Nowhere Left to Run: Capitalist Collapse, the Rise of Neofeudalism, and the Need for Socialist Resistance

Towards a Vanguard of the Discarded

As an autistic trans woman, my existence is under direct attack. The appointment of RFK Jr. as the Secretary of Health and Human Services signals something far more sinister than just another unhinged political pick—it represents a clear and present danger to autistic people everywhere. His long history of antivax conspiracy-mongering, coupled with a eugenicist view that sees autism as an affliction to be eradicated rather than a valid neurotype, puts us all in his crosshairs. And he is not alone. The rest of the Trump administration is openly working towards the wholesale erasure of trans people, not just in the social sense of exclusion and demonisation, but in ways that have material, life-threatening consequences. The attack on healthcare, legal recognition, and basic human rights is accelerating, with states now voting on banning transition care for trans adults and pushing policies that make survival as an out trans person nearly impossible. The message is clear: we are to be erased, in more than just a metaphorical sense.

Friends, family, and colleagues urge me to leave the United States whilst I still can, but the question that lingers is where to go? A decade ago, the same advice was being handed out to people in California—leave, they said, flee the high taxes, the high cost of living, the supposed “liberal insanity,” and head for places like Texas, where the cost of living was allegedly lower and opportunities were supposedly abundant. Imagine if I had listened. If I had followed the exodus and moved to Texas, I would now be trapped in a state where HRT is under threat even for adults, where my very existence would be up for debate in every legislative session, where the same people who welcomed California defectors with open arms now look for ways to strip us of our rights, our safety, and our ability to live. And Texas is not an outlier. Every so-called “safe” place today could just as easily become the next battleground in this war against trans and neurodivergent people.

The truth is, under capitalism, there is no escape—only the illusion of choice. The belief that we can simply leave and find safety elsewhere rests on the assumption that there is a place untouched by the same global systems of oppression. But the forces driving this collapse—corporate feudalism, nationalist reaction, and the ever-tightening grip of authoritarianism—are not contained within U.S. borders. They are global, and they are expanding. Fleeing to another country might buy time, but it does not offer real security. The idea that a safe haven exists somewhere, that if things become unbearable here, we can simply relocate and rebuild, is one of capitalism’s most insidious illusions. The world is shrinking, the options narrowing, and for many of us, there is nowhere left to run.

The Collapse of the “Both Sides” Narrative & the Illusion of a Political Spectrum

The idea that the United States has a functioning political spectrum, with two opposing parties locked in ideological battle, is one of the most persistent and effective illusions ever sold to the public. The Democrats are disappearing as a meaningful opposition, not because they are losing the fight, but because they were never truly fighting in the first place. The so-called “progressives” within the party, once heralded as a rising force, have either fallen silent or proven themselves to be complicit, offering only the weakest rhetorical resistance whilst continuing to funnel money into the same war machine, police state, and corporate welfare schemes as their supposed adversaries. If there were any genuine opposition, where is it? Where is the real pushback against the Tangerine Tyrant and his movement’s increasingly open embrace of authoritarianism? Where is the resistance to the rolling back of trans rights, to the dismantling of disability protections, to the overt criminalisation of dissent?

The truth is, there is no meaningful opposition because the United States is, in reality, a one-party state—a Uniparty, fully captured since ever since by the ruling class. The illusion of opposition exists to keep people distracted, to create the theatre of conflict so that the public remains invested in the idea that electoral politics might still offer a way out. But both Democrats and Republicans serve the same financial oligarchs, the same private equity funds, the same corporate behemoths that have turned every necessity of life into an extractive revenue stream. This is why nothing ever truly changes, regardless of who is in power. In fact, that’s the entire point.

Biden’s presidency did not halt the rightward shift—it accelerated it. His administration oversaw one of the largest upward wealth transfers in modern history, using the pandemic as an excuse to funnel public money into the hands of the already wealthy whilst millions faced eviction, job loss, and the collapse of social safety nets. The very institutions that were supposed to serve the people were repurposed to serve capital instead, reinforcing the same structures of economic and political control that have always ensured that real change remains impossible. Even if the Democrats manage to win another election, they will not reverse the damage that has already been done. They are being paid not to. Their job is to look the other way, to keep the machine running smoothly whilst the public is distracted by the false promise that this time, maybe, things will be different. They won’t be. Because this system is not broken—it is working exactly as intended.

