death
Dear friends,
The acceleration of populist movements globally presents an interesting contradiction for analysis. Populism, a peculiar (if increasingly popular) political “logic” positions people against one another for the benefit of a person, or small group of people, vying for political power. Building on manufactured “us vs them” narratives, populist leaders will typically suggest the people need to rally behind their cause to take on the elites. The elites, importantly in this context, are not capitalists – but rather minorities that have been or can be depicted as evil, menacing, and controlling society. There is an aura of sophistication to the way populists speak, engage, and share their messaging, but above all else it is regularly xenophobic, racist, and comes with a chaser of hatred. All this in the name of clawing over some political power while allowing the continued exploitation of workers, and so on. Over time, populism has come to serves as a sophisticated tool for capital by leveraging new technologies to fragment class consciousness while continuing to reinforce the power structures it claims to oppose. This deserves our attention, particularly as we suffer from the transformation of social relations through algorithmic mediation and the cultivation of what can only be described as digital fascism.
Populism, which, positions an imagined “pure people” against a supposedly corrupt elite offers a relatively straightforward power grabbing tool for political figures – and so its proliferation globally over the last hundred odd years has an almost self-evident feeling. Because populism doesn’t demand truth, nor offer anything genuinely transformative, it does not upset capitalist status quo. Indeed, it can simply serve extant capitalist agendas, while keeping the working class fighting amongst ourselves. Populist campaigns across history have shown this, from Long’s “Share Our Wealth” movement in 1930s America to contemporary figures like Trump, Bolsonaro, and Modi, populist movements have emerged as responses to capitalist crisis. They swoop in, purporting to connect with working class issues, and offer seductive but false solutions to systemic contradictions. While these movements often appropriate left-wing critiques of inequality, they invariably redirect legitimate working class grievances toward reactionary ends, substituting scapegoating for structural analysis.
The historical record reveals some distinct variants: right-wing populism, which typically combines nationalist mythology with racial grievance (c.f., George Wallace); left-wing populism, which attempts to build multi-racial working class coalitions but often remains trapped within capitalist logic (c.f., Peron in Argentina); and what we might call techno-populism, exemplified by figures like Elon Musk who marry Silicon Valley utopianism with reactionary politics. Each variety, despite their surface differences, shares a fundamental characteristic: they offer individualist solutions to collective problems while reinforcing rather than challenging capital’s grip on social relations. Frequently, populist movements have relied on technologies to advance their messaging, initially a reliance on radio broadcasts and mass rallies, today demagogues harness algorithms and data analytics to micro-target their messaging – or just buy an entire social media platform and run it into the ground with fascist spam. This technological “evolution” requires theoretical framing to understanding how capital reproduces its hegemony through increasingly sophisticated means. Let me digress slightly to reactionary politics, first, though.
Marx offers a critique of reactionary politics, particularly his analysis of Louis Bonaparte’s rise to power, which provides a crucial substrate for insights into contemporary populism’s function within capitalism. Importantly, Marx observed how reactionary movements emerge during periods of class struggle, presenting themselves as defenders of “traditional” social relations while actually serving capital’s need to forestall revolutionary consciousness. His famous line about history repeating “first as tragedy, then as farce” continues to hold resonance as we witness capital’s recycling of reactionary tropes through digital means.
What Marx identified as “Bonapartism”, where a supposedly charismatic leader claims to transcend class conflict while actually intensifying capitalist exploitation, perfectly describes the function of contemporary populist figures. Nailed it. Analysis over… But not quite. The key difference lies not in the fundamental mechanism, but in its technological amplification. Where Bonaparte relied on army and bureaucracy to maintain power while appearing to stand above class interests, today’s populists leverage technological manipulations, algorithmic timelines, and digital surveillance to achieve the same end with unprecedented precision. Marx’s insight that reactionary politics serves to “represent” the masses while actually defending ruling class interests remains, devastatingly, relevant as the specific technologies of control metamorphose.
