Capitalism has already eaten democracy anyway

There’s an Australian election tomorrow, Joe Exotic from Tiger King is now tangentially involved, and I just cannot take any of this shit seriously anymore. 

I understand that’s an unusual position for an editor of a political media outlet to take, but it’s 2025, get with the program. If I treated this circus with reverence, and acted as though I wanted to be included in its detached world, I believe I would be derelict in the responsibilities that come with having an audience.

If this campaign hasn’t alienated at least a small part of you, I don’t think you’re paying enough attention. And if you aren’t, you know what, that’s fair enough, too. I do not see how the last five weeks of petrol stations, racist fear mongering, tinkering and tax bribes, and avoiding talking about all of humanity’s existential crises deserves our unquestioning respect. I crossed the street to avoid talking to my local ALP member, a Zionist that went to the same hyper-wealthy private school Josh Frydenberg went to, the other week. It’s a depraved shitshow out there. 

Big picture: we either get petrol credits or tax credits, fossil fuels or fossil fuels, genocide with Australian weapons or genocide with Australian weapons. The rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer, and as more and more people want to shout Free Palestine or Fuck Capitalism or End Fossil Fuels, it will become harder and more illegal to do so. 

Laws will be abused to silence anti-genocide dissent and anti-fossil fuel protest as each situation gets worse. You can already see this if you look just beyond the boundaries of the mainstream TV world; it is everywhere else. These trajectories should snap us out of our stupor. 

If the actual Left cannot get its shit together soon, ineffective spineless centrists committed to managing the decline will eventually collapse under the coordinated weight of a global campaign of the far-right’s to seize the West forever. 

And it’s all because we allowed the rich to get too rich. 

The unstated plan, quite clearly, is for the hyper-wealthy to play make believe and rort the last drops of joy from the planet as it burns. We get authoritarianism, they get more dick-rockets to take Katy Perry to space in. Then they blame brown people, or trans people, or Communists, and we all fall about ourselves arguing with each other instead of just eating these pricks. 

None of this is natural, all of this is a poor choice called capitalism, and you just know things are ominous when Hitler anecdotes seem pertinent…. 

Two weeks before Germany’s 1933 election, the nation’s wealthiest oligarchs, titans of finance, mining, banking, textiles and insurance, were summoned to Göring’s palace across the river from the Reichstag. There, Hitler explained the nature of his plan, leaving out the ethnic cleansing but explicitly mentioning the end of free elections. ‘Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy,’ he told the gathered elite. ‘We must first gain complete power if we want to crush the other side completely.’ You will profit more if the people are less free, was the core of Hitler’s proposal to the oligarchs. 

First, Hitler needed money to win the ‘last election’. The Nazis held out their weird fashy hats and the capitalists naturally poured money in with the wannabe dictator. 

David de Jong writes in Nazi Billionaires that ‘the tycoons clearly had no qualms about funding the demise of their democracy.’ The largest donations to the Nazi campaign in 1933 came from the mining industry association (600,000 reichsmarks) and IG Farben (400,000 reichsmarks), a chemical and pharmaceutical company.      

It’s always the parasitic assholes that own giant holes in the ground, isn’t it?

Capitalists saved the Nazi cause from defeat before it even got started. Pumped up with the influx of desperately needed cash, the Nazis instantly started spending big on propaganda. Joseph Goebbels, essentially their in-house Rupert Murdoch/IPA/Elon Musk all rolled into one, wrote in his diary on February 21: ‘Göring brings the joyful news that 3 million is available for the election. Great thing! I immediately alert the whole propaganda department. And one hour later, the machine rattles. Now we will turn on an election campaign… Today the work is fun. The money is there.’

History doesn’t repeat, but it always rhymes. 

Elon Musk donated $288 million to Donald Trump’s campaign, not to mention the incalculably valuable influence of his propaganda network, X. Now he’s inside the treasury, working to redistribute public money into the hands of the ultra-wealthy even more than has already occurred under the neoliberal deathcult. All the silicon valley billionaires have fallen into line. Every American newspaper now needs to be read between the lines for glimpses of the truth. Government could have seized Big Tech; instead, the opposite happened. 

In Australia, Clive Palmer has spent a metric shit-tonne annoying the absolute living fuck out of the electorate with ads filled with lies and culture war nonsense, and our cowardly, financially squeezed, amoral press leapt at the cash. ‘The Greens are power mad. They’re evil!’ his YouTube ads scream every seven minutes. In the 2022 election, Palmer alone spent $117 million on ads. I’d be surprised if he spent less this time out. Gina Rinehart donated $500,000 to the Liberal Party via their state branches; the impact of her dark money spent on think tanks like the IPA is less clear and almost certainly more dangerous. 

Is it any wonder that we keep letting these people influence our politics, pilfer our resources, and refuse to tax them adequately?

If left unsupervised, capitalism will always eat democracy. And we are further on this arc than many of us want to believe. 

Political control ebbs and flows, light and dark battle eternally, and human societies of altruists and community-minded people end up governed by psychopathic vampires over and over again. This is the most important thing history shows us. There is always a class that rules, and a class that serves. How tight the boot stomps on our necks waxes and wanes, as does our awareness of the boot’s existence. But in embracing neoliberal ‘greed is good’ capitalism, we were always making the re-emergence of fascism inevitable. 

Enjoy the small victories tomorrow. I will. Each Zionist that feels the rage of humanity, each racist asshole that loses their seat, I will celebrate. But this game is unequivocally rigged while the hyper-wealthy are allowed to hoard this much wealth. We only really win when we start playing a different game.