Mark Fisher described capitalist realism as “the fatalistic acquiescence in the view that there is no alternative to capitalism.” In one of his last pieces of writing, he pointed to Chile: “If there was a founding event of capitalist realism, it would be the violent destruction of the Allende government in Chile by General Pinochet’s American-backed coup.” (Acid Communism, unfinished introduction, 2016).

That framing makes Allende’s government worth revisiting in at least two ways. First, as a source of ideas — what an alternative (to Stalinism as well as capitalism) actually looked like when it was being built, in concrete institutional detail, by real people working within real constraints. And second, as a window into how power responds when such an alternative starts working: what coordination between state and capital looks like in practice, and what that tells us about what any serious challenge to the current arrangement can expect to encounter.

On September 11th, 1973, the US-backed Chilean military bombed the presidential palace in Santiago.

The elected president died inside. The junta that replaced him disappeared thousands, imprisoned and tortured tens of thousands more, and completely restructured Chile’s economy.1

To understand why, you have to know what they were destroying.

Three years earlier, Chile had done something no country had ever done. They democratically elected a Marxist president.2

Salvador Allende’s platform was sweeping: nationalize the copper mines — Chile’s primary resource, owned almost entirely by American corporations — nationalize the banks, expand healthcare, housing, education. The vote to nationalize copper passed unanimously in Congress. Including the opposition.

His government launched free milk for every child in the country. Copper revenues that had been leaving the country started funding schools and hospitals instead.

They reinvented economic planning, building a nationwide communications network connecting factories to a central operations room in real time — not Soviet-style central planning, which had failed by trying to control everything from the top down, but a distributed system where decisions stayed local unless they needed to escalate.3

Poverty fell. Wages rose. The economy was being shaped to serve people rather than extract from them.

It lasted three years.

The architects of the coup handed the economy to a group of American-trained economists who privatized public services, eliminated price controls, crushed unions, and slashed social spending — what’s become known as neoliberalism, imposed here for the first time under cover of a terror campaign against anyone who might oppose it — labor organizers, intellectuals, artists, political leaders.

Declassified documents show years of coordinated effort between American corporations, the CIA, and the White House to destabilize and bring down Allende’s government — the coup a last resort when everything else had failed.4

What Chileans had built together was democratic, legal, replicable within most existing liberal democracies. No violent overthrow. No seizure of power. Just a majority of people, organized, using the tools available to them.5

So the question Chile leaves open — the one nobody has fully answered yet — is not whether there is any viable alternative to capitalism.

It’s how you build it in a way that can’t be destroyed by the few people for whom it’s a problem.

How much of this translates to contemporary American politics specifically is not a simple question. Chile’s constitutional order in 1970 was more permeable to this kind of politics than the US is today — it had genuine multi-party competition, no counter-majoritarian Senate, no Supreme Court with a history of striking down redistributive legislation.

There is also the question of how to interpret the coup. On one reading, the fact that Allende had to be murdered — that his program couldn’t be stopped through normal political channels — is evidence that constitutional democratic socialism is more viable than its critics allow. On another, it suggests that capital will simply move outside constitutional channels when sufficiently threatened, rendering the question of institutional permeability somewhat beside the point.

Whatever strategic conclusions you draw from the coup itself or the specific circumstances that made Chile’s constitutional order more permeable than most, the history establishes something more fundamental: that a genuine alternative was built, that it commanded real democratic majorities, and that it had to be actively destroyed rather than simply failing on its own terms. The strategic questions are hard and open. The existence of the horizon isn’t.

Every introductory economics course begins with the same story. Before money, there was barter: the farmer swapping grain for the blacksmith’s tools, until the inconvenience of matching wants drove the invention of a common medium of exchange. Markets are what you get when you leave people alone.

