The Nature of Power Under Capitalism (Part III)

Capitalism is an economic system that organizes the production and exchange of goods.

Simultaneously, it is an all-encompassing social order that organizes human relationships, perceptions, desires, and behaviors. The genius of its design lies in its ability to take the dynamics of power described in Parts I and II of this series and channel them into mechanisms that ensure its own perpetual reproduction.

At its core, capitalism produces specific psychological and social conditions through competition, insecurity, the pursuit of status, and the internalization of scarcity, and then offers outlets for these tensions that feed back into the system. These outlets manifest through role-playing within institutional structures, consumption as identity formation, spectacle as distraction, and micro-level divisions that fracture collective solidarity. Each of these mechanisms operates simultaneously, creating an environment where the focus remains on managing the symptoms of systemic exploitation.

The Machinery of Roles Under Capitalism

Capitalism demands labor, but more deeply, it demands identities. People aren’t born as workers, consumers, managers, or entrepreneurs, they’re shaped into these roles. These job titles and social roles become the framework through which individuals understand who they are and what they’re worth. This process starts early.

Schools under capitalism churn out students like standardized parts, each molded to fit neatly into the machinery of the existing order. Curiosity is acknowledged but channeled, allowed only within the boundaries of state-approved curricula. A student may have questions that extend beyond the textbook, but the structure rarely allows time for deeper exploration. Lessons are standardized, designed to produce measurable outcomes rather than genuine intellectual engagement.

Discovery is permitted, but again, only within the sanctioned boundaries of the curriculum. Like a miner confined to a pre-dug shaft, students are never allowed to strike out in search of untapped veins of knowledge. Students are trained to raise their hands, to wait their turn, and to internalize hierarchy as natural. They are conditioned not to question the shape of the world but to slot themselves into it without resistance.

More than anything, schools teach the deeper lesson of how to navigate a world where your value is measured by performance and where success means adapting to external expectations rather than shaping your own path. The system is designed to produce people who can follow the steps laid out for them, who see the next grade, the next test, or the next job as the only imaginable direction forward.

By the time you reach adulthood, the shaping is nearly complete. You’ve spent years learning how to read the room, how to modulate yourself to match expectations you were never explicitly taught. The workplace is just the next stage, but now the stakes are higher. The script is already written, and you’re expected to know your lines. Be productive, be efficient, be “professional.” Project confidence but not arrogance, be agreeable but not weak, show enthusiasm but not too much. The problem is, no one ever gave you the full script so you have to work with only scattered cues and shifting expectations.

Because the rules aren't written down, you rely on vague signals. You adjust how you speak, how you sit, when you laugh, how you respond. Every action is filtered through a quiet mental calculation: Will this make me seem competent? Will this cost me something? The line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior is not fixed, and part of your job becomes predicting where that line will be tomorrow. Over time, this guessing becomes automatic. You start to watch yourself as others might. You monitor your tone, your timing, your facial expressions. The pressure to stay within bounds doesn’t go away—it becomes part of how you move through the world.

At first, the performance is conscious and deliberate. But repetition turns it into habit, and habit turns it into identity. You don’t just act the part; you become it. The boundaries blur between what you do and who you are because survival depends on embodying the role so seamlessly that you don’t have to think about it anymore. The better you are at adapting, the more natural it feels, until eventually, there’s no distinction between the self that works and the self that exists outside of work.

Ask someone who they are, and the first answer is often a title: I’m a doctor. I’m an engineer. I’m a teacher. Identity fuses with labor so that quitting feels like losing the one role you knew you were supposed to play. It’s here that the real power of the capitalist system lies, in its ability to shape identity.

Power follows you home, settling into your phone, shaping the way you think before you even realize it. Social media turns every thought, every joke, every moment into a product. A casual post feeds the algorithm, which decides who gets to see you, how much attention you’re worth, whether you exist in the feed or get buried beneath the next wave of content. Each interaction builds a digital profile corporations can mine, refining the ads that land in your scroll.

Validation and self-doubt move in tandem, engineered to keep you engaged. A post with high numbers feels like a rush, proof that you struck the right balance between authenticity and marketability. A post that flops lingers in your mind, a nagging reminder to calibrate better next time. Advertisements slot into the cracks, offering fixes in the form of new clothes or a better skincare routine. The same platforms that measure your worth in impressions serve up solutions to make you more appealing, more clickable, more optimized for engagement. The loop never stops, because as long as you keep looking for ways to refine yourself, someone is making money off the search.

