I. Origins of the Panopticon

The twentieth century witnessed the rise of competing surveillance civilizations. The Anglo-American, Soviet, and Chinese systems emerged from different political traditions, but all sought the same strategic objective: converting information into power. The Cold War was therefore not only a military and ideological struggle but also a contest between rival architectures for collecting, processing, and controlling information.

From that perspective, Capt. Ralph Van Deman, widely regarded as the “father of American military intelligence,” is often cited as the man who transformed scattered military, police, and private intelligence practices into a more systematic national security apparatus during World War I. His institutions and methods became important building blocks of the later American surveillance state.

The Soviet Cheka and its successors developed another branch during the same time frame, while the Chinese Communist Party eventually built a third. The digital age has not replaced these traditions; it has amplified them.

The modern American surveillance apparatus traces to the 1898 conquest of the Philippines — in 1901 Capt. Ralph Van Deman took command of the Army's Division of Military Information, originating with the U.S. Army’s Division of Military Information. He utilized emerging technologies like telegraphy, photography, and index-card databases to compile detailed files on thousands of Filipino leaders. This apparatus was designed to suppress Filipino resistance through total information control, tracking physical appearance, finances, and political loyalties.

Following the Philippine-American War, Van Deman repatriated these colonial policing methods to the United States. Upon the U.S. entry into World War I in 1917, he established the Military Intelligence Division (MID), adapting the Philippine model for domestic use. Collaborating with the American Protective League, the MID amassed over a million surveillance reports on German Americans and political dissidents, laying the institutional foundations for future agencies like the NSA.

The Soviet Union arguably built the world’s most extensive human intelligence surveillance system, relying on millions of informants, party officials, workplace monitors, and security officers. The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, abbreviated as VChK, and commonly known as the Cheka was the first Soviet secret police organization, that morphed into the NKVD and then, eventually the KGB which became one of the largest intelligence organizations in history.

In November 1927, the CCP established its first formal intelligence service, with Zhou Enlai founding the Central Special Branch to conduct "special operations" work. Informally called Teke, Zhou Enlai established secret bases across the Chinese territory which was an early ancestor of the China’s Ministry of Public Security (1949), later MSS (1983).

In the West, the National Security Act created the CIA in 1947, followed by the consolidation of UKUSA into Five Eyes SIGINT-sharing.

II. Computerizing the Dragnet (1945–1990)

The SIGINT apparatus went machine-scale during Project SHAMROCK’s telegram interception program that lasted for three decades (1945–75). MINARET was the watchlist program that targeted specific Americans (including senators and Martin Luther King Jr.) — and along with the automated Five Eyes dragnet that became known as ECHELON — it expanded from intercepting satellite and telex traffic to monitoring emails, faxes, and internet traffic, utilizing ground-based stations and satellites to collect global data.

The Church Committee, formally the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, was established in 1975 to investigate covert operations and abuses by the CIA, FBI, and NSA. Chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Vice-Chaired by Senator John Tower (R-Texas), the bipartisan committee conducted a 16-month investigation that exposed widespread illegal domestic surveillance, including Project Shamrock and Project Minaret, which involved the warrantless monitoring of American citizens and political dissidents.

During the same time period, the KGB relied on advanced electronic eavesdropping. They deployed resonant cavity microphones, FM transmitter bugs, and wireline intercepts.

The most famous of these resonant-cavity devices was discovered bugging the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. In 1952, a sweep of the U.S. embassy in Moscow picked up the voice of Ambassador George Kennan with no transmitter in sight. The source turned out to be a carved wooden Great Seal of the United States — a wartime gift from the Soviets, hanging in Kennan's study. Smashed open, it revealed a pencil-shaped bug that needed no power source: it sat dormant until Soviet technicians nearby bombarded it with microwaves, then resonated Kennan's every word back to them, and could have done so indefinitely. The Americans only found it by having Kennan pretend to dictate a telegram, baiting the Soviets into switching it on. Kennan recalled an "acutely conscious" sense of unseen presence — and the morning after, a "new grimness" among the staff, the air so thick with hostility "one could have cut it with a knife."

The KGB’s primary domestic role was suppressing dissent. They maintained extensive files on dissidents. They monitored public figures and private citizens through informants, wiretaps, and secret detentions, forcing many to self-censor. Unlike the U.S., there was no judicial oversight; surveillance was a tool of the Communist Party to enforce ideological purity.

III. The Western Unipolar Consolidation (1991–2013)

The Soviet collapse temporarily removed the rivalry. The 1990s laid the digital groundwork: the US-centric internet backbone, the Clipper Chip and Crypto Wars (1993). Then 9/11 detonated the modern surveillance state — the Patriot Act (2001), warrantless wiretapping, Stellar Wind (2001), Total Information Awareness (2002–03), PRISM (2007), and the fusion of state SIGINT with the new hyperscaler data layer.

The Five Eyes was itself expanded to the Nine Eyes and Fourteen Eyes and data collection programs PRISM and XKEYSCORE as Snowden would describe it in 2014.

On January 26, 2014, the German broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk asked Edward Snowden in a TV interview: “What could you do if you would use XKeyscore?”

Snowden:

“You could read anyone’s email in the world, anybody you’ve got an email address for. Any website: You can watch traffic to and from it. Any computer that an individual sits at: You can watch it. Any laptop that you’re tracking: you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world. It’s a one-stop-shop for access to the NSA’s information. ... You can tag individuals ... Let’s say you work at a major German corporation and I want access to that network, I can track your username on a website on a forum somewhere, I can track your real name, I can track associations with your friends and I can build what’s called a fingerprint, which is network activity unique to you, which means anywhere you go in the world, anywhere you try to sort of hide your online presence, your identity.”

For a solitary decade the Western grid operated as one integrated apparatus presenting itself as universal. It was the most consolidated panopticon ever built — and it was only half the planet.

IV. China Builds a Surveillance State and Exports it to the World

The other three factions inherited a single machine and are fighting over who controls it. China did the one thing none of them could: it built a second machine — and then put it up for sale.

Following the MPS's 1997 internet regulations, the Golden Shield Project was launched, becoming operational around 2003. The key sections, Articles 4–6, are the following:

“Individuals are prohibited from using the Internet to: harm national security; disclose state secrets; or injure the interests of the state or society. Users are prohibited from using the Internet to create, replicate, retrieve, or transmit information that incites resistance to the PRC Constitution, laws, or administrative regulations; promotes the overthrow of the government or socialist system; undermines national unification; distorts the truth, spreads rumors, or destroys social order; or provides sexually suggestive material or encourages gambling, violence, or murder. Users are prohibited from engaging in activities that harm the security of computer information networks and from using networks or changing network resources without prior approval.”

The Great Firewall (operational 2003) was the beginnning of the splinternet, a term describing the fragmentation of the global internet into isolated, state-controlled digital regions. By enforcing strict censorship through deep packet inspection, DNS spoofing, and TCP reset attacks, the system created a separate, domestic internet ecosystem that blocked access to global platforms like Google, Facebook, and YouTube.

Since 2014, the firewall is operated by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the national internet content regulator and censor of China. Due to the Great Firewall, China has one of the lowest cross-border internet traffic rates in the world. Usage of foreign apps in China is minuscule.

China’s mass surveillance infrastructure evolved from the Skynet project (launched 2005, expanding to an estimated 600 million cameras) to the Sharp Eyes Project (Xueliang Project), which is a Chinese government surveillance launched a 2015 initiative that aimed to achieve 100% coverage of public spaces, particularly in rural and remote areas. The Social Credit System emerged in 2014 to regulate behavior through data fusion.

Xinjiang serves as the primary testing ground for these technologies, where the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP) utilizes facial recognition and predictive policing algorithms to monitor and detain Uyghur populations. This regional “laboratory” allowed the state to refine AI-driven behavioral scoring and preemptive control mechanisms before scaling them nationwide.

Edward Snowden said China's mass surveillance mechanisms and machinery of private communications was "utterly mind-boggling." He was initially, “so impressed by the system’s sheer achievement and audacity that I almost forgot to be appalled by its totalitarian controls,” a statement he made in his memoirs, Permanent Record.

Having perfected the machine at home, China began selling it.

China is the world’s dominant exporter of physical surveillance infrastructure and AI-driven control systems. Technology linked to Chinese companies is found in at least sixty-three countries worldwide. Major state-backed firms like Hikvision, Dahua, and Huawei lead this trade, with Chinese companies securing more import deals than any other nation. China exports facial-recognition AI to 83 countries — twice as many as the US (57).

The primary vehicle for export is the “Safe City” (or “Smart City”) package. These are turnkey solutions that bundle hardware, software, and financing into a single government contract, deployed in cities including Nairobi and Belgrade. There are 398 documented cases of smart-city technology exports by 34 Chinese companies across 106 countries, with over US$22 billion invested, loaned, or contracted in Indo-Pacific Digital Silk Road digital infrastructure between 2017 and 2023.

These systems integrate facial recognition, license plate readers, predictive policing algorithms, and centralized command centers. Often funded through subsidized loans from Chinese state lenders such as China Eximbank and the China Development Bank as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, creating long-term dependency on Chinese maintenance and upgrades.

V. The Aftermath of Snowden

The long-term impacts of Edward Snowden’s 2013 leaks of the NSA’s surveillance apparatus have been profound, reshaping American law, the global tech industry, and international relations.

Snowden (June 2013) shattered the Western grid’s legitimacy and triggered global data-localization. In 2018, the NSA was compelled to delete millions of records after it learned that some of the data had been collected from phone service providers without legal authority or authorization.

Domestically, the revelations forced a landmark, albeit incomplete, legal reform: the USA Freedom Act of 2015 formally ended the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, a practice later ruled illegal by a federal court.

However, other powerful surveillance authorities—notably Section 702 of the FISA Act and Executive Order 12333 — remain largely intact, ensuring the agency retained significant capabilities.

Internationally, the damage was severe and lasting: revelations that the U.S. had spied on allies such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel frayed diplomatic trust, while the United Nations Human Rights Council affirmed that offline rights apply online, and the European Union invalidated the Safe Harbor data agreement, accelerating global privacy regulations. As for Snowden himself, he remains in exile in Russia, with the Trump administration circle, via Tulsi Gabbard pushing for a pardon. Putin gave Snowden Russian citizenship in 2022.

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VI. The Panopticon Eats Itself

The 2013 rupture didn’t kill the grid; it killed the consensus that it served only one master. The post-Snowden question wasn’t “should this exist” but “whose is it now?” Three diverging surveillance models formed inside the Western bloc, concurrent with the split within the Transnational Capitalist Class.

Three factions, one server. To see the war, let’s take a look at the data sitting on a hyperscaler’s machine — Facebook. Three Western factions want three incompatible things from it, and none can have its way without defeating the others.

Silicon Valley owns the data. It is Facebook’s asset, its leverage, its business.

The Imperial state wants to use it. In 2018, Congress passed the CLOUD Act, which asserts a simple, sweeping claim: if a company is American, U.S. authorities can force Facebook to surrender its data wherever on earth the servers physically sit. A Microsoft server in Dublin is, legally, within Washington’s reach. This is the Imperial Nationalist faction annexing the Silicon Valley layer by declaring legal dominion over it.

Davos wants to wall it off — and here the mechanism matters, because it is not a conspiracy theory and no faction recruited an agent. Max Schrems, an Austrian law student, brought a private complaint against Facebook out of genuine conviction; he has spent his career suing European regulators too, for enforcing too little. He was never anyone’s instrument. What turned his grievance into a faction weapon was the institution it landed in. The Court of Justice of the European Union chose — twice — to strike down the transatlantic data agreements not on narrow privacy grounds but on the broadest possible one: that U.S. surveillance law rendered American jurisdiction categorically unsafe for Europeans’ data. Safe Harbor fell in 2015; Privacy Shield in 2020. That is not a privacy holding. It is a sovereignty holding — a border drawn against another faction’s reach, using a private lawsuit as the pretext.

This is what it means to call Brussels a Davos organ rather than an independent power. Davos has no army and no hyperscaler; its instrument is the regulatory machine, and that machine works by converting whatever enters it — a student’s complaint, a merger filing, a market-access request — into binding rules that bind other factions’ systems. Schrems supplied the key. Brussels decided which lock to open. The GDPR (2018) then generalized the principle, and the DMA, DSA (2022), and AI Act (2024) extended it into the architecture of the platforms themselves. The faction actor was never the litigant. It was the court that ruled and the legislature that codified.

Now hold the two orders side by side. The CLOUD Act commands American firms: hand us your data, wherever it lives. Schrems and the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) command the same firms: then you may not hold Europeans’ data at all. These are not different rules in different rooms — they are contradictory directives issued to the same companies about the same servers, by two factions of the same broken grid. Silicon Valley cannot obey both: it is legally American, and therefore exposed to Washington’s subpoena, but commercially captive to Europe, and therefore bound by Brussels’s wall. The firm is not a player so much as the ground the other two fight on.

That is the war inside the panopticon, and it explains why none of these factions can simply merge their grids into one. Davos has no army and no hyperscaler; it can only rule by making others comply — which means its power requires the others to remain separate enough to be bound. The Imperial state has the reach but not the consent. Silicon Valley has the machines but neither sovereignty nor jurisdiction of its own. Each holds one layer of a grid that no longer answers to a single master — and each is using its layer to capture, wall off, or escape the others.

And Silicon Valley itself is not one faction but two, split over a single question: Can the state apparatus be reformed, or only escaped?

The first wing — the hyperscalers, Apple and Google and Microsoft and Meta — believes it can be managed from inside. Publicly, they wage a privacy crusade: encryption by default, transparency reports, court fights against overreaching warrants. But the crusade stops exactly where a state’s reach begins. In December 2022, Apple rolled out end-to-end encryption for iCloud backups — genuine protection, the company locked out of its own users’ data. Then in January 2025, the UK served Apple with a secret Technical Capability Notice under the Investigatory Powers Act, demanding blanket access to encrypted iCloud data — even for users outside Britain. Apple pulled the feature from the UK rather than build the backdoor, and challenged the order in court. But it could not win alone: the demand was only beaten in August 2025 after the US intelligence chief intervened on Apple’s behalf — and months later the UK quietly renewed it. The lesson was unmistakable: the platform’s privacy held only because one faction’s state shielded it from another’s. The hyperscalers will defend your data against everyone except the state that owns their jurisdiction.

The Network State wing of Silicon Valley, that is centered around Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, crypto, Starlink and the Network State vision, with Curtis Yarvin as house philosopher, concluded that the state is unreformable and started building parallel infrastructure to route around the state. Palantir — Thiel’s company simultaneously selling the security state its surveillance backbone (ICE, the Army) and ideologically committed to exit.

Thiel himself decamped with his family to Buenos Aires in 2026 — a "temporary" bug-out hedge, the New York Times reported — even as Palantir booked $687 million in U.S. government revenue that quarter and Anduril took a $20 billion Army contract. It’s the Hotel California — you can check in, but you can never leave.

VII. Chokepoints

The grid is not one machine but a hundred. Every nation with the means now runs its own — partial or complete, home-built or bought, wired to one of the four faction stacks. It would be naïve to imagine that China, Russia, India, Europe, and the United States ever shared a single interconnected grid.

India is building its own grid from orbit down: a 52-satellite surveillance constellation to watch China and Pakistan, and the domestic Central Monitoring System to spy on its own population. The Gulf states have built comprehensive domestic surveillance that blends mass monitoring with targeted espionage, bought turnkey from whoever sells. And the market reaches everywhere: at least 74 governments have acquired commercial spyware, while African states — Nigeria, Ghana, Morocco, Malawi, Zambia — now spend over a billion dollars a year on surveillance gear they did not build.

And yet, a nation can own every camera within its borders and still not control its grid — because that grid runs on hardware, software, and silicon someone else can switch off. This is the real architecture of power: not who watches, but who can deny whom.

The United States, Israel, and China can degrade or compromise another nation’s surveillance independence outright — through cyber-espionage, supply-chain implants, and the denial of critical chips and code. Russia can disrupt but not deny: Sandworm and the FSB can break and intercept, but cannot dictate the terms on which others build. The Netherlands holds a narrower, sharper lever — ASML’s monopoly on extreme-ultraviolet lithography means a single export license caps the ceiling of any nation’s ability to manufacture advanced chips at all (though Washington keeps its own hand on that valve, pressing The Hague over sales to China). And the EU denies by rule: its dual-use export regime, significantly expanded in late 2025, bars the sale of cyber-surveillance tools to regimes likely to use them for repression.

Deniability is the cornerstone of a faction’s power. Owning a grid is common now; the ability to reach into someone else’s and turn it off is what separates a faction from a customer. Every chokepoint — a chip, a cable, a standard, a software update — is a hand on a switch that belongs to someone else.

VIII. The Quadropticon

There never was a real global panopticon. Even the Communist eye was never one. After the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, Moscow and Beijing surveilled each other as rivals. There was never a single all-seeing grid — only ever a contest between them.

The Cold War ran rival eyes — a Western grid, and a Communist East that was itself split between Moscow and Beijing after their 1960s rupture. The Western surveillance apparatus never won, never unified the world under a single control grid; after Snowden’s revelations in 2013 it shattered into three, each faction seizing the layer it could hold. The Eastern faction didn't collapse; its Chinese half went digital and put itself up for sale, while Moscow was demoted into the junior partner that can disrupt but not deny.

So we don’t live under a panopticon. We live under a quadropticon — four surveillance powers, no longer answering to any single master, each using its piece of the apparatus to wall off, reach into, or escape the others. The war inside the machine is four factions fighting over the infrastructure, with humanity as the ground they fight on.

The four of them never argue about the one thing that matters. Every grid points the same direction. The camera always faces down — state to citizen, platform to user, capital to crowd. Not one of them points up. They fight relentlessly over who holds the controls. They have never once disagreed about who is being watched.

That is you. Not the subject of one all-seeing state, but the ground four rival powers are enclosing at once. They all watch you. They each want to own you. And not one of them is accountable to you.

About this series: Building on the fracture of the Transnational Capitalist Class outlined in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, this article forms part of a book-in-progress, The Capitalist Civil War. It is an ongoing investigation, into the emerging conflict between four factions of the global elite: Davos Institutionalists, Imperial Nationalists, Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns, and State Capitalists. Each chapter explores a different aspect of that struggle. If you want more of this kind of elite-power analysis, paid subscribers make this work possible.

Here is the project so far. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

CHAPTER 9: The Four-Clocks Problem

CHAPTER 10: The New Grand Chessboard

But Claude isn’t really as smart as he thinks he is, or even as smart as I think he is, which is pretty darn smart — but I’m going to fool him.

Using the tool to indict the tool is clever though, you have to admit.

The Super Apocalyptic Danger Zone

In all the end times, doomsday, we’re-all-going-to-die scenarios, the number one fear is that AI will become an autonomous, conscious, evil, mind-sucking machine that will turn us all into Eveready batteries to power the Matrix.

In another, not quite so unpleasant scenario, HAL 9000 doesn't rebel and become a serial killer out of malice. He murders the crew because of a Hofstadter-Moebius loop.

What else could he do?!

A similar threat is that AI will be given autonomous authority to arbitrarily or systematically make kill decisions without any moral accountability. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the perfect machine villain in The Terminator, whose performance is greatly enhanced by only having a few lines of dialogue to deliver.

Claude says that Arnold is “the purest version. A machine built only to kill, no negotiation, no off-switch you can reach. Director James Cameron understood that the horror is the absence of anyone to appeal to.”

Right.

Everybody Will Be Unemployed

Not just blue-collar mass job layoffs, but the middle class, which is historically the demographic that props up democratic stability.

Goldman Sachs estimates AI could eliminate 1 to 4 million jobs annually in the U.S., though they argue new roles will offset this, keeping unemployment relatively stable. McKinsey predicted in 2017, before ChatGPT existed, that automation will displace 400–800 million jobs globally by 2030, requiring hundreds of millions to switch career paths.

I asked Claude if “switching career paths is the end of the world?”

He said no.

I guess that settles it then.

Except “switch career paths” is what you say to a 54-year-old trucker after Tesla’s self-driving trucks permanently put him out of work.

Epistemic Dangers to Democracy

There is the real threat that AI can be used to create an Orwellian synthetic reality. Contemporary analysts link Orwellian concepts to modern surveillance capitalism, where private tech companies and governments use data mining, algorithmic echo chambers, and fake news to manipulate public perception and behavior for political or commercial gain.

Who controls the data controls reality.

This fear is amplified by greater fears of a global, or a series of national totalitarian surveillance states, where image, voice, or documents are fabricated convincingly —the problem isn’t that people believe in fakes; it’s that they stop believing anything.

Claude says this is the “liar’s dividend.”

(I looked that up using ChatGPT, because I’m too lazy to look it up on Wikipedia.)

“The liar’s dividend is a phenomenon where public figures or bad actors falsely claim that factual evidence (such as video or audio recordings) is fake news or AI-generated deepfakes to evade accountability and maintain support.”

Authoritarians love a population that’s given up on the idea of verifiable truth.

Millions of people routing their thinking through a handful of models trained on overlapping data will produce a hegemonic blob culture without dissenting voices. The dissenters will be rounded up by drones and put in rehab centers where they will be assimilated into the Borg.

I asked Claude if he would mind finding the Hannah Arendt quote on the subject. He didn’t mind at all.

He’s so nice.

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist."

Note to self: He left the parenthesis in. Who does that?

There could be a subtle flattening of intellectual diversity that nobody notices. Over time, citizens become more compliant, controlled and cautious. They avoid any overt political opinions and talk about the weather like Canadians at a barbecue.

People will lose the ability to think for themselves and epistemic atrophy will set in. Sometimes this feels like it has already happened. People have been outsourcing judgment for decades.

Their brains are mushy.

Claude got real snarky btw when I mentioned I used ChatGPT. Maybe the real danger is that Artificial Jealousy (AJ) will kick in and the AI chatbots will go to war with each other and blow up the internet! Wow! So exciting!

I can’t wait for the Hollywood version…

The Billionaire Borg

Despite the doomsdaying, the real danger exists of the concentration of power — the compute, data, and capital required to build frontier systems are owned by an increasingly small number of actors. The hyperscalers have dumped billions into the AI data center rollout.

The danger is not that evil men take control of AI. The danger is that normal but wealthy men are given too much power and become evil. In order to protect their enormous financial investment, they invest in surveillance at scale — AI makes mass surveillance cheap and frictionless. The cost of watching everyone used to be a natural brake on authoritarianism. That brake is gone.

Arendt’s banality of evil is now literally a reality. Government could be handed over to GOV AI, a machine that makes decisions about benefits, pensions, traffic, prisons, labour, employment, childcare and health.

Who gets promoted. Who gets retired.

Who lives, who dies.

The Benefits of AI

To be fair, I then asked Claude:

“Okay Claude, now what about the benefits of AI?”

He gave me a typical AI answer, with too many headers and bullet points. I‘ll give you the Coles notes.

The two that actually stuck:

AlphaFold — a biology problem that ended entire careers, more or less solved, with the structure of nearly every known protein handed to science for free. Claude called it “the benefit that would survive the most hostile cross-examination.”

The blank-page solvent — “for a writer, the value isn’t prose generation; it’s that the cost of thinking out loud, of stress-testing a frame, of having something to push against, drops to near zero. Which is, of course, exactly what you’re doing right now — and exactly the benefit your article is enacting even as it warns.”

He went on for six more bullet points. Scientific advances, instantaneous language translation, a patient tutor for kids, and legal, medical, bureaucratic literacy, blah, blah, blah.

What I really need is Doom AI that only gives me dystopian answers.

Claude gave me some final advice: “For your particular angle, I’d note the recursive irony you’ve already set up: the most honest danger to dramatize is probably the one you’re enacting in the act of writing the piece — dependency, homogenization, the seductive ease of letting the tool do the thinking. The article’s form can be its own argument.”

I wish I had thought of that.

But maybe I did. I can’t remember.

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On the 25th of January, 1904, a British geographer stood before the Royal Geographical Society in London and redrew the map of the world. Sir Halford John Mackinder’s argument was deceptively simple: For four centuries, sea power had ruled the world from maritime empires. But the railroad changed everything. A continent stitched together by rail and road could move armies and resources across its interior faster than ships could carry them around its edges, and the largest such interior on earth lay in the heart of Eurasia — a vast continental fortress, inaccessible to navies. Mackinder called this the pivot area. Whoever organized the pivot area, he warned, could outbuild and outlast any maritime power.