A Return to Tradition: The U.S. Was Always Meant to be a Corporate Feudal State

What we are witnessing is not an unprecedented collapse, nor is it a deviation from some imagined democratic ideal—it is a return to tradition. The United States was always meant to be a corporate feudal state, structured to keep power in the hands of an elite ruling class whilst ensuring that the working masses remained landless, powerless, and dependent. From the very beginning, the U.S. was founded by white landowning elites who intentionally restricted political power to those who owned property, barring the vast majority of the population from any meaningful participation in governance. The modern corporate buy-up of residential housing, turning entire neighbourhoods into rental fiefdoms controlled by hedge funds and private equity firms, is not a new development. It is simply a return to the natural order as the founders envisioned it—a society where landowners run the show, and the landless do as they are told, knowing their place. The American Revolution was never about liberty for the common man. It was about the colonial elites wanting to keep their wealth in their own hands rather than paying rents, royalties, and taxes to the British Crown. The moment they secured that independence, they set about building a system where power remained tightly concentrated at the top.

Every so-called “civil war” in the Global North has followed the same pattern: not a true conflict between workers and rulers, but a struggle between competing factions of the elite. World War I (the Great War), often framed as a tragic clash between nations, was just as much a war between aristocratic cousins—King George V, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Tsar Nicholas II—all vying for imperial dominance whilst the bankers who funded them played both sides. Even the U.S. Civil War, often mythologised as a moral battle over slavery, was ultimately a fight between two competing capitalist models: the industrial wage-labour system of the North versus the plantation slavery economy of the South. The liberation of enslaved people was an outcome of that struggle, but it was never the driving motivation. The ruling class has always fought itself for control, but the structure beneath them—the concentration of power, wealth, and land—has remained unchanged. The same families, the same financial institutions, the same multinational corporations that dominate today are not inventing new strategies; they are simply refining and expanding a system that has existed for centuries.

This method of control—pitting factions of the ruling class against one another while ensuring financial power remains untouched—has been perfected over centuries by banking and industrial dynasties that have always played both sides of every major conflict. The Rothschilds mastered war financing by simultaneously funding opposing nations during the Napoleonic Wars, proving that true power does not lie in governance but in controlling the flow of capital. The Warburgs, deeply embedded in both American and German financial systems, helped bankroll both sides of World War I, guaranteeing that their influence remained intact no matter the outcome. The Wallenberg family of Sweden followed the same blueprint, maintaining economic ties with the Nazi Reich whilst discreetly supporting it’s opponents, ensuring that their vast financial empire—spanning heavy industry, telecommunications, and banking—would emerge from the war stronger than ever. J.P. Morgan, acting as the financial arm of the U.S. government, ensured that American industry profited immensely from both world wars, supplying munitions, loans, and raw materials while consolidating monopolies at home.

Today, this same strategy continues under the guise of “global investment firms.” BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street have become the modern heirs to these banking dynasties, ensuring that whether through war, economic crisis, or political upheaval, capital remains concentrated in the hands of the few whilst entire populations are reduced to debt servitude. The names may have changed, but the method has not: manufacture crises, fund both sides, and consolidate power amidst the wreckage. The old families, like the Wallenbergs, still exert influence, but the financial aristocracy has evolved into a transnational entity, governing not through political office but through the control of markets, resources, and industries across the globe.

The so-called "Great Reset"—the conspiracy du jour during the COVID pandemic—is not a nefarious plot hatched in secret, nor is it a deviation from capitalism’s natural trajectory. It is simply the next phase of a system that has been evolving for centuries, one where financial dynasties no longer need to rule from gilded palaces when they can govern through the market instead. The Rothschilds, Warburgs, Wallenbergs, and Morgans built the foundation, but their modern successors—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street—have perfected the model. These firms are not capitalists in the classical sense; they do not innovate, produce, or even compete. They control. Holding decisive stakes in nearly every major industry, they ensure that corporate power is consolidated rather than dispersed, that markets serve their interests rather than function as spaces of actual competition. Energy companies, tech giants, food conglomerates, and pharmaceutical firms no longer operate as independent players—they move in lockstep, maximising rent extraction across entire sectors while ensuring that no alternatives emerge.

This is where the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” narrative becomes essential—not as a radical new direction, but as a rebranding effort for an old system morphing into its final form. When Klaus Schwab and his associates talk about a “stakeholder economy” and a “reset of capitalism,” they are not calling for a more equitable system—they are laying the ideological groundwork for the full transition into a world where private capital has fully supplanted democratic governance. The WEF’s vision is not one of wealth redistribution or sustainability, as its PR would suggest, but of social management—of a controlled collapse in which the remnants of liberal democracy are swept away, and corporate feudalism is cemented in their place. Governments are no longer meant to regulate capital; they are to become mere enforcers of policies set by the financial aristocracy.

