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Episode Summary:
In Episode 50 of Revolution Now, Peter Joseph delves into the history and consequences of capitalism’s dominance, highlighting how market forces, rooted in colonialism, shape global politics. He discusses Noam Chomsky’s insights on the United States’ role in solidifying capitalist supremacy, emphasizing that capitalism and democracy are incompatible. The system, driven by market incentives, perpetuates a hierarchy of private property “dictatorships,” leading to oppression and environmental degradation.
Joseph critiques the belief in “free markets,” calling out the dangers of reducing governmental regulation and embracing market hegemony. He connects the rise of fascistic, pro-market ideologies with the ongoing decline in democratic governance, warning that unchecked capitalism leads to authoritarianism. He advocates for systemic change, promoting a parallel economy project that seeks to undermine the existing market system by fostering sustainable, local economies. Joseph concludes by urging listeners to resist the escalating power of corporate influence and fight for real democracy before it’s too late.
Transcript:
[Noam Chomsky:]
“There is a conventional doctrine about the new era that’s opening up before us. The official version of this was given about a year ago by the National Security Advisor, Anthony Lake. The doctrine is that we are now able to move from containment, as we did in the old days, to enlargement, which is what we’re now going to do. In his words, “throughout the Cold War, we contained a global threat to market democracies. Now we should seek to enlarge their reach” with the evil empire out of the way.
There’s a position at Harvard called the Eaton Professorship of the Science of Government, now held by Samuel Huntington. He writes in a prestigious journal, *International Security*, that the “United States must maintain its international primacy for the benefit of the world because, alone among nations, the national identity of the United States is defined by a set of universal political and economic values: liberty, democracy, equality, private property, and markets.”
Well, since that’s a matter of definition, so the science of government teaches us evidence is beside the point. So you don’t waste time testing, doing experiments to find out if 2 and 2 is really equal to 4. And that’s a kind of useful conclusion because if people don’t understand it, they might be tempted to raise some rather disturbing questions.
To pick just, say, the peak period of American liberalism, take, say, the Kennedy administration. Somebody might want to know just how the Kennedy administration was containing the global threat to market democracies when it prepared the overthrow of the parliamentary government of Brazil, installing a regime of killers and torturers, and setting off a plague of neo-Nazi national security states that spread over the hemisphere, always with firm U.S. support and, in fact, direct participation. Indeed, the actions were presented at the time as a great victory for democracy.”
[Peter Joseph:]
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning everybody. This is Peter Joseph and welcome to Revolution Now, episode 50. The opening audio was Noam Chomsky from 1994, a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union, addressing the change in strategy, if you will, in order to firmly solidify capitalist supremacy on the planet and, by extension, supremacy of the United States. He also touches upon the dramatic historical and modern dichotomy and ultimately hypocrisy of so-called market democracies, which I want to explore a bit more today in concert with the last Substack article I wrote titled “Nexus: Capitalism to Fascism & the Role of Representative Democracy.”
Let’s remember the history honestly. The installation of global capitalism, neoliberalism as we know it, was done fundamentally by force and coercion, not by some internal enlightenment of a nation’s people. It’s clear that the very same economic system is rooted in the exact same predatory values as colonialism, by which the United States spent a great deal of time and energy in the mid to late 20th century applying to the Global South in particular, supporting overthrows, propaganda campaigns to convince poor countries to stay in favor of the pro-US capitalist ethos, keeping those profitable markets open for foreign capital exploitation and control, and so on.
Which Chomsky commented on this regarding the overthrow of Brazil many years ago and the institution of a US-backed capitalist dictatorship, which is also what happened in Chile in 1973, and in dozens of other countries that dared to move away from the reins of market dynamics and the power structure it creates. And don’t forget the “Jakarta Method,” which started in Indonesia where millions were literally killed, purged, that had any kind of socialist or communist ideology; countless imprisoned as well, tortured.
You know, people often speak about the oppression instituted by the USSR, which of course is true but more focused on internal oppression, while on the other side the United States took its form of oppression into the external, shutting down anything that might get in the way of capitalist hegemony.
So that noted, what I’d like to do today is explore the obvious connection between markets and oppression, shutting the powerful mythology that still prevails.
So, let’s begin with the obvious that a capitalist-rooted government is fundamentally a business-run government. While non-market-rooted interests do exist, such as educational policy, abortion rights, and so forth, they are vastly overshadowed and indirectly and indirectly altered by market incentives and market forces and the vested power interests related. Vested market power interests and market incentives that forever sabotage hope for any true democratic effect in government.
