democracy
Dear friends,
I am constantly forced to think about Elon Musk and his egomaniacal, loud, and unearned positioning in society and emerging formal role in government in the US. Today I want to talk about consent, particularly in how consent has forged Musk as either a “super genius” or “capitalist success story”. He seems to have been depicted, at least in Australia, as an underdog innovator whose singular fortitude has allowed him to rise to power — this, at least, is Rupert Murdoch’s position on things, and you can bet that he wishes he was Musky, too. Obviously, this is a manufacturing of consent to Musk’s businesses — none of which he has meaningfully contributed anything to — and a demonstration of how consent is built. From “humble beginnings” Musk has “changed the world”, they say, which is a significantly empathetic narrative verging on outright lies. The reality, of course, is that “daddy got rich killing people” and he bought some investments with daddy’s money at a good time at the advice of others. I know which story I’d prefer to be told about me. What interests me, in this, is how even when critiquing Musk, the manufactured complicity and volume of (“quiet”) fascism still forestalls real systemic change.
The reaction to Musk’s Twitter acquisition reveals an interesting contradiction in how social media shapes resistance to oligarchic power. While communities like Reddit’s r/enoughmuskspam and the entirety of first, Threads now, Bluesky, emerged as spaces for critiquing Musk’s growing influence, they ironically seem to be contributing to a form of controlled opposition that ultimately serve his interests. By containing anti-Musk sentiment within echo chambers and focusing on his personal foibles rather than systemic critique, these spaces inadvertently helped normalise his broader accumulation of power. The obsession with Musk as an individual figure — even in opposition — distracted from more substantive analysis of how his ascension represents capital’s broader turn toward direct political control. Or, at least, this is the story I’m telling today. While users shared memes mocking his management of Twitter or cataloguing his numerous failures, his actual consolidation of power through strategic alliances with Trump and other far-right figures continue unchallenged. This phenomenon exemplifies how social media’s tendency to transform political resistance into entertainment and personal grievance can neutralise genuine threats to capital’s interests. Hegemony working as described. Rather than building class consciousness and organised resistance, the energy of critique became contained within platform-managed spaces that posed no threat to Musk’s growing power. If anything, they waited eagerly for the next blunder to fuel new memes. The result was a kind of “safety valve” that allowed people to feel they were opposing oligarchic control while actually participating in structures that enabled its expansion. Eek — but we need to talk about the broader political movements here.
Oligopoly and dictatorship, while seemingly distinct forms of power concentration, share fundamental characteristics in their service to capital accumulation. An oligopoly represents the consolidation of market power among a small number of firms, while dictatorship centralises political power — but both serve to protect and advance ruling class interests. And aspects of both of these power ‘consolidating’ approaches are in effect before our eyes in the US. The blueprint for almost every other western “democracy” the world over due to their amassed imperial power. From a Marxist perspective, these governance forms naturally emerge from capitalism’s inherent interest in monopolisation and the need to maintain class dominance through increasingly direct forms of control. As contradictions within capitalism intensify, the pretence of market competition gives way to oligopolistic domination, just as liberal democracy’s facade crumbles to reveal increasingly authoritarian forms of rule. From indirect manipulation through donations, lobbying and backing favourable candidates to direct filling of government with billionaire capitalists, the future of “democracy” is beyond bleak in the USA.
This shows us the financial capture of ostensibly “democratic” political systems by mega-corporations is but a heartbeat away in the rest of the west. Not only does direct control ensure capitalist interests, it also enables the system to quell dissent and analysis — two things we hold dear here, reader. Whether through the Democratic and Republican parties in the US, Labor and Liberal in Australia, or similar “opposing” party binaries in other nations, corporate funding ensures policy outcomes that protect accumulation regardless of electoral results. But the “two party” systems of these nations serves to narrow the window of acceptable political discourse. The illusion of choice between parties masks their shared commitment to maintaining capitalist hegemony. This process has accelerated as wealth becomes increasingly concentrated among a smaller circle of tech oligarchs and corporate behemoths who can directly shape policy through unprecedented financial influence. Now, instead of pretending there’s a choice between two fascist regressives, some countries are moving to a capitalist populism ruled by oligarchs feeding their angered masses misinformation. What a world.
