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Oligopoly capitalism: angry men, idiots, and fascism

Dear friends,

With the increase in Musky headlines, I cant help but offer a christmas posting on oligopoly capitalism. This, I argue, is the next phase in the torturous helltrip that is our contemporary political economy, particularly if we see that the USA is the blueprint for modern economies all around the globe — particularly in the margins as they control the status quo for trade and economics from their substantial imperial torment. What we are seeing in the USA, to be clear, is an undeniable turn to fascism, which I need to repeat some of here so people understand the full scale and gravity of what Trump and Musk, amongst billionaire cronies are bringing to their people [1] [2]:

  • » Gutting abortion access
  • » Mass deportations
  • » Abusing warrantless surveillance
  • » Unleashing force on protestors
  • » Severely limiting voting access
  • » Censoring critical discussions in classrooms
  • » Attacking trans people and regressing fought for rights
  • » Changes to government (as already seen) including making the president alone responsible for Judiciary and Military
  • » Complete cuts to climate change project funding, and the deregulation of coal and gas
  • » Deregulating big tech (as long as they bend the knee), banning access to “woke propaganda” (as defined by Trump, et al.)
  • » And many many more horrible details.

Make absolutely no mistake. Trump and Musk, as well as others who have ‘bent the knee’, as the internet has termed it, such as Zuckerberg (Meta/Facebook), Cook (Apple), Sarandos (Netflix), as well as a litany of others literally (soon to be) inducted into his government [3], are all supporters of this plan and each of these points. They are ardent defenders of human suffering. On a list of 1,000 billionaires, big tech CEOs, and other wannabe capitalists you would struggle to identify 1 who genuinely cared and acted towards human liberation. These people, the utterly worthless leeches on society, are the ones running the USA. Now, though, they are in direct control — rather than abstracted through lobbying.

This transformation, unfortunate mostly for the already marginalised US citizens directly impacted by this soon-to-arrive despotism, is not unique to the US. It is not even the beginning of capitalist meddling in government and decision making infrastructure. Lobbying, back-room deals, and boys clubs have been hallmarks of our “democracies” worldwide, with little real power ever handed to the citizens — unless they believe their best interests are served by deregulating billionaires (and there are many stupid enough to believe that). Reinforced through media hegemony, c.f. Murdoch, the status quo has always favoured those with ill-gotten wealth — no, not pirates, something far worse, the capitalist class. The wool pulled over the peoples collective eyes, however, was somewhat lifted by the emergence of analytical thought on the internet. But we can’t have that — it creates a crisis of capitalism. That crisis has led to the fall of democracy, even notionally.

This ‘modern oligarchy’ represents capitalism’s (forever) penultimate triumph in consolidating both economic and political power within an increasingly small circle of elites. As Gramsci theorised, hegemonic control requires both coercion and consent, and today’s oligarchs have mastered this dual approach through their ownership of cultural institutions, media empires, and increasingly, direct political offices. The billionaire class no longer operates through intermediaries but directly shapes policy and public discourse, from Murdoch’s media manipulation to Zuckerburg’s platform control. This concentration of power serves capital’s interests by ensuring that any potential challenge to accumulation can be quickly neutralised, whether through manufactured consent in the media or direct suppression through captured state institutions. The oligarchy’s control extends beyond traditional economic dominance into algorithmically-mediated social control, using ownership of digital platforms to shape discourse and prevent class consciousness from emerging.

Between these forces there is little room for human freedom. The billionaire class do not care about you. The billionaire class want you to die to build their hoards. They want you to suffer while you work. To keep you distracted and fighting your peers. They want all of us to be angry, dumb, and lashing out at each other. The same way the deranged farmer herds cows by the thousands to their cruel deaths, the billionaires have you in their trap — right where they want you. This violence, the same violence used on animals, the same violence used to enclose humans, the same violence used in colonial projects, that violence never goes. Rather, that violence remains a threat. If you don’t “look right”, “act right”, “speak right” — if you don’t comply, you are eradicated, removed and marginalised — and this is naturalised through conceptions of a Just World™.

The Just World theory, which posits that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get, serves as a powerful tool of hegemonic control by naturalising systemic violence and inequality as inevitable outcomes of individual choices rather than structural conditions. This ideology, deeply embedded in what Gramsci termed “common sense” (as opposed to critical “good sense”), allows privileged groups to rationalise their position while blaming the oppressed for their own suffering. Through this lens, poverty becomes a moral failing rather than a necessary feature of capitalist accumulation, racism becomes a matter of individual prejudice rather than systemic oppression, and billionaires’ wealth appears as earned reward rather than stolen labour value. The Just World fallacy works hand-in-hand with capitalist meritocracy myths to transform questions of structural power into matters of personal responsibility, effectively masking how privilege operates through intersecting systems of class, race, gender, and ability. By positioning success and failure as purely individual outcomes, this ideology helps maintain hegemonic control by preventing the development of class consciousness and solidarity among oppressed groups. We see this operating powerfully in contemporary discourse around everything from housing access to climate change, where systemic violence is reframed as natural consequence rather than deliberate policy choice. This framing is particularly insidious because it doesn't just justify privilege to the privileged — it often convinces the oppressed themselves to internalise responsibility for their own exploitation, transforming potential revolutionary energy into self-blame and preventing recognition of shared class interests. Remember when you were told growing up that “good things happen to good people”, yeah that was a load of shit to justify colonial capitalism’s deep violence. Violence ardently vanguarded by Musk, Trump, Cook, and countless others — and they don’t even pretend its not violent any more.

