Why the story of the “free market” masks the rise of corporate empires—and what reclaiming democracy really requires.
We’re told capitalism guarantees choice, innovation, and competition. Neoliberal doctrine goes further: the less government interferes, the better the outcome. In theory, firms compete on price and quality, consumers choose rationally, and the best rise while the worst fall. In practice, it doesn’t work that way. Information is uneven. Choices are manufactured. Power doesn’t disperse. It accumulates.
Remove the referee, and the biggest player doesn’t just win. It rewrites the rules.
What we live with now isn’t an open market, but a landscape defined by decades of consolidation. Firms don’t simply compete. They shape entire ecosystems. Amazon sells goods but also owns the warehouses, the data infrastructure, and the logistics networks. Google structures access to knowledge while dominating ads, mobile services, and web infrastructure. Meta hosts discourse but also curates what gets seen and by whom. These companies act as both participant and gatekeeper—setting terms for consumers, suppliers, and even regulators.
...What used to be empire now appears as logistics. The structure hasn’t changed—value flows upward while the costs are pushed outward and downward.
In sector after sector, what appears to be choice is tightly controlled. Nestlé and PepsiCo dominate bottled water, baby formula, cereals, and snacks. BlackRock and Vanguard hold stakes in hundreds of competing firms. Investment funds quietly absorb housing, nursing homes, and healthcare facilities, setting prices through algorithms and chasing quarterly returns.
From this perspective, the harms of consolidation go beyond economics. What’s sold as market rationality often produces structural violence—the long-term degradation of public goods, the erosion of local economies, and the dislocation of vulnerable populations. Wages stagnate. Work becomes precarious. Services degrade. Environmental costs are dumped on communities least able to absorb them. These are not side effects. They’re the operating logic.
"If human beings hated injustice and inequality as we say we do and think we do, would any of the Great Empires and High Civilizations have lasted fifteen minutes?
If we Americans hate injustice and inequality as passionately as we say we do, would any person in this country lack enough to eat?
We demand a rebellious spirit of those who have no chance to learn that rebellion is possible, but we the privileged hold still and see no evil.
We have good reason to be cautious, to be quiet, not to rock the boat. A lot of peace and comfort is at stake. The mental and moral shift from denial of injustice to consciousness of injustice is often made at very high cost. My contentment, stability, safety, personal affections, may become a sacrifice to the dream of the common good, to the idea of a freedom that I may not live to share, an ideal of justice that nobody may ever attain.
The last words of the Mahabharata are, 'By no means can I attain a goal beyond my reach.' It is likely that justice, a human idea, is a goal beyond human reach. We’re good at inventing things that can’t exist.
Maybe freedom cannot be attained through human institutions but must remain a quality of the mind or spirit not dependent on circumstances, a gift of grace. This (if I understand it) is the religious definition of freedom. My problem with it is that its devaluation of work and circumstance encourages institutional injustices which make the gift of grace inaccessible. A two-year-old child who dies of starvation or a beating or a firebombing has not been granted access to freedom, nor any gift of grace, in any sense in which I can understand the words.
We can attain by our own efforts only an imperfect justice, a limited freedom. Better than none. Let us hold fast to that principle, the love of Freedom, of which the freed slave, the poet, spoke."
- Ursula K. Le Guin, from "A War Without End." Jacobin, 26 January 2018.
If you’re dreaming of a white Christmas, you’re definitely racist.
This entire ‘season of goodwill’ is deeply problematic. Across the world, children are being registered on lists of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and their behaviour rewarded according to the strategic allocation of gifts. They are being indoctrinated into capitalism without even knowing it.
The implication that merit should be any kind of benchmark for reward and achievement is everything that is wrong with modern society. Instead, Christmas gifts should be distributed according to skin colour, sexual orientation and other vectors of oppression.
For instance, a Latinx girl should receive twice as many gifts a white male infant as reparations for the brutalising experience of existing in a systemically racist patriarchal culture. When it comes to white boys, parents should probably just smash up their presents with a mallet.
If you have reproduced, you should be ashamed of yourself. Children are trophies of meat for self-congratulatory heterosexuals. And they are terrible for the environment. You’d be far better off with a peace lily or a spider plant.
But if you must breed, here are some Christmas gifts that are adequately woke: reusable water bottles, Hamas t-shirts, tins of tomato soup (to chuck about in art galleries), pronoun badges, recyclable paper hats, keffiyeh-themed onesies, halal cupcakes laced with puberty blockers, and a papier-mâché bust of Zack Polanski.
Christmas is a form of structural violence. If you need further evidence, consider how families are brainwashed into murdering trees and dressing their corpses in flashing lights. It’s this kind of grotesque ecological vandalism that first radicalised Greta Thunberg.
Besides, scientists have proven that families are deeply damaging to our mental health, encouraging generational rivalry, manipulative mind-games, and a psychiatric disorder known as ‘love’. There is no more destructive way to live than with parents, siblings and children. It’s called the ‘nuclear family’ for a reason.
And so Christmas simply intensifies an already unhealthy state of affairs, by demanding that we spend excessive periods of time with other human beings simply on the grounds that we have similar DNA. You can’t get much more discriminatory than that.
And let’s not forget that some of the worst crimes take place within the family home. For example, studies have shown that there have been zero recorded cases of incest among people who are unrelated. That cannot be a coincidence.
Father Christmas is, of course, a symbol of patriarchal entitlement. What kind of monster breaks into people’s houses, guzzles their sherry, and expects to be lauded for it? And thanks to Ozempic, these days he’ll find it much easier to descend down the chimney.
Besides, we’ve all watched that video of Father Christmas rolling around in the snow with Mariah Carey. Such repugnant displays of toxic masculinity are completely unacceptable. Not to mention that his catchphrase – ‘ho, ho, ho’ – is profoundly offensive to sex workers.
Santa’s elves are, of course, a form of slave labour. He has evaded criminal prosecution by living in Lapland, a place so desolate that it does not appear on many maps. You would think the Finnish government would do something about this festive terrorist, but I suppose they’re too busy building saunas.
And why can’t Christmas be more LGBTQIA+ friendly? We all know that Santa is in a nongay marriage with Mrs Claus, which makes him a terrible role model. And one of the most popular movies at this time of year is A Christmas Carol based on a book by that notorious heterosexual Charles Dickens.
Watch any version of the story of Ebeneezer Scrooge and you’ll be shocked by the lack of queer and trans representation. Why does the BBC keep showing such fascist-adjacent propaganda on Christmas day? They may as well broadcast Triumph of the Will.
And the ‘nativity’ is the most objectionable of all. Even if we assume the three kings are in a polyamorous relationship, the focus of the scene is squarely on Mary and Joseph, the ultimate icons of heteronormativity. Until the queer community is properly represented at Christmas, they can never be free.
From today’s Book of the Day, I have selected one sentence for a multidisciplinary analysis.
“The question as to who and what is responsible for African underdevelopment can be answered at two levels: first, the operation of the imperialist system bears major responsibility for African economic retardation.” — Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972)
Walter Rodney’s observation in…
