The Communism-Capitalism Convergence

"Corporate Communism" is a real thing, but it goes way deeper than you thought

Below is an essay I wrote, featured in the new Book Underground Theory Volume 2 (an anthology compiled by Theory Underground, featuring Slavoj Zizek, Nick Land, Benjamin Studebaker, David McKerracher, yours truly, and others). The Original title of my essay was “The Rational Kernel in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Notion of Corporate Communism.” I highly recommend buying the book to read all the other essays, but you can get a sneak peek by reading my piece here or listening to it in audio form, read by David Ruiz. You can listen to the voice-over here on Substack or (if you don’t like the atmospheric background music) via the audiobook version on The Theory Underground YouTube channel as well. Below is the text of the essay itself:

Capitalism with “Communist” Characteristics

Back when the rogue Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene went viral on the internet for repeatedly saying in various interviews that the current political-economic system of America is turning into what she calls “corporate communism,” most people laughed at her, and understandably so. The very notion of “corporate communism” sounds absurd. The phrase appears to either be a hyperbolic parody or a disingenuous category error. Describing the world’s most advanced capitalist system as a form of communism seems to reveal either profound ignorance or willful misrepresentation of both economic systems.

Yet beneath this absurdity lies something worth examining. What if Greene’s formulation accidentally points toward a genuine contradiction in how our contemporary system operates? What if her ideological incoherence nevertheless captures something that more sophisticated analysts have been grappling with for years: the emergence of a hybrid system that combines some of the worst features of both bureaucratic statism and predatory capitalism?

“You Will Own Nothing and Be Happy”

The late anthropologist David Graeber, in his groundbreaking analysis of “bullshit jobs,” identified something that resonates powerfully with Greene’s intuition: modern capitalism has indeed developed Soviet-style bureaucratic bloat while maintaining its fundamental profit imperative. We have created what might be called the worst of both worlds: the inefficiency and alienation of bureaucratic statism combined with the inequality and insecurity of market competition.

Greene’s use of the term “communism” in this context reveals something about how political language has evolved since the Cold War. For most Americans, communism has come to mean simply “the government controls everything” rather than the Marxist ideal of a stateless, classless, moneyless society. Some contemporary Marxists have ironically accepted this popular definition when defending China’s economic success as proof that “communism works.” Yet what communist regimes consistently produced were indeed systems of total control: bureaucratic authoritarianism rather than worker liberation. When Greene invokes “corporate communism,” she channels a hybrid critique: the left’s longstanding opposition to corporate capitalism combined with the right’s traditional suspicion of bureaucratic statism. In this sense, she stumbles toward the same recognition that more sophisticated analysts like Yanis Varoufakis and David Graeber have articulated: that our system has evolved to combine troubling features of both traditions, creating something genuinely novel.

Consider the insurance industry, perhaps the most glaring manifestation of this bureaucratic-capitalist hybrid. Insurance companies employ vast armies of people whose primary function is not to facilitate healthcare or provide security, but to deny claims, process endless paperwork, and navigate labyrinthine regulatory compliance structures. This work adds virtually no productive value to society while extracting enormous profits through administrative complexity rather than genuine innovation or service provision.

This isn’t the lean, efficient capitalism celebrated in economic textbooks, nor is it the rational economic planning that socialist theory promised. It represents something qualitatively different: a bureaucratic apparatus designed to generate profit through administrative obfuscation rather than productive investment. The experience of navigating these systems (whether dealing with insurance companies, trying to resolve billing disputes, or attempting to access basic services) can be equally frustrating and dehumanizing as anything the Soviet Union produced.

But the parallel runs deeper than mere bureaucratic inefficiency. Large corporations increasingly function as quasi-governmental entities, wielding enormous power over suppliers, workers, and entire communities while developing internal bureaucracies that rival anything centralized planning ever produced. Amazon’s fulfillment centers operate with the surveillance intensity of a police state, while Walmart’s supply chain management exercises more control over global production patterns than most national governments. The difference is that these bureaucracies serve private profit rather than public planning, but the experience of powerlessness they generate is remarkably similar.