The “mask-off” nature of contemporary billionaires, particularly their direct assumption of state power, signals capitalism’s growing comfort with openly authoritarian governance. Where previous generations of capitalists maintained a facade of democratic legitimacy through professional political proxies, figures like Trump exemplify a new breed of oligarch-politician who openly flaunts their “wealth” while claiming to represent “the people”. This turn isn’t an aberration, it is another step in capital’s need for ever-greater control as contradictions intensify. The billionaire class increasingly drops any pretence of serving the public good, instead nakedly wielding power to protect their accumulation while the planet burns. Their assumption of direct political control shows both a faux confidence in their hegemonic position and fear of growing systemic instability. Insurrections which must be quelled to ensure they die “king of the hill”.

Today’s billionaire class has perfected the art of manufacturing division while posing as populist champions. Through sophisticated deployment of identity politics stripped of class analysis, they redirect legitimate working class grievances into tribal conflicts that prevent solidarity from emerging. Figures like Musk exemplify this strategy – playing the role of free speech warrior and anti-establishment rebel while actively working to fragment worker consciousness and prevent organised resistance. Their performative, often “bumbling”, personas mask sophisticated manipulation of media narratives and platform algorithms to keep workers fighting each other rather than recognising their shared class interests. This manufactured conflict serves capital by preventing the development of genuine class consciousness while providing cover for accelerating exploitation.

The cultivation of toxic masculinity, at this juncture, serves as another tool of capitalist hegemony, redirecting legitimate male alienation and economic precarity into reactionary politics rather than class consciousness. As traditional paths to masculine identity through stable employment and economic security become increasingly unavailable under late capitalism, oligarchs and their cultural apparatus actively channel male anger toward marginalised groups rather than systemic critique. Figures like Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, and various “manosphere” influencers — promoted heavily by Zuckerberg’s platform algorithms due to “engagement” — offer superficially appealing narratives that transform structural critiques of capitalism into individualised grievances against feminism, “wokeness”, and other manufactured enemies. And quite literally fomenting violence, from the streets where rape and murder of women continues to be a significant problem, to the internet where misogynistic comments and cyberbullying also claim lives. This process serves capital’s interests perfectly – rather than recognising their shared exploitation with other workers, angry men are encouraged to view feminist, LGBTQI+, and racial justice movements as threats to their “status” (not that they ever had any), effectively fracturing potential class solidarity. The billionaire class actively cultivates these reactionary masculine movements, understanding that redirecting male rage toward cultural grievances prevents it from developing into genuine anti-capitalist consciousness. Due to the deliberate echo-chambers run by Zucc which practically speaking are the only social media platforms on the web a self-reinforcing cycle emerges where any ‘legitimate’ male suffering under capitalism is rapidly transformed into support for precisely the system causing that suffering, with toxic masculinity serving as the perfect vehicle for maintaining hegemonic control while preventing class consciousness from emerging. Anger, its a hell of a drug.

As capitalism’s contradictions become increasingly difficult to manage through consent alone, we see its mask of democratic legitimacy falling away to reveal naked authoritarianism. Anger, denial, hate, fear and rage are harnessed here to keep the violence lateral, rather than systemic. Angry men as enforcers of Trump’s empty bullshit, weak men as the defenders of Musk’s exploitative, murderous and despotic plans, and so on. The system’s fundamental incompatibility with genuine democracy becomes impossible to conceal as climate collapse and inequality reach crisis levels — ‘crisis’ so deep that they can’t contain CEOs being murdered. Rather than risk genuine popular control that might interfere with accumulation, capital increasingly embraces fascist solutions to maintain power. This shift isn’t happening in traditionally authoritarian states but in the heart of “liberal democracies”, where capital abandons democratic pretences in favour of direct domination.

These developments are deeply interconnected: the oligarchy’s consolidation of power enables the billionaire class’s despotic turn, while their manipulation of popular consciousness provides cover for capitalism’s shift toward naked authoritarianism. The system’s inherent drive toward fascism emerges from its need to maintain accumulation in the face of mounting crises, with the billionaire class serving as both architects and beneficiaries of this transformation. Their success in redirecting popular anger away from systemic critique and toward manufactured enemies enables capital's increasingly open embrace of anti-democratic governance.

This is precisely why we need to continue fighting for democracy. From our workplaces, to our government decision-making. Because once we loose the pretence of democracy, we loose our rights. When dumb, angry men are dictators of our society, we will truly have arrived at the hell on earth the billionaires use their bible to warn us about (“scary socialists”) — only hell is their plan — hell for us, heaven for them.

Happy fucking christmas, “consume it all”,

Aidan.

