The Brooklyn Rail

The IDF’s mass killing of (to the date of writing) 23,000 Palestinians in Gaza is an extreme case of undemocratic authority. Palestinians are overwhelmingly at the mercy of Israeli decision-makers, who impose their decisions through physical abuse, killing, maiming, and threats. Given that the majority of Palestinians have no legal channels to influence the overwhelming force of Israeli coercion, they are effectively ruled by the Israeli state in an exclusionary “one-state reality” that includes Gaza and the West Bank, since Palestinian movement is constrained and policed through armed force by Israeli state agents.

However, the Israeli state’s control over the region, including over the lives of Palestinians, is not total. In fact, acts of extreme violence dictated by Israeli decision-makers can have the effect of undermining that control. For example, the physical abuse doled out by Israeli agents generates in many Palestinians a physical reaction in the form of violent resistance. For Israeli decision-makers, the elimination of thousands of Palestinians is justified by the security need to exterminate the Hamas leadership. Yet, Hamas is neither the origin nor the end of Palestinian violent resistance, nor is the creation of thousands of Palestinian orphans going to produce a more secure Israel. In fact, in addition to the tragic loss of Israeli lives during the October 7 attacks, there are signs of internal destabilization of Israel as dissenters to the current extreme right-wing regime are increasingly subject to state repression.

The inability of United States policy-makers to criticize Israel is unsurprising, since undemocratic authority is the bread and butter of American governance. At the most explicit level, millions of legally disenfranchised people who live and work in the United States, immigrants and prisoners, are excluded from having a say in a government that imposes its authority on them. There are also government officers, such as the members of the Supreme Court, who are not democratically elected and impose unaccountable judgments on how citizens should act.

Yet government office-holders are not the only powerful decision-makers with an undemocratic influence on society. In many ways, private decision-makers have the most disproportionate say on how individuals should live and society’s resources should be used. The average American lives most of her waking hours working under the private governments of corporations. They follow rules they have little to no say in and dictates from managers they do not elect. Given that the average worker must work to live, they might have a slight choice, depending on the demand for their labor, among some firms, but in any case, they will still be subject to the commands of corporate management. These corporate governance patterns are dictatorial since workers are subject to unaccountable decision-making.¹ The reason the average American has very little say in how they “make a living” is that corporations own the means of production, the infrastructure required to produce objects and services for human well-being.

The immense amount of power these private governments have over society’s labor and infrastructure gives them disproportionate influence in society’s government. At the surface level, they influence policy through lobbying and donations, and sway the average voter by filling airwaves with messages that serve corporate interests. Ultimately, government officers depend on corporations to mobilize the labor and resources of society. Corporations in turn depend on government officers to shape legislation to enforce their property privileges. Corporate bosses and government officers form interdependent complexes.

Eisenhower, in his famous address of 1961, identified one of these complexes, the military-industrial complex (MIC), a powerful network of private military contractors and government officers that heavily influences American policy. The development of the military-industrial complex was related to an increasingly proactive executive that dislodged itself from democratic accountability² on who they hurt, spy on, torture, and kill. The secrecy of the Pentagon and intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA are salient examples, with citizenship providing very little protection, while for those who are not American citizens, whether on American territory or abroad, legal recourse is basically nonexistent. Today Israel is a junior partner of this military-industrial complex. The United States injects billions of dollars into Israel’s military institutions, they share dense business connections, and Israel is an important source of military intelligence for the United States. The catastrophe in Palestine is intimately connected to this American-led MIC. The killing fields in Gaza are a testing ground for a cutting edge “mass assassination factory,” Israel’s research and development of weaponry, artificial intelligence algorithms used to select bombing targets, and legal arguments used to justify atrocity.³