Every essential component of life—housing, healthcare, energy, food—is being absorbed into this new order, where ownership is concentrated in the hands of unelected corporate lords who dictate the terms of existence. The much-touted transition from ownership to access, epitomised by the slogan “You will own nothing and be happy,” is not a promise—it is a directive. It is not about reducing inequality or increasing efficiency; it is an explicit command from those in power: accept your dispossession, embrace your precarity, and do not resist. Everything—from housing to transport to even basic social mobility—is being locked behind a perpetual paywall, ensuring that nothing is truly owned, only rented at the pleasure of the corporate lords who control it all. The so-called free market has been reduced to a hollow performance, a façade maintained for public consumption whilst the real decisions are made in private boardrooms and exclusive gatherings in Davos, where the only thing left to determine is how best to manage the masses in their state of forced contentment.

This is not capitalism’s failure; it is its logical endpoint. The myth of free enterprise has collapsed, and what remains is a system in which participation in society itself is determined by capital’s whims. The old world is not being reformed or improved—it is being dismantled and replaced with something far more insidious. The so-called Great Reset is not a break from history but its culmination, a moment when the financial aristocracy no longer needs nation-states to protect its interests because it has become the state itself.

BRICS and the Global South: A New Empire, Not Liberation

The rise of BRICS is not a revolution—it is a realignment of power within the same global system. Leftists who champion it as a step toward international socialism mistake shifting imperial competition for genuine liberation. BRICS was not created to dismantle capitalism or global economic exploitation; it was formed to provide an alternative centre of financial power outside of Western control. The Global South’s ruling class is not looking to overthrow the system but to carve out their own space within it. The same extractive relationships that have long defined the Global North’s dominance—through institutions like the IMF and World Bank—are now being mirrored in new forms, controlled by elites in China, Russia, and India. The game is not changing—only the players.

The Global North’s reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has accelerated this shift. The sweeping sanctions imposed on Russia were meant to isolate its economy, but instead, they revealed the limits of U.S. financial hegemony. By freezing Russian assets, cutting off its access to SWIFT, and weaponising the dollar-based financial system, the U.S. signaled to every other nation that dependence on the Western-controlled monetary order is a vulnerability. If the U.S. can erase a country’s economy overnight, what is stopping it from doing the same to others? This realisation has driven not only Russia but many other BRICS-aligned nations to seek alternatives. The sanctions regime, long the favoured tool of U.S. economic warfare, has backfired—accelerating the creation of a parallel financial system designed to insulate Global South economies from Western pressure.

One of the most significant developments in this realignment is the move toward trading in local currencies. Since 1944, global trade has been dominated by the dollar, not just because of the U.S.'s economic strength, but because of the financial infrastructure that enforces it. Oil, commodities, and international loans are typically priced in dollars, forcing countries to maintain reserves of U.S. currency. This ensures demand for the dollar, strengthening its value and allowing the U.S. to print money with minimal consequences. However, as BRICS countries shift to trading in their own currencies—China buying Russian oil in yuan, India purchasing Iranian goods in rupees, Brazil conducting trade in reais—they reduce the necessity of holding dollars. This shift is not just about bypassing Western sanctions; it actively undermines the dollar’s dominance by boosting the value of these local currencies whilst decreasing demand for U.S. dollars.

The consequences of this are profound. As BRICS countries sell off their dollar reserves to buy the necessary currencies for trade, they put downward pressure on the dollar’s value. This isn’t just about replacing the dollar as the global reserve currency—it’s about devaluing it. If the dollar weakens significantly, it threatens the U.S.’s ability to fund its deficits, sustain its financialised economy, and project global power through economic coercion. The dollar’s dominance has long allowed the U.S. to live beyond its means, running massive trade and budget deficits without suffering the consequences that any other country would face under similar conditions. But if the rest of the world no longer needs dollars to trade, the U.S. economy will face the reckoning it has long deferred.

China’s Belt & Road Initiative plays a key role in this transformation. By offering infrastructure loans and development projects in exchange for access to local markets and resources, China has created an alternative to the Western development model—but one that still consolidates elite power. These deals ensure that Global South nations remain dependent—not on the IMF, but on Chinese financial institutions. Similarly, Russia’s economic pivot has not created a more just or equitable system; it has simply reinforced the dominance of its own oligarchs, who now control vast sectors of industry, energy, and finance in ways that mirror their Western counterparts.

