Market Totalitarianism

Why aggregated capital power is pernicious—and cannot be reformed

Reactionaries invariably respond to anticapitalist critiques of the U.S. by asserting that the only alternative to capitalism is totalitarianism. Of course, reactionaries don’t use the word “totalitarianism.” They use words like “communism” and “Marxism”—even though they rarely have a working knowledge of either. They then point to their ahistorical caricatures of figures like Stalin, Mao, and Castro to support their assertion that communism and Marxism are inherently totalitarian.

Implicit in this false framing of capitalism vs. freedom is the notion that so-called “free markets” are what make people free. When the state impinges on the economic freedom of the capitalist, argues the reactionary, it infringes on freedom itself.

This argument is, of course, absurd. The worker is not free under capitalism—but is instead held in bondage to aggregated capital power. Indeed all of the political, judicial, military, educational, and media mechanisms of the United States are similarly subject to the dictatorship of aggregated capital. Most ironically, markets themselves are not free. It’s probably a mistake to even call them “markets.”

The invisible oppressor

Let us first be clear about the myth of freedom. The USian worker is not free. Workers must put in long hours for low wages in order to afford even the basic necessities of life. They are relentlessly penalized for their constrained finances with high-interest debt, low credit scores, and bank fees. Many live in food deserts where the only affordable diet is an unhealthy one. And, of course, poor people are imprisoned in the U.S. as a matter of course—even if they haven’t committed a criminal offense.

The constant state of precarity in which workers find themselves is not the result of any innate principle or natural law. It is the result of the power that aggregated capital exercises over their lives. It is the power of the owner class that keeps wages suppressed and denies the worker the value of their labor. It is the power of the landlord that pushes rents ever higher. It is the power of the banker that allows the piling of financial penalties on top of poverty. It is the power of the corporation that determines what goods will appear on what shelves for what price. And it is the power of the carceral state that stacks the deck against the indigent defendant.

One reason that these oppressions are apparently invisible to the reactionary is that they are systemic. It’s relatively easy to attach the concept of totalitarianism to an individual like Stalin or Mao, because the iconic visual image of a Really Bad Guy at the Top doesn’t require any critical thinking or analysis.

Capital power, in stark contrast, can’t be readily reduced to a single cartoonish figure. That power is instead exercised by a very small but essentially faceless cabal of capital aggregators: asset managers like BlackRock and Vanguard, hedge funds like Bridgewater and Citadel, high-wealth individuals like Bezos and Buffett.

But make no mistake about it. These ostensibly distinct—and in some ways even competitive—entities exercise their power collectively. Landlords, egg producers, and military contractors don’t need to explicitly collude to drives prices up. Employers don’t need to explicitly collude to drive wages down. They simply need a commonality of interest. And that commonality of interest consistently trumps the supposed benefits of competition—especially as competition is systematically removed from systems through consolidation.

So when reactionaries talk about “markets,” they’re engaging in a semantic charade that lets avaricious, wealth-hoarding sociopaths off the hook for their actions. The idea that “markets” are subject to natural forces in the same way as physical bodies are subjects to natural forces like gravity and electromagnetism is spurious. A “market” is a set of relations determined by power. And that power is not wielded by the people in the people’s interests. It is wielded by the aggregators of capital in the interests of the aggregators of capital power.

The irrelevance of intention

Another reason that reactionaries tend to be in denial about the unfreedom of capitalism is that it doesn’t have the exact same flavor of intentionality as political totalitarianism. That is, a political despot intentionally and explicitly seeks control of a nation by seizing political power—whereas aggregators of capital power seem to gain control of a nation incidentally in their pursuit of economic power.

But here’s the thing. It doesn’t materially matter to me whether you’re harming me because you’re a power-mad despot or because it’s a secondary knock-off effect of your avaricious behavior. Harm is harm.

And if we soberly assess the harms done by aggregated capital power, we see that they are in many ways significantly greater than those done by mere political despotism. It is terrible that political despots suppress speech and imprison their political enemies. But corporate media also suppresses points-of-view while manufacturing consensus that is contrary to the public interest. And under the influence of capital power, the U.S. absolutely out-incarcerates even the most amoral despot.

Aggregated capital power also utilizes military power to threaten and destroy other countries for access to their economies and their resources. And worse yet, capital power is rapidly exterminating life on the planet—whether that life is indigenous people, endangered fauna, or life-sustaining flora. Capital power’s reckless disregard for life is thus catalyzing a climate crisis that will likely have adverse consequences on a scale we cannot yet fully comprehend.

The mindlessness with which capital power seeks to aggrandize itself actually makes it even more dangerous than political despotism, because it is entirely unable to perform any ethical calculus whatsoever. To capital power, everything that doesn’t contribute to capital aggregation is a mere “externality.” So capital power inherently ignores all the harms it inflicts on human beings—whether the physical harm of poisoned water, the psychological harm of daily economic precarity, or the socio-political harm of disenfranchisement.

In fact, insofar as any harm inflicted by capital power generates the opportunity for greater capital aggregation—such as selling water, driving consumption of emotion-assuaging goods, or capturing attention with media content that feeds off of disenfranchisement-induced rage—capital power actively embraces those harms.

Overthrowing capital power

By the way, one of the tropes reactionaries often use when invoking the purported totalitarianism of non-capitalist states is something along the lines of “If you like communism so much, why don’t you move to Cuba?” The notion behind this verbal tactic is that of course you don’t want to move to Cuba because of course your life is materially superior here in the U.S.

However, the reason life in the U.S. is materially superior to life in Cuba has nothing to do with Cuba’s own internal economic polity. It’s because aggregated capital power has been aggressively choking the economic life out of Cuba for more than a half-century in order to punish Cuba for choosing a path other than that of unrestricted capital aggregation.

And while I might not be able to choose from 100 different sugar-saturated breakfast cereal in a Cuban grocery store, I also wouldn’t have to worry about becoming homeless. And if my child needed a cochlear implant, I wouldn’t have to go without just because I work the checkout line at a Wal-Mart.

The point, however, is not to argue about whether Cuba is a better place to live than the U.S. It’s whether the U.S. could be a better place to live tomorrow than it is today. And for that better tomorrow to happen, it is patently obvious that aggregated capital power must be eliminated from the economic equation. Capital aggregation is an oppressive, destructive, and amoral force that is incapable of addressing the economic precarity of U.S. worker-citizens, the threat of climate disaster, the crisis in U.S. healthcare, the deterioration of U.S. public infrastructure, or the many escalating social ills we face—including addiction, gun violence, and identity hatreds.

Capital power can also not prevent the U.S. from precipitating world war. Truth be told, the U.S. is the most militaristic nation in the history of mankind—and the interests of capital power are a primary cause of that militarism.

Capital power is, in a word, totalitarian—because it controls all aspects of life in the U.S.

So let us reject and defeat every reactionary argument in support of capitalism—whether that argument is put forth by traditional conservatives, Christian nationalists, liberals, neoliberals, libertarians, or self-styled “progressives.” Capital power is killing us, and it makes us less free every day. If we do not destroy it, it will certainly destroy us.