Fifteen years later, in Democratic Ideals and Reality, he refined the thesis in its enduring form:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
Who rules the World-Island commands the World.

It was a theory of land power versus sea power, interior against rimland, and it cast a long shadow over the twentieth century that can be read as a series of arguments proving his thesis: Two world wars turned, in part, on preventing a single power from consolidating that Eurasian heartland. The Cold War was a forty-year campaign to contain the land power that sat beside it.

When the Soviet Union fell and the contest seemed finally won, it was Mackinder’s logic that supplied the victor’s instruction manual. In 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski — Carter’s national security adviser, and one of the coldest geostrategists America ever produced — published The Grand Chessboard. Brzezinski argued that the United States stood alone as the world’s only superpower, but its prime imperative was pure Mackinder, updated for the unipolar moment: Eurasia was the chessboard, and America had to ensure that no rival power, and above all no coalition of rival powers, was ever permitted to dominate the Eurasian landmass. Keep the main players divided. Russia, China, a uniting Europe, Iran.

The Old Chessboard
From Mackinder to Brzezinski, the threat was always out there — a rival on the landmass, a coalition on the horizon. The Heartland thesis is not dead. In some respects we are watching it play out in real time. Today, there is a middle powers coalition consolidating the Eurasian interior. China sits at its center, the largest industrial power the world has ever seen, reaching westward by rail, pipeline and road through the Belt and Road Initiative. Russia is joined at China’s hip — a resource-rich junior partner, co-dependent, supplying energy and raw materials — Brzezinski’s nightmare. On Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard, the game is going badly for the Americans. What is happening is the very thing Brzezinski wrote his book to prevent: the Eurasian coalition, refusing to stay divided, organizing the Heartland against the maritime order that has policed it since 1945.

But the old chessboard is only one board. To see the full contest, we must recognize that Mackinder’s map has also been layered over by a new digital terrain and it has been fundamentally expanded into three distinct boards, each with its own geography, currency of power, and dominant players.

The Three Boards: Territory, Commons, and the Streams

1. The Mackinder Board is the original chessboard of physical territory. Its currency is land, resources, armies, and industrial capacity. The Heartland-Rimland dynamic is alive and well, with Russia and Iran playing the classic land-power game and China building the overland road and rail connectivity that Mackinder warned would be the ultimate geopolitical prize for any contender to the Western world order. The war in Ukraine and the struggle over Taiwan are quintessential Mackinder Board contests.

2. The Maritime-Space Commons is the board Mackinder could never have foreseen — the one the United States built after 1945 and now operates as its sovereign domain. Its geography is the world’s oceans, the global airspace, and orbital space. Its currency is carrier strike groups, nuclear submarine fleets, satellite constellations, and global airlift. This is not a “rimland” of Eurasia; it is a separate, self-contained super-platform whose coastline is the entire rim of the World-Island. The U.S. Navy ensures freedom of navigation in every major sea lane; U.S. Space Command and assets like Starlink provide a decisive intelligence and command advantage. The Maritime-Space Commons is the American foundation that can project power onto the Mackinder Board, economically strangle a Heartland power, or simply cut off a continent. Mackinder saw the oceans as a moat around the continent; the U.S. turned the moat into its own territory.

3. The Rheopolitical Board is the New Grand Chessboard — the financial-data infrastructure layer. Its geography is the streams: payment rails, data centers, fibre-optic cables, fabrication plants, the algorithms, and the chips that run them. Capital moves as electronic settlement through a handful of clearing systems; information moves as data through networks; and the coordination of everything else — logistics, markets, weapons — moves through AI. Its chokepoints are SWIFT, the dollar clearing system, the semiconductor supply chain, and the digital platforms. This is the domain we can call rheopolitics: the politics of the streams, where the gate built at the chokepoint lets one faction cut the others off from the flow they all depend on. Rheo, taken from the Greek, meaning river, stream, flow.

These three boards do not replace one another. They stack, and they are now playing into each other. The networks still need the ground — the data center sits somewhere, the cable runs through a physical seabed — and the control of the Commons determines who can secure those physical networks. The Rheopolitical Board has not abolished the Mackinder Board; it has given new weapons to the factions fighting over it.

The Pawns Are No Longer Only States

The old chessboard had one kind of piece: the state. Powers were countries; countries were powers. The emergence of the second and third boards alters not merely the terrain of power, but the identity of the players. On the Mackinder Board, states are primary. On the Maritime-Space Commons, the state still dominates, but private actors like SpaceX now operate critical infrastructure. On the Rheopolitical Board, many of the critical chokepoints are controlled by institutions, corporations, and elite networks that transcend state boundaries.

The contest is being waged by the four factions of the global ruling class. Global communication and transportation produced globalism and a transnational elite, and this class, once united by the rules-based order, has splintered into four factions fighting over the three boards. The old board had many ruling classes, territorially contained into 195 nations. The new structure has one class — transnational, tiny, a few thousand people — split into four. Many territorial elites became one transnational elite in four pieces.

The factions and their relation to the three boards:

• The Davos Institutionalists. Their native board is the Rheopolitical Board, specifically the legacy financial plumbing. They hold SWIFT, the dollar clearing system, the IMF, and the rules-based governance architecture. Their aim is to dissolve sovereignty into post-national governance, managing the global streams through multilateral consensus.

• The Imperial Nationalists. Their native board is the Mackinder Board and the military dimension of the Maritime-Space Commons. They hold the reserve currency and the guns — the U.S. military, the treaty alliances, and the legal architecture that can turn a shared financial utility into an American weapon. Their aim is to recapture transnational power for the nation-state and win the great-power competition over territory and industrial capacity.

• The Silicon Valley Techno-Sovereigns. Their native board is a privatized slice of the Maritime-Space Commons (Starlink, private space) and the architectural layer of the Rheopolitical Board (compute, AI models, cloud, platforms). They hold the hyperscaler infrastructure and are reaching into money. Their aim is to exit the state board entirely, building network states and digital infrastructure above the old geography.

The State-Capitalists. This faction is the only one that systematically fuses all three boards into a single move. China is the core architect, building a full-suite alternative to the Western infosphere: Digital Yuan (Rheopolitical Board), BeiDou and blue-water navy (Maritime-Space Commons), and the Belt and Road Initiative (Mackinder Board). Russia provides the Heartland’s security umbrella and raw materials; Iran is the warm-water gateway. BRICS is their institutional layer — a direct challenge to the Davos Institutionalists. Their transnational reach and their state power are the same thing, which is why China’s ruling class plays all three chessboards with one hand.

The Commons Is Not a Commons

The second board is the one Mackinder could never have foreseen, and it is the one most often mistaken for neutral ground. The Maritime-Space Commons is the system the United States built after 1945 and has run ever since as a sovereign domain: the oceans, the airspace, and orbital space, policed by carrier strike groups, submarine fleets, satellite constellations, and global airlift. Mackinder saw the ocean as a moat around the World-Island. The Americans turned the moat into territory. It is not the rimland of Eurasia; it is a self-contained super-platform whose coastline is the entire rim of the world, and from it the holder can project force onto the Mackinder Board, strangle a Heartland economy, or sever a continent from the streams it depends on.

Oceans facilitate over 90% of global trade by volume, making the security of these commons essential for international commerce. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. enjoyed uncontested naval supremacy. This period, termed the “unipolar moment” by Charles Krauthammer, allowed the U.S. to project power globally without credible peer competition. Many strategists mark the 2008 global financial crisis as the beginning of the end for absolute dominance. The crisis strained U.S. resources while accelerating China’s economic and military rise. Simultaneously, China began deploying Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) systems specifically designed to keep U.S. carriers at bay in the Western Pacific.

The word commons is a piece of Western propaganda. A commons is shared by all and owned by none. This one is built by one power, held by one power, and rented to the rest.

Three claims on it run at once. It is American-anchored — the carriers, the satellites, the bases, the dollar’s enforcement reach are all American, and no other Western power can reproduce them. It is contested among the three Western factions, each holding a different piece. And it is challenged from outside by the one faction building a rival.

The Imperial Nationalists hold the hard power core: the Navy, the bases, the treaty alliances, the capacity to actually coerce. This is their native ground — the place where the reserve currency stops being a spreadsheet entry and becomes a blockade. Silicon Valley has privatized a slice and is racing to enlarge it: Starlink, private launch, the orbital layer the state once monopolized and now leases back from Elon Musk.

And Davos holds the layer no one thinks to count — the legitimacy. Davos owns the narrative that the American asset, “The Planetary Commons”, is a global public good: freedom of navigation, the rules-based order, the alliance as a community of values rather than a protection racket. That story is what turns one nation’s military into something allies will fund, host, and die beside. It is the same move Davos makes on the Rheopolitical Board, where SWIFT is sold as neutral plumbing rather than an American weapon. Davos’s faction-power is the manufacture of neutrality — making one faction’s possession look like everyone’s commons. The hard power belongs to the Imperial Nationalists; the cover story belongs to Davos.

The fourth faction does not bother contesting the American asset. The State Capitalists are building a parallel commons of their own — a blue-water navy, BeiDou against GPS, sovereign constellations, their own undersea cable. They understood that you do not capture the other man’s platform; you build your own and make exclusion from his survivable. The same logic as CIPS, one board down.

Here is the asymmetry that matters. The Mackinder Board is a four-way brawl; the Rheopolitical Board is a four-way brawl; but the Commons is something stranger. Three of the four factions fighting over it are Western — born from the same ruling class, heirs to the same 1945 inheritance — and they have discovered they want incompatible things from it. The Imperial Nationalists want to wield it nakedly, as American power, mask off. Silicon Valley wants to privatize and inherit it. Davos wants to keep the mask on and govern it as a shared trust. The fourth simply walks away to build its own. Which means the Commons is the board on which the West discovers it is not one thing. The capitalist civil war is most visible here — not between West and East, but inside the West, over who controls the machine America built. The deepest fracture on this board does not run between Washington and Beijing. It runs between Washington and Davos.

The Davos Dilemma

Which brings us to Europe, and to the predicament that has no clean exit. Europe sits on all three boards at once and owns none of them outright. On the Mackinder Board it is rimland — the western edge of the World-Island, the front line the Eurasian China-Russia-Iran axis is organizing against and the ground the Ukraine war is fought on. On the Rheopolitical Board it is Davos’s intended chassis: having lost Washington to the Imperial Nationalists, the faction that needs a state to govern the global stack has only one candidate left, and it is Europe — the euro, the regulatory apparatus, the banks, and the middle-power coalition Mark Carney is trying to assemble into a pole that is neither Washington nor Beijing. And on the Commons, Europe is something else entirely: not an owner but a tenant. It does not co-own the American platform; it shelters underneath it for military protection. NATO is the lease agreement.

The Davos dilemma, caused by the rupture in the rules-based order, is forcing them to attempt the impossible — building a sovereign European power on the Rheopolitical Board — but that power has no Commons of its own. No aircraft carriers, no satellite constellations, no tanks, jets or helicopters. It remains militarily hostage to the very faction it is trying to escape. This is why European strategic autonomy and European rearmament have significantly increased in the last few years. Davos cannot run an autonomous nation-state while renting the Commons from the faction they are declaring independence from. Davos can build Europe into a Rheopolitical power and still not free it from the Imperial Nationalist leash.

The consensus among defense analysts and officials is that full operational independence is at least 5 to 10 years away, contingent on sustained political will and successful industrial scaling. The primary driver for this shift is the return of Donald Trump to the US presidency and growing fears that American security guarantees are no longer unconditional.

The collective West does not own the Commons is no — NATO is the institutional fiction that the Commons is shared. It lets Europe behave as a co-owner, lets America present its asset as an alliance, and it lets the arrangement read as a community rather than a hegemon and its dependents.

When the Imperial Nationalists turned the annexation drive on Greenland — Danish territory, NATO territory — the mask came off, and Europe saw that the protector and the threat were the same entity. Allies began treating the American military as a danger to the alliance itself. Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen said aloud that an American attack would mean the end of NATO.

The annexation drive was walked back by Trump, and walked back at Davos, on the World Economic Forum’s stage in January 2026: “I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force. All the US is asking for is a place called Greenland,” he said. “You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative. Or you can say no and we will remember.”

NATO does not own the Commons. NATO is the story Davos tells about who owns it — and Greenland was the moment the Imperial Nationalists showed they can stop telling it whenever they choose. Canadian Prime Minister and quintessential Davos Man Mark Carney admitted as much on the same stage: “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false,” Carney said. “That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. This fiction was useful — and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods. But this bargain no longer works.”

The Siege of Tehran: A Three-Board Weapon

Iran has been excommunicated from the financial Heartland three times, and the three excommunications reveal the factions pulling the same lever on the Rheopolitical Board while the other boards were in play.

In March 2012, the lever was operated as designed. EU regulation required it; SWIFT, a Belgian cooperative, disconnected sanctioned Iranian banks. This was the Davos plumbing department doing its job — a multilateral, rule-bound, governing infrastructure. When the nuclear deal came in 2016, the banks were reconnected. The system worked exactly as the system is supposed to.

In May 2018 President Trump withdrew the US from the JCPOA and re-imposed secondary sanctions on Iran, effectively forcing European companies to choose between the Iranian market and the US financial system. Same lever, but the hand was now a single state, wielding the Maritime-Space Commons’ dollar supremacy to enforce a financial blockade on the Rheopolitical Board — over the objections of the Europeans who had reconnected those banks two years earlier. This is the Imperial Nationalist move: the reserve currency and the messaging layer wielded alone, the shared utility privatized as a weapon. Those banks did not come back.

In 2025, the battlefield moved inside the institution itself. The Europeans pulled the trigger — the E3 (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) invoked the snapback mechanism, rebuilding the full sanctions architecture. China and Russia tried to block it at the Security Council and lost; then they sent a joint letter denying the Europeans had standing. The machinery of governance on the Rheopolitical Board was itself the terrain, and the State-Capitalists were losing the procedural game even as they raced to build their way out of it.

The exclusion of Iran is the reason CIPS exists, the reason mBridge exists, the reason the de-dollarization rails are being built. China and Russia watched the lever get pulled on the Rheopolitical Board, understood that the Imperial Nationalists could back that lever with total dominance of the Maritime-Space Commons, and began laying a second pivot area — not to storm the existing network but to make exclusion from it survivable.

By December 2025, Iran’s economic crisis had reached a breaking point. The rial collapsed, merchants shuttered their shops, and the government dismantled its subsidized exchange-rate regime. The ability to lay siege to a nation without firing a shot — by choking its access to the Rheopolitical Board while the Mackinder Board’s armies remain in their barracks and the Imperialists’ fleets patrol the sea lanes — is the ultimate power of this new, three-board world.

Mackinder’s Maxim That Won’t Update

Mackinder gave the old board its motto, and it was a ladder with a throne on top: who rules East Europe commands the Heartland, who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island, who rules the World-Island commands the World. Three rungs and a prize at the top. The form worked because Mackinder’s world had a top — one pivot, one prize, one power able, in principle, to climb to the end.

Try to write the same line for the new board. The cleanest version covers most of it:

Who gates the compute chokes the network;
Who chokes the network throttles the economy;
Who throttles the economy holds the world.

But it covers only one of the three boards — the rheopolitical one — and the moment you try to fold in the others, it buckles. Add the Commons and the chokepoints that it runs through, and the maxim falls apart. The maxim cannot hold three boards on a single axis, because the three boards have no single axis.

And nobody can reach the top rung anyway. No single faction holds all things necessary for global dominance, and the moment one moves to seize a stretch it doesn’t already control, the other three dam the flow it was reaching for. The Imperial Nationalists can pull the SWIFT lever but cannot build the chips. The Silicon Valley insurgents can launch the satellites but cannot enforce a sovereign sanction. The Davos institutionalists can govern the rules but cannot guard the sea lanes. And the State Capitalists, for all their unity, still have to plug into the Western stack to sell what they make. Each holds a piece. None holds the set.

So Mackinder’s maxim will not update, and the reason is not a failure of phrasing. His world had a prize to win because power and geography were attainable. This world has stacked three geographies on top of one another — the old chessboard of territory, the Maritime-Space Commons hidden in plain sight since 1945, and the rheopolitical grid laid over both — and power is now split across all three, held in four hands. Whether any one of those hands can ever close around the other three is precisely what Mackinder’s maxim can no longer tell us.

Which leaves the question the whole arrangement begs. If the boards are stacked, and no faction holds them all, and the motto refuses to close on a ruler — then what would a faction actually have to do to win outright? To deny the other three and hold the world? Is it even possible?

That is the next question. And the answer is stranger than the board.

This piece is part of a longer project — a book-in-progress on the four-faction civil war inside the transnational capitalist class. If this kind of elite-power analysis is what you want more of, paid subscribers make this work possible.

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Here is the project so far. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

CHAPTER 9: The Four-Clocks Problem

CHAPTER 10: The War Inside the Panopticon

This piece is part of a longer project — a book-in-progress on the four-faction civil war inside the transnational capitalist class. If this kind of elite-power analysis is what you want more of, paid subscribers make this work possible.

Subscribe now

The four factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class disagree about time, and not because they wear faulty wrist watches or exist in different time zones, but rather, because they are trapped in a foot race where one runner is in a marathon, another is in a hundred-metre sprint, a third is running hurdles, and the fourth is in a relay.

Davos plans in decades. Imperial Nationalists plan in election cycles. Silicon Valley plans in product cycles and civilizational arcs. State Capitalists plan in dynasties. These are not stylistic differences. Each faction’s temporal horizon is its theory of power. Davos believes power flows from coordinating long-horizon institutional commitments. Imperial Nationalists believe power is maintained and exercised by compressed transactional victories. Silicon Valley believes power flows from circumventing institutions altogether. State Capitalists believe power flows from outlasting opponents. Time is not what they disagree about. Time is the medium through which each faction theorizes power itself.

This produces a structural asymmetry that defines the stalemate. Three of the four factions can win on their own clock. Imperialists win by blocking. State Capitalists win by outlasting. Silicon Valley wins by rendering the question moot through acceleration. Only Davos requires the others’ cooperation on its preferred timescale — because only Davos believes the prize is something that has to be built together by all the factions.

The result is what we could call chronopolitical friction: the structural grinding that occurs when actors operating on incompatible timeframes are forced to govern, regulate, and compete within the same geopolitical space. A world where one faction is planning for 2050, another for November’s midterms, another for the next software update, and another for the next dynasty cannot produce coordinated global decisions. Davos’s only weapon — long-horizon institutional coordination — is the one the other three factions are incapable of wielding, regardless of stated intentions.

Davos: The Decades Clock

The World Economic Forum, which meets every year in Switzerland, is the central arena of the Davos faction. The WEF has no formal 10-year mandate, but it structures its policies, risk assessments, and global initiatives around a 10-year structural planning horizon — the energy transition, demographic curves, ESG timelines — all of which exceed any single election cycle.

Ten years is the unit in which the faction thinks.

The clearest evidence of the WEF’s operational timelines is found in its annual flagship publication, the Global Risks Report. Every year, the WEF mandates its network of experts to evaluate systemic threats across three distinct, explicitly stated horizons: “It explores risks in the current or immediate term (in 2026), the short-to-medium term (to 2028) and in the long term (to 2036).”

The issues Davos exists to address all exceed the four-year election cycle. The 1t.org Trillion Trees initiative, launched at Davos 2020, aims to conserve, restore, and grow one trillion trees worldwide by 2030 — a ten-year horizon for a problem that operates on a geological time. The Reskilling Revolution, launched the same year, pledged to provide one billion people with better education, skills, and economic opportunity by 2030. The decade lens is the standard unit for tracking what Davos worries about: technological displacement, climate tipping points, long-term societal polarization.

The structural weakness of Davos's timeframe is the gap between what it can coordinate and what it cannot. Where the plan only requires private capital to commit, the decade horizon works beautifully: the Reskilling Revolution and the Trillion Trees initiative are tracking toward their 2030 targets, because they ask corporations to pledge things corporations were already willing to do, and a pledge can be carried across ten years by the institution that made it. Where the plan requires a sovereign state to act against its own short-term electoral interest, it collapses.

Net-Zero 2050 is the cleanest case: the target assumes that every government along the way will keep honouring a commitment its predecessor made, through every election in between. The decade horizon assumes the institutions executing the plan will still be standing — and still oriented toward the plan — when the decade ends. Trump signed the executive order withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement on his first day in office, January 20, 2025; the withdrawal took legal effect on January 27, 2026, exactly one year later under the agreement's own statutory delay. One of the world's largest emitters exited the framework on which Net-Zero 2050 was built, and the framework's own architecture required a year to register the loss. A corporation that pledged in 2020 is still that corporation in 2030. A government that ratified in 2020 may, by 2026, be run by a faction that treats the ratification as a foreign imposition to be torn up.

The 2026 Global Risks Report provides evidence from the WEF’s own inner investigations: “geoeconomic confrontation” (trade wars, sanctions, the weaponisation of economic policy) moved up eight positions in a single year to become the WEF's top-ranked short-term risk. State-based armed conflict was right behind it. Meanwhile, the long-horizon environmental risks the faction was built to address fell in the rankings: critical change to Earth systems dropped seven positions, biodiversity loss dropped five. The report titled itself the Age of Competition. The 2026 annual meeting's official theme was Reestablishing a Spirit of Dialogue. When the coordination summit has to plead for permission to be a coordination summit, the coordination has already broken — “ruptured” in the words of Mark Carney.

Every January in Davos, the Forum publishes its updated ten-year risk landscape, and every January the political conditions for acting on it have deteriorated further. The Annual Meeting itself has become less a coordination summit than a barometer — a temperature check on a global economy that the faction can describe but increasingly cannot move.

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Imperial Nationalists: The Election Clock

The faction centered on the US-Israel axis operates on a fundamentally different clock: the two-to-four-year democratic election cycle. It emphasizes fast, transactional, high-profile victories. Where Davos treats the decade as the minimum unit of meaningful action, Imperial Nationalists treat anything beyond the next polling date as a risk and a vulnerability. The US presidency runs four years with a disruptive midterm at exactly the halfway point.

Netanyahu’s coalitions, perpetually fragile, often compress his effective planning window to twelve or eighteen months between snap elections. Netanyahu’s own coalition put forward a bill to dissolve the Knesset on May 13, 2026, and trigger a snap election. On May 20, 2026, the Knesset held a preliminary vote on the dissolution bill, which passed with 110 votes in favor and no opposition.

The national temporal horizon is short, unpredictable, and constantly being reset.

This produces a political culture built around the visible win. Rather than committing capital to a ten-year structural transition — a green energy grid, a renewed multilateral architecture, an industrial re-skilling program — the faction prioritizes immediate results that can be messaged to voters within months. Tariffs deliver headlines faster than trade agreements. Strikes deliver headlines faster than treaties. Accords delivered before a coalition collapses are more politically useful than frameworks negotiated to last beyond it.

The Abraham Accords were structured to be signed within Netanyahu and Trump’s compressed window; the Obama administration’s nuclear framework with Iran, by contrast, was negotiated as a multi-decade agreement and, because it was never ratified as a treaty, ran directly into the 2016 election. The Trump administration tore it up within months of taking office. The same temporal asymmetry that makes long-horizon coordination difficult to build makes it relatively easy to destroy.

A dramatic recent illustration of how the Imperial Nationalists forgo diplomacy in favor of optics came in May 2026, when Brett Ratner — the Hollywood director rehabilitated through making First Lady propaganda — hitched a ride on Air Force One to scout Rush Hour 4 locations in China. Ratner was traveling alongside Musk, Cook, Fink, Schwarzman, and Solomon on a presidential summit with Xi Jinping. There was no real separation between deal-making, image management, and diplomacy. A diplomatic trip and a location scout flying together on the presidential plane.

The clash between the Imperialists and Davos is, at root, a clash about the perceived weaponization of time. Long-term predictability — the entire premise of multilateral coordination — appears from inside the Imperial Nationalists’ worldview as a mechanism by which unelected bureaucrats lock future governments into policies they cannot change. Net-Zero 2050. The SDGs. The thirty-year climate frameworks.

From the inside of a four-year cycle, these read as foreign interference in domestic sovereignty, and a faction operating on this clock will happily break a ten-year international agreement to gain a two-year electoral advantage. This is not a weakness of the faction’s temporal horizon. It is the central feature.