David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years shows that this story has no basis in the historical or anthropological record. No society has ever been found that operated primarily through barter. Within communities, the overwhelming historical norm was credit — informal, trust-based systems of mutual obligation requiring no coin and no simultaneous exchange of equivalents. Where barter did occur, it appeared almost exclusively between strangers with no ongoing relationship, and it looked nothing like the rational, utilitarian swap of the economics textbook.1 More fundamentally, what we would now call economic life has not, for most people at most times, been an intelligible separable sphere — something with its own logic that could be analyzed apart from kinship, religion, status, or cosmology. The economy as a domain unto itself is not a universal feature of human social life. It is a historical construction.

What constructed it is Graeber’s central finding. Tracing coinage economies across the ancient Near East, the Mediterranean, South Asia, and China, he identifies a recurring pattern: military conquest produces slaves; coinage is minted primarily to pay soldiers; conquered populations are taxed in the conqueror’s coin, forcing them into the coin economy regardless of any prior arrangement. To obtain the coin, they must sell something — their labor, their goods, themselves. Graeber calls this the military-coinage-slavery complex.

The complex is not a feature of the ancient world that modernity superseded. It is the engine that produced modernity. The age of the great capitalist empires does not replace it — it globalizes it. The logic of conquest is taken up by competing colonial powers, trading companies, and eventually multinational capital, driving into every remaining enclave of non-market life on the planet. The era ideologically defined by free labor is historically the most intensive period of chattel slavery on record. The transatlantic slave trade, colonial land seizure, the forced opening of markets across Asia, Africa, and the Americas are not aberrations from a capitalism otherwise characterized by free exchange. They are the complex at full extension.

The present form is the hardest to see as the same thing, which is partly the point. Military alliance networks, international financial institutions, a dollar-denominated global trading system — these present themselves not as conquest but as the neutral framework within which civilized economic life takes place. The dollar’s reserve currency status has rested explicitly on American military supremacy, a relationship financial analysts note without apparent irony. Wage dependence — the compulsion to sell one’s labor or face destitution — has been generalized across the planet as the very form of freedom.

What we call the state and what we call the free market are not opposed historical forces. They are co-productions of the same complex. Every economy organized around this complex is a planned economy, planned around the extraction of surplus on behalf of those controlling it. The debate between free markets and planned economies is not a debate between planning and its absence. It is a debate between differently planned economies.

The market the complex installs, for all that it is rooted in coercion and domination, is genuinely free in one specific sense: it dissolves the particular dependencies of embeddedness — the obligations, hierarchies, and constraints of the human economies it displaces. The individual extracted from a total social system and placed in a commercial market is, in that sense, free of it. What the complex fails to provide is a choice about entry, or somewhere to land once entry has been forced. Extracted from embeddedness — whether through conquest, enclosure, or the slow elimination of any alternative — the individual arrives not on open ground but in a structural hole, compelled to sell their time continuously just to remain alive, one form of dependence dissolved and another immediately installed in its place.

The target of an inverted economic engine — one directed at the basis of compulsion rather than its reproduction — would be something like this: unconditional livelihood, a guarantee of material existence prior to any particular belonging. Not a return to the communities the complex destroyed, not the reconstitution of particular dependencies, but a livable plane prior to belonging, from which participation in any community, any arrangement, any form of collective life, becomes for the first time a choice.

The European witch hunts were not driven by superstition. They were a central mechanism in the construction of capitalism.1

Across Europe in the 1500s and 1600s,2 as capitalism took shape, hundreds of thousands of women were persecuted — publicly tortured, hanged, burned alive. Other local women were often forced to watch. The women targeted were not random.

Common land was being enclosed, privatized, and fenced off. A new economy was taking shape, organized around wage labor. Women were largely excluded from it. They were pushed out of trades and guilds, made dependent on the male wage. The work of sustaining daily life — raising children, preparing food, caring for the sick, maintaining the household — was reclassified. Under the commons, this work had been communal and valued as part of economic life. Under capitalism, it was redefined as not-work: a natural duty, a feminine instinct, an act of love. It was performed in isolation, inside a private household, without compensation, and cut off from the communal spaces that had once given women solidarity and autonomy.

