HENRY GIROUX
SEPTEMBER 18, 2026

We have many monsters to destroy. – George Seferis

But how can anyone tell the truth about Fascism, unless he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth?   – Bertolt Brecht

More than four decades ago, the Greek composer and public intellectual Manos Hadjidakis issued a warning that now reads less like a reflection on fascism than a prophecy of our own time. The greatest danger, he suggested, comes when we grow accustomed to the monster, when its presence no longer shocks the conscience and its violence begins to merge with the routines of everyday life. Tolerance does not diminish the monster; it multiplies the conditions that allow it to flourish, strengthening its presence in public life until monstrosity itself acquires the authority to govern. In this instance, the collapse of conscience is inseparable from the uncoupling of “belief from judgment, conviction from action.”

We have reached such a moment.

The monsters are no longer hiding in the shadows. They occupy presidential offices and ministries, command armies and police forces, control digital platforms, dominate television screens, administer borders, build detention centers, and transform the suffering of others into political theater. Their language of racial purification, mass deportation, extermination, vengeance, and disposability no longer produces the outrage it once might have summoned. Cruelty is displayed as strength. Humiliation becomes entertainment. The spectacle of suffering becomes a source of political pleasure. What should be unbearable becomes familiar; what should provoke resistance is absorbed into the rhythms of everyday life.

The monster triumphs not simply when it commits atrocities, but when its language becomes ordinary, its violence becomes acceptable, its weaponization of racial and class divisions goes unnoticed, and its presence no longer disturbs the moral imagination. Toni Morrison gave us another language for understanding how monsters become ordinary. She called it “dead language,” a language emptied of ethical responsibility and enlisted in the service of domination. Morrison’s dead language is itself monstrous. As she writes, oppressive language “does more than represent violence; it is violence.” It is a language that “drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind.”

Morrison’s insight reaches beyond rhetoric. Monsters require a language that prepares the ground for their violence, strips their victims of humanity, and teaches people to accommodate the unthinkable. Dead language is one of the conditions that allows monstrosity to pass into everyday life disguised as common sense.

Primo Levi once observed that “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” Levi remains right about the role of unthinking functionaries, but today the monsters themselves have acquired institutional power and public legitimacy. Emboldened by staggering economic inequality, empowered by the machinery of high-tech authoritarianism, and legitimated by an expanding culture of state violence, they have moved from the political margins to the commanding heights of American society.

Here Hannah Arendt’s warning about the failure of thinking takes on a renewed urgency. Monstrosity thrives when judgment is surrendered, when the obligation to think becomes a burden, and when ignorance is transformed from an absence of knowledge into a cultivated refusal to know. We might call this the banality of ignorance: the willful suspension of judgment that allows people to see suffering without confronting it and to hear lies without rejecting them. The monster does not merely demand obedience. It needs subjects who have learned not to think about what their obedience makes possible.

Yet Hadjidakis’s warning poses a question more disturbing than whether monsters now govern us. What does it mean for a society to begin to resemble its monsters? And what pedagogical forces are at work in creating and normalizing that resemblance? Resemblance does not mean that everyone becomes a killer or a fascist. It means that the habits of thought, structures of feeling, and forms of indifference on which monstrosity depends begin to penetrate everyday life. The banality of ignorance becomes a social condition, a cultivated form of moral blindness in which not knowing offers a refuge from responsibility and refusing to think becomes a condition of belonging. But such ignorance does not exist outside the realm of desire. It has an emotional register, a psychology of authoritarianism and a pedagogy of terror through which people learn not simply to live with cruelty but to bathe in its emotional charge, finding pleasure and belonging in “patterns of domination and submission [that harden] into a syndrome of attitudes regarding hierarchy, power, sexuality and tradition.”

The monster has a long history, born in the darkest regions of the social imagination where fear, difference, and power converge. As Manvir Singhhas observed, monsters have long haunted the boundaries between the human and the inhuman, the familiar and the terrifying, the civilized and what it casts outside its gates. But monsters are never simply creatures of fantasy. They are warnings, projections, embodiments of collective fears, and often weapons for deciding who belongs within the circle of humanity and who can be expelled from it. What matters politically is what happens when the monster steps out of myth and fantasy, takes possession of the institutions of power, and acquires the authority to decide who may live, who must suffer, and who can be made disposable.

