"Wage Slaves Of The World Unite!" Cannot Work As A Rallying Call If They Believe The Fascist Indoctrination That They're Not Slaves!
A wage slave is a worker who must sell their labor power to an employer to obtain the means of subsistence, especially for survival. Formal legal freedom, limited to the ability to quit one job and seek another, is largely illusory. Because the worker does not own productive property or independent means of survival, the alternative to wage labor is poverty, homelessness, hunger, or worse. This creates a structural compulsion that makes the employment relationship coercive rather than a free contract between equals. The worker is free only in the narrow sense that no individual owner legally owns their body; the system as a whole forces them to work under conditions set by capital. The wage relation extracts surplus value while leaving the worker with just enough to reproduce their labor power for the next day. Various types of slavery happen every day in the US, UK, and Scandinavian countries that are so common, the population ignores them and views their treatment as necessary and natural treatment for the labels assigned.
A prison slave is a person incarcerated and compelled to labor, often for little or no pay, under threat of further punishment. In the United States, the 13th Amendment’s exception for punishment of crime explicitly authorizes this form of forced labor. Prison labor systems supply cheap or free workers to private contractors or state industries; the incarcerated person has minimal bargaining power, limited exit options, and faces direct state coercion. This is a clear, residual form of chattel-like slavery that persists inside modern legal systems.
Under-the-table, cash-in-hand, or off-the-books workers are particularly exposed. Without formal contracts, legal protections, minimum-wage enforcement, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, or the ability to organize openly, they depend almost entirely on the employer’s goodwill. Threats of non-payment, sudden dismissal, or reporting to authorities function as coercive levers. The absence of institutional safeguards turns the employment relation into one of personal dependence and vulnerability, which is a form of de facto slavery or highly intensified wage slavery.
Undocumented workers face an even sharper form of coercion. Their legal status creates a constant background threat of detention, deportation, family separation, and loss of livelihood. Employers exploit this vulnerability by demanding longer hours, sub-minimum wages, unsafe conditions, or unpaid work under the implicit or explicit threat of calling immigration authorities. The worker’s ability to quit or complain is severely constrained by fear of state power being used against them. The arrangement is one in which the state and capital jointly produce a hyper-exploitable, rightless labor force, creating slavery enforced through immigration law rather than formal ownership of the person.
These structures function through five distinct mechanisms. Extortion operates as the threat of destitution, deportation, or further imprisonment to extract compliance and surplus labor. Oppression exists as the systematic denial of power, voice, and exit options where the worker cannot meaningfully refuse the terms on offer. Violation occurs against bodily autonomy, dignity, and the formal equality promised by liberal law. Exploitation is the extraction of surplus value, where workers produce more value than they receive in wages, with the difference being appropriated by capital. Coercion manifests not primarily as personal violence, but as structural compulsion arising from propertylessness, legal vulnerability, and the necessity of survival. These differ from classical chattel slavery mainly in form while sharing the essential feature that the laborer’s will is subordinated by necessity and force.
All forms of capitalism require these and other forms of slavery. Capitalism is a system of generalized commodity production driven by the competitive accumulation of capital. It requires a class of people who have nothing to sell but their labor power, alongside mechanisms that keep the cost of that labor power low enough for profitable accumulation, including a reserve army of labor whose existence disciplines those currently employed. It also requires access to cheaper labor, resources, and markets beyond the core countries. When domestic conditions improve enough that overt coercion or extreme exploitation becomes politically or economically costly, capital and the states that support it turn outward through colonial extraction, unequal exchange, structural adjustment, military intervention, support for authoritarian regimes that suppress labor, and migration regimes that create vulnerable workforces.
Even in high-wage social-democratic or welfare-state variants of capitalism, the relatively better conditions of the domestic working class rest on the intensified exploitation of workers elsewhere. When a capitalist system appears free of domestic slavery-like relations, it is simply offshoring or externalizing those relations through foreign policy, trade rules, debt, and military power. The system as a whole depends on the continued existence of unfree or semi-free labor in some form, because fully free, equally empowered labor eliminates the surplus that capital requires for accumulation.