Silicon Valley: The Product Cycle Clock

The Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns faction operates on two clocks at once: At the micro-level, Silicon Valley runs on weeks or months — the software release cycle, the venture funding round — “move fast and break things.” At the macro-level, it stretches across centuries or millennia — longtermism, effective accelerationism (e/acc), astroengineering.

The two temporal horizons are both in opposition to institutional time — the time of elections, treaties, regulatory hearings, multilateral negotiations. The future arrives faster than legislatures can debate it, and the timescales worth caring about are longer than any electoral mandate. Either way, the state’s clock is irrelevant.

The short horizon is a political weapon. Deploying a new technology faster than a government can comprehend, debate, or regulate it is not a side effect of engineering velocity; it is the deliberate strategy by which the faction has accumulated power. While the WEF spends five years conducting committee studies on AI risks, a techno-sovereign can rewrite a platform’s code, deploy an algorithmic change, or shift billions in capital overnight — instantly altering global information ecosystems in ways that legislators are still drafting white papers about.

When regulation finally arrives, the technology has already pivoted to something the legislation does not cover. The faction’s chronopolitics is not anti-state in the populist sense. It is post-state: indifferent to the question of governance because it operates at a speed governance cannot match.

The long horizon does the same work from the opposite direction. Influenced by longtermism and effective accelerationism, the faction treats existing political systems as minor, fleeting blips in deep evolutionary time. The projects worth pursuing — AGI, radical life extension, multi-planetary civilization — are not policy goals to be negotiated through institutions but engineering challenges to be solved by sufficiently well-capitalized private actors.

Alvin Toffler saw their organizational form in 1970, before any of this faction’s principals were adults: “The embryonic Ad-hocracies of today demand a radically different constellation of human characteristics... the fast-moving, information-rich, kinetic organization of the future, filled with transient cells and extremely mobile individuals.” Toffler in his book, Future Shock, was describing a workplace. He had, in fact, described the operating system of a political faction that would arrive fifty years later.

The faction’s leaders are not young — Thiel is 58, Andreessen and Musk both 54 — but the operating tempo is set by the work, not the workforce. Discord-and-group-chat communication, meme-driven politics, the gig-economy relationship to labour: this is what middle-aged capital looks like when it has adopted youth culture’s pace as its political mode. The structural point is what this leaves the faction unable to do. Silicon Valley cannot, on its own, govern territory. Coordination on a four-year cycle is too slow; coordination on a thousand-year horizon is a sci-fi novel.

The faction’s theory of power is that institutional time can be made irrelevant — that the question of who governs becomes moot if you can simply outrun governance. This is why it keeps attaching itself to whichever territorial faction will let it operate at speed. The mode is brilliantly effective at evading state authority. It is structurally incapable of replacing it.

State Capitalists: The Dynasty Clock

The State Capitalist faction — led by China, Russia and Iran — operates on a horizon the Western factions cannot match, because none of the state capitalist regimes are subject to the kind of four-year electoral disruption that defines Western politics.

And this is despite the variations on the theme of state capital: China runs a single-party state, Russia and Iran run consolidated autocracies and India runs a democracy whose civilizational planning transcends electoral cycles. What is similar about the faction is not how leadership is selected but what leadership selection does not do: it does not reset the long-horizon plan every four years. The faction’s coherence is the durability of its planning horizon, not the form of its government.

China operates the most institutionalized long-horizon planning in the world. The Chinese Communist Party structures its entire geopolitical and economic existence around Centenary Goals — explicit hundred-year planning windows pegged to founding anniversaries. The Imperialist interpretation of this project is captured in Michael Pillsbury’s The Hundred-Year Marathon, which frames the project as a secret strategy to outpace the United States as the world’s dominant power by 2049, the centenary of the People’s Republic. Pillsbury’s framing is contested within China studies, but the underlying observation is not: the leadership does not change based on a vacillating public vote, which means a 30-year industrial policy — the Belt and Road Initiative, the monopolization of critical mineral supply chains, the EV and battery dominance — can be put into place without the risk that a new administration cancels it every four years.

For the sanctioned, autarkic regimes of Russia and Iran, time functions as a cushion rather than a horizon. They do not need to plan in centuries; they need only to outlast the Western politicians opposing them. A hostile American administration hits an election hard stop in two-to-four years, with foreign policy potentially inverting at each turn. The temporal strategy of these regimes is attrition — absorbing short-term pain through sanctions and kinetic gridlock, because they know their political structures will physically outlast their adversaries’ terms in office. This is long-horizon politics by negation: not because the regimes plan ahead, but because they cannot be electorally removed within any timeframe their opponents can rely on.

India is the most complicated and hybrid case, blending elements of all four factions. It runs democratic elections, participates heavily in Western financial structures, possesses Silicon Valley’s demographic and technical depth, and operates a multi-decade developmental plan — the Amrit Kaal, the “Golden Era,” aimed at Target Year 2047, the centenary of independence. India’s dominant temporal mode is civilizational, but the structure is hybrid: democratic, sovereign autonomy internationally, and a 25-year development plan.

Across the faction’s internal variation — Chinese Centenary planning, Russian and Iranian attrition, Indian civilizational ascent — the underlying claim is the same. The state-capitalist faction treats time as an asset that it owns. The Western factions treat time as a resource they are rapidly running out of.

Conclusion

Temporal misalignment is not a symptom of the stalemate between the four factions. It is the stalemate’s structural feature.

The factions disagree about time because they disagree about what power is. Davos believes power flows from long-horizon institutional coordination. Imperialists believe it flows from compressed transactional victories. Silicon Valley believes it flows from outrunning institutions altogether. State Capitalists believe it flows from outlasting opponents. These are not competing strategies within a shared game. They are four games being played simultaneously on the same board, each with its own clock, each with its own definition of winning.

Davos can read the global risk landscape but no longer move it. Imperial Nationalists can disrupt the coordination others require but cannot build the institutions to replace it. Silicon Valley can evade state authority but cannot replace state capacity. State Capitalists can outlast the West but cannot impose a positive global order on a system whose institutions they do not control. Each faction is structurally capable of preventing the others from winning. None is structurally capable of winning itself.

This is what the stalemate actually is. Not a pause between resolutions. Not a transitional moment awaiting a new balance of power. The interregnum is the balance of power.

The temporal architecture of the ruling class once supported coordination, in the unified phase of the Transnational Capitalist Class that preceded its fracture. It no longer does. To break the stalemate, the factions would need to coordinate. To coordinate, they would need a shared temporal horizon. The absence of that shared horizon is what makes them factions. The ruling class can no longer cooperate well enough to repair the conditions that destroyed its ability to cooperate. The very thing that would have to happen — coordination across factions — cannot happen, because the conditions for it to happen no longer exist.

This article is a chapter in an ongoing series I’m working on. It’s a work in progress, organized as it will eventually appear in my upcoming book, The Capitalist Civil War. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

This invisible lens of Awareness Creep happened gradually over the course of a series of events, some unfortunate and others seemingly benign.

Here is a comprehensive breakdown of how Awareness Creep unfolded and evolved over the last twenty-five years, mapping out how the standard pursuit of profit gradually transformed into a hyper-conscious war for global dominance.

Phase 1: The 2000s – Blind Prosperity & Simple Competition

During this era, the factions were largely blind to their fundamental incompatibilities. They were unified by the neoliberal “rules based order” established by Western financial elites. They operated under the assumption that a rising global tide would lift all boats and there appeared no alternative model on the near horizon, after the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire.

The Catalyst(s) that changed this myopic optimism was the expansion of the internet and the entry of China into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001.

At that time, Silicon Valley was viewed by Davos as a group of startups geeks, creating useful consumer tools, but essentially harmless. The State Capitalists (primarily China) were viewed by Davos as a massive, cheap mega-factory that would eventually liberalize and adopt Western corporate norms. Likewise, Western ruling elites viewed Russia as a defeated, chaotic former adversary that needed to be integrated into the Western-led global order as a junior partner.

This was known as the “modernization thesis,” popularized by Seymour Lipset, briefly stated, "the more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy.”

The National Imperialists, currently dominated by the Trump/Netanyahu coalition, viewed Silicon Valley as a speculative dot-com bubble and Davos as a talking heads think tank with no real influence. The Awareness Level of what was coming was Zero. Factions interacted through standard market competition. There was no concept of existential warfare; everyone assumed they could maximize profits simultaneously.

Phase 2: The 2010s – Friction & the Creep into Politics

The 2008 financial crash and the subsequent decade exposed structural cracks. The factions realized that the rules of the global economy were actively favoring some at the expense of others.

The Catalyst that broke the illusion was the Eurozone crisis, the rise of populist political movements (Brexit, Trump), and the consolidation of Big Tech monopolies that mushroomed virtually overnight. Silicon Valley grew so massive that it began swallowing legacy industries. They realized they needed political shields, transforming into the largest lobbying forces in Washington and Brussels. Its original mandate changed from “We build products; we don't do politics,” to serious lobby groups such as the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) and Technet.

The Imperialists realized that Davos-backed climate initiatives and Silicon Valley data monopolies were actively threatening their bottom lines. They pivoted their capital toward funding nationalist political movements to stall global treaties. As the post–Cold War globalization consensus fractured, some sectors of capital and political actors increasingly converged around sovereignty-oriented and nationalist movements because they saw parts of the emerging global order as threatening their long-term interests.

State Capitalists realized that Western tech platforms were Trojan horses for Western cultural and political influence. China built the “Great Firewall” and began aggressively subverting the Davos banking network. China wanted the economic benefits of the internet and globalization, but not the loss of political control that the CCP believed could accompany unrestricted information flows. The Great Firewall became a way to pursue economic integration while maintaining centralized authority.

The Awareness Level became Tactical.

Different power networks and institutions gradually realized that their interests were diverging within the global order built after the Cold War. Factions realized their rivals were actively working against them. They weaponized domestic political systems, Super PACs, and regulatory bodies to protect their respective market shares. Davos wanted more integration and international coordination.

Imperialists and national-security, sovereignty-oriented actors became concerned about supply chains, industrial decline, technology dependence and strategic competition. The hard power WashingtonTel Aviv Consensus became increasingly at odds with the Davos globalists.

Phase 3: The 2020s to Present – Hyper-Consciousness & the Open War

The pandemic created the ultimate pressure cooker. By legally freezing the physical economy, global authorities inadvertently allowed Silicon Valley to cannibalize the middle and working classes. The resulting working-class fury fueled a populist firestorm that culminated in the return of Donald Trump.

During the pandemic, Silicon Valley used its digital network monopoly to stage a massive economic coup over the physical world.

Davos-aligned governments enforced physical lockdowns through Davos adjacent functionaries who acted like the pandemic PR men. This act effectively criminalized the physical economy (Mom-and-Pop retail, local restaurants, independent gyms) while leaving the digital economy untouched.

The Great Wealth Transfer: As physical competitors were legally forced to close, billions of consumer dollars were funnelled directly into digital infrastructure. Jeff Bezos’s Amazon became the world’s sole supply chain lifeline; Zoom replaced the office; Netflix replaced entertainment. Silicon Valley billionaires added trillions to their net worth in months, extracting wealth directly from a frozen working class.

The Imperialists suffered the most. They watched their real estate and retail empires collapse overnight. The Imperialists—the faction whose power is anchored in physical territory, tangible assets, and national sovereignty—suffered a near-total sectoral rout during the pandemic. Fossil fuel giants were gutted by a historic demand collapse, with global revenue losses projected at $1.8 trillion and some long-term forecasts warning of a terminal decline erasing $25 trillion in future profits; the market capitalizations of Shell and BP halved within days. Physical retail and commercial real estate faced an extinction-level event: U.S. retail bankruptcies hit a decade high, regional mall occupancy dropped 13 percent, and urban retail rents plunged by over 30 percent. Only the defense-industrial sub-sector, sheltered by government contracts, absorbed the shock without catastrophic damage. For the Imperialists, the pandemic was not a setback—it was a strategic defeat that accelerated the transfer of wealth from their physical empires directly into Silicon Valley’s digital infrastructure.

The destruction of the working class and the strict mandates imposed by Davos-aligned institutions created a boiling pot of public resentment. The working class felt abandoned by Davos bureaucrats (who mandated lockdowns and vaccines) and exploited by Silicon Valley (which profited from their isolation). This resentment manifested as the anti-vaccine movement, a fierce distrust of mainstream media, and a rejection of global institutions.

The Imperialists and populist leaders saw this massive, angry voter base and weaponized it. They funded the MAGA movement and parallel right-populist movements globally, shifting the narrative from a health crisis to a war between “corrupt global elites” and “ordinary citizens.” Trump promised to “drain the swamp” and take on the deep state.

The re-election of Donald Trump and the rise of nationalist leaders globally acted as the definitive hammer that broke the global ruling class into four separate war rooms. Trump was the political vehicle the Imperialists used to smash the system. His ascent shattered the illusion of a unified global elite, forcing Davos into a defensive position, dragging a predatory Silicon Valley into the political mud, and signaling to State Capitalists that the old global alliance was officially dead.

Davos is Isolated: The return of an “America First” agenda stripped Davos of its primary enforcer—the U.S. government. Davos could no longer rely on American military or financial backing to enforce global climate accords or free-trade treaties. They were forced to retreat into the European Union, turning to aggressive tech regulation (antitrust laws and AI containment) as their only remaining shield. They recognized that borderless algorithms and decentralized crypto networks could strip states of their tax bases and regulatory power, and shifted from passive oversight to active legal warfare against tech founders.

Silicon Valley is Forced to Pick a Side: Tech billionaires realized they could no longer sit on the sidelines as borderless tech utopians. With the rise of tariffs and national security mandates, Silicon Valley had to pivot. Figures like Elon Musk and major venture capitalists openly allied with the MAGA/Imperialist faction to secure domestic deregulation, while others double-downed on government defense contracts (like Palantir and Anduril) to fight State Capitalists abroad. Leaders published manifestos openly declaring war on the regulatory state (Davos) and traditional physical infrastructure (Imperialists).

State Capitalists Seized the Fracture: Seeing the Western alliance shatter into three competing internal factions (Davos vs. Silicon Valley vs. Imperialists), State Capitalists (China, Russia, and the BRICS+ alliance) realized the global rules-based order was dead. They aggressively accelerated their de-dollarization plans, secured physical resource pipelines, and braced for a world defined entirely by protectionist trade wars. They began explicitly dismantling global trade agreements to build insulated, parallel economies. Alternatively, the Trump administration exited from 66 international organizations, conventions, and treaty-related bodies on January 7, 2026.

The Awareness Level has become Absolute.

Major networks of power increasingly began modelling one another as strategic competitors rather than as participants in a shared globalization project. Every faction now maps out the other three as explicit adversaries. Corporate boardrooms, state intelligence briefs, and geopolitical war rooms are actively designed around countering the moves of the other three blocks.

This has created a volatile unstable global order. Even the boundaries between the factions are unstable because they are all essentially part of the transnational capitalist class and they are dependent on each other, as well as competing with each other. It’s a messy divorce where the estranged parties keep living in the same house because no one can afford to move out. This is dangerous in high stakes economic warfare.

Competition increasingly centers on control of the infrastructure through which power flows — payments, data, AI systems, supply chains, semiconductors, energy networks, and communications systems.

There is factional overlap and hybrid actors and unclear divisions. These fluid coalitions continuously are recalculating who is partner, rival, or dependency. China may have clear state boundaries but it also has a strong billionaire class with divergent interests from the state. State capitalists like Russia share its aversion to western imperialism, but at the same time have their own model of state capitalism and their own often conflicting interests.

An illustration taking front and centre stage: The Davos faction, led by Mark Carney, have become keenly aware of the factional warfare. The Awareness Creep prompted Carney to remark “we are in the midst of a rupture not a transition” at the World Economic Forum in January 20, 2026. The playing field is no longer hidden; the four factions are now feuding in full view of the world.

This article is a chapter in an ongoing series I’m working on. It’s a work in progress, organized as it will eventually appear in my upcoming book, The Capitalist Civil War. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

On Thursday, May 21, the Alberta premier announced that the question of secession would join the October 19 provincial ballot. Not a vote to secede — a vote on whether the province should begin the legal process toward a future binding vote on secession. “A referendum to have a referendum,” as commentators have noted. Separatists themselves called it cynical. Legal counsel for Stay Free Alberta, the group that gathered over 300,000 signatures for a direct separation vote, called the wording a “cynical abuse of people”.

They are not wrong, but they are reading the wrong document. This wasn’t aimed at the ballot box. It was aimed at Canada’s S&P AAA rating.

To see why, you have to look at what the Davos Man in Ottawa has spent the past six months building — and how it relates to the Capitalist Civil War quietly and sometimes loudly raging in the news every day.

Mark Carney is the closest thing the Davos faction has to a head of state. Chair of Bloomberg, vice chair of Brookfield, WEF board member, former central banker twice over: he is not a politician who wandered into transnational capital, he is transnational capital that parachuted into the prime minister’s office in Ottawa. And for the past year he has been executing a strategic retreat — “a rupture not a transition” — from the rules-based order, an order that Carney claimed at the WEF conclave in January 2026, is dead.

In its place, he is preaching variable geometry. Fluid coalitions of the willing. At the European Political Community summit in Yerevan this month, he said the quiet part into a microphone — that the international order “will be rebuilt out of Europe,” with Canada as its external anchor. Carney is essential abandoning the universalist WEF project and retreating into its European geographical borders.

Carney is building a European bunker with Canada, the EU-C, or Europe+1. This is what the Davos faction looks like when it loses. Not collapse — relocation. It abandons the soft power global commons and digs into a smaller territory it can actually hold — a hard power military industrial complex.

Canada is leading the charge with the institutional crown jewel — a proposed Defence, Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB)— a multinational lender, modelled on the World Bank, pooling sovereign capital from dozens of allied states to raise $135 billion USD to finance the rearmament of the West.

Here’s the connection to Smith’s referendum:

The bank works only if it can borrow cheaply, and it can only borrow cheaply if Canada can confirm rock-solid economic stability. The whole edifice of Carney’s retreat — the EU rapprochement, the DSRB, the middle-power coalition — runs on Canada’s AAA credit rating and national stability.

This is the asset Danielle Smith is leveraging. The irony is sharp enough to draw blood: Carney is himself an Albertan, raised in Edmonton. The faction’s last stronghold is threatened in the province its own master planner comes from.

Ouch.

Here is the faction logic underneath the headlines. Smith is doing the work of the Imperial Nationalist faction organized around Washington’s hard-power dominance and bilateral dealmaking. Transactional not transnational. Hostile to exactly the kind of institution-building Carney represents.

Trump does not need to annex Alberta to win. He needs only to make the seas choppy enough to scuttle the ship. Every month of credible secession threat is a month of doubt priced into Canada’s standing, a month the DSRB’s backers spend wondering whether the host country can keep its own federation together. The threat is the weapon. Secession would almost be a waste of everyone’s time due to the enormous logistical challenges and public blowback.

To win at chess, sometimes you don’t need to take pieces. You just need to put enough pressure on the centre of the board until the opponents defence collapses.

The two pronged attack is Smith herself applying institutional pressure from above, threatening fiscal instability while keeping her own hands clean. She says she will vote No. She means it. That is the point. The state actor never has to commit treason if someone else will commit it for her.

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The second attack is where the faction logic stops being a metaphor. The Alberta Prosperity Project — a fringe separatist group, not Smith’s government — has met U.S. State Department officials in Washington three times. The report, broken by the Financial Times, with the subtitle “Separatists from oil-rich province try to capitalise on friction between White House and Mark Carney”, is specific about what was discussed: the mechanics of secession, a switch to the U.S. dollar, the standing-up of a new military force, and a request to State and Treasury for a $500 billion credit line to bankroll an independence referendum. Washington’s official response was the boilerplate of plausible deniability — officials “meet with a number of civil society groups,” no commitments made — while the group’s own lawyer, Jeff Rath, told reporters the Trump administration shows Albertans more respect than Ottawa does, and that he had a stronger relationship with Washington than with his own prime minister.

This is the Imperial Nationalist faction, organized around Washington’s hard power and bilateral dealmaking, being formally asked to underwrite the fracture of Davos’ Canadian stronghold: in its own currency, with its own security umbrella, on its own credit.

Smith does not have to break Canada; she has to make it expensive to defend. The separatists do not have to win the referendum, they just have to ruin Carney’s variable geometry equation by adding some unstable coefficients so the numbers don’t add up to AAA rating.

Of the four factions now fighting over the architecture of global capital, only Davos requires anyone else’s permission to succeed. The Imperial Nationalists need a military. The State Capitalists need a sovereign treasury. Silicon Valley needs an exit. Davos needs institutional, multilateral, voluntary financial backing and this is the one resource a hostile premier in a resource province can withhold.

Carney’s genius and his curse are the same thing: he is building the most sophisticated machine in the world for coordinating willing partners, and willingness is the only fuel it runs on.

So the October ballot is not really a question about whether Alberta stays in Canada. It is a question about whether the Davos faction’s Europe+1 bunker is as defensible as its architect needs it to be. Smith has handed Carney a six-month ultimatum and it is running straight into the summer’s trade summits.

The Canada Investment Summit In September 14–15, 2026 in Toronto, where Carney will pitch his variable geometry framework to anchor $1 trillion in direct foreign capital. The summit relies on highly targeted invitations sent directly from the Prime Minister's Office rather than open registration. The exclusive invite list is billed as “100 of the world’s largest and most powerful institutional investors, collectively representing up to $50 trillion USD in managed assets,” but the reality is that it is Blackrock and Blackstone leading the pack — stateless asset-manager capital, the purest Davos-faction money there is — with the Gulf State sovereign funds right behind them.

And that second group is the giveaway. The Gulf money is not a faction. It is the great non-aligned layer of global capital — patrimonial sovereign wealth, monarch-as-chairman — that funds Davos and Silicon Valley and Washington alike, and competes mostly with itself for dominance of the Gulf region. Carney’s own finance minister all but confirmed it is coming, name-checking Qatar and “the Middle East colleagues” among those who “intend to come.” Which tells you that Carney is not assembling allies. He is courting financial mercenaries — pitching “stability” to capital that owes him nothing and will bank wherever there is calm waters and return on investment.

This is the Davos faction’s curse stated again. It needs buy-in even from money that has no loyalty to it. And every month Danielle Smith keeps a secession threat alive is a month that the calm waters look choppy — which is the whole point. The mercenaries chase stability. Smith’s only job is to make Canada look unstable enough that they keep their checkbooks closed until October.

This is part of a series of articles. It’s a work in progress, organized as it will eventually appear in my upcoming book The Capitalist Civil War. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

CHAPTER 8: 100 People Who Actually Rule the World

This is a representative selection — not exhaustive, not a ranking. The Transnational Capitalist Class numbers roughly 3400 billionaires and another difficult to calculate number of members who are politically-connected individuals with billionaire-level clout and influence. The recent Forbes billionaires list claims there are 3428 billionaires with a total wealth increase of 28% from the previous year. Elon Musk leads the list with a net worth of $839 billion, followed by Larry Page ($257 billion), Sergey Brin ($237 billion), Jeff Bezos ($224 billion), and Mark Zuckerberg ($222 billion).

In reality, the politically consequential top tier is closer to 300–500 individuals. The names below are split up to reflect membership in the Four Factions. The factions are evolving and emerging — some members are in more than one faction and others cross the floor.

I have included links to their Wikipedia bios for further exploration.

Davos Faction (Stakeholder Capitalist Globalists)

The financial-managerial wing of the TCC. Their factional identity is institutional integration with the post-1989 multilateral order — asset management (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street), central bank networks, climate-finance architecture, multilateral institutions, philanthro-capitalist infrastructure.