  1. https://www.aclu.org/project-2025-explained ↩︎

  2. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c977njnvq2do ↩︎

  3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2024/12/22/the-billionaires-trumps-picked-for-next-administration-elon-musk-tilman-fertitta-and-more/ ↩︎

,   &  Aidan Cornelius-Bell
capitalism, futurism, fascism, angry men, misogyny

The kids aren’t alright – they’re banned

Dear friends,

Yesterday the ALP passed into law legislation that bans all young people from social media [1]. This has been widely regarded as a bad move [2]. Without wanting to sound like a broken record, this is another step towards fascism from a supposedly union-supporting party – populism anyone? As mentioned a few days ago, social media bans for young people are not Lovejoyesque “won’t somebody please think of the children”, but rather a sinister configuration of common sense that seeks to shape and control the development of class consciousness in the digital age – amongst those most likely to see that there’s something really very wrong with our social order. This enacted ban, dressed up in the language of protection, is nothing but an attempt to forestall the development of digital literacy and thinking skills among young people. In 2024 the best tool the ALP and LNP can dream up together (yeah, those two supposedly opposed parties) is banning – this is simply because they can’t force US tech giants to capitulate to their will and enforce their particular brand of fascism.

So, to get to the bottom of this, we need to understand what social media actually represents under contemporary capitalism. These platforms aren’t spaces for connection. In fact, I doubt anyone is “connecting” on any tech-bro founded social media (and if you’re on social media, odds are you’re on social media not the fediverse). No, contemporary social media platforms, of which there are ever smaller numbers not subsumed by Meta (Zuckerberg), are a human-machine hybrid of mechanisms to enforce hegemony. They simultaneously atomise users while harvesting their data for profit. Does that make you feel good about your social media use? Nah, me either. Meta, Twitter, “Truth Social”, Bluesky and their ilk function as digital fiefdoms – we talked about this earlier today [3] – where interaction itself becomes a commodity. The “social” in social media is a cruel joke. What’s actually being cultivated is a form of managed isolation that serves capital’s interests. So, not a great place to exist if we can agree on the toxicity of these systems and their owners. So what, banning this is a good thing now?

The trouble here is young people are being systematically denied access to even this hollow form of connection, while simultaneously being prepared for lives of digital exploitation. And more importantly, because social media is such a “thing” their ability to navigate these spaces is forestalled, and appropriate forms of engagement aren’t suitably developed. At least, that’s what this bill would prefer. Remember the “digital native” narrative? I was supposed to be one of those, computers were just accessible enough during my youth that I pretty well had access to one from birth, and this made me a digital native – no questions asked. Except I’m the exception – most of my peers have no clue how a computer works, how to navigate digital spaces critically, or engage with thinking about the problematic nature of platform concentration. No, they were too busy seeing the opportunities presented by MySpace to cyberbully each other. I’m not helping here, am I?

But this is the fundamental trouble.

Young people either learn to be consumers of technology, and particularly today’s youth are directed almost exclusively towards consumerism. YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, it’s all “consume” with very little create – beside perhaps performative selfies. This doesn’t build technical literacy, actually it seems to do the opposite. Young people today can’t touch type on a keyboard (maybe on a phone screen), they don’t know what a CPU is, and they certainly don’t understand TCP/IP. Yeah, so the last one is maybe not so necessary – but my point here is about deliberate mystification of technology. This mystification only ever serves capitalist interests – it reinforces the exploitative status quo, and by denying young people access to digital literacy, it reinforces digital sheep – giving up all their personal information and attention, numbing the existential pain of knowing we are all dying from human-made climate death. Weeeee.

The intersectional impacts of this ban also demand our attention. For young people already marginalised by race, class, disability and other axes of oppression, being cut off from digital spaces means being denied access to community, support networks, and critical information about identity and resistance. The bourgeois fantasy that kids will just “go outside and play” ignores how digital spaces can provide vital refuge and resources for marginalised youth – particularly LGBTQI+ kids who are at incredible risk of “vengeance” from their right-wing moron parents. When the ALP talks about “protecting children”, they tacitly, and deliberately, mean only the straight white middle class children. Certainly not working class kids, Indigenous kids, or queer kids who rely on digital connections to find community and survival strategies. They also deny knowledge of how these systems operate, are governed, and whose interests they serve – the real educational piece needed today. We know creating communities is a threat to the ALP. Because anything that’s not one of “theirs” is a threat to their hegemony, and they are viciously and disgustingly protective of their “community” (cult). Probably something to do with the ban, ey.

Rather than dwelling in doom and gloom, let’s think about the interesting aspect, and perhaps hopeful corner offered by this ban. The very attempt to lock young people out of mainstream social platforms could create opportunities for new forms of digital resistance and community-building. And I don’t mean because Meta will basically refuse to enforce this (unless they see it as an opportunity to force you to tie your social media profile to a drivers license, etc. so they can extract more real-world data from you, the opportunities are endless, if you’re a sociopath). No, as a response to the “enshittification” of mainstream services we have already seen the emergence of federated platforms like Mastodon and Lemmy that operate on fundamentally different principles than the corporate social media giants. Different, but still susceptible to human problems. These spaces, governed by communities rather than algorithms, suggest possibilities for social interaction that isn’t primarily oriented toward data extraction and profit generation. As long as that’s what the communities focus on (and ignoring those problematic fascists purporting communism over in the .ml TLD).

