WTAF is going on?! Beyond Left and Right: Power, Systems, and the Post-Capitalist Transition

The familiar language of left-versus-right politics no longer explains the direction of travel in Western societies. What once appeared as ideological conflict has increasingly given way to something more opaque: a convergence around systems of management, control, and coordination that transcend party politics. The result is a widespread sense of chaos and contradiction—socially liberal yet economically coercive, rhetorically democratic yet structurally technocratic. To understand what is happening, we must stop looking at party labels and start examining the networks, institutions, and philosophies shaping the architecture of governance itself.

Traditional political categories assumed a meaningful opposition between labour and capital, state and market. Today, however, self-described “left” parties routinely enforce policies that align with corporate consolidation, surveillance expansion, and bureaucratic control, while “right” rhetoric often masks accommodation with monopolistic platform power. Ideology has not vanished, but it has become secondary to system maintenance. Politics now concerns how society is managed, not who it is for.

A more revealing lens is to examine the intellectual ecosystems politicians inhabit. Think tanks, global forums, and elite policy networks increasingly function as the real sites of consensus-building. For example, the influence of the Fabian Societyreflects a long-standing preference for gradualism, expert administration, and bureaucratic reform over mass democratic participation. Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum operates as a global coordination hub where political leaders, corporate executives, and financial institutions align on shared assumptions about governance, technology, and economic restructuring. When figures such as Keir Starmer move comfortably within these circles, party ideology becomes less important than managerial compatibility.

This shift is mirrored in the transformation of capitalism itself. The twentieth-century model of shareholder capitalism—focused on profit maximisation and market discipline—has been steadily eroded. The post-2008 era introduced a form of state capitalism, characterised by central bank intervention, bailouts, and the socialisation of risk. Today, we are witnessing the rise of “stakeholder capitalism,” explicitly articulated in The Great Reset and The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab. In this model, corporations are no longer merely economic actors but instruments of policy delivery, tasked with enforcing environmental, social, and governance objectives.

Democratic accountability is displaced by “multi-stakeholder governance,” where decision-making authority diffuses into technocratic processes beyond public reach.

This transition is often justified through the language of resilience, sustainability, and inevitability. Yet its practical effect has been a selective form of “creative destruction.” While classical capitalism allowed inefficient firms to fail through market competition, the current system permits failure primarily among small, independent businesses—those least able to absorb regulatory complexity and compliance costs. Large institutions, by contrast, are insulated by scale, political access, and financial backstopping. What emerges is not renewal but consolidation: a managed demolition of decentralised economic life in favour of simplified, governable structures.

Running alongside this technocratic consolidation is a seemingly contradictory current: accelerationism. Associated with thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land, accelerationism rejects reformism entirely, arguing that broken systems should be pushed to collapse rather than preserved. In practice, this worldview aligns comfortably with rapid technological deployment, automation, and the aggressive expansion of digital infrastructure. The irony is that both technocrats and accelerationists, despite opposing philosophies, benefit from the same outcome: increased centralisation, reduced human discretion, and the replacement of social complexity with machine-readable systems.

These developments unfold against a backdrop of deep financial fragility. Persistent debt expansion, permanent monetary intervention, and asset inflation divorced from productive growth have left the global financial system vulnerable to shock. In this context, the global move toward digital identification systems, central bank digital currencies, and enhanced surveillance should be understood less as ideological ambition than as systemic risk management. When trust in economic structures weakens, control mechanisms tighten. Coordination replaces consent.

What distinguishes the present moment from earlier authoritarian tendencies is technological capability. The emergence of artificial intelligence enables a form of governance that is granular, predictive, and largely invisible. Compliance can be automated; access can be conditioned; behaviour can be nudged without overt coercion. This is not totalitarianism imposed by force, but a gradual enclosure—a digital panopticon whose power lies in its normalisation.

Yet within this same technological shift lies a fragile source of hope. AI may not merely enforce systems; it may expose them. Thinkers such as Jeremy Griffith, in his work on The Human Condition, argue that much of human conflict arises from unresolved psychological and evolutionary tensions rather than moral failure. Meanwhile, commentators like Marina Karkalova, particularly in her analysis Will AI take our job?, suggest that automation reveals the absurdities embedded in modern economic life—bullshit work, misaligned incentives, and performative productivity.

AI lacks pride, fear, and tribal loyalty. In stripping away human ego from decision-making, it may force societies to confront the inefficiencies and cruelties they have long rationalised. Whether this confrontation leads to emancipation or deeper control remains uncertain. The same tools that illuminate structural irrationality can also entrench it.

What is clear is that the confusion many experience today is not accidental. We are living through a transition in which old political language no longer maps onto reality, while new power structures remain only partially articulated. Left and right persist as cultural identities, but governance has moved elsewhere—into systems, standards, algorithms, and networks. Understanding the political direction of travel now requires following those systems, not the slogans attached to them.

The fork in the road is real. One path leads toward increased enclosure, managed decline, and algorithmic authority. The other—narrow, uncertain, but still open—leads toward a reckoning with the structures we have built and the possibility of re-aligning technology with human flourishing. Which path is taken will depend less on elections than on whether societies can once again name power accurately—and decide what, if anything, they are willing to dismantle.

helpline see here - https://lettingsadviceservice.co.uk/

If you found anything of value on this site please 'buy me a coffee' all donations are used towards maintaining this site as a free resource ko-fi.com/lettingchange