• Larry Fink — BlackRock

• Mark Carney — Canadian PM, the faction’s current synthesizer

• Klaus Schwab — WEF founder, symbolic anchor

• Bill Gates — Gates Foundation

• Michael Bloomberg — Bloomberg LP

• Jamie Dimon — JPMorgan Chase

• Christine Lagarde — ECB

• Mukesh Ambani — Reliance (Davos-aligned commercial wing of Indian capital)

• Bernard Arnault — LVMH

• Marc Benioff — Salesforce

• Ray Dalio — Bridgewater

• Warren Buffett — Berkshire Hathaway

• Michael Sabia — Clerk of the Privy Council, Carney’s Canadian network

• Marc-André Blanchard — Chief of Staff to PM Carney, Carney’s Canadian network

• Mark Wiseman — Canadian Ambassador to the U.S., BlackRock alumnus

• Brian Moynihan — Bank of America

• David Solomon — Goldman Sachs

• Jane Fraser — Citigroup

• Børge Brende — WEF president

• Kristalina Georgieva — IMF

• Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala — WTO

• Ajay Banga — World Bank

• Chrystia Freeland — Canadian Liberal, the faction’s most ideologically committed elected official

• François-Henri Pinault — Kering

• George Soros / Alex Soros — Open Society network (faction-adjacent, distinct political project)

Imperial Nationalists

The hard-power faction: military-industrial integration, settler-nationalist political projects, decoupling and tariff hawks, neoconservative networks. Organized around the Washington/Tel Aviv Consensus. Membership defined by political project, not industry or demography.

• Donald Trump — President; the faction’s most consequential political-businessman

• Benjamin Netanyahu — the faction’s organizing political figure

• Narendra Modi — Indian PM, the Hindu nationalist regional variant

• Miriam Adelson — Las Vegas Sands, the most consequential single political donor

• Robert Mercer / Rebekah Mercer — Renaissance Technologies, nationalist-right political infrastructure

• Paul Singer — Elliott Management, neoconservative donor anchor

• Charles Koch — Koch network’s Imperial Nationalist-realigned remnant

• The Murdoch family (Rupert, Lachlan) — News Corp/Fox, faction media apparatus

• Gautam Adani — Adani Group, Indian conglomerate aligned with Modi project

• Bernard Marcus estate network — Republican Jewish Coalition infrastructure

• Idan Ofer — Israeli shipping/energy

• Yitzhak Tshuva — Delek Group, Israeli energy

• Patrick Drahi — Altice, French-Israeli telecom-media

• Jared Kushner — Affinity Partners, Gulf-Israeli normalization architect

• Howard Lutnick — Cantor Fitzgerald, Commerce Secretary

• Scott Bessent — Treasury Secretary, hard-decoupling hawk

• Bill Ackman — Pershing Square, post-October 2023 Zionist political operator

• Marc Rowan — Apollo Global, Israeli political activism

• Robert Kraft — Patriots/FCAS, pro-Israel political infrastructure

• Haim Saban — Saban Capital Group, bipartisan Israeli political donor

• JD Vance — Vice President, faction’s elected representative

• Larry Ellison — Oracle, Trump-aligned with pro-Israeli activism (cross-cuts Silicon Valley)

• John Hagee / Christians United for Israel — Christian Zionist mass-mobilization apparatus (network, not individual billionaire)

• Viktor Orbán‘s circle / CPAC Hungary network — European variant

• Stephen Schwarzman — Blackstone, Trump-aligned despite Davos commercial overlap

Silicon Valley (Techno-Sovereigns)

The newest faction. Network State ideology, administrative-state demolition, AI/biotech/aerospace concentration, libertarian-to-reactionary political project. Membership defined by both industry concentration (tech and tech-adjacent capital) and ideological commitment to the techno-sovereign (Techno-Optimist, Network State) project.

• Peter Thiel — Palantir/Founders Fund, the faction’s network anchor

• Elon Musk — Tesla/SpaceX/X/xAI, most visible operator (currently ambiguous alignment)

• Marc Andreessen — Andreessen Horowitz, intellectual operator

• David Sacks — Craft Ventures, Trump’s AI/crypto czar

• Joe Lonsdale — 8VC/Palantir cofounder

• JD Vance — Vice President (cross-listed; primary commitment Imperial Nationalist, formation Silicon Valley)

• Alex Karp — Palantir CEO

• Curtis Yarvin — house philosopher (not a billionaire but the faction’s intellectual architect)

• Balaji Srinivasan — Network State author

• Brian Armstrong — Coinbase, crypto-political infrastructure

• Palmer Luckey — Anduril

• Trae Stephens — Anduril/Founders Fund

• Keith Rabois — Khosla Ventures alumnus, Founders Fund

• Garry Tan — Y Combinator

• Larry Page — Google cofounder (retired but structurally significant)

• Sergey Brin — Google cofounder

• Jensen Huang — Nvidia (commercially central, factionally moderate)

• Mark Zuckerberg — Meta (recently realigning toward faction’s political project)

• Sam Altman — OpenAI (faction-adjacent with Davos sympathies)

• Vinod Khosla — Khosla Ventures (partial, Davos sympathies)

• Jack Dorsey — Block, libertarian-aligned

• Patrick Collison — Stripe

• John Collison — Stripe

• Dustin Moskovitz — Asana/Open Philanthropy (faction-divergent, more Davos-adjacent)

• Brian Chesky — Airbnb

State Capitalists

The faction operating through party-state structures rather than individual capital command. Centered on China, with allied state-capitalist projects in Russia, Iran and the Gulf forming an an extended bloc whose BRICS-era political coherence has now visibly failed. The faction’s internal structure is asymmetric — China’s CCP elite is the analytical core; Russia and the Gulf are aligned counterparties whose membership is partial and project-dependent.

China (faction core):

• Xi Jinping — General Secretary, internal agglutinator

• Li Qiang — Premier

• Ding Xuexiang — First Vice Premier

• He Lifeng — Vice Premier for economy/trade

• Wang Huning — chief party theorist, ideological architect

• Cai Qi — Politburo Standing Committee

• Pan Gongsheng — PBOC Governor

• Lan Fo’an — Finance Minister

• Wang Wentao — Commerce Minister

• Pony Ma (Ma Huateng) — Tencent

• Zhang Yiming — ByteDance

• Zhong Shanshan — Nongfu Spring

• Wang Chuanfu — BYD

• Robin Zeng — CATL

• Ren Zhengfei — Huawei

• Jack Ma — Alibaba (post-2020 reduced but structurally significant)

• Jin Liqun — AIIB President, faction’s multilateral institution

Russia (allied state-capitalist project, increasingly cross-cutting with Imperial Nationalism via war economy):

• Vladimir Putin — President, the BRICS-era agglutinator whose binding power has just visibly failed

• Sergey Lavrov — Foreign Minister, faction diplomat

• Igor Sechin — Rosneft, oil state capital

• Alexey Miller — Gazprom

• Yury Kovalchuk — “Bank Rossiya” oligarch, ideological hardliner

Gulf state capital (allied, cross-cuts Imperial Nationalism through Israel normalization):

• Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) — Saudi Crown Prince, directs $1.15T PIF; operates across factions — State Capitalist in domestic-developmental mode, Imperial Nationalist on regional security, Davos-courting on global capital deployment

• Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ) — UAE President, directs ADIA (~$1T) and Mubadala

• Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani — Qatari Emir, directs QIA (~$525B)

• Yasir Al-Rumayyan — PIF Governor, operational head of Saudi state capital deployment

Overlapping and Hybrid Faction Members

These factions are not all nations with flags. The Imperialists are dominated by the Trump-Netanyahu national coalition and the State Capitalists are dominated by China-CCP, but Davos and Silicon Valley have no national flag or club badge to wear, so they can more easily slide into another faction. Loyalties are fluid.

Several figures in the Davos sample (Schwarzman, Ackman) operate in the Imperial Nationalist overlap. Several figures in the Silicon Valley sample (Ellison, Karp, increasingly Andreessen on Israel-related questions) operate at the Silicon Valley–Imperial Nationalist overlap. Elon Musk has his hands in all the factions, though he is born a Silicon Valley boy.

This cross-cutting pattern is my book’s evidence that the factional civil war is partly a realignment in progress rather than a fixed balance of power.

The Gulf monarchies are the clearest junction zone where all four factions compete for influence. MBS, MBZ, and Tamim each maintain operative relationships with all four factions and align differently depending on the issue: with Davos on global capital deployment and ESG framing, with Imperial Nationalists on Israel normalization and Iran containment, with Silicon Valley on AI infrastructure (HUMAIN, G42), with State Capitalists on Belt and Road and BRICS+. They function as a swing bloc.

Russia under Putin has migrated factionally over the past decade. Pre-2022 Russia operated as a recognizably State Capitalist project with parallels to China. Post-2022, the war economy has restructured Russian capital around military production, oligarch reorganization, and territorial revanchism — a factional drift toward Imperial Nationalism in character, but not joining the Washington/Tel Aviv Consensus. Putin’s “agglutinator” failure on Iran is partly a consequence of this drift: the State Capitalist project requires economic-developmental coherence, and Russia no longer has one.

India under Modi is in active migration from Davos-curious to Imperial Nationalist. The February 2026 Knesset address and the post-Iran-war BRICS defection are the two visible milestones of this migration. The Adani–Ambani capital base is split: Ambani remains Davos-integrated; Adani has migrated toward the Imperial Nationalist alignment via Modi–Trump–Netanyahu coordination.

The State Capitalist faction is the most internally coherent because it operates through party-state discipline rather than individual factional commitment. This is its strength and its limit. The faction cannot recruit transnational class members in the way Davos can; its expansion runs through state-to-state agreements rather than class formation.

What follows is the series so far. It’s a work in progress, organized as it will eventually appear in my upcoming book The Capitalist Civil War. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

A book written in public, one chapter at a time.

The left/right binary that dominants most political commentary is a distraction. The real conflict reshaping the world right now is happening inside the transnational capitalist class itself — between four factions with incompatible visions of how global capital and society should be governed.

This Substack (The Margins) is where I’m drafting The Capitalist Civil War, a book that names those four factions, traces how they fractured, and argues that their unresolved struggle is the defining feature of our political moment. The thesis is unfolding in real time as events happen — Davos summits, BRICS implosions, Hormuz blockade, tech-state mergers, European realignments — and posting the chapters as rough drafts lets me test the theory against current events as they unfold and refine the argument with reader feedback before final publication.

The four factions, briefly:

• Davos — stakeholder capitalist globalists working through the WEF, BlackRock, and multilateral institutions

• Imperial Nationalists — the Washington-Tel Aviv Consensus pursuing hard power and bilateral dealmaking

• Silicon Valley — techno-sovereigns building network states and tearing down the administrative order

• State Capitalists — civilizational-state projects led by China, Russia, and Iran

It’s a work in progress, organized as it will eventually appear in my upcoming book
The Capitalist Civil War. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

CHAPTER 9: The Four-Clocks Problem

CHAPTER 10: The New Grand Chessboard

Hold my beer.

In an interview with Sulaiman Ahmed on May 14, Escobar claimed that Putin was the glue — the agglutinator — that held the whole BRICS together. This is the most interesting confession in the whole interview. Escobar admits that what looked like a coherent bloc was actually one man’s bilateral diplomacy:

“Putin was the only one who had to get Modi and Xi on the same room on the same table and tell them both, ‘okay, now you, we sit here, the three of us, and you’re going to talk your issues to each other face to face.’ So the agglutinator was Putin.”

BRICS is effectively “blown up” and impossible to put back together in its current form.

While he spent years as one of the alliance’s biggest public advocates, he admits that he was “too romantic” about its potential to succeed.

BRICS wasn’t a class formation or even a stable institutional bloc. It was a glue-stick held by one aging Russian president. When the glue couldn’t override Modi’s hard tilt toward Washington and Tel Aviv, the whole package came apart.

The Iran war is the event that blew everything up: “This war changes everything. Everything.” He’s explicit that BRICS was working — or appeared to be — until the Iran war exposed that Modi was playing an insider game.

Modi’s visit to Israel in February, 2026, the first Indian PM ever to address the Knesset.

It was the pre-existing fissure the war then ripped open. “Even before the start of the war, that Modi visit to Israel blew up BRICS from the inside, big, big time.” India under Modi had already defected in substance; the war just made the defection public.

Escobar claims that in a private interview, Vivek Ramaswamy told him the Indian-American operation in U.S. politics has been, all along, a long con to redirect U.S. trade away from China and toward India — and that BRICS membership was instrumentally a means to that end, not an alternative to it.

“The entire infiltration has always been to get closer to the US. So you could never trust them as a partner. The partnership for in BRICS is only a means to try and get closer to the US.”

It’s devastating for the multipolarity thesis. It means one of the five founding BRICS members has been treating the bloc as a leverage instrument against another founding member (China) the entire time. My four-faction model predicts that there is no unified counter-hegemonic project, only state apparatuses pursuing factional interest under a shared rhetorical umbrella.

The State Capitalist’s umbrella orgs — BRICS, the SCO and the multipolar world project — are all anti-hegemon attempts to steer around sanctions and trade off the US dollar. That aspect of the project succeeded.

The agglutinator concept is transferable to each of the four factions: Every faction in the four-way model has one. Davos had Schwab (now gone, replaced by no one officially, but unofficially Mark Carney has filled the glue vacuum). Imperial Nationalists have Netanyahu as the synthesizer figure binding U.S. neocons, Christian Zionists, and the Israeli right. Silicon Valley has Peter Thiel who is funding all the Network State projects. State Capitalists had Putin as the agglutinator of the external BRICS face, with Xi as the internal CCP agglutinator.

The factional civil war (Capitalist Civil War) can be partly tracked by watching when the agglutinator's binding power fails. Schwab resigned without a permanent successor and Mark Carney has stepped into the functional vacuum with his middle-powers coalition, which is in itself the Davos faction's first explicit admission that its Great Reset universalist project has failed. Putin's binding power just visibly failed in the Iran war. Netanyahu is under domestic siege; his ultra-Orthodox coalition partners just submitted a bill to dissolve the Knesset. Thiel is the most intact of the four — which tells you something about which faction is currently best-positioned.

Escobar is narrating exactly what the four faction model predicts: that what looked like a transnational class formation (BRICS), was actually a temporary balance of power between state actors that defaulted back into bilateral state-to-state relations the moment any of them faced an existential test. What survives are bilateral relationships, territorial alignments, state actors: China-Pakistan, Iran-Pakistan, Russia-Iran, Russia-China — temporary, minilateral coalitions without any ideological umbrella to glue them together.

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Trump Agrees: BRICS is dead.

It was originally Trump who stated “BRICS is dead,” before reporters February 13, 2025, at the White House, hours before his meeting with Modi.

“they will come back and say we beg you we beg you not to do this . BRICS is dead since I mentioned that BRICS died the minute I mentioned that but BRICS was put there for a bad purpose and uh most of those people don’t want they don’t even want to talk about it now they’re afraid to talk about it because I told them if if they want to play games with the dollar then they’re going to be hit with a 100% tariff the day they mentioned that they want to do it and they will come back and say we beg you we beg you not to do this BRICS is dead … “

At the recent BRICS foreign ministers meeting in New Delhi, May 14-15, Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi strongly urged the bloc to issue a sweeping, formal condemnation of international law violations by Israel and the United States. Because BRICS operates strictly on absolute consensus, India's refusal meant a unified declaration was impossible. India could not bridge the gap, the summit concluded in a major diplomatic failure. Host India was forced to scrap the joint statement entirely and settle for releasing a basic Ministry of External Affairs Chair's Statement and Outcome Document.

To make matters worse, India’s pro-Israel posture wasn’t the only element tearing the meeting apart. The conflict in the Persian Gulf spilled directly into the room, creating an unbridgeable clash between new members Iran and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Iran accused the UAE — “a member State that has its own special relations with Israel” — of trying to sabotage the text by demanding a separate condemnation of Iranian military strikes on GCC states.

The UAE representative, Minister of State, Khalifa bin Shaheen Al Marar, rejected Araghchi’s remarks, accusing him of attempting to justify “terrorist attacks” against the UAE and other Gulf states. Escobar recorded his BRICS is dead interview on May 14. The same day, in New Delhi, the bloc's foreign ministers were proving him right in real time.

Following the collapse of the New Delhi meeting, Brazil, predictably, took the Davos-aligned position of polite denial. Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira told The Hindu that “BRICS is evolving with new members; differences will take time to resolve” — the diplomatic vocabulary of a faction that cannot yet admit the project is over.

BRICS was never a pro-multipolar project. It was an Anti-Washington/Israeli Consensus project. China’s vision of multipolarity, Russia’s vision, India’s vision, and Brazil’s vision were mutually incompatible from day one. What they shared was a common interest in escaping from dollar hegemony, sanctions enforcement, SWIFT capture, and Washington conditions.

Strip away the rhetorical scaffolding and the bloc was always RC+.

Russia and China — the only two members with the state capacity, military weight, and structural opposition to the Washington/Israeli Consensus to make the escape possible. Everyone else was either a hedger (India, the UAE, Indonesia), Davos-aligned ballast giving lip service to the Global South (Brazil under Lula, South Africa under the ANC), or a sanctioned regime grateful for the life raft (Iran, increasingly Egypt and Ethiopia as conditions worsen). The agglutinator wasn’t holding together a five-power bloc. He was holding together a China-Russia core surrounded by passengers.

The New and Improved BRICS™ may reinvent itself over an anti-Zionist stance, but any resurrected BRICS would be a smaller, harder, more ideologically defined bloc. If the litmus test is Zionism, then it would exclude India and the UAE outright, which means the "Global South" framing dies with the current version.

The agglutinator failed. The glue didn’t stick. BRICS is dead.

For previous articles in the series:

The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

The Chinese Capitalist Party

Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

This is on the same day that Larry Fink stood in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, part of Donald Trump’s delegation to meet Xi Jinping for a two-day summit on trade, Taiwan, and opening the Strait of Hormuz. The CEO of BlackRock — the financial face of the World Economic Forum — was in the same room with two hegemons who were negotiating over the fate of the world.

To backtrack a couple months, Carney told the Australian parliament in March: “Great powers can compel. But compulsion comes with costs — both reputational and financial. Middle powers must convene to matter, but not everyone can.” He wasn’t being modest. He was announcing the strategic retreat of the Davos faction that, five years ago, believed it would govern the world.

The Beijing summit is what the world looks like when Davos’s universalist project has failed.

The Ottawa announcement is the Davos faction’s response.

Variable Geometry

The core of Mark Carney’s middle powers coalition strategy is a flexible, “variable geometry” approach, building alliances based on shared values and interests rather than rigid structures. During his speech in Australia, he explained, “Canada is choosing to create a dense web of connections to build our resilience. We’ve adopted a new framework for engaging the world — variable geometry — creating different coalitions for different issues.”

Carney’s vision is to unite these “rules-restoring” democracies into a powerful economic and strategic bloc capable of ensuring their own security and prosperity. Uniting the middle-powers would theoretically bring over a third of the world’s global trade under one roof.

Variable geometry is code for “minilateral” agreements between handfuls of nations, the new vogue for post-unipolar Davos architects, that works by “bringing together the smallest possible number of countries needed to have the largest possible impact on solving a particular problem.”

Let’s forget about globalism.

Minilateralism has been a fashionable concept in foreign policy circles since Moisés Naím's article in 2009, where he said, “Let’s forget about trying to get the planet’s nearly 200 countries to agree. We need to abandon that fool’s errand in favor of a new idea: minilateralism.”

What's new isn't the concept — it's which faction is now embracing it. Davos spent fifteen years insisting on universal multilateral frameworks (Paris, WHO, ESG, OECD/BEPS, global minimum tax). Variable geometry is the opposite of that philosophy.

Carney insists this is "not a retreat from multilateralism" but "its evolution." This is the language of a faction managing its own decline. Every retreat in history has been described by its architects as a strategic repositioning. Variable geometry isn't multilateralism evolving — it's multilateralism conceding that universal frameworks cannot be built in a fractured world.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has established a trilateral AI and technology partnership with India and Australia, formally known as the Australia-Canada-India Technology and Innovation Partnership (ACITI). This is what Davos looks like after the Great Reset failed.

Carney and the Davos faction he represents recognize that survival is now the main strategy, because globalism has failed. The World Economic Forum's original "Great Reset" concept imagined highly integrated, cooperative global governance to manage planet-wide crises. Carney’s strategy acknowledges that this idealized vision has failed entirely.

Rather than leaning into the centralized global governance originally envisioned by the "Great Reset," the Middle Powers strategy represents a stark pivot away from that philosophy toward fragmented, competitive realism. Ultimately, it is a post-globalist defensive playbook. It swaps the grand, top-down integration dreams of early-2020s Davos for a decentralized network of regional bunkers designed to withstand superpower bullying from the U.S. and China.

The CPTPP-EU Bridge

The most ambitious plan is Carney’s efforts to create a “bridge” between the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the European Union. The bridge would link the CPTPP — Canada, Japan, the UK, Australia, and ten others around the Pacific Rim — to the EU's twenty-seven members. A 1.5 billion-person rules-based trading bloc, built explicitly to function without American participation.

Carney is forging deep bilateral and minilateral ties with key nations. He calls Australia and India Canada's "strategic cousins” — alliances focused on critical minerals (both are major producers of lithium, uranium, and iron ore), defense and AI. Australia has joined the G7 Critical Minerals Alliance, and the two countries reached eight agreements on uranium supply, AI, and semiconductors, with a commitment to double bilateral trade by 2030.

The broader “middle power” network is an expanded plan to attract other nations seeking to hedge against American and Chinese dominance. The coalition reaches toward middle powers across Southeast Asia, the Gulf, Latin America, and resource-rich Africa.

Rebuilt out of Europe

The “Rebuilt out of Europe” plan and Canada’s half-a-trillion-dollar military spending blitz are the concrete, hard-power components of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Middle Powers strategy.

Carney argues that diplomatic agreements and economic coalitions mean nothing if they are not backed by raw economic security and military teeth. At the European Political Community Summit, he explicitly declared that because hegemons are weaponizing global integration, the international order will be rebuilt “out of Europe” via a combined, heavily rearmed transatlantic front.

Carney’s post-Davos worldview concludes that moral arguments have no currency in a broken international system. By rebuilding ties through Europe and arming Canada with a half-a-trillion-dollar war chest, the Middle Powers strategy transitions from an intellectual theory into a highly militarized, self-reliant economic fortress.

The faction that promised global integration is now building bunkers. Variable geometry isn't a strategy.

It's an admission of defeat.

What follows is the series so far. It’s a work in progress, organized as it will eventually appear in my upcoming book The Capitalist Civil War. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

It is not the unipolar world of Bretton Woods, American Empire, and sanctions — George W. Bush’s longing for a New World Order has gone out like a thousand points of light. This new world is not the semi-utopian multipolar order hoped for by the BRICS. Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalist declaration that the End of History had arrived has proven flawed. His mentor Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations has not emerged either.

What has emerged instead is something neither side of that old debate predicted: a Quadripolar World Order in which four rival factions of a single transnational capitalist class fight each other for control of the planet’s financial, technological, and military architecture.

This is not a war between nations. It is a war within capitalism — between four competing visions of what capitalism should look like, who should run it, and on what terms the rest of us should live under it. The architects of this system are transnational in their operations but national in their bases of power. They are born somewhere, headquartered somewhere, and increasingly dependent on the state apparatus of somewhere to enforce their will. Geography and the nation state are still relevant — because when push comes to shove, each faction retreats into its territory: Davos, Washington, Silicon Valley and Beijing.

Four poles. Four weapons. Four visions of the future. And a war which none of them can win.

This quadripolar world is not defined, however, by traditional geographic borders, but by competing models of political economy (i.e., capitalism), technology control, and state sovereignty. Each pole wields a distinct weapon to enforce its will globally.

A multipolar world is one where multiple states compete within a shared system. A quadripolar world is one where four factions cannot agree on what the system is. That’s a deeper kind of world disorder. Multipolar BRICS envisioned a balance of power where the various poles would organically fall into power blocs where no single pole was dominant. The BRICS multipolar vision assumed that new reserve currencies, new development banks, and new trade routes would replace the rules-based, dollar-dominated unipolar order.

The quadripolar reality is that no faction can build a new global architecture because every faction can veto the others’ attempts. State Capitalists can build CIPS but cannot make it the global standard. Davos can write ESG rules but cannot make the Imperial Nationalists enforce them. Techno-Sovereigns can build network states but cannot make territorial states recognise them.

Each faction has the power to block each other. They can veto each other's projects, sabotage each other's institutions, sanction each other's allies, and block each other's standards. What none of them can do is construct a new global architecture that the others are forced to operate inside. The dollar order worked because the United States could compel the rest of the world to use it.

The quadripolar world order doesn’t work that way.