The dictatorial patterns behind American-led corporate and military complexes are samples of general trends in the modern capitalist system. Corporations and their dictatorial governance are ubiquitous everywhere, including associated military-industrial complexes. These dictatorial governance systems exert disproportionate influence on the economy, without the capacity to properly understand and manage the complex consequences of their policy since the affected people, such as workers, don’t partake in the decision-making. As a result, economic and social crises become ubiquitous. Decision-makers reinforce their dictatorial authority through increased coercion to gain control of the crises, opening the door to even more catastrophic consequences. In the 1930s the German military-industrial complex imposed the most extraordinary and catastrophic dictatorship the world had ever seen in response to the social dislocation brought by World War I, the militancy of the workers’ movement, and the economic crisis of the 1930s. The Nazi dictatorship unleashed mass calamity in Europe and Asia in the form of the bloodiest war the world had seen so far, including the mechanized extermination of almost all European Jewry and the death of 15 percent of the Soviet Union’s population.

Revolutionary Reconstruction and Dictatorship

During the 1930s, a black scientist in the United States became preoccupied by the calamitous consequences of the corporate dictatorship that precipitated world war, fascism, and economic crises.⁴ Although W. E. B. Du Bois is widely known as an activist for Black rights and one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the leading civil rights organization in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, his political activism was informed by a scientific perspective. In spite of the extreme racism during his time, he became the first Black PhD from Harvard and pioneered statistical and empirical methods in the social sciences, becoming the first modern sociologist in the United States.⁵ Du Bois’s research showed that the Black disenfranchisement he fought against was connected with a vast corporate dictatorship that had spread its tentacles through imperial ventures and stratified workers into racial castes. He argued in his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction, that the defeat of the revolutionary Black self-government established in the United States during the Reconstruction Era, a consequence of federal failure to abolish the dictatorial patterns in American governance, paved the way for a vast corporate dictatorship that would become involved in a lethal struggle for control of the labor and natural resources of the planet.

Du Bois developed this argument from an earlier critique of dictatorial governance that he documented in Black Reconstruction, originating in the Radical faction of Lincoln’s Republican Party. The Radicals had blamed the American Civil War, an industrialized carnage that claimed more than 600,000 lives, on the dictatorial patterns behind southern slave-ownership, an institution that enforced extreme domination over black subjects. Black leaders and Radicals referred to these dictatorial patterns as tyrannical.⁶ The Radicals who fought for black government and emancipation were among the founders of the Republican party. For the Radicals the institution of slavery was a catastrophic mistake that if not dealt with immediately would lead to even greater catastrophe. The Radicals had studied American revolutionary literature, with its idea that people are naturally predisposed to fight back against their political abusers. According to the Radicals, slavery was an institution enabled by “tyranny,” the rule of cruelty and abuse. Given that tyrannical authority was based on the arbitrary whims and wishes of tyrants, rather than on a sound legal order, it was lawless. An abusive institution would naturally predispose other institutions to become abusive and lawless, bringing catastrophic disorder to society. Radical Senator Charles Sumner, a “student of civilization” as Du Bois called him, commented on the destabilizing effect of slavery:

The slave trade is bad; but even this enormity is petty, compared with that elaborate contrivance by which, in a Christian age and within the limits of a Republic, all forms of constitutional liberty were perverted; by which all the rights of human nature were violated, and the whole country was: held trembling on the edge of civil war; while all this large exuberance of wickedness, detestable in itself; becomes tenfold more detestable when its origin is traced to the madness for Slavery.… Founded in violence, sustained only by violence, such a wrong must by a sure law of compensation blast the master as well as the slave; blast the lands on which they live; blast the community of which they are a part; blast the Government which does not forbid the outrage; and the longer it exists and the more completely it prevails, must its blasting influences penetrate the whole social system.⁷

The Radicals claimed to derive their arguments from natural law, which rationally follows from the study of nature. Natural law thinkers claimed that the correct human norms could be derived from the study of nature (a scandalous thought today!).