There is, however, another problem with the metaphor of the monster itself. To imagine Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Benjamin Netanyahu, or other architects of contemporary authoritarian violence simply as monsters risks placing them outside history, as if their cruelty originated in some private pathology detached from the society that produced them. The monster can then become an alibi for the society that created him. Moral outrage becomes individualized, while the institutions, economic interests, racial hierarchies, cultural apparatuses, and political forces that make organized cruelty possible disappear. This is the crucial insight in Jorge Gonzalez Arocha’s argument that turning perpetrators into monsters can itself become a way of looking away. Arocha argues that “reducing the perpetrator to nothing more than a monster protects us from recognising ourselves as potential perpetrators. It distances us from the event and its reality, while placing us in a position of moral superiority….[It] is a way of denying that the ability to destroy also belongs to us, that it forms part of the human condition.”

The problem is not that monsters do not exist. The problem begins when monstrosity becomes an explanation rather than a question. Monsters do not descend upon society from somewhere outside history. They are produced within history, cultivated through institutions, protected by bureaucracies, legitimized by law, financed by powerful economic interests, amplified by media, and normalized through culture. The political significance of monsters lies not simply in the horrors they commit, but in the social order that makes those horrors possible, useful, legitimate, and eventually ordinary. A singular focus on monsters can obscure the deeper structure of gangster capitalism, a system that “prioritises certain forms of power over the common good and enables the gradual dehumanization of our societies.”

The question must therefore change. We must move from monster to machinery, from the pathology of the individual to the political economy of organized cruelty, and from there to the cultural and educational forces that teach people how to live with the suffering such machinery produces. Monsters do not act alone. Their power becomes visible in the institutions that protect them, the wealth that sustains them, the laws that authorize them, and the violence that follows in their wake. We see their handiwork in streets stained with blood, in migrants brutalized and left to die in detention centers, in the torture documented in Israeli prisons, and in the bodies of children and families torn apart by Israeli and American bombs in Gaza. Behind these abstractions are torn limbs, dismembered bodies, children pulled from rubble, families burned and buried beneath the ruins of their homes, and human beings reduced to flesh and bone by systems in which cruelty has been organized, authorized, and repeated until even the most horrific violence threatens to lose its capacity to shock.

The horror lies in a society’s growing accommodation to monsters, in the silence surrounding their crimes and the erosion of moral and political boundaries that once made their actions intolerable. Such silence is never innocent. It is the rigor mortis of ethical and political decay, the point at which a politics organized around death begins to pass as ordinary life. The nightmare no longer lurks in the shadows; it claws its way into daylight and is met with indifference, resignation, or applause. The question is how people learn to live amid mass suffering and eventually look away. What forms of power require such silence? What institutions cultivate it? What culture teaches people to turn away from the bodies left behind? And most important, what pedagogical machinery teaches millions not merely to tolerate cruelty but to identify with those who inflict it, desire the power they embody, and experience the suffering of others as the price of their own imagined liberation?

Political economy, culture, and pedagogy converge here. The monster becomes inseparable from gangster capitalism, pedagogical terrorism, and the culture of cruelty. Gangster capitalism does not accidentally produce monsters. It increasingly requires them, along with publics capable of loving them.

Arendt’s concept of radical evil takes this argument further, moving us from the failure of judgment to the political machinery that renders human beings superfluous. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, radical evil emerges from a political order capable of stripping human beings of rights, history, individuality, and finally their claim to membership in the human community. The concentration camp represented the most extreme realization of this logic, but its political significance extended beyond the camp. Totalitarianism required institutions capable of transforming human beings into disposable matter.

Arendt’s later account of Adolf Eichmann complicated the picture further. Eichmann did not appear before her as a demonic figure possessing some unfathomable depth of evil. He appeared frighteningly ordinary: bureaucratic, careerist, obedient, incapable of thinking seriously about the consequences of his actions. The banality of evil did not mean that his crimes were banal. It meant that extraordinary crimes could be administered through ordinary routines, bureaucratic language, professional ambition, obedience, and the suspension of judgment.