The shift from performative “two-party democracy” to direct oligarchic rule through populist manipulation is yet another capitalist mask-off moment. Where previously the ruling class maintained hegemonic control through the illusion of democratic choice between barely distinguishable parties (Labor/Liberal, Democrat/Republican). Their growing confidence for oligopoly capitalism stems from their unprecedented control over information and their successful fragmentation of working class consciousness through sophisticated deployment of identity politics and algorithm manipulation. Oligarchs like Musk can now openly declare their intention to rule directly while using their platform control to manufacture consent through carefully curated misinformation and manufactured outrage. This represents a more “efficient” form of class domination — rather than maintaining expensive electoral theatrics, the billionaire class can simply channel popular anger toward manufactured enemies while consolidating their own power.
As the masks come off figures like Musk move from behind-the-scenes influence to direct political power through Trump’s promised cabinet positions. While this is more obvious than lobbying or political donations, it still evades genuine media analysis. Due more to complicity by billionaire media magnates who see benefit in supporting their capitalist brethren, rather than any actual ideological position. Indeed, the utter lack of morals, culture, knowledge, or ethics is quite the hallmark in contemporary media which would rather revel in capitalist accumulation than shine any investigative light on the massive challenges of today. And this, in part, reconnects with our /r/enoughmuskspam commentary above — too much time spent in the echo chamber, not enough spent critiquing the status quo. The shift from “democratic processes” to oligarchic rule reflects capital’s growing comfort with authoritarian governance as climate collapse and inequality explode past crisis levels. Rather than maintain the expensive facade of democratic legitimacy, capital increasingly embraces fascist solutions to maintain power — particularly as the contradictions of capitalism become impossible to manage through consent alone. The integration of tech oligarchs into direct state power represents a new phase where the distinction between corporate and political power dissolves entirely. And we continue to allow (social) media to control us in this way.
This whole situation demands both mindful awareness of how these systems operate and critical analysis of the narratives used to justify them. The mythology of “free markets” and “democratic choice” serves to obscure the reality of oligarchic control and growing authoritarianism. We need to carve new frameworks for understanding how these systems specifically harm workers and marginalised groups through intersecting forms of oppression. Rather than accepting, at face value, narratives peddled by mainstream media sources, we need to analyse how capitalism’s rapid movement toward fascism emerges from its fundamental contradictions — and it only serves to cement capitalists, not the “fall of society” which right-wing soothsayers peddle. Only through building class consciousness and solidarity across lines of identity can we hope to resist capital’s increasingly naked grab for totalitarian control. The alternative is accepting a techno-feudal future where even the pretence of democracy gives way to direct rule by billionaire oligarchs.
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 have been necessarily pondering “end times” – conceptually a troubling thought. We’re seeing the slow motion collapse of ecology, social fabric, and empire. However, we are not seeing, as Marx and Engels infamously foretold, the end of capital concomitant with these collapses. Instead, capitalism’s hegemonic stranglehold on thought, production, ideology, community and more is ceaselessly suffocating any revolutionary potential. So powerful have the oligarchs become that alternatives are endlessly forestalled in capitalist realism.
Who voices “different” in these times? And what possible alternatives exist to create a new world, a new way, and some hope? This is what occupies my thoughts - cheery, ey?
Borrowing from some of the best of philosophy and ontology, let’s consider that time is cyclical. Imagining that the “end” of an era is, in fact, the beginning of something new. At the moment, I feel a grim and troubled modernity encapsulating the very way we speak, think and interact – bound in a deep evil, capitalism. This endless intensification of a singular mode of production, such that it has embraced a truly global exploitative and extractive way of working (ontology), feels inescapable – and that is part of the problem. If I, too, accept that capitalism is the end of humanity, then I have succumbed to capitalist realism. Instead, we need radical hope in the face of these times.
So, in practicing what I preach, let’s really think about what the future might be – the end of the world is the end of capitalism, but the end of capitalism is the beginning of something new and different. My hope is that humanity, this too often selfish, manipulated, and narcissistic being, flourishes and finds its positive transformation. Instead of negativity, social and cultural disintegration, and fatalism in capital’s grasping of ecology and economy, that rather we collectively wake up, pump the breaks, and seize capitalism’s fall, not as the end of ecology, but as the beginning of a new form of truly grassroots participatory democracy and change.
There is an inevitability in collapse, fatalism, capitalism, this will either lead to our collective heat death – the intensification of the already back-to-back record breaking global catastrophes, including floods, tornadoes, fires, and more that currently grip our ecology. Or, it could lead to the end of the expropriative and pathologically evil capitalist class. Redistributing resources, knowledge, and power back to the people to whom it belongs - the 99%. I hope that we are able to realise the damage that this sociopathic class enact on us every single day, and that we assert a better way. Not a new group of capitalists – but genuine distributive decision making.