For the Radicals, natural law revealed that without the abolition of the dictatorial institution of slavery, the project of the Union for the pursuit of Happiness (as was put in the Declaration of Independence) was doomed. The Civil War would later confirm this thesis, as the United States exploded into mass killings and cruelty. This extraordinary industrial mass carnage was precipitated by the southern planters and slave-owners, who formed a Rebel⁸ Army led by the traitor Jefferson Davis. The Unionist response in the form of the Federal Army would precipitate a massive uprising of Black workers: a “general strike”⁹ of half a million enslaved Black workers who escaped Rebel plantations and crossed over to the Union side, including the two hundred thousand Black soldiers who took up the bayonet to liberate themselves by force. Once the Union beat back the Rebels, Black leaders and Radicals would challenge white supremacy by advocating for Black enfranchisement, in contrast to the orthodoxy of the time which saw only a small minority of people, white male property holders, as capable of exercising that freedom.

The military struggle against the Rebel dictatorship precipitated a social revolution that enfranchised four-million ex-enslaved Black workers, producing many Black officials in state legislatures, Congress, courts, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and the military. More than half of the delegates to the convention that drafted the 1868 reconstructed constitution of South Carolina were Black, many of them workers who had once been enslaved. The southern property-owning elite would later overthrow Black government and reestablish white supremacy.

Du Bois, inspired by his enthusiastic studies of Karl Marx,¹⁰ would associate the overthrow of Black government with what he called “the dictatorship of property,” a governance system through which property owners rule through their control over land, infrastructure, and people. This dictatorship is enabled through the coercive enforcement of legal property privileges. Radicals failed to understand the coercive and exclusionary nature of the dictatorship of property, which actively undermined enfranchisement of Black people. Some Radicals, like the venerable Thaddeus Stevens, began to understand the connection between property and Black disenfranchisement, arguing that the criminal planters who had instigated the Rebellion against the Union should be expropriated and their land given to freedmen so that the latter could make a living and therefore have the material resources to engage in democratic governance. Stevens, however, was in thrall to an outdated and utopian view of an agrarian polity made up of self-sufficient small property owners, a perspective that industrialization was rendering ever more obsolete. In general, the Radicals were under the spell of a heavily ideological worldview based on lofty metaphysical concepts of Equality, Freedom, Liberty, and Civilization, an understanding incentivized by the class background of their leadership of comfortable property owners.

In fact, chattel slavery can be understood as an extreme case of the dictatorship of property, rather than, as the Radicals saw it, a distinct ill. The master’s control over a slave’s life was merely one among other property relations enforced through armed coercion that increased the southern planter’s disproportionate influence over American governance. The planter’s property privileges extended over the means of production, the land and infrastructure that produced society’s necessities and wealth. The dictatorship of property facilitated more property acquisition for those who already owned a lot of it. Given the centralization of the means of production in the hands of the master, the southern “free” citizens were rendered dependent on the slave owner’s patronage, giving slave owners dominion over citizens and state officials so that the latter legislated, enforced, and voted for the master’s norms.

Slaveowner power wasn’t limited to states where slavery was legal. Jordan von Manalastas, constitutional lawyer and prison abolitionist, describes how the antebellum planters used their accrued power to dominate the rest of the population through the federal state:

The southern slaver class insisted on aggressive federal power to make the north bend to the laws and whims of slave states, compelling free-state governments to kidnap blacks accused of being “fugitives” and deport them south, without due process, into bondage. Slaveholders demanded the right to bring their human contraband wherever they stepped foot, notwithstanding local laws. Mob violence was deployed routinely and with impunity on abolitionists in the south, and even in the north, where federal marshals could summon posse comitatus to force all bystanders to join “slave-catching” hunts. This last point can’t be stressed enough: the southern fleshmongers relied on federal agents to force free citizens of the north to work as their personal repo men in human trafficking. The whole nation was conscripted—dare I say “enslaved”?—at the pleasure of the slaveocracy. It cast the whole divided house into ill-repute.¹¹

As planter domination enabled by the dictatorship of property brought the federal union into disorder, instabilities appeared in the form of intense class struggle against the planter class. An example is the opposition from northern small farmers. These small farmers, yeomen, were often racist, had little sympathy for Black workers, but self-interest drove them into a bloody class struggle against the planters, since the latter endangered the yeoman’s independence in the western territories due to fierce competition over land from wealthier and more powerful slave owners.