Okay, back on the constructive bandwagon. Our questions become: how might we support young people in developing the technical literacy and the critical consciousness needed to build and maintain alternative spaces? Not “teaching kids to code” (though it probably wouldn’t hurt). What I’m pushing here is fostering forms of digital literacy that help them, and frankly everyone else, to understand and resist the mechanisms of control embedded in mainstream platforms. We need to craft tools and practices that support genuine community governance, intersectional equality, and meaningful dialogue rather than engagement metrics and algorithmic manipulation. The systems we have now either started as and became perfected under capitalist ontology, or are late-comers who go full throttle capital accumulation and propaganda out the gate. Where community run systems exist, we need safeguards that prevent hijacking on the basis of popularity, attention, and ad sales.

Let’s get into the construction zone – pouring some concrete here, we could:

  1. Develop open-source moderation tools that centre harm reduction and community accountability rather than automated content filtering
  2. Create educational resources that teach both technical skills and critical analysis of platform capitalism
  3. Build infrastructure for local, community-controlled social spaces that can’t be easily co-opted by capital
  4. Support young people in understanding and creating their own governance structures for digital spaces

But we should also be clear-eyed about the challenges. Capital is proven at co-opting and neutralising resistance movements. Any alternative platforms or practices we develop will face intense pressure to either conform to market logic or become irrelevant. Or worse, be legislated out of existence. The history of the internet is littered with promising experiments in digital democracy that ended up serving as research and development for corporate platforms. Remember when that soccer club setup a digital platform for making all their corporate decisions? Neither does capitalism, but the emergence of investor decision centres based on the same principle – just tailored for accumulation rather than public good – certainly go strong even today.

The likely immediate effect of the social media ban will be to push youth interaction into even less accountable spaces – private Discord servers, anonymous forums, and encrypted messaging apps. While this might temporarily evade state and corporate surveillance, it also fragments community and makes collective organising more difficult. The ALP knows this – again, the goal isn’t actually to “protect” young people but to prevent them from developing the digital literacy and class consciousness needed to resist exploitation. Added bonus points if adults forced into validating their age also have to hand over 100 points of ID to Zucc to expand his surveillance propaganda machine. And a big glaring reminder that Zuckerberg recently “bent the knee” to Trump at Mar-a-Lago, granting the dictator platform control [4].

We can’t ignore how this ban fits into broader patterns of surveillance and control – and a space of continued interest to the ALP who seek to regulate anything “private” into their domain. A friendly reminder that the Australian Labor Party is the very same current government who are expanding police powers, criminalising protest, and maintaining some of the most draconian digital surveillance laws in the supposedly “democratic” world. It’s never been about safety. It’s all about maintaining hegemonic control as capitalism enters an increasingly authoritarian phase. Of course, the very intensity of these control efforts suggests their underlying fragility. Capital wouldn’t work so hard (they rarely work at all) to prevent young people from developing digital literacy if it wasn’t afraid of what they might do with it. The challenge is always using moments of crisis to build genuine alternatives. Letting corporate social media platforms win is just a modern system of “digital enclosure”. Instead, we can, and are, finding better ways of community building.

This means thinking beyond individual platforms or technical solutions to consider how we might fundamentally reshape human interaction in digital space. Instead of engagement metrics and data extraction, what if we oriented digital tools toward mutual aid and collective liberation? Instead of algorithmic manipulation, what if we developed practices of genuine dialogue and democratic decision-making?

We already see, globally in forums, fediverse tools, and other digitally-mediated social spaces:

  1. Networks of community-controlled servers and services
  2. Educational programs that combine technical skills with political analysis
  3. Tools that support consensus-building and collective decision-making, and
  4. International solidarity networks that can resist state and corporate control.

Ultimately, though, the question of youth access to digital spaces can’t be separated from broader struggles against capitalism and fascism. The ALP’s social media ban is just one front in a larger war being waged against the possibility of collective resistance and alternative futures. Our response needs to be equally comprehensive – not just “building better platforms”, but developing new forms of governance, engagement, solidarity and struggle that can effectively challenge capital’s control of digital (and physical) space. The fascist creep doesn’t just happen in parliament or the streets – it happens in code, in algorithms, in the architecture of our digital lives (and we choose who the architect is). Resistance means developing not just alternative platforms but alternative ways of being together online, of making decisions, of building power.

They want to deny young people access to digital literacy and community? Fine. Let’s build something better – something they can’t control or co-opt. The future isn’t in the Metaverse or government-approved platforms. It’s in the spaces we create.

In solidarity,

Aidan

  1. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/nov/28/labor-passes-migration-and-social-media-ban-bills-after-marathon-senate-sitting ↩︎

  2. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/nov/26/australia-social-media-ban-expert ↩︎

  3. https://mndrdr.org/2024/on-immunity-and-the-ruling-class ↩︎

  4. https://www.mediaite.com/tv/mark-zuckerberg-visits-mar-a-lago-after-trump-threatened-him-with-imprisonment/ ↩︎

,   &  Aidan Cornelius-Bell
social media, labor party, fascism, corporate control, meta, digital literacy

On immunity and the ruling class

Dear friends,

I woke to news that France was refusing to arrest Netanyahu despite the ICC’s ruling on his creation and maintenance of genocide. So yes, in one fell swoop, France declares a law of its own and renders the ICC as a theatre for political drama, not action – same as it ever was I suppose. This movement gives us yet another lens, in what has basically become a camera store or optometrist, through which to examine how the ruling class protects its own. This isn’t surprising, after all when was the last time you saw a billionaire or war criminal actually face consequences for their actions? But what makes this moment interesting is how this protection is being reinforced in mainstream society through broader political moves – once again creating opportunities to climb and hoist up the ladder. What we see, here, is concomitant and frankly thus far unprecedented control of digital information to manufacture consent.

