The belief that a perfect society can be brought into existence through communism is, at its core, a modern secular mythology. Yet capitalism is no less mythological. It, too, rests upon grand narratives and articles of faith disguised as self-evident truths. Its so-called twin pillars—individual freedom and free enterprise—have been elevated to the status of moral absolutes, but they are as historically contingent and as vulnerable to abuse as the tenets of ancient cults and religions.
When a political leader proclaims his desire for a “free society,” what he often means is a society free to conform to the norms, values, and hierarchies of his own culture. The annals of history are filled with instances in which “freedom” was wielded as a weapon—a moral justification for the subversion, domination, or assimilation of other cultures. Similarly, calls for “free trade” have rarely meant a neutral exchange of goods and services; more often, they have signified an ambition for one nation’s corporations to penetrate foreign markets, commandeer natural resources, exploit local labour, and in many cases, influence or control the levers of political power abroad.
The uncomfortable question thus arises: can a capitalist society truly flourish without plundering the resources of weaker minorities—both within its borders and beyond them? Historical evidence offers little reassurance. Capitalism has yet to produce a sustained model of prosperity and contentment that does not rest upon the exploitation of humanity’s voiceless underclass.
The United States has long styled itself as the exemplar of capitalist virtue and the “land of the free.” Yet its history tells a more sobering story. The violence inflicted by European settlers upon the Native Americans—ranging from dispossession and forced removal to outright extermination—was every bit as brutal as the Bolshevik terror unleashed on Russia’s bourgeoisie after 1917. Nor was the exploitation confined to indigenous peoples; the transatlantic slave trade brought millions from Africa in chains to labour for the enrichment of the colonial and later industrial economies.
By the close of the 19th century, with the Native American nations subdued and their lands expropriated, American ambitions turned outward. The 20th century saw the United States not only participate in but play decisive roles in the First and Second World Wars. It has, with remarkable consistency, been at war somewhere on the globe for most of the last century. Its foreign policy record is replete with covert interventions, engineered coups, and the installation of pliant regimes—often at the expense of democratically elected governments—in order to safeguard American geopolitical and corporate interests.
If the world’s major nations were to emulate the American capitalist model in both spirit and method, the prospects for peace would be grim. The competition for resources, markets, and strategic advantage would almost certainly accelerate the slide toward large-scale conflict, perhaps even a Third World War.
This week, I finished reading John Perkins’s semi-autobiographical Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, a work that offers a shadowy glimpse into the machinery of economic imperialism. Perkins claims he was recruited by the engineering consulting firm Chas T. Main, allegedly connected to American intelligence, and tasked with persuading leaders of developing nations to accept vast loans for infrastructure projects—loans designed not to foster genuine development but to ensnare them in cycles of dependency and control.
I am not persuaded that Perkins’s account is wholly reliable. At times, his narrative drifts into the realm of the overheated conspiracy theory; at others, it veers toward the rhetoric of the ideologically committed activist. Yet even if one approaches his work with scepticism, his central critique—that capitalism and corporatism often operate through coercion, manipulation, and the calculated entrapment of vulnerable nations—rings uncomfortably true. In that sense, his book stands as a reminder that beneath capitalism’s shining myths lies a machinery as capable of subjugation as any ideology it claims to have superseded.
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