India’s rise within BRICS follows a similar pattern. The Adani and Ambani families, two of the most powerful financial dynasties in the country, are poised to profit immensely from India’s expanding role in global trade. These families are not interested in breaking from the capitalist system; they are interested in controlling it. The myth that BRICS represents an anti-imperialist alternative ignores the reality that these new power brokers are simply replacing the old ones. The dollar’s decline may weaken U.S. hegemony, but it will not end elite rule—it will simply shift its centre of gravity.

Even in the realm of financial infrastructure, BRICS countries are not dismantling the systems of control; they are duplicating them. Russia, expelled from SWIFT, quickly developed its own financial messaging system for use with its partners like Iran and China. China has done the same, creating a payment alternative to SWIFT that allows for seamless transactions without reliance on Western financial institutions. These moves further weaken the U.S.’s ability to enforce economic sanctions, but they do not democratise global finance—they create a new bloc of financial power, still operating within the same framework of elite dominance.

The lesson here is clear: the ruling class always adapts, consolidates, and ensures that no matter how the global order shifts, the structure of power remains intact. BRICS is not a pathway to liberation—it is a power play, one that will elevate new oligarchs whilst maintaining the systems of financial extraction that have long defined global capitalism. The Global South’s elites are not looking to build a world free from exploitation; they are positioning themselves to be the next Wallenbergs, the next Rothschilds, the next Morgans. And just as the financial dynasties of the past played both sides of every major conflict, the new financial order will continue to prioritise profit over people—because the real war is never between nations, but between the ruling class and everyone else.

The Real Solution: The Antidote to Capitalist Fascism is Socialism

The reason the U.S. violently suppresses socialist movements—both within its borders and across the world—is because socialism is the only true alternative to capitalist fascism. Every attempt to break from the system, to build an economy not dictated by private profit, has been met with sabotage, sanctions, or outright military intervention. From the Soviet Union to Cuba to modern socialist movements, history shows that the ruling class does not tolerate alternatives. The decades-long blockade of Cuba is not about “human rights” or “democratic values”—it is about ensuring that no working alternative to capitalism is allowed to exist. The U.S. cannot afford for Cuba to succeed, just as it could not afford for the USSR to thrive, because every socialist success is proof that capitalism is neither necessary nor inevitable.

Domestically, the same logic applies. Any movement that dares to challenge the supremacy of capital is met with brutal repression. The Black Panther Party, explicitly Marxist in its ideology, understood that the struggle for racial justice could not be separated from the struggle against capitalism. They built free breakfast programs, community health clinics, and armed self-defence patrols—not just as acts of resistance but as direct challenges to a system that kept Black communities impoverished and over-policed. In response, the U.S. government declared them the greatest internal threat to national security. Under COINTELPRO, the FBI waged a covert war against the Panthers, using informants, psychological warfare, and assassinations to dismantle the movement. Chairman Fred Hampton, a charismatic leader and a powerful socialist organiser, was murdered in his sleep by the Chicago Police in a raid orchestrated by the FBI. His crime? Uniting working-class Black and white communities in the fight against capitalism.

Martin Luther King Jr. has been sanitised in the popular narrative, reduced to a passive advocate of nonviolence. But by the end of his life, King was a staunch anti-capitalist, speaking openly against capitalism and organising the Poor People’s Campaign to unite the working class across racial lines. The FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover, saw King as a radical threat, wiretapping his phones, sending him anonymous letters encouraging him to commit suicide, and publicly smearing him in an attempt to discredit his growing influence. His assassination conveniently cut short his shift toward a broader anti-capitalist movement—just as he was beginning to challenge not only segregation but the economic exploitation that upheld it.

Even as late as the 1980s, the U.S. government crushed socialist and labour movements with surgical precision. The Reagan administration, with full bipartisan support, waged war against labour unions, using the air traffic controllers’ strike (PATCO) as a warning shot to all workers: organise at your peril. The systematic destruction of unions in the U.S. was not just about breaking specific strikes—it was about ensuring that workers had no collective power to demand better wages, working conditions, or economic justice. The neoliberal order that followed, with deregulation, globalisation, and financialisation, cemented corporate power and ensured that any meaningful socialist resurgence would be strangled before it could take root (see also, Utah votes away collective bargaining rights).