Many women resisted the role being constructed for them — the housewife. They lived independently, outside the structure of the male-waged household. They were healers and midwives, drawing on traditional knowledge of the body at a time when medical knowledge was being monopolized by male-dominated institutions. They exercised control over reproduction while new laws were criminalizing contraception and abortion. These were the women targeted in the witch hunts.

They were prosecuted by Church and state authorities: inquisitors, magistrates, secular courts, often in coordinated campaigns across regions. Capitalism couldn’t take hold while women like these, whose labor, knowledge, and body remained their own, were still ordinary. Because behind every wage was a household where someone worked without one. That unpaid labor wasn’t incidental to the new economy — it was the foundation it was built on. This was not a spontaneous eruption of mass hysteria. It was the systematic disciplining of women into a new economic role, enforced through terror.

The world that emerged from this process is the one we still live in: where care remains invisible and uncompensated, where those who can’t or won’t sell their labor have no claim on the means of life.3

I want to take this question seriously, even when it comes in the frustrated, slightly hostile register of someone who suspects you’re being naive.

But first: this reaction, so normal even among serious thinkers, is also really bizarre. We have the technological capacity for abundance and collective care on an unprecedented scale. Most people readily acknowledge that capitalism produces enormous structural harm, that it tends toward ecological catastrophe, that it is in the most literal sense unsustainable. And the prevailing conclusion, the dominant intellectual stance of our time, is: this is about the best we can do. It’s an eerie cynicism that most of us seem to have absorbed without noticing.

It also didn’t arise on its own. There has been a sustained effort to produce it through the systematic suppression of alternatives. Mark Fisher called the result capitalist realism: the sense that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.1 David Graeber traced the mechanisms behind it, the active production of political hopelessness.2

That said, it’s not constructed from nothing. A stable alternative at scale has not yet been achieved, and some of the attempts have been catastrophic. But what I’m proposing is not a revolutionary gamble. It’s a set of concrete structural changes aimed at altering the system’s logic from within. And given what we’re facing — ecological destabilization, accelerating technological risk, ongoing atrocity — it would seem not just plausible that we can do better, but necessary that we try.

So here’s what I’d offer, less a personal invention than a synthesis of what thinkers across traditions have been reaching toward.

Make livelihood unconditional. Decouple access to basic needs from participation in particular arrangements: wage labor, having wealthy parents, navigating the bureaucratic gauntlet of a means-tested welfare state.

This can be achieved through a combination of Universal Basic Services (housing, healthcare, wifi, the material infrastructure of a dignified life) and Universal Basic Income at a level sufficient to cover what UBS doesn’t.

This doesn’t require abolishing money or markets. It doesn’t require violent takeover of the state. It doesn’t mean everyone lives in the same kind of house or earns the same income. It means everyone’s basic material needs are met, with no conditions attached.

André Gorz had a phrase for these kinds of demands: non-reformist reforms, measures achievable within the existing system that, once won, fundamentally alter the system’s logic.3 That’s what I’m describing. Not a utopian blueprint. Concrete structural changes with transformative downstream effects.

This is not what typically passes for the welfare state. Conventional welfare, at its most generous, helps people who fall through the cracks of capitalism survive and, ideally, re-enter the system that failed them. Support is conditional, temporary, oriented toward restoring participation.

What we should be building runs the other direction. The point is not to help people survive capitalism. It’s to expand people’s real capacity to exit capitalist and other coercive arrangements, to make participation genuinely voluntary. That’s not a subtle difference in emphasis. It’s the entire point.

A reasonable objection: even with UBI and UBS, capitalists still own the means of production. They still extract, still lobby, still consolidate. You haven’t changed the power structure. You’ve just made it more comfortable to live under.

But compulsion is the foundation of the power structure. Capital’s leverage depends on the fact that most people must sell their labor or face destitution. Give people the means to say no, and they can strike or quit without risking starvation. They can walk away from exploitative conditions and organize without the threat of ruin.