Reinhard Heydrich, one of the principal architects of the Nazi machinery of terror and mass murder, represents another configuration of the political monster. Here ideological fanaticism, administrative intelligence, and extraordinary institutional power converged. Eichmann and Heydrich should not be collapsed into the same psychological type, but both expose the inadequacy of treating atrocity simply as the work of monsters. Modern systems of terror require administrators, lawyers, technicians, police officers, propagandists, intellectuals, journalists, and functionaries. Evil becomes most politically dangerous when it acquires an office, a budget, a bureaucracy, a vocabulary of necessity, and a public willing to accept its premises.

Primo Levi understood this danger in another register. He rejected the consoling temptation to divide the world neatly between innocent humanity and incomprehensible monsters. As he once put it, “It is a stupid mistake to see all the demons on one side and all the saints on the other…. To divide into black and white means not to know human nature.” His concept of the gray zone gave this insight its most disturbing political force. The gray zone did not abolish distinctions between victim and perpetrator; it exposed the ways systems of domination corrupt moral life itself. The political lesson is disturbing precisely because it denies us the comfort of believing that atrocity belongs to another species of human being. Modern barbarism does not emerge outside civilization. It is organized through civilization’s institutions, technologies, forms of expertise, and structures of obedience.

Umberto Eco made a related point about fascism. Fascism does not possess a single immutable costume. It changes its language, symbols, technologies, and institutional forms. Eco warned that “Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises.” To search only for Mussolini’s blackshirts or Hitler’s brownshirts is therefore to risk missing fascism when it returns wearing a business suit, carrying a Bible, appearing on podcasts, commanding an algorithm, or invoking the language of freedom, national rebirth, border security, and popular sovereignty. Fascism survives precisely because it learns how to inhabit the historical conditions of its own time.

If fascism changes with the historical conditions it inhabits, then those conditions become central to understanding how its monsters are produced and sustained. The problem of the monster must therefore be situated within political economy, culture, pedagogy, and history. The conditions that make monstrosity possible are neither accidental nor timeless. They emerge from societies in which extreme inequality is treated as natural,cruelty becomes entertainment, racial hierarchy is defended as common sense, militarism becomes a national virtue, and entire populations are designated as disposable.

The monstrosity of the present did not suddenly appear with Trump. Its genealogy runs through the long history of American empire and, with particular force, through the War on Terror. In the name of fighting terrorism, the United States unleashed wars whose direct death toll exceeded 600,000 people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen, while estimates of deaths produced indirectly through destroyed infrastructure, disease, displacement, and malnutrition run into the millions. Such devastation cannot be reduced to the language of catastrophic policy failure. It constituted a vast machinery of racialized disposability in which entire populations could be bombed, tortured, displaced, imprisoned, and abandoned while their suffering barely registered within the moral vocabulary of American political life.

Aimé Césaire understood long ago that imperial violence never remains safely confined to the people against whom it is first directed. Colonial brutality, he warned, produces a “terrific boomerang effect”: the habits of dehumanization, racial hierarchy, lawlessness, and organized violence cultivated abroad eventually return home. The War on Terror offers a terrifying contemporary illustration of that warning. The torture chambers of Abu Ghraib, indefinite detention at Guantánamo, extraordinary rendition, drone assassination, mass surveillance, and the normalization of permanent war did more than devastate other societies. They helped educate the American public into accepting torture, surveillance, militarized policing, lawless executive power, and the designation of whole populations as threats. Trumpism did not invent this political culture. It inherited it, intensified it, and turned its imperial habits inward. In this sense, the monster came home because the machinery that produced it had been operating for decades.

Under gangster capitalism, the imperial machinery of disposability turns inward, assuming an especially lethal domestic form. Wealth concentrates, public goods are stripped for private profit, democratic institutions are subordinated to billionaire power, and the punishing state expands as the social state contracts. Abandonment and repression become two sides of the same political order.