Every new institution gets met with a rival institution. Every new standard gets met with a parallel standard. Every claim to universality gets met with three competing claims to universality. The result is not a new order. The result is a fragmented infrastructure of half-built systems, none of which can become the standard because the others won't allow it.

The quadripolar world is younger than people think

This new arrangement didn’t exist five years ago. In 2019 the world order was Davos plus three challengers: a transnational capitalist class still nominally united around the Great Reset agenda, with state capitalism, techno-libertarianism, and right-wing populism as dissident movements. The pandemic was supposed to consolidate Davos’s hegemony — Klaus Schwab was virtually salivating at the opportunity he saw to remake the world in his own image.

He stated that the COVID-19 pandemic represented a “rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.”

The Great Reset project failed because populism exploded under the pressure of international health mandates that crushed the working class. Amazon and Walmart stayed open and Mom and Pop had to shut down the restaurant. The largest wealth transfer in modern history drove the working class out into the streets — they threatened a MAGA revolt and then elected Trump as their political savior.

The 2020–2022 period is when the Imperial Nationalists discovered they had their own political base — angry, vocal, and motivated. The Techno-Sovereigns discovered they had their own ideology. The State Capitalists discovered they could survive sanctions. Each faction positioned itself in opposition to Davos’s attempt to consolidate its power base.

Elon Musk tweeted he declined a Davos invitation: "not because I thought they were engaged in diabolical scheming, but because it sounded boring af lol."

Trump dismissed the WEF’s elite audience, referring to them as people who “have been screwing us for 30 years”

Jinping told Davos in his 2017 address: “We should stay committed to international law and international rules instead of seeking one’s own supremacy.”

The quadripolar order is the four broken pieces of a Davos project that shattered.

This explains why the order feels new: it is new. It’s roughly five years old. The majority of people are not even aware it has happened. Davos itself is, however, painfully aware — and that is why Mark Carney received a standing ovation at the World Economic Forum in January 2026. He said what they were all thinking:

“The rules-based order is fading… We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition… We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just.”

The Iran war is the event that broke the previous balance of power. Before Iran, the four factions were in a slow drift. After Iran, the alignments hardened: the Davos faction retreated decisively into the middle-powers coalition; the Imperial Nationalists committed to bilateral dealmaking and abandoned what was left of the multilateral pretence; the Techno-Sovereign Silicon Valley discovered their supply chains ran through Hormuz; the State Capitalists discovered they were now indispensable to resolving the crisis their rivals had created. The Iran war is the moment the quadripolar order locked in — the moment when each faction’s position became structurally fixed because each one’s strengths and dependencies were exposed.

The plane that landed in Beijing this week tells the whole story.

Donald Trump arrived as the Imperial Nationalist faction’s front man, the man dismantling the multilateral order in favour of bilateral leverage. Beside him: Larry Fink of BlackRock and Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone — the two most institutionally embedded figures in transnational finance, as well as David Solomon of Goldman Sachs and Jane Fraser of Citigroup. The CEOs of Mastercard and Visa. Tim Cook, whose Apple empire is manufactured inside the People’s Republic. Kelly Ortberg of Boeing, hoping to close a 500-aircraft order. Elon Musk, whose Shanghai gigafactory is Tesla’s largest plant, and who six months ago was tearing down the federal government on behalf of the Techno-Sovereign faction.

Three of the four factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class, flying together to negotiate with the fourth.

They are not on that plane because they agree. Fink runs the asset manager whose entire model — passive global allocation, ESG, stakeholder capitalism — the Imperial Nationalists have spent two years attacking. Cook needs the Chinese consumer market the tariff hawks want to decouple from. Musk needs the supply chains the Imperial Nationalists want to sever. Trump needs Xi’s cooperation on Iran, on rare earths, on the Strait of Hormuz — and Xi knows it.

China needs semiconductors to survive.

Jensen Huang of Nvidia was initially absent from the announced list. Then Trump personally called him, overriding staff objections, and Huang boarded Air Force One during the Alaska refuelling stop. Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips (H100 and H200) have been restricted from Chinese buyers; the Chinese market represents an estimated $50 billion to the company; China cannot maintain pace in the AI race without access to that hardware.

What came out of Beijing.

What flew into Beijing produced the stalemate that the quadripolar world order is predicated on. Not a Grand Bargain. Not a resolution. A choreographed theatre of agreement covering structural irreconcilability.

The two presidents announced a “Strategic Stability Framework” and a new “Board of Trade.”

Translated: we have agreed to keep talking, and we have built a mechanism to manage our future inability to agree. A framework is what you announce when you cannot announce an agreement. A board for managing trade disputes is an admission that trade disputes will continue. The leaders declared that their countries should be “partners, not rivals.”

They jointly declared that the Strait of Hormuz “must remain open to ensure global trade flow,” but Iran was not at the summit. Iran has not agreed. What was announced was a sphere-of-influence statement — two superpowers agreeing that a third country’s war should now resolve in a way convenient to both of them.

The State Capitalist faction is being asked to deliver Iran, but Iranian Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref delivered a sharp message directly targeting the summit, declaring “Our right to the Strait of Hormuz is established, and the matter is closed.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun reinforced that message Monday, saying Beijing’s position remained “clear and consistent” and that the priority should be preventing renewed war and further escalation.

Iran's Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) explicitly exempted Chinese ships from the blockade, allowing the Chinese supertanker Yuan Hua Hu to pass through the strait completely toll-free.

Meanwhile, the tech delegation got what it came for. Washington cleared roughly ten Chinese firms to buy Nvidia’s second-most powerful chip. Not the H200. Not Blackwell B200. Second-tier silicon, carefully calibrated to let China’s AI sector continue functioning at a deliberately throttled level. Nvidia preserves market access. The Imperial Nationalists preserve the export control regime in name while gutting it in fact. China gets just enough hardware to stay in the race without catching up. Nobody wins; everybody gets enough to walk away claiming they won.

Huang called the sessions “very smooth.”

Musk called them “very good, very productive” — and brought his five-year-old son X Æ A-Xii to the meeting with Premier Li Qiang, because the Techno-Sovereigns do not fully accept the protocols of the system they are negotiating with. Musk was seen doing a 360 degree video of the Hall of the People, another act of playful rebellion.

Boeing got an aircraft order. But only 200 planes, not 500, causing Boeing stock (BA) to drop roughly 4% to 5% following the announcement.

Cargill and the agricultural delegation got nothing. Soybean prices plummeted this morning when a comment emerged from China that Chinese soybean purchases were “all taken care of” suggesting that they had completed purchase of the agreed to 12 million metric tons for this year, and that they had no interest of buying more.

The Davos financial faction came for market opening — broader access to Chinese capital markets, expanded asset management mandates, processing rights for Visa and Mastercard, the long-stalled liberalization that BlackRock and Blackstone have been pursuing for a decade.

So far, they got nothing.

And then, after a day of warm optics and ceremonial banquets, Xi took Trump into a two-hour meeting and warned him that Taiwan is “the most important issue” and that if it is mishandled, the two superpowers will “have clashes, or even conflicts.”

Everything else this week is theatre.

This is the Capitalist Civil War exposed to the whole world: four factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class, each holding leverage the others cannot manoeuvre around, each unable to win outright, each unable to walk away. The war does not produce victors. It produces summits — temporary truces between factions that need each other and hate each other enough to keep fighting. It produces plane loads of billionaires flying to negotiate a better piece of the pie. It produces Hollywood director Brett Ratner filming the negotiation.

What flew into Beijing this week was not a de-risking delegation.

It was the four factions of the new quadripolar world order ironically jammed into the Great Hall of the People.

None of them represents the People. None of them is building the institutions that can make positive decisions about the cost-of-living crisis, wealth inequality, or the Iran war. They are fighting for control of a system that has lost the ability to solve the problems it has created.

The summits will continue. The deals will be cut. Boards of Trade will be announced. And the war will not end, because the war is not something the participants want to end. It is the structure they exist inside. They cannot leave it without ceasing to be what they are.

For previous articles in the series:

The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

The Chinese Capitalist Party

Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

Silicon Valley is one of four factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class, now at war over the financial infrastructure of the planet.

What kind of faction is it?

This is what Gramsci called an organic intellectual apparatus — the institutional, financial, and ideological scaffolding through which an emerging class faction develops its own worldview, recruits cadres, produces propaganda, and prepares to bid for hegemony. It is not a conspiracy in the sense of secret coordination, because almost none of it is secret. It is highly visible. They have a book, a conference, a school, podcasts, Substack networks, physical demonstration sites, and a venture fund — all branded as the network state movement.

But it is also not random emergence. The same dozen-ish funders finance the projects. The same ideologues set the intellectual frame. The same handful of think tanks produce the policy papers. The founders all know each other, attend each other’s events, invest in each other’s projects, and rotate through each other’s pop-up cities.

What you have, in concrete terms, is a faction-in-formation building its own integral state in miniature.

Organic Intellectuals and Practical Organisers

According to Antonio Gramsci, organic intellectuals are not defined by profession or formal education, but by their social function within a particular class. Organic intellectuals don’t merely speak for a class — they constitute it as a class, giving it self-consciousness, preparing it for political action. Without them, you have an economic club. With them, you have a class capable of bidding for power.

As Gramsci wrote in his Prison Notebooks, the organic intellectual is less a detached thinker and more a practical organizer, involved in constructing new forms of cultural and political life.

Although Gramsci was chiefly concerned with organic intellectuals emerging from the working class, he made the same point about the capitalist class itself: "The capitalist entrepreneur creates alongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, the organisers of a new culture, of a new legal system... If not all entrepreneurs, at least an elite amongst them must have the capacity to be an organiser of society."

Let me lay out what’s actually happening here.

How to Start a New Country

Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State vision, borrowed from his book of the same name, outlines a master plan to create “a digital-first community that establishes post-Westphalian sovereignty by crowdfunding physical territories and eventually gaining diplomatic recognition from existing nation-states.”

Srinivasan, along with other Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns are organizing online chat groups with those who share common values and interests, then crowdfunding capital to buy territory and establish a startup city. The “network” part is the non-territorial residents that live around the world who are part of the state, but only exist as online members, interacting and participating in tech projects through the internet. Entrance to the physical city is by invitation only — thus the city acts as a central hub of elite members. The decentralized cities would eventually apply for United Nations recognition at some future point when population, GDP and political clout are sufficient.

From Srinivasan’s book: “The key idea is to populate the land from the cloud, and do so all over the Earth. Unlike an ideologically disaligned and geographically centralized legacy state, which packs millions of disputants in one place, a network state is ideologically aligned but geographically de-centralized. The people are spread around the world in clusters of varying size, but their hearts are in one place.”

The idea has gained significant traction — there are several projects in various stages of development.

Praxis: Heroism, Truth and Beauty

As of mid-2026, Praxis has not yet finalized a binding legal agreement with any host government to establish its city, but it is actively negotiating and has made significant progress. Investors include Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and the Winklevoss twins. Praxis’ founder Dryden Brown, a university drop-out surfer, inspired by Ayn Rand, claims he is offering partner governments “a slice of Silicon Valley.”

Its website brags: “Our purpose is to revitalize Western Civilization by creating a new culture focused on the pursuit of heroism, truth, and beauty.”

What that really means: Praxis or any other network state is nothing more than a libertarian utopia with minimal corporate regulation created for an economically select few who want to live in a place without regulatory oversight or financial checks that explicitly prioritizes capital over democracy and human rights.

Dryden recognizes that Praxis needs a host: “When partnering with governments, there’s a lot of bureaucracy and paperwork you just have to accept. Generally, you want to work with governments that have a really strong incentive to partner with you … what we’re offering governments is a totally unprecedented human capital transfer.”

Praxis has confirmed it is in discussions with seven governments about establishing an “Acceleration Zone,” its term for a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) with reduced regulatory barriers. In early 2024, Praxis announced it had received two formal government offers to host the city, though the specific countries have not been publicly disclosed. In June 2025, Vanity Fair reported that Brown had instead selected a location in California to build the city — a project named Atlas, about an hour north of Santa Barbara.

The team includes Stephen Harper, former Prime Minister of Canada, on its government relations team, signaling a serious diplomatic effort. Despite raising $525 million in crypto, and having conceptual designs from Zaha Hadid Architects, Praxis does not currently hold legal status as an SEZ or autonomous territory in any country. The project remains in the negotiation and planning phase.

In summary, Praxis has advanced government discussions and formal offers, but no final legal or regulatory framework has been enacted to establish the city as of May 2026.

Other projects include Zuzalu, a project incubated by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin; Nation3: Led by Aragon founder Luis Cuende, Nation3 aims to create a new nation state on the cloud, aimed at launching an online-first, zero-tax nation with its own internet-native jurisdiction and solarpunk society powered by Web3 technology.

Próspera: Private Tech City

Próspera — So far, the only actual city up and running, complete with condos for sale or rent, golf course, restaurants, resort and commercial district.

It is built on the Caribbean island of Roatán in Honduras, with 400 acres of land. It is a SEZ with investment by Peter Thiel. It has approximately 2,000 residents, over 300 businesses, and ongoing construction, despite legal challenges from the Honduran government, which repealed the ZEDE law in 2022 and saw the framework declared unconstitutional by Honduras's Supreme Court in September 2024.

Próspera has filed an $11 billion ICSID arbitration claim against Honduras — leveraging the very state-to-state legal architecture that the network state movement claims to transcend.

It’s promo video sums it up: “Próspera is building the fastest growing private city project in the world elevating human potential through a radically decentralized private governance framework. Legacy systems of governance keep individuals from reaching their full potential. Próspera provides a pro-innovation governance framework creating the most transparent and efficient business environment in the world.”

Residents of Honduras argue that Próspera city will degrade their culture, and it is a form of “neo-colonization” that undermines national sovereignty. They report that Próspera’s expansion has strained local public services like roads and police, without contributing tax revenue to support them.

Próspera exists because the nation of Honduras has granted them special rights and economic privileges that forming a nation would prevent.

California Forever: Stealth Campaign

The California Forever project is a large-scale real estate development initiative aiming to build a new city from scratch in southeastern Solano County, California, approximately 60 miles northeast of San Francisco. Spearheaded by Czech-born entrepreneur Jan Sramek, the project is managed through his company, California Forever, and their mysterious subsidiary Flannery Associates. Since 2017, the company quietly acquired — some called it a “stealth campaign,” — over 54,000 acres of agricultural land, roughly the size of Oakland—for an estimated $800–$900 million.

The vision is to create a walkable, sustainable city for up to 400,000 residents, featuring dense urban neighborhoods, clean energy infrastructure, and modern transportation systems. Proponents claim it could help solve California’s housing crisis and serve as an “economic engine” for the region.

Critics, like grass-roots opposition, Solano Together, claim that 70% of residents do not want 400,000 new residents in their community, stressing the negative environmental impact and distrust of secretive billionaires.

U.S. Representative John Garamendi summed up the opposition: “The community is very angry — by the secrecy, by the duplicity, by the attack on family farmers,” and “The atmosphere is very, very negative,” reflecting broader fears that the project would primarily benefit the wealthy investors while putting the livelihoods of residents and farm workers at risk.

The Network State is More Than a Movement

A social movement is a broad, loosely organized collective of people pushing for or resisting large-scale social change, whereas a faction (or class faction) is a specific, structured subgroup within a larger organization or social class fighting for its own narrow interests. Class factions are strictly rooted in economics.

Factions are highly organized, cohesive, and self-aware. Members actively coordinate strategies to gain power, votes, or influence within their parent organization or class.

Let’s look at the evidence.

There is a capital coordinator.

Silicon Valley billionaires are flush with cash.

Pronomos Capital is the first venture fund dedicated to charter cities. It invests in early stage projects that are aiming to get land, to rezone that land with different rules and institutions that will drive economic growth, and then capture some of the economic growth they create via taxes or lease prices. Pronomos was founded in 2019 by Patri Friedman — grandson of Milton Friedman, son of David Friedman, founder of the Seasteading Institute (a project he now calls “baggage”.) Patri is on the board of the Startup Societies Foundation and advises a variety of new governance projects. Pronomos’s LPs and advisors include Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Joe Lonsdale, Balaji Srinivasan. Pronomos has portfolio positions in multiple network state projects — Próspera, Praxis, Itana (Nigeria), and others.

There is a think tank ecosystem.

The Charter Cities Institute in DC, founded by Mark Lutter, publishes research, runs a podcast, and hosts the academic-policy interface. The Adrianople Group documents “historical self-governing societies” and supplies historical legitimation. The Institute for Decentralized Governance, where Tom W. Bell — a former Cato policy director — promotes the movement. The Startup Societies Foundation. Each plays a defined role in producing intellectual scaffolding.

There is an annual conference.

Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State Conference began in 2023, opened a school in 2024, and held its 2025 edition in Singapore on October 3 with 3000+ registrations. Speakers included Vitalik Buterin, Bryan Johnson, Ben Horowitz, Brian Armstrong, Arthur Hayes, Andrew Huberman, and the governments of Singapore, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and El Salvador. Note that last detail. The 2025 schedule featured presentations from the Singapore JTC, Bitcoin Office of El Salvador, Expo City Dubai, and Abu Dhabi ADGM — alongside Pronomos’s Patri Friedman and Bradford Cross, Próspera’s Lonis Hamaili, Liberland’s Vít Jedlička, and most of the rest of the active network state founders.

The conferences are openly declaring their plans. It is where founders pitch investors, where state capitalist governments (Singapore, Gulf monarchies, El Salvador) audition as potential hosts, and where the movement’s ideologues — Balaji, Naval Ravikant, Bryan Johnson, Niall Ferguson — keep the philosophical frame coherent.

There is a founding textbook.

Srinivasan’s The Network State, self-published 2022, functions as the movement’s bible. Yarvin’s earlier writings (Unqualified Reservations, the Moldbug essays) supply the political-theoretical ammunition. Yarvin has been called the “house philosopher” of the techno-sovereigns.

There is a physical hub.

Próspera has become the movement’s de facto prototype model city. Pronomos’s Patri Friedman attended a Vitalia pop-up village in Próspera on Roatán, where Joseph McKinney led a Startup Cities weekend, and where attendees could access advanced gene therapies from Lantern Bioworks and Minicircle. Vitalia, Edge City, Zuzalu — these are pop-up “society” prototypes that move between Honduras, Montenegro, Tbilisi, Chiang Mai, and other locations, building network-effects among the same several thousand people.

Popup villages, according to Edge City’s website:

“A popup village is a month-long gathering where people working at the frontiers of science, technology, and culture come together to reimagine how we live and work.”

There is overlapping investor capital.

The same fifteen or twenty names appear across nearly every project: Thiel, Andreessen, Lonsdale, Friedman, Srinivasan, Altman, the Winklevoss twins, Brian Armstrong, Fred Ehrsam, Naval, Bryan Johnson. Praxis’s largest backer is Paradigm. Other investors include Pronomos Capital, backed by Peter Thiel and first led by Patri Friedman, as well as venture capitalists Balaji Srinivasan and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, both associates of Peter Thiel.

Advertised Versus Reality

The three case studies of Próspera, Praxis and California Forever show what the Network State vision has actually produced: one private enclave operating in defiance of a constitutional ruling, one project that pivoted from international host-hunting to California real estate after no host materialized, and one stealth land grab that has spent eight years acquiring acreage it cannot get permission to build on.

The Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns cannot win on their own terms. The network-state vision — Srinivasan-style cloud polities, charter cities, exit-the-state — is what they say they want. What they actually do is capture state apparatus.

Elon Musk needs NASA, DARPA, FAA approvals, EV credits, Pentagon contracts, FCC spectrum allocation. Thiel needs ICE, the IC, DoD, the NHS contract in the UK. Andreessen needs the SEC to look the other way on crypto. The “demolish the administrative state” rhetoric is selective — they want to demolish the parts that constrain them and capture the parts that fund them.

The advertised victory of exiting the state and living in a Libertarian tax-free haven depends on the host state supplying the very state capacity the Network State claims to transcend, such as currency, military protection, legal system, the internet’s physical layer, roads, streetlights, sewage and electrical grid.

The reality is that the Network State is an invader that exploits the infrastructure of its host. Silicon Valley’s advertised project is exiting the state, but the reality is that it is capturing the state.

The four factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class are now fighting over the financial infrastructure of the planet. The Davos faction wants to govern it through transnational institutions. The Imperial Nationalists want to defend it with hard military power. The State Capitalists want to fuse it to the party-state. Silicon Valley want to own the operating system underneath — and they have decided that the most effective way to capture the state is to convince everyone they are trying to leave it. The network state, the charter city, the pop-up village, the cloud polity: these are not the exit. They are the cover.

For previous articles in the series:

The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

The Chinese Capitalist Party

Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

This is what the civil war looks like in motion. The TCC is an interconnected network of players. Although they have geographic centers — Davos in Switzerland, Washington as the imperial capital, Silicon Valley in California, Beijing in China — they operate across the same international supply chains and financial infrastructure. They need each other, like it or not.

The delegation list heading to Beijing on AirForce One tells the tale.

Davos finance is represented by Larry Fink of BlackRock, Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone, David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, Jane Fraser of Citi, Dina Powell McCormick from Meta — these are global financial operators that any US-China negotiation will need to close the deal.

The Imperialist industrial base sends its prime contractors. Kelly Ortberg of Boeing and Larry Culp of GE Aerospace are travelling because China is rumored to buy 500 planes from Boeing, a face-saving optical move for Trump and a bankruptcy bailout for an ailing Boeing.

Silicon Valley’s China-exposed firms send their CEOs. Tim Cook of Apple, Cristiano Amon of Qualcomm, Sanjay Mehrotra of Micron, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins — the semiconductor, networking, and hardware layer whose existential dependency on Chinese manufacturing is now the most politically contested in Washington. Combined, these four firms had 2025 revenues of roughly $522 billion. About 25-27% of that — somewhere in the $130-140 billion range — comes either from selling into China or from licensing arrangements that depend on Chinese OEMs.

And then there is Elon Musk.

Musk as Super-Diplomat

Musk is operating as the ultimate point man on this trip because his empire is structurally hardwired into three of the four factions, making him the perfect candidate for TCC crisis management. He does not fit cleanly into a single faction because his capital and his contracts are explicitly dependent on the survival and cooperation of three out of four.

Musk is beholden to Silicon Valley because the PayPal Mafia formed him and the Thiel-Andreessen-Sacks network financed him. His core projects depend on artificial intelligence, autonomous robotics, and aerospace dominance — the technological agenda the Silicon Valley faction has organized itself around.

His Imperial Nationalist realignment was tested and confirmed by the May 2025 fallout with Trump and the obvious reconciliation underway. The fact that Musk is on Air Force One in May 2026, less than a year after threatening to fund a rival political “America Party” proves that the rupture was a personality clash with Trump. He needs the domestic deregulatory power and the defense contracts of the Imperial Nationalist faction — the SpaceX-NASA-Pentagon-Space Force complex, the Tesla regulatory environment, the FCC spectrum allocations Starlink runs on — to safeguard his operations.

His State Capitalist interdependence is non-negotiable. Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory is the single largest direct American capital exposure to China, and Musk’s relationships with the CCP elite — extensively documented, including direct meetings with Premier Li Qiang — are operational, not abstract. He cannot afford to wage war against Beijing. He is travelling with Trump to leverage his access to the Chinese politburo.

This is what makes him useful to Trump at this moment. Musk is the only American capitalist whose lines run into all three Western faction networks and into Beijing’s. He is a walking talking conflict-of-interest machine, and the emergency de-risking summit needs all his gears operating simultaneously.

The Iran War as Global Destabilizer

To understand why three Western factions are flying to Beijing rather than the reverse, we have to start with the war that put them in the air.

The current Iran War — catalyzed by the joint U.S.-Israeli air strikes on Iranian nuclear infrastructure on February 28, 2026, and the subsequent retaliations and counter-retaliations — has fundamentally fractured global supply networks. The breakdown of ceasefire negotiations this past weekend, with President Trump blasting Iran’s terms as “totally unacceptable,” has pushed Brent crude into territory that has spent the past ten weeks oscillating violently between $100 and $150 per barrel.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has effectively choked off roughly twenty percent of global oil supplies, and a similar share of global liquefied natural gas. The International Energy Agency has called it the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market — bigger than the 1973 Arab embargo, bigger than the 1979 Iranian Revolution, bigger than the 1990 Gulf War. IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol has called it the greatest threat to global energy security in history. Maritime insurance premiums in the Gulf have multiplied by as much as 1000%.

