Is This Marxism?
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Is This Marxism?
A monopoly on the means of production has created a monopoly on the means of perception.
I. The War Never Ended—It Just Went Inside Your Head
Marxists named the system. Anti-imperialists mapped its spread. Decolonial thinkers traced its psychic and cultural grip. The enemy is capitalism. That hasn't changed. But the battlefield has.
The class war didn't vanish. It shifted terrain. From land to labor. From labor to belief. From belief to perception itself. The new frontline isn't the picket line or the border checkpoint—it's the interface, the feed, the filter, the collapsing center of what "real" even means anymore.
We’re not naming a new enemy here. We’re naming what it's doing now. The factory still exists. So does empire. But now the violence moves through confusion; now the capture happens through contradiction; now the control is exerted not just through laws or guns or markets, but through narrative density and engineered unreality.
II. Means of Production vs. Means of Perception
Marx was right—control the means of production, and you control the structure of society. That still holds. But now, ownership has metastasized. The fight isn't just over who owns the machines or the mines—it's over who controls the lens. Not just the inputs and outputs of labor, but the framing of the story around them.
Capital doesn't just own the factory. It owns the way the factory gets talked about. It owns the discourse, the disinformation, the doubt. It owns the feed that tells you the factory doesn’t matter. It owns the theory book—and the meme that mocks the theory.
The class war hasn’t ended. It’s still about extraction. Still about who eats and who starves. But layered over it now is a different war entirely—a war over perception, over consensus, over the very possibility of clarity. And you can’t win a material war if you’re losing the narrative one in real time.
III. From Tactics to Terrain: When Propaganda Becomes Infrastructure
Propaganda used to be something you spotted. You could call it out, laugh at it, pass it around as an example of what not to believe. Censorship used to be heavy-handed, obvious. Psyops were a Cold War relic. But now?
Now it's ambient. It’s architectural. It’s not what you see—it’s what filters what you see. It’s not what you hear—it’s what decides who you hear and when and why and how often. The tactic became the terrain, it became the infrastructure. An action of stress performed by the powerful became standard operating procedure. Why only use it during emergencies if it is so effective? So now, everything is an emergency.
Every app notification, every recommendation, every headline formatted for maximum outrage, every carousel of curated content—it’s all part of the same structure. It doesn’t care what you believe. It cares that you believe something strongly enough to never reach consensus with anyone else. It wants engagement, not understanding.
You’re not being surveilled. You’re being shaped. You are the marble and the sculptor, but the powerful will not let you own a chisel.
IV. Doubt as a Weapon, Saturation as a Cage
It doesn’t matter what you believe if you’re paralyzed. It doesn’t matter if you spot the lie if you can’t act on the truth. That’s the brilliance of the machine: it doesn’t require your loyalty. It just needs your exhaustion and, ultimately, your complacency.
It fills your screen with more than you can parse; it breaks your focus; it mocks your attempts to care; it scatters your attention across a thousand micro-scandals; it makes every political crisis into a vibe and every injustice into an aesthetic—and I think the liberals among you are quite fond of the Andor quote about hiding behind a thousand atrocities instead of one, because that’s exactly what this machine has trained you to do: intellectualize your paralysis.
And in the gap between knowing something is wrong and being able to name it with precision? That’s where they win. That’s where people stop trusting each other. That’s where the rage curdles into conspiracy, and the fear morphs into tribalism. Identity becomes a crutch; rage becomes a compass; echo chambers become homes.
Not because people are stupid—but because the alternative is drowning or unmaking the very world we inhabit. They are both absolutely terrifying choices to have available.
V. Fractured Language, Simulated Thought
It's not just misinformation anymore. It's not disinformation either. It's not even misdirection. It's something stranger. Something more recursive. A breakdown that doesn’t just confuse you—it undoes the ground you thought you were standing on. Like trying to fight on a floor made of fog.
Language itself has been unmoored. Words still exist, but they're slippery. Shifted. Preloaded with irony, tribal cues, and vague emotional weight that changes based on who's listening and who they think you are. Say "freedom," and you might mean sovereignty, while they hear capitalism. Say "communism," and you might mean mutual aid, while they hear gulags. Say "truth," and now it just means, "my side's vibe."
This isn't Orwell. Orwell thought you'd lose language by force. What's happened instead is we drowned it in speed. Every term, every label, every slogan gets looped and memed and aestheticized and flattened and sold back to us with six contradictory definitions by noon.
We're not just misinformed. We're unaligned. Ungrounded. Speaking in echoes of what used to mean something. And without shared language, you're not even arguing. You're shadowboxing with someone else's hallucination. You’re not having a disagreement. You’re performing parallel monologues, often just to the benefit of an audience that already has their mind made up for them.
VI. How Capitalism Colonized Meaning Itself
Capitalism has always needed to control belief. But the scale, speed, and subtlety of its methods have evolved. It no longer just dictates what you buy or where you work—it engineers what those things mean. It takes the raw material of perception—language, narrative, symbolism—and builds a control system out of their distortion.
It does this not by banning or silencing opposition, but by contextualizing it into irrelevance. By framing, reframing, pre-framing. By deciding in advance what ideas are legitimate, what forms of protest look like chaos, what solidarity looks like extremism, what terms are unserious. It doesn’t need to argue with you. It just needs to make sure everyone else sees you as incoherent.
