Reflection April 30, 2026 Andrea Zhok
Marxist-inspired analyses remain the most effective for interpreting contemporary society, and the best suited to explaining and anticipating its underlying dynamics. However, they often suffer from a lack of intuition and figurative perspective. If you explain to someone that their actions, regardless of what they think of themselves, are, in the long run, channeled or at least conditioned by the structural mechanisms of capital’s self-reproduction, most people’s instinctive reaction is mistrust or disbelief. This is because they (and, in reality, all of us, with rare exceptions) do not intentionally allow themselves to be influenced by these mechanisms: they do not seek to “make ever more money,” they do not seek to “achieve ever-increasing profit margins”; that is not what motivates them.
This fact has always made it difficult to fully understand this explanatory model, nearly two centuries after its initial formulation. By observing the national and international movements that led to World War I, we can clearly see how the conflict emerges as the inevitable outcome of unlimited and necessarily expansive economic competition, which first exhausts its own internal resources, then extends to colonial ventures (the first wave of globalization), and finally moves into action, transforming economic competition into a full-scale war. However, although a retrospective analysis clearly reveals these processes (and although some, such as Rosa Luxemburg, had already described them at the time), the vast majority of people on the eve of World War I (including prominent members of the ruling classes) interpreted these circumstances as a “search for living space,” “national self-defense,” “patriotic pride,” “protection of their families against foreign barbarism,” and so on.
They did not go to war to please the Rothschilds, but for entirely understandable human reasons. The bitter wisdom of Marx’s Cassandra lies in the fact that, in reality, they were serving the Rothschilds and the Krupps, and not themselves, nor their country, nor their families, etc.
Today, the situation is similar, with the added advantage of a capacity for manipulation by big capital that is far more sophisticated than in the past. Even today, one must not believe that all “capitalists” act for “capitalist reasons.” In reality, they are a minority. The fact is that “capitalism” is, technically, a very simple form of social production and reproduction: it is a system (an “algorithm”) with a single “objective”: the progressive increase in average capitalization; and, consequently, a single direction: infinite growth, infinite expansion. It knows no other objectives, or rather, it can exploit them all, but these do not constitute the true breaking point. It is therefore a social system that automatically generates unlimited consumption of resources, expansionism, the universal imposition of its own paradigms everywhere, and, consequently, in a cyclical manner, crises, conflicts, and massive destruction, which only set back the clock of this same blind dynamic.
The point I wish to emphasize here, however, is that the capitalist structure, over time, has also learned to construct its own “ideology,” which is gradually beginning to take on an increasingly defined form (see the “visions” of figures such as Peter Thiel). This “ideology” is not based on the crude and abstract perspective of “making ever more money”—a sterile perspective incapable of moving even the sharks of finance. This ideology possesses certain fundamental principles, linked to ideas that the philosophical tradition has termed “nihilism” and the “will to power.”
The ideology of capital is:
- NIHILISTIC, in the sense of the destruction of any reference to natural, traditional, or historical values;
- PROGRESSIVE, in the sense of conceiving “progress” as something that coincides with the “best”;
- TECHNOCRATIC, in the sense of envisioning a world in which wisdom is defined as competence in the exercise of technological power;
- TRANSHUMANISTIC, in the sense that it conceives of humanity as a freely malleable raw material for other purposes and specifically with a view to an “increase in power”;
- MONOPOLISTIC UNIVERSALIST, in the sense that it assumes there can and must be only one true worldview, extending across the entire planet and excluding all other views, which are essentially “inferior.” The Musks, the Thiels, the Gates, the Soros, and many other lesser-known figures operate within this nihilistic, progressive, technocratic, transhumanist, and universalist framework. It would be a mistake to think that they “seek only to make ever more money.” In their eyes, capital appears merely as a necessary tool which, as such, naturally cannot be compromised in any way. Yet they consider themselves “idealists.” What escapes them—just as it does millions of people who would like to be in their place—is that what seems to them to be a “true vision” is merely the visual translation of how capital operates.
- The triumph of capital (money) is the replacement of natural and traditional values with exchange value (price);
- The process of capital is ideally a forward movement toward indefinite accumulation (progress);
- Capital is the most powerful metatechnology in history: it is the means of all means, the instrument that allows us to govern all other instruments and all goods;
- Capital is an infinite and unlimited power of transformation: it has no form of its own, but can fluidly transform itself into anything; and it therefore seems that it could retain its value even if human beings were to disappear;
- Capital is an abstract form, intrinsically universal. The worldview of capital is to historical and anthropological worldviews what numbers are to the words of human languages: a universal, cross-cutting language, yet semantically empty.
Thus, when we see today the world’s wickedness concentrated in the Trumps, in the Netanyahus, let us remember that they will soon disappear (well, it’s never too soon), and that their facile excuses, their grotesque justifications based on the Bible, the Holocaust, human rights, etc., will soon disappear, but the fundamental motivation that drives them (as well as many others, even those with opposing political positions) will not disappear.
An impulse that coalesces into these reified forms of thought:
- that there are no objective values (neither in nature nor in history);
- that “moving” toward progress (that is, toward greater “progress”) is in itself a good thing;
- that those who possess technoscience are also those who possess knowledge and wisdom;
- that humanity is an accident we can do without;
- that any other vision, perspective, or opinion is merely an atavism, an error, or a prejudice that must be overthrown and replaced.
We will see this pattern again and again, in other international aggressions, other “humanitarian” bombings, other preemptive strikes, other “clash of civilizations,” other genocides in the name of progress, other imprisonments in the name of the greater good, other assassinations in the name of the idea that our way of life is non-negotiable. Until, either we destroy it, or it destroys us.
Source: https://www.elviejotopo.com/topoexpress/sobre-el-espiritu-del-capitalismo/
Original source: https://www.linterferenza.info/cultura/sullo-spirito-del-capitalismo/