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,
I have been thinking about the how the corporate class, the bootlickers, the “upper middle class” and others utterly slavish to the capitalist simultaneously dehumanise themselves and others. A phenomenal piece of mental trickery: contortion, gaslighting and betrayal. Those who fancy themselves stable and wealthy (an ever treacherous position to claim), and often profess it so by engaging in “high culture” activities (themselves equal parts immoral and despicable) which range incredibly broadly from horse racing, to stock market investing, or apparently lately cryptocurrency market gambling. This, to me, is a fundamentally interesting group of “people”. Let’s think on it.
In the imperial core — conceptually a useful imaginary space for us to consider in theorisation about “wealth” and culture — there are opportunities for multi-generational “middle classes” to establish themselves. However, there are no “middle classes” only capitalists and workers. So a false segregation has emerged similar to other divisions around identity. Except, differently to identity politics, the middle class often intentionally serves the capitalist class in their promotion of capital’s ideals. Indeed, we’ve seen recently post the CEO-killing (which Rupert Murdoch is very very unhappy about — lol) the clamouring of the middle class to attempt to protect and vanguard capital and its mistakes. And, almost as though it were natural, shift blame for the problems in society onto a perceived “lower class” (working class, but probably blue-collar and underemployed people).
So, within imperial core countries (majority white, western, largely european, and the “white” diaspora) there is a growing fat middle class that asserts to be different from those “lowly workers”. Beside the obvious snobbery, as mentioned, this is a false division. There is perhaps 1:10,000,000 chance that a member of the so called middle class could ever accumulate enough wealth that they be considered a capitalist. Particularly as the capitalist class currently hold so much wealth that they control more moneys than all the worlds governments combined. And often with a great deal more liquidity. The top 1% hold an absolutely unconscionable and utterly unrecognisable volume of capital such that their entire social organisation, purpose for being, and very existence is different to the 99%.
We might actually, to better understand this, consider that even if we combined all the wealth of people living on Kaurna Country (Adelaide, Australia) that this wealth would be less than Jeff Bezos pays himself in an hour. A. Single. Hour. Combine the wealth of Australia for ten financial years of extreme productivity and you might come close to the wealth of the empire that is Amazon, but it would be very close. Millionaires cosplaying that their wealth makes them a capitalist are a huge part of the problem of reinforcing this exploitative system. Even though they are still subject to a great many of the terrible conditions that the rest of us experience every day. Importantly, anyone whose accumulation overs $1m is highly unlikely to hold solidarity with the rest of the working class, but millionaires are no longer wealthy, and they experience class struggle (albeit at a deeply atrophied rate to the rest of us). But I promised some cultural exploration, we know we are being exploited and that these people have a very active role in it, so let’s get exploring what this does, culturally, to this group of people.
Guilt.
Just bucketloads of guilt. Deeply internalised, highly processed, and almost intangible. But there is palpable guilt, fear and a sense of anxiety that runs so deep amongst class traitors that they will be: recognised as imposers and thrown to the lower class “wolves”, seen for what they are as enabling deep and unhinged violence against the working class, or ousted as incompatible with those they admire — the capitalists — because their godheads reject them. Interestingly, to me, the last of these is not unlikely. Actual capitalists, the strategists behind the human and planetary torment that is our existence, are psychopaths in the clinical sense. They have no recognition of the value of humans, have very little connection with humanity, and feel, experience and engage with the world in a way utterly different to the rest of us. Compassion is not in the dictionary. And the middle classes see this is as the ultimate “sacrifice” to the altar of capital and seek to emulate the violent despotism of their masters upon anyone around them, including their so-called friends.
Grim assessment? Yes, but there’s no other way of thinking of this. Class ascendancy is a sociopolitical process that is tied to inequitable and deeply unethical behaviour. We can characterise two major features of ascendancy that enable the process of stripping the humanity from the ascendant: first, an economic accumulation which, at minimum, undermines and exploits the skilled labour of coal-face workers; second, a social process of utterly re conceptualising humanity as a workforce to be enslaved. This has deep implications for socialisation, culture, and participation in “high society” not least of which is Gatsbyesque political circus and backstabbing.