There’s reason to think this isn’t lost on the people who benefit most from the current arrangement. The post-1960s political economy looks, in hindsight, like a deliberate restoration of precarity. A generation with real free time and real exit capacity had begun questioning the entire arrangement, protesting, organizing, dropping out. What followed was a decades-long project of filling people’s time and draining their security: the proliferation of meaningless work, the erosion of public goods, the normalization of debt and chronic financial anxiety. If compulsion didn’t matter to the maintenance of the system, it would be hard to explain why so much effort has gone into preserving it.

Now for the practical questions. Who builds the housing, staffs the clinics, develops the renewable energy technology?

It’s worth noting at the outset: full employment is not needed to make any of this happen. The insistence on full employment is one of the great unexamined dogmas shared by systems from the USSR to the modern United States, and it has resulted in the spread of meaningless work as automation takes on an increasing share of what actually needs doing. The direction we need to establish is the opposite: toward zero percent compulsory employment, where no one has to work to survive. That’s what this framework is doing. That said, there is work that needs to get done, and no shortage of people who can be freed up to do it.

Start with bullshit work: jobs that even the people performing them acknowledge serve no real purpose, along with the further work that exists only to support those jobs. Graeber estimated that this accounts for more than half of all employment in wealthy countries. Much of the military falls squarely into this category, with the added distinction of being the single largest employer connected to the federal government, comprising well over two million active duty and reserve servicemembers and millions more in the broader defense sector. Its centralized, federally created structure makes it a natural starting point for redirection.

Genuine defense is a real need, and this framework retains it: missile defense, cybersecurity, disaster response, and the other capacities that actual defense requires. But the bulk of what the US military does, and the bulk of what it costs, has little to do with defense. Its primary function has been to secure economic dominance abroad: protecting resource access, enforcing market liberalization, suppressing alternative political arrangements in other countries. The framework I’m proposing would render that function obsolete. A serious reckoning with where threats to human life actually come from is long overdue. The ratio of Americans who die from internal causes (suicide, drug overdose, homicide, traffic accidents) to those who die from foreign terrorism is staggering, and many of the external threats that do exist are themselves downstream of the very interventionism this would end.

Redirect that energy toward care infrastructure. Build new housing and renovate what already exists. Staff health services. Develop clean energy and resilient local food systems. The program should be at least as accessible as military service is now, and as well-compensated, no college degree required, no gatekeeping. Military service is already, by far, the most rewarding and accessible pathway to economic stability the government offers. This would build on that infrastructure while giving it a purpose commensurate with the actual needs of the century.

There is reason to believe people would find this work more fulfilling than what the military currently asks of most servicemembers. Studies of overseas military bases have found that aid and outreach programs are among the strongest drivers of retention, despite not seeming to measurably benefit the communities they are meant to serve. They improve retention because servicemembers find the work meaningful. Many will say: this is why I enlisted.4 They are, in a sense, frustrated altruists. Give them something worth building.

As for those currently absorbed in other forms of meaningless work, some would find their way into this care apparatus. Many, being educated and resourced and newly free, would independently pursue work that actually interests them. It’s worth noting that the epidemic of anxiety, depression, and substance abuse that defines contemporary life tracks suspiciously well with the spread of meaningless work. The crisis is not just economic but existential, a crisis of purposelessness. Opening pathways to meaningful activity addresses something the current system structurally cannot.

This also supports a broader demilitarization that is long overdue, and creates exit capacity not just domestically but internationally. Countries currently subject to economic coercion and military threat would gain real room to organize themselves differently. The possibilities for genuine international collaboration, global care infrastructure rather than global military infrastructure, belong on the horizon even if that’s a longer conversation.

And for those wondering how you pay for any of it: the question itself is framed in terms that don’t describe how federal spending actually works. The US government is a sovereign currency issuer. It doesn’t collect taxes and then spend them; it spends by issuing currency. Taxes serve real functions (managing inflation, driving demand for the dollar), but “taxpayer money” is not the pool from which federal programs are funded. The household budget analogy that dominates public debate is simply wrong at the federal level.5

Everyone already knows this in practice. When COVID hit, trillions appeared virtually overnight. No corresponding tax increase, and the deficit spike receded without one. The same pattern holds for military spending: when the political will exists, the money materializes. The question “how do you pay for it” is seldom asked about war or emergency measures. It’s reserved mainly for lasting programs that would fundamentally alter the arrangement.