Internationally, everywhere capitalism fails, socialism emerges as the natural counterpoint—so the system must make sure it is strangled before it can take root. The Soviet model, for all its flaws, provided an alternative framework that directly threatened capitalist hegemony. The response was immediate: economic warfare, Cold War propaganda, and ultimately, the engineered collapse of the USSR. Any nation that attempts even moderate socialist reforms—land redistribution, labour protections, nationalised industries—faces the same fate. Latin America has been ground zero for this for over a century, with U.S.-backed coups and economic destabilisation destroying any government that dares to prioritise people over profit. From Chile, where Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist government was violently overthrown by a U.S.-backed military coup in 1973, to Venezuela, where relentless economic sanctions have attempted to starve the population into rejecting socialism, the same playbook is used time and again: install friendly dictators, crush workers’ movements, and ensure that wealth extraction continues uninterrupted.

Reform within the system is a dead end. The institutions that protect capital—governments, financial institutions, law enforcement, media conglomerates—exist to maintain control, not to enact meaningful change. The idea that capitalism can be softened, made more humane, is a fantasy sold to pacify those who might otherwise resist. Autistic and trans people, already facing systemic erasure, cannot afford to be passive observers, waiting for electoral politics to produce salvation. We are already targets of this growing corporate fascism, and survival requires more than hoping for better policies. The only real defence is organisation—mutual aid, direct action, and socialist movements that operate outside the control of the state.

History has made one thing clear: when the working class organises, when the most marginalised demand more than just survival, the ruling class responds with violence. That alone should tell us that socialism is not just an option—it is a threat to their power. And if it is a threat to them, then it is our greatest hope.

The Call to Action: Now is the Time to Organise

The oligarchs are tightening their grip, accelerating the collapse in real time. Wages are stagnant whilst “the cost of living” soars, the currency is being debased through unchecked financial speculation, and fundamental rights are being stripped away under the guise of “efficiency” and “security.” They are not merely consolidating power—they are extracting every last drop of value from society before the system inevitably fractures. This is disaster capitalism in its final form: an economic order designed not to sustain itself, but to maximise profit during its own controlled demolition. We are not just losing ground—we are being erased. Autistic people, trans people, the disabled, the poor, the working class—anyone who does not fit into the corporate-controlled, AI-surveilled, neofeudal future is being methodically pushed to the margins, cut off from resources, from rights, from basic survival.

Now is the time to build a true leftist opposition—not the hollow, ineffectual progressivism of the Democratic Party, not the performative activism of NGO-liberalism, but a real vanguard movement. A movement that understands that capitalism cannot be reformed, that power concedes nothing without force, that the only path forward is collective organisation and direct action. The answers are not new—they are in those dusty old volumes of Marxist theory, in the lessons of those who have fought and died before us. The system depends on people believing that history is dead, that revolution is impossible, that there is no alternative. That is a lie.

Make studying the Marxist canon your special interest. Learn from Lenin, from Fanon, from Mao, from Luxemburg, from Cabral. Make helping others your special interest. Mutual aid is not charity—it is the infrastructure of survival. Make community your specialist subject. The ruling class thrives on isolation, on keeping people atomised and struggling alone. Connection is our greatest weapon. Capitalism is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, but without organised resistance, the only ones who will benefit from its fall are the same elites engineering the collapse. There is no neutral ground, no opting out. The time for complacency is over. The time to build is now.

Final thoughts …

I can’t say this enough, capitalism is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, but without organised resistance, the only ones who will benefit from its fall are the same elites engineering the collapse. This is not happening by accident. The ruling class is not scrambling to stop the crisis—they are accelerating it, managing the decline to ensure that when the dust settles, they remain in power whilst the rest of us are left to fight for scraps. If life is hard now, if the struggle feels unbearable, understand this: it will get worse. The “cost of survival” will continue to rise, basic needs will be further commodified, and those who do not conform—who are not deemed economically useful—will be abandoned entirely.

There is no escape. There is no safe haven. The world order is shifting, and we have a choice: be crushed beneath its weight or seize this moment to build something better. Capitalism, feudalism, fascism—these are not separate systems; they are iterations of the same logic, a cycle of exploitation that exists to keep power in the hands of the few whilst the many suffer. There is only one antidote, and the ruling class knows it. That is why they fear socialism more than anything else. That is why they have spent decades waging war against every attempt to create an alternative. That is why they are cracking down harder than ever—on workers, on the marginalised, on anyone who dares to resist.

We don’t have time to waste. The walls are closing in, the mechanisms of control are tightening, and every moment spent waiting for someone else to act is a moment the ruling class uses to strengthen their grip. No more running. No more illusions. The fight is here, and it is now. The only question left is whether we face it alone, scattered and struggling, or together, organised, and ready.