Pedagogy becomes central because fascism is never merely imposed from above. It must be learned. People must be taught whom to fear, whom to hate, whose suffering matters, whose suffering can be ignored, and whose disappearance can be celebrated. They must learn to experience cruelty as strength, domination as freedom, racial hierarchy as natural, and violence as national purification.

Pedagogical terrorism names this process. It operates through schools and churches, television and social media, podcasts, political rallies, digital platforms, advertising, and the spectacular theater of state violence. These cultural apparatuses do more than communicate ideas. They organize attention, shape consciousness, mobilize desire, and teach habits of feeling. They create the emotional and ideological conditions under which disposability becomes common sense.

Private anxieties are given public enemies. Loneliness is transformed into the counterfeit solidarity of the tribe, powerlessness redirected into aggression, and resentment elevated into a moral virtue. Fear is converted into hatred and humiliation into the desire to humiliate others. Fascism thrives on this emotional economy because it gives private suffering a public target. The wounds inflicted by an increasingly brutal social order are redirected away from the structures that produce them and toward immigrants, Black people, Palestinians, feminists, intellectuals, queer people, dissidents, and anyone else designated as an enemy.

A culture of barbarism takes hold when cruelty is no longer confined to the state or its most fanatical leaders but enters everyday life, shaping public consciousness, political desire, and the boundaries of who is considered human. Barbarism becomes cultural when large numbers of people support forced removal, collective punishment, starvation, exterminatory violence, and the destruction of civilian life without experiencing such policies as a moral catastrophe.

Israel offers a chilling example. In May 2025, a survey conducted by Pennsylvania State University professor Tamir Sorek found that 82 percent of Israeli Jews surveyed supported the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, with 54 percent saying they were “very” supportive. More disturbing still, 47 percent agreed that when the Israeli military conquers an enemy city it should act as the Israelites did in the biblical conquest of Jericho, by “killing all the residents.” These figures register something more terrifying than support for a particular military policy. They reveal how the language of expulsion and extermination can migrate from the margins of political life into the moral vocabulary of everyday society. This is what a culture of barbarism looks like when disposability becomes common sense and the destruction of another people can be imagined as legitimate, necessary, or even righteous.

Omer Bartov has gone further, arguing that Israeli society has become complicit through both action and silence, and is increasingly marked by violence, vulgarity, and indifference. What is at stake here exceeds the crimes of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, or the Israeli military. It points to the pedagogical production of a social order in which the language of elimination becomes thinkable, mass suffering becomes tolerable, and exterminatory violence can be absorbed into the ordinary rhythms of national life. This is the endpoint of pedagogical terrorism: the manufacture of subjects for whom barbarism no longer appears barbaric.

The culture of fascism does not merely tolerate monsters; it turns them into celebrities, strongmen, saviors, and objects of identification, reproducing a cult of leadership. Their violations of moral and political norms become signs of authenticity, their cruelty proof of strength. Their contempt for democratic restraints becomes a source of pleasure for followers who experience each transgression as their own imaginary liberation from the obligations of equality, compassion, and mutual responsibility.

Trump offered a chilling display of these mobilizing passions of fascism when he called upon his followers to cheat in the November elections. At the Republican convention in Dallas, he instructed thousands of supporters to raise their right hands and repeat an oath of personal loyalty that included the declaration, “I don’t care if I’m registered or not. I’m going to try and cheat like hell like they do.” This was more than another assault on democratic norms. It was a fascist political ritual in which loyalty to the leader, contempt for law, and the thrill of collective transgression were fused into a mass spectacle. Yet the incident was absorbed into the churn of the news cycle as another bizarre Trump performance. This is how fascism becomes ordinary: the outrageous is reported, consumed, and forgotten before its meaning can become a matter of sustained public judgment. What should have registered as a political emergency dissolved into the culture of immediacy, stripped of its historical meaning and reduced to another spectacle without consequence.

The political task cannot be reduced to removing individual monsters from power. The language of monstrosity becomes politically disabling when it individualizes what is systemic, directing attention toward pathological leaders while leaving intact the institutions, economic interests, media ecosystems, racial hierarchies, and educational forces that produce authoritarian consciousness.