Just consider the structure of business itself. Firstly, is it democratic? Obviously not. Business is a hierarchical command structure, with power and control moving from the top down, with loyalty and submission moving from the bottom up, rooted, mind you, in a catastrophic, scarcity-based game which requires the use of multiple levels of strategic exploitation and manipulation in the game of competition, which translates into being not only a strict power hierarchy, it is a predatory power hierarchy. And yet, as obvious as it really should be, people have been conditioned to not see it.
For the anti-democratic structure that self-organizes through market capitalism is different from what most people have been taught to expect when they consider systems of oppression. Instead of a singular, overtly totalitarian, Orwellian-type system of oppression, capitalism, as culminated once again by mass competitive market trade, manifests into a litany of networked mini-dictatorships, which compete with each other for their consumer prey, while also competing against the prey themselves, of course, and you could throw the planet in there as well. I say the planet because clearly the market economy is, without a doubt, at war with our habitat as there’s no built-in function for sustainability – zero, no system-level incentive.
In fact, the opposite is true by which the Earth can only be seen as an inventory to exploit in the same way the human being is viewed as a machine to exploit for surplus value; in the same way the consumer entity exists as a fundamental enemy as well, even though the system is reliant upon the consumer’s engagement, of course.
At the root of it, the consumer is never allowed to be satisfied or the system falters. While one can obtain useful goods in the act of commerce, which on the surface appears like a win-win situation, and that’s how it’s presented to us in principle, what happens on the system level, things such as negative market externalities, is nothing but anti-consumer health and anti-social:
The constant production of inferior goods, the foster repeat purchases, exploitative markups, virtually no reuse design, or relevant downstream sustainability protocols, endless waste and pollution as a result, the conjuring of addiction, which is the best friend of any industry, just look at the ultra-processed foods that are killing people off rapidly, and they’re all based on addictions. Coupled, of course, with the endless propaganda campaign that’s been normalized, we call advertising, working to manipulate people’s sense of social inclusion, primarily, fostering infinite wants, artificial wants, and so forth and so on.
In other words, people see that little gadget in the fancy box thinking this is the end result of the system. In truth, it’s one of many end results, most of which are not supportive of public health at all. As behind every capitalist product sold is a shockwave of general harm and indifference.
And you may ask yourself in this machine where we can now really see all the negative side effects of what it takes to produce something very simple because we do it all wrong – how is it held up? How can we look at a world where all life support systems are in decline and still blinker out the actual ramifications of the economic system; the role that it plays?
And what you find is that the whole thing is held together by slogans and jingles and a general superficiality that isn’t based on evidence, but rather half-truths, very dangerous half-truths that sound like they make sense, but actually do not.
Slogans like “you get what you work for” – sounds like they make sense, but don’t account for system-level influence. Or in this particular case, “the market serves the consumer,” as if that’s the starting point of decision-making when the system is set up in a giant cycle to make sure it is indeed not the starting point. Believe me, if the starting point of what’s produced in society actually came back to true consumer preference based on what the consumers’ aggregate needs are without the influence of what they’re being told they should buy or do need in that constant, hedonic adaptation push, things would be very, very different out there.
And where was I? Yeah, back to my prior point as I attempt to curtail my tangents here regarding the self-generating rise of self-organizing networks of private property dictatorships – it doesn’t take much investigation to see how the system has adapted from more abject forms of exploitation and abuse, particularly debt-based slave systems; debt peonage, which is what our financial system manifests as a constant systemic outcome. There is always more debt in existence than there is money because of the nature of the system. So what happens when people can’t pay their bills because this imbalance of debt flows across society, putting people into mathematically guaranteed deficiency? They become vulnerable and weak and hence subject to further exploitation by the system through the “choice” of private property dictatorships that are there to employ them. So you get to choose your slave owners in this system. That’s the coveted illusion of choice in fact. Hence this “freedom” we hear so much about in classical economic theory, “the freedom to choose.”
Well.
Let’s return to a more fundamental question here. What is the deeper meaning of democracy? Whatever methods aside, I define democracy as the intellectual will of a citizenry expressed through some process of assessment, so societal decisions are made based on the majority consensus in the end. Hence, democracy is faith in the collective awareness to do the right thing, dependent of course on things like education.