The capitalist class exists in what we might term a “parallel society”, one which operates with fundamentally different temporal, spatial, and social coordinates than the world inhabited by workers. Their leisure practices aren’t merely more expensive versions of working-class recreation, but rather constitute an entirely distinct mode of being-in-the-world that systematically reproduces their class position. Consider how their relationship to time itself differs fundamentally from wage labourers — they experience neither the tyranny of the clock nor the anxious relationship to future security that characterises working class existence. Their leisure isn’t carved out from work time but rather represents their primary mode of existence, with “work” (in the form of capital management) seamlessly integrated into social activities.
This manifests in spaces of exclusive socialisation — private clubs, invitation-only events, closed “philanthropic” circles — where the real work of class reproduction occurs through what C. Wright Mills termed the power elite network. Here, marriages are arranged (let’s not even get into how deeply sexist and misogynistic these people are), business deals are conceived, and perhaps most importantly, the psychological and cultural foundations of ruling class consciousness are maintained through constant reinforcement of shared values and perspectives. Their children are socialised from birth, at a distance, into this parallel world through private schools, exclusive summer camps, and carefully curated social circles that ensure they never meaningfully encounter or understand the lived reality of the working class. This creates what we might term an epistemic bubble that renders the violence of capitalism natural to its beneficiaries such that it “always was”, allowing them to conceptualise their position as natural and deserved rather than the product of systemic exploitation. The result is a form of class consciousness that is simultaneously highly developed in terms of protecting class interests and profoundly unconscious of its own conditions of possibility and exploitation.
The interplay between ruling class consciousness and middle-class aspiration creates a self-reinforcing system of social reproduction that extends far beyond mere economic relations into the very fabric of cultural and psychological existence. There is a deeply broken nature to this relation, not only naturalising violence, extraction, inequity, inhumanity, and exploitation, but making those suffering most feel worst about their own suffering. Understanding this through hegemony gives some hope. The system perpetuates itself not primarily through direct coercion but through the active participation of its subjects in their own domination — particularly the middle classes who, despite their material position as workers, function as the most zealous defenders of capitalist social relations, perhaps more than the capitalists themselves. Their desperate performance of ruling class values, combined with their anxious policing of class boundaries, serves to maintain an epistemological fortress of capital (it hurt me not to write solitude), where the violence of exploitation is rendered simultaneously invisible and natural.
This process of class reproduction operates through a tripartite of alienation: first, the fundamental alienation from labour that Marx identified; second, the alienation from class consciousness that results from the middle class’s false identification with capital; and third, the profound alienation from human solidarity that characterises the ruling class’s parallel society. Each level of this alienation reinforces the others, creating a totalising system where the very possibility of alternative social relations becomes utterly unthinkable. Hello, capitalist realism. The ruling class’s complete detachment from working class reality, maintained through their distinct temporal and spatial existence, isn’t a symptom of wealth inequality but rather a fundamentally necessary condition for the continuation of capitalist exploitation. One that the middle class desperately tries to emulate even as it ensures their own continued subordination.
The path forward requires more than recognition of these mechanisms - it demands a fundamental rupture in the reproduction of class relations at both material and ideological levels. See, I’m doing the hope thing from the last post. This rupture must begin with the recognition that the middle class’s position as capital’s loyal foot soldiers is fundamentally untenable, both materially and psychologically. Their guilt, their anxiety, their desperate performance of ruling class values — these are not individual psychological phenomena but rather structural features of a system that requires their active participation in their own exploitation. Only through the development of what Gramsci termed organic intellectual leadership, combined with practical solidarity across the working class (broadly defined), can we begin to imagine and construct alternative forms of social organisation that don’t require the systematic dehumanisation. The challenge, then, is not only to critique these mechanisms but to actively construct new forms of consciousness and solidarity that can break the cycle of class reproduction and create possibilities for genuine human emancipation.
The answer is quite literally compassion.
In solidarity,
Aidan.
Dear friends,
I have been thinking about optimism and despair. Actually, I’ve been reading on optimism over despair [1] and thinking about an analytical pattern that might help us mobilise this kind of thought in the way we discuss contemporaneous issues on mind reader. So, yes, this post is a meta post about being meta, what else have you come to expect from me? I’m going to talk in abstract about both the reason for optimism, and for despair, and how we might mobilise these against the way they are mobilised by the capitalist class. Because what’s better than human emotion, passion, feeling and process against something so fundamentally inhuman, nonhuman, non-human as capitalism. Let’s get into it...