The purpose of all this role-playing is to keep you from seeing the system at all. Capitalism divides life into rigid performances—worker at the office, influencer online, consumer at the mall—each with its own expectations and unspoken rules. The more these roles feel like second nature, the harder it becomes to see them as the constraints they are. Instead of recognizing the full range of ways we could engage with the world, we stay locked into narrow identities, believing that a job, a brand, or a marketable skill is the core of who we are.

There’s no reason a person should spend decades refining a single function when we carry the capacity to do so much more. In a world that wasn’t organized around profit, work would be something we flow in and out of, responding to needs, interests, and abilities as they change. A community would be a space where people contribute in different ways over time, such as through teaching, creating art, solving logistical problems, and caring for one another simply because human connection and mutual support are understood to make life richer.

Capitalism blocks that possibility. It insists that work is identity, that value comes from productivity, that to be anything at all, you must prove your worth through labor. The system demands your sense of self. It keeps you focused on optimizing within your assigned role, never stepping back long enough to ask: Why should life be reduced to this? What else could we build together if we weren’t trapped in these narrow definitions?

Consumption as Identity: The Commodification of Desire

Capitalism sells you to yourself. It takes the basic human need for meaning, belonging, and self-expression and funnels it through the checkout line. Under this system, identity is something you assemble from the outside, piece by piece, with every purchase. Your clothes, your car, your playlists, the apps on your phone, the brands you endorse without even realizing it. It’s all designed to define who you are.

We are socialized into acting as if who you are is inseparable from what you own. This includes the big things like houses and cars, of course, but it also extends to the small, everyday tokens like sneakers that signal you’re part of a culture, coffee from the “right” café, the phone case that aligns with your aesthetic. Even rebellion is repackaged and sold back to you.

How twisted is it that the Punk movement became a fashion line? Radical slogans end up on T-shirts in corporate malls. Dissent gets a price tag, and suddenly, being “anti-system” is just another brand identity you can buy into.

The emotional rush you feel when you make a purchase is a chemical trick. Capitalist marketing preys on your brain’s dopamine circuits, pairing products with promises: This will make you feel whole. This will make you matter. Social media amplifies the effect, rewarding displays of consumption with likes, comments, and fleeting attention. The high never lasts, but that’s the point. The thrill fades, leaving a subtle void, a sense that something’s missing. And the system is right there to offer the the new model, the limited edition, or the must-have item of the season to be your next fix.

Capitalism thrives on dissatisfaction. It can’t function if people feel content. Every ad, every influencer, every trend is designed to redirect your sense of lack toward the next purchase. You’re not encouraged to ask why you feel empty or disconnected. Instead, you’re nudged to believe the solution is just one click away, tucked inside a package with express shipping.

In the end, consumption fills the gaps where self-understanding, connection, and genuine fulfillment might have been. It keeps you busy managing your image, chasing trends, and curating your life as if it’s a storefront while the system profits from your endless search for something you’ll never find in a shopping cart.

The Spectacle: Capitalism’s Theater of Control

Capitalism surrounds you with images and messages that direct what you notice and what you ignore. Advertisements, entertainment, and social media shape your desires without asking for permission. The spectacle meets you where you are and pulls your attention before you’ve made a choice. It works through repetition and pace.

The stimulation is constant. Each screen, sound, and scroll draws you into the next. You move from one piece of content to another without pause. Over time, the rhythm of watch, react, want, move on becomes automatic. It floods your senses with endless stimulation, numbing your ability to step back and ask, Why does everything feel like this? The more time you spend engaged, the less space you have to reflect.

You wake up to notifications. A politician said something outrageous, a celebrity had a meltdown, a new gadget just dropped. Your feed is a conveyor belt, endlessly moving, each post designed to grab your attention just long enough to push you to the next. Turn on the TV, and you see breaking news banners flashing red, crime stories designed to stoke fear, talking heads arguing over symptoms while ignoring causes. A police shooting is framed as an isolated tragedy, a single bad apple, just like the last one, just like the next one. Climate collapse is a segment between sports highlights and stock market updates, a passing concern before a commercial reminds you to book a tropical vacation.

You’re meant to feel outraged, but never to connect the dots. The spectacle feeds off your attention, locking you in a cycle of anger, fear, and fleeting amusement. Capitalism wields power through conditioning your reflexes. You reach for your phone without thinking, refresh feeds like a nervous tic, feel a creeping unease when too much time passes without new input. Every every surge of anxiety fuels a system that profits from your exhaustion.

Celebrity culture is capitalism’s most dazzling illusion. It works by turning a handful of people into gods while the rest watch from below, transfixed. You don’t know these people, but the machinery of media makes sure it feels like you do. Their faces flood your screen, their outfits, relationships, and struggles are analyzed in obsessive detail, their every move framed as something that matters.

