<
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/30/how-americas-business-elite-became-their-own-marxist-caricature/>
"There is a moment in every authoritarian takeover when the business elite must
choose between principle and profit, between defending the system that made
their wealth possible and accommodating the forces destroying that system. That
moment has arrived for America’s capitalist class, and they are failing the
test so spectacularly that they’re validating every Marxist critique of
capitalism ever written.
I have a question for my center-right friends sitting on their hands: what do
you think is going to happen when all is said and done, when all the blood is
spilled, and all the corporate leaders who bent the knee to this regime try to
resume their lectures about the virtues of free market capitalism? Do you
really think monologues about Milton Friedman’s pencil parable are going to
resonate with a population that watched you collaborate with authoritarianism?
Their inaction, their neutrality, their “pragmatic” accommodation—every golden
plaque presented to Trump, every settlement paid to avoid retaliation, every
silent acquiescence to constitutional destruction—all of this is discrediting
capitalism in the eyes of ordinary Americans in ways that no socialist
organizer could achieve. They are acting like the cartoon villains Marxists
make them out to be, and they should not be surprised when the torches and
pitchforks come for them.
Tim Cook’s trembling hands as he presented Trump with a custom Apple plaque on
a 24-karat gold base will be remembered as the moment American capitalism
genuflected before American fascism. The image is perfect: the leader of the
world’s most valuable company, literally shaking as he offers tribute to a
criminal regime, gold adorning gold in the gaudy corruption of what was once
called the people’s house.
Mark Zuckerberg’s hot mic moment was even more revealing: “I wasn’t sure what
number you wanted to go with,” he whispered to Trump after announcing that Meta
would invest $600 billion in American AI infrastructure—a figure so
astronomically absurd it would require borrowing more than twice the company’s
total book value. The CEO of a publicly traded company admitting on live
microphone that he fabricates financial projections based on whatever pleases
the Dear Leader.
These aren’t isolated incidents of individual moral failure. They represent the
systematic transformation of American capitalism from a system of competitive
enterprise into a protection racket where tribute payments and loyalty
demonstrations determine market outcomes. Every tech oligarch who showed up to
grovel, every Fortune 500 CEO who stayed silent about constitutional
destruction, every venture capitalist who treated systematic institutional
capture as normal political transition—they’ve all participated in the
conversion of free enterprise into oligarchic feudalism.
We have seen this before. German industrialists who thought they could use the
Nazis while remaining untouched by them discovered too late that
authoritarianism doesn’t respect prior arrangements or sophisticated
calculations. When it suited Hitler’s purposes, their “pragmatic” collaboration
became evidence of their expendability. The business leaders who enabled the
regime found themselves consumed by it when their usefulness expired."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