The relatively high-wage, regulated, welfare-oriented systems of Scandinavia, broader EU social democracies, and Lockean-style liberal democracies such as the United States still require these coercive and exploitative relations. These systems are inherently capitalist, as the means of production are predominantly privately owned or controlled by capital. The great majority of people own little or no productive property and must sell their labor power to survive. Welfare states, strong unions, minimum wages, and social transfers raise the floor of subsistence and improve bargaining power, but they do not abolish the underlying compulsion. The worker who refuses all available employment still faces poverty, loss of housing, or dependence on residual means-tested benefits that are deliberately kept below a comfortable living standard. The wage relation itself continues to rest on economic coercion, forcing work under threat of deprivation, even when that deprivation is softened.
Domestic mechanisms maintain this dynamic within developed nations. Full employment is rarely absolute, ensuring that precarious, part-time, gig, and low-wage service work remains, while a pool of unemployed or underemployed people disciplines those currently employed. Under-the-table work continues in construction, cleaning, agriculture, care, and hospitality, especially among migrants. Scandinavian and EU countries rely on immigrant workers for agriculture, elder care, cleaning, logistics, and meatpacking. Undocumented or asylum-seeker populations face restricted rights, fear of deportation, and heightened vulnerability to wage theft and unsafe conditions. The US relies heavily on a large undocumented workforce in agriculture, construction, and services, plus formal guest-worker programs that limit mobility. Simultaneously, the United States retains large-scale prison industries, while several European countries operate prison work programs where the lack of free exit and the threat of punishment remain coercive. Low-wage, high-exploitation niches are disproportionately filled by racialized minorities, recent immigrants, and women, reproducing hierarchies that lower overall labor costs.
The relatively high living standards and social peace of the Nordic model, much of the EU core, and the US middle class are made possible by external extraction and unequal global relations. Consumer goods, intermediate inputs, and raw materials are produced under far harsher conditions in the Global South or Eastern Europe, where low wages, weak labor rights, and authoritarian suppression of unions subsidize cheap imports that raise real living standards in the North. Capital from Scandinavian, German, Dutch, or American firms invests abroad precisely to capture this surplus. The wealth that funded early industrialization and later welfare states was accumulated through colonialism, slavery, resource plunder, and unequal trade, while contemporary foreign policy, trade agreements, debt regimes, and military power maintain access to cheap resources, open markets, and compliant labor regimes abroad. Restrictive external borders create a pool of rightless or semi-rightless workers inside richer countries while allowing capital to benefit from their labor, just as free movement inside the EU creates an internal periphery that supplies cheaper labor to the core. Additionally, Norway’s oil wealth, Sweden’s and Germany’s advanced manufacturing exports, and the US’s technological and financial dominance rest on global market positions underwritten by geopolitical power and historical advantage.
A pure free market among juridical equals never exists at the systemic level. Lockean liberal property rights protect already-accumulated capital and the ongoing right to hire labor under conditions of unequal bargaining power. Social-democratic regulation and redistribution humanize the domestic face of the system and reduce the most visible forms of destitution, but they leave the capital–labor relation, the need for surplus extraction, and the reliance on more intensely coerced labor intact. When domestic conditions become too costly or politically contentious, capital and the states that support it externalize the harshest exploitation through trade, investment, migration policy, and foreign policy. The comparatively milder systems of Scandinavia, the EU, and the United States merely redistribute and internationalize these coercive labor relations.
Social, liberal, and moderate fascists perform a specific systemic function by stabilizing and legitimizing capitalist relations of exploitation while appearing to mitigate or oppose their harshest edges. Reformist liberals, social democrats, democratic socialists, and progressives enable and sustain the system by managing its contradictions rather than abolishing the underlying structure. They expand welfare, labor protections, public services, and progressive taxation to raise the floor of subsistence, reduce open destitution, and dampen revolutionary pressure from the working class, making the system more tolerable and durable. They incorporate unions and left parties into parliamentary and corporatist arrangements, giving organized labor a stake in the continued profitability of capital so that strikes and unrest are channeled into negotiable demands rather than challenges to property itself. They supply moral and democratic legitimacy through elections, rights discourse, anti-discrimination laws, and rhetoric of fairness that make the core coercive relation appear as a free contract and equal citizenship. They act as shock absorbers through bailouts, stimulus, and temporary expansions of the safety net, preventing collapse while preserving capital’s rights to accumulate and relocate production. On migration, prisons, and informal labor, they combine humanitarian language with enforcement through pathways to regularization or guest-worker programs alongside deportation regimes and carceral systems that continue to supply vulnerable or coerced labor. These forces humanize the domestic face of exploitation enough to keep the machine running, reproducing the system under a more consensual, less openly brutal form. Those who do not believe full socialism is possible and oppose it, are indirectly admitting to being a moderate fascist; and those who do not support the dictatorship of the proletariat and its democratic centralist operating system are either a fascist opportunist variant or a liability that will lead us into a fascist variant.
