Want to know why the world is messed up? The reason is simple, though it will make many Americans angry at me for even saying it.
Just as I predicted, over and over again, capitalism is imploding into fascism. Before us we have two indisputable examples — Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, and the globe on the brink of another World War, by way of fascism resurgent.
My predictions — and my warnings — fell, ironically, predictably too, on deaf ears. And so I stopped issuing them. Americans, in particular, would get remarkably, aggressively defensive about this point. But let me try again — perhaps by now our consciousness has matured a little bit. Or maybe not.
Capitalism. Americans think that it’s all business and all commerce. It’s not. The average small business owner is not a capitalist. Capitalism is a system of mega-corporations and hedge funds and billionaires and banks being bailed out. It has literally nothing to do with the average small business, it never touches it. My local baker and brewer aren’t capitalists. They don’t earn a living from capital income — which is what a capitalist is — they just draw a salary. They’re proles, in hock to the bank. Not capitalists.
Capitalism is not everyday business and commerce. That’s been around since civilization began. Capitalism is a modern affair. It’s stock markets and mega-bonuses and CEOs making $50 million for not much, it’s the average job in America paying less than $30K. The number of capitalists — people who actually live off of capital income — in the economy is tiny: less than one percent. The rest of us are just proles. The problem is that in America, people genuinely believe they’re capitalists, when they’re no such thing at all — and so of course they don’t grasp how their society, and this world, is falling apart now. This too is a feature of capitalism, by the way, one called “false consciousness.”
So when I warn, predict, that capitalism is imploding into fascism, it doesn’t mean something like “my dry cleaner and baker are Nazis!!” What does it mean? It means something structural, institutional, a set of social forces, shaped by inequality and despair and extremism. Let’s do our first example now that we have some context.
You couldn’t possibly — possibly — have a better example of capitalism imploding into fascism than Elon Musk’s hostile takeover of Twitter. There are those who are still like “just give the guy a chance!!” Meanwhile, he’s tweeting things like “the Democratic Party has been hijacked by extremists,” or sending false charts of the Overton Window shifting left. The Democratic Party can’t even raise the minimum wage. Captured by extremists? In global terms, it’s a right wing party. It’s more conservative than every single major conservative party in Canada and Europe — all of whom still support, for example, public healthcare and education and media and so forth.
What is Musk doing? Well, he’s used his money and power to acquire the world’s digital town square. It didn’t want to be acquired. After a difficult period, it was getting better. For the rest of us. Less abuse, less harassment, less Russian propaganda designed to infiltrate minds, less disinformation, less fanaticism.
And that was exactly the problem to Musk. Sorry, you’re not allowed to have this. You’re not allowed to have a public space. No sense of community and solidarity and concern for each other is to happen. You’re just commodities. And you’re going to do what I say.
“Free speech” is under attack from an “extremist” left, which has “hijacked” society. None of this is remotely true. Yes, wokeness is annoying, childish, and irritating often. But who’s banning books? Who’s trying to stop kids learning about gay people? Who’s trying to stop women from leaving their states? Who’s trying to make it a crime for women to even discuss their bodily autonomy? Who’s criminalising not just speech, but even thought and intent? The right is, obviously.
That is exactly why America is now ranked as a “flawed democracy” — because it has slid way, way far to the right, off the precipice of full democracy. We all know this. Nobody doesn’t know this. Even the far right knows this. But to keep shifting society — and the Overton Window — even further right — it plays this game. Of bad faith. Hey! We’re doing it for your own good. You’re the real extremists! We’re just defending free speech. Wait…by banning books? By banning gay people’s self-expression? By empowering hateful fanatics to attack the rest of us, send us rape and death threats, so that we’re too afraid, exasperated, exhausted to speak? Bad faith. It’s a hallmark of fascists.
Musks’ vision for Twitter becomes clearer by the hour, if not the day. He doesn’t respond to anyone on the center. He tweets what can only be described as laughable propaganda. He does all this to signal to the far right that Twitter is theirs now. He bought it for them. The rules are to be rolled back, the gloves can come off. Here’s your playground. Use it to bash anyone you don’t like. Want to do some gay-bashing today? Go for it. Want to send a woman a rape threat? Go right ahead! Want to assault a kid? Smear someone as a pedophile? Destroy a reputation? A life? Excellent!
Aggression, rage, hostility, and hate rule, because there are no rules. Might makes right. The vulnerable are to be punished. The “left” is the real problem, even if it’s so powerless that it can’t even pass a minimum wage. It’s taking our rights away — so we have to get it, attack it, abuse it, intimidate it. Wait, who’s “the left”? Why, everyone that says “gay.” Kids who want to read books. Women. Anyone who supports not abusing them, man, woman, or child. What does that sound like? Fascism.