In fact, while I’m at it, the same goes for free speech theory. The idea that with open speech and dialogue, the most probable truths of any given matter will eventually come to the surface, with false notions “voted” down, so to speak. And while established truths do come to the surface by such mechanisms, I find that people don’t seem to put enough gravity on the fact that all it takes is a mass delusion; a cult-like mentality to emerge in a citizenry based on ignorance, fear, propaganda – where highly destructive, irrational ideas and conclusions arise: deranged consensus leading to deranged action.
And I’ll go one point further because it’s not just education, which is of course critical. There’s also a dangerous kind of social psychology that we see, where the human nervous system tends to gravitate toward group acceptance. I won’t go into detail as I’ve talked about this before, and in my book “The New Human Rights Movement,” but studies show that from many different angles, people have a tendency to conform. And not just through a kind of cultural or operant conditioning, but as a biological-brain reaction, a general tendency.
Plenty of people certainly don’t want to rock the boat in their normal lives because their boss might find out they have disagreeable opinions and it might interfere with one’s survival in the business structure, which is a very unfortunate corrective mechanism that keeps people in line in our society. Deviations from normality can have serious consequences to one’s survival.
In fact, there’s a very clear-cut tendency for those that follow the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the slow-motion genocide and ethnic cleansing and outrageous oppression, many decades in the making – Israel against Gaza and the West Bank. People will sit back and say, “Oh, you know, I disagree with that so much, but I can’t say anything because my boss is identified with Israel and is Jewish,” or “my brother’s sister is Jewish, and you know, I don’t want to rock the boat. I don’t want to create more inconvenience for myself.” And of course, you have to overcome that cowardice in general if you want to have any integrity in this life.
So anyway, there’s that with the evolutionary baggage that I mentioned, a kind of “evolutionary fitness” where you want to keep tight with your local group. And it makes sense. If you lose the group protection, you don’t want the group to abandon you. You need the support of the group for your own survival. And I’m really not one to invoke “human nature” as it were, but there appears to be some kind of biological wiring there that keeps us attuned; keeps us bonded to the group – for better or for worse.
And all of this is to say that whether it’s a kind of biological tendency toward group-based self-protection; pressure to not rock the boat for the sake of your job or basic social comforts; or recognizing the inevitable rise of preposterous, trending ideas via mass delusion – democracy and free speech are not the starting points of any intelligently functioning society. Relevant education and people learning critical thinking skills and learning the moral responsibility to be hyper-conscious and move against those primitive tendencies bravely; move against any discomfort that you might agitate your local group — that is far more relevant as a starting point.
And we don’t have that in modern society, which helps explain why mass delusion is the norm, not the exception. A false zeitgeist held together by slogans, jingles, and overarching mythology once again, from billions believing in invisible entities that guide their lives to the modern irrational consensus that the economy that dominates the world today is actually sustainable or moral.
Now moving on, one thing I want to add to this system of market-rooted oppression and anti-democracy, which rests at the core of the cognitive dissonance out there, is the direct involvement of money itself in the political structure.
And it doesn’t take much to recognize that if you seek a democratic social system based on equality of influence, the very moment money is utilized is the very moment the entire concept of democratic equality flies out the window. “Get money out of politics,” people cry, and the naivety is just baffling.
In fact, let’s put this into context of all the things we’ve touched upon so far in this section.
It’s bad enough people don’t see the morphing of government into the very structure of business year after year. The structure of private property business dictatorships, which is the ultimate attractor here; is what the pure business and hence fascist mindsets, even though they won’t admit it to themselves, wish to see, in fact, as the governing mechanism of society, a long-standing gravitation, which is ramping up right now in the United States and the world, which I’ll talk about at the end of this podcast.
Likewise, it’s bad enough people don’t see the inherent violent warfare built into this thing due to the contrived system of scarcity and hence scarcity exploitation, which leads to marginalization, oppression, deficiency, and so on for the majority of the population as a consequence of scarcity-induced economic competition.
And it’s also bad enough people can’t understand that the business world they submit to every day is a little more than an outgrowth of the debt peonage exploitation systems of the past, but the modern world’s college of private property dictatorships linked by trade into a single network ultimately, which is well ready to receive and financially exploit and make money off of all of those that are in current financial deficiency, which is the vast majority at all times, for many reasons in fact, not just inevitable debt…
But to add insult to injury in this list, people also draw lines that don’t exist when it comes to what is universally condemned as a “problem” in politics, the vested interference of money.