This is not speculation about a possible future. It is the same structural determinism Marx applied to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall: a law of motion internal to the system, temporarily offset by countervailing factors (colonial extraction, welfare concession, credit expansion, war economy), which reassert themselves the moment those offsets are exhausted. Dimitrov's 1935 definition, fascism as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinist, and imperialist elements of finance capital, was not a description of one historical accident in interwar Europe. It was a description of what capital does in every instance where reform can no longer contain the contradiction between accumulation and the class it depends on. Weimar, Pinochet's Chile, and the post-2008 authoritarian turn across Europe and the United States are not three separate events. They are the same law of motion expressing itself under three different sets of exhausted countervailing conditions. The absence of open fascism in a given capitalist state at a given moment is not a refutation of the tendency. It is evidence that the offsetting mechanisms, welfare, credit, colonial rent, have not yet been exhausted in that state.
All forms of capitalism inevitably decay into fascism. Fascism is the form capital turns to when parliamentary reform and welfare can no longer contain intensifying contradictions, especially mass unemployment, falling profits, strong labor organization, or threats to property. It operates as an emergency dictatorship of the most reactionary elements of the bourgeoisie, using nationalism, anti-communism, and paramilitary violence to smash independent working-class organizations while preserving private property and hierarchy. Reformist welfare capitalism delays this outcome by buying social peace. When profitability crises, debt, demographic pressures, or geopolitical shocks erode the material base of the safety net, these same states shift rightward through austerity, scapegoating of migrants or minorities, expanded policing and incarceration, and restrictions on labor and protest. This decay is a cyclical, ever-present potential that becomes actual under sufficient strain. This is not speculation about a possible future. It is the same structural determinism Marx applied to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall: a law of motion internal to the system, temporarily offset by countervailing factors, which reassert themselves the moment those offsets are exhausted. Dimitrov's 1935 definition, fascism as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinist, and imperialist elements of finance capital, was not a description of one historical accident in interwar Europe. It was a description of what capital does in every instance where reform can no longer contain the contradiction between accumulation and the class it depends on. Weimar, Pinochet's Chile, and the post-2008 authoritarian turn across Europe and the United States are not three separate events. They are the same law of motion expressing itself under three different sets of exhausted countervailing conditions. The absence of open fascism in a given capitalist state at a given moment is not a refutation of the tendency. It is evidence that the offsetting mechanisms, welfare, credit, colonial rent, have not yet been exhausted in that state.
Prosperous capitalist nations naturally evolve into anarcho-capitalism, aristocracy, corporateocracy, oligarchy, or plutocracy due to the endogenous tendencies of capital accumulation. Competitive accumulation produces the concentration and centralization of capital as successful firms grow, merge, or acquire others, making wealth and ownership increasingly skewed over time. Concentrated economic power translates into political influence through lobbying, campaign finance, revolving-door appointments, media ownership, and the structural dependence of governments on investment and employment. The result is oligarchy or plutocracy, where formal democracy persists, but the range of viable policy is constrained by the preferences of large capital. While the visible middle class expands and social mobility appears real, the upper tail of wealth and corporate power pulls away through regulatory capture, intellectual property regimes, financialization, and barriers to entry that reinforce elite closure into a corporateocracy or new aristocracy. Anarcho-capitalism emerges in deregulatory, privatizing phases where public goods are commodified and residual state functions primarily protect property and contracts, allowing large corporations and wealthy individuals to exercise outsized power inside a continuously deregulating state.