What Greene stumbles toward in her “corporate communism” formulation is the recognition that contemporary capitalism has abandoned many of the features that once distinguished it from state socialism. The creative destruction, entrepreneurial dynamism, and competitive innovation that classical theorists celebrated have given way to monopolistic rent extraction, regulatory capture, and administrative complexity that serves existing power structures rather than productive efficiency.

What Greene’s terminology perhaps best captures is the trajectory toward what economist Yanis Varoufakis has more precisely termed “techno-feudalism”: a system where traditional ownership patterns are replaced by subscription-based access to platform-controlled resources. The World Economic Forum’s infamous prediction that “you’ll own nothing and be happy” reveals something profound about where our system is heading, though it certainly doesn’t represent the stateless, classless society that communist theory envisioned.

The irony here is striking: this “own nothing” future resembles precisely what critics of communism always feared most: a society where individual property ownership disappears and people become dependent on centralized authorities for access to basic necessities. But instead of collective ownership replacing private property through democratic planning, we’re witnessing the emergence of a system where a small class of platform owners controls access to everything while everyone else becomes permanent renters, subscribers, and licensees.

This isn’t communism in any meaningful sense; it’s a new form of dependency that creates concentrated dependence on corporate platforms. People lose the security of ownership that capitalism once promised while gaining none of the collective power that socialism theoretically provides. Instead, they become perpetually dependent on corporate platforms for access to housing (Airbnb), transportation (Uber), entertainment (Netflix), and even basic software functionality (subscription-based applications).

The genius of this system lies in how it presents dependency as freedom. Rather than acknowledging the loss of ownership as a form of dispossession, it’s marketed as liberation from the burdens of maintenance, storage, and commitment. You don’t own a car because you’re free to access mobility on demand. You don’t own software because you’re liberated from the hassle of updates and compatibility issues. You don’t own your entertainment library because you have access to unlimited content streams.

This represents a profound transformation in the relationship between individuals and the means of production, but it’s a transformation that serves concentrated capital rather than collective empowerment. Where socialism promised to socialize the means of production, techno-feudalism privatizes access to socialized resources.

The Communist-to-Capitalism Horseshoe

Aside from Marjorie Taylor Greene’s specific remarks, the notion of “corporate communism” relates to a much deeper, paradoxical phenomenon that I have been analyzing, which I call “the communism-capitalism horseshoe.”

Perhaps the most theoretically interesting aspect of it lies in how certain strands of radical left politics and contemporary capitalism converge in unexpected ways. Many of the social ideals promoted by early 20th-century bohemian radicals (the abolition of traditional family structures, collective child-rearing arrangements, sexual liberation, polyamory, and the systematic rejection of conventional moral constraints) have indeed become prominent features of contemporary progressive capitalism. This isn’t coincidental; it represents the absorption and commodification of radical critique by the very system it once challenged.

The 1918 Bavarian communist program, for instance, included comprehensive sex education for children, the legalization of no-fault divorce, and the establishment of fully secular public institutions free from religious influence. These weren’t peripheral concerns for early radicals: they were central to their vision of human liberation. Similarly, figures like Norman O. Brown in the 1960s advocated for organizing society around pleasure and self-expression rather than guilt, duty, and moral constraint.

What’s remarkable is how these radical visions have been selectively incorporated into advanced capitalism without fundamentally challenging its power structures. The counterculture’s emphasis on individual self-expression and liberation from conventional morality ultimately proved compatible with (and useful to) an economic system based on constant consumption and lifestyle marketing. The bohemian ideal of organizing life around aesthetic experience and personal fulfillment aligns perfectly with consumer capitalism’s need for people who define themselves through their purchases and lifestyle choices.