The system works because it gives people a sense of meaning. If a few lives seem important, it suggests that importance can be earned. It makes inequality feel like a reflection of merit rather than a result of power. Even if your life feels overlooked, the success of others becomes proof that the system works. Their fame becomes evidence that value is real and reachable.

It’s comforting to believe that significance is possible. Even if it’s not attainable for you, it is for those whose stories you can live through, whose triumphs you can celebrate, and whose tragedies you can mourn. As long as the dream exists for someone, the system doesn’t feel empty. You don’t want to burn it down; you want to be closer to it, even if that just means watching from the sidelines, consuming the spectacle, believing that the right mix of talent, luck, and hustle might make you—or someone like you—matter too.

Even politics gets swallowed by the spectacle. Elections play out like reality TV with candidates cast as characters, debates staged like gladiator matches, and every scandal and gaffe dissected for entertainment value. As we fixate on personalities, governance devolves into drama while the real machinery of power grinds on, untouched. Policies become afterthoughts, systemic change a fantasy, drowned out by soundbites and outrage cycles that reset every 24 hours.

The genius of the spectacle is that it makes you feel like you’re participating. You’re constantly liking, sharing, and commenting, but all of this engagement is contained within a loop of passive consumption. You feel informed because you’ve read headlines. You feel connected because you follow influencers. You feel politically active because you’ve posted a hashtag. Yet, deep down we know none of this threatens the system, but we are content with this, because on some level we crave the existential stability it provides us, even if it is causing immense pain to ourselves and others.

Dissatisfaction is monetized. The system acknowledges your frustration, packages it, and sells it back to you. Outraged about injustice? Here’s a documentary. Feeling lost? Here’s a self-help podcast. Want to rebel? They’ll slap a revolutionary slogan on a T-shirt, mass-produce it in a sweatshop, and sell it back to you for $29.99. They’ll turn protests into photo ops, radical language into marketing buzzwords. Your rebellion is a brand waiting to happen.

The spectacle gives you just enough emotional release to keep you from boiling over, just enough engagement to keep you from realizing how deeply you’ve been disarmed.

The twisted brilliance of capitalism’s spectacle is how it parades mass suffering and chaos in front of you, stripped of context, drowned in noise, until reality feels like just another show you’re watching, powerless to change.

You’re told to pick a side, root for your “team,” believe that casting a vote every few years is the height of civic engagement. The spectacle thrives on your anger, as long as it’s not aimed in the right direction. Hate a politician, despise a rival voter base, rage at a public figure who said something outrageous, that’s all fine, just don’t look beyond them. The system needs you emotionally invested in its surface but ignorant of its structure. The moment you stop treating life as a game, the moment you step back and see how power warps every aspect of your life to preserve itself, the illusion starts to crack. And cracks are dangerous. Cracks let people see through.

Division at the Micro Level: The Fracturing of Collective Solidarity

Capitalism’s sharpest weapon is division. Not the obvious kind, like the chasm between the billionaire and the minimum-wage worker. The system’s real genius lies in how it slices communities, workplaces, and even friendships into fragments, turning potential allies into rivals. It pits the poor against each other, the working class against itself, grinding solidarity into dust through competition, comparison, and manufactured distrust.

Look at who does the policing. The people making the rules never have to get their hands dirty. The billionaires, the CEOs, the politicians don’t need to be the ones enforcing obedience.

That job falls to people a step or two removed from the communities they control. The middle manager cracks down on workers to meet quotas he likely didn’t set. The teacher disciplines kids for resisting rules they had no say in. The cop, often from a different neighborhood, sees the people he patrols as potential threats.

This distance is the point. When enforcement comes from the outside, it feels less personal, more like a job, just following orders. It creates a divide between the enforcer and the policed, between the people trying to survive and the ones trained to see them as obstacles. Since the enforcers don’t hold real power, they take the blame when things go wrong, while the ones at the top stay untouched. The system runs smoothly because its enforcers see themselves as separate from the people they control, never questioning who benefits from keeping things exactly as they are.

We police each other because we’ve been taught to, because the system functions best when its enforcers don’t realize they’re just cogs like everyone else. Even managers, supervisors, and small business owners—the ones who think they have power—are still inside the machine, playing roles they didn’t write, enforcing rules they didn’t create. The trap is so complete that most don’t see it, don’t question it. Instead, they participate, believing that discipline and order serve them rather than the system itself.

Everywhere you look, the script is compete or be left behind. In the workplace, colleagues are obstacles to your advancement. That promotion is a scarce resource, and there’s only one seat at the table. So, you watch your back. You withhold information. You smile through gritted teeth while quietly hoping the person next to you slips up. You don’t see yourself as cruel, you just know there’s not enough to go around and if they win, you lose. Trust erodes through the silent, grinding pressure to survive through competition.