Prosperous phases coexist with, and accelerate, elite consolidation. The Nordic countries, Germany, and the post-war United States demonstrate that high living standards for many do not prevent rising top-end inequality, corporate political influence, or reliance on externalized cheap labor and resources. Reformist management, fascist emergency responses, and oligarchic drift are different modalities of the same system, operating as structural laws shaped by politics, technology, demographics, and resistance.
Workers do not unite against a condition they have been trained not to recognize. The ideological apparatus of capitalism, its schools, its churches, its television, its news media, its cultures, its liberal civics, exists to manufacture the belief that the wage relation is a free contract between equals rather than a structural compulsion backed by the threat of poverty, homelessness, and death. This is fascist indoctrination in the precise sense used above: it launders coercion into consent, launders extraction into opportunity, and launders the worker's structural unfreedom into a story about personal choice, hard work, and mobility. A worker who believes they freely chose their employer, freely chose their wage, and could freely leave for something better will not identify with the phrase "wage slave." They will hear it as hyperbole, as an insult to actual chattel slaves, as the rhetoric of people who have never worked a real job.
This reaction is not a rebuttal of the analysis. It is the indoctrination functioning exactly as designed. The rallying cry "wage slaves of the world unite" fails not because the analysis is wrong but because the class it addresses has been ideologically conditioned to reject the premise before examining the argument. Class consciousness is therefore not a spontaneous byproduct of exploitation; it must be built against an active, continuous, materially-funded campaign to prevent it. Any revolutionary or vanguardist project must treat this ideological battle as inseparable from the economic one, because a class that cannot name its own condition cannot organize to end it. This is why education, re-education, and deprogramming is so important for humanity in the fight against capitalism, fascism, and the dark triad personalities and identity protective cognition it fosters under the guise of individual liberties, freedom, and democracy.
A prison slave is a person incarcerated and compelled to labor, often for little or no pay, under threat of further punishment. In the United States, the 13th Amendment’s exception for punishment of crime explicitly authorizes this form of forced labor. Prison labor systems supply cheap or free workers to private contractors or state industries; the incarcerated person has minimal bargaining power, limited exit options, and faces direct state coercion. This is a clear, residual form of chattel-like slavery that persists inside modern legal systems.
Under-the-table, cash-in-hand, or off-the-books workers are particularly exposed. Without formal contracts, legal protections, minimum-wage enforcement, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, or the ability to organize openly, they depend almost entirely on the employer’s goodwill. Threats of non-payment, sudden dismissal, or reporting to authorities function as coercive levers. The absence of institutional safeguards turns the employment relation into one of personal dependence and vulnerability, which is a form of de facto slavery or highly intensified wage slavery.
Undocumented workers face an even sharper form of coercion. Their legal status creates a constant background threat of detention, deportation, family separation, and loss of livelihood. Employers exploit this vulnerability by demanding longer hours, sub-minimum wages, unsafe conditions, or unpaid work under the implicit or explicit threat of calling immigration authorities. The worker’s ability to quit or complain is severely constrained by fear of state power being used against them. The arrangement is one in which the state and capital jointly produce a hyper-exploitable, rightless labor force, creating slavery enforced through immigration law rather than formal ownership of the person.
These structures function through five distinct mechanisms. Extortion operates as the threat of destitution, deportation, or further imprisonment to extract compliance and surplus labor. Oppression exists as the systematic denial of power, voice, and exit options where the worker cannot meaningfully refuse the terms on offer. Violation occurs against bodily autonomy, dignity, and the formal equality promised by liberal law. Exploitation is the extraction of surplus value, where workers produce more value than they receive in wages, with the difference being appropriated by capital. Coercion manifests not primarily as personal violence, but as structural compulsion arising from propertylessness, legal vulnerability, and the necessity of survival. These differ from classical chattel slavery mainly in form while sharing the essential feature that the laborer’s will is subordinated by necessity and force.
All forms of capitalism require these and other forms of slavery. Capitalism is a system of generalized commodity production driven by the competitive accumulation of capital. It requires a class of people who have nothing to sell but their labor power, alongside mechanisms that keep the cost of that labor power low enough for profitable accumulation, including a reserve army of labor whose existence disciplines those currently employed. It also requires access to cheaper labor, resources, and markets beyond the core countries. When domestic conditions improve enough that overt coercion or extreme exploitation becomes politically or economically costly, capital and the states that support it turn outward through colonial extraction, unequal exchange, structural adjustment, military intervention, support for authoritarian regimes that suppress labor, and migration regimes that create vulnerable workforces.
