The dominant narratives around the invincibility of capitalism continue to undermine all other available alternatives by employing various tools and strategies of governance that domesticate not only the everyday lives of people but also their critical consciousness, which is central to the radical transformation of society. The ideological, cultural, social, political, and economic apparatuses of capitalism promote ideas, policies, processes, and institutions that suppress both individual and collective consciousness. It dismantles communitarian society in the name of individual freedom and individualises processes of consumption in the name of personal happiness, utility, and satisfaction. Such processes accelerate different forms of individual alienation that are inseparable from the capitalist system. The separation of consumers from producers in the name of mythical free-market-led efficiency is part of this commodification process, reinforcing alienating structures that domesticate both consumers and producers.
Like alienation and atomisation, various forms of crisis are inseparable from capitalism. However, many liberals and critics of capitalism argue that the capitalist system is resilient enough to absorb shocks, crises, and dissent—and even use these crises to consolidate itself. If this is the case, why is the capitalist system often reliant 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 instils fear over lives and livelihoods to shock and weaken people, making it more difficult for them to challenge capitalism and seek alternatives. The destabilisation of society, everyday life, and communities enables capitalism to survive challenges and overcome its inherent structural contradictions between labour and capital.
Capitalism institutionalises precarity, risk, violence, and fear as part of everyday living conditions, where individualised happiness through commodity consumption is solely defined by individual survival and the self-realisation 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 Descartesian duality in knowledge production and dissemination. This supercilious duality, along with its colonial and neocolonial universalisation in the name of science and civilisation, undermines decolonisation, diversity, and the democratisation of knowledge. It commercialises knowledge and skills for profit, while naturalising and normalising 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 honour, 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, normalising 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 normalisation 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 normalised 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 civilisation 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 weaponises institutions and processes to sustain and legitimise 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 only available alternative. Therefore, collective class consciousness, class organisation, 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