Awaken the Spectre

“A Spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre.”

-Karl Marx

The Spectre did more than haunt. It rose with crimson eyes from mashed fingers in gears and the coughs of children. Midwifed by mustard gas and famine. The old powers panicked as in the north, they watched the Spectre pierce one of their own thrice through the chest. The Spectre pounded at the gates of Nanchang to the east, boiled the Nile in the south, shook mountains in the west. The hand of a new world was about their neck. As the sun rose, the Spectre started to become flesh.

The powers of old Europe (and new America) were forced to convene, to prepare a ritual that would obliterate this possible future. And what a ritual it was! No ceremony could rival it. Coups instead of chants, sanctions rather than spells. Invasions, not invocations, were levied against the Spectre. And the blood price upon the altar? The low, low price of tens of millions of souls.

Wreathed in the acidic scent of agent orange, eyes dancing with nuclear lightning, this holy alliance reclaimed their throne and bound the Spectre in history’s golden chains. Their wrinkled hands encircled the earth and squeezed. Violation of this new order was not tolerated. Conflict and war were dubbed a thing of the past. Disagree and face heaven’s fire.

Victory beyond all imaginable victory. The total and eternal rule of western capitalism.

And then they fucked it all up.

Economic crashes, climate disasters, popular discontent, plagues, addiction, loneliness, genocide, mass shootings, more economic crashes, more climate disasters.

Quietly, almost imperceptible at first, The Spectre stirs again. It tests the length of its chains. A protest here, a strike there, a riot or two. It remains bound…for now. Capital’s sigils weaken, hair-thin cracks spread along the gilded links.

The people’s eyes flash red.

To live in 2025 is to live in contradiction. The world continues. Eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building. Just as Luke 17 foretold.

But we all see it, don’t we? The teetering. The air smells like apocalypse. The ultra-wealthy–Marx’s old powers–hover above us at heights that would have stunned even that old philosopher. Spaceship joyrides, AI-powered death machines, universal databases, a listening device in every pocket, planet-killing bombs. Their might borders on the sorcerous. It is no exaggeration to say that these powers would, in the eyes of the majority of humans throughout history, make the capitalists indistinguishable from gods.

And yet, like I said, they’re fucking it all up.

The old invocations aren’t working. They’re chanting the same spells, but they just don’t hit like they used to.

Why? The basics aren’t complicated:

1. a system predicated on endless growth on a planet with finite resources is bouncing against those constraints.

2. People will pursue their material interests. The poor will always want a slice of the wealth they toil to create, many among the middle class will desire to obtain the power of the upper class, and the individuals in the upper class will want to grow stronger in relationship to one another. Conflict is inevitable.

A child could tell you such a system is untenable, and yet the gods of our age insist that we now walk the only possible path. All other roads lead to death, and no, don’t ask why this road now enters the bowels of a crumbling tomb. No, that’s not a bottomless pit just up ahead. What an imagination you’ve got!

Capitalism is, by all fundamental logic, dead. The skull shows through torn flesh. The corpse is starting to stink. The body is held together by rough stitches, fraying rope, and government bailouts.

Yet it keeps walking, rigor mortis grip around our wrists. We are dragged deeper into the catacombs. The floor has become uneven, the walls are starting to leak putrid fluid, there’s a half-perceptible hissing just behind us. They insist a paradise awaits at the bottom.

And so we’re calling this project, “The Capitalist Crypt.”

Capitalism, at least in its current incarnation, is sounding the death rattle. It’s smashing against every economic, sociological, and ecological limit. The world is on fire, and their arrogance has set the blaze.

“Well hooray then!” the naive might say, “If capitalism is doomed, then we’re good to go. Why write a silly blog? Why organize? Let’s wait for it to die and then start up our perfect utopia.”

Sorry, not how that works.

Sure, a kinder world could emerge out of capitalism: a world of comprehensive democracy, economic planning, respect for humanity and the planet, and mass disarmament. But it won’t simply be willed into being. Capitalism and its overlords have no intention of letting anyone leave this crypt.

They will keep burning oil, keep building weapons, keep amassing wealth, keep on marching down until the wrong support beam snaps and we’re all buried here for good, scrabbling in the dark, knifing one another in the gut over rotten meat and fetid water.

And what then? We know, because we’ve seen it before. Conjured by capitalist desperation, The Beast rises from the abyss, an amalgamation of iron and teeth and swastikas and horns and heads and memes and claws and cryptocurrency crowns. It is marked with the festering wound of capitalism’s death, a lesion from which pours vengeance against the people.

The Beast is a wretched inversion of Marx’s liberating Spectre, a final fascistic mode of production. Its scab-covered arms carry a new set of chains, enough for all of us and our children to boot.

Don’t scoff at it. Even now, many capitalists look hopefully towards The Beast for their salvation.

No. If we don’t want to die in this crypt, then we must put in the work to escape it. There’s a lot to do, so we best get started.

First, we must understand how we got here and where we are. This will take some time to piece together. We’ll find maps scrawled on cave walls by long dead wanderers. We’ll collect bits of parchment and bloodied diaries left atop the skeletons of those who didn’t escape. Piece by piece, we will reconstruct the story of our class laboring in the dark.

Next, we must plot to break free of the zombie’s grip around our arm, then prepare to contend with whatever forces the necromancers of capital will conjure to stop us. They will not collapse into a pile of bones just because we tell them to, we must prepare an exorcism of our own.

Finally, we must break free from the dead’s realm entirely. Emerge into the world above, feel a sweet breeze, lap some water from a cold stream, brush the bone dust from our clothes, and get to work building a world worth living in.

That is what this project is about. We will venture into the dark heart of capitalism, the feeling of being trapped in this impossible moment. Together, we will dream and scheme and scrap our way out of this damned crypt.

It’s time for the Spectre to awaken.