human creativity. Only through counter-hegemonic movements can we reclaim innovation as a collective social process rather than a commodified product of capitalist exploitation.
Yours in solidarity,
Aidan
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Marx, K. (1990). Capital: A critique of political economy, Volume 1 (B. Fowkes, Trans.). Penguin Books. (Original work published 1867) ↩︎
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Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks (Q. Hoare & G. Nowell-Smith, Eds. & Trans.). International Publishers. ↩︎
Thomas, P. D. (2009). The Gramscian moment: Philosophy, hegemony and Marxism. Brill. ↩︎