Last week, I found myself being lectured by a right-wing friend as to why it was entirely fair, natural, right and proper that small independent enterprises based in our local area were being put out of business by a major corporate hospitality chain – let us call it, for the sake of argument, ‘JFC McDonuts’. ‘What you fail to understand,’ I was informed by my friend, with that degree of conventionally conservative condescension typical of the conversation of the provincial public house, shortly before the big fight of the night kicks off, ‘… what you don’t understand is that the free market gives the people what they want.’

Yes, obviously it does. But it also tells them what they want. Market demand is largely the product of desire rather than need, and that desire to consume is stimulated by the mechanisms of capital. That is why companies spend so much money on advertising. No one ever advertises things people actually need. Nobody advertises water, for instance; but many millions of dollars are spent each year promoting specific brands of designer water, artificial constructs each replete with their own cunningly crafted images and heritages: sourced, as they say, from some traditional, pure, vitamin-infused and perfectly unique natural spring. And all, of course, available with or without added effervescence.

Consumer-capitalism shapes and sells brands rather than actual products. It purveys pretty packaging rather than substantive content. Markets are determined by marketing. 

The synthetic products of the multinational conglomerates are not objectively better than the products created by smaller businesses; they are just more universally familiar. The taste of the Big Mac is the flavour of the brand itself, the lifestyle and ethos that its marketing and advertising have always promised. It is a message and a call which each consumer has heard all her life, consistent, cumulative and irresistible.

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan proposed that, as adults, we desire those things whose attainment might console us for the loss of that bliss which we experienced in that period of early childhood before we achieved reflexive self-consciousness. It was, he supposed, only in the months before we recognised ourselves as separate individuals that we were ever truly content. This was the utter and uncomplicated happiness of being absolutely at one with the world, prior to that alienating and traumatic process of coming to see oneself as a clearly defined being, differentiated and severed from the rest of humankind. 

This is why we seek wealth and power: because they offer to return us to the centre of our own personal universe. We pursue social, romantic and culinary pleasures for similar reasons – because they make us feel less physically alone in ourselves, because they extend our bodies into the outer world and the outer world into our bodies. We even expose ourselves to recreational drugs and alcohol because the oblivion which they afford allows us to forget, for a moment, the inescapable loneliness of our detached adult subjectivities. 

The political philosopher Louis Althusser argued that the consumer economies of market capitalism sustain their appeal to the masses by offering to fulfil precisely those desires identified by Lacan. They simultaneously provoke and provide a focus for that same fundamental and insatiable yearning. They tell us that we can be whole again, that we can live those full meaningful lives that we have always dreamt about, ever since we abandoned that paradise of uncomplicated infant bliss. They promise us that we can regain that state of unutterable joy by buying into the right set of lifestyle choices, the correct commercial products and accompanying ideologies. They convince us that we are each special – rather than merely expendable cogs in an inhuman industrial machine – because we buy the right brands of toothpaste and toilet paper, cosmetics and fashion, fast food and fizzy drinks.

This is of course an illusion. It is the same mode of ideological trickery that persuades people to purchase lottery tickets every week: the belief that one is different from others and therefore favoured by fate, that one will someday win. But, of course, capital does not favour the humble individual; it favours capital; it favours power. 

In its rawest state, capitalism is neither benevolent nor even coherent. It is not the great liberator and saviour it purports to be. In March 2021, the British Prime Minister therefore provoked outrage when he declared that the motivations behind the swift and successful development of a range of Covid-19 vaccines were ‘capitalism’ and ‘greed’. This suggestion was particularly galling to the creators of Oxford’s AstraZeneca vaccine, which was being sold at cost price. 

In February 2022, those scientists told the BBC that they lamented the ‘politics’ and the ‘nationalism’ which had jeopardised the global roll-out of their vaccine and which had most probably resulted in the deaths of ‘hundreds of thousands of people’. Contrary to Boris Johnson’s argument, it was the impact of self-serving secondary interests which had undermined an overwhelmingly altruistic medical initiative. The profit motive had not inspired the development of the vaccine, but that same blinkered focus upon material self-interest had severely limited its potential to save lives.

Mr. Johnson had been echoing the now-clichéd sentiment from Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street – that ‘greed is good’. But that defence of an unrestrained and conscienceless mode of capitalism appears for the most part to have been disproven by both the best and the worst behaviours witnessed at the height of the coronavirus crisis. Even as volunteers and healthcare workers risked their lives in service to their communities, members of the British government itself were responsible for some of the emergency’s most shamefully mercenary activities, siphoning off public funds to support the business concerns of their friends, while casually ignoring their own administration’s coronavirus regulations. This was taking ‘laissez-faire’ to a whole new level of recklessness.

In February 2022, another member of that same government was accused of facing a clear conflict of interests when it emerged that his ministerial responsibilities to develop the UK’s opportunities for global trade had the potential to benefit his significant stake in an $8-billion international investment fund. Capital is in this one sense like water: it avoids the high ground, but seeps down to find the lowest level that it can. Its trickledown effect is moral rather than economic. This force of nature, which reduces human activity to the lowest common denominator of material self-interest, cannot be reversed or halted by revolutionary or repressive action. The most we can hope to do is to slow its course and to moderate, ameliorate and harness its impacts. The flow of capital reveals our basest selves. It is instinctive and atavistic, a primal urge.

Capitalism is not the product of intelligent design; it is not the result of a conspiracy of a group of wizened old men smoking cigars as they weave their intricate plots in the secrecy of their darkened rooms. It is an overpoweringly mechanical process, as automatic, autonomous and ruthless as those processes of natural selection which have underpinned the evolution of life on this planet.

