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—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 doesn’t just demand labor; it demands identities. People aren’t born as workers, consumers, managers, or entrepreneurs—they’re shaped into these roles, carved and molded to fit the machinery of the market. 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 are rigid assembly lines, churning 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 only within the sanctioned boundaries of the curriculum, like a miner confined to a pre-dug shaft, never allowed to strike out in search of untapped veins of knowledge. Respect exists, but it trickles downward like a corporate memo—administrators to teachers, teachers to students—rarely flowing back up with equal weight. Students are trained to raise their hands, to wait their turn, 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 a deeper lesson: how to navigate a world where your value is measured by performance, 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, the next job as the only imaginable direction forward.

By the time you reach adulthood, the shaping is 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—only scattered cues and shifting expectations.

You're constantly adjusting—tweaking your words, shifting your stance, second-guessing every move—trying to land on the right side of an invisible line. Step outside these invisible lines, and you risk losing something—an opportunity, respect, stability. The line keeps moving, and the more you internalize this, the more you anticipate its shifts, the more the self-monitoring becomes second nature. The uncertainty keeps you alert, scanning for signals, interpreting unspoken cues, anticipating shifts in what’s acceptable.

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 until quitting doesn’t just mean leaving work behind—it feels like stepping into uncertainty, losing the one role you knew you were supposed to play. And that’s the real power of the capitalist system: it shapes identity, so that the fear of stopping is stronger than the desire to change.

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—packaged, tagged, and optimized for engagement. 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—new clothes, a better skincare routine, a confidence boost in the form of a product. 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 isn’t just to keep the system running—it’s 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, its own unspoken rules. The more these roles feel like second nature, the harder it becomes to see them for what they are: constraints. 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. We learn, we adapt, we collaborate. In a world that wasn’t organized around profit, work wouldn’t define identity—it would be something we flow in and out of, responding to needs, interests, and abilities as they change. A community wouldn’t just assign people fixed roles; it would be a space where people contribute in different ways over time—teaching, creating, problem-solving, caring for one another—not because they’ve been slotted into a permanent category, but because human connection and mutual support make life richer.

But 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 doesn’t just sell products—it 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—they’re designed to define who you are.

From the moment you can comprehend desire, you’re socialized into believing that who you are is inseparable from what you own. Not just the big things—houses, cars—but the small, everyday tokens: 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—the quick hit of excitement, the fleeting sense of satisfaction—isn’t about the object itself. It’s 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 next fix—the new model, the limited edition, the must-have item of the season.

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—not towards reflection or community, but 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 doesn’t just fill your closets; it fills the gaps where self-understanding, connection, and genuine fulfillment might have been. It keeps you busy—managing your image, chasing trends, 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 fills every space with images, narratives, and spectacles that shape how you see, what you desire, and what fades into the background. The spectacle moves with you, wrapping around every moment, guiding your attention before you even realize it. It saturates your senses with stimulation, keeping you engaged, immersed, absorbed. Every click, every glance, every passing thought flows into the next, pulling you forward without pause. Reality becomes a constant stream of content, a rhythm of looking, wanting, consuming. It floods your senses with endless stimulation, numbing your ability to step back and ask, Why does everything feel like this? It doesn’t need to win you over with arguments—it just needs to keep you looking, clicking, consuming, until there’s no room left to think beyond it.

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 the cycle continues—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 reaction—every surge of anxiety, every click—fuels a system that profits from your exhaustion. The same corporations that flood your feed with manufactured outrage sell you products to soothe the stress they create. And the longer you stay trapped in this loop—scrolling, reacting, consuming—the less space you have to question the system itself, keeping you too overstimulated to imagine a different way of living.

Celebrity culture is capitalism’s most dazzling illusion—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. This isn’t just entertainment—it’s a system designed to make you care, to keep you emotionally tethered to lives that will never intersect with yours.

But why does it work? Because it offers something deeper than distraction—it offers meaning. If some lives are larger than life, then maybe life itself has a hierarchy, an order, a structure where importance isn’t random but earned. Even if your own life feels small, at least some people are special. And if they are special, then the system that created them must be real, must be justified.

It’s comforting to believe that significance is possible—even if not for you, then for those whose stories you can live through, whose triumphs you can celebrate, 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—candidates cast as characters, debates staged like gladiator matches, every scandal and gaffe dissected for entertainment value. The point isn’t to inform or challenge the system but to keep you fixated on personalities, to turn governance 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 engaged—liking, sharing, commenting—but it’s all 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. But none of this threatens the system. In fact, it strengthens it, channeling your energy into rituals that simulate agency while stripping you of the real thing.

Dissatisfaction isn’t suppressed—it’s 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 isn’t a threat; it’s a brand waiting to happen.

The spectacle contains. It 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.

This is the twisted brilliance of capitalism’s spectacle: it doesn’t hide the truth. It parades it 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. But the spectacle doesn’t care if you’re angry—it 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—just don’t look beyond them. The system needs you emotionally invested in its surface, not its structure. Because the moment you stop treating it 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—they 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 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 not as neighbors but 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. And because 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 the same: compete or be left behind. In the workplace, colleagues aren’t just colleagues—they’re obstacles to your advancement. That promotion isn’t just a career milestone; it’s 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. Not because you’re cruel, but because the system whispers that there’s not enough to go around—and if they win, you lose. Trust erodes, not through betrayal, but through the silent, grinding pressure to survive.

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 don’t just persist because of ignorance; they’re constantly fueled by the system, redirecting 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 weaponized—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. But instead of aiming that anger upward, it gets misfired sideways—at co-workers, neighbors, 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, climate disasters—these are 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 don’t lose sleep—they buy up assets at rock-bottom prices. When Israel commits a genocide in Gaza, developers don’t mourn—they see prime real estate. Crises create fear, and fear is the perfect breeding ground for profit.

Capitalism engineers chaos, knowing that every collapse, every disaster, every moment of instability creates another opportunity to consolidate wealth and tighten control. Scarcity is the raw material that keeps the system running, ensuring that security, stability, and comfort remain privileges, not guarantees.

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.

And when the system inevitably crashes under its own weight, the response is always the same: austerity for you, windfalls for them. After every financial crisis, they cry scarcity. There’s no money for public services, no budget for wage increases, no room to protect the vulnerable. But there’s always enough to rescue failing banks, to fund another war, 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.

And it doesn’t stop with economics. Political crisis? The perfect excuse to expand surveillance, arm the police, pass emergency laws that never get rolled back. Environmental collapse? A branding opportunity—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. Every crisis is a business opportunity, every disaster another chance to tighten the grip. And 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 isn’t a failure of the system—it’s the system’s logic.

Even when people see through the facade, capitalism pivots. Calls for systemic change get rerouted into technocratic quick fixes—“ethical consumption,” “sustainable growth,” “inclusive capitalism.” As if the problem isn’t capitalism itself but just that it needs 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.

And when all else fails, they 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 you—your mindset, your work ethic, 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 not just in its economic dominance but in its ability to shape the very conditions of thought, feeling, and action. 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 not a conspiracy. This is the logical outcome of a system designed to prioritize profit at the expense of people. The challenge is not merely to resist its most visible manifestations but 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 not just the symptoms of oppression but its 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.