The real constraints are material: do we have the people, the resources, the productive capacity? Inflation is the genuine risk to watch, not “running out of money.” And given the staggering scale of human effort currently devoted to work that serves no discernible social purpose, the binding constraint is clearly not real resources. The obstacle is political.

A world where livelihood is unconditional is, to me, a post-capitalist world, even if money and markets persist. The core of what we experience as capitalism is not the existence of markets or private enterprise but the near-universal compulsion to sell your labor within them in order to survive. Make that participation voluntary and you’ve changed the social order at its root.

People, freed from the material necessity of reproducing capitalism, would largely stop reproducing it. The frantic consumption, the competitive extraction, the resignation to meaningless work — these aren’t expressions of human nature. They’re symptoms of a system that has to be imposed because it would not be chosen. When common lands were enclosed at capitalism’s dawn, many chose vagabondage over wage labor, even as it was criminalized.6 People had to be forced into this arrangement. The idea that they’d sustain it freely doesn’t have much going for it.

What we’d likely see instead is a major increase in voluntary work and voluntary association. People working on things that matter to them with people they want to work with. Some people would lounge around, smoke weed, read novels, watch movies, write bad poetry, sure. But we’d also get great art, cutting-edge physics, advances in renewable energy, local food systems, things that are vital but not immediately valuable in the eyes of the market. Think of the creative and intellectual explosion of the 1960s, when a generation had widespread free time and economic security: new forms of music, literature, and film, the appropriate technology movement, major efforts to think about sustainability and self-sufficiency outside the logic of the market. Now imagine that room extended and stabilized.

You’d also get a population that is more politically engaged. Think of what that same generation set in motion: the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the largest anti-war mobilization in American history. Demands that currently feel impossibly remote — nationalized industry, global wealth redistribution, stronger international institutions — start to look achievable when people aren’t too exhausted and precarious to sustain the movements that would win them. The program I’m describing doesn’t finish the work. It creates the conditions under which the remaining work can take place. Winning even this much will require political struggle against deeply entrenched interests.

I don’t know exactly what a post-compulsory society would look like. But it would be a clear improvement for the vast majority of people living in the one we have today. The transitional structures, the non-reformist reforms suggested here, are technologically and institutionally feasible. The rest is political will.

Under feudalism, most European peasants lived on land they could meaningfully use as their own. The system they lived within was still hierarchical and coercive — they were bound to the manor, owed labor or rent to the lord, and had limited legal autonomy. But within that structure, peasants had direct access to common land: shared pastures, forests, water. They governed these resources collectively. They had substantial control over how they organized their labor, and they kept most of what they produced. Subsistence was not mediated by a wage.

Starting in the 1400s and accelerating over the next several centuries, the nobility and gentry began enclosing common land across Europe, fencing off fields and pastures that peasants had used for generations and claiming them as exclusive private property. In England alone, Parliament — largely controlled by the landowning class — passed over five thousand enclosure bills, privatizing millions of acres. Peasants who had worked that land for generations were displaced, often with nothing, or offered plots so small and poor they were effectively useless.

What this meant in practice was the destruction of a way of life. Without land, a person could no longer grow food, graze animals, or provide for themselves directly. Those who accepted the wage entered a cycle in which they sold their labor to someone else in order to earn the money to buy back the very things that had previously been theirs: food they once grew, shelter on land they once lived on.

Many people refused. They chose to live as vagabonds rather than submit to wage work. They tore down the fences that enclosed the commons. They organized uprisings and formed communes. Understanding what had been taken from them, and what the wage represented — less opportunity than subjugation — they resisted at every stage.

