The prevailing narratives surrounding capitalism's supposed invincibility persistently undermine all alternative systems, employing diverse tools and strategies of governance that not only domesticate daily life but also suppress the critical consciousness essential for societal transformation. Capitalism's ideological, cultural, social, political, and economic apparatuses promote ideas, policies, processes, and institutions designed to stifle both individual and collective awareness. It dismantles communitarian society in the name of individual freedom and individualizes consumption in the pursuit of personal happiness, utility, and satisfaction. These processes accelerate various forms of individual alienation, an intrinsic feature of the capitalist system. The separation of consumers from producers, justified by mythical free-market efficiency, is part of this commodification, reinforcing alienating structures that domesticate both.
Like alienation and atomization, crises are inherent to capitalism. However, many liberals and critics argue that the system is resilient enough to absorb shocks, crises, and dissent, even using them for consolidation. If this is true, why does capitalism so often rely on wars and conflicts? In reality, the capitalist system, with its imperialist and colonial foundations, manufactures wars and conflicts to domesticate the working masses. It creates crises and instills fear over lives and livelihoods to shock and weaken people, making it more difficult for them to challenge capitalism and seek alternatives. The destabilization of society, everyday life, and communities enables capitalism to survive challenges and overcome its inherent structural contradictions between labor and capital.
Capitalism institutionalizes precarity, risk, violence, and fear as everyday living conditions, where individual happiness through commodity consumption is solely defined by individual survival and the self-realization of happiness and freedom. This elusive nature of individual happiness and freedom shapes individual consciousness around an obscure notion of 'self-interest.' Such a narrow, manipulative, and unnatural construction of self-interest—as well as individual freedom, happiness, and the survival of the fittest (i.e., the rich)—is further entrenched by capitalist and colonial knowledge traditions.
Capitalism and its dominant Eurocentric knowledge traditions promote Cartesian duality in knowledge production and dissemination. This supercilious duality, along with its colonial and neocolonial universalization in the name of science and civilization, undermines decolonization, diversity, and the democratization of knowledge. It commercializes knowledge and skills for profit, while naturalizing and normalizing alienating and exploitative working conditions. Scientific knowledge and its emancipatory, secular traditions—aimed at promoting creative and collective consciousness—are structurally undermined by both educational processes and religious institutions.
Religions, abstract morality, family honor, caste dignity, racial purity, and other reactionary social and cultural norms have been promoted in the name of culturally relativist traditions to uphold capitalism. These ideals are central to both the passive and active domestication of individuals within capitalist society, normalizing capitalist values and traditions of inequality, exploitation, individualism, and hierarchy as natural. Capitalism, along with its institutions and processes, has embedded itself within all forms of reactionary, feudal, and authoritarian forces to ensure its survival at the cost of people and the planet.
The casino character of capitalism, along with its techno-feudal forms, works to dismantle collective cultures of empathy by promoting imperialist wars and conflicts under the guise of upholding national interests. War functions as imperialist politics of hegemony to sustain capitalism and eliminate alternative economic, political, and social systems. The death and destitution of Palestinians, Ukrainians, Russians, Afghans, and poor working-class lives are rendered distant and disconnected from the consciousness of people in other parts of the world. The division and erosion of individual empathy—based on region, religion, race, culture, caste, gender, sexuality, territory, and nationality—amounts to no empathy at all. This culture of no empathy is not only aligned with the structural demands of capitalism but also contributes to the normalization of barbarism as a mode of survival.
Capitalism has moved humanity into a culture that undermines cooperation, solidarity, and empathy. The revolutionary and romantic English poet William Blake, in his poem Auguries of Innocence, describes such a culture with the line: “A dog starved at his master’s gate predicts the ruin of the state.” This barbaric culture is being normalized by capitalism and imposed upon humanity. The situation echoes the prophetic words of The Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels present a stark choice: “either a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or the common ruin of the contending classes.” As Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg later argued, the future lies either in advancing toward socialism or regressing into barbarism. The choice is clear. The collapse of human civilization is not an option; therefore, socialism stands as the only viable path for human progress and survival.
However, it is important to understand the weapons of capitalism in order to effectively fight it. Secular class consciousness is essential for understanding the various ways in which capitalism weaponizes institutions and processes to sustain and legitimize its culture of plunder—often in the name of stability, human freedom, progress, and prosperity. These fictitious dreams and the capitalist snake oil are sold to the masses every day to make people believe in the capitalist trap as the only available alternative. Therefore, collective class consciousness, class organization, and class struggles are central to resisting and defeating capitalism and all its reactionary ideas and projects—so as to ensure peace, progress, democracy, freedom, and socialism. People can write their own victory over capitalism only through actively resisting and fighting it.
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