Even in high-wage social-democratic or welfare-state variants of capitalism, the relatively better conditions of the domestic working class rest on the intensified exploitation of workers elsewhere. When a capitalist system appears free of domestic slavery-like relations, it is simply offshoring or externalizing those relations through foreign policy, trade rules, debt, and military power. The system as a whole depends on the continued existence of unfree or semi-free labor in some form, because fully free, equally empowered labor eliminates the surplus that capital requires for accumulation.
The relatively high-wage, regulated, welfare-oriented systems of Scandinavia, broader EU social democracies, and Lockean-style liberal democracies such as the United States still require these coercive and exploitative relations. These systems are inherently capitalist, as the means of production are predominantly privately owned or controlled by capital. The great majority of people own little or no productive property and must sell their labor power to survive. Welfare states, strong unions, minimum wages, and social transfers raise the floor of subsistence and improve bargaining power, but they do not abolish the underlying compulsion. The worker who refuses all available employment still faces poverty, loss of housing, or dependence on residual means-tested benefits that are deliberately kept below a comfortable living standard. The wage relation itself continues to rest on economic coercion, forcing work under threat of deprivation, even when that deprivation is softened.
Domestic mechanisms maintain this dynamic within developed nations. Full employment is rarely absolute, ensuring that precarious, part-time, gig, and low-wage service work remains, while a pool of unemployed or underemployed people disciplines those currently employed. Under-the-table work continues in construction, cleaning, agriculture, care, and hospitality, especially among migrants. Scandinavian and EU countries rely on immigrant workers for agriculture, elder care, cleaning, logistics, and meatpacking. Undocumented or asylum-seeker populations face restricted rights, fear of deportation, and heightened vulnerability to wage theft and unsafe conditions. The US relies heavily on a large undocumented workforce in agriculture, construction, and services, plus formal guest-worker programs that limit mobility. Simultaneously, the United States retains large-scale prison industries, while several European countries operate prison work programs where the lack of free exit and the threat of punishment remain coercive. Low-wage, high-exploitation niches are disproportionately filled by racialized minorities, recent immigrants, and women, reproducing hierarchies that lower overall labor costs.
The relatively high living standards and social peace of the Nordic model, much of the EU core, and the US middle class are made possible by external extraction and unequal global relations. Consumer goods, intermediate inputs, and raw materials are produced under far harsher conditions in the Global South or Eastern Europe, where low wages, weak labor rights, and authoritarian suppression of unions subsidize cheap imports that raise real living standards in the North. Capital from Scandinavian, German, Dutch, or American firms invests abroad precisely to capture this surplus. The wealth that funded early industrialization and later welfare states was accumulated through colonialism, slavery, resource plunder, and unequal trade, while contemporary foreign policy, trade agreements, debt regimes, and military power maintain access to cheap resources, open markets, and compliant labor regimes abroad. Restrictive external borders create a pool of rightless or semi-rightless workers inside richer countries while allowing capital to benefit from their labor, just as free movement inside the EU creates an internal periphery that supplies cheaper labor to the core. Additionally, Norway’s oil wealth, Sweden’s and Germany’s advanced manufacturing exports, and the US’s technological and financial dominance rest on global market positions underwritten by geopolitical power and historical advantage.
A pure free market among juridical equals never exists at the systemic level. Lockean liberal property rights protect already-accumulated capital and the ongoing right to hire labor under conditions of unequal bargaining power. Social-democratic regulation and redistribution humanize the domestic face of the system and reduce the most visible forms of destitution, but they leave the capital–labor relation, the need for surplus extraction, and the reliance on more intensely coerced labor intact. When domestic conditions become too costly or politically contentious, capital and the states that support it externalize the harshest exploitation through trade, investment, migration policy, and foreign policy. The comparatively milder systems of Scandinavia, the EU, and the United States merely redistribute and internationalize these coercive labor relations.