States met that resistance with force. Vagrancy laws made it illegal to be landless and unemployed, punishable by whipping, branding, forced labor, even execution. A person could be dispossessed of everything and then brutalized for having nowhere to go. Uprisings were crushed militarily.

So when we hear the word “transition” to describe the shift from feudalism to capitalism, we should understand it as a euphemism. This was a dispossession, carried out through force, against sustained resistance, over centuries. The world it produced, where we sell our time to be able to pay to live on the land beneath us, is not ancient, inevitable, or permanent. It was built. And we can build something else.

But the contradiction doesn’t eliminate the problem. However committed we are to collective transformation, individuals still have to survive within systems we can influence but do not control. The question is not whether we should organize to change the social order. The question is how people — especially those without inherited wealth — secure the material stability necessary to participate in that struggle over the long term.

Under contemporary capitalism, access to livelihood is overwhelmingly mediated by competitive markets. The conventional path we present to young people — accumulate credentials, secure employment, invest savings, rely on steady growth — presumes an economic order that is ecologically untenable and structurally precarious. At the same time, many professions held up as morally preferable require substantial debt and channel workers into institutions that ultimately reproduce the system as it exists.

If collective struggle is the horizon, then material stability and discretionary time are not luxuries; they are preconditions. An anticapitalist politics that declines to address how people secure those conditions risks becoming a politics available primarily to those who already possess them.

My last piece suggested that, for some people, short-term military service might be one constrained pathway to such stability. That was not a moral endorsement of U.S. foreign policy, nor a universal recommendation. It was an argument that, under certain material conditions, it should not be categorically foreclosed as an option for those seeking economic footing.

Reasonable people will disagree about that assessment. But more important than any single example is the broader question: what forms of anticapitalist self-help are we prepared to articulate? If we can’t answer how materially constrained people are supposed to survive, build capacity, and sustain political engagement, then our politics risks functioning as moral commentary rather than strategy.

Work, for most people, is not primarily an arena of self-expression but a constrained mechanism for meeting basic needs. A left that hopes to expand its base must grapple with that reality directly.

Note: This is the written version of the video essay embedded above.

Introduction

In the last video, I looked at U.S. narco-terrorism by commission — cases where U.S. foreign policy designed and exported systems of repression that used drugs and violence as tools of political control while restructuring economies around authoritarian market reforms.

In this video, I’ll argue that the U.S. government is also a narco-terrorist organization by omission — maintaining mass harm through systematic non-intervention in the social conditions that make drugs reliably lethal.

These aren’t separate phenomena. They’re two sides of a political economy that offers stable, well-funded, and socially rewarded pathways into organized violence while systematically failing to provide dignified, secure pathways for building care infrastructure and other forms of public wealth here in America.

And of course, this isn’t about one party’s failures. It’s a bipartisan pattern reproduced across administrations with very different rhetoric but the same underlying priorities.

The Argument

I’m going to use a standard line of reasoning from contemporary ethics and political philosophy — the idea that agents are responsible for preventable harm when they have the knowledge and capacity to stop it – but applied to a state rather than individuals.

P1. If an agent knows that mass preventable deaths are occurring, knows the primary structural causes, and has the capacity to substantially reduce them at reasonable cost relative to its resources, then failing to act makes the agent morally complicit in those deaths.

Since at least the early 2010s, the U.S. government…

P2. has known that mass overdose deaths are occurring.

P3. has known, beyond reasonable doubt, the primary structural drivers of overdose mortality — including housing instability, lack of healthcare, post-incarceration risk and social isolation

P4. has had the institutional and economic capacity to significantly reduce (not fully eliminate) these causes.

P5. And yet, it has failed to do so. Not completely, but systematically.

C1. So by any standard moral reasoning, the U.S. government has been morally complicit in mass overdose deaths since at least the early 2010s: it has known the harm, it has known the causes, it has had the capacity to reduce them, and has consistently failed to act.

