Modern western society is not merely in crisis. It is undergoing a controlled, long-term process of internal dismantling.
The capitalism analyzed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was industrial, national, and territorially rooted. Capital and labor confronted one another within the same borders. Even at its most ruthless, this system depended on a domestic workforce, national infrastructure, and internal markets. Exploitation was severe, but it remained anchored in place.
However, that structure has been replaced.
From the late twentieth century onward, industrial capitalism gave way to financial hyper-capitalism. Production was gradually subordinated to speculation. The trading desk took the place of the factory, and profits shifted from goods to debt, derivatives, and financial engineering. Capital became mobile, borderless, and indifferent primarily to national consequences.
The global financial crisis of 2008 revealed how this system functions. Bailouts, monetary expansion, and austerity subsequently transferred the massive losses generated by private speculation to the public. While millions lost jobs, homes, and security, the financial sector emerged larger and more concentrated than before. This outcome was not an accident. It showed how the system worked on its own.
At the center of this order lies a dense transnational financial network composed of major banks, regulatory institutions, and legal mechanisms that operate beyond effective national control. This network does not govern through elections or force, but through credit access, currency stability, and capital mobility. In practice, it functions as a form of supranational sovereignty.
The deindustrialization of Western societies was not simply the result of efficiency or globalization. It followed a coherent structural logic with three interlocking effects.
First, it dismantled organized labor's power base. Industrial workers, once capable of coordinated disruption, were replaced by fragmented, precarious forms of employment with little collective leverage.
Second, economic life shifted from value creation to value extraction. Finance, rent-seeking, real estate speculation, and debt-driven consumption replaced production as the dominant engines of growth. Populations burdened by permanent indebtedness are easier to manage than those rooted in stable productive roles.
Third, countries that used to be industrialized became dependent on consumer markets. Once domestic production was hollowed out, these societies became structurally vulnerable to external financial pressure—through capital flight, credit restrictions, ratings manipulation, or currency instability. Financial coercion proved more efficient than direct political control.
Enforcement operates through soft totalitarianism. The system presents itself as open, pluralistic, and tolerant, while enforcing a narrow ideological orthodoxy. Acceptable discourse is tightly constrained. Challenges to financial globalization, mass immigration, or cultural deconstruction are suppressed instead of debated; they are marginalized, stigmatized, and excluded from visibility.
The result is a population fragmented along horizontal identity lines and increasingly incapable of collective resistance. Individuals are encouraged to see themselves as isolated consumers rather than members of a coherent people.
This fragmentation is not merely a social or political phenomenon. It signals a more profound civilizational shift, one that reaches beyond institutions and into the inner structure of modern consciousness.
At this deeper level lies a spiritual crisis. Modernity flattened hierarchies of meaning, severed transcendence, and dissolved shared purpose. The sovereign, atomized individual replaced collective identity. This hollowed subject—politically weak, endlessly consuming, and morally flexible—became the ideal unit of the system.
China stands as an antithesis to this trajectory. There, capitalism functions as a tool rather than a ruling ideology. Markets operate under firm political sovereignty. Finance remains subordinate to state authority. National continuity is maintained rather than dismantled. This does not imply moral superiority, but it demonstrates that modernization does not require surrendering sovereignty to transnational financial power.
Self-destruction, therefore, is not inevitable.
In a system built on organized lies, naming reality becomes a revolutionary act.
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