And they do so without reflecting on the reality that this is just how the world functions in every other arena, and why would it be different in this context? Buying and selling is what makes the world move in the current economy. And the naivety to think that somehow this central, sacrosanct mechanism would be off limits in the realm of government is nothing but irrational, especially when you understand business as a system of power. Markets as a culminating system of power. It produces power structure.
Now, could you legislate against all that? Of course. We hear about it all the time. Again, “get money out of politics.” Some politicians attempt to do just that. Does it work? Of course not. The people in power are the ones that benefit the most. The political class is ultimately defined by business people. Yeah, there’s lots of lawyers in there, but they’re just business people too. So why would the rich and powerful business class, political class defined by business, not carry forward the very mechanisms that made them rich and powerful to begin with?
Yes, we do live in a “market democracy.” That is the phrase we often hear. And the secret meaning of that phrase isn’t what people are taught, it’s the fact that, yeah, the market will determine what the democratic outcomes are with the democratic mechanism being the use of money and influence. Buying and selling once again in the same way the market arrives at the production of a hairdryer.
And you can’t have it any other way if market economics is the foundation of the social system as unfortunately, we have throughout the world today.
Which brings me now to the core of my Substack article, and what we know is the true sacrilegious disposition: intervention and regulation. Intervention and regulation against private property dictatorial free market power.
So if you have this religion that recognizes the almighty, all-seeing market God, and hence the competitive interests of money power by extension as the sacrosanct determining mechanism of society, what becomes the “Antichrist?”
Well naturally that becomes anything that moves against the market God, hindering its “purity” and “beauty” and its natural self-organization and self-regulation.
Now where does that sacrilegious intervention and regulation occur? Well, under the umbrella of the administrative state, as we call it, which in turn makes the administrative state, hence the government itself, the enemy of the market God. Government, which today across the world generally is supposed to be a manifestation of democratic interest, right?
As opposed to the overt monarchies of the past. And what does that mean? It means that the administrative state, the government itself, is not only the enemy of the market God, so is the very, most foundational notion of democracy itself.
What we have is a global civilization fully locked into trade-based economics, which is structurally undemocratic, and the only mechanism to move against that fascistic outcome; the only mechanism to try and counter that enormous power imbalance inevitable in the inequality of the system is through the use of governmental regulation and by extension democracy itself.
But of course, since the idea of saying “democracy is bad,” which no capitalist will ever say, the capitalism-preserving attack moves toward the vehicle of democracy, hence government itself. And we know the trajectory from the cliche, Thatcher, Reagan era of reducing so-called “big government.” That’s their euphemism. Combined with the endless writings and dialogue and debate, where the so-called “statists” are considered condemned. I mean, think about that word, I’ve been called that. “Oh, you’re a statist.” Like, what the fuck does that even mean?
The implication when someone tells you that you’re a statist in the libertarian delusion is that you are in favor of coercive violent power, but that, of course, is a completely myopic and derisive worldview. Of course, government has to be coercive if it’s regulatory. And rather than see the need for regulation, the value system just says we don’t believe that regulation is needed and that this is the way of the world.
And it’s truly insidious because most people that talk that way – it’s just been ingrained in them. The idea that the state only represents coercive violence and is somehow inhumane, omitting the fact that the entire market economy is utterly inhumane and unsustainable, which requires some kind of regulatory intervention, which, of course, I will go so far as to say, is impossible to the degree that’s required. Regulatory intervention will be forever sabotaged and so forth and so on. You can’t regulate this kind of system; the system’s too powerful. It buys its way out to obstruct any regulation, of course.
And don’t forget the punchline of the entire thing, the very reason democratic governments today suck so badly -population ignorance and mass delusion aside, of course – is because of the very influence of the free market itself. The religious adherents of capitalism refuse to recognize that as well. Of course, they’d blame morality and whatnot. But just go down the list of all the crimes of government and find one that doesn’t relate to the self-preservation of power and by extension the use of money. Yes, we can talk about other forms of religious extremism, the evangelical Christians in the United States – they want to make sure no one can ever have an abortion and everyone must adhere to the bullshit equivocation that the Bible can also be considered history, it should be taught in classrooms along with evolution and all of that stuff. Okay, that’s fine. That’s there. But that’s less mechanistic in regard to the way government actually operates when it comes to money fucking up everything.
But apparently that’s too complicated. People can’t think that deeply. So they superficially see government doing all these criminal things composed of criminal mentalities. And they say, “Oh, the government itself is bad. Management itself is bad. The very idea of any organization is bad!” That’s literally how fucking stupid things have become.