Social, liberal, and moderate fascists perform a specific systemic function by stabilizing and legitimizing capitalist relations of exploitation while appearing to mitigate or oppose their harshest edges. Reformist liberals, social democrats, democratic socialists, and progressives enable and sustain the system by managing its contradictions rather than abolishing the underlying structure. They expand welfare, labor protections, public services, and progressive taxation to raise the floor of subsistence, reduce open destitution, and dampen revolutionary pressure from the working class, making the system more tolerable and durable. They incorporate unions and left parties into parliamentary and corporatist arrangements, giving organized labor a stake in the continued profitability of capital so that strikes and unrest are channeled into negotiable demands rather than challenges to property itself. They supply moral and democratic legitimacy through elections, rights discourse, anti-discrimination laws, and rhetoric of fairness that make the core coercive relation appear as a free contract and equal citizenship. They act as shock absorbers through bailouts, stimulus, and temporary expansions of the safety net, preventing collapse while preserving capital’s rights to accumulate and relocate production. On migration, prisons, and informal labor, they combine humanitarian language with enforcement through pathways to regularization or guest-worker programs alongside deportation regimes and carceral systems that continue to supply vulnerable or coerced labor. These forces humanize the domestic face of exploitation enough to keep the machine running, reproducing the system under a more consensual, less openly brutal form. Those who do not believe full socialism is possible and oppose it, are indirectly admitting to being a moderate fascist; and those who do not support the dictatorship of the proletariat and its democratic centralist operating system are either a fascist opportunist variant or a liability that will lead us into a fascist variant.
This is not speculation about a possible future. It is the same structural determinism Marx applied to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall: a law of motion internal to the system, temporarily offset by countervailing factors (colonial extraction, welfare concession, credit expansion, war economy), which reassert themselves the moment those offsets are exhausted. Dimitrov's 1935 definition, fascism as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinist, and imperialist elements of finance capital, was not a description of one historical accident in interwar Europe. It was a description of what capital does in every instance where reform can no longer contain the contradiction between accumulation and the class it depends on. Weimar, Pinochet's Chile, and the post-2008 authoritarian turn across Europe and the United States are not three separate events. They are the same law of motion expressing itself under three different sets of exhausted countervailing conditions. The absence of open fascism in a given capitalist state at a given moment is not a refutation of the tendency. It is evidence that the offsetting mechanisms, welfare, credit, colonial rent, have not yet been exhausted in that state.
All forms of capitalism inevitably decay into fascism. Fascism is the form capital turns to when parliamentary reform and welfare can no longer contain intensifying contradictions, especially mass unemployment, falling profits, strong labor organization, or threats to property. It operates as an emergency dictatorship of the most reactionary elements of the bourgeoisie, using nationalism, anti-communism, and paramilitary violence to smash independent working-class organizations while preserving private property and hierarchy. Reformist welfare capitalism delays this outcome by buying social peace. When profitability crises, debt, demographic pressures, or geopolitical shocks erode the material base of the safety net, these same states shift rightward through austerity, scapegoating of migrants or minorities, expanded policing and incarceration, and restrictions on labor and protest. This decay is a cyclical, ever-present potential that becomes actual under sufficient strain. This is not speculation about a possible future. It is the same structural determinism Marx applied to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall: a law of motion internal to the system, temporarily offset by countervailing factors, which reassert themselves the moment those offsets are exhausted. Dimitrov's 1935 definition, fascism as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinist, and imperialist elements of finance capital, was not a description of one historical accident in interwar Europe. It was a description of what capital does in every instance where reform can no longer contain the contradiction between accumulation and the class it depends on. Weimar, Pinochet's Chile, and the post-2008 authoritarian turn across Europe and the United States are not three separate events. They are the same law of motion expressing itself under three different sets of exhausted countervailing conditions. The absence of open fascism in a given capitalist state at a given moment is not a refutation of the tendency. It is evidence that the offsetting mechanisms, welfare, credit, colonial rent, have not yet been exhausted in that state.