The class struggle between planters and yeomen culminated in Bleeding Kansas, an armed conflict in the late 1850s within the Kansas Territory over the question of whether Kansas should become a slave state or be free, involving between fifty and two hundred political killings. Once the planters lost the class struggle in Kansas, signaled by its incorporation as a free state, “the Southern radicals, backed by political oligarchy and economic dictatorship in the most extreme form the world had seen for five hundred years, precipitated secession.”¹²

Even after the Rebel president, slave-owner, and traitor Jefferson Davis had surrendered, the control of Rebels over property such as their vast estates funded terrorism against Black Unionists. During the Reconstruction era, after the official end of the Civil War, the Rebels continued to perpetuate lawless violence against Black leaders and Radicals. For Radicals, the legal emancipation of chattel slaves was insufficient to resolve the legal disorder that had dissolved the Union into Civil War. Without the enfranchisement of Black men so they became equal citizens, the Rebels would retake the Southern legislatures and spread their power through the Federal machinery. Enfranchisement of freedmen required that decision-makers protect Black officials and citizens, mobilizing the government’s armed agents to crush the remaining Rebel leadership.

The South Carolina Democratic Party drafted their objective to threaten and murder Black people and Radicals to control the vote:

Every Democrat must feel honor bound to control the vote of at least one Negro, by intimidation, purchase, keeping him away or as each individual may determine, how he may best accomplish it.… Never threaten a man individually. If he deserves to be threatened, the necessities of the times require that he should die. A dead Radical is very harmless—a threatened Radical or one driven off by threats from the scene of his operations is often very troublesome, sometimes dangerous, always vindictive. ¹³

The federal government, led by businessmen and property-owners, had reasons to oppose issuing the finishing blow to the Rebels, since Rebel defeat would imply the expropriation of the property that made wealthy ex-masters able to finance violence against Black leaders, Radicals, and Black workers. Federal and state officials opposed redistributing the property of the Rebels, since government officers were wealthy property owners themselves. For Du Bois, if the Federal Government, the Union Leagues, the philanthropists, the white workers’ movement, and the Radical Clubs were actually committed to Reconstructing from the ruins of a Failed and Collapsed American State a Union for the Pursuit of Happiness, they erred in not dispatching armed agents to crush and expropriate the property of the Rebels.

The Southern dictatorship of property waged a war of extermination against Black and Radical leaders. Ulysses S. Grant tried to save Black leaders, Black workers, and Radicals by military means, but it was too little and too late. The armed agents of the white property owners—the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia, the White League, the Democratic rifle clubs—exterminated and routed many strong Black and Radical leaders, mortally weakening Reconstruction in the South, completing the “counterrevolution of property.” Du Bois, as a Marxist, argued that American democracy could only have been realized if Black and white labor had united into a workers’ government against the dictatorship of property, but white supremacy had erected a barrier against this possibility.

The dictatorship of capital

Because the government was unable to resolve the general lawlessness of the South, as evidenced by the extermination of Black and Radical leadership and the ruin of many small businessmen during the financial panic of 1873, a new complex made of interdependent corporate bosses and government officers took over the administration of the South and the federal government. Du Bois described this reinforcement of the dictatorship of property into a dictatorship of capital, a dictatorship of corporate agents, “corporate monarchs,” as he referred to them:

Dictatorship came, and it came to guide the industrial development of the nation by an assumption of irresponsible monarchial power such as enthroned the Caesars, by methods of efficiency of accomplishment and control never surpassed among so many millions of men. But the object of this new American industrial empire, so far as that object was conscious and normative, was not national well-being, but the individual gain of the associated and corporate monarchs through the power of vast profit on enormous capital investment; through the efficiency of an industrial machine that bought the highest managerial and engineering talent and used the latest and most effective methods and machines in a field of unequaled raw material and endless market demand. That this machine might use the profit for the general weal was possible and in cases true. But the uplift and well-being of the mass of men, of the cohorts of common labor, was not its ideal or excuse. Profit, income, uncontrolled power in My Business for My Property and for Me, this was the aim and method of the new monarchial dictatorship that displaced democracy in the United States… ¹⁴

