Capitalism is incompatible with democracy. When a small group of people owns the lion's share of companies, corporations, and industries, they become exceedingly rich. Like every wealthy person before and after them, modern capitalists use their wealth to expand their influence, which they wield to increase their wealth, and so on and so forth until they own and control everything. We see billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg doing this routinely. They form monopolies, buy up competitors, and bribe politicians, as well as a thousand other immoral things that advance their interests. As capital’s wealth grows, so does its power. What would have been unthinkable to robber barons a century ago, such as illegally buying votes for $1 million each, is now standard practice. This isn’t because Rockefeller and Carnegie were better people than today’s oligarchs and overlords. They certainly bought votes and influenced politics in other ways. But I doubt they could even fathom having so much money that they could hand out $1 million checks like they were “I Voted!” stickers. It simply reflects the ever-increasing power of capital that today’s capitalists can achieve what those just a century ago never dreamed of. As investors and owners who do nothing continue to be enriched on the backs of the working class, the bourgeoisie’s strength will grow, giving them more control of society while everyday people get less and less. We already see billionaires and trillionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk using their exorbitant power to shape the world to their liking.
No stranger to manipulating elections, the American ultra-wealthy are openly thwarting the democratic process at both home and abroad. Drawing from its rich history of anti-leftist imperialism throughout South America, the American capitalist class is currently aiding the Latin far-right in more modern ways than previously.
The week before the Brazilian elections, the campaign of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — known as Lula — reported that Facebook and Instagram were censoring its accounts. According to the Brazilian Workers’ Party (the “Partido dos Trabalhadores” or “PT”), the President’s posts appeared without a share button, were hidden by the algorithm, and played without audio or at fast speed to discourage viewing. Meta quickly blamed “technical” issues, saying “Any suggestion that Meta favors one side is false.” But new reporting from the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo shows that was a lie. The paper's reporters reviewed internal Meta messages confirming that Mark Zuckerberg’s company restricted accounts related to the PT and President Lula, while boosting the accounts of rightist candidate Flavio Bolsonaro. Meta even went so far as to change its algorithm to recommend that Instagram and Facebook users join Bolsonaro’s WhatsApp channel, directly funneling them into the fascist project.
Independent watchdogs also found that Meta allowed unauthorized foreign accounts to buy ads supporting Bolsonaro, violating Brazilian election law. The pro-Bolsanoro techno-fascist campaign received additional support from journalist-turned-Peter Thiel-lackey Glenn Greenwald, who may as well be on the Palantir payroll by this point. The anti-imperialist South American outlet Orinoco Tribune reported that The Intercept founder was boosting conspiracy theories about judicial malpractice and a closed U.S. embassy to help the Bolsonaro campaign. Greenwald offered no evidence to support his claims, and the president of Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, Kassio Nunes Marques, appointed by Falvio Bolsonaro’s father, former president and current inmate Jair Bolsonaro, said the theory had no merit. Orinoco Tribune reporters noted that all of Greenwald’s messages were in English, a clear sign he was laying the ideological groundwork for English-speaking audiences to accept a possibly stolen Brazilian election.