As always, let’s delve into a little theory first. Gramsci (hello there) gave us a robust understanding of how the dominant group in society controls and maintains their power – hegemony – which helps us understand how ruling class power is maintained not just through direct state violence, but through cultural control and manufactured consent. In our digital age, this hegemonic control manifests equally through cultural institutions – now reconstituted to include social media companies – and through use of force when this manufactured consent fails. The ruling class isn’t just controlling traditional media anymore, in fact they are actively shaping the architecture of digital spaces to prevent class consciousness from emerging. The newspapers, radio stations, and cultural organisations of Gramsci’s time served to normalise fascist ideology and make it appear as “common sense”, today’s social media platforms serve the exact same function – personalised propaganda for fascist ends.

Consider how platforms like Meta, Twitter, and YouTube have “evolved”. What began as seemingly neutral spaces for connection and information sharing have become (badly tuned) instruments of ideological control. The concentration of power in the hands of a few tech oligarchs – looking at you Musk and Zuckerberg – is an extension the media barons of Gramsci’s era, hell of our era – looking at you Murdoch. These modern-day Hearsts (or “Johnny Newspaperseed” if you like) don’t just own the platforms, they shape what information users can see – right so history repeats itself, got it? The “freedom” – that brief flash of democratisation – to post whatever you want is, now more than ever, utterly meaningless when “the algorithm” ensures only certain viewpoints gain traction. This hasn’t “changed” because the technology itself changed – rather the technology is now more fit for purpose. Capital recognised the threat posed by truly “open” digital spaces and moved aggressively to capture and reshape them. That’s why there’s so much platform monopolisation and so many moves to lock down hosting, platform providers, and fundamentally “open” parts of the internet. The early internet’s potential for activist organising and counter-hegemonic discourse was precisely what made it dangerous to ruling class interests. And now it’s nice and Musky instead — and what’s left in the open web is not substantial enough to shake Meta’s exclusivity.

Modern digital hegemony is not a major departure from previous forms of platform control. Nothing truly innovative has ever emerged from capitalism, it is capable only of subsuming peripheral ideas that benefit control and manipulation tactics. But its propaganda machine is enviable and terrible – the modern Web 2.0 internet was a con to pull democratic voices and conglomerate them under tech giants. The aura of “open” remains in forums like Facebook, where people feel a sense of broad connection because their once upon a time physical network of actual friends migrated there (and then promptly stopped interacting in the real world). Mediation of friendship and human connection through technology could have been a wonderful thing, instead it’s an intensification echo chamber that amplifies the worst of humanity to serve capitalist ends. Users feel like they’re freely choosing what content to engage with, but the choices themselves are curated by algorithms designed to promote ruling class interests. This is Gramsci’s “spontaneous consent” operating at a deep level of sophistication.

Varoufakis offers a compelling framework, here, for understanding this transformation through his concept of technofeudalism. He argues that we’re seeing the emergence of a new form of economic domination where tech platforms function as digital fiefs, extracting rents from all social and economic activity that occurs within their domains. Much like feudal lords who could demand tribute from anyone living on their land, companies like Meta and Twitter can extract value from any interaction that takes place on their platforms. Look no further than Twitter’s claim that it owns Alex Jones’ profile and therefore criminal action cannot seek to sell it to reclaim damages. This isn’t traditional monopoly power - it’s a restructuring of social relations where tech oligarchs function as modern-day lords, determining what information can flow through their digital fiefdoms while demanding tribute (in the form of data and attention) from their users. The parallel to feudal power structures is apt when we consider how these platforms have become essential infrastructure for modern life. Just as medieval peasants couldn’t simply “opt out” of their local lord’s domain, today’s workers can’t realistically withdraw from these digital spaces without facing social and economic isolation – though, I’m happily Meta free for 6 months and counting and my mental health has significantly improved.

When we couple these background pieces with our key point – bad people can do what they want, as long as they work for capital, and legislature, public opinion, common sense and judiciary will be turned on anyone who doesn’t agree – we see hegemony in action with all its warts. What better capturing of coercive control than the Australian, particularly South Australian, Labor government’s utterly insane legislation to ban under-17s from phones in school and social media altogether. As always, this isn’t about “thinking of the children”. It is about preventing young people from developing critical digital literacy skills that might help them see through ruling class propaganda. Rather than teach young people how to critically engage with digital information, the response is to simply cut off access entirely. The message is clear: better to prevent access than risk class consciousness emerging through digital means. That’s what TikTok was fostering – communist awareness, even if it was the Chinese brand of capitalist communism (yes, that’s an oxymoron folks – and also another form of international state actors creating dissent).

