What Makes Us INVISIBLE: Neoliberalism, Elite Capture, Empire of Normality
Hello fellow humans,
Don’t you feel that capitalism is forcing us between a rock and a hard place? On one hand capitalism is pushing us to comply with norms, rules, standards, acceptable behaviour, and on the other hand is telling us to stand out, reach for visibility if we want to be successful, achieve something in life, and be above others. Be a champion. Be a leader. Assembly line worker, white collar worker, call centre operator versus tiktok influencer, celebrity, entrepreneur. These are your options. Behind these fabricated choices, there is a simple truth: the insatiable quest of capitalism for power.
There is a way to dismantle this inhuman system: a bottom-up, fully-inclusive democratic society that can deliberate and decide via citizen assemblies on how capitalism can be phased out, and replaced with an economic system that guarantees wellbeing for everyone.
What is neoliberalism? What is elite capture? What is the empire of normality? All these are what capitalism is doing to us. Neoliberalism claims that “human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” (David Harvey)
“Elite capture happens when the advantaged few steer resources and institutions that could serve the many toward their own narrower interests and aims.” (Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò)
The empire of normality refers to how capitalism restricts the acceptable normal range for bodies, cognition, and emotions in its quest to create conformity and control.
The birth of a doctrine…
When the East India Company was chartered in the year 1600, and the Dutch East India Company was chartered in 1602 as some of the earliest and biggest joint-stock companies in the world, little did those merchants know that their activities would lead to the rise of the Industrial Revolution, the globalisation of trade, the Internet Age, and energy-thirsty artificial intelligence.
People have been pooling money and resources together for centuries, to share risk and profit from businesses that were too big to be taken on by one person. The invention of the joint-stock company in which shares of the company's stock can be bought and sold by shareholders, has developed the notion that property can be linked to power. Each shareholder owns company stock in proportion, evidenced by their certificates of ownership, which are the rights to command, control, transform part of the company. Those rights are just another way of describing power. Capitalism was formed gradually around linking property to power, in proportion.
Some of the first printed share certificates (Source)
As the doctrine evolved, more and more resources, machines, land, people, know-how, money as cash, money as credit, and so on, were added to the system as the means of production, also known as capital.
The trinity of property, power, capital became as the de facto design of the economic system. Humans became a subset, a subcategory, a disposable resource as workers for hire and fire at the pleasure of the employer. When you are a shareholder in a modern company, your voice does not count equally with the voice of other shareholders, or the employers who do not own shares. Unlike electoral democracy, where each adult citizen has one vote, therefore equal voice and equal share of power in selecting politicians, in capitalist economies it is the size of your property, namely how many shares you have, that gives you the size of your voice.
At the core of the doctrine, we have the growth (a.k.a. profit, a.k.a. accumulation) incentive. It is also an objective, a moral ground, a legal obligation, a political agenda, a cultural expectation, a social requirement, a system to recognize value and worth, a test for the quality of a business. This endless accumulation happens through inequality (usually legal), speculation (illegal and legal), dispossession (illegal and legal), coercion (illegal and legal, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), theft (illegal), financialization (illegal and legal, 1, 2), monopolies (illegal and legal, 1, 2), war (illegal), consumerism (legal, 1, 2), manufacturing consent (legal), unequal exchange in trade (illegal and legal), modern slavery (legal, illegal, immoral). Need we go on? Growth is the grand delusion of capitalism. Its supremacy over all other categories of values has…
…hijacked and trampled freedoms
Since its beginning, capitalism was in conflict with everyone who was not an elite. For very good reasons people have been revolting against the ruling class for the past 400 years. Even the famous French Revolution attempted to create liberty, equality, fraternity for everyone, but failed in its attempt. Some battles were won over the decades around the world, such as universal suffrage, paid vacation, and many other benefits for workers and families, but the economic doctrine that has dominated society has not been overthrown. Inequality has persisted and has gotten worse. Even self-declared socialist regimes, such as the USSR, have maintained the trinity of power-property-capital by shifting all three elements to the state itself, and not to the people.
While the Soviet communist experiment was unfolding, there was also a massive counter-reaction. In 1944, Friedrich Hayek published his famous book, The Road to Serfdom, in which he argued that social democracy would mutate into totalitarian control as it was deployed by Stalin and Hitler. In the same year, another wisecrack, Ludwig von Mises published the book Bureaucracy, in which he wrote the same thing.
