Our Biggest Fears of a Soviet Dystopia Are Becoming True Under Capitalism

American capitalism has this Soviet-esque quality to it, with all its pointless bureaucracy, collectivism, burnout, and helplessness

Credit: Cocoon/Getty

Another dull day at the office and I’m sitting at my desk staring glassy-eyed into my work-issued MacBook, dredging my soul for inspiration to finish writing advertising copy for some big business account that’s trying to sound “relatable.” Then an interesting headline pops into my news feed. An international firestorm, but surprisingly, not caused by our “very stable genius” president rage-tweeting us to the brink of nuclear genocide while scarfing down his seventh Quarter Pounder of the day. No, the Houston Rockets general manager expressed support for the Hong Kong protestors, and the Chinese government swiftly whipped the NBA like a red-headed mule. I sigh, lean back in my chair, and stare out the window as the cicada sound of fingers clacking on the keyboard fills the air around me. It’s sonic waterboarding.

I begin to ponder how concentrated global capital is undermining our most cherished ideals: freedom of expression, self-determination, truly bottomless breadsticks. Our growing dependence on Chinese markets has already had censorial effects on Hollywood production, a theme so viscerally portrayed in South Park when Randy strangles Winnie the Pooh to death. When China was first designated the World’s Sweatshop, Bill Clinton pitched us on this idea of “engagement.” America was supposed to liberate developing countries by exporting its democracy; instead, we’re importing Chinese autocracy.

American capitalism has this Soviet-esque quality to it, with all its pointless and repressive bureaucracy, collectivism, propaganda, burnout, and helplessness. In fact, our workforce has ballooned with what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs”: industries like financial services, telemarketing, corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. It’s like Kafka crafted an economic system for shits and giggles and then the whole Western world said, “this, but unironically.”

An email notification banner flashes across the top right corner of my screen and interrupts my internal monologue. A Big Pharma client wants me to replace the phrase “enjoy your moments” in an Instagram caption to “with the potential to possibly have more moments.” Whenever I come across this kind of business-speak, I wonder if corporate lawyers are this tedious in mid-cunnilingus because it’s the only conceivable way these doughnuts could make this world slightly less insufferable. And it’s another reminder of the moral quandary I’m situated in: As a PR copywriter who supports universal healthcare, it seems all this money dumped into marketing could be spent on something far more ambitious — like bankrolling someone’s insulin treatment on GoFundMe.

The bleak, misty sky lingering outside my window is the color of a sweaty gym sock. I wonder if I’m depressed or jaded or nihilistic, or if a certain amount of time on the career path blurs the three until they’re indecipherable. Shouldn’t our lives be more exciting than this? My 9-to-5 has curdled into an indiscriminate slog of meetings, projects, and requests to “please give this a look.” Modernity is draining in its mundanity. Yet somehow, when the evenings roll around, I’ve fallen into a cagey dissemblance and my brain has deteriorated into applesauce. These are hours we could otherwise have for fun, sex, hobbies, or anything other than humming along to the Belichickian phrase “do your job.”

One day in 1935, Alexei Stakhanov hewed 102 tons of coal during a six-hour shift in a Ukrainian mine, and a giddy Soviet government unspooled the feat with a propaganda assault, valorizing workers and emphasizing traits like cleanliness, neatness, and preparedness — not too dissimilar to Jordan Peterson lectures, except slightly more intelligible to native English speakers. In America, we’re conditioned to obsess over #RiseAndGrind, a lust for Monday mornings fueled by a cult of performative workaholism that’s impossible to escape. But for what? You’ll hear the adage “work builds character” from warehouse managers, boomer dads, and Joe Biden whenever he’s not apologizing for another casually racist comment. Well, ask yourself: Does your job really build character, or is it more likely to bring out things like anxiety or a pent-up sense of homicidal rage?

Even after the HBO satire Silicon Valley turned the vacuous mission statement “making the world a better place” a recurring punchline, lizard-brained politicians and sociopathic CEOs will still cheerlead the virtues of work with high-minded messaging about innate creativity and boundless possibility. Steve Jobs set the bar for exhorting this gobbledygook as he dressed like an adjunct slam poetry professor and spoke about humanity with flair while rolling out new iPhones that wouldn’t even work with the charger you already own. Now the world is littered with delusional incel tech bros who fancy themselves as “visionaries” because they secured VC funding for designing an app that adds gold sprinkles to poop emojis. Spotify, a music streaming platform, says its mission is “to unlock the potential of human creativity.” WeWork, a company that provides shared workspaces for startups, wants to “unleash every human’s superpowers.” Dropbox, which lets you upload and email files, says its purpose is “to unleash the world’s creative energy by designing a more enlightened way of working.”

In the Soviet Union, where work was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system doled out as many jobs as necessary to guarantee full employment. But this is the very problem that market competition is supposed to fix, according to Very Serious National Review columnists who use cancer patients as footrests. But take a look at our private health insurance system — which ranks 29th in the world and is double the cost of universal systems — and you’ll see that its inefficiency is exactly why this bloated corpse of market bureaucracy has its hands around our throats. Even as Comrade Obama forced the individual mandate onto geriatric Tea Partiers, he admitted as such:

“Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents one million, two million, three million jobs [filled by] people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?”

For the pleasure of preserving millions of unnecessary paper-pushing jobs, we have a system that leads to a host of other needless indignities: 30 million Americans are uninsured; half of the population delays or forgoes medical care due to affordability concerns; greasy tapeworms hike the price of a life-saving drug from $13 to $750.

We Americans, in all our freedom-humping geniusness, let loose rampant, deregulated vampirism that has unleashed calamities that reshaped our nation — opioid epidemics, Trump, The Big Bang Theory, the backpack kid dance, Taco Bell Cantina, all that stuff. If capitalism fosters human creativity, then why does our economy produce an extremely limited demand for artists, musicians, academics, researchers, or scientists, but has a seemingly insatiable appetite for corporate lawyers and rehashing the same Marvel superhero movie every six months? Well, if the 1% controls most of the wealth, what we call “the market” is merely a reflection of their desires, and it’s imposed a privatized tyranny on us all.