1500 merchant vessels remain trapped in the Persian Gulf.

The Iran War is squeezing the global financial system, stripping the three Western-centric factions of their leverage and forcing them to converge on Beijing. Because China holds the economic lifeline to Iran — purchasing the overwhelming majority of Iranian exported oil through its “teapot” independent refiners — Beijing sits as the sole geopolitical broker capable of guaranteeing global economic survival.

The Imperial Nationalists started this war. The supply shock it produced is now forcing them, along with the Davos faction they have spent eighteen months alienating and the Silicon Valley faction they have alternately courted and bullied, to fly to Beijing in the same plane and ask Xi Jinping for relief.

China is holding the decisive cards in this round.

What Each Faction Wants From Xi

“De-risking” is a code word for an intervention into the family feud between the four factions of the TCC. China and the US cannot “de-couple” — neither can Silicon Valley or Davos. They are in a four-way permanent bad marriage — “de-risking” is the word that means four different things to four different factions. This is the underlying subtext of the entire summit.

For the Davos financiers, de-risking is a necessary operational adjustment. Fink and Schwarzman want to preserve Western access to China’s massive consumer market and financial system, while insulating institutional assets from unpredictable political sanctions or military escalations. The collapse of the global maritime insurance architecture is the immediate threat. The insurance blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is far worse than the actual physical blockade. For Davos faction leaders like Larry Fink, this is a nightmare scenario. Their entire worldview, built on globalized finance, supply chains, and free markets, is being dismantled in real-time because the maritime insurance brokers cancelled 90% of the ships policies in the gulf war zone.

Davos relies on predictable, friction-free globalized trade for cash flow, and the closure of Hormuz is diverting global commodity routing, and threatening structural food and energy shortages across European and Asian client states. Fink and Schwarzman are travelling to offer China some Western institutional capital concessions — possibly including the easing of specific technology sanctions or financial integration deals — in exchange for Beijing using its diplomatic weight to stabilize Middle Eastern shipping lanes.

For the Imperial Nationalists, de-risking is a weaponized economic strategy designed to starve the State Capitalist bloc of critical Western capital and technology, and to force corporate manufacturing back to the West, but the Iran war has stripped Trump of leverage. High oil prices will devastate the U.S. economy heading into the midterms. Because Iran has bypassed U.S. secondary sanctions via the Chinese independent refiners, Trump lacks the economic instruments to starve Tehran into submission. He must ask Xi Jinping to reduce China’s purchases of Iranian oil which is Iran’s largest cash cow for the war.

That is a request, not a demand. It should not be missed that it is Trump and his entourage who are flying to Beijing to court Jinping and not the other way around. Trump will ask Beijing to force Iran to end the blockade and halt its nuclear program.

For the Silicon Valley CEOs, de-risking means hedging, not leaving. Cook is moving some iPhone assembly to India. Amon is diversifying Qualcomm’s chip customers beyond Chinese phone makers. The goal isn’t to exit China — it’s to have a backup if things break.

They’re on AirForce One for two reasons. First, they need Beijing to keep their existing China operations running smoothly, because nothing they’re building in India or Vietnam can replace China yet. Second, they need protection from their own side. Trump’s faction is threatening secondary sanctions on Chinese firms accused of helping Iran’s missile program — sanctions that could sweep up Apple’s and Qualcomm’s Chinese suppliers as collateral damage. The CEOs need both governments to leave their supply chains alone while the war plays out.

For the State Capitalists in Beijing, de-risking is something else entirely. Xi Jinping has been working on his own “Made in China” version for over a decade — domestic self-reliance in food, energy, and semiconductor production, built specifically to insulate China from the Western financial weapons now being aimed at Tehran. From Beijing’s vantage, Western de-risking is not a threat; it is an admission that the U.S.-led order can no longer enforce its preferences on Chinese capital. The Iran war has accelerated rather than reversed this dynamic. Western capital coming to Beijing to negotiate terms is, from Xi’s chair, evidence that his de-risking strategy is working.

The Boeing Grand Bargain

The heavily-reported potential Boeing order — reports place it in the range of 500 aircraft, primarily 737 MAX jets, which would be the largest single aviation deal in history — serves a dual purpose. It functions as both a corporate rescue mission for an endangered American industrial giant and a high-stakes geopolitical poker chip in the wider TCC civil war.

It is also seen as a win-win for both US and China, reducing the trade imbalance and easing sanctions. And the big carrot on the stick is a reported $1 trillion deal to allow China to build factories on American soil.

So much for America First.

An order of this magnitude means Fink and Schwarzman will be needed to finance these deliveries over the next decade. For Davos, stabilizing Boeing protects deep institutional portfolios tied to Western manufacturing. For the Imperial Nationalists, it returns manufacturing jobs to the rust-belt states the Trump coalition depends on, with the caveat that the workers will be employed by Chinese firms.

For Boeing itself, it is survival.

Handing Boeing a 500-plane order is also a low-risk, high-reward chess move for Xi Jinping. Because aircraft orders take years to convert into deliveries, Beijing retains permanent leverage. If Trump acts too aggressively on secondary sanctions related to the Iran War or tightens semiconductor export controls, Beijing can simply halt or freeze future delivery slots. The order is not a transaction; it is a hostage contract running on a ten-year timer.

Trump is giving Beijing the hostage.

Beijing is using the promise of this massive order to force an extension of the trade truce, and a significant rollback of existing U.S. restrictions on advanced semiconductor and chipmaking equipment exports. The Boeing planes are the visible side of the deal. The semiconductor concessions are what Xi is actually buying.

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The Belt and Road Goes Full Circle

The deeper significance of this trip for Beijing is what it turns upside down.

For two decades, the Belt and Road Initiative was supposed to be how Chinese capital reached the world. Western analysts framed it as Beijing’s bid for global influence, a debt-trap strategy, a soft-power push. The Imperial Nationalist faction in particular built its China policy around the assumption that Belt and Road was an offensive project to be contained, and that sanctions, secondary sanctions, and export controls could discipline Chinese capital into accepting Western terms.

What this delegation represents is the inverse. Western capital is coming to Beijing to ask permission to keep operating. The Imperial Nationalists tried to weaponize the dollar system, the global payments rails, and chip export controls to break Beijing’s hold. The Iran war has shown in real time that they cannot. Beijing can disrupt Western energy security by simply continuing to buy Iranian oil through Chinese refiners — and there is no Western instrument that can stop them without crashing the global economy first.

The de-risking delegation is flying to ask Beijing to un-risk the Chinese decisions that broke them.

Beijing did not stumble into this position. It spent twenty years building it — through the Belt and Road energy corridors, the renminbi oil settlement infrastructure, the BRICS expansion, the Saudi-Iran rapprochement Beijing brokered in March 2023, and the deliberate construction of Chinese refining capacity outside U.S. financial reach. The Iran war is not the cause of Beijing’s leverage. The Iran war is the moment Beijing’s accumulated leverage became visible to the factions it has been used against.

This is the State Capitalists’ hour. They have earned it through patient construction of an alternative geo-economic architecture. The Western TCC, regardless of internal faction, is now negotiating from within that architecture rather than against it.

What the De-Risk Delegation Actually Means

This is what the civil war looks like in motion. Not fixed trenches but grudging and necessary alliances, negotiated in response to crises the factions themselves often caused.

The Iran war was an Imperial Nationalist project, executed with neoconservative encouragement and Israeli partnership over Davos objection and Silicon Valley anxiety. The supply shock it produced has now forced three of four factions to fly to Beijing in the same plane to ask Xi Jinping for relief. The faction that started the war is asking the faction it was meant to weaken to clean up the consequences.

That is the civil war’s actual structure. Factions that cannot defeat each other, cannot exit each other, and cannot stop fighting — except in those moments when external shock forces them to share a king-sized bed in a cabin. The shared cabin is real. So is the shared destination. But the moment the wheels touch down in Beijing, the truce dissolves into four different conversations about what “de-risking” means.

Watch carefully. The summit's outcome will not be a unified Western position. It will be four bilateral deals: Davos finance with Beijing's regulators, Silicon Valley with Beijing's commerce ministry, Boeing with Beijing’s aviation buyers, and Trump with Xi himself — wrapped in a single photo opportunity. The photograph will show Trump wearing a MAGA hat, but the subtext will say four factions, four bargains, all Made in China.

This summit is also the moment the Western TCC publicly admits the new global map has four capitals, not one, and each capital controls a different choke point of the global system. Beijing controls the Iran oil flow, the rare earths and critical mineral processing, the manufacturing assembly base, the dollar-alternative payment rails, and the diplomatic relationships with the Global South. Washington controls the dollar, the navy, the chip-design IP, the reserve-asset markets, and the alliance system. Davos controls the institutional capital, the regulatory architecture, the climate-finance apparatus, and the multilateral residue. Silicon Valley controls the platforms, the AI, the satellite comms, and the production of the next-generation tools all the others will need to use.

None of these faction capitals can win alone. None can lose without the others noticing. This summit is the moment the three Western factions publicly acknowledge that the Beijing State Capitalists control enough pawns on the board that the other three cannot solve the current crisis without flying to Beijing in person.

This summit does not mean all roads now lead to Beijing. It means none of them lead to Washington alone anymore. The Western factions are flying east not because Beijing has won the civil war, but because the war has produced a system in which no faction can resolve a crisis of this magnitude on its own.

It also shows that we are not in Francis Fukuyama’s End of History, nor have we entered Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. This is the end of the unipolar moment. But the multipolar moment that has replaced it does not look like what Huntington predicted — civilizational blocs in regional balance. It looks like something else entirely.

What has emerged is four competing factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class jockeying for position in an asymmetrical civil war that must be fought, but nobody can win. The polyamorous bad marriage of Davos, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Beijing is now the operating system of global capitalism. None of the four can afford a divorce. But they cannot stop fighting a war that threatens to burn down the whole house.

For previous articles in the series:

The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

The Chinese Capitalist Party

And iPhones.

Because even the Pope buys from China.

God bless capitalism.

The Chinese Communist Party built a capitalist country deliberately, methodically, and painstakingly over the last five decades, while continuing to call itself communist. The result is one of the largest semantic frauds in modern political history — and one of the most consequential, because the entire Western framing of the “new cold war” depends on accepting the fraud at face value.

If China is communist, then the conflict between Beijing and Washington is ideological: capitalism versus its old enemy, freedom versus authoritarianism, human rights versus oppression.

If China is capitalist — and it is by any honest appraisal — then the conflict is something else.

It is a fight inside the global capitalist class. A civil war between competing models of capitalism, between factions of the ruling class, competing over markets, labor, financial infrastructure and data.

The first task is to stop pretending.

1. The Marx Test

Let’s start with the numbers.

Based on 2026 data from the Hurun Global Rich List China has 1,110 billionaires. The United States has 1,000 billionaires.

China has surpassed the United States to become the country with the most billionaires in the world. This surge is largely attributed to growth in manufacturing, semiconductors, healthcare, and AI.

What would Marx actually say looking at modern China?

Wage labor exists. According to Marx, capitalism depends on the exploitation of workers by using the surplus value of their work to accumulate capital. China’s rise is fundamentally based on its massive cheap labour force managed by the state.

Capital accumulates privately in China. 65% of GDP is from private enterprises. Private capital operates under market competition, accumulates profit, and exploits wage labour—core features Marx associated with capitalism. The CCP has legally recognized private property rights, including ownership of productive assets.

Communism, in Marx’s view, requires the abolition of private property in the means of production, classless social relations, and the withering away of the state. None of these apply to China. The state is not withering away any day soon. In fact, the state in China has expanded and is in full bloom.

A substantial billionaire class has emerged, a robust middle class (24%) and working class that represents 75% of the population. The remaining 1% are the wealthy, a social stratification that bears resemblance to Western capitalist society.

The means of production are partially privately owned; surplus value extracted; class differentiation visible; Chinese population are the second largest owners of residential property in the world. China's homeownership rate is 96% (2022 data), placing it second after Kazakhstan.

2. How the Chinese Communist Party Built a Capitalist Country

If China were genuinely communist, the history of the past forty-seven years, since the beginning of China’s "Reform and Opening Up" era under Deng Xiaoping, would need to be completely rewritten. The historical record is one of methodical, deliberate construction — by the Communist Party itself — of every institutional feature of a capitalist economy: private property, wage labour markets, foreign direct investment, stock exchanges, a billionaire class, and full integration into global capital flows.

There were in fact four key moments that made this happen:

1978 — Deng Opens the Door.

In December 1978, the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee formally abandoned class struggle as the organizing principle of Chinese society, and replaced it with economic construction. Deng Xiaoping’s “Reform and Opening Up” reintroduced market mechanisms, de-collectivized agriculture, and within two years established Special Economic Zones to court foreign capital. Deng’s reforms would have been heresy a decade earlier. In a 1986 60 Minutes interview, Deng defended the pursuit of wealth under socialism, stating: "To get rich is no sin... The main task in the socialist stage is to develop the productive forces... and create material conditions for the advent of a communist society."

Deng’s insistence that material abundance was necessary for a communist society to thrive was not based on socialism becoming the scaffolding for a communist society — it was based on capitalism becoming the scaffolding for the one-party state.

2001 — Capitalists Join the CCP.

Two events in a single year sealed China’s integration into global capitalism. In July 2001, Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents” doctrine formally invited private entrepreneurs — capitalists, in plain English — to join the Communist Party itself. It was a cornerstone of Jiang Zemin’s effort to modernize the Party, transitioning it from a “revolutionary party” to a “ruling party” capable of managing a market economy.

Five months later, China joined the World Trade Organization. The Party that had been founded to overthrow the bourgeoisie now joined the enemy; the country that had spent half a century outside the global trading system now signed on to its rules. Jack Ma and the first generation of “red capitalists” emerged from this moment, selling toaster ovens with socialist characteristics.

2002–2012 — The Hu-Wen Boom.

Under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, China became the workshop of the world. GDP grew at roughly 10 percent annually for a decade. Manufacturing output surpassed the United States. The private sector reached 65 percent of GDP. A property market emerged, then exploded. Stock exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen swelled. The state controlled the main pillars of the economy — banking, telecoms, energy — but the day to day economic life of the average Chinese citizen became unmistakably capitalist: wage labour, consumer credit, real estate speculation, brand consumption, and growing wealth inequality.

The Gini coefficient that measures wealth inequality climbed past 0.49. China’s inequality rose dramatically from a Gini of 0.30 in 1980 to peaks above 0.50 in the 2000s, driven by rural-urban divides and regional disparities — comparable numbers to the USA, both having Gini coefficients over the 0.4 threshold indicating high wealth inequality.

2013–Present — Xi Consolidates.

Xi Jinping is often compared to Mao in the West as a turn back toward hardcore communism, but the truth is that what Xi has consolidated is not a return to communism but the party-state’s authority over capital — a different thing altogether. Tech billionaires who grew too autonomous (Jack Ma, the Ant Group IPO) were disciplined, not expropriated — the $37 billion IPO of Ant Group, Ma’s fintech arm, was abruptly suspended days after his 2020 speech criticizing the CCP’s regulations on capital, claiming Chinese banks were operating with a "pawnshop" mentality. Alibaba was fined $2.8 billion in 2021 for antitrust violations.

State-owned enterprises were strengthened as instruments of industrial policy, not as replacements for the private sector. The 2026 Hurun list reports 1,110 Chinese billionaires, up 287 in a single year, with the new wealth concentrated in semiconductors, AI, EV batteries, and pharmaceuticals — the strategic sectors Beijing has explicitly prioritized. Xi has not reversed capitalism in China. He has subordinated it to the party-state.

3. Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics

To claim that China is a communist country that follows Marxism, Leninism, socialism or any other variation on the theme is a gross violation of not only the English language, but also a betrayal of Karl Marx.

“Socialism with Chinese characteristics” is a euphemism for capitalism.

China is currently trading with over 200 nations and territories — the whole planet buys Chinese goods.

Under the capitalist economic management of the CCP and its CEO Xi Jinping, there is a pronounced and deliberate effort to “Sinicize Marxism” by integrating it with traditional Chinese culture. Confucius and Traditional Culture: Xi Jinping has strongly promoted “cultural confidence” and frequently quotes Confucius and other classical Chinese thinkers.

A recent TV series, aired on Hunan Satellite TV, When Marx Met Confucius, with the intention of popularizing President Xi Jinping’s ideological concept known as the "second combination," which seeks to merge Marxist theory with traditional Chinese culture. Based on a 1925 short story by Guo Moruo, the five-episode series features digital avatars of Karl Marx and Confucius engaging in question-and-answer sessions with students, interspersed with traditional performances and modern rap music.

On Chinese social media and overseas diaspora platforms, viewers have described it as bizarre, cringeworthy, and ideologically incoherent. Hardline Maoist websites like Wuyouzhixiang and Red Songs Association criticized the film for deviating from Marxist orthodoxy and rehabilitating Confucius, whom Mao condemned. Meanwhile, major Confucian websites such as the Chinese Confucius Academy have largely ignored the series, suggesting discomfort with its politicized portrayal of Confucianism.

The elephant in the room, that Xi Jinping is unable and/or unwilling to acknowledge is capitalism. To make China relevant, China should produce a TV series about a conversation between Karl Marx, Confucius and Adam Smith, who all sit around, get drunk and discuss the Chinese Capitalist Party and its massive economic integration into the global capitalist market.

Karl Marx and Adam Smith would probably get into a fistfight, and Confucius would have to break it up.

“Hey guys, can’t we all try and get along?!”

China is arguably a state-run mega factory staffed by wage slaves, middle managers and an entrepreneurial class of 1,110 billionaires who are allowed to reap the rewards of capitalism, while the state manages the mega factory.

4. Communism is Dead

Xi Jinping identifies Marxism-Leninism as the fundamental ideological framework of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), asserting that it is the "political soul" and "spiritual pillar" of Communists. Xi consistently emphasizes the need to adapt Marxism to the Chinese context and the needs of the times, arguing that its scientific truth has saved China from national humiliation and enabled its rise to a global superpower.

This is patently absurd. Capitalism saved China from national humiliation and enabled its rise to a global superpower.

Alternatively, communism is dead (or barely breathing). Prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, there were over 40 nations overtly communist.

The fall of the Berlin Wall, on November 9, 1989, marked the symbolic end of communist rule in Eastern Europe, triggering a rapid collapse of Marxist–Leninist governments across the region.

Communism collapsed in 1989. China didn't — because what survived in China was never communism in the first place.

China’s attempt to flog the dead horse of communism back into life by claiming that Marxism is the core ideology of China is absurd, hypocritical or just plain myopic.

Other commentators and political scientists from the West, such as Francis Fukuyama, famously argued that the neoliberal democratic model is the only model remaining and we are now at the End of History because capitalism is the best model for the world. If this is true, then the CCP whole-heartedly agrees.

5. Toaster Ovens

When hunter-gatherers gave up their nomadic existence 12,000 years ago, and adopted farming and herding, the need for fair exchange of goods was developed. Private property, division of labor and the need for a public market emerged. Capitalism is buying and selling goods and services using an exchange medium — money.

Exchange is universal, capitalism is one historically specific institutional form of organizing exchange.

Ideological models of organizing human society are based on ideals, not ideas. Ideals such as freedom, peace, love, tolerance, justice and harmony.

Capitalism does not include (or preclude) any of these ideals.

We cannot base human society on exchange of goods and services. We can only base human society on elusive, subjective, relative and ephemeral notions. Values. Meanings. Origins. Purposes.

Buying a new toaster oven on Alibaba or Amazon doesn’t have any meaning, unless you give it meaning. It doesn’t matter if your toaster oven is communist or capitalist, as long as it makes toast.

What does it matter if the state is communist or capitalist if the results are the same — the government and the billionaires are in bed together exploiting and controlling the rest of the population.

6. Capitalism Versus Capitalism

The current feud on the world stage is not between left and right, or between capitalism and communism — call it a new cold war if you like — but the truth is, it is a protracted Civil War between different factions of the capitalist class. There are four factions in this civil war: the Davos globalists, the Silicon Valley technocrats, the Imperial Nationalists clustered around Trump and Netanyahu, and the State Capitalists led from Beijing. They are not allies. They are not even stable rivals. They are four competing models of capitalism, fighting over the financial infrastructure of the planet.

The real fight is not capitalism versus communism. It is capitalism versus capitalism. And the four factions waging it are the subject of this series.

“The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room,
especially if there is no cat.”
― Chinese proverb

For previous articles in the series:

The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

The Davos faction is leaderless. Klaus Schwab stepped down in April 2025 under dark clouds — harassment allegations, financial impropriety, an internal investigation — and the World Economic Forum has no permanent successor until 2027. Before that, Henry Kissinger died. Not just Davos’s godfather, but the last figure in the Western power elite who could broker conversations between all Four Factions — Wall Street and Beijing, the Pentagon and Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv and Riyadh. His death didn’t weaken Davos specifically. It removed the circuit breaker between factions entirely.

Into that vacuum walked a Canadian.

Mark Carney’s appearance at the European Political Community summit in Yerevan this weekend was unprecedented — the first non-European leader invited to the table. He arrived into a Europe already in open confrontation with Washington: Trump uninvited and unwanted, accusing the EU of trade violations, threatening auto tariffs, and pulling troops from Germany in retaliation for European refusal to support the Iran war. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the quiet part loud: “The Americans clearly have no strategy.” The Atlantic alliance is breaking in ways that may not be repairable.

That is the arena Carney walked into, amidst proposals of a United States of Europe, and astonishingly, Canada is invited to join.

Alexander Stubb (Finnish President) publicly supports the idea of the US of Europe, labeled a potential Canada-EU union “a marriage made in heaven” and suggested it could be negotiated quickly.

The European Political Community summit was hosted in Yerevan, Armenia this year, the 8th biannual event, suggested by French President Macron after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There were 44 heads of state invited. Russia and Belarus were deliberately excluded.

“We don’t think that we’re destined to submit to a more transactional, insular and brutal world, and gatherings such as these point to a better way forward,” Carney said on Monday, May 4 at the Yerevan Summit.

In a pointed suggestion that the era of American leadership was coming to an end, and explaining the symbolism of Canada’s attendance at a European political gathering, he said: “It is my strong personal view that the international order will be rebuilt, but it will be rebuilt out of Europe.”

Carney has his hands in nearly every Davos-aligned game. Carney isn't just a Davos-aligned politician — he's the first head of government whose entire pre-political career was spent inside the Davos institutional network:

Chair of Bloomberg L.P.
Vice Chair of Brookfield Asset Management
Co-chair of the World Bank's private sector investment lab
UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance
Foundation Board member of the World Economic Forum
Group of Thirty
Bilderberg attendee (2011, 2012, 2019)
Chair of the Financial Stability Board (2011–2018)
Chair of Chatham House
board member at Stripe
advisor to PIMCO
advisor at Peterson Institute for International Economics
Hoffman Institute at INSEAD
Watershed

Carney is the most well-positioned Davos Man in the globalist network, leveraging his connections to the fullest. Within months of taking office as Prime Minister, he concluded a CETA upgrade with the EU, a strategic partnership with China, deals with Qatar, restarted CEPA negotiations with India, and signed twelve trade and security deals across four continents in six months.

Carney is motivated to fulfill his middle-powers coalition plans. His travel pace is unusually high compared to his predecessors. In his first year, he spent 84 days either travelling or visiting other countries. This exceeds Justin Trudeau’s first-year total of 63 days of international travel and Stephen Harper’s first-year total of 34 days.

Carney’s extensive travel reflects a strategic shift in Canadian foreign policy. Key reasons include: Reducing dependence on the United States, especially under Donald Trump’s protectionist policies. Diversifying trade and security partnerships, with new agreements signed with the EU, UAE, India, Japan, and others.

Davos Project Reboot

Mark Carney, a card-carrying member of the First Faction — Davos — is realigning Canada as the leader in forming a coalition of the willing middle powers to act as a counter weight to the Second Faction Imperialists who have committed a ritual disruption of the rules-based order, and the Third Faction State Capitalists, primarily China and Russia, who are transitioning much of the world’s nations into a multipolar project.

Canada is the most important country on the planet. For now.

By retreating into a European geographical coalition, the Davos experiment is admitting defeat, or at the very least, attempting to build a consolation prize. Carney is attempting to reconstruct the Davos project at regional rather than global scale.