Historically, populist movements have emerged during periods of capitalist crisis, offering simplistic solutions to complex systemic problems while redirecting working class anger away from its true source. As we’ve touched on, the fundamental playbook hasn’t changed. Scapegoating marginalised groups, promoting nationalist mythology, and promising restoration of an imagined golden age. Rinse and repeat. But the mechanisms of delivery have evolved dramatically – and while this doesn’t change fundamentally the role of populism, it does alter the scale and damage. Where demagogues once relied on radio broadcasts and mass rallies, today’s fascist authoritarians deputise traditional intellectuals to leverage data analytics, manipulate social media feeds, and micro-target their messages of hate and division. As with all right-wing ideas, the goal is to continue capitalist accumulation, exploiting and fucking over the 99% – fracturing working class solidarity while maintaining capitalist hegemony.
From the printing press enabling nationalist propaganda, through radio and television creating the first “celebrity” politicians, to today’s social media platforms optimising for engagement through extremism, each new communication technology has been seized by capital to enhance its ideological control. The key here is that capital does not care who on the spectrum is chosen to “lead” – it cares only that growth continues. In this humanity-destroying way, capitalism is tantamount to cancer. The only difference offered by new technologies is the unprecedented precision of manipulation. Social media algorithms don’t just broadcast populist messaging. Rather, they actively cultivate ideological bubbles, pushing users toward increasingly extreme content while creating the illusion of mass movement. Your feed becomes a carefully curated echo chamber, with each interaction driving you further from genuine class consciousness and deeper into manufactured tribal identity. Regardless of the “specific messaging” you’re seeing, this is true for you if you use any of Meta’s platforms. The resulting right-wing scream-fest of hatred and misguided anger coupled with the extremely inequitable capitalist model we continue to allow creates such angst and suffering and, remains, largely unidentifiable by the 99% due to hegemonic enforcement and cultural institutions.
The cruel genius is that populism, through its “almost truth” about exploitation, extraction, harm and division, transforms legitimate working class grievances into individualised rage, redirecting systemic critique into personal vendettas. Better yet, for the capitalists, cottage industries of hatred and “content creation” intersect to fuel accumulation and production of whole categories of misanthropic, cynical, and despotic media, merchandise, and more. Rather than recognising shared class interests, atomised “users” are encouraged to view their fellow workers as enemies, with algorithms helpfully suggesting which out-group to blame for their precarity. This technologically enhanced division serves capital perfectly – keeping the 99% fighting each other while the 1% continues accumulating wealth at our collective expense. The new found dictators rising to prominence through these platforms aren’t threatening the capitalist order; they’re its perfect products/pundits, offering the illusion of rebellion while reinforcing its fundamental logic. Or better yet, they are capitalists, beneficiaries of the worst of the system, seeing how it operates and perpetuating crueller and intersectionally more disadvantageous systems to solidify their own wealth and power.
This brings us to the wicked problem of electoral strategy in an age of algorithmic radicalisation. While the liberal fantasy of individual consumer choice in the “marketplace of ideas” has proven catastrophically inadequate, we must also reject the false populist promise of strongman solutions. The path forward requires rebuilding class solidarity and collective political consciousness – what we (or specifically Piper) might term utilitarian voting for the many, not the few. This means understanding elections as tactical terrain in an ongoing struggle, not as ends in themselves. When we vote, we must do so with clear eyes about the systemic limitations of electoral politics while recognising the material differences that policy choices make in working class lives – particularly at the margins and intersections of gender, race, disability and class. The myths perpetuated to forestall this kind of collective consciousness are as numerous, from the bootstrap fallacy of the “self-made millionaire” to the fiction of meritocratic mobility, capital relies on an elaborate mythology to naturalise its violence. These just-so stories about deserved wealth and poverty serve to individualise systemic problems, making structural critique appear impossible or naive. The ultimate success of these myths lies in how they’ve infected our ontological understanding. They make the artificial constructs of capitalism appear as natural as gravity – and even economists will tell you it’s not. We must remember that every “self-made” fortune rests on generations of stolen labour, every “individual success” story obscures a network of social relations and structural advantages.