The convergence reveals something important about how capitalist systems absorb and neutralize their critics. Rather than simply suppressing radical ideas, advanced capitalism demonstrates a remarkable capacity to incorporate oppositional culture and transform it into market opportunities. Revolution becomes lifestyle choice, critique becomes brand identity, and transgression becomes consumer category.

But this process of co-optation is more complex than many leftists understand. The common assumption is that co-optation occurs when the capitalist system cynically adopts radical ideas and strips them of their transformative potential. This analysis suggests that “authentic” versions of these ideas exist that could be salvaged if only they hadn’t been corrupted by the system.

What this misunderstands is how co-optation actually works. Co-optation occurs most easily when there already exists something within the ideas themselves that is genuinely compatible with the system they claim to oppose. The reason certain ideas get co-opted by capitalism is not merely because the system is propagandistically sophisticated, but because those ideas are in fact beneficial to capitalist expansion. It is precisely the sexual liberation, libertinism, and indifference to traditional moral constraints found within ultra-progressive communist circles that proved tremendously beneficial to the capitalist system as a cultural superstructure, stripping away moral barriers to capital accumulation and opening up previously protected spheres of social life to market colonization.

The Protestant work ethic and deferred gratification that Max Weber identified as capitalism’s original cultural foundation is no longer the system’s primary superstructure. In an age of consumer capitalism, people need to feel pressure not for enjoying too much, but for not enjoying enough. The bohemian communist ideal of liberation from moral constraint serves this consumer economy perfectly, creating subjects who define themselves through lifestyle experimentation and constant consumption of new experiences.

This brings us to the deepest level of the communist-to-capitalist horseshoe: where both liberal capitalism and certain forms of orthodox Marxism converge most problematically in their relationship to moral reasoning and ethical constraint. This convergence helps explain how apparently opposed ideological traditions can produce similar cultural outcomes and similar types of human subjects.

Capitalism doesn’t reject morality outright (that would be too crude and politically unsustainable). Instead, it systematically subordinates moral considerations to market logic while maintaining the formal apparatus of ethical discourse. If moral beliefs create barriers to profit maximization, market forces work to erode or circumvent them through cultural change, regulatory capture, or simple economic pressure. The system can accommodate any moral framework provided it doesn’t interfere with capital accumulation.

Liberalism, as the dominant ideology of capitalism, typically resorts to moral relativism when faced with conflicting value systems. As political philosopher Leo Strauss demonstrated in Natural Right and History, liberalism’s commitment to neutrality among competing conceptions of the good life leads inevitably toward value relativism: the position that moral beliefs are matters of personal preference rather than objective truth claims that can be rationally evaluated.

Meanwhile, orthodox Marxism’s strict materialist and historicist worldview often reaches remarkably similar conclusions through a different route. Despite Marx’s own obvious moral commitments, vulgar materialist analysis insists that all moral beliefs are products of economic relations and class interests, ultimately prioritizing “objective facts” over moral values. By maintaining a rigid distinction between facts and values, this materialist approach can end up undermining the very moral arguments (about exploitation being wrong, dignity being valuable, or justice being worth pursuing) that might motivate people to seek fundamental change.

This theoretical convergence around moral indifference has profound practical consequences. It produces human subjects who understand themselves primarily as consumers, pleasure-seekers, or rational maximizers rather than moral agents embedded in communities with obligations to others and commitments to shared values. Paradoxically, this kind of subject is perfectly suited for contemporary consumer capitalism, which depends on people defining themselves through their individual choices rather than their social relationships or moral commitments.

This helps explain why both free-market libertarians and certain strands of leftist politics end up supporting similar social policies around issues like family structure, sexual behavior, and cultural expression. Both traditions, despite their economic disagreements, share a commitment to maximizing individual freedom and minimizing traditional moral constraints, though they pursue these goals through different institutional mechanisms.