It prewrites the script of resistance and lets you act it out. It sells revolution as lifestyle. It drowns radicalism in irony and rebrands it as nostalgia. It doesn’t erase your critique—it makes sure it's never taken seriously, never lands clean, never escapes containment.
Capitalism colonizes meaning by never letting it stabilize. By never letting words rest. By building a system where every shared concept is already loaded, fragmented, collapsed, then sold back to you as content. It makes your message indistinguishable from parody before you've even finished speaking.
It doesn’t need to censor. It doesn’t need to silence. It just needs to keep rewriting the terms of intelligibility.
VII. This Is Not a New Ideology
This isn’t a replacement. It’s a clarification. It’s not here to supplant Marxism, anarchism, or any other lineage of resistance—but to extend the map to cover ground they couldn’t yet see. The terrain has shifted. The tactics have mutated. And if we want to survive this phase, we need to understand what phase we’re in.
What we’re describing here is not a theory—it’s a condition. A structural condition that affects communication, comprehension, and coherence at scale. It is not about whether the left or the right has better ideas. It is about whether ideas can even survive contact with the reality we find ourselves in. The battlefield isn’t just polluted—it’s liquefied. Identity repeatedly collapses into branding. Truth repeatedly collapses into tribalism. And theory repeatedly collapses into content. Even in my attempts to write this stuff down, I am at risk of these collapses.
This isn’t a better ideology. It’s a lens to see where the others are breaking down—not because they were wrong, but because the enemy has upgraded the battlefield while many still cling to older maps. We don’t need purity tests or new slogans. We need to reorient. To assess where the ground has shifted beneath us. To admit that clarity is now more scarce than resources, and coherence is more valuable than agreement.
So no, this isn’t a new -ism. It’s, hopefully, a way to survive the storm while holding onto something real, so we can be ready with a good foundation when it is our turn to build. And if we can’t name the terrain we’re on or the weapons being used against us, we’re going to keep walking in circles—thinking we’re advancing while being funneled into every trap they’ve laid. You can already see this with the protests and the State's reactions.
VIII. You Can’t Organize in a Simulation
You can’t build with people who live in separate realities. You can’t coordinate through a fog of contradiction. Everyone’s walking around with different definitions, different timelines, different stakes—none of it matching up. Not because they’re irrational, but because the architecture of reality has been privatized and politicized. Most people now trust their algorithm more than their neighbor.
That’s not miscommunication. That’s isolation by design. We’re not speaking different languages—we’re using the same language with different meanings, anchored to different worldviews, reinforced by different tribes. And every word you speak gets scanned for affiliation before it’s ever heard.
Movements don’t fail because the ideas are bad. They fail because no one agrees on what’s real, what’s urgent, or what’s possible. Organizing in a simulation means every message is filtered, flattened, branded, and bounced back at you with zero traction. Resistance gets pre-loaded into spectacle. Every action becomes marketing. Every slogan gets memed to death before it organizes anyone.
Before strategy, before slogans, before strikes—there has to be a shared plane of understanding. A baseline. A common map. Because if we can’t even agree on what’s happening, we’re not organizing. We’re just talking past each other while the machine watches, logs, and learns. This is where learning theory comes in, seeking out the fundamentals so you can have context for what is happening. But...
IX. They Don’t Just Own the Factory—They Own the Language
They don’t just own the factories. They own the tree farm. They own the lumber mill. They own the machines that pulp the paper. They own the printing presses, the warehouses, the trucks, the distributors, the store shelves, the advertising agencies, and the review platforms. They don’t need to ban your message. They can own every step of its transmission.
And it's not just the logistics. They own the terms of discourse. They don't just control the medium; they shape the frame, the tone, the tempo, and the interpretation. They set the emotional valence of words before they reach your mouth. They decide which definitions circulate, which ones are mocked, which ones get buried, and which ones get turned into hashtags.
If you say something real, it won't be deleted. It'll be drowned. It'll be sliced into clips, turned into content, and dropped into a pool of performative disagreement. Every critique will be reframed as extremism, every demand for justice tagged as instability, every call for change wrapped in the language of danger.
What makes this powerful is not the censorship—it’s the conditioning. The same people who own the factory now own your dictionary. You may still be allowed to speak, but the meanings are no longer yours to command. I feel that their control over language is the most Orwellian thing of the modern age, and the closet thing resembling prophecy that he had written: the management of a New Speak.
X. Seizing the Means of Perception
They don’t need to burn the books if they own the alphabet. They don’t need to smash the presses if they can rewrite the language on-the-fly. They don’t need to kill the messenger if the message dissolves before it lands. This is not theory. This is not metaphor. This is the terrain of the next theater of the Class War.
This is still Marxism. It has to be. But the class war didn’t stay in the factories. It followed the power. And power moved into the feed, the lens, the dictionary. The owners of the means of production didn’t just win—they leveled up. They bought the networks, the channels, the influence machines. They bought the words we use to understand our condition. And because they own the supply chain of perception, they no longer need to argue. They just need to saturate.
The working class was alienated from the product of its labor. Now it’s alienated from the meaning of its language. You cannot organize what you cannot describe. You cannot build solidarity if your definitions collapse at the point of contact.
So this is the next front in the same war: the means of perception. I'm not theorizing a new ideology—I am trying to chart their attempt at a new enclosure. And we have to name what has to be taken back.
Not just the factory. Not just the land. But the ability to know what’s real.
If we don’t fight for that—we’ll lose everything else before we even know it’s gone. They have the means of production, and it funds their war on our perception.