It cannot, however, offer the prospect of eternal progress. On the contrary, it appears to lead towards a mathematically inexorable conclusion: at the end of the free market’s feeding frenzy, all that remains will be one sole surviving corporate predator, omnivorous and cannibalistic, perched at the apex of the food chain, grown fat on the flesh of its erstwhile competitors, bloated beyond all recognition and reason.

The cold mathematics of evolution do not, in the final analysis, lead to civilisation or sustainability. In its early stages, capitalism, like biological evolution, propagates diversity; but eventually its unbridled forces promote patterns of market domination and exclusivity. Just as the evolution of the human species has upset the balance of the Earth’s natural environment, so the emergence of disproportionately dominant players in the world’s capitalist markets have come to threaten economic, social and cultural diversity. Evolutionary progress has flipped into entropic decadence and decay. The predominance of a diminishing number of increasingly indistinguishable and merging mega-brands promulgates an economic homogeneity, the market hegemony of the absolute monopoly.

This creates what cultural historians have dubbed the Disneyfication, McDonaldization or Coca-colonisation of international cultures and economies. Twenty years ago, the Nobel-prize-winning American economist Joseph Stiglitz very publicly denounced this phenomenon as the devastating downside to globalization. Since then, the acceleration of what we might now call the ‘Domino’s effect’ has rolled relentlessly on.

This kind of commercial imperialism has underpinned the expansionist strategies of advanced economies for decades. The Cold War was not won by Ronald Reagan but by Ronald McDonald. The fast-food giant opened its first restaurant in Moscow in 1990, even as the Soviet Union began to fall apart. The greatest secret of western power is not the bomb but the mall, not the military-industrial complex but the retail-entertainment complex. Although its tolls of civilian casualties may seem rather less brazen than those of transnational warlords, like all modes of modern imperialism it extends its influence by manufacturing the semblance of consent. Its continuing global machinations represent both the prevalent economic reality and a motivation and a metaphor for contemporary geopolitical crises.

In December 1996, the American journalist Thomas Friedman famously wrote in his column in the New York Times that ‘no two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other’. Friedman’s suggestion was that membership of that franchise represented a submission to the rules of the global economy; but he warned that growing frustrations with the inequities of globalization made the prospect of world peace forged beneath those iconic golden arches both unstable and unsustainable. That has, of course, certainly proven to be the case. 

Friedman’s celebrated essay cites the work of the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama had a few years earlier announced that, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of European Communism, the apparent victory of liberal democracy had heralded what he called ‘the end of history’. The ideological conflicts which had characterized millennia of human history were now, he thought, well and truly over. That has, of course, not proven to be the case.

Earlier this month, falls in the number of daily active users of Facebook resulted in a slump in the share price of its parent company that saw the personal fortune of its founder Mark Zuckerberg drop by thirty-one billion dollars. That dip was equivalent to the entire annual gross domestic product of the Baltic nation of Estonia. The global economy has never before seen such extreme, absurd or obscene concentrations of wealth. 

At a time when rich western nations are experiencing significant declines in their average standards of living – prompted in part by massive rises in power prices, felt most severely in those countries with the most poorly regulated energy industries – something in this tightly wound, brittle and febrile system surely has to give. It was revealed in February 2022 that, in the UK, recent increases in the cost of living had exceeded rises in wages, and that inflation had grown to its highest rate in thirty years. It is costing ordinary people more, in real terms, to heat their homes and to feed their families, and many can no longer afford to do so.

Yet the super-rich continue to grow super-richer, and the accumulated wealth around the British Cabinet table literally runs into the billions. Under such circumstances, arguments for completely free market economics are really feeling the strain. There might, many people suppose, at least be some sense in seeking a reasonable middle ground, one that can be navigated between the stultifying restrictions of a total command economy and the precarity of a stupefyingly unregulated free market, before the entire economic edifice reaches the point of outright meltdown. After all, as Joseph Stiglitz suggested in a 2019 interview with The Economist, if capitalism is broken then maybe it is possible to fix it.

Capitalism may be broken or at least horribly skewed; yet it is far from mortally wounded. The cultural philosophers Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek have both been credited with originating the maxim that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The problem is not that human civilisation might witness the death of capitalism; it is that capitalism may witness the end of civilisation as we know it. 

Indeed, the end of civilisation is in many ways the logical conclusion of capitalism – when the free market reaches the point at which every outlet on every high street, mall and retail park is a single giant branch of JFC McDonuts-Nandominos, and the flag of the globe is the Starbucks and Stripes. By then, climate change will have sunk much of the planet’s habitable landmass, and the only Amazon we’ll know will be the monolithic online store. Our only source of rolling news, games, infotainment and social interaction will be the multi-channel, multi-platform hybrid, the pan-cultural churn, of Meta-Disnetflix Prime. 

These amalgamized brands will of course fall under the control of an anonymous, invisible, unaccountable, unitary and all-powerful multinational ultra-corporation, as will all the public services and national governments of the Earth. Every decision of this ‘WorldCorp’ will be determined by the artificial intelligence of a vast supercomputer. This digital brain might very possibly like to call itself the planet’s General Operations Director, or GOD for short. The function of humanity will be to fuel and feed the machine. Perhaps it has always been this way; but now the cruel unvarnished truth will be plain for all to see.

This is something that my free-market friend might like to consider the next time he has the opportunity to patronise a local independent enterprise. Maybe then he’ll step inside and give the place the benefit of his generous custom. After all, the triumph of global mega-capital is not inevitable. The biggest bully in the playground does not always have to win. Strange though it sounds, such modest economic choices may be all it takes to start to turn the tide and to change the course of the entire history of the world.