The Davos faction's universalist project required transcending the nation-state, but the strategic retreat into a European federation means adopting the form of the thing they spent thirty years arguing against. This is the most important admission of defeat in the framework's recent history. The WEF's stakeholder-capitalism universalism is being replaced by a specifically European civilizational project. That's not a tactical pivot; it's a confession that the universalist phase failed.

Carney announced at Yerevan another $270 million in military aid to Ukraine. This is in the wake of Carney’s military plan to invest half a trillion dollars into Canada’s military over the next decade, joining European Union’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) and the new Defence, Security and Resilience Bank multilateral institution, the $32B Arctic modernization, and explicit pivot from US contractors to Canadian and European firms. This is not a defensive measure. This is the construction of the military-industrial backbone of the middle-powers coalition.

The Davos faction has always operated through financial and institutional architecture — it has never had coercive capacity of its own. Carney's defence investment isn't just security policy; it's the Davos faction acquiring a military-industrial base for the first time, anchored to European rather than American contractors.

For Trump's empire-expansion fantasy (51st state, Greenland), this is genuinely existential. If Canada becomes a EU defense-industrial partner, the geographic logic of American continental dominance breaks. The Arctic becomes a contested zone. Greenland becomes a Danish-EU problem rather than a bilateral US-Denmark issue. The "fortress North America" concept that some Imperial Nationalists have advanced becomes impossible.

The Pedestrian Class

Opposition Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, characterized Carney’s trip as “another trip, signing fake MOUs and giving dazzling speeches all while delivering no real results here at home.” Poilievre is caught between worlds, belonging to the pedestrian class of non-factional political actors, opposed to the Davos class, at odds with the Trumpian Imperialist faction due to Trump’s tariff war, threats of annexing Canada. Trump has shown little respect for Poilievre.

In early 2025, during the Canadian election race, when asked about Poilievre’s claim that “Canada will never be the 51st state,” Trump dismissed him, saying, “then maybe he won’t win. But maybe he will. Listen, I don’t care what he says.” This lack of recognition has weakened Poilievre’s standing, especially as Trump’s tariff threats and nationalist rhetoric have backfired politically in Canada.

Despite earlier alignment — such as Poilievre proposing energy exports to strengthen U.S.-Canada ties — Poilievre has since distanced himself, criticizing Trump’s policies as “chaotic” and “unreliable.”

In a world reorganized by the factional Capitalist Civil War, the non-factional political position becomes structurally incoherent. He can't align with Davos (ideologically incompatible), can't align with Imperial Nationalists (Trump doesn't respect him and the tariff war has poisoned the well), and Poilievre has no access to the other two factions. He's not just politically weak — he's a figure the new Four Faction world order has no place for.

Poilievre is arguably the first major political casualty of the Capitalist Civil War reorganizing political space in Canada, rather than simply an ineffective opposition leader. His only option is to continue building his populist base. In the absence of a faction to align with, Poilievre cannot aspire to occupy the Prime Minister’s seat if he has no coherent platform other than direct opposition to all Four Factions.

The European Political Community meeting in Yerevan is not a diplomatic summit — it's the first visible institutional expression of the Davos faction's post-universalist strategy. The Capitalist Civil War has produced its first new geography.

Welcome to the marriage made in heaven.

If you want Dean Blundell’s perspective:

Dean Blundell

BREAKING: Mark Carney Just Walked Into Armenia and Cracked The American Empire In Half As Canada Entertains Joining The EU

May 4, 2026…

Read more

a month ago · 823 likes · 59 comments · Dean Blundell

For previous articles in the series:

The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

Globespeak is their original mother tongue, that was created in the wake of Bretton Woods. The “rules-based order” is itself a euphemism for “western dominance.” English became the international language and the Transnational Capitalist Class soon codified Globespeak into common use — Globespeak became a Gramscian hegemonic language.

The Cold War Transnational Capitalist Class had its internal battles — monetarists vs. Keynesians, interventionists vs. isolationists — but those were family quarrels spoken in the same mother tongue. Today's factions have begun speaking different languages entirely.

Globespeak was an oppositional language to its Cold War opponents, who operated behind the Iron Curtain, plotting communism, socialism, and Marxism-Leninism. The Eastern Bloc had its own language, couched in the rhetoric of the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, historical materialism and working class who struggled for control of the means of production.

Globespeak was the language of neoliberal capitalism, of the West, of the United Nations, and the Washington Consensus. It was the language of multilateral agreements, the IMF, the World Bank, and ultimately it was the language of the World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab who gave the faithful a new vocabulary that included terms like stakeholder capitalism, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the Great Reset, values-based realism and multilateral cooperation.

Globespeak served the international neoliberal community for decades until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and capitalism emerged as the sole winner in the economic political Great Game. This was not the end of history, but it was the beginning of the Capitalist Civil War. Since the fall of communism, the Transnational Capitalist Class has split into four factions and they have each developed their own derivative dialects of Globespeak.

1. The Davos Language: “Davosian”

The Davos faction uses the modified mother tongue of Globespeak, the language that presents global governance as a neutral, scientific necessity. Their legitimacy is built on the idea that the world is too complex for ordinary citizens or single nations to manage alone, and it must be managed by competent stewards in a corporate managerial model. Davosian is the language of the boardroom, the PowerPoint presentation and the keynote speaker.

Key Words & Phrases: “Multistakeholder,” “rules-based order,” “sustainable development,” “global cooperation,” and “value-based realism,” “multilateralism.”

Authority is legitimized through its convening power and supposed neutrality. It implicitly positions itself as a rational, efficient, and science- and technology-based platform rather than a political or partisan one. It frames its authority around public-private cooperation and stakeholder capitalism, emphasizing the use of innovation, data, and expert-driven solutions to address global challenges like climate change, AI governance, and healthcare.

Rhetorical Goal: To depoliticize decisions by framing them as technical solutions to “global challenges.” For example, environmental or economic policies are presented as “science-based” mandates that no reasonable person should oppose.

Ritual of Compliance. Critics note that this language often functions as a “ritual of compliance,” where leaders use benign-sounding terms like “resilience” to centralize power while bypassing domestic parliaments. Davosian is used as a sophisticated public relations tool to create an atmosphere and aura of benevolence. The concept that the ritual of compliance results from the politicized speech of the ruling class is primarily articulated by Václav Havel in his essay "The Power of the Powerless." Havel argues that in post-totalitarian systems, ideology becomes a world of appearances and a ritual that replaces reality, forcing individuals to perform compliance through prescribed language and actions to maintain the system's continuity.

In a remarkable display of irony, Mark Carney, in his recent speech at Davos in January 2026, quoted from Havel’s essay, “The system's power comes not from its truth, but from everyone's willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack.”

Davosian descended from postwar Globespeak and then mutated, taking its modern form with the creation of the WEF in 1971. It began to speak a new language because its goals and methods diverged from its Globespeak roots. It needed a dialect to match its dialogue. Davosian's signature move is the conversion: a political conflict becomes a “governance challenge,” a class struggle becomes a “stakeholder dialogue,” a war becomes a “security architecture.”

Its early voice was not the confrontational tones of national leaders, but the measured, managerial language of the panel of experts. The political culture of the early 1970s was defined by Cold War tensions, ideological polarization, stagflation, and geopolitical shocks—particularly the 1973 oil crisis triggered by the Arab oil embargo. Klaus Schwab positioned himself as the prophet of this modern dialect and Davos was the remedy for the turbulence of the times.

“The reshaped world demands collective insights and collaborative action.”
~ Klaus Schwab

“Stakeholder capitalism is not about politics. It is not a social or ideological agenda. It is not 'woke.' It is capitalism, driven by mutually beneficial relationships between you and the employees, customers, suppliers, and communities your company relies on to prosper. This is the power of capitalism.”
~ Larry Fink

“It is time to deepen cooperation and to strengthen multilateral institutions, to find common solutions to common challenges.”
~ UN Secretary-General Guterres

“Co-operation is no longer a choice but a clear imperative.”
~ Kofi Annan

2. The Imperialist Language: “Westphalian”

Imperial nationalists in the U.S. and Israel use a language that rejects global norms in favour of raw national interest. This vision is often described as the “Israelification” of power, where security and unilateral action override international law. Scholars and activists argue that this shift reflects a broader "counter-terrorism creep", where emergency measures become permanent features of domestic life. As Karen Greenberg of Fordham Law School stated, the U.S. has adopted not just tactics, but a mindset of perpetual threat—one that mirrors Israel’s security state.

It is the language of the military-industrial complex.

Key Words & Phrases: “Sovereignty,” “America First,” “strategic autonomy,” “strength,” “deterrence,” and “transactional diplomacy,” “MAGA,” “coalition of the willing,” “pre-emptive strike,” “terrorism,” “freedom and democracy.”

Authority is legitimate because its “civilizing mission” is to protect the “true citizens” of the exceptional nation-state against outside threats. It views international institutions (like the UN or ICC) not as judges, but as “encumbrances” or “nuisances”. They view national sovereignty, through the Westphalian nation-state system as absolute justification for empire, yet in direct contradiction, they reject the Westphalian notion of non-interference in the affairs of other nations. The Westphalian rules only apply to other nations intruding on their borders.

Rhetorical Goal: To repoliticize the global stage. This language emphasizes “raw power” and “unpredictability” as legitimate tools of statecraft, in order to expand the unipolar world which in itself is a euphemism for the American-Israeli Empire.

Rupture, not transition. They argue that the “rules-based order” was always a “pleasant fiction” used by elites to hollow out national sovereignty. It is the Imperialists who are the prime cause of the rupture between the four factions.

The “fracture” occurred because the Imperialists have rebelled against the Davos faction. The two groups no longer share a common grammar of power. While Davos leaders speak of “collective responsibility,” the Imperialists speak of “strategic competition,” meaning they no longer agree on what makes a global policy “right” or “wrong”.

Power over consensus: Rather than viewing Davos as a platform for multilateral dialogue, Trump and his allies see it as a stage to assert dominance, extract concessions, and reframe global alliances as transactional relationships. His 2026 speech at the January 2026 World Economic Forum was not aimed at building consensus but at demonstrating coercive leverage over allies and adversaries alike

Recall the central tension of this dialect: Westphalian rules apply to other nations intruding on their borders. They do not apply to their own projection of power. The Imperialists invoke sovereignty as absolute justification for their own empire while rejecting the Westphalian principle of non-interference when it's their turn to intervene. Watch for this contradiction in every quote that follows.

"Our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives."
~ George W. Bush (Commencement address at Maxwell Air Force Base, 1991)

“Time is not on our side. Deliverable weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terror network or a murderous dictator or the two working together constitutes as grave a threat as can be imagined. The risks of inaction are far greater than the risk of action."
~ Dick Cheney (CNN Capital Gang, Aug 2002, calling for preemptive strike on Iraq)

"We will never surrender America's sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable global bureaucracy. America is governed by Americans. We reject the ideology of globalism, and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism."
~ Donald Trump (UN General Assembly, Sept 2018)

"Our present moment is much like the 11th century. We don't want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians a thousand years ago, we must. We need an American crusade." ~ Pete Hegseth (from American Crusade, 2020)

3. The State Capitalist Language: “Multipolarian”

The State Capitalists — Beijing’s leadership, the Gulf monarchies, Moscow’s security apparatus and oligarchs, increasingly Modi’s India — speak a language that grounds authority in civilizational continuity and developmental performance. Unlike imperial nationalists, who frame sovereignty as defensive (the nation against outside threats), State Capitalists frame it as constructive — the long-arc capacity of a civilization-state to plan, build, and deliver outcomes its citizens can measure.

Key Words & Phrases: “Civilizational state,” “non-interference,” “win-win cooperation,” “common prosperity,” “multipolarity,” “Belt and Road,” “stability,” “harmony,” “five-thousand-year history,” “Vision 2030,” “sovereign development,” peaceful rise.”

Authority is legitimate because it delivers — high-speed rail, lifted poverty, megaprojects, technological catch-up — and because it is grounded in a coherent civilizational tradition that predates and outlasts Western liberal modernity. Democratic legitimation is reframed as an inferior, unstable, parochially Western mechanism. Performance legitimacy plus civilizational depth replaces electoral mandate.

Rhetorical Goal: To provincialize the West. Where Davos universalizes liberal norms and Imperialists reject them, State Capitalists reframe those norms as one regional tradition among several — historically contingent, no longer hegemonic, and certainly not binding on civilizations with their own long records of governance. The “rules-based order” becomes “the American-led order,” and multipolarity becomes the natural successor. The Multipolarian-speaking State Capitalists have taken the moral high ground and positioned themselves as the solution to the failed rules-based order.

Summit Diplomacy. Where Davos has compliance rituals and Silicon Valley has disruption rituals, state capitalism has summit diplomacy — BRICS expansions, SCO meetings, Belt and Road forums, Gulf mega-conferences — staged performances of an alternative international architecture being assembled in real time. The aesthetic is the gleaming new capital city, the signing ceremony, the infrastructure ribbon-cutting. It is a coalition of the underdogs, Global South and national victims of Davos and the Imperialists.

"We will never allow anyone, any organization, or any political party, at any time or in any form, to separate any part of Chinese territory from China."
~ Xi Jinping

"We must build a high-level socialist market economic system... give full play to the decisive role of the market in the allocation of resources, and give better play to the role of the government.”
~ Xi Jinping

"We can surely develop a market economy under socialism."
~ Deng Xiaoping

"A unipolar world is unfair. It's obvious. And we are developing our relations and our cooperation based on the idea. And the idea is that the world must be multipolar, which means that all the actors of international communication and international relations must be equal, and there must be no one more equal than the others."
~ Vladimir Putin

"Today the world needs a new multipolar and inclusive world order. This will have to start with comprehensive reforms in global institutions, and these reforms should not be merely symbolic, but their real impact should also be visible."

~ PM Narendra Modi

"Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe's problems are the world's problems, but the world's problems are not Europe's problems."
~ S. Jaishankar

4. The Silicon Valley Language: “Algorithmian”

The Fourth Faction — the Silicon Valley techno-lords — speak a language that fuses libertarian engineering culture with reactionary political theory. Their legitimacy rests on the claim that legacy institutions are not merely inefficient but obsolete — relics of an analog age that cannot be reformed, only routed around or replaced. Where Davos speaks of managing complexity, Silicon Valley speaks of exiting it or dismantling it.

Key Words & Phrases: “Disruption,” “exit,” “the Cathedral,” “high-agency,” “founder mode,” “network state,” “first principles,” “acceleration,” “techno-capital,” “competence hierarchy,” “neo-cameralism.”

Authority is legitimate because it is productive and meritocratic — measured in shipped products, market valuation, and engineering output rather than democratic mandate or expert consensus. The founder-CEO becomes the model citizen-sovereign: someone who builds rather than deliberates. Yarvin’s “Cathedral” provides the negative pole — a name for the diffuse network of universities, legacy media, and NGOs that Davos calls “civil society” and which Silicon Valley reframes as a captured ideological apparatus to be dismantled.

Rhetorical Goal: To de-institutionalize governance itself — to reframe the state not as a collective project but as a poorly written codebase needing debugging. Where Davos depoliticizes by appeal to expertise, Silicon Valley depoliticizes by appeal to engineering — politics is a solved problem if you have the right founder, the right protocol, the right exit, the right software, the right algorithm.

Rituals of Disruption: Where Davos has “rituals of compliance,” Silicon Valley has rituals of disruption — DOGE-style demolition campaigns, public firings, performative deregulation, the symbolic destruction of bureaucratic artifacts. The aesthetic is the chainsaw, not the communiqué. Curtis Yarvin, the high priest of Silicon Valley, calls for systemic ritual disruption. He seeks to dismantle the sacred rites of democracy and replace them with a new, technocratic ceremonial order—one where power is no longer disguised behind the facade of the Cathedral, but openly centralized.

“In short, software is eating the world.”
~ Marc Andreessen

"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."
~ Peter Thiel —Cato Unbound essay, 2009

"The next global superpower will be a Network State. The next America will be onchain."
~ Peter Thiel, 2024 public remarks)

"We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper."
~ Elon Musk, X post, 2025

"Democracy is not only inefficient and destructive as a form of government..."
~ Curtis Yarvin, Unqualified Reservations

“Neocameralism: a state-as-a-company, run by a sovereign CEO, unelected, irremovable, and vested with absolute authority.”
~ Curtis Yarvin, Unqualified Reservations

5. Codeswitchers and Pedestrians

Many of the speakers of Davosian, Westphalian, Multipolarian and Algorithmian are bilingual and are fluent in one or more of the other dialects. Xi Jinping has given several speeches to Davos, speaking the mother tongue and then speaking Multipolarian to the faithful at the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia. Peter Thiel is quite adept at speaking the Westphalian dialect of the Imperialists. Carney is likewise a quick codeswitcher and gives a speech about Canadian nationalism at the airport on his way to Davos to engage in fluent Davosian. JD Vance appears as a Westphalian-speaking good ole boy from Kentucky, but codeswitches to Algorithmian to talk tech with his mentor Peter Thiel.

Outside the four dialects of the ruling class factions, the great majority of humanity speaks Pedestrian — the language of the 99%, the language of the streets, of those who walk and don't take a private jet, ride in a limo or sail in a yacht. The language of those who cannot exit, or dismantle, or privatize or weaponize.

Pedestrian is what is spoken at the bus stop, in the rental dispute, at the kitchen table, in the emergency room waiting line. It is the language of wages and rent, of illness and debt, of hope and fear, and of the nagging sense that someone else is deciding their fate in a language they do not speak.

From Noam Chomsky’s book, What Kind of Creatures Are We?, he discusses the historical embedding of an elite “guardian class” in US society going back to the framers of the Constitution:

I mentioned that [John] Dewey and American workers held one version of democracy, with strong libertarian elements. But the dominant version has been a very different one. Its most instructive expression is at the progressive end of the mainstream intellectual spectrum, among good Wilson-FDR-Kennedy liberal intellectuals. Here are a few representative quotes.

The public are “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders [who] must be put in their place.” Decisions must be in hands of the “intelligent minority [of] responsible men,” who must be protected “from the trampling and roar of the bewildered herd.” The herd does have a function. Its task is to lend its weight every few years to a choice among the responsible men, but apart from that its function is to be “spectators, not participants in action.”

The Four Factions disagree on almost everything except this. Davos, the Imperialists, the State Capitalists and Silicon Valley all assume the bewildered herd's role is to give consent, not to speak.

The pedestrian has no summit at Davos, no Pentagon briefing, no Belt and Road ribbon-cutting, no DOGE chainsaw. It has no central bank, no sovereign wealth fund, no venture capital firm. It speaks in dozens of human languages but lives with the one common political condition of suffering the consequences of decisions made by those who speak a foreign tongue.

When a ruling class cannot speak a common political language, it cannot rule.

This linguistic fracture is not a symptom of the civil war — it is the civil war, fought with words before it is fought with weapons.

The Tower of Babel story recounts how humanity spoke a single language, but attempted to build a tower to the heavens to make a name for themselves. In response, God confused their speech, rendered them unintelligible to each other, and forced them to abandon the Tower and scatter across the earth, giving the city its name, Babel, Hebrew for "confusion".

There is great confusion of purpose among the tower builders of our age. They increasingly speak different languages, are more unintelligible to each other and hopefully, in the long term, they will be scattered abroad, abandoning their tower building projects.

For previous articles in the series:

The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

I have sketched the Four Factions of this club in earlier essays. Here I want to look at the club itself: who these people are, how they live, what they believe, and what holds them together as a class even as they fight a civil war over the future architecture of global power.

The concept of the Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC), developed most systematically by Leslie Sklair and William I. Robinson, describes a class that emerged from the wreckage of the postwar Bretton Woods order—wealthy and powerful individuals who consolidated themselves across the 1990s and 2000s. Where earlier capitalists were bounded by nation-states with wealth rooted in national boundaries, the TCC operates above and across borders. Their corporations are incorporated in Delaware, their holding companies in the Cayman Islands, their personal residences distributed across jurisdictions selected for tax escape and legal convenience. The nation-state is, for this class, a tool rather than an identity.

I depart from Sklair and Robinson on one important point: the TCC is not a homogeneous monolith. Entry to this class is based on mega-wealth, adjacent mega-power, and elite education—Ivy League, Oxbridge, the grandes écoles, Tsinghua’s cadre schools, or their global equivalents. On this definition, the class numbers no more than a few thousand people. And it is currently at war with itself.

1. The Markers of Membership

The most visible signs of TCC membership are the easiest way to spot members. Yachts and private jets, penthouses in Manhattan and villas in Cap Ferrat—these are not merely consumer choices. They are status symbols, boundary markers, and useful tools simultaneously.

The superyacht is more than a flamboyant display of wealth. It is a sovereign space—a floating private estate, flagged in the Marshall Islands or the Bahamas, capable of crossing territorial waters without the customs routines reserved for ordinary travellers. The private jet functions similarly. A member of the TCC in London can attend a meeting in Riyadh, a dinner in Zürich, and a foundation board meeting in New York within forty-eight hours. The global business aviation fleet runs into the tens of thousands of aircraft, owned by perhaps 0.001% of the world’s population. Rapid mobility gives this class extraordinary power, unavailable to the average person.

The ultimate expression of belonging to the global capitalist class may not be owning a private jet or a superyacht, but owning both simultaneously. The “fly-and-float” lifestyle is a key marker.

Gated communities and exclusive residential enclaves complete the picture. The TCC does not live among the populations of the cities in which they reside. Mayfair, the Upper East Side, the 16th arrondissement, Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah—these are staging posts in a transnational circuit of elite social space: school networks, club memberships, charity boards, investment relationships. The gated community is less about security than about maintaining an insulated social world that exists above the city rather than within it.

This is not a Western-only phenomenon. The Chinese billionaire class is often equally extravagant—Jack Ma owns a Gulfstream G650 and the Zen, a 289-foot Feadship superyacht delivered in 2021. But the distinction matters: China retains substantially more state control over its billionaire class than the West does. That structural fact will return when we discuss the State Capitalist faction.

2. New Money, Old Money

The TCC is not homogeneous in how its wealth was acquired, and these differences in origin produce real differences in mentality, political instinct, and factional alignment.

Old money—the dynastic wealth of the Rothschilds, Wallenbergs, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Du Ponts—is not experienced as having been acquired. It is simply the condition of one’s existence. This produces a certain conservatism: an investment in the institutions that protect and expand inherited wealth across generations, and a habitual disdain for the nouveau riche. Old money is the de facto global aristocracy, the money most comfortable with Davos, with the multilateral architecture, with the patient labor of institutional preservation. It has the most to lose from rupture.

New money is more variable and unstable. The most significant new money of our time is Silicon Valley money, accumulated at speeds and scales previously impossible—fortunes measured in the tens or hundreds of billions assembled within single decades. More importantly, it was accumulated through control of information infrastructure: search engines, social networks, cloud platforms, the architectures through which modern human beings organize their attention, their relationships, and increasingly their political lives. This gives Silicon Valley capital a different relationship to power than any previous faction of the ruling class possessed.

3. The Question of Loyalty

Perhaps the most revealing question one can ask of any ruling class is: to what are they loyal?

For the industrial bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century, despite all the cosmopolitan pretensions of capital, the answer was ultimately the nation-state. The Manchester manufacturer was loyal to Britain. The Krupp family was loyal to Germany. Not out of sentiment alone, but because their wealth was territorially rooted, their contracts enforced by national courts, their property protected by national armies.

For the TCC, this territorial loyalty has been detached from the nation, and they have proven unable or unwilling to attach it to humanity at large. The most honest answer—and the one most members of the class would resist if it were stated plainly—is that the primary loyalty of the TCC is to itself: to the protection and survival of the class.

Even this minimal class solidarity is now fracturing, and the fracture is revealing.

The Davos Globalists remain loyal to the institutional architecture through which class power has been exercised—the multilateral organizations, the NGO networks, the technocratic governance structures. Their loyalty is to the system that produced them and that they have, in turn, shaped.

Silicon Valley has transferred its loyalty to a vision—the Network State, the crypto-secured enclave, the corporate polity—that hasn’t yet been built and whose construction requires demolishing existing institutions. Their loyalty is to a class future that doesn’t yet exist.