What makes our current moment particularly dangerous is how new technologies amplify and accelerate these mythologies while simultaneously fragmenting our capacity for collective response. Ughh, I’m tired, are you tired? The same platforms that connect us also isolate us, channelling legitimate rage into algorithmic dead ends killing the development of genuine class consciousness. Filter bubbles abound, and rage lies at the end of every rainbow. Every click, every share, every angry reaction feeds the machine learning models determining what content spreads – letalone the deeply manipulated content priorities on platforms such as Twitter and “Truth Social”. All this, naturally, supports capitalist accumulation – more clicks, more ads, more engagement, more MAUs, more investors, more money! And engagement metrics inevitably favour extremist content that drives division over nuanced systemic critique – because who wants to listen to a Marxist when you’ve got Andrew Tate on the scene (present company excluded).
The “self-made” mythology really deserves scrutiny as a masterwork of hegemonic control. This narrative performs a dual function in service of capital, offering a phantasmic promise of class mobility while legitimising the structures that make mobility impossible. Like a cruel parody of Tantalus, the “American Dream”, hello white picket fence, or “Australian Dream”, just “a house”, I guess – the colonial-capitalist branding matters not, dangles forever out of reach, close enough to maintain hope while far enough to ensure continued submission to wage labour exploitation. This mythology operates simply: a very small handful of privileged workers do manage to ascend to petit bourgeois status through some combination of “foundational capital”, chance, and brutal self-exploitation. Their stories are then weaponised by capital’s (occult) cultural apparatus, transformed into morality tales about “hard work” and “determination” – better yet “GRIT” my absolute favourite psychology bullshit-ism – carefully excising any mention of structural advantage or stolen labour value. That’s right, these “self ascending” dickheads stole from you to get where they are. These exceptional cases serve as both carrot and stick – promising rewards for compliance while implicitly blaming the vast majority of workers for their own exploitation. “If they made it, why haven’t you?” (words that I’ve heard way too many times). The unspoken accusation, transforming systemic critique into personal failing – a joy.
The ideological sleight-of-hand ever effective because it leverages real examples while completely mystifying the underlying relations of production. Yes, some workers do become small business owners or climb the corporate ladder. But their individual success stories obscure how this limited mobility actually reinforces rather than challenges capitalist hegemony. The petit bourgeois small business owner often becomes an even more passionate vanguard of capitalist relations than the capitalist class itself, having internalised the logic of exploitation through their own desperate struggle to avoid falling back into the proletariat. They become the perfect deputies of capital, enforcing its logic at the micro level while championing the very system that keeps them in constant precarity. Not to mention the narcissistic, psychotic, torturous class of professional “managers” that capital deputises to “bootstrap enforcement” jobs.
Naturally the ingenious, come utterly evil, system transforms the potential energy of class consciousness into the energy of individual striving (or cutthroatism). Rather than organising collectively to challenge exploitation, workers are encouraged to view their peers as competition in a grand meritocratic game. What. An. Absolute. Load. Those “above” are more interested in pulling the metaphorical ladder up behind them than doing any work, and constantly in the process of creating new platitudes, torture technologies, and endless bureaucratic bullshit to keep workers busy. This process of selective co-optation serves capital perfectly – fracturing class solidarity while creating a layer of ideological enforcement within the working class itself. The. Worst.
We need both tactical savvy and strategic clarity. We need to deeply understand these technologies without being used by them, to use alternatives like Mastodon, Lemmy, and other decentralised systems rather than gargling corporate fascist propaganda on Bluesky, Instagram or Reddit. We need to find ways to build genuine solidarity that can withstand algorithmic manipulation. This means developing new forms of digital literacy and collective resistance – my assertion is that digital literacy remains one of the most foundational pieces of knowledge required to date, and Australia’s political leaders have spent a majority of the last term in office ensuring that kids have absolutely 0 exposure to any kind of analytical thinking or technology capabilities. Only by understanding how these systems work while refusing to let them work on us can we see “through” the shit – the constant normalisation of harm. The alternative is continued fracturing of the working class, with populist demagogues serving as the perfect instruments of distraction while we literally COOK OURSELVES ALIVE. The jet stream is gone, folks, we’ve already passed the point of no return on climate. If anyone’s willing to learn a lesson here, its the 8 billion of us who will be left here suffering when Musk’s on his way to Mars.
Deep time is such an important concept for our futures – and its something we absolutely have not come to understand. Caring for the future – generation, ecology, collectivism – these are things we notionally cared about as a society – now it’s militant individualism and capitalist propaganda all the way down. What the hell.
In solidarity,
Aidan
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. ↩︎