They Aren't Afraid Enough

Morning Comrades.

The strangest thing about contemporary capitalism here in the West is not that it produces misery, because exploitation has always generated misery, nor that it concentrates wealth, because accumulation has always demanded concentration, but that it appears increasingly unwilling even to purchase social peace at a price that it can so obviously afford. I am just coming of a unusually demanding day at the restaurant and as I was riding my bike home, that thought struck me.

Every economic mechanism, every technological innovation, every logistical achievement, every increase in productivity, every advance in automation, communications, medicine and industrial capacity points towards a civilisation capable of providing levels of material security unprecedented in human history. Even if one were to leave untouched the vast machinery of global extraction through which the capitalist core continues to appropriate extraordinary wealth from the Global South, even if one accepted for the sake of argument the continued existence of private property, markets, multinational corporations and billionaires, even if one accepted the continuation of capitalism itself, the resources already exist to construct societies across Western Europe and North America in which housing insecurity, poverty wages, hunger, medical bankruptcy, educational indebtedness and the constant anxiety of survival simply ceased to exist. The wealth is there. The productive forces are there. The technical capacity is there. The political choice is not.

This is what should disturb us far more than the familiar observation that capitalism is unequal, capitalism has always been unequal. The more revealing question is why contemporary capitalism and specifically its leaders and the figure heads they choose as our political representatives, refuses to buy stability through abundance when previous generations of capitalists often considered precisely that arrangement to be in their own interests. Between the decades following the Second World War and the crises of the 1970s, much of the Western working class experienced a historically exceptional settlement. It was neither socialism nor equality, and it was certainly not free from imperial violence, racial hierarchy or patriarchal domination, yet stable employment, affordable housing, expanding public services, pensions, accessible education and rising wages produced an appearance of shared prosperity that became embedded within the political imagination of successive generations. The crucial point is not that this settlement represented justice; it represented management. It was a compromise designed to prevent something infinitely more dangerous than higher taxation, it was designed to prevent revolution.

That compromise no longer exists, although the capacity to sustain it certainly does. Productivity has multiplied beyond anything imaginable in the 1950s. Supply chains now encircle the globe, agricultural production vastly exceeds nutritional requirements and vast financial institutions routinely mobilise trillions of pounds within days whenever markets require rescuing. Governments that endlessly explain why hospitals cannot be funded somehow discover limitless resources whenever banks collapse, military budgets require expansion or financial markets begin displaying symptoms of anxiety. Scarcity has become almost entirely political and the inability to provide abundance is not an economic failure but an ideological performance.

One, therefore, arrives at an uncomfortable hypothesis. If the ruling classes genuinely wished merely to preserve capitalism, they could almost certainly do so by expanding social democracy beyond anything previously experienced. They could build affordable housing on an unprecedented scale, guarantee universal healthcare without austerity, abolish tuition fees, provide shorter working weeks, expand public transport, introduce generous universal basic services, regulate rents, increase taxation upon extreme wealth and maintain sufficient living standards that the overwhelming majority of the population would have very little incentive to challenge the existing order. Indeed, I suspect that the overwhelming majority of those who presently describe themselves as critics of capitalism would accept precisely such an arrangement. They would continue criticising multinational corporations over expensive coffee, publish thoughtful essays on structural inequality, vote for respectable centre-left parties every few years and quietly conclude that history had reached a satisfactory compromise. Radical politics would become a lifestyle preference rather than a historical force.

There is an irony bordering upon comedy here. Much of the contemporary Western left imagines itself permanently revolutionary while simultaneously demanding little more than a slightly kinder administration of the existing economic system. Remove tuition fees, tax billionaires somewhat more aggressively, strengthen labour protections, restore public healthcare, regulate landlords and introduce environmental reforms, and enormous sections of supposedly anti-capitalist politics would happily declare victory. Capital itself could continue extracting extraordinary wealth from Bangladesh, the Congo, Indonesia, Palestine, Latin America and wherever else cheap labour and valuable resources remained available, provided the domestic population received sufficient comfort to stop asking inconvenient questions. It would be an empire with excellent cycling infrastructure.

One would imagine that any rational ruling class interested primarily in maintaining power would leap enthusiastically towards such an arrangement. Instead they appear determined to do almost the exact opposite.

Rather than expanding democratic participation, they strip it of every substantive capacity until democracy survives only as theatre, while surveillance ceases to be an emergency measure and becomes the ordinary condition of everyday life, and the public institutions won through generations of struggle are methodically dismantled, sold off and cannibalised, because a society organised around shared provision and genuine political agency remains infinitely more threatening to capital than any temporary loss of profit.. Rather than protecting labour, they casualise employment until entire generations exist permanently within an economy of temporary contracts, impossible rents, algorithmic management and perpetual insecurity. Rather than encouraging political confidence, they cultivate exhaustion. Rather than permitting public spaces in which people might assemble anonymously, they transform every interaction into data, every relationship into a market opportunity and every expression of dissent into a security concern.

The puzzle therefore becomes impossible to ignore. If capitalism could purchase stability through abundance, why does it increasingly choose instability through repression?

