HOW CAPITALISM MAKES US OBEY
The omissions uncovered here are traditional ways of training us not to think.
One of them: stressing ideas as motivating forces, without seeing what interests they represent. Another: the belief that prominent individuals cause change, not the masses. As Berthold Brecht put it, "Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. All by himself?"
Those are reasons why history is an eminently political subject: We absorb from childhood the notion that we cannot make change themselves.
We also lose the capacity to see that what we are told makes no sense. For example in Paris, almost no one notices the long, wide, straight streets that lead to voids that are much too vast for traffic, that at Napoleon's tomb references are not to Napoleon but to Louis XIV, that at the heart of the Opéra, considered the apex of high culture, is a salon whose ceiling is decorated by an orgy... .
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Inculcating docility has gotten worse, an evolution that coincides with the rise of multinationals. Take the ads that since about 2011* hover over great cities or take up huge walls, with images that do much more than promote a brand:
*When I first noticed them in Paris.
Richard Nahem, Eye Prefer Paris, 2020
Union Square in Manhattan, 2025 / Elisabeth Rawson
They glamorize irrationality...
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| At the Châtelet crossroad in central Paris, June 2022 |
Isolation...
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At the top of the Hotel Lutetia in Paris's 7th district, 2015. |
And voids: Nothing outside the product exists.
The Opéra
Psychologists and anthropologists know that all aspects of cults and primal societies combine. That is also true for more complex societies, where a multitude of facets buttress the economy, that is, its leaders. Habits and beliefs are adopted spontaneously: Take the underclass insult in Old Regime France, your father was a valet!" Like those humble people who did not realize they were strengthening the system that oppressed them, most historians do the same because the alternative has been so effectively erased.*
*Personal memory: Classes in modern European intellectual history at Vassar College and Russian history at the Soviet Union Program at Harvard did not mention Marx's approach even once. I learned of it by spending my third year of college in France (an approach that vanished toward 1980).
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Old Regime acceptance of hierarchy changed when the economy did: "What gave you all that wealth? You took the trouble to be born." That may be happening now.
Take a huge panel on a métro wall made in 2024, which radically breaks with the mainstream by recalling the victorious combat for the eight-hour day:
The station is part of the extension of the métro line that connects Orly international airport in the south with the stadium in Saint-Denis in the north. Built for the 2024 Olympics, thousands of soccer fans pass it at every game.
Dark colors express that fight...
Bright ones celebrate a victory that improves lives now.
It was commissioned by the Socialist government of working-class Saint-Denis — woken up from its sleep? — and coincides with continuous protests. These three, arbitrarily chosen, took place over the weekend of November 29-30, 2025, dates also arbitrarily chosen (because I was writing this page):
Pro-Palestine demonstrations in Paris, London, Geneva, Lisbon, Dublin, Rome...
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Status Coup News, Saturday, November 29, 2025 / zoom |
Al Jazeera, Sunday November 30, 2025 / zoom
In Manilla, demands that the President resign because of graft.
Local factors are the immediate reason for all, but globalized capitalism is the underlies them: It destroys an entire society to build beach-front properties for billionaires in Gaza, tries to reinforce oligarchs control of the economy by heightening racial tension in the U.S., takes corruption to unimagined levels. And everywhere, it is a storm that blows away the most deeply held beliefs and most basic social ties:
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| Harald Wolff |
The struggle is increasingly between über-capitalism backed by far-right parties and democratic socialists providing solutions to the problems that face us all.
Understanding how capitalism blinds us helps that fight.
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| Harald Wolff |
That is why these blooks were written.
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If you find their ideas useful
pass them on.
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