Chomsky uses a pattern of explanatory critique that comprises his own unique theoretical positioning. I suspect, to label him as a “Marxist theorist” is to do him disservice given the expansive cannon of his texts over the decades. But, and gee can you tell I’m a fan, there is a tangible pattern to a great deal of his writing that offers not just critique, explication, and contextualisation of thinking, theorising, politics and more, but also a movement. This movement, I think, is what is often missing from other contemporary Marxist theory. In my own work, I reflect, that following Gramscian notions of praxis — rather than, say, theorisation for theorisations sake — I have been able to portray a sense of change or at least the desire for change. This, I have been told, demonstrates immeasurable optimism in the face of challenges. Cool. I’m in this meta and ... I guess I like it?
Chomsky, particularly in his recent books combining letters and correspondence on contemporary politics, shows a pattern of writing and thinking. It looks something like this:
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Offer a clear-eyed analysis of serious problems. This includes contemporary and sometimes even reactionary (in the Marxist sense) political moments, anything from the climate crisis to nuclear threats and recently robust explanation of democratic decay.
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Contextualise through examination of historical parallels where collective action achieved meaningful change despite seemingly insurmountable odds. This, in particular, is useful for understanding modes “out of” our current crises (or reactions, and so on).
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Offer identification of current opportunities and levers for change. Weaving the topic of concern, into a historical mesh that explains both how a given phenomena may be understood through an anti-capitalist lens, while offering possibility and momentum. But more specifically, directing people to protestation that holds precedent.
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Finally, subtle emphasis on how despair serves power by making resistance seem futile. This is where, I think, we all need a reminder. When we allow in-fighting, degradation of comradery, and separation from our causes (qua collapse into arbitrary battles instead of fighting the ruling class) we are giving into the despair which sees individualism rise, narcissistic solutions to big problems, and failures of solidarity from all parties involved.
This pattern, expanded loosely here, intriguingly follows form with some of the mind reader posts shared, but not all. And I think, when we stray from this trajectory, we do each other a disservice. My last post, admittedly not my best, showed a way to respond to reactionary politics — engagement with discourse, personalisation of opinion, sharing of commentary, and so on. But it didn’t follow the trajectory of this pattern. Something I’m looking to do a better job of moving forward — without binding myself to a formula that puts everyone to sleep. If we re-frame the pattern explored above as a movement:
Despair -> (Analysis -> Ideation ->) Optimism
We can see collectivised analysis — work in the ballpark of this project (said humbly) — as advancing hope. I don’t know about you, but I find engaging with news, mainstream journalism, incredibly difficult. Particularly on days where I feel down about things. And partly this is my own filter, bringing such disdain for the cancer that is our onto-economic system, tarnishing news celebrating billionaires’ newfound oligopoly. And partly it’s the nature of hegemonic media offering no relief from the ontic primacy of capitalism. It’s one of those “once you see it” moments — once you know how to identify how anti-human capitalism is, you see the values, attitudes and approach everywhere. It’s gross. Not to mention racist, sexist, classist, ableist, and so much more — and liberal notions of “inclusion” do not quell the rage for the bullshit that is this way of life... But the answer isn’t (only) rage, just as it cannot be despair. Rather it’s salient, theoretical analysis, closed by calls for action that are actualised, contextualised, or meaningful. Instead, I want to offer hope or at least optimistic naivete.
Some days, of course, you just feel done. And that’s okay too, we all need a bitch, cry, or meditation every now and then, but I hope we can collectively, readers, writers, thinkers, activists, change makers and those unable to “unsee” capitalism’s exploitation find the collective space to move towards an optimistic future. Because otherwise we’re advancing values that both support capitalism’s exploitation, and we’re feeding our own death and destruction.
That’s not optimism, though. Let me take my own medicine so that we may be hopeful about the future.
We are in a time where forces of evil — literal fascists — vie for power in a system designed for the destruction of 99% of humans, and 100% of the environment for the benefit of less than 1%. The optimism, though, is in the numbers. Time and again, workers of all varieties have come together to transform this system for the better. To resist the attacks, undermining, and lateral violence of a system that knows no bounds. Even when we have shit day after shit day, the environment suffers catastrophic losses, human rights take a backslide, or our own personal circumstances seem helpless we still collectively hold a spirit of recovery, change, revitalisation, and energy. We have a fundamentally human value of hope. A human value of optimism.
