The Post-Capitalist Horizon

What world can we build together after systemic collapse?

This book inspires the tech crypto-libertarian billionaires behind Trump. In their quest for power, could they saw off the branch upon which they sit?

Even before we roll the opening credits of Trumpocalypse 2: The Return, the news is so insanely horrible that I find it a masochistic act, potentially causing brain injury or psychosis, simply to scan my various social media feeds each morning. It would be fabulous if there was a way to opt out of this movie. But changing the channel doesn’t seem an option available to us at this point.

I am amazed that many millions of people—even friends of mine—wanted to experience this again, this time on steroids. Some are even enthusiastic about it. These days, most people I know who don’t support the Right seem to have adopted a mode of self-protective dissociation: They simply try to ignore what’s happening. 

On my Instagram this morning, I learned that Trump—who ran as a populist candidate promising to help working people—will seek a tax break for the top 5% of wealthy people while raising taxes on everyone else, with the poorest receiving as much as a 5% raise in taxes:

He also intends to bring the corporate tax rate down from 21% to 15% (it was 52% in the 1950s). They are talking seriously about obliterating the FDIC, which insures people’s bank accounts at amounts up to $250,000, protecting them in case of bank failure. Of course, they also intend to do away with the EPA and the Bureau of Education, or shrink them down to nothing. 

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, at DOGE, plan to pillage social security and Medicare. This will help to pay for the new tax cuts on the wealthy. Back in the 1950s, when American prosperity was the envy of the world and our society was considered a meritocracy instead of an oligarchy, taxes on income above a certain threshold were over 90%. Today, the wealthy pay 30% or less. It is quite likely that Trump’s billionaire advisers will convince him to invest US Treasury money into Bitcoin, a speculative asset backed up by nothing but social trust. A tiny number of early adaptors and billionaire speculators own the lion’s share of BTC, making the speculative asset more of an oligarchic project than what we find in the world’s most despotic societies. 

We have just learned that RFK Jr.'s lawyer lobbied the FDA to revoke approval of the polio vaccine on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), a group founded by Del Bigtree, another Kennedy ally. Over the last decades, as a result of the vaccine, global polio cases went down 99% from 350,000 to just six reported in 2021, according to the World Health Organization. I interviewed Bigtree years ago. I found some of his ideas around multiple vaccines and Autism worth considering, but the efficacy of the Polio vaccine seems unassailable. I also interviewed RFK and read his book on Fauci, which made me very concerned about his motives as well as his capacity to think critically.

The approaching vivisection of our institutions is an indirect result of the multiplying, brutal global crises we confront across the world now. This includes intensifying wealth inequality, geopolitical stress as nations crumble (particularly in the Global South), and, above all, the ecological emergency: Not just accelerated warming and biodiversity loss (the Sixth Great Extinction), but also the depletion of resources such as fresh water, food, and rare minerals. In many places, the ill-informed, indoctrinated masses now gravitate to “strong man” leaders such as Trump, suckered by their simplistic promises and brazen lies, because they experience their lives and their children’s lives getting tangibly worse, decade after decade. At this point, many of them prefer to destroy the old system entirely: They vote for that. 

However I can’t pretend the Democrats—even though I thought they offered a much better choice in the last election—present an authentically viable alternative. Structural forces make this system what it is, and keep pushing it in a particular direction, no matter who is in charge. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have the capacity to address the dire urgency of the ecological threat, for example. Democrats could not accomplish basic things while ostensibly in power, such as raising the minimum wage or creating a decent healthcare system. They failed to address the crisis of Fentanyl addiction (a result of working class despair), among many other senseless societal maladies. 

One of my pet theories is that, in a mass society like ours, it never made sense to consider the public and the private sector as separate entities. Perhaps one could make that case with a smaller society where most goods are produced locally. When it comes to a gigantic country made up of hundreds of millions of people interacting via highways, media, communication networks, and so on—all needing to be regulated, harmonized, syncopated—government and business must be deeply interconnected. The “free market” was always a useful lie. As the most powerful country in the world, the US would always “coup whoever we want to,” in Elon Musk’s tender phrase. 

I still don’t like to use the word “Fascism”—it somehow doesn’t roll happily off the tongue—for where we seem to be heading. But one definition of Fascism is the emphatic unification of state and corporate power. This is attributed, perhaps mistakenly, to Mussolini. But Mussolini said another name for Fascism is “corporatism.” 

Under Fascism or “corporatism,” the government controls all sectors of society, including business, labor, and industry, to achieve national objectives such as security, territorial conquest, or ethnic purity. Fascist governments do not abolish private property or capitalism outright (as in socialism or communism), but, ultimately, they subordinate private enterprise to the state’s authoritarian goals. Under “free market” capitalism, corporations operate independently, but fascist systems only allow businesses to function if they support the state's agenda. Companies that refuse are suppressed, taken over by the state, or closed down. Other features of this delightful form of government include ultranationalism, authoritarianism, suppression of dissent, demonization of minorities, and militarism.

At the moment, it looks like we are heading for a schizoid mixture of corporatism and extreme libertarianism. Ultimately, one of these approaches will come to dominate. I find it incredibly weird that people like Elon Musk and Mark Andreessen who benefited massively from the existing form of government want to risk everything they have by tearing it all to shreds. They want to give all power to a despotic, authoritarian leader who could eventually turn on them, while also dismantling the system of legal protections that supported their accumulation of massive wealth. A society without a strong rule of law is inherently unstable and insecure. Many Chinese and Russian oligarchs now spend their lives in hiding, anxiously evading the totalitarian power of the State in the hinterlands of Bali or New Zealand. 

One baleful influence on the thinking of Peter Thiel and the other billionaire tech investors surrounding Trump is The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson, an American investment adviser, and William Rees-Mogg, a British journalist and libertarian. The book argues that the rise of information technology inevitably decentralizes power, disrupts nation-states, and empowers individuals to achieve unprecedented autonomy: “The Information Revolution will destroy the monopoly of power of the nation-state as surely as the Gunpowder Revolution destroyed the Church's monopoly.” The authors believe, as digital tools make wealth mobile and governance optional, traditional systems like taxation and state welfare will erode, giving way to a new era where the adaptable flourish while the unprepared face marginalization or worse (like death, for instance). They celebrate “the new revolution of power which is liberating individuals at the expense of the twentieth century nation-state.” This is distinctly different from the Fascist ideal. But it isn’t what we see in China, Russia, and elsewhere. 

I think it is nonsense. Absolute autonomy for the “sovereign individual”—in a deeply interdependent and interconnected world—will be impossible to achieve. As the billionaire crypto-libertarians behind Trumpocalypse 2: The Return seek to enact this, they will unleash incredible damage and destruction. This could eventually bring them down. In an extraordinary, must-watch moment in Piers Morgan’s interview with Peter Thiel, Morgan asks the tech tycoon what he thinks about Luigi Mangione. With terror in his strangely eyebrow-less eyes, Thiel replies eloquently here (or watch below):

As critical theorist Mark Fisher famously noted, it has become easier to envision the end of the world than the end of capitalism—a limit in our collective imagination he called "capitalist realism." Since there are no real solutions available within our current system, we must continue to imagine, and explore, what world we can build together after the systemic collapse of Capitalism. Today, this may sound radical, even impossible—but the boundaries of the possible can shift rapidly.