This doesn’t mean, as some racists have suggested, a return to sticks, rocks and foraging – not that this is a true depiction of history, but rather a fallacy manufactured by capitalism to enable its realism. Rather, that we turn the tools of technology away from profit and instead focus on creating globally a better way of living. One that really embraces diversity, that finds strength and hope in human invention, and marvels at the possible. Our collective creative, inventive, and fundamentally intelligent energies turned towards survival, thriving, and lifting “all the boats” could truly see the end of expropriative capitalism.
Yes, such a thing as socialism, or anarchy, or whatever you want it to be - it could be. We could assert our values as “care for each other and for the planet”. This is our true role, and it always has been - responding to the needs of our ecology, not destroying it for profits. When we fall out of relation with place, environment, whatever you want to call it, we disconnect from each other, from reality, and allow the narcissistic, manipulative, and despotic reign to ruin us. This needs to end - and the planet will ensure that it does. So how do you want this to go? Work to create collective change now, or give up and let the capitalists make the 99%‘s lives even more impossible before they escape in Elon’s bullshit spaceships?
I think we are past due for serious collective rethinking of governance, collectivity, participation, purpose, and so on. We – the working class – need to assert something new, that cares, that values each other, that builds comradery, before heat death. Because, I, for one, don’t want to see this beautiful planet further damaged by vanity and corporate profits. Its a fake, empty, and bullshit system. Only together can we create hope, alternative ways, and a better world. So let’s do that instead, yeah?
The task before us is always feels monumental, as does anything transformative, but it is never impossible. We can reimagine our relationship with labour, with each other, and with the planet. This reimagining requires a fundamental shift in our ontology – our way of being in relation to the earth. We can move beyond the capitalist realism that has infected our collective imagination and embrace what Gramsci might call a new common sense [1]. This new common sense must be rooted in solidarity, mutual aid, and ecological stewardship.
But how do we get there? How do we find the cracks in the stranglehold of capitalist hegemony? The answer, I believe, lies in praxis – the unity of theory and practice. We need to engage in what Fraser calls boundary struggles [2], challenging the artificial separations between production and reproduction, economy and ecology, that capitalism relies upon – this is not difficult, and is a project we are continuing here in partnership, you and me. This means building alternative institutions and ways of living in the here and now – or at least finding ways of thinking about the possibilities – while simultaneously working to transform existing structures.
We might look to examples like the Zapatistas in Chiapas, who created autonomous zones of democratic self-governance [3]. Or to the growing movement for a “pluriverse” – a world where many worlds fit [4]. These are not utopian fantasies, but real, lived alternatives to capitalist domination, even if they have flaws.
Crucially, as I keep harping on, such transformative projects must be intersectional. We cannot separate the struggle against capitalism from the struggles against racism, patriarchy, colonialism, and other forms of oppression. As Bhattacharya reminds us, social reproduction theory offers a way to understand how these various forms of oppression are interconnected and essential to capital’s functioning [5]. By centring social reproduction in our analysis and our organising, we can build a truly inclusive and liberatory movement – but will we?
The ruling class will not give up their power willingly – they fight dirty. We continuously face repression, co-optation attempts, and, of course, battle at the front lines of ecological collapse. But we have no choice but to persist. The alternative – the continuation of capitalism’s death march – is simply unacceptable, or rather “the end of humanity” (and, yes, maybe that’s not the worst thing).
So, comrades, let us embrace this moment of crisis as an opportunity for radical transformation, please? Let us build networks of solidarity and mutual aid that can weather the storms ahead. Let us create spaces of prefigurative politics where we can experiment with new forms of democratic decision-making and ecological stewardship. And let us never lose sight of the world we’re fighting for – a world of justice, equality, and harmony with nature.
The end of capitalism need not be the end of the (human) world. But it will be if we don’t act. I think we could start something beautiful – if we have the courage and creativity to make it so. The future is unwritten – but it’s not looking great. We can do better.
In solidarity,
Aidan
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers. ↩︎
Fraser, N. (2016). Contradictions of Capital and Care. New Left Review, 100, 99-117. ↩︎
Holloway, J., & Peláez, E. (1998). Zapatista!: Reinventing Revolution in Mexico. Pluto Press. ↩︎
Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press. ↩︎
Bhattacharya, T. (Ed.). (2017). Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. Pluto Press. ↩︎