We have the power to change our trajectory. And this is demonstrable in analyses by countless thinkers. Shown in the wins of activists, unionists, and independent radicals the world over. And time and again we (humans) have shown that we can come together. And we can change the world. We do this in myriad ways. Not just activism. Not just theory. Not just governance. Not just solidarity. Not one mode — because there is no such thing as one size fits all. We all change the world in small ways, and through our collective thought, care, and values we can reassert something fundamentally different that moves us to optimistic spaces.
Here’s feeling. We must continue to assert that change is possible. We collectivise optimism. We need to find ways to unite. Because it is every. single. one. of. us. in the 99% against the Musks, Trumps, Zuccs, Cooks, and so on. Let’s do better, be better, and rise above attacking each other. “The workers united will never be defeated”. Not as an excuse to ignore the intersectional needs of our friends, neighbours, and comrades — actually, quite the opposite. Learn about intersectional causes. Find allyship. Move forward in respectful and reciprocal ways. And above all, stay hopeful, optimistic, and moving towards a brighter future, because at the moment that’s really all we’ve got — anything is better than this deeply troubling and very real global return to fascism.
With love, optimism, and respect,
Aidan
Chomsky, N., & Polychroniou, C. (2017). Optimism over despair: On capitalism, empire and social change. Penguin Books. ↩︎
I’m trying something a little different on the web view of mind reader. I’ve introduced (manual) ML based AI summaries for some articles shared. This way you’re saved from engaging with full text if you have limited time, but can otherwise choose to ignore “AI” and carry on with your day. For logged in people (hello, yes, sign up if you haven’t) I’ve added a switch to enable/disable these summaries. Just to be clear, these summaries are generated by Kagi’s Universal Summarizer product, they’re generated on the server side and you are never exposed to any “AI” mumbo jumbo on the client side — rest assured there’s no gross tracking, AI slop, or other nastiness here. Also this post type is new, so you’re on the bleeding edge!
Dear friends,
Overnight in the US a person killed a private health care company’s CEO [1]. The suspicion, of course, is that this company denied the person’s (or their family/friends) health care claim. I commented on mind reader that this could well be the start of rolling out the guillotines to end billionaires. Let’s see how good our odds are looking of an anti-capitalist revolution through our theoretical lenses, before we start partying on dead CEO’s graves. Hang about though because there is some cause for a party right out the gate: healthcare companies in the US have been allowing claims at a much higher rate today, they’ve removed information about their boards and directors, and are obscuring details about their CEOs. Okay, so one of those is a good thing. But it is interesting how scared the capitalist class is today. This is a deeply theoretically interesting time – if morally challenging.
While, of course, one cannot advocate for violence, there are some interesting nuances to consider in both the reaction to these events, and the fallout of showing “it’s possible” to bring an end to violence, suffering, and death – if only for a moment. To be extremely clear, I mean that quite literally the removal of a CEO brings a net positive in the world. Today, hundreds if not thousands of US citizens fortunate enough to have health cover are more likely to have their claims accepted. The direct causal effect of a CEO being murdered over the perception that their company denied too many claims and therefore became a target has led to mass positives. This tells us a lot about the nature of capitalism.
Normally, our “economy” – discussed ad nauseam, this is a fallacy to mask human suffering – channels all production towards capitalists (investors, shareholders, directors, CEOs, billionaires, and so on). But what if companies were operated for humanity instead? We see a brief glimpse of this as direct action forces the hand of corporate scumbags. Of course, sadly, this wont last. If the US people rally enough that they kill a CEO a week, perhaps for a short time corporations will turn to serving the people – a move that they can easily afford, and is the morally correct thing to do, but inconveniences the Musk types. More likely, though, is that Trump’s oligopoly succeeds [2].
There are a few implications, here, for Gramscian theorisation, and amongst these are: the role of the police as class-treacherous enforcers of capital (reacting only when CEOs are killed, not when thousands are denied owed healthcare claims), the media’s complicity in ethically sanitising billionaires and other oligarchs, and the role of politics and hegemonic enforcement in ensuring a status quo that oppresses 99% of people. As always, the reaction of various institutions reveal much about how hegemony operates. The media’s immediate rush to condemn individual action while normalising the systemic violence of denied healthcare claims demonstrates the manufacturing of consent that Chomsky identified. Corporate media portrays the daily deaths from denied claims as unfortunate but natural “market outcomes”, while framing any resistance as illegitimate violence. This selective morality serves capital’s interests by making the violence of the system appear invisible while spotlighting any challenge to it.
