Earthlings in the Capitalocene

With the rise of Trump and his unique brand of fascism, many are quick to make the claim that we are living through “literally 1984.” It’s easy to see why. Trump is a very Big Brother esque figure, authoritarian, somewhat mythical, outwardly exhibiting masculine tendencies. His dismantling of American soft power in favor of pure coercion and repression is a radical departure from the way American presidents have ruled in the neoliberal era. Mahmoud Khalil and other immigrants are imprisoned for what amounts to thoughtcrimes, while ICE and the surveillance state harken to the Thought Police and telescreens.

In this video, however, I will argue that Trump, for all his disciplinarian tendencies, is really just the logical conclusion of capitalism. Capital has consumed and consumed and there is nothing left to consume. In the words of Prahbat Patnaik, “The neofascist assault on democracy is a last-ditch effort on the part of neoliberal capitalism to rescue itself from crisis.” Orwell’s communist-coded vision of totalitarianism is replaced by unfettered capitalism. The dreary, lifeless coldness of 1984 becomes the overheated, hyper-individual accelerationism of 2025. Our society is plagued not by stagnation, but by uncontrolled expansion.