And the insidiousness cannot be overstated, the feedback process you have, where these free market philosophers or pseudo anarchists, pining once again for the endless vague reduction of governmental power in favor of this unregulated society, unregulated free market, in its symbolism… And yet the more unrestrained the market is, the more it works to corrupt the integrity of government and hence democracy itself.
So I think I’ve run this into the ground, and I want to point out something interesting in my research that’s actually going into the new film which I keep updated and changing while I try to figure out some licensing problems: Is F. A. Hayek, you know, a high priest of the Austrian school right up there with Milton Friedman in the Chicago school and that laissez-faire cult. In 1960, Stafford Beer, cybernetician, gave a lecture at a conference on self-organization. And he looked out and he was surprised to notice F. A. Hayek.
Now you might remember that in free market theory historically, where they hijacked the phrase “invisible hand” from Adam Smith, evolving that into the pursuit of general equilibrium, “general equilibrium theory,” which attempts to say markets self-regulate properly, we begin to see the hijacking of cybernetic principles by free market economists in this era.
F. A. Hayek in his writings post that conference talked a lot about cybernetics and self-organizing self-regulating systems. And I’m not sure what the word is where you take an idea that seems to fit your pre-existing hypothesis about something and you simply superimpose it when there’s no validity to it. You say, “Well, this describes what I want to believe about this system, so I’m just going to declare that it does.” F. A. Hayek’s writings linked back in its ambition to the work of Ludwig von Mises, who talked about the price mechanism, and only through competitive trade and price, can economic complexity be understood. And there is some truth to that, but there’s also a vast chasm of nonsense in terms of what society actually requires to self-regulate in a sustainable and equitable way, keeping social stability.
And I don’t want to belabor that because I’m getting tired now, but I will say that it’s interesting, isn’t it? – that the field of cybernetics based on biology, manifested itself, only to be hijacked by laissez-faire economists that desperately wanted to say that “this is a viable cybernetic system already. The price mechanism, competitive trade, and money. This is all we need.” So something to keep in mind. And lots more to say, which I’ll save till next time, but I want to just conclude by pointing out that there’s a trajectory here. And it’s not enough to sit back and say, well, this is just what the system’s doing. So let’s just let it crash and hope for the best, maybe after it crashes or whatever, we can rebuild. And of course, all of that is nonsense. The system’s not just going to fail and good people come in to rebuild. It’s just going to get worse and worse and worse, particularly as the environmental decline increases; more draconian legislation will follow…
And if the transition continues, which is what’s happening, into this pursuit: ending of government administration and regulation to let the elitist free market thrive and the world molded in that image – well, I can assure you things are going to be so much harder to shift back, which means you need to pull all the levers you can at this point. This is emergency time.
In the United States, along with much of the world, Europe is having the same general problem. We’re seeing a rise in pro-market, fascistic entities in the political realm. The United States has its resident Trump, but we have plenty of others like that. And the constituencies they represent, if you look deeply, they all embrace the basic hierarchical, totalitarian, dictatorial, pro-self-regulating market neuroses and belief system, which pairs in perfectly with the evangelical Christians or Sharia law or whatever other form of oppression you can come up with and overlay.
If you’re in the United States and have paid attention to recent Supreme Court rulings, you’ll see this trajectory once again in motion, from the removal of the Chevron Deference to the presidential immunities ruling, it’s all about solidifying power, destroying regulatory democratic aspects and making sure that the market God prevails, even though for many of these people that isn’t in their consciousness. But this is the religion they adhere to – perhaps the most defining foundation in fact of what we call “conservative” thinking.
And if you’re one of those progressively minded people that’s convinced themselves, half rightly, that it doesn’t matter who you vote for, it doesn’t matter if you participate in the system, it doesn’t matter if you protest, keep in mind that it’s not that cut and dry. The system is a corporate totalitarian system in its very nature, but it can indeed get far worse. And that’s what you have to fight back through whatever in-system mechanisms you can, as we all work, of course, toward the true solution, which is total system change, as we’ll talk about more so in this podcast, which I also hope to get off the ground to a degree with the Integral parallel economy project that I will introduce in my new film: Zeitgeist Requiem by which localized, smaller economic structures emerge, and then they self-organize through their own nodes as they connect to other parallel economies of the same nature, and ideally continue self-organizing to a point where their use is so widespread, it takes all of the steam out of the horrific market economy system.
Alright folks, take care out there. I apologize for being a little sleepy here. It’s been a long day. But yeah, take care, be safe, talk to you soon.
