The most effective way to undermine a democracy these days is to purchase it, while forcing each citizen to buy a share in it. In one simple step you have seized power and eliminated all opposition.
It is pointless to invent a term for this new political system, because it isn’t one. Rather, it is the end of politics altogether, because power today has been transferred from humans to global capital. Global capital controls everything because it owns everything: the media, politicians, and consumers. Humans have been paralyzed into subordination via two threats: the threat of losing their job, and the fear that they won’t get to buy all the things the system convinced them they need. As long as consumers are kept in a perpetual state of pursuit, financial blackmail, distraction and narcissism, they won’t even blink an eye about the existential issues facing this civilisation. Humans have become complicit to the ongoing crimes of global capital by virtue of their incapacitation.
It is about time we begin to recognise that both politics and democracy are illusions: they are nothing but a façade for a global regime of capital that has taken over and has been in power for decades alraedy. Hostages to money, we live in a global terror state but have accepted the terror into our lives as a necessary evil: we are so symbiotically dependent upon it that we cannot even bring ourselves to admit that we have been blackmailed into total subordination: any such brave admission on our part would be a deeply painful, shameful, and punishable offense. We prefer to sink into denial and even defend this self-destructive economic system to our death, perishing in the gleeful company of billions of other sheep than suffer the loneliness of a crucified rebel that stuck out like a sore thumb. When you cannot fight your master, you side with them, like a battered wife afraid to assert herself, doing what all the other battered wives are doing: shut up and take it. She convinces herself that she has full control of her black and blue situation, perhaps even some bizarre power over her aggressor. The best, and the only protection humans have against the truth of their predicament at this moment, the darkest one in our history, is denial. This of course only guarantees that there are even darker times ahead.
To take stock of what exactly this system is, we need to first and foremost understand that it is far worse than fascism or any other totalitarian system we might be familiar with from our college textbooks. Our modern capitalist totalitarianism manages to hide in plain sight by putting us in charge of our own censorship and exploitation in the most cunning and sickening way. A crucial difference between the global capitalist terror state and traditional fascism is that there is no “dictator” or tyrant in charge, but something much more sinister and difficult to tackle: a semi-sentient incarnation of profit which presides on a global scale, irrespective of national or cultural borders, time zones or party affiliations. Given the nebulous and intangible nature of global capitalism, it cannot be eliminated the way you would eliminate a normal dictator. Profit is in fact an internal parasite in all of us, because we depend on this extractive system for our jobs and livelihoods. We nourish the parasite by keeping our head down so that we don’t make it angry. It makes all our decisions, infecting our parliamentary process, our judicial system, our media, what we think, and who we end up voting for – that is, if we weren’t too busy on TikTok to go and vote.
To put it simply, there is no “dictator vs the people” anymore. Each of us has become our own dictator, by assisting a system that controls our every move, every thought, every intention. Most of us will never realise that capital owns every bit of our existence. We live in an illusion of infinite freedom exactly because we have confined our existence within the strict black lines of the consumer’s colouring book. Why seek real freedom when you can have products instead? We have bought so many shares in this system that we are stakeholders of our own demise, whatever we may do or say otherwise.
Humanity has reached a cognitive cul de sac where it is unable to even imagine a life without capitalism. This does not mean that such a life cannot exist. It only means that this system owns so much of who we are that we are incapable of asking for a divorce. Yet the only chance this species has of continuing its existence is, in fact, if it expels this system altogether.
The other clever attribute of the capitalist terror state is that it is able to masquerade as a democracy. The cleverest way to keep democracy permanently disabled is to maintain the illusion that it exists. Rather than dissolved, democratic institutions were zombified by their corporate owners, much like a deep fake that steals your voice, your face, and your reputation. This pseudo-democracy we live in may sound like an oxymoron, but it isn’t. Technically people can still vote, but their votes are a result of microtargeted brainwashing by media empires owned by global capital, whether domestic or overseas. Decision-making and debate continue to take place via “democratic” parliamentary procedures, but all MPs are prostitutes to corporate stakeholders. Rather than dismantling democracy therefore, as previous, more overt types of fascism may have done, this system has decided to infect it. It is an incredibly successful parasite nested within the democratic apparatus so much so that, parasite and host are beginning to evolve together: capital cannot function without the illusion of democracy, and democracy can no longer function without selling itself to capital. This was a very predictable outcome of neoliberalism: because once you surrender all privileges to capital, eventually capital becomes your master. It becomes your politics, your judicial system, your media.
But how did we get here? We forget that things were not always this way. At some point in our history we were forced to buy shares into this system. The industrial revolution was the age when we officially became converted to consumatrons: a low-intelligence humanoid whose purpose is only to work, consume, and financially support an ever-strengthening exploitative, colonialist, racist, ecocidal, genocidal and war-hungry system.