The defining political question of our time is not whether monsters have returned. It is what kind of society produces them, what forms of power need them, and what pedagogical machinery teaches people to follow them. The monster is not the end of the analysis but its beginning. Fascism cannot be defeated by removing its most visible leaders while leaving intact the economic, political, and cultural machinery that produced them. The struggle against fascism must also confront gangster capitalism, white supremacy, militarism, the carceral state, and the institutions that turn human beings into disposable populations.

But resistance cannot live on outrage alone. It needs a language of possibility and a politics capable of making hope concrete. Hope is neither optimism nor faith that history bends automatically toward justice. It is a practice born when people refuse the manufactured loneliness of neoliberal life, discover one another in struggle, and recognize that what they experience as private misery is often a public wound produced by structures of power. It takes form in unions, classrooms, demonstrations, mutual-aid networks, abolitionist movements, struggles for Palestinian freedom, immigrant justice campaigns, and organizations capable of turning anger into collective power.

There are already signs that such a politics is struggling to be born in the United States. The resurgence of democratic socialism, the extraordinary growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, the electoral victories of socialist candidates, and renewed labor militancy suggest that increasing numbers of people are no longer willing to accept the tyranny of the market as the horizon of political possibility. DSA reported more than 120,000 members by the summer of 2026, alongside a widening field of socialist electoral victories and organizing campaigns. These developments should neither be romanticized nor mistaken for a mass socialist transformation. But they matter because they register something the ruling order desperately wants declared impossible: capitalism is once again being named as a political problem, socialism has returned to public life as a language of possibility, and collective struggle is breaking through the suffocating claim that there is no alternative.

Hope is dangerous to fascism because authoritarian power feeds on isolation, historical amnesia, political exhaustion, and the conviction that nothing can be changed. Militant hope shatters that conviction. It turns private suffering into public anger, spectators into political agents, and the loneliness on which fascism feeds into collective power. Against the pedagogy of fear, it creates a pedagogy of resistance and civic courage. Against the culture of cruelty, it makes solidarity a weapon and justice a collective demand. Against a society organized around disposability, it insists that human beings are worth more than markets, borders, property, and profit, and that the institutions producing misery, abandonment, and organized violence must be transformed.

The struggle is larger than defeating the monsters who occupy the commanding heights of power. We must destroy the conditions that make them possible by building a mass democratic politics capable of confronting concentrated wealth, dismantling racial and economic hierarchies, defending public goods, breaking the grip of militarism, and returning economic and political power to ordinary people. Democracy cannot survive as the political shell of capitalism, emptied of its substance while concentrated economic power governs from within. It must become a way of organizing social life itself, grounded in equality, collective power, and the struggle for a just future.

More than four decades ago, Manos Hadjidakis warned: “When the face of the monster ceases to frighten us, then we must be afraid… because that means we have begun to resemble it.” His warning has never been more urgent. But resemblance is not destiny. The monster depends upon our resignation, our silence, our isolation, and finally our belief that resistance is futile. The most radical form of hope begins with the refusal of that lie. Monsters are made by history, and they can be unmade by collective struggle. That struggle must confront capitalism itself and build a democratic socialist politics capable of wresting power from the ruling elites, returning it to ordinary people, and transforming hope into a force for remaking the world.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

First published on Counterpunch.org.

Shared via Creative Commons.

DAVID S. D’AMATO
SEPTEMBER 15, 2026

Today a debate is raging over the question of whether we now have a technofeudal economy of rentierism, pervasive anti-competitive practices, and stagnation or a dynamic and brutally competitive hypercapitalist system. To complicate matters, there are further disagreements amongst those who reject the “technofeudal hypothesis” and contend that existing theories of capitalism already adequately explain the phenomena we observe today.

Featuring prominently within these debates are, among many others, John Bellamy Foster, perhaps the most famous living proponent of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s monopoly capitalism framework, and economist Stephen Maher and political scientist Scott Aquanno, who oppose not only the technofeudal hypothesis, but also the ideas of monopoly capitalism and political capitalism. While these may appear to be niche debates between different Marxist schools, irrelevant to anyone but academic leftists, they confront some of the most important issues in politics and economics today.