In 1947, Hayek goes on to create the Mont Pelerin Society to promote neoliberalism, which was a club of the elite, by the elite, and for the elite. Their biggest con was the idea that we must increase freedom in order to have a better society, however, they did not tell us the fine print, the hidden message, which was (1) the preservation of the proportional link between power and property, (2) freedom was meant only for the owners of capital, (3) governments must obey the demands of capital owners.
The Cato Institute, Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Center for Policy Studies, the American Legislative Exchange Council, Manhattan Institute, the Pacific Research Institute, the Adam Smith Institute are just a few places in this wide network of so-called freedom fighters. The enormous Atlas Network, founded in 1981, has more than 500 neoliberal think tanks in more than 90 countries. Their vicious militancy has…
…enforced hierarchies of control to benefit the ruling class (see 1)
Neoliberals began winning the game only in the 1970s, despite the efforts and successes of Hayek and his likeminded robber barons. After decades of successful Keynesian economics that benefited the working class and the middles class, here came Richard Nixon in 1971 to abandon the system of fixed exchange rates, allowing speculation and capital flight. This was inspired by another smart aleck: Milton Friedman. He too wrote a book: Capitalism and Freedom. Guess what it was all about? The same lie that freedom will save us, leaving out details that freedom does not apply to everyone.
All following governments, left and right, in the English-speaking world and beyond, enforced this paradigm. Even Obama, the president of hope and change, bailed out the top banks that have left millions of Americans without savings. Obama did not penalize the executives and did not discourage the banks from repeating that predatory behavior.
Freedom is still about corporations avoiding to deal with unions, avoiding regulation that benefits the population and protects the environment, avoiding economic democracy where each employee has equal voice in the workplace, regardless of their position. With all that freedom, since 1989, the super-rich of America have become $21 trillion richer and the poorest 50 percent have become $900 billion poorer (1).
In Mexico, a large chunk of mobile-phone and landline services were given to Carlos Slim, who then became the world’s richest man for a while. Meanwhile, in Russia, six oligarchs controlled half of Russia’s economy. Roman Abramovich bought from the government the oil company Sibneft for $200 million in the 1990s, and sold it back for $20.5 billion in today’s money (1). All in the name of freedom, privatization is legalized theft from the public domain.
From the thousands of examples of how neoliberalism works only for the elites, here are two more. In 1981 the Heritage Foundation published a work called Mandate for Leadership, to benefit the newly elected Ronald Reagan. The document had 2000 the benefited the ruling class and diminished the wellbeing of everyone else. The same Heritage Foundation published with nerve and shameless the Blueprint for a New Administration, which guided Trump to cut federal spending by $10.5 trillion, again to benefit the elites. Are you surprised to hear that the Heritage Foundation is also behind Project 2025 (1, 2, 3, 4) that wants to turn America into a capitalist Christian autocracy?
Throughout their history, stuck-up neoliberals continued the demonization of the opposition, exacerbated the culture wars, pitted the working class against their interests, and…
Why have more than 100,000 people died of overdose in 2021 in America, up from 20,000 in 2010? These people, and many more on the edge of loneliness, depression, anxiety, insomnia do not fit into the requirements of neoliberalism. We are asked to comply with the strict culture of our workplaces, with credit scores, employment and unemployment applications, behavior that does not challenge the trinity of property-power-capital. We are pushed out of society if we are neurodiverse.
In 1697 the Badging Act required everyone who relied on help from their parish to wear a badge with their initials and status as poor people. Capitalism was not even 100 years old on paper, and society was already constructing new classes of people. Intellectuals did not wait long to have brilliant ideas about how to further put people into groups and statistics. Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874) played an important role inventing a science of human normality. For the longest time health was seen as harmony, but then health began to be seen as normality. Quetelet wrote that “the weight and stature of a man may be measured directly, and we may afterwards compare them with the weight and stature of another man. In comparing the different men of a nation in this manner, we arrive at average values, which are the weight and stature proper to be assigned to the average man”. (quoted in 1)
Another smart human comes along, Francis Galton (1822–1911). His book Hereditary Genius published in 1869 combined Darwin’s theory with Quetelet’s statistical methods. He proposed to “range men according to their natural abilities, putting them into classes separated by equal degrees of merit […] The method I shall employ for discovering this is an application of the very curious theoretical law of ‘deviation from the average’.” (quoted in 1)
Galton was obsessed with ranking everything about humans. He was the first man to rank women different areas in terms of attractiveness. He did it in secret with a clicker hidden in his pocket whenever he saw a woman out in public. This began a misogynistic tradition of numerically ranking women that continues to this day (source).