In our neighborhoods, the same dynamic plays out differently. Struggling with rising rents? Blame the new immigrants. Wages stagnating? Blame the workers willing to accept less. Systemic inequalities get reframed as personal failings or cultural clashes. Racism, xenophobia, and misogyny are constantly fueled by the elite who use media figures and politicians to redirect economic frustration into hate, keeping people fighting each other instead of the structures squeezing them both.

Even within movements that should be spaces of resistance, division creeps in like a virus. Identity politics, originally a tool for recognizing diverse struggles, gets used to fracture coalitions instead of strengthening them. The focus shifts from collective liberation to internal disputes over language, representation, and purity tests. The system doesn’t have to infiltrate these movements to weaken them. It just lets the pressure build until people turn on each other, exhausted from fighting battles within, too drained to confront the enemy outside.

The psychological toll is devastating. The stress of economic vulnerability morphs into resentment. Instead of aiming that anger upward, it gets misfired sideways at co-workers, neighbors, and even family members. This is how capitalism sustains itself: by turning collective struggle into private pain, by making sure that when people feel the walls closing in, they blame each other for the shrinking space.

The Reproduction of Capitalism Through Crisis and Adaptation

Capitalism feasts on crises. Economic collapses, political upheavals, and climate disasters are all opportunities. Every catastrophe cracks the door open for capital to slither through, rebranding exploitation as “recovery,” looting as “innovation,” and oppression as “security.” When economies crash, billionaires buy up assets at rock-bottom prices. When Israel commits a genocide in Gaza, developers see prime real estate. Crises create fear, and fear is the perfect breeding ground for profit.

Housing exists, but it’s kept just out of reach through speculation and artificially inflated rents. Healthcare exists, but only for those who can pay, while millions are priced out, forced to ration medication or avoid the doctor altogether. Wages never quite rise fast enough, leaving people one missed paycheck away from disaster, even as corporate profits break records year after year.

When the system inevitably crashes under its own weight, the response is always austerity for you, windfalls for them. After every financial crisis, the elite bemoan scarcity. There’s no money for public services, no budget for wage increases, no room to protect the vulnerable. Well, if that’s true, then why is there always enough to rescue failing banks, to fund another war, and to pump cash into stock markets and keep billionaires from losing a dime? It happened in 2008 when governments bailed out Wall Street while millions lost their homes. It happened in the pandemic when corporations raked in trillions while essential workers were left to fend for themselves.

Political crisis is the perfect excuse to expand surveillance, arm the police, pass emergency laws that never get rolled back. Environmental collapse is an opportunity to slap a “green” label on the same destructive industries, sell carbon credits like indulgences, keep drilling, keep polluting, and blame individuals for not recycling enough. The worse things get, the more people are told to just work harder, accept less, and be grateful for whatever scraps trickle down. Keeping people in a state of desperation is inherent in the system’s logic.

Even when people see through the facade, capitalism pivots. Calls for systemic change get rerouted into technocratic quick fixes like “ethical consumption,” “sustainable growth,” or “inclusive capitalism.” The problem is capitalism itself. We need more than a diversity officer and a fresh coat of paint. They’ll give you a thousand ways to feel like you’re making a difference without touching the systems of power that created the mess.

When all else fails, the rhetoric of the elite shifts to turn the blame inward. Feeling crushed under the weight of economic precarity, climate anxiety, political despair? That’s your fault. You’re told to download an app to manage your burnout or start a side hustle to "take control of your future." The system doesn’t need to fix itself if it convinces you the problem is your mindset, your work ethic, and your failure to “adapt.”

Capitalism lights the house on fire, sells you a bucket of water with a hole in it, and then convinces you that if the flames keep spreading, it’s because you’re not using the bucket correctly.

The Totalizing Logic of Capitalist Power

Capitalism’s power lies in its economic dominance, yes, but its ability to shape the very conditions of thought, feeling, and action is how it reproduces itself. It produces the dynamics of competition, insecurity, and alienation that define modern life and then channels these dynamics into behaviors that sustain the system. Through role-playing, consumption, spectacle, and division, capitalism ensures that individuals remain occupied with managing the symptoms of exploitation rather than confronting its structural roots.

This is the logical outcome of a system designed to prioritize profit at the expense of people. The challenge is to recognize how deeply its logic has been internalized. Only by understanding the totalizing nature of capitalist power can we begin to imagine and build alternatives that address oppression’s foundational structures.

Peter S. Baron (http://www.petersbaron.com)  is the author of If Only We Knew: How Ignorance Creates and Amplifies the Greatest Risks Facing Society.