All this legislature to dumb down the working class nests within a broader pattern of global control. The ruling class clearly recognised that Gen Z’s unprecedented access to information posed a threat to their hegemony. For a brief moment, young people had the ability to bypass traditional media gatekeepers and access unfiltered information about capitalism’s contradictions, imperial and intersectional violence, and class struggle. The response has been swift and brutal: the algorithmic promotion of fascist content, the strategic purchase of Twitter to control discourse, the flooding of the internet with AI-generated slop, and the deliberate degradation of search capabilities. There’s a reason Google only offers you mainstream news, social media posts, and “Reddit discussions” (read: AI bots screaming at each other; and sadly the other dominant search index is not much better).

The purported “neutrality” of algorithms provides perfect cover for the neo-Nazi ideological project (sorry, “Labor Party”) – the rise of fascism to cement capitalism under fire. When YouTube “randomly” promotes far-right content, or TikTok faces bans for allowing anti-hegemonic narratives to spread, we’re supposed to believe these are natural or necessary technical decisions rather than deliberate acts of class warfare. This is what manufactured consent looks like for the digital age. No longer just filtering information through corporate media ownership as Chomsky described, but actively manipulating the infrastructure of digital spaces to fragment class solidarity – and then enacting laws that ensure this is the only way to engage with politics, society, and critique. Meanwhile, the traditional protection racket continues unabated. France’s refusal to arrest Netanyahu follows the same logic as America’s refusal to prosecute war criminals from its own imperial adventures, or Australia’s protection of mining executives who destroy Aboriginal land. The ruling class doesn’t arrest its own – whether they’re genocidal leaders or billionaire exploiters. What’s changed is their ability to couple this direct protection with digital platform manipulation to preempt and prevent resistance from forming. This is what Marx would recognise as the intensification of class warfare through new technological means. The current axis of economic exploitation coupled with maintenance of “correct ideology” prevent workers from developing the consciousness needed to recognise our shared interests.

I think the worst part is that this all seems to be working. Despite having theoretical access to more information than any generation before, many young people are being systematically channelled into reactionary politics through carefully curated digital spaces. From PragerU propaganda to algorithm-boosted fascist content, the ruling class has turned digital spaces into machines for manufacturing consent. It’s a nazi’s world out there, or rather the new nazis, zionists, cryptofascists and other bullshit peddlers. The fact that they’re working to control digital information flows reveals their fear of what might happen if workers could freely share information and recognise their common interests. As always, all it takes is looking at how the 1% destroys the souls of the 99% and using these tools against them … not that that ever seems to happen.

Is there an opportunity here, now, to use the open technologies of the modern internet to undermine their propagandist, ecologically destructive, and toxic ideology? Of course there is, and there are a litany of open source projects that promote free platforms moderated by communities not tech oligarchs. There are many ways to learn digital literacy, to be critical of information that appears in front of you, and to reject racist, sexist, ableist, xenophobic and hollow explanations for exploitation. The real problem is very simple – capital is destroying us as a species, and all those trapped in this jail with us. If we, the vast majority of people don’t take meaningful action to change course, we’re doomed – we are already doomed, even with traditional intellectuals sounding alarms of no return. If it’s so bad that the ruling class is divided on it, the urgency of working class action has never been clearer.

We can use our own digital infrastructure, we can find ways to connect with fellow humans, and we can reject the laws, propaganda, and bullshit the ruling class has cranked up to 11. From critiquing the colonial-capitalist project, to teaching our communities how to understand information that is presented to them, there are better ways. And if none of that sounds like you, the least you can do is get off Meta’s platforms – it’s actually as simple as just deleting the app. The ruling class is betting everything on their ability to control digital spaces and prevent class consciousness from emerging through these channels. Our job is to prove them wrong.

In solidarity,

Aidan

,   &  Aidan Cornelius-Bell
genocide, fascism, capitalism, israhell, literacy, social media

Liberals, whinging and performance politics

Dear friends,

I’ve been “experiencing” liberal American post-election analysis on every form of media I visit. I’m sure you’re in the same boat as politically engaged people – but things have really reached frustration point today. So, without naming names, msnbc, I want to explore how “liberal politics”, or really what should be labeled soft-right after this Trump-slide, maintains hegemonic control through a variety of interlinked mechanisms that ultimately serve capital while preventing genuine social transformation. You know – the usual. Specifically today I’m interested in “sanewashing” and virtue signaling, because that’s the thrust of post-electoral fervor in the US – and I can feel it in my bones coming to Australia next (after all we’re just little USA, right? More on that soon).

It’s worth beginning with how liberals internally justify their political positioning. Their inaction, justification of government and corporate decisions, and general malaise unless something is a personal threat to them (even then, a stretch for action to occur). The bourgeois “left” engages in endless self-congratulatory rhetoric about being “reasonable” and “moderate”. Through this they position themselves as the “adult in the room” (in all things, really – yuck) while actively enabling fascism through constant concessions to capital. This manifesto of mediocrity serves to police the boundaries of acceptable discourse while portraying any genuine challenge to capitalism as dangerously extreme. Thanks, liberals (and to be clear to the Australians in the room I mean ALP supporters, not “Liberal Party” supporters who are Trumpian). The grip of the liberal mindset becomes a self-reinforcing loop: “we must be reasonable because we are moderate, and we are moderate because we are reasonable”. This circular logic conveniently ignores how their “reasonable” politic continues to enable exploitation and expropriation. Nice gymnastics.