Foster sees the state as bound by monopoly capital, now serving to hand out privileges and thus unearned rent streams. The state in this view is also a means through which surplus capital is absorbed (through, for example, spending on war and empire). He describes this as a form of politicalcapitalism in which the state and capital are tightly connected, with the former bolstering the position of the latter as it becomes less competitive and more stagnant. Describing the findings of a study conducted by Foster, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonnahe fifteen years ago, the editors of Monthly Review recently wrote, “Practically, every industry in the United States was controlled by a very few firms, and levels of concentration were rising. These firms were also multinational corporations dominating the world.”

For prominent monopoly capital theorists like Foster, record corporate profits and ballooning asset prices do not necessarily point to a thriving, dynamic economy generally or industrial base specifically. Quite the opposite. They are viewed as the consequences of today’s runaway financialization, an upshot of the fact that the economic surplus cannot any longer be absorbed by markets that are in fact stagnating. This is why we see speculative bubbles, stock buy-backs, and further debt-juiced accumulation, not expansion of the real sector. As within today’s markets, dominated by massive corporate oligopolies, prices are administered more than they are competitively set. There is therefore a tendency toward economic stagnation until it is addressed by intensive state intervention through bailouts, quantitative easing, war and empire, and massive-scale artificial waste. The state must constantly intervene to prop up capital in the face of chronically weak demand.

Maher and Aquanno contend that the monopoly capital school’s idea of competition is fundamentally flawed and outdated, too narrowly focused on the concentration of key sectors and the number of competing companies. They see investment booming, spending on research and development continuing to increase, technological innovation accelerating, and profits soaring to historical highs, and they conclude that there is no evidence of declining productivity or general economic malaise. Rather than seeing corporate consolidation, highly concentrated markets, and strong state intervention and integration as historically aberrant, and thus ushering in a new, anti-competitive form of monopoly capitalism or technofeudalism, they see these features of the present moment as deeply connected to and implicated in capitalism’s competitive dynamics.

To them, it doesn’t matter that most of the growth of the past several decades has been driven by the financial sector, nor does the more conspicuous and muscular role of the state in the economy necessarily mean a less competitive system. They draw on Anwar Shaikh’s formulation of “real competition” to contend that today’s concentrations of capital, financialization, and unabashed statism have in fact intensified competition. They see both capitalists and governments as participants in an extremely fast-paced and intense fight for investment, market position, and survival.

Maher and Aquanno believe that theories of technofeudalism, rentier capitalism, and monopoly capitalism alike entail an implicit argument in favor of an alliance between capital and workers. They see this as an analytical and strategic mistake for socialists. That is, by framing the fundamental problem as one of monopoly, of unearned rents through the corruption of competition, we end up in a shallow, reformist cycle of merely asking for a fairer or more competitive capitalism. This, they argue, forecloses a deeper analysis of the exploitation always present in capitalism and the capitalist accumulation process. They believe that workers fundamentally have no interest in a more competitive and decentralized economy, indeed, that “competition is the problem.” To Maher and Aquanno, the socialist left should focus on the appropriation of our actually quite efficient corporate institutions, administering them to serve socialist goals. In political and economic decentralization, Maher and Aquanno see the traps of reformism and pro-competition liberalism. They believe that socialists must instead take over and democratize the efficient, centralized administrative apparatus already constructed by contemporary financial and technological capitalism. But in setting forth their case, they give short shrift to the argument that democratization would, in practice, mean economic decentralization.

The Meaning of Competition and Socialism

Certainly the number of firms within the field of economic play must have some impact on the overall degree of competitiveness. It would seem that much of this disagreement cannot be solved by pointing to empirical facts, because it is largely, if not entirely, an argument about what we mean normatively when we invoke “competition.” If, on the one hand, we see economic competition as necessarily or definitionally excluding the coercive political means (much as thinkers as diverse as Charles Dunoyer, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Benjamin Tucker, and Franz Oppenheimer did), then it is clearly correct to draw a sharp distinction between capitalism and an actual competitive market economy. And it is notable that the theorists of monopoly capital themselves admit that such a truly competitive market system is always introduced as a point of critical departure or hypothetical thought experiment. Foster, for example, recently wrote that “no Marxist economic theorist would ever accept the neoclassical concepts of perfect and pure competition as anything but a fiction.”

