HOW CAPITALISM MAKES US OBEY
We can't prevent mass tourism from presenting post-card images or a historical museum rendering homage to elites and leaving out rebels or a view of the past that emphasizes individual action ("Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon"), omitting the masses, economic interests and underlying forces. We might recognize those aims — but don't.
Nor do we notice what should jump out at us as strange: long, wide, straight streets that lead to voids that are much to vast for traffic, a historical panel about soldiers executing officers by firing squad, at the heart of a monument considered the apex of high culture a salon whose ceiling is decorated by an orgy... .
The omissions uncovered here are traditional ways of training not to think. It's gotten worse. Take the ads that since 2011* hover over great cities or take up a huge wall, 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.
The Opéra
Psychologists and anthropologists have shown that all aspects of cults and primal societies combine. That is also true for more complex societies, a multitude of facets buttressing the economic organization, 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 they have never heard of an alternative.*
*Personal memory: Professors 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 (that orientation changed later).
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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 that since 2024 recalls the victorious combat for the eight-hour day:
The métro station is part of the extension of the métro line that connects Orly international airport in the south with the stadium in working-class 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, the time when I happened to be 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 dramas are the immediate reason for all, but globalized capitalism is the underlying cause: It destroys an entire society to build beach-front properties for billionaires in Gaza, emphasizes extreme racial division in the U.S., takes corruption to unimagined levels. And everywhere, the storm that blows away the most deeply held beliefs and most basic social ties:
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| Harald Wolff |
The coming struggle will be between über-capitalism backed by far-right parties and democratic socialists providing solutions to the problems that face us all.
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Understanding how capitalism blinds us
helps that fight.
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| Harald Wolff |
That is why these blooks were written.
* * *
If you find their ideas useful
pass them on.
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