This horseshoe effect forces us to confront fundamental questions about the basis of anti-capitalist politics itself. If freedom is the highest good, and capitalism proves remarkably effective at expanding certain forms of freedom, then what exactly is the case against capitalism? If radical social change is the goal, and capitalism demonstrates itself to be the most dynamic and transformative force in human history, then what distinguishes progressive politics from capitalist modernization?

What if change and social progress are not barriers to capitalism but rather mechanisms through which it colonizes more spheres of social life, expanding into new virgin territories? The system’s capacity to absorb and commodify its own critiques suggests that traditional anti-capitalist arguments based on freedom and progress may be fundamentally inadequate to the task.

This suggests that effective anti-capitalist politics must be grounded in something other than abstract freedom or perpetual change. Perhaps it must be based on a different conception of freedom: freedom for human flourishing, for the development of human capacities, for the ability of human civilization to reproduce itself sustainably. The most compelling case against capitalism may not be that it constrains freedom, but that it threatens the basic conditions for human survival through environmental destruction and demographic collapse. Every generation produces fewer children than the last, spelling a dangerous trajectory toward civilizational extinction that no amount of consumer choice can remedy.

A World Without Limits

The core homology between capitalism and communism (the fundamental similarity that explains their convergence despite being opposites) lies in their shared commitment to a world without limits.Communism, despite being capitalism’s antithesis, objects to capitalism primarily on the grounds that it constrains human potential through private property and class hierarchy. The communist ideal, at least in theory, aims to unleash human desire and social transformation to unlimited horizons. In this regard, Communism is capitalist progressivism on steroids. Capitalism shares this same promethean ambition: the endless expansion of production, the multiplication of consumer choices, the transformation of every aspect of human life into a site for innovation and profit.

Both capitalism and communism are premised on endlessly transcending both the limits of nature and the constraints of human-imposed traditions. Capitalism has proven remarkably successful at expanding the frontiers of human possibility, enabling medical procedures that allow people to transform their bodies in ways previous generations could never imagine, creating technologies that blur the boundaries between human and machine, generating material abundance that would have seemed miraculous to our ancestors. Communism promised similar transcendence through political transformation rather than market mechanisms, envisioning a post-scarcity society where human beings could finally realize their full potential freed from economic necessity.

This shared prometheanism explains why historically actually existing communism (in the likes of the Soviet Union) competed with capitalism on capitalism’s own terms. The Soviets measured success through industrial output, technological achievement, and material production, accepting the framework that defined progress as perpetual expansion and growth. Communism and capitalism both promised material abundance as one of their goals, yet it was the capitalism of the Western world that ultimately succeeded in achieving this goal. While most communists throughout history weren’t Soviet-style authoritarians, they nevertheless shared the fundamental premise: that revolutionary transformation would unlock unlimited human freedom, that the constraints binding human potential were products of social organization rather than inherent to the human condition.

Both communism and capitalism are rationalized by fundamentally libertarian ideology. Capitalism seeks freedom from all moral and traditional constraints that might limit market expansion, while communism envisions a stateless future where political authority itself withers away. The revolutionary zeal is identical in structure even if opposed in content: capitalism constantly revolutionizes economic production, opening new markets and frontiers; communism commits to perpetual political revolution and total social transformation. One subordinates politics to economics, the other economics to politics, but both imagine a future where limits themselves are overcome.

Limitarianism vs Libertarianism

Socialism, in the sense that I envision it, represents something categorically different: a political philosophy of limitarianism, as opposed to libertarianism. Rather than promising unlimited freedom or endless expansion, limitarian socialism recognizes that human flourishing requires boundaries, constraints, and the wisdom to distinguish between desires that should be fulfilled and those that should be redirected or restrained. This isn’t pessimism but realism about human nature and social sustainability.