You could not have a better example of capitalism imploding — literally could not — than Elon Musk buying Twitter for the far right to turn a public space into a gallows. Now, it’s to be a place where the rest of us are made examples of. So that society;’s norms change. Don’t say that. Don’t express that. Don’t associate with that person. They’ll get you. They’ll make an example of you.
This is how you break a society. You send a morality police into its public spaces, you turn people into vigilante informants. Iran has one. They slap women’s ankles. What are Elon Musk’s vigilante-informants — all those sad gamer-desk incel guys who rage at women for not dating them — going to do? They’re going to go after women with a vengeance. What are all those religious and supremacist fanatics who want to ban books, words, ideas going to do now? They’re going to hound and harass abuse people, just for being gay, or saying forbidden words, or discussing ideas. This is how you break a society.
By the way, when wokers attack you for not saying “pregnant person,” It doesn’t help. It makes both sides feel the same. In a sense, they are. None of that should be OK.
You capture a society’s public institutions — and you hand them to the far right. That is one key way capitalism implodes into fascism. Twitter is just that now — a playground for the far right, and the increasingly ridiculous tweets Musk sends are designed to let the far right know it belongs to them now. Think about how odious all this really is for a second — a billionaire just bought the world’s digital town square, and just as many feared, is now telling the far right, “here, this is a present for you.”
That’s why every kind of repulsive person is now salivating at being let off the leash again.
Here’s my second example, which again, is an eminently obvious one. The world. Why is it on the brink of World War again, or at least heading back that way? Because the global economy is basically the 1930s, all over again.
The global economy works like this. America and Europe consume. Russia provides resources. China manufactures them. India coordinates. Now. What happened to global politics over the last decade or two? All of these places, almost, began to go fascist. America, Trumpism, China, Xi, India, Modi’s hyper-fanaticism, Russia, Putinism, Europe, various strains of neo-fascism.
That wasn’t one of history’s biggest coincidences. It was a relationship. In all these countries, inequality spiralled out of control. Oligarchs and billionaires — rich enough to buy entire towns and cities — emerged. Meanwhile, the average person struggled to make ends meet. Even if they made more money, costs went up faster. Healthy middle classes never developed — or in America’s case, fell apart. A sense of despair and hopelessness began to pervade society. And demagogues arose who provided these societies scapegoats to aim their rage at.
Today, the world is a giant game of musical chairs…for scapegoats. Brits scapegoat Europeans, who scapegoat refugees, who flee from countries like Ukraine, who are scapegoats for Russia. India and China scapegoat Muslims, the West, anybody they don’t like. On and on it goes. And it’s growing. Trumpism scapegoated Mexicans and Latinos — but today, the GOP literally scapegoats teachers and kids and parents. Just average teachers. Kids. Parents.
Worlds head back to war just this way. When searches for scapegoats reach terminal velocity. You find a scapegoat, and now a demagogue says: you need to kill them. Not just wars between countries, but even wars within countries. Civil wars. America had the foreshadowing of one on Jan 6th. What if it had succeeded? The plan was to declare “Marshall” law, as Marjorie Taylor Greene so memorably put it. Yes, they’re actual fascists — and idiots, to boot.
The world is on a knife edge because capitalism failed. As what Immanuel Wallerstein would have called a “world system.” A way to order the world. It fell prey to its structural flaw: the rich got mega, mega richer — but only by fleecing the middle and working classes. Those masses, left in despair, rage, and hopelessness — they needed somewhere to put it. Hey, presto — along game a set of demagogues, around the world, at exactly the same time, who redirected those feelings at scapegoats, because of course it’s far easier to punch down at the already hated.
This is exactly — exactly — what happened in the 1930s. We are living through a repeat of history. And it’s so far advanced now that a second wave of demagogues is emerging. Trump, Modi, Xi, Putin — the first wave. The second wave is made of tycoons aspiring to become true political demagogues — like Musk, or the various idiot techno-magnates who, amazingly, idiotically, basically want to use technology to make society to revert to the Dark Ages, in a stroke of irony so grand it’s laughable.
This is the 1930s, only with iPhones and global mega-communications. That is why things like Elon Musk acquiring Twitter for the far right matter — because they deliberately destabilise the already precarious state of the world. The world is on a razor’s edge, and maniacs like this want to tip it off.
What really changed in the 1930s? People grew poor. And it became, in the name of survival, OK to hurt people. First a little bit. Then a very great deal. As groups. To the point of genocide. Americans’ real income has fallen 4% compared to where it should have been. Elon Musk is making it OK to hurt people. Russia’s carrying out horrific atrocities in Ukraine.
These things aren’t a coincidence. They’re a pattern.
This is a civilization falling apart, repeating history, fascism rising, and its jaws slavering for…the rest of us.