D. Now, if an organization is morally complicit in the mass lethal effects of narcotics on civilians, then it can coherently be described as a narco-terrorist agent — even if the harm is produced through omission rather than direct violence.

C2. And that leads to the conclusion that the U.S. government qualifies as a narco-terrorist organization by omission.

A brief defense of premises

P1. The Principle of Preventive Responsibility, or The Preventing Bad Things Principle. To me, this intuitively makes a lot of sense – if you walk past a pond and see a child drowning and you don’t do anything about it, you’re morally complicit in the child’s death. That’s the idea here but in applied to mass deaths from drugs.

P2. This isn’t controversial — it’s one of the most heavily tracked public health phenomena in the country.

Overdose deaths:

Started rising in the late 1990s,

Become a major public health crisis by the mid-2000s,

Crossed 50,000/year around 2015.

Cross 100,000/year after 2020.

P3. This is also not controversial – the U.S. government has full access to U.S. policy and research institutions, and social determinants of health have been mainstream in epidemiology and public health since the mid 90s. By the 2000s there was extremely strong evidence linking overdose risk to housing, isolation, incarceration, lack of healthcare. And by around 2010 there was basically no serious expert dispute that overdose is structurally driven rather than mainly supply-driven.

P4. If the U.S. can take fit young adults, pay them, train them, house them, and turn them into soldiers, intelligence analysts, and weapons engineers within a few years, it can do the same to train nurses, builders, renewable energy engineers, and other forms of care workers.

P5. The failure isn’t subtle. It’s visible in how the U.S. structures work and reward. Programs like AmeriCorps offer low pay, temporary contracts, and minimal institutional support for care-oriented labor, while military and security careers offer stable salaries, housing, education, healthcare, and long-term benefits. At the same time, most of the work that actually sustains communities — caregiving, emotional labor, social maintenance — remains unpaid or precarious, disproportionately performed by women. And meanwhile, vast sectors of socially unproductive but highly paid work in finance, management, and administration continue to expand, not by accident, but as the structural consequence of state regulation and policy. Even liberal reformers openly admit this — for example, Obama argued against universal healthcare on the grounds that it would eliminate millions of insurance jobs, not-so-subtly implying that entire labor markets that do not need to exist are being preserved based on political objectives. Taken together, this shows not a lack of effort, but a consistent pattern: the state pays well to administer and manage harm, and poorly to prevent it.

D. You might be wondering what, exactly, makes this a form of narco-terrorism rather than just policy failure. In my earlier piece, I argued that for “narco-terrorism” to make sense it would require centralized control over drug supply, forced administration, and explicit political objectives. What changes here is not the structure, but the direction: centralized control over remedy supply, structurally enforced non-administration, and political objectives that are implicit but durable.

Precarity persists for the same political reason meaningless work proliferates: widespread material security and social autonomy would fundamentally destabilize existing arrangements of power and profitability. In other words, it’s difficult to imagine effectively addressing the underlying causes of the overdose crisis without triggering a major political realignment that would make the forms of domination characteristic of our current political economy much harder to sustain. If the vast majority of us had decent housing, healthcare, and real choice about what to do with ourselves, we would likely start organizing society around priorities other than private profit, wealth accumulation, and enforcing economic dependence. And it’s hard to find a more consistent pattern in U.S. policy, especially over the last half century, than the prevention of precisely that outcome.

Conclusion

What all this points to is that American political economy is organized around two complementary forms of power — outward, through organized violence and coercion, and inward, through sustained precarity and managed dependency. In practice, this distinction is increasingly blurred: financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank govern through debt and austerity abroad, while policing, incarceration, and the federal immigration enforcement apparatus apply militarized control at home.

The inversion, as I’ve already mentioned in my defense of premise 4, is almost trivial. The same institutional capacities could be used to organize care instead of coercion: large-scale public investment in housing, healthcare, education, and social repair, creating opportunities for stable, dignified work whose direct output is stronger communities rather than geopolitical instability.