Illustration required! The phenomenon of “sanewashing” exemplifies this mental HIIT workout perfectly. Liberals dismiss Trump supporters and other right-wing voters as simply “crazy” or “weird” rather than engaging with the material conditions and deliberate manipulation that drives working people toward reactionary politics. This is particularly important – the start and end of issues in US and Australian politics alike is that there are no parties supporting fair working conditions, socialised care, or ecological preservation – no parties beside the Australian Greens anyway. And even that is a concession to the change desperately needed in both countries to save our planet from climate destruction. “Those people are just nuts”, the liberals declare, while continuing to support the very economic system that creates the desperation and alienation fuelling fascism’s rise. This narrative conveniently absolves liberals of any responsibility to build genuine solidarity or challenge fundamental injustices, they can rest easy on their privileged boomeresque retirement fund. It also reinforces the false binary between two flavours of capitalism – one openly fascist, one with a pride flag – a dichotomy of the ages as the “political spectrum” tells you you can have your opinion, as long as it is ontologically capitalist.

From a sociological perspective, this othering process serves multiple hegemonic functions. It allows liberals to maintain their self-image as the “reasonable” ones while actively participating in systems of exploitation – hot. It fragments working class solidarity by creating artificial divisions between the “normal” and “crazy” segments of society. Most perniciously, it prevents meaningful analysis of how capitalism itself produces the social conditions that drive people toward extreme positions. The people who should be conducting the analysis, hell, they should be rallying on the streets, instead its “woe is me, some crazy people won the power” and “Kamala only lost because she was marginalised by the media” – not an ounce of introspection in the whole liberal core. The obsession with individual “sanity” versus “insanity” literally masks the systemic nature of our crisis – if you reduce all our problems to one faulty leader (Dutton, Badenoch, Luxon, Trump) then “capitalism is ok, it’s just the leaders who are wrong” while their more palatable leader (Albo, Starmer, Hipkins, Biden) institutes the same policy with a rainbow flag draped over it – do you feel sufficiently “washed” yet?

The normalising of “sanity” as defined by acquiescence to capitalist relations represents another victory for ruling class ideology. And with liberals it is always ruling class ideology – not anything born of organic intellectualism – because they seek only to become the next oppressor (landlord, CEO, investor), not defeat systems of oppression. Those who accept endless war, environmental destruction, and grinding poverty as “normal” get to claim the mantle of “reason”, while those who suggest that perhaps we shouldn’t sacrifice human flourishing on the altar of profit, planetary destruction, and genocide are dismissed as extremists. Again, cool work liberals. The deep irrationality of a system that demands infinite growth on a finite planet gets naturalised as “just the way things are” and this pervasive hegemony informs all of what is “allowed” on the political spectrum – policing the possibility of change.

Particularly galling is how this discourse completely ignores the role of education. (Here we go Aidan’s back on the high horse). Not in the liberal sense of “if only they understood facts and logic” but in the Gramscian sense of developing critical consciousness – consciousness born of their class origin that enables a shared understanding of the failings, expolitation, and fundamentally cancerous nature of capital – rather than vanguarding and justifying it endlessly for “sanity” against both the socialist left and the alt-right. Instead of building systems of popular education that help people understand their material conditions and collective interests, liberals fixate on sneering at the “uneducated masses” while offering no alternative vision. They posture about how the “poors and illiterates” can’t truly understand their big brain political system, and yet when they do vote they somehow choose “insanity” rather than their candidate. Their conception of education remains trapped within capitalist logic, naturally – training “better workers” (read: complicity in capitalism’s exploitation) rather than developing revolutionary consciousness.

The political spectrum, here, serves as yet another tool in this same hegemonic arsenal. By positioning “moderate” pro-capital positions as the reasonable centre, with socialism relegated to the “extreme” fringe alongside fascism (no, not in horseshoe theory’s twisted worldview – if those liberal kids could read they’d be very upset), this framework naturalises exploitation while pathologising resistance. It is no accident that the “centre” always seems to align perfectly with the interests of capital – and over time creeps ever further rightward as capital’s crises and metastaticisation destroy our ecology, demand more socially gruelling positions, and continues painting anything that challenges these interests as dangerous extremism – anything. This false equivalence between left and right “extremes” serves to maintain capitalist hegemony by preventing genuine alternatives from gaining traction. Again, harming progressive causes and trapping the broadest discourse within a narrative controlled by binary and “sanity”.

The manufactured spectrum, with perhaps its most damaging feature, enables the alt-right to position itself as merely the “opposite” of some imagined radical left, thereby normalising its fascistic tendencies through false equivalence. “Well, if there are communists on the far left, we must be the reasonable counterbalance on the right”, goes their twisted logic. But this framing fundamentally misunderstands (deliberately, of course) the dimensional nature of political thought. The spectrum isn’t a simple line from left to right, it’s not even a two-dimensional political compass. The reality is that while fascists and liberals argue about various flavors of capitalism, genuine socialist and communist thought operates on a different axis (because their values are concerned with freedom from oppression, not “how would you like your oppression today?”). Fundamentally, it is an axis that questions the very premises of capital that both “ends” of the mainstream spectrum take for granted. It’s like watching two people argue about the best way to arrange deck chairs on the Titanic while refusing to acknowledge the iceberg – or better yet, refusing to acknowledge that boats could be steered differently altogether. The right’s success in positioning itself as just another “pole” on a reasonable spectrum serves to further entrench capital’s hegemony by making any genuine alternative appear literally unthinkable. Through this sleight of hand, they can paint socialists as “just as extreme” as fascists, while the real extremism – the endless extraction, exploitation, and expropriation required by capitalism itself – gets completely naturalised as the water we all swim in. The bourgeois media’s obsession with “both sides” reporting only reinforces this dynamic, creating an artificial equivalence between those who want to accelerate capitalism’s death drive and those who dare to imagine we might organise society differently.