These corporations were for-profit dictatorial governance systems—Du Bois called them “super-dictatorships”—with jurisdictions enforced and chartered by government officers. These corporations were chartered to govern vast masses of labor and resources for immense monetary profit. A late nineteenth-century example in the US were the railroad corporations that fleeced the state and federal vaults, contributing to “the slime of this era of theft and corruption.” ¹⁵

The subject of the corporate dictatorship is the waged worker. Although wage labor appears as free today, rather than coerced, since it is mediated through a contract, its “coerced” and “servile” status was widely acknowledged in nineteenth-century America.¹⁶ In fact, nineteenth-century wage labor contracts often could be enforced through coercion if a worker refused to work or missed the hours stipulated. It was widely recognized that the waged worker’s dependence on the property owner for sustenance made her servile, that is subject to the domination of the owner. In his famous essay, “Coercion and Distribution in a Supposedly Non-Coercive State,” Robert Hale, the early twentieth-century critical legal theorist, shows the connection between wage labor, property, and coercion. Through force and fear of starvation, property laws coerce workers to work under the dictatorial authority of property owners, since the law prevents laborers from working on land and in shops that produce the necessary objects for human sustenance and well-being other than under the authority of the owner.

The unit of the dictatorship of capital, the business corporation, is a legal entity or “legal person” with a set of rights and privileges that allows it to extend its timescale beyond the human lifespan, facilitating massive capital investment, power, and wealth far beyond what a private individual could acquire. The legal architecture that facilitates capital accumulation gives the business corporation immense economic and political power and therefore influence to shape society and its government. The business corporation is also a form of private government, with a constitution and jurisdiction¹⁷ enforced ultimately through the state’s “special bodies of armed agents.”¹⁸ The legal architectures of the corporation and the state are tightly coupled, since the American business corporation originated in the chartered corporation, a delegation of public governance organized around a charter, a sort of corporate constitution legitimized by the state. (For example, some of the original American colonies were corporations chartered by the British monarchy.)

These corporate dictatorships incentivize workers—through coercion and positive feedback—to act as machine parts manipulated by quasi-scientific control systems for the efficient production of commodities, services, and coordination among other corporations, forming planetary networks of production and circulation that clothe, feed, and replenish billions around the world. The massive mobilization of resources and labor through the pooling of capital allowed by the legal architecture of the corporate dictatorship leads to accelerated technological development. Advances in communication and information technology stimulated by the corporate jurisdiction, where the telegraph introduced practically instantaneous transfers of dictations and commands compared to the locomotive and the horse. Radio technology also brought information transfer at the speed of sound, and made coordination inside and outside of the corporation rapid and precise.

The corporation began to implement a caste-like stratification of workers to minimize labor costs: skilled and unskilled, Black and white, immigrant and Indigenous labor. Scientific development and stratification led to an elite caste of workers such as engineers. This stratification of waged workers became worldwide and racialized, as the corporation systematically exploited every prejudice, political weakness, racial pseudo-science, and imperial leverage to discipline lower castes of waged workers into accepting lower compensation, leading to massive wage differences across ethnicities, nationalities, gender, and race. Du Bois described the rise of a caste of “dark workers,” the “dark proletariat,” a class that appeared through the imperial caste stratification implemented by corporate and imperial bosses:

That dark and vast sea of human labor in China and India, the South Seas and all Africa; in the West Indies and Central America and in the United States—that great majority of mankind, on whose bent and broken backs rest today the founding stones of modern industry—shares a common destiny; it is despised and rejected by race and color; paid a wage below the level of decent living; driven, beaten, prisoned and enslaved in all but name; spawning the world’s raw material and luxury-cotton, wool, coffee, tea, cocoa, palm oil, fibers, spices, rubber, silks, lumber, copper, gold, diamonds, leather…. All these are gathered up at prices lowest of the low, manufactured, transformed and transported at fabulous gain; and the resultant wealth is distributed and displayed and made the basis of world power and universal dominion and armed arrogance in London and Paris, Berlin and Rome, New York and Rio de Janeiro.… Out of the exploitation of the dark proletariat comes the Surplus Value filched … which, in cultured lands, the Machine and harnessed Power veil and conceal. The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black.¹⁹

The rise of economics, the law of value, and the tendencies of capitalist breakdown

As corporate dictatorships emerged around the planet, covering whole countries and empires, shuffling around extraordinary masses of material and labor with an unrivaled precision in space and time, the dictatorship of capital enabled the rise of political economy, later called economics, the science for the administration of labor under state and corporate bosses.

