Carpe Momentum: Build What Comes Next

To end autocracy, we must also end economic dictatorship.

The Trump era has torn the veil off illusions many Americans still clung to. While some saw his rise as an anomaly or a betrayal of democratic norms, others understood him as the symptom of a much deeper pathology. Trump did not create this crisis. He merely arrived like a fever, dangerous, yes, but revealing the illness already present in the body politic. And now, with the country weakened, the system strained, and the rot exposed, the question is no longer: "How did this happen?" It is: "What now?"

To answer that, we must stop treating economics and politics as separate struggles. Richard Wolff and Ruth Ben-Ghiat come at this from different angles, but together they illuminate a shared truth: capitalism and autocracy are not just connected, they are co-dependent. One enforces the other, sustains the other, and disguises the other.

Wolff's argument is plainspoken and powerful. The employer/employee relationship, he insists, is not a democracy. It is a dictatorship. In every so-called free enterprise, decisions are made top-down: what to produce, how to produce it, who gets what, and who gets nothing. Workers are not consulted, only commanded. This structure is not freedom. It is feudalism with better branding. It is lord and serf, master and wage-slave, dressed up in corporate jargon. And now, with inflation, instability, and layoffs rippling through the economy, this reality is harder to ignore. Wolff is optimistic because people are finally starting to see it.

Ben-Ghiat warns of something parallel. America, she argues, is already what she calls an "autocratic democracy", a nation that retains the forms of democratic governance but steadily guts them of substance. Trump didn’t invent this dynamic; he accelerated it. He reveled in it. His attacks on the press, the courts, and the electoral system were not flukes. They were the logical extension of a political culture that rewards power for power’s sake and conditions citizens to mistake spectacle for participation.

We live in a country where workers have no say in their workplaces and voters have less and less say in their government. Where billionaires can buy immunity while teachers buy their own classroom supplies. Where the very concept of the public good is ridiculed as socialism, and the erosion of rights is repackaged as strength. This is not coincidence, it is the two-headed beast: capitalism, which concentrates wealth, and autocracy, which concentrates power. Each justifies the other. Each protects the other.

Capitalism, left unchecked, requires control. It needs the courts to side with property over people. It needs the police to defend capital, not justice. It needs a political class that can be bought. And autocracy, for its part, thrives on scarcity, economic instability, job insecurity, and mass precarity. It exploits these conditions to promise order, safety, and salvation. It points downward and sideways, never upward, when people begin to ask why the system always seems rigged against them.

This interdependence is perhaps most visible in how capitalism now commodifies not just labor, but even the intangible, air, data, identity, and attention. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the crypto economy, where ether itself, the symbolic name for the currency powering much of the blockchain, has been monetized. Something once ethereal, associated with possibility, imagination, and even science fiction, is now repackaged as financial speculation. Value becomes detached from use, and risk is pushed downward. The winners are the early investors, the tech giants, and the political class that shields them. The losers are the working class, who bear the brunt of market crashes, manipulated hype cycles, and environmental costs. In this world, even nothingness has been turned into a product, proof that capitalism will colonize any realm it can reach, including the metaphysical.

Few figures exemplify this twisted dynamic more brazenly than Donald Trump himself. His memecoin grift, a scheme where loyalty and status were sold through speculative cryptocurrency, laid bare the fusion of authoritarian branding and financial exploitation. Attendees of his $148 million fundraising dinner thought they were buying access to power; instead, they got overcooked steak, empty speeches, and the thrill of being used as props. Trump didn’t even stay for the meal. But he cashed the checks. Here was the president of the United States, cloaked in the seal of office, peddling worthless digital tokens to desperate investors and true believers, all under the banner of freedom. It wasn’t just a scam. It was a statement: everything, even patriotism, can be commodified.

This is why piecemeal reform cannot save us. You cannot vote away fascism while leaving capitalism intact. Nor can you abolish wage slavery while trusting that the political elite will suddenly decide to hand back power. You cannot untangle one without confronting the other. The project ahead of us is not merely electoral or economic. It is foundational.

And yet, there is hope, but not the passive, manufactured kind that asks us to wait for rescue. The hope lies in action. In beginning the hard work of building a world that operates on different terms. If we want to escape the grip of this dual tyranny, we must show people what freedom actually looks like. Not as a slogan, as a practice.

That means worker self-directed enterprises. It means co-ops, collectives, community-owned systems of care. It means workplaces where democracy is not a metaphor, but a method. Where decisions are made together, profits shared, and dignity restored. These structures already exist. They are not fantasy. Look at the Mondragon Corporation in Spain, a federation of worker-owned co-ops employing tens of thousands across multiple sectors, with a governance model rooted in egalitarian principles. Or consider the Arizmendi Bakeries in California, a network of worker-owned cooperatives that share recipes, profits, and democratic decision-making processes. These are functioning, often thriving, models of an economy that serve the many, not the few. They must be replicated, expanded, multiplied.

We do not defeat autocracy in the abstract. We erode it in the everyday. In how we work, how we organize, and how we build alliances beyond the ballot box. The revolution won’t come from Washington. It will come from your town. Your shop floor. Your farm. Your neighborhood council. It will come from refusing to play by the rules of a rigged game and starting to write new ones together.

We must seize the moment, but not just to topple the old order. We must build the new. That begins now. And it begins with us.