The socialist perspective begins with the recognition that human beings are flawed creatures embedded in material and social constraints that cannot be transcended through revolutionary will or market innovation. Capitalism’s fundamental problem isn’t merely that it exploits workers or generates inequality (though it does both) but that it systematically profits from humanity’s worst tendencies. The system succeeds by cultivating and monetizing every vice, every weakness, every short-term impulse at the expense of long-term flourishing and social solidarity.

Consider the civilizational paradox we currently inhabit: the average person in the developed world commands material resources that would have made medieval monarchs envious. We have access to an abundance that our ancestors couldn’t imagine, technological capabilities that border on the miraculous, and medical knowledge that has doubled human lifespans. Yet suicide rates climb to historic highs. Depression and anxiety have become near-universal experiences. Fertility rates collapse as people either choose not to have children or find themselves economically unable to afford family formation. We live in augmented survival: technically alive, technically free, yet profoundly unfulfilled and unable to reproduce the basic conditions for civilization’s continuation.

This paradox reveals capitalism’s fatal flaw: it fulfills desire at the expense of meaning, provides abundance at the cost of purpose, expands individual freedom while destroying the social fabric that makes freedom valuable. The system undermines precisely those institutions (family, community, tradition, shared moral frameworks) that historically provided the “social glue” enabling human flourishing within sustainable limits.

Communists attribute human failures to social engineering, believing that once we eliminate capitalism and its attendant hierarchies, human nature itself will be transformed. This reflects the same unlimited thinking that capitalism embodies: the fantasy that all constraints are artificial and removable. Socialism, by contrast, accepts human nature as given (neither wholly good nor wholly evil, but requiring social structures that channel our capacities toward constructive ends while protecting us from our destructive tendencies).

This means accepting certain limits as necessary and beneficial rather than as constraints to be overcome. No one should accumulate billions of dollars when that concentration of wealth translates directly into political power and social domination. We accept certain limits on political authority through constitutions and separation of powers; we must equally accept limits on economic power. The libertarian worship of unlimited accumulation is as dangerous as the communist fantasy of unlimited revolution.

A genuinely socialist politics would function like responsible parenting rather than either authoritarian control or radical permissiveness. The state must intervene to protect people from capitalist predation that profits from addiction, from financial schemes that extract wealth without creating value, from systems that offer cheap pleasures at the cost of long-term wellbeing. Yet this intervention must itself be constrained through democratic institutions, constitutional protections, and popular empowerment, ensuring that protection from capital doesn’t become domination by state bureaucracy.

This requires distributing economic power rather than merely redistributing its products. Workers need genuine democratic authority in their workplaces, not just higher wages. Communities need control over essential services, not just better funding. Citizens need the ability to check corporate power through political mechanisms, not just social safety nets to cushion capitalism’s worst effects. The goal isn’t to eliminate markets, profit, or private ownership entirely, but to ensure these mechanisms serve human flourishing rather than ruling over it.

Post-capitalist socialism is not a system where capital has been fully abolished, but one where capital no longer rules above labor, above politics, or above the interests of the common majority. Socialism must arise as a response to capitalism’s fundamental contradiction with democracy itself, not by rejecting democracy as a “bourgeois” superstructure, but by divorcing it from capitalism’s corrupting influence and expanding democracy to the spheres where the power of capital is hegemonic over labor. Hierarchy cannot be abolished, and attempting to abolish economic hierarchy leads to new hierarchies being reproduced through the state or by more primitive human means (charismatic authority).

We might not be able to ever have utopia where everyone lives like a bourgeoisie, but it might be possible to work towards a system that can guarantee everyone a dignified life and sufficient opportunity (through time, energy and community resources) to fulfil their potential while preventing anyone from accumulating enough power that could allow them to be a tyrant. A socialist society would be post-capitalist insofar as economic hierarchy doesn’t automatically translate into political domination, where market value doesn’t solely determine human worth, and where the accumulation of wealth has limits that prevent it from reaching past a point where it is not fruitful for human civilization and produces degeneracy at the expense of the common majority.