Wait, this gets better. Then came the movement of anti-psychiatrists, such as Thomas Szasz (1920-2012). He identified as a disciple of Friederic Hayek. Szasz wrote that when psychiatrists decide on someone’s madness depends on subjective judgement, not on an objective biological test. Mental illness is not a genuine illness, and psychoanalytic psychiatry is myth. He wrote in his 2008 book Psychiatry: Science of Lies: “So-called mentally ill persons’ all in fact ‘pretend to be disabled by illnesses that do not exist’.” (quoted in 1) This was used as a reason to advocate for the phasing out of the social care for mental health and put it on the shoulders of correctional institutions.
Mental health and wellbeing did not improve since the 1980s. Thomas Insel, the boss of National Institute of Mental Health between 2002 and 2015 said in 2017 that: “I spent 13 years at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders, and when I look back on that I realize that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs – I think $20 billion – I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.” (quoted in 1)
Why is that? The structure of controls kept in place throughout society, not only forced undemocratic standards of normality on all of us, but also…
…allowed the rise of neoliberal elites
Some reports say that the Ambani wedding cost $600 million. I would not bother you with the enormous list of debauchery, luxury, and rich elites that were on display at the event. Suffice to say that Mukesh Ambani has about 123 billion dollars and is the richest person in Asia.
I picked the Ambanis, just to show you that neoliberalism embraces all cultures, genders, races, religions. It’s a very inclusive doctrine! In the Vanity Fair article, Everything to Know About the Ambani Wedding, we did not read any criticism of the system, such as why richness is allowed in the first place, why the elites rub elbows behind closed doors. We did read, however, that the families provided meals to their community, feeding 51,000 people and spreading their wealth to their neighbors. As if that is an ethical cleanse that provides justification for that insane wealth.
This is how our freedoms are captured by the elite, how we are kept invisible, how we are never allowed in their boardrooms, in their meetings, never allowed to know how they make their decisions, how we are not listened to, how we are ridiculed and insulted with fairy tale stories that taste like piss in the soup. Elites have distracted us with culture wars over which identity group deserves mores rights and recognition. They concealed the truth about the trinity of property-power-capital behind reality shows, talk shows, celebrity galas, fashion shows, the glamour of meritocracy and talent, the lie of success available to anyone.
The elites have had their glory, and have build a grand empire of domination…
…against which we can fight back, and win visibility for all.
We must repeat again and again: capitalism is the proportional relationship between power and property. All our problems come from this doctrine of proportionality: the lack of economic democracy, the obsession with growth, the fetish with hierarchies.
Mark Fisher wrote that capitalism is the only game in town and cannot be replaced. Margaret “Iron Lady” Thatcher said there is no alternative to capitalism. Really?! Wanna bet? I found 19 alternatives to capitalism, by several categories, so don’t tell us that there are no alternatives.
I say and write these things because I want to hit at the heart of capitalism. I want to show you how week the system actually is, how immoral, unjust, and replaceable it is. Folks keep asking me, but how are we going to convince the elites, the super rich to give up their power, and vast chunks of their property, whether its stock, cash, real estate, whatever. I always reply that we don’t convince them, we cannot convince them, we should never attempt to convince them. We must attack the system itself, not individual billionaires and millionaires. The system is rotten. Humans are just players in the game, and no individual member of the elite class has the power to keep the game going, without massive playing-along and collusion.
We hit the elite class at the core of their doctrine. We fight and demand visibility for all humans, equal wellbeing for all humans, without appeasing the interests of the elites. We can begin with putting a limit on wealth. Then we phase out the trinity, we dismantle the doctrine or proportionality. The Atlas Network must be defeated and dismantled. All billionaires will be taxed out of existence. Debauchery, luxury, excesses will become widely accepted as immoral, illegal, indecent.
We can earn our visibility only if we (1) recognize how the elites are maintaining their control through the neoliberal doctrine of property-power proportionality (2) learn about alternatives based on universal egalitarian and inclusive democracy and (3) participate in networks of mutual support and solidarity.
Chains will be broken.
Until next time be well! Increase the peace!
*Originally published as a video essay here. Subscribe for more.