Karl Marx developed a “critique of political economy” to show how the “economic science” used by elites managing the corporate dictatorship is self-undermining. In a previous Field Notes article²⁰ I recast Marx’s idea of critique for a twentieth-century audience:

The critique of political economy starts from the runaway tendency of the “capitalist mode of production” to undermine the rule of the bourgeois elite. In other words, it shows how, despite the management skills of the elite, the “law of value” (Marx’s term for the emergent structures of the capitalist mode of production) undermines elite decision-making both through an increase of opaque interconnectedness and complexity and also through economic constraints (e.g., the requirement to sustain a certain type of economic growth).

This opaque interconnectedness follows from the dictatorial jurisdiction of the firm, since the interdependent workers that build this network of production and circulation do not deliberate together and share information as a self-aware community of producers, instead their actions are constrained by dictatorial decision makers following the profit motive.

The profit motive is required for the survival of the firm, since the business must have sufficient income to be able to pay overhead and liabilities. The survival constraints of the firm give rise to a “mute compulsion,”²¹ as firms are constrained to impose workplace discipline to eliminate inefficiencies that hamper profit acquisition. This compulsion overrides workers’ desires for well-being and their creative input, which might undermine the competitiveness of the firm. Thus even workers’ co-ops transform into stratified firms. For example, “the famous workers’ co-op Mondragon has developed a tiered system where overseas contractors are treated like normal wage workers and have no stake in the company. Representatives had justified that practice by saying they run a business and if they don’t contract overseas cheap labor they won’t be competitive.” ²² This “mute compulsion” acquires a global dimension where firms’ decision makers throughout the world experience a ‘compulsion’ to adopt dictatorial forms of workplace governance to stay competitive. These dictatorial forms of governance are only optimized to consider information relevant to monetary profit, with other crucial aspects about production and circulation of commodities, for example how ecologically wasteful a product is, or long-term stability of a supply chain or banking system, becomes secondary unless it serves to pay the costs and debt required for the firm’s survival. In other words, class incentives lead to the creation of ad-hoc logistical complexity that although profitable, might destabilize the overall capitalist system, creating uncertainty and opacity about the system’s behavior.

As the complexity of the capitalist network of production and circulation becomes too opaque, the commitments and expectations between different economic decision makers (for example the commitment to pay interest on debts or expectations of payments and orders) break down, leading to crises. Corporations become increasingly dependent on the state to enforce their jurisdiction, and the government increasingly relies on the corporations’ capacity to mobilize resources and supplies to feed, clothe, train, and arm the executive agents. Powerful security and military-industrial complexes develop, where capitalist weapon manufacturers, corporate security bosses, industrial captains, and state officers form interdependent networks. The rise of the capitalist business of killing and threatening forms a deadly combination with the inherent instabilities of industrial-capitalist societies, since capitalist and political factions can mobilize mass killing technology to gain control, giving capitalist crisis an existential dimension for the human species.

The dictatorship of the bosses

During the early twentieth century, the dictatorship of capital faced attempts at workers’ governments across continents such as America,²³ Europe, and Asia. Workers’ organizations amassed millions of members, who formed workers’ unions, parties, educational associations, and clubs to fight the dictatorship of capital. The students of Marx who filled their ranks argued that the bloody wars, such as World War I, instigated by imperial corporate dictatorships, had shown that the dictatorship of capital is a threat to the human species, since the capitalist mode of production was prone to violent crises and breakdowns. World peace could only appear after the workers overthrew the corporate dictatorship and established a global government of workers’ councils.