Meanwhile liberals engage in endless virtue signalling about inclusion and diversity while actively participating in systems of exploitation and expropriation. They need to “look” reasonable, after all, as the moderate centre in all this. They’ll put “Black Lives Matter” in their social media bios while opposing any policy that might actually challenge racial capitalism. Similarly with decolonial efforts – full support for Indigenous movements unless they challenge capitalism – but knock-off art piece looks nice on their wall right? They’ll celebrate pride while supporting politicians who maintain the carceral state. I could go on but I’m feeling physically ill at the thought of liberal performativity, capture, and misappropriation of genuine causes into identity based squabbles [1]. The performance of progressive values without material commitment to transformation only serves to recuperate radical movements into channels safe for capital – and serves to both disempower the genuine movement and fuel capitalist “washing” – i.e., greenwashing, queerwashing, and so on.

And readers out there from the philosophical tradition may be troubled by my espousals today, but let’s be clear – contemporary liberal politics has devolved far from the aspirational heights of philosophical liberalism. While classical liberal philosophy, emerging from enlightenment thinking, at least attempted to grapple with fundamental questions of human freedom, rights, and the relationship between individual and society, today’s liberal politics has abandoned even these intellectual ambitions – verging on libertarianism. Philosophers like Locke, Mill, and even Rawls – raced, gendered and classed as their conclusions largely were – engaged seriously with questions of justice, liberty, and the social contract. Their theoretical frameworks, which integrated into the bourgeois interests of their time, maintained some commitment to universal principles and rational inquiry. By contrast, contemporary liberal politics circle jerks itself to pure pragmatism in servitude to capital. The profound questions about human nature, freedom, and justice that animated classical liberal thought have been replaced by shallow technocratic discussions of “what works” where “works” is defined entirely in terms of maintaining capitalist social relations (slavery of the 99%). This degeneration of liberalism from a philosophical project (however flawed) to pure ideology maintenance exemplifies the broader crisis of bourgeois thought under late capitalism.

All of these varied techniques the “washing”, othering, normalisation of capitalist “reason”, and the shallow performance of progress – are the modern day tools of hegemonic enforcement – these are the ways that capitalism is protected, steered, and remains in a state of growth and subsumption forever – liberal engines perpetually powering and justifying capitalist heat death. These techniques, and the broad approach of liberals to contemporary politics fragments solidarity, mystifies power relations, and channels dissent into dead ends. Most dangerously, it prevents us from building the kind of intersectional movement for justice that could actually challenge capital’s death grip on our future [2]. The liberal framework offers no tools for addressing the deep interconnections between various forms of oppression because it cannot question the capitalist system that produces and requires those oppressions.

Through Chomsky’s lens of manufactured consent, we can see how the liberal worship of capitalism – dressed up in the language of pragmatism and progress – represents the ultimate betrayal of human potential. The media apparatus, educational institutions, and cultural frameworks that reproduce liberal hegemony don’t just maintain capitalism – they actively work to prevent us from imagining alternatives – they inform our epistemology and shape our ontology [3]. When liberals valourise “moderate” politics while demonising genuine resistance, when they perform inclusion while defending exploitation, when they preach “civility” while enabling fascism, they aren’t just expressing personal political preferences – they are carrying out essential ideological work for capital. This betrayal cuts deepest at the intersections of oppression, where the violence of capitalism compounds with racism, patriarchy, colonialism, ableism, and other systems of domination. Liberal hegemony works overtime to obscure these connections, to prevent us from seeing how capitalism requires these interlocking systems of oppression to function [4]. The result is a profound distortion of human nature itself – our inherent capacities for solidarity, creativity, and collective flourishing constantly twisted into competitive individualism and performative politics. Breaking free from this hegemonic web requires more than just critiquing liberal politics – it demands building new forms of consciousness and organisation that can unite the multiply oppressed in struggle against capital and all its mutually reinforcing systems of domination. Only through this kind of radical, intersectional solidarity can we begin to imagine and create the kind of world our human nature actually calls for – and the start point, as always, is education.

In solidarity,

Aidan

  1. https://mndrdr.org/2024/identity-politics-and-the-crisis-of-working-class-solidarity ↩︎

  2. Arruzza, C., Bhattacharya, T., & Fraser, N. (2019). Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto. Verso. ↩︎

  3. Gramsci, A., & Hoare, Q. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers. ↩︎

  4. Chomsky, N., & Herman, E. S. (2002). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books. ↩︎

,   &  Aidan Cornelius-Bell
hegemony, capitalism, enforcement, greenwashing, queerwashing, trump, fascism, liberals