This didn’t happen overnight. Unlike traditional fascism where you take control of the military and scare the hell out of everyone into subordination within 24 hours, establishing a capital terror state is a slow process which takes decades to root, as parasite and host co-evolve. The parasite must creep and grow very slowly in order to maintain the illusion of democracy, all the while as it erodes the rights to protest, the judicial system, public consultation on government projects, and all elements of a real democracy. Almost there.
But much of the ideological machinery of systemic terrorism originates directly in the corporation. Corporations were the hothouses of the modern capital terror state, where this system was first conceived, introduced and beta-tested within small populations of salary slaves. It was perfected before eventually breaking out into society, where it infected central governments worldwide.
A culture of toxic positivity and self-censorship reigns large in all corporations today. If you challenge, question, or appear “inflexible” towards client needs or the company’s strategy, then you have directly attacked the “Profit God”. Employees are strictly forbidden from expressing their personal opinion, if this opinion presents even a remote threat to the company’s profits. This level of terrorism towards employees is easy, when everyone in the company depends on a salary. Ethics-based opinions are automatically dismissed and at the very least laughed upon as “unprofessional” and “naive”, given that ethics is a significant overhead to any corporation. The only ethics followed is the minimum and inadequate level required by law – while getting away with as much unethical activity as possible, at minimum litigation cost.
Governments today have successfully replicated the corporate terror state within broader society. Rather than terrorising their subjects with the loss of their salary, they terrorise them with the loss of the consumerism theme park these companies have addicted them to. “The economy” is the number one entity to be protected at all cost: environment, human rights, justice are all secondary, and can be sacrificed at any point in order to protect the economy and appease the profit god.
All the while the illusion of democracy is maintained, because these global corporate entities are masters of delusion, having learned over many decades the art of marketing, branding and re-branding, communications strategy and media buying and selling which they needed anyway in order to promote their cheap, toxic and often defective products to consumers the world over. They have taught our governments how to maintain the illusion of democracy, just as they have been maintaining the illusion of choice among their consumers. In fact, many of these politicians are successful businesspeople, so they know very well how it all works.
Along with the illusion of democracy, there is an illusion of politics altogether – that is, the illusion that people have choices when they enter the voting booth. We have more plurality than ever, but it is a plurality of different flavours of the same narrative. While old fascism dismantled all political parties, the capitalist terror state makes them all the same, whether left or right, effectively achieving the same result.
While old totalitarianism censors the truth, our pseudo-democratic digital dystopia drowns it out through an overload of lies and false debates, effectively rendering reality irrelevant, and the search for truth an impossibility. While Netflix and TikTok provide a full democracy of 24/7 dance videos and binge programs, those who dare to look away from their screen and into the real world, are living the most surreal experience: watching everyone else fall asleep like sheep on drugs. But while old fascism distracted people with football, the capitalist terror state is so reality-bending that it doesn’t need to rely on distractions. We live with the delusion that our vote still counts for something, because we have not started questioning this system. Now all that’s left is for us to begin to experience the worst of this system, as it goes from strength to strength. Visible manifestations of “old fascism” will become more pronounced, but don’t expect tanks and “heil Hitlers” in the street. We won’t need them, because we’ll all be asleep watching TikTok dance videos, probably created by AI.
However, the struggle for freedom and truth will be quashed, make no mistake. Even as climate chaos and social inequality ramp up in a world devastated by capital, the capita terror state’s marketing departments are hard at work successfully bending reality. Any social activism and protest is increasingly shadow banned and condemned by the media, and if this doesn’t work, shut down by force. And why wouldn’t it? The corporate entities are the big polluters, and the masterminds of the very inequality which is vital to their exploitative practices and profit margins. They do not want to see people fighting for human rights, nature’s rights, pollution or the climate crisis, all of which are very expensive overheads in this necrocapitalist system. Those who dare to protest are now being imprisoned with long sentences to terrorise the rest of us away from questioning, challenging, protesting and dissenting against this self-destructive system. We are slowly beginning to see images of old fascism: activists’ houses being raided and people who protested for Palestine or the climate crisis being taken to prison by a system which deems their arguments “irrelevant”. Yes, in the UK, and soon all over the world, “the climate apocalypse” cannot be used as an argument for protest, or defence in a court of law, even as the facts on the ground unequivocally prove that this planet is in free fall. Prisons will begin to fill up with climate protesters worldwide, as the system does everything it can to protect its profits. Meanwhile the real criminals will make billions.
The climate crisis created by this system will bring tremendous death, destruction and destitution. It is up to us to recognize what caused it all in the first place, rather than succumb to new messaging, as capitalism, once more, tries to exploit its own disasters for profit. As the terror state begins to look more and more like old fascism, we cannot sit back and wait for it to complete its transformation. A revolt is necessary: not against this new fascism, but against the very economic system which gave birth to it in the first place.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Tsakraklides is an author, researcher, chemist, molecular biologist, and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter, @99blackbaloons, and enjoy his books, A New Earth: The Apocalypse Locus, The Unhappiness Machine and Other Stories about Systemic Collapse,
Beyond The Petri Dish: Human Consciousness in the Time of Collapse, Apathy, and Algorithms, and others.
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