Maher and Aquanno maintain a strict Marxist distinction between profit and rent; for them, profit requires an active participation in the cycle of capital accumulation, whereas rent relies on the suspension of that cycle. They argue that it “strains the imagination to say…that any income from ownership is rent.” Yet many historical socialists have held to a version of just this claim and, accordingly, did not hew so closely to Maher and Aquanno’s distinction between profit and rent. Many socialists have regarded rent, interest, and profits as alike, forms of extraction based in the structural inequalities of the capitalist system. Nor does this mean somehow abandoning the labor theory of value. Socialists have in fact long argued that monopoly ownership and special privilege are the mechanisms through which the labor of the worker is stolen. This debate is perhaps best understood not as one between reformist liberalism and socialism, but as yet another iteration of the old debate between Marx and Bakunin, between competing visions of socialism.

The ultimate problem for the Maher and Aquanno view—and indeed for the orthodox position of all statist Marxists—is that their goal of a supposedly rational, democratic, ex ante form of economic planning, to replace the chaos of the marketplace, can only ultimately result in the creation of one giant capitalist firm. Is it never made clear why or how this integrated conglomerate under the direction of state power would be any less exploitative or environmentally destructive than competition. Maher and Aquanno deeply misunderstand the practical, historical relationship between political domination and economic exploitation. The state is not a neutral tool that can be seized from the capitalists and then inverted and democratized, placed in the hands of the working class.

The Marxists’ own historical and material analyses reveal the state, in its structural DNA, as a coercive apparatus that concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a specialized minority. This argument was among Bakunin’s key contributions, and what allowed him to predict the emergence of a “red bureaucracy” (or the “new class”) and through it the reemergence of so many of capitalism’s core features and mechanisms. In erecting a highly centralized and powerful administrative hierarchy in which the very few give the orders and the masses do the work, Marxists can and have reproduced exactly the forms of domination, alienation, and extraction that they set out to abolish. These relations existed long before capitalist forms of property and markets, and changing the names does not change the relationships, at least not on its own. We find competitive dynamics and pressures in all human systems. Even in an economic system in which the state owns everything and employs everyone, there will be competition between workers within the state equivalents of companies and business units, as well as reconstituted competitive class struggles between the managing bureaucrats and the workers.

Liberty or Authority?

The old practical question remains: how do we make the economic system democratic and non-exploitative? How do we get to a system where labor is compensated with its full product? It doesn’t seem that centralizing power even further will accomplish what orthodox Marxists believe it will, given our experience with centralized power. To accomplish the normative goal identified by Marx himself, a social world without domination, a world in which human beings are free and not alienated, requires the rejection of hierarchy in all its forms. The tension here is, once again, the one that split the socialist movement between authoritarians led by Marx and libertarians led by Bakunin. Recent years have witnessed renewed interest in the republican reading of Marx (for example, William Clare Roberts’s Marx’s Inferno and Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx). In the republican tradition, freedom is a condition of non-domination, the freedom from being subjected arbitrarily to the will of another. Reading Marx in this way, capitalism is just one of many ways that an individual can be so subjected. The real horizon of the socialist is the end of domination—which would have to include the abolition of the state. And while Marxists have often insisted that their doctrine is defined historically and materially, as opposed to normatively, Marx himself clearly set out normative claims and goals.

If Marxists like Maher and Aquanno insist that massive, centralized, hierarchical forms of organization are a necessity of modern economic production, then the anarchist replies that they must be made unnecessary. This is in no way a merely liberal or reformist approach. Bakunin’s position is arguably more radical and ultimately more anti-capitalist than Maher and Aquanno’s in that it takes on the forms of hierarchy and centralized power that actually give rise to the theft of surplus value. Leaving the state untouched leaves the fundamental problem unresolved. The forms of technology and industrial organization we have today are not inevitable. There are local, decentralized, commons-based alternatives that have existed and still can.