Prosperous capitalist nations naturally evolve into anarcho-capitalism, aristocracy, corporateocracy, oligarchy, or plutocracy due to the endogenous tendencies of capital accumulation. Competitive accumulation produces the concentration and centralization of capital as successful firms grow, merge, or acquire others, making wealth and ownership increasingly skewed over time. Concentrated economic power translates into political influence through lobbying, campaign finance, revolving-door appointments, media ownership, and the structural dependence of governments on investment and employment. The result is oligarchy or plutocracy, where formal democracy persists, but the range of viable policy is constrained by the preferences of large capital. While the visible middle class expands and social mobility appears real, the upper tail of wealth and corporate power pulls away through regulatory capture, intellectual property regimes, financialization, and barriers to entry that reinforce elite closure into a corporateocracy or new aristocracy. Anarcho-capitalism emerges in deregulatory, privatizing phases where public goods are commodified and residual state functions primarily protect property and contracts, allowing large corporations and wealthy individuals to exercise outsized power inside a continuously deregulating state.
Prosperous phases coexist with, and accelerate, elite consolidation. The Nordic countries, Germany, and the post-war United States demonstrate that high living standards for many do not prevent rising top-end inequality, corporate political influence, or reliance on externalized cheap labor and resources. Reformist management, fascist emergency responses, and oligarchic drift are different modalities of the same system, operating as structural laws shaped by politics, technology, demographics, and resistance.
Workers do not unite against a condition they have been trained not to recognize. The ideological apparatus of capitalism, its schools, its churches, its television, its news media, its cultures, its liberal civics, exists to manufacture the belief that the wage relation is a free contract between equals rather than a structural compulsion backed by the threat of poverty, homelessness, and death. This is fascist indoctrination in the precise sense used above: it launders coercion into consent, launders extraction into opportunity, and launders the worker's structural unfreedom into a story about personal choice, hard work, and mobility. A worker who believes they freely chose their employer, freely chose their wage, and could freely leave for something better will not identify with the phrase "wage slave." They will hear it as hyperbole, as an insult to actual chattel slaves, as the rhetoric of people who have never worked a real job.
This reaction is not a rebuttal of the analysis. It is the indoctrination functioning exactly as designed. The rallying cry "wage slaves of the world unite" fails not because the analysis is wrong but because the class it addresses has been ideologically conditioned to reject the premise before examining the argument. Class consciousness is therefore not a spontaneous byproduct of exploitation; it must be built against an active, continuous, materially-funded campaign to prevent it. Any revolutionary or vanguardist project must treat this ideological battle as inseparable from the economic one, because a class that cannot name its own condition cannot organize to end it. This is why education, re-education, and deprogramming is so important for humanity in the fight against capitalism, fascism, and the dark triad personalities and identity protective cognition it fosters under the guise of individual liberties, freedom, and democracy.
The preceding analysis is offered as a neutral description of interconnected social problems and structural relations. It expresses the worldview of the author and of the comrades and acquaintances who share this political understanding. Capitalism, the state, the workplace, law, media, education, borders, culture, and interpersonal relations are understood through the lenses of class struggle, exploitation, coercion, ideology, and the preservation of capitalist power. People and institutions are evaluated not only by their stated intentions, but also by the material role they play in reproducing or resisting these relations.
In this framework, politics is not separate from everyday life. Work, consumption, speech, relationships, citizenship, and social norms are all shaped by and can help sustain or challenge class domination. Those of us who share this philosophical and ideological orientation do not identify merely as communists. We understand ourselves as a synthesis of communists, internationalists, secular humanists, activist-misanthropes, and tankies, committed to humanity’s collective liberation while refusing sentimental or sectarian illusions about how people, institutions, and societies reproduce exploitation, hierarchy, and reaction.
Our loyalty is to humanity and the planet, and our allegiance is to the innocent, vulnerable, and defenseless. We hold that allegiance to flags, deities, currencies, corporations, race, nationality, borders, sexuality, gender, employment, wages, government, and similar sectarian collective political identities produces hierarchy by dividing human beings into categories of belonging, status, and exclusion. These divisions create and sustain conditions in which domination, exploitation, imprisonment, slavery, and other violations including death are normalized or justified. This is why the left says it starts at anti-oppression and anti-capitalism, although the anti-capitalist part is often implied and not said out loud unless situations require it, leading to soc dems and other capitalist reformists to a false consciousness, misunderstanding and thinking the left side of the right wing is the left.
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