But particularly interesting, to me, is the role of “enforcement”.
The role of class traitors becomes particularly visible in these moments. Police mobilise (verging on massive) resources to protect corporate leadership while showing little interest in investigating deaths from denied claims. Middle managers in healthcare companies enforce policies they know harm people, having internalised capital’s logic that profits matter more than lives. The system’s gatekeepers – from HR departments to media commentators – work to maintain a status quo that ultimately harms them too, demonstrating how thoroughly hegemonic control shapes consciousness. Isn’t it weird? Don’t you find how amoral and unethical society is just extremely weird?
We teach kids to care for each other, to show respect, compassion, and to work collaboratively. We talk about centring values we describe as human: “kindness,” “care,” “love,” “affection” and so on, as natural, desirable, and important characteristics… At least of young people. As we age, this completely reverses. Cutthroat middle managers are celebrated – gaslighting and lying to employees, CEOs are lauded for their profiteering, and in Trump’s America, billionaires – the ones most responsible for the catastrophic environmental destruction which is sure to kill us all within a handful of years, are installed as dictators of government departments. The values held by Vice Chancellors, CEOs, directors, managers, and many many more belligerent, meaningless, and ultimately inhuman creatures are the direct opposite of “kindness”, “respect”, or “decency”. And yet, our system is geared for their protection – and is enabled in such a way that to even notice the cruelty and inhumanity of the system to which all 8 billion of us have consented requires a violent act? Ughhhh.
I think particularly revealing here is how quickly companies changed their behaviour when faced with direct consequences. This exposes the lie that denied claims are unfortunate necessities rather than choices made to maximise profit. The instant shift toward approving more claims proves these companies could always afford to provide care – they simply chose not to while the costs of their violence remained externalised onto the working class. At every possible moment, these corporate giants seek only to extract the maximum profit from us, all of us, yes you – dear reader, even your “wannabe millionaire friends” – we are all screwed over by billionaires and corporate giants. We created these machines of toxic destruction, and we empower their lackeys – the sycophantic narcissists that populate management in our institutions, corporations, and governments. Like a cancer they have grown and subsumed everything good, wholesome, healthy, and positive about the world – to the extent that our planet is dying.
The ruling class’s reaction also illuminates how democracy under capitalism is conditional. When electoral politics and permitted forms of protest fail to protect human life, and people feel driven to direct action, we see how quickly the system drops its democratic pretence [3]. The same voices who justify the violence of poverty, houselessness, and denied healthcare suddenly become deeply concerned with “law and order” when the 1% face consequences.
This moment forces us to grapple with uncomfortable questions about how change happens in a system designed to prevent it. While we cannot advocate violence, we must acknowledge how the system’s inherent violence – from denied healthcare to ecological collapse – creates conditions where people feel they have no other recourse. The fact that a single action produced more concrete positive change than decades of permitted resistance reveals the bankruptcy of working only within the system’s approved channels. And that is perhaps the most terrible part of all – in order to defeat this violent, disgusting system, the response that works seems to be more violence?
And yet, perhaps most importantly, this reveals the fiction of market inevitability. When faced with sufficient pressure, companies can choose to prioritise human wellbeing over maximum profit extraction. So, what, how do we build movements powerful enough to force this choice consistently, rather than temporarily? The answer as always lies in rebuilding class consciousness and solidarity while developing tactics that impose real costs on capital’s violence, without resorting to our own. Or at least that is my hope, because violence (physical and otherwise) does not bring good things – ever, not in the long run, it is incompatible with compassion, respect and decency.
The path forward requires understanding these dynamics while working to create alternatives to both individual actions of desperation and the system that produces them. This means building dual power – developing democratic institutions to meet human needs while delegitimising the structures that prioritise profit over life.
I feel like today I needed the “or something” more than the last post. This is a complex space to navigate, and it’s hard sometimes not to jump for joy when cracks in capital’s facade appear – even if they are brought by murder. I’m hopeful this is the start of some revolutionary activity that centres humanity, but I’m also fearful that we’re just seeing a further exponent on the curve towards extreme anti-human violence and that this isn’t really anti-capitalist at all, but rather a convenient scapegoat for further global authoritarianism…
In solidarity,
Aidan