The European revolutionary wave peaked in Germany, where a government of the workers’ councils was erected in 1918 during an uprising against the imperial monarchy, a revolt against the four years of world war where workers were sent to slaughter and be slaughtered for the prestige and profit of political and corporate bosses. The workers’ government was violently put down by the bosses through private mercenaries called the Freikorps. Many Freikorps leaders, like Ernst Röhm, later joined the Nazis’ paramilitary bodies. As the Nazis rose, Hitler would promise the bosses to crush the bothersome labor radicals and communists who threatened the corporate dictatorship. The communists and socialists called the fascist dictatorship the “dictatorship of the bosses.”²⁴ This dictatorship was inclusive of bosses of all sizes, from Big Bosses, the corporate magnates, to Little Bosses, like the sadists of the Schutzstaffel, with Hitler the Boss of all Bosses, the Fuhrer, the source from which the legitimacy of this murderous regime flowed. Hitler’s fantastic vision offered a facile explanation for the tendencies to capitalist breakdown, crises caused by opaque and fragile interconnectedness built by corporate dictatorships. World War I, an inter-imperial conflict triggered by complex dependencies and alliances between different national corporate cartels,²⁵ and the economic depression caused by the breakdown of a fragile and intractable global financial system, made many middle-class Germans receptive to simplistic explanations: that the breakdown of German society was due to organized efforts by traitors and enemies conspiring to bring down the great German nation. The Nazi fixation on some of these enemies could be explained by Hitler’s mandate to clear the obstacles to unbridled capitalist dictatorship. Others, like the “enmity” of the Jews, were psychotic fetishes²⁶ serving to explain the crises of capitalism as conscious conspiracies instead of consequences of capitalist irrationality. Hitler’s project of enslaving and exterminating Slavs, considered Untermenschen or “underhumans,” to clear living space (Lebensraum) in Russia for German settlers harkened back to the genocidal settler project in colonial America that used the Christian political theology of the perpetual enmity of infidels to kill and coerce natives. Echoes of this political theology of enmity exist today around today’s military-industrial complexes such as in the United States, Israel, and Russia, with terms such as “terrorist” and “Nazi” justifying mass killings and maiming from Ukraine to Yemen and Palestine.

Republicanism and deliberative social technology

It’s imperative that the human species overcome the crisis-riddled dictatorship of capital. Given that the destructive power of the planet’s military-industrial complexes is capable of annihilating our species, the magnitude of possible catastrophe is unbounded. Today eight billion people are materially interdependent, and rather than self-consciously coordinating their activities based on a real understanding of our exchanges of matter with each other and the Earth, we are subject to dictatorial corporate and government bosses imposing their visions—smokescreens for their profit and power—using religious, national, and ethnic delusions to justify their mandate and compel us to kill each other.

The workers’ movements, from the ex-enslaved Black workers of nineteenth-century America to twentieth-century unions, associations, and parties, struggled against the dictatorship of property and capital by advocating for deliberative self-rule. Whether under the banner of the Union for the pursuit of Happiness or the World Republic of Workers’ Councils, the core idea was self-rule through collective creation and adoption of norms informed by everyone’s shared and unique life experiences. Given the complexity of the systems of production and circulation that keep our species alive, transcending national borders and the particular interests of corporate bosses, only if members of the global species actively contribute their diverse thoughts and practices to collective decision-making do we stand a chance.

To use a phrase of Marx’s, the social revolutions of the twenty-first century can’t take their poetry from the past but only from the future. Although the nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutions shaped today’s world, often for the better, they did not overcome the dictatorship of property and capital in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. We must let the “dead bury their dead.” Yet behind the old slogan of the Republic was the understanding of the need for a social technology of collective deliberation. With the existence of the internet and artificial intelligence, the potential for deliberative and self-aware coordination of the species at a global scale is astronomical; but its realization requires the defeat of the dictatorship of capital that separates and alienates us from each other. The workers in the factory, the nurses taking care of our sick and wounded, the employees filling spreadsheets in cubicles, the farmers growing food, and the people in the military and the streets must find ways to link for a final confrontation with the dictatorship of capital that threatens us all.

1. Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).
2. Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).
3. Jordan von Manalastas, “Civilization and Its Disproportions,” A E S T H E T I C I D E, December 23, 2023, https://aestheticide.com/2023/12/23/civilization-and-its-disproportions/.
4. Du Bois writes in Black Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935): “The immense profit from this new exploitation and world-wide commerce enabled a guild of millionaires to engage the greatest engineers, the wisest men of science, as well as pay high wage to the more intelligent labor and at the same time to have left enough surplus to make more thorough the dictatorship of capital over the state and over the popular vote, not only in Europe and America but in Asia and Africa.… Within the exploiting group of New World masters, greed and jealousy became so fierce that they fought for trade and markets and materials and slaves all over the world until at last in 1914 the world flamed in war. The fantastic structure fell, leaving grotesque Profits and Poverty, Plenty and Starvation, Empire and Democracy, staring at each other across World Depression. “
5. Aldon Morris, Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2017).
6. Frederick Douglass on the tyranny of slave-owners: “You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the two great political parties) is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crown-headed tyrants of Russia and Austria and pride yourselves on your democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and bodyguards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina." Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” Wikisource, the free online library, November 27, 2022, href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/What_to_the_Slave_Is_the_Fourth_of_July%3F">https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/What_to_the_Slave_Is_the_Fourth_of_July%3F.
7. Charles Sumner, “The Barbarism of Slavery,” Wikisource, the free online library, March 13, 2021, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Barbarism_of_Slavery.
8. For the Radicals, the Confederates Rebelled not only against human law enacted by citizens of the Union (positive law), but also against natural law, the law derived from the study of nature.
9. Du Bois’s term for the mass desertion of the plantations by slave workers.
10. Du Bois called Marx the “greatest figure in the science of modern industry” in “Karl Marx and the Negro,” Credo 9 (1935) (https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b211-i086).
11. Jordan von Manalastas, “A Revolution If You Can Keep It,” A E S T H E T I C I D E, December 23, 2023, https://aestheticide.com/2023/07/04/a-revolution-if-you-can-keep-it/.
12. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and Company Inc., 1935), p. 55.
13. South Carolina Democratic Party, “Southern Democrats Declare "a Dead Radical Is Very Harmless",” SHEC: Resources for Teachers, accessed January 11, 2024, https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1534
14. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, pp. 585–586
15. Ibid, p. 583
16. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
17. David Ciepley, “Democracy and the Corporation: The Long View,” Annual Review of Political Science 26 (2023).
18. Lenin, paraphrasing Engels, originally referred to “special bodies of armed men” in State and Revolution.
19. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, p.16
20. “On Adam Tooze: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" by Amir Hernandez: https://brooklynrail.org/2023/02/field-notes/On-Adam-Tooze-A-Contribution-to-the-Critique-of-Political-Economy.
21. Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (London: Verso Books, 2023).
22. “On Adam Tooze: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy."
23. A workers’ government appeared in the West Virginia coal fields during the 1920s. The workers’ union allied with municipal officers in Matewan attempted a workers’ government to fight corporate enforcers contracted by the Stone Mountain Coal Company, Sid Hatfield, municipal police chief, deputized armed workers, many vets from World War I, in order to stop the evictions carried by the Baldwin-Felts detective agency in retaliation against union efforts. The mining corporation owned the houses. Armed combat later ensued, a shootout that left seven detectives dead, two workers and the mayor Cabell Testerman. The Detective Agency would later murder Sid Hatfield in revenge after he was acquitted by the courts of wrongdoing. Enraged miners raised a workers’ army of thousands, the largest armed uprising in US History since the Civil War and attempted to unionize the county by force and avenge their fallen officer, Sid Hatfield. The county sheriff, financed by the mining corporations, would raise a reactionary army in response, which defeated the workers’ army and thus the workers’ government.
24. Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Penguin, 2008).
25. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism (Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/).
26. Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to the Holocaust," New German Critique 19 (1980), 97-115.