What remains unresolved is how a system built around organized violence and managed dependency — with deeply entrenched incentives — could be redirected toward organized care, and what kinds of political, social, or moral pressures would be sufficient to make that shift durable.

This is Part 2 of a series. Part 1 examines U.S. narco-terrorism by commission.

“Unlike actual BDSM play, where there’s always a safe-word, when ‘normal’ people fall into the same dynamic, there’s never such an easy way out. You can’t say ‘orange’ to your boss. It’s always occurred to me that this insight is important, and could even become the basis for a theory of social liberation.”

This essay takes that suggestion seriously. Rather than proposing a system or policy program, it treats the ability to refuse without ruin as a minimal test of freedom. Drawing on a view of power associated with Michel Foucault, and on traditions—from Ivan Illich to feminist political economy—that treat care as social infrastructure rather than private virtue, the essay asks what follows if freedom is evaluated not merely by formal choice but by whether refusal remains viable in practice.

I. Games, Refusal, and the Livable Substrate

Games are defined by contingency. They have rules, boundaries, and stakes that are understood to be limited. What makes them games is not the absence of power or conflict, but the presence of an exit.

Where games involve vulnerability or asymmetry, this rule becomes explicit. A safe-word preserves the distinction between a bounded context of play and the broader context of life. Without such a mechanism, the situation ceases to be play, and any claim to ongoing consent is illusory.

The distinction between life and particular social arrangements, such as games, is ordinarily obvious. Yet much of contemporary society functions by obscuring it.

Wage labor is the obvious example. In principle, it is a voluntary agreement between parties. In practice, refusing it generally means losing access to basic features of a dignified social life. What is formally a choice functions as necessity.

This structure is not unique to wage labor. It appears wherever access to basic needs is made conditional on compliance with particular arrangements—housing, healthcare, education, and policing are familiar examples.

For cooperation to be meaningful, refusal must be viable. This requires the presence of a livable substrate: the material and social conditions that secure access to basic needs independently of participation in any particular arrangement.

This substrate is not “outside” society. It is the background condition that makes it possible for cooperation within society to be voluntary.

A safe-word, understood in this expanded sense, is the mechanism by which the bounded stakes of contingent relations are collectively honored, so that no one has to gamble their continued social existence on saying “no”.

II. Power, Domination, and Care

Power is not an anomaly in social life. It is everywhere, shaping what is possible, expected, and taken for granted. No social arrangement exists without it, and no serious account of freedom can ignore it.

The problem, then, is not power as such, but certain ways in which it functions.

One particularly consequential way power functions is through domination via controlled dependence. Where continued access to the conditions of a viable social life is made conditional on participation, power acquires leverage over refusal without relying on force.

Power can also be exercised through care—not as a moral attitude or private virtue, but as an infrastructural practice that expands autonomy. Housing access that is independent of employment or market participation is one example. Where care is durable and shared, people are less exposed to ruin when particular arrangements fail. Dependence is not eliminated, but diffused in ways that reduce leverage over refusal.

These are not opposites in the sense of power versus its absence. They are opposing poles in how power operates. Domination concentrates dependence; care diffuses it. Domination makes refusal dangerous; care makes it viable.

Domination and care operate both personally and systemically, but systemic conditions are what enable—or render structurally untenable—personal domination.

The livable substrate does not abolish hierarchy or authority; it changes how they operate. When no single arrangement monopolizes access to the conditions of life, power loses its ability to compel participation through threat.

III. Making Refusal Ordinary

If unbounded domination depends on making refusal nonviable, then neutralizing it does not necessarily require seizing power or designing a perfected system in advance. It requires altering the conditions under which participation takes place.

Revolution, understood in these terms, is not a singular event but a process. It proceeds by cultivating a livable substrate—by expanding and normalizing forms of care.

A society that met this standard would still be fragile, imperfect, and contested. But it would no longer be organized around relationships in which one party’s authority depends on another’s lack of alternatives.

What has been achieved so far is not general freedom, but a system of managed dependence. Civilization may always remain unfinished, but this minimal condition names a horizon worth aiming at.