Within our current political economy, it is not clear how diminished inter-company competition would actually have to be before Maher and Aquanno would admit that power itself is the ultimate driver of the dynamics we observe. That is, if we reduce the meaning of competition to the mere presence of coercive dynamics, rivalry between organizations, or constraints that compel agents to optimize their performance, then competition is a universal quality of human activity and organization. It is not unique to capitalism or to market economies generally. We will find competition regardless of the label on a system and regardless of its actual structure. Government bureaucrats will struggle and compete amongst themselves for broader administrative powers. The old aristocratic lords constantly competed for land and power. Corporate managers vie for allocations of capital. The anarchists understood that we must structure these historically durable competitive forces horizontally and cooperatively. We can distinguish between competition through domination and theft, and competition within a framework that respects freedom and equality.

Maintaining a normative distinction between the economic means and the political means helps to draw our attention to what is elided when competition is defined as Maher and Aquanno define it, without further analysis or qualification. Theories of rentier capitalism or technofeudalism are, at bottom, attempts to point out and diagnose the expanding role of the political means within contemporary political-economic systems. If we follow Maher and Aquanno in insisting that we must not use these labels because we’re still looking at plain old capitalism, then it isn’t at all clear why they think it’s acceptable to use other labels such as fascism, which also contains competition under their definition. Historical fascism was not just a state form. Not only explicitly but materially, it was also a specific economic system. They must grant that fascism left the capitalist mode of production intact; private property, the wage relationship, and competition between firms all remain under fascism. Large firms and industrial conglomerates were in very active competition for customers, state contracts, and dominance within sectors and markets. If it is only the presence of such competition and of profit-seeking that requires the retention of capitalism as the preferred label, then Maher and Aquanno’s reasoning would seem to require the rejection of “fascism” as a new or distinct category.

They are no less selective and arbitrary in the way they define the productive reinvestment that supposedly distinguishes today’s tech giants from feudalism. Their narrow definition obscures many of the ways political-economic power reproduced itself for centuries under that system. In arguing that today’s tech companies are unlike the old lords, Maher and Aquanno claim that the lords produced unproductively, in order to consume. It is true as far as it goes: they did not produce for the market as we understand it today. Yet this argument facilely ignores the myriad strategies feudal lords used to deploy and reinvest their resources toward consolidating their power and strengthening their ability to dominate and extract more. As a matter of historical fact, feudal lords frequently reinvested in the infrastructure projects that both secured and expanded their extractive capacities, building fortified structures, mills, and roadways; funding large-scale agricultural development; and buying military equipment and arming their retainers. In making productive reinvestment their test, Maher and Aquanno obscure the underlying historical continuity between the various systems of political economy, for example, the feudal, mercantile, and capitalist systems. Dominant ruling classes through time have always applied portions of accumulated surplus toward the architectures (physical, technological, social, legal, and otherwise) necessary for power preservation and continuing extraction. This is a feature of all coercive, hierarchical systems, not just capitalism.

Today’s global corporate monopolies are not competitive in the normal sense in which either classical or neoclassical economists would have used that term. Capitalism is a “market economy” only in an incredibly misleading sense. The federalized, non-capitalist forms of markets outlined by anarchists like Proudhon and Tucker were also called liberal, reformist, and bourgeois in their time. We need new ways to talk about these questions. Perhaps ironically, today’s intra-Marxist debates make the structural necessity of centralized power to capitalism especially salient. Centralized, hierarchical power inherently produces class stratification, domination, and exploitation, regardless of what the system is called or who is in charge. Indeed, we might go further: it is not just that such power produces these results, but that it represents them or constitutes them in and of itself.

David S. D’Amato is an attorney, businessman, and independent researcher. He is a Policy Advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation and a regular opinion contributor to The Hill. His writing has appeared in Forbes, Newsweek, Investor’s Business Daily, RealClearPolitics, The Washington Examiner, and many other publications, both popular and scholarly. His work has been cited by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, among others.

First published on Counterpunch.org.

Background image via Reddit.

Shared via Creative Commons.