The obvious explanation is greed, but greed alone seems insufficient. The billionaire who acquires ten billion instead of eight billion gains almost nothing materially significant. There comes a point where accumulation ceases to satisfy consumption and instead becomes indistinguishable from power itself. Wealth ceases to function as money and becomes command. The objective is no longer to possess more than everyone else but to ensure that everyone else possesses less autonomy.

This distinction matters because it shifts the analysis away from economics narrowly understood and towards class power in its fullest political sense. Capital is not merely interested in profits, capital is interested in obedience. Obedience is easier to secure when populations remain permanently uncertain about housing, employment, healthcare and debt. A secure worker negotiates, an insecure worker complies. A population that believes tomorrow will resemble today begins making demands. A population convinced that tomorrow may involve eviction, redundancy or bankruptcy thanks the government merely for postponing catastrophe until next Thursday.

Precarity therefore performs a political function that abundance cannot. It disciplines.

This is why surveillance expands alongside insecurity rather than replacing it. It is not enough that people depend economically upon employers; they must also internalise the possibility of observation. The architecture resembles less the spectacular terror of twentieth-century dictatorships than an infinitely patient bureaucracy quietly recording everything while insisting that those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear. Fascism no longer necessarily arrives marching in uniform beneath enormous banners. Increasingly it arrives wearing ergonomic trainers, carrying an iPhone and explaining that facial recognition simply improves customer experience.

The remarkable achievement of contemporary liberalism has been its ability to construct increasingly authoritarian infrastructures while continuing to describe itself as the opposite of authoritarian. Emergency legislation quietly sheds the pretence of exceptional necessity and hardens into the permanent architecture of government, while counter-terrorism powers drift ever further from their declared purpose to encompass environmental activists, anti-war campaigners and socialist organisations. Police authority expands with scarcely a murmur of democratic consent, digital identities become inseparable from participation in everyday life, financial transactions are rendered increasingly transparent to the state and its corporate partners, and artificial intelligence is celebrated as the next great advance in governance precisely because it promises to identify, classify and intervene against individuals before they have committed any crime, revealing a political order that no longer seeks merely to regulate dissent but to anticipate, pre-empt and extinguish it before it can acquire collective form. Meanwhile newspapers continue discussing freedom as though freedom consisted primarily of selecting between different subscription services.

One has to understand that the ruling classes fear something deeper than electoral defeat. They fear social confidence itself.

There exists a particular quality possessed by populations who no longer fear losing everything. Once survival ceases occupying every waking hour, politics expands into the available space. Time itself becomes dangerous and leisure produces association. Association produces solidarity and then solidarity produces organisation. Organisation eventually produces movements capable of imagining societies beyond capitalism altogether.

Perhaps this is the possibility that abundance inadvertently creates.

After all, history repeatedly demonstrates that revolutionary movements rarely emerge from absolute destitution alone. Political consciousness requires space within which consciousness can develop. Endless insecurity destroys precisely that space.

This may explain why neoliberalism increasingly appears willing to sacrifice long-term stability in exchange for immediate domination. Better an exhausted population permanently managing crises than a prosperous population with sufficient time to discover that billionaires are historically unnecessary. Better endless culture wars than class politics. Better algorithmic distraction than public assembly. Better loneliness than solidarity. Better anxiety than confidence.

Viewed from this perspective, contemporary capitalism resembles a system that no longer trusts its own legitimacy. It governs not through optimism but through anticipation of rebellion. Every expansion of surveillance, every restriction upon protest, every attack upon trade unions, every criminalisation of dissent, every attempt to pathologise radical politics reveals less confidence than fear. States genuinely secure in their authority rarely require populations to be monitored so comprehensively. Governments confident in public consent seldom criminalise inconvenience with such enthusiasm.

This should, and has to, encourage us rather than depress us.

Power that behaves as though it is afraid usually is.

That contradiction cannot be explained by economic necessity because it is not economically necessary. It can only be explained politically.

The most dangerous realisation, therefore, is not that another world is possible, because that slogan has become so familiar as to risk harmlessness. The more dangerous realisation is that this world could already be materially transformed without abolishing the productive capacities that capitalism itself has created. The resources exist. The labour exists. The technology exists. Even the wealth extracted from the rest of the planet already exists. What does not exist is a ruling class prepared to exchange domination for legitimacy. Don’t, importantly, mistake that reality with my appreciation for it, it is the exact opposite, but viewed from their viewpoint, it could be easier than fuelling and increasing number of people willing to put their head on a pike. However, material security possesses an unfortunate tendency to generate intellectual curiosity, and intellectual curiosity has repeatedly proved incompatible with stable class rule.

So they choose something else instead. A civilisation technically capable of abundance deliberately administered as though it were suffering permanent shortage. Not because they cannot imagine a better society, but because they can, and because they understand with absolute clarity that once ordinary people begin living well enough to think freely, they may eventually discover that the entire architecture of class domination has become historically obsolete.

That, perhaps, is the secret hidden beneath the endless austerity, the digital policing, the managed fear and the carefully cultivated exhaustion. It is not simply that they despise us, although many undoubtedly do. It is that they understand something we too often forget. Human beings who possess security, dignity, leisure and one another become politically unpredictable. History has repeatedly shown that such people eventually cease asking to be governed more kindly and begin asking why they require masters at all.

Yours, tiredly but warmly as always,

V.