The Socialists' Convenient Blindness

§1

They say: “Capitalism breeds imperialism” — as if Alexander wept for new worlds to invest in! As if Rome’s legions marched for shareholder value! The socialist, that magnificent accountant of suffering, has discovered that exploitation began in 1602 with the Dutch East India Company. Before this: paradise, presumably. Rousseau’s noble savage, trading fair-trade coconuts.

§2

Here we observe the ressentiment of the theorist: unable to face that the will to power courses through all human arrangement, he invents a villain young enough to be slain. “Abolish capitalism and the lamb shall lie with the lion!” — No: the lion shall merely find new justifications for his meal.

§3

What is capitalism but one costume the will to power wears to the present masquerade? The critic who tears at the costume believes he fights the dancer beneath. He does not. He merely prepares the next costume.

§4

The Athenian democrat, voting on which island to subjugate. The Christian emperor, blessing the sword that takes Constantinople. The Jacobin, liberating through the guillotine. And finally: the progressive, who shall democratize the extraction.

§5

Witness the socialist’s most precious myth: the Indigenous Eden.

Here, we are told, man lived before the fall into property, hierarchy, and domination. A people outside the will to power. One imagines them photosynthesizing, perhaps — drawing sustenance from pure communal feeling rather than from the bodies of animals or the exclusion of rival bands from resources.

§6

But travel to the Pacific Northwest — before any European boot touched the shore. Find the mouth of the river. Find the salmon.

Here stood chiefs who owned the fishing sites. Owned! — that contaminated word. Ownership enforced not by contract but by war, by raid, by the enslavement of defeated peoples who would process the catch for masters who did not touch the nets.

The potlatch: that ceremony our romantics adore as “gift economy.” Look closer. Chiefs destroying wealth to dominate rivals through the very act of abundance. “I am so powerful I can annihilate what you cannot even acquire.” This is not the absence of the will to power. This is its apotheosis — domination refined beyond crude accumulation into pure display.

§7

The Māori consumed their enemies — literally. The Aztecs built pyramids of skulls for gods who thirsted. The great mound-builders of Cahokia buried servants alive with their lords. These were not aberrations. They were solutions — each culture’s answer to the same question: “How shall the strong arrange their relation to the weak?”

§8

The progressive cannot bear this. And so he performs his most acrobatic maneuver: when confronted with Indigenous and ancient empire, he calls it “not really” imperialism. When shown Indigenous slavery, “not really” slavery. When presented with conquest, extraction, hierarchy — “not the same thing.”

Not the same as what? As the European version he requires as unique evil?

Here the game reveals itself. The critique of capitalism is not a critique of domination. It is a critique of one tribe’s domination — his own. The progressive does not hate power. He hates his fathers’ power. He dreams not of a world without hierarchy but of a hierarchy that flatters his self-conception.

§9

Let us speak plainly: wherever there is a defensible resource, there emerges a defender. And the defender becomes the owner. And the owner becomes the chief. And the chief requires enforcers. And enforcers require payment. And payment requires extraction. And extraction requires the subordination of those who do not defend, do not own, did not arrive first or fight hardest.

The salmon run. The water hole. The obsidian deposit. The tin mine. The oil field. The rare earth mine. The data center. Different nouns; same grammar.

§10

Capitalism did not invent this grammar. Capitalism inherited it — from feudalism, which inherited it from Rome, which inherited it from the priest-kings, who inherited it from whichever band of clever apes first realized that controlling the river crossing meant controlling everything.

The socialist who blames capitalism for imperialism is like a man who blames writing for lies.

§11

The deepest dishonesty: to locate the source of domination in an institution rather than in man himself. This permits the critic his most cherished fantasy — that he would not dominate, that his hands are clean, that the will to power is a disease he has not contracted rather than the health he dare not acknowledge.

§12

To hate capitalism for producing domination is to hate the throat for producing speech.

Strangle the throat; the message will be written.

Cut off the hands; it will be stomped in code.

The will to power does not require permission. It does not await the correct economic system. It uses whatever system exists — or creates one.

§13

Capitalism did not teach man to exploit.

Capitalism taught exploitation to keep receipts.

§14

And here, finally, is what the socialist cannot forgive capitalism for: not that it dominates, but that it dominates efficiently. Not that it extracts, but that it extracts transparently. The ledger, the contract, the quarterly report — these expose what the chief’s war-paint and the priest’s incense once mystified.

The socialist does not dream of a world without masters.

He dreams of a world where mastery is once again invisible — sanctified by revolution rather than contract, justified by History rather than profit, wielded by himself under the title “servant of the people.”

§15

Plus ça change — but the socialist cannot read French, only Marx.

And Marx himself? That magnificent hypocrite, who wrote of the liberation of the worker while his maid bore his child and his friend paid his bills?

Even the critic of the will to power cannot escape it. He merely learns to theorize while others fetch his bread.

§16

What remains, once we have swept away the comforting lie that domination is historically contingent?

Only this: consciousness without illusion.

The will to power is not a sin to be abolished but a force to be understood, channeled, made to serve rather than merely to devour. The question is not “How do we eliminate hierarchy?” — that is the question of children and professors. The question is: “What forms of hierarchy are least degrading? What structures constrain the will to power toward creation rather than mere consumption?”

§17

This is harder. This offers no utopia, no end of history, no final revolution after which the state withers and the lamb grazes beside the lion.

But it has one advantage over the socialist’s critique:

It is true.