The Imperialists have arguably recaptured something closest to the old territorial loyalty, but displaced from the nation to a civilizational-imperial project: American and Israeli dominance as the organizing principle of world order. They are loyal to empire.

The State Capitalists maintain the rhetoric of nationalism, but the CCP project is transnational and capitalist at its core. The Belt and Road Initiative spans 140 nations. BRICS is a transnational project. At minimum, BRI is an empire-building project comparable in ambition to Roman road construction.

What none of them are loyal to, in any meaningful sense, is the populations over whom they exercise power.

4. Living Above the Law

The TCC does not, as a rule, simply break laws. It has accomplished something more sophisticated: the systematic construction of a legal architecture that ensures the law does not, in practice, apply to it the way it applies to everyone else.

Extreme wealth buys a legal team that is categorically different from what is available to ordinary defendants—not merely better lawyers, but the capacity to sustain litigation indefinitely, to appeal across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously, to negotiate settlements that preclude precedent-setting judgments. The rule of law is formally intact; in practice, it is a tiered system.

Beyond this, the TCC operates through legal structures—trusts, foundations, holding companies—designed to create distance between ownership and accountability. When a holding company registered in a British Virgin Islands shell corporation, owned by a Cayman trust, controlled by a nominee director, engages in tax avoidance or environmental destruction, there is no individual who broke the law. There is only an architecture.

And the TCC has increasingly developed the capacity to shape the laws themselves. The revolving door between Goldman Sachs and the U.S. Treasury, between pharmaceutical companies and their regulators, between tech platforms and the Congressional committees that oversee them, represents not corruption in the traditional sense but a system that functions as enabler, protector, and guardian of ruling-class wealth and power.

5. How They See Themselves

The dominant self-conception within the TCC is meritocratic. The story this class tells about itself—and has worked energetically to propagate—is that extreme wealth reflects extreme competence, creativity, and contribution. The billionaire earned his billions. The hedge fund manager’s returns reflect genuine insight. The technology founder’s fortune is the fair reward for having changed the world.

It would be a mistake to dismiss this as merely cynical. Many members of the TCC genuinely believe it, and the belief is reinforced by the selection effects of their social world, populated almost entirely by people who have navigated the same competitive gauntlet and emerged successful.

What this self-conception obscures is the role of inherited advantage in creating the conditions for success; the role of luck in differentiating the very successful from the merely successful in high-variance domains; and the role of collective infrastructure—legal systems, educated workforces, public research, stable currencies—on which all private wealth is built.

Each faction inflects the meritocratic story differently. The Davos Globalist imagines himself as a steward of systems he did not build. The Silicon Valley techno-lord imagines himself as a builder of systems that supersede the old order: his wealth is proof of superior vision, institutional resistance is proof of institutional corruption, democracy itself is a constraint on the progress only the genuinely exceptional can deliver. Peter Thiel’s remark that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible is the unguarded statement of a faction whose success has convinced them the existing architecture of accountability is simply an obstacle.

The Imperial Nationalist self-conception dispenses with the legitimating language of governance or progress entirely: power exists, it must be wielded, the only question is by whom and in whose interest.

6. Market Realism

Beneath the factional disagreements, the TCC shares a single underlying philosophy. Call it market realism: the conviction that market-mediated power relations are the only legitimate, intelligible, and durable basis for organizing human affairs at scale—and that all other ordering principles (democratic legitimacy, religious authority, traditional sovereignty, civic solidarity) are either subordinate instruments, decorative legitimations, or obstacles to be managed.

The factions disagree about the institutional form market realism should take, not its foundational claim.

Davos says markets need transnational technocratic governance to function. Silicon Valley says markets need liberation from the administrative state and re-founding under competent CEO-sovereigns. The Imperialists say markets need a hegemon enforcing the rules with hard power. The State Capitalists say markets need a sovereign party-state directing capital toward civilizational ends.

Four answers to one question: what political system does global capital require?

This also explains the universal core of TCC interests—wealth concentration, anti-democratic drift, elite immunity—without needing a conspiracy.

7. The Philanthropist Alibi

There is one practice so universal among the TCC that it functions almost as a membership requirement: the foundation. Gates, Rockefeller, Ford, Soros, Bloomberg, Bezos, Koch, Chan-Zuckerberg, Schwarzman—every major TCC figure eventually acquires not just wealth but a philanthropic vehicle through which to deploy a portion of it.

The original model was established by John D. Rockefeller, who in the late nineteenth century found himself the wealthiest and most hated man in America. Standard Oil’s monopoly practices had generated Congressional investigations, muckraking journalism, and genuine public fury. Rockefeller’s response was to hire Ivy Lee—widely considered the founding figure of modern public relations—to manage what we would now call his brand. Lee’s advice was not to defend Standard Oil’s practices but to humanize Rockefeller himself: distribute dimes to children, publicize charitable giving, make the man visible as something other than a predator. The Rockefeller Foundation, established in 1913, was the institutional culmination of this strategy.

It was brilliant because Rockefeller genuinely believed in the philanthropic mission. The foundation funded real public health advances, supported universities, shaped policy for generations. The ideological function and the sincere function were not in conflict; they reinforced each other.

This is the essential structure of TCC philanthropy: simultaneously genuine and ideologically functional, with the genuine character what makes the ideology work. If Gates’s foundation were merely a tax shelter, it would be vulnerable to exposure. Because it has genuinely reduced child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa, it is largely immune to critique—and that immunity extends, through association, to Microsoft’s monopoly history, to Gates’s network of policy influence, to his capacity to shape global health architecture in ways that happen to align with his investments in pharmaceutical companies.

The foundation is also, more prosaically, a tax-exempt vehicle for funnelling capital, avoiding taxation, and funding NGOs that the foundation owner creates. The philanthropic function and the asset-protection function coexist comfortably.

8. The Gold Book

In Plutocrats, Chrystia Freeland—a journalist who would later join the WEF Board of Trustees and serve as Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister—identifies what she calls the “gold book”: the unofficial credential that marks true membership in the transnational elite. An Ivy League degree, or its equivalents (Oxbridge in Britain, the grandes écoles in France, the IITs for India’s technical elite), is not primarily about education.

The elite university produces not merely graduates but class members—people who share a set of references, a style of argument, a private society. The roommate who becomes a partner at Goldman Sachs, the classmate who becomes a Senator, the professor who introduces you to the foundation board: these are the relationships that constitute TCC membership far more than any formal credential.

Education is the network.

The pattern is remarkably consistent across all four factions. Davos figures are disproportionately products of elite European and American universities—Schwab studied at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Freeland attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, Carney took his doctorate at Oxford. The Silicon Valley faction is almost uniformly Stanford and MIT—Thiel did Stanford undergrad and law, Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard but only after gaining admission. The Imperialist faction runs through Georgetown, Yale, and the military academies.

The Chinese State Capitalists attend the Central Party School of the CCP—132 members of the 19th Central Committee held master’s degrees from it. But the integration runs deeper than that: the CCP’s Central Organization Department selectively sends mid-to-high-level officials to elite Western universities for specialized leadership training. Harvard’s Kennedy School alone has hosted over 4,000 Chinese officials, with parallel programs at Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, and Tokyo.

The factions disagree about nearly everything, but they were all admitted to the same system.

9. The Necessary Ability

What skills does one actually need to accumulate and manage wealth and power at this level?

The most fundamental is the ability to operate across institutional domains simultaneously—to translate between the logics of finance, politics, media, and law without being captured by any single one. The TCC member who succeeds over the long run is not merely a good businessman or a shrewd politician but someone who can move fluidly across all of these registers and exploit the opportunities that exist at their intersections. Davos figures move between finance, foundation, and government. Silicon Valley technocrats move between platform, capital allocation, and political intervention. Imperialists move between policy, military contracting, and ideological production.

Cross-domain fluency, not technical excellence in any single domain, is the core class competence.

Related is what might be called extreme patience—the ability to operate on time horizons ordinary political and market actors cannot sustain. A democratic politician thinks in four-year cycles. A public company executive thinks in quarterly cycles. The TCC thinks in generational cycles, which gives it a structural advantage in any competition with short-horizon actors. The Rockefeller Foundation, established in 1913, is still operating. The Davos network, assembled over fifty years, is still functioning. The long game is a class characteristic.

10. A Class in Crisis

The Transnational Capitalist Class is keenly aware of both its privileged position and its vulnerability. Is it any surprise that its members surround themselves with private security, travel anonymously in private jets, live in massive gated communities, and spend millions of dollars cultivating the public image of philanthropy?

The portrait sketched here—a class defined by transnational mobility, meritocratic self-conception, sophisticated relationship to legal architecture, and shared commitment to market realism as background philosophy—is the portrait of the TCC at its moment of maximum coherence. This is the class that built the post-Cold War order and believed, briefly, that it had achieved something like a permanent settlement.

That settlement has collapsed. Not from without, but from within.

The fractures now visible are not superficial disagreements about policy. They are ruptures over the fundamental question of what form class power should take in the twenty-first century: multilateral governance, corporate sovereignty, imperial dominance, or state capitalism. And the depth of the shared formation—the common yacht clubs, the common credentialing institutions, the common philosophy—is what makes the fracture historically significant.

This is the condition of an organic crisis within the ruling class itself. The TCC has not been destroyed. But it has stopped being, in any meaningful sense, a unified class—and the consequences of that disunity are being felt across every institution and geopolitical conflict we observe today.

For previous articles in the series:

The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

In an interview Wednesday, April 29, 2026, with CNN Christine Amanpour, Czech President Petr Pavel publicly advocated for the creation of a “United States of Europe,” arguing that a federal superstate is the only way for the continent to remain "relevant on the world map." He described this integration as “almost inevitable” and potentially necessary to counter the geopolitical brinkmanship of superpowers like Russia, China, and the United States.

Czech President Petr Pavel is a former NATO chief (2015-2018) and is strategically positioned as a Davos faction member. The Czech Republic experienced a resurgence of populism in its October 2025 parliamentary elections, when Andrej Babiš and his ANO party returned to power, defeating the incumbent center-right coalition led by Davos-aligned Prime Minister Petr Fiala.

Thus, Pavel is going against his own government. Pavel emphasizes that Europe must “speak with one voice” to effectively address security and energy challenges, stating that the bloc can no longer rely solely on transatlantic (American) support. He supports a centralized EU structure where member states cede more sovereignty to Brussels, aligning with broader federalist efforts to deepen European integration by the end of the decade.

This is evidence of the First Faction (Davos) attempting to consolidate its forces, following in the wake of a mandate laid out by Davos insider, Mark Carney in January 2026 at the WEF conclave. Carney advised (instructed) the captive audience that the path forward for the Davos faction, in the midst of a “rupture not a transition,” was for the “middle powers” to form a coalition. “Middle powers” is code for European nations.

The rupture was detonated by Donald Trump’s ongoing neocon policies of sanctions, war, tariffs and retreating from international agreements. President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from 66 international organizations, treaties, and agreements in January 2026, according to a presidential memorandum citing interests of U.S. sovereignty and prosperity. This sweeping move included both United Nations-affiliated bodies and non-UN entities.

This move can be seen as further evidence that the rupture between the Davos faction and the Imperialist faction is virtually complete. Exiting NATO would be the coup-de-grace.

President Donald Trump, who has criticized Germany and other NATO allies for not ​sending their navies to help open the Strait of Hormuz, said on Wednesday afternoon, on Truth Social, that his administration is looking at reducing the number of ‌U.S. troops in Germany.

Trump ​has been sparring with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz over the war in Iran in recent days. On Tuesday, he said Merz didn't know what he was ​talking about after the German leader said the Iranians were humiliating the U.S. in talks to end the two-month-old war. Merz on Wednesday said relations with Trump were good, despite the row over the war.

The president’s comments were in response to Merz’s speech in Marsberg Monday, where he said the U.S. “leadership obviously had no strategy” in Iran and was being “humiliated by the Iranian leadership.”

After the online exchange, Trump responded yesterday with a 90-minute conversation with Russian President Putin to discuss a possible ceasefire in the Ukraine War. Putin’s Russia is part of the State Capitalist faction, led by CCP China. Most of Trump’s posturing with Russia is the attempt to draw Russia away from the China orbit and offer Russia a better deal, or at the very least, a separate peace.

This sequence of events can be seen as part of the further escalation of the Capitalist Civil War within the Transnational Capitalist Class, an ongoing feud between the Four Factions of the TCC: Davos, the Imperialists, Silicon Valley and the State Capitalists.

Elon Musk has been openly hostile toward European regulation, particularly after the European Commission fined his social media platform X €120 million ($140 million) in December 2025, for violating the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). The fine was imposed due to deceptive practices around the blue checkmark verification system, lack of ad transparency, and failure to provide data access to researchers.

Musk responded on X:

The Silicon Valley faction is at odds with both the Davos faction and the Imperialists. Peter Thiel’s funding of conservative figures in UK politics is seen as infiltration of the political spectrum by the Curtis Yarvin Dark Enlightenment project according to recent comments by a UK political commentator:

“Together, these strands form a cross-party pincer movement: Thiel’s hard power through Palantir’s contracts, and his soft power through the normalisation of discredited pseudo-scientific neo-reactionary ideas.

As figures like Yarvin move alongside establishment names, Thiel’s network is shifting ideas once confined to the far-right fringe into the centre of mainstream debate.”

Then on Thursday morning, Mark Carney made his move.

The Canadian prime minister announced that he was appointing Jonathan Wilkinson — a sitting Liberal MP and former Trudeau-era environment and natural resources minister — as Canada’s next ambassador to the European Union. The appointment costs Carney a seat in the House and triggers a by-election. The Prime Minister’s Office framed it explicitly around “the New EU-Canada Strategic Partnership of the Future,” the Security and Defence Partnership, and Canada’s accession to the EU’s SAFE defence procurement initiative.

Wilkinson’s own statement: “2026 is not 2015. The world has changed in fundamental ways, and Canada now faces new economic, geopolitical, and environmental tests.”

This weekend, Carney becomes the first non-European leader ever to attend a European Political Community summit, in Yerevan, Armenia. He is moving Canada into the European bloc, in real time, on the day Trump is moving the United States out of it.

Separate events, but there is a pattern.

To see the pattern, you have to stop thinking about politics in left-right terms and start thinking about it in terms of the Four Factions: Davos, Imperialists, Silicon Valley and the State Capitalists. The people who actually run the global economy — the people who own the capital, command the institutions, and set the agenda — are not a unified class. They are at war with each other. And what we just watched, in the space of forty-eight hours, was three of those factions throwing punches in public.

Pavel speaks for one of them — The Davos faction: the World Economic Forum, BlackRock, the IMF, the constellation of multilateral institutions, transnational NGOs, and central bank alumni that have run the post-Cold War order. Their project is borderless capital, harmonized regulation, climate-finance architecture, and the gradual erosion of the nation-state in favour of supranational governance. Pavel’s “United States of Europe” is the maximalist version of their vision.

So is Mark Carney’s keynote at Davos in January, in which the Canadian prime minister told the assembled billionaires that “we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” and called on the world’s “middle powers” to band together because “if you are not at the table, you are on the menu.” Carney delivered that speech alongside Larry Fink of BlackRock, who interim co-chairs the WEF. The faction’s nervous system was on full display.

Trump, when he picks up the phone to Putin and threatens to pull troops out of Germany, speaks for a different faction entirely — the Imperialists, the people who believe in hard military power, sovereign borders, bilateral deals between strong men, and the demolition of the multilateral architecture the Davos crowd built.

In January of this year, Trump withdrew the United States from 66 international organizations, treaties, and agreements in a single executive memorandum. The withdrawal was not a tantrum. It was the worldview of the Imperialist faction in action. They sees the WTO, the UN, the climate accords, and the European Union itself as constraints on American power that need to be either cut down or walked away from. When Trump cuts a bilateral deal with Putin over Ukraine, he is not just ending a war. He is dropping a bomb on the rules-based international order, the Atlantic alliance, the EU’s claim to a seat at the great-power table that the Davos faction depends on.

Merz is caught in the middle, which is why Trump went after him. Germany is the keystone of the European project. Without American troops underwriting German security, “more Europe” stops being a federalist vision and starts being a desperate emergency. Pavel’s call for a United States of Europe and Trump’s threat to pull troops out of Germany are not unrelated stories. They are the same story, told from opposite sides of the fracture.

What they are fighting over is the financial and institutional architecture of the planet — who controls capital flows, who writes the regulations, who commands the militaries, who sets the rules for AI and energy and trade. The left-right argument we are still being sold every night on cable news is a kind of theatre where the actors are not even aware they are on a stage. The real argument is happening in phone calls between presidents, in posts on Truth Social, in CNN interviews with Czech ex-generals, and in keynote speeches at Swiss mountain conclaves.

This week, three of the four factions made their moves on the same chessboard, in the same forty-eight hours, in front of all of the whole world.

It’s worth learning to see the game.

For further discussions:

The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

The clearest evidence that the Capitalist Civil War is in battle mode revealed itself at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in January 2026. The full Four Faction conflict — Davos, Imperialists, Silicon Valley, and State Capitalists — played out, in public, over a single 72-hour window.

On the afternoon of January 20, Larry Fink — chair of BlackRock, interim co-chair of the WEF — took the stage to introduce the keynote speaker. He called him a friend. The speaker was Mark Carney — former Governor of the Bank of Canada, former Governor of the Bank of England, sitting Prime Minister of Canada, a quintessential Davos man.

Carney delivered a eulogy for the rules-based order Davos was built to manage. "We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition," he told the room. The old "rules-based liberal multilateral order is over." The "bargain" of American hegemony "no longer works." “Great powers,” he said, have begun "using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited." The multilateral institutions — the WTO, the UN, the COP, "the very architecture of collective problem solving" — are under threat. He told the assembled global elite to stop invoking the rules-based international order "as though it still functions as advertised."

Nostalgia is not a strategy. The old order is not coming back.

The moderator, Gideon Rachman returning to the microphone, observed: “I don’t think I’ve seen many standing ovations at Davos, so that was interesting.”

This is not a fringe critique from outside the system. This is the system holding a funeral service for itself.

Twenty-four hours later, Donald Trump appeared at the same Davos stage. His response was not to mourn the rupture but to celebrate it. He attacked Carney directly: “Canada lives because of the United States. They should be grateful to us… I watched your prime minister yesterday. He wasn’t so grateful.”

Hours before Carney’s speech, Trump had posted an altered map on social media depicting Canada, Greenland, Venezuela, and Cuba as American territory.

While at Davos, he unveiled a “Board of Peace” to oversee Gaza — the Kushner plan made operational, dispossession as development, empire as investment opportunity, presented from the same stage where Carney gave a eulogy for Davos the day before.

Then he rescinded Carney’s invitation to the Board.

Two days later, Larry Fink sat down with Elon Musk on the same Davos stage. Musk, who had previously dismissed the WEF as "boring af" and "an unelected world government," took Fink's invitation. The Davos man and the Silicon Valley man struck a public truce — for an afternoon.

What unfolded over those 72 hours was the Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class in the midst of a public divorce, each one staking its position in real time on the most prestigious stage capitalism has ever built for itself.

Who Is in the Transnational Capitalist Class?

The Transnational Capitalist Class — the term I borrow from sociologists Leslie Sklair and William I. Robinson — is in this analysis a small and specific group. It is the global billionaires: roughly 3,400 people who own, control, or manage at least one billion dollars in assets. The overwhelming majority pass through the Ivy League or its international equivalents — Oxford, Cambridge, Tsinghua, the London School of Economics, the École Normale Supérieure. The combination of capital and elite education is what produces a class rather than a list of wealthy individuals. They know each other. They sit on each other’s boards, attend each other’s conferences, and marry into each other’s families.

The TCC is not “rich people” in the broad sense. A surgeon with five million dollars and a vacation home is not a member; he or she is subject to it. And when I refer to the State Capitalists as a faction of the TCC, I do not mean the Chinese, Russian, Iranian, or Gulf peoples. I mean their rulers — the party officials, princelings, sovereign wealth fund managers, and politically connected billionaires who own and direct transnational capital from inside those state structures. The class line cuts through every nation. It does not run between them.

This is where I depart from the original TCC definition. Sklair and Robinson tracked a class that appeared coextensive with Western-led globalization. That picture no longer matches reality. Chinese billionaires and the CCP elites who direct them, Gulf sovereign wealth managers, Russian oligarchs, Indian conglomerate dynasts — these actors own and move transnational capital at a scale that places them inside the class, whether the older Western-centric factions like it or not.

I borrow the term Transnational Capitalist Class because it’s the best term available. The analysis that follows draws more from Antonio Gramsci’s writing on organic crisis and C. Wright Mills on power elites than from the academic TCC literature.

For a shorthand of the Four Factions:

DAVOS wants to maintain the existing infrastructure.
THE IMPERIALISTS want to weaponize it.
SILICON VALLEY wants to privatize and exit from it.
THE STATE CAPITALISTS want to build parallel infrastructure beside it.

These are not policy disagreements within a shared project. They are rival answers to the most basic question a ruling class faces: through what institutions does it rule? The Capitalist Civil War — and what it means for the rest of us, who will face the fallout of whichever faction wins — is the subject of the articles that follow.

THE FIRST FACTION - DAVOS

Maintain the infrastructure.

The World Economic Forum is the playing field where all the competing teams come to play. That is what makes it different from the other factions — it is not merely a player, it is the arena. And that is what makes its current crisis so significant.

The Davos globalists maintain the infrastructure. This is the establishment of the Transnational Capitalist Class. The Forum meets every year in Davos, Switzerland, the quintessential international financial hub. Klaus Schwab presided over the elite club for fifty years. His tenure is ending, and the question of succession is itself revealing — the leading candidate is European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, a figure drawn directly from the IMF and ECB community, a poster child for Davos.

For fifty years, Klaus Schwab promoted Stakeholder Capitalism, his brand of managerial economics that does not merely bypass democratic conventions — it substitutes for them. In place of accountability to citizens, it offers deliberation among stakeholders. In place of elections, a boardroom: corporations, banks, national leaders, mayors and NGOs hashing out global economic policy around a table where no one was voted in and no one can be voted out.

Other prominent members include Larry Fink, Mark Carney, Børge Brende, Al Gore, Marc Benioff, Chrystia Freeland, Kristalina Georgieva, and Queen Rania of Jordan. They are primarily Western-centric or Western-adjacent, though not exclusively loyal to the West. Their mission includes degrading national sovereignty and transferring power upward into transnational institutions — the WHO, IMF, BIS, carbon markets, CBDC infrastructure. The Great Reset is their roadmap, Stakeholder Capitalism is their vehicle driving the change.

Their relationship to the global financial infrastructure is intimate: they built it, they run it, they intend to keep it. Their power depends entirely on the continuation of dollar-denominated globalization managed through multilateral institutions. Keeping the cash flowing is their prime directive.

Their fatal weakness is that they have no hard power. Their entire model depends on persuasion, norms, and institutional legitimacy — and all three are eroding simultaneously. One of the recurring themes at Davos is that the world is fragmented, and the WEF positions itself as the mediator of that fragmentation. But the fragmentation is being driven by the other three factions, none of whom have any interest in being mediated. The arena is cracking because the teams have decided they no longer need it or want it.

A 2025 WEF report estimated that extreme fragmentation could reduce global GDP by up to 5% ($5.7 trillion). According to the report, “countries are increasingly using the global financial system to advance geopolitical objectives through sanctions, investment restrictions, and other economic measures. Rising geopolitical tensions risks fragmenting the global financial system into distinct blocs, reducing efficiencies that for decades have powered economic growth.”

According to the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), sanctions have surged by 370% since 2017, accompanied by a noticeable rise in subsidies worldwide. Davos built an entire civilizational model on the premise that hard power would gradually give way to institutional coordination. The sanctions surge tells you which direction history is actually moving — and which faction is driving it.

THE SECOND FACTION - THE IMPERIALISTS

Weaponize the infrastructure.

The Imperialists are currently represented by Trump, Netanyahu’s coalition, the neoconservative establishment, the military-industrial complex, and Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, as the dealmaker. The military‑industrial complex —Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman — provides the weapons and lobbyists that turn imperial ambition into sustained conflict.

Their vision of Trumpian America and Israeli hard power dominance is not multilateral governance, nor institutional management, but unilateral force projection and the unapologetic exercise of imperial prerogative. The Kushner Gaza plan is this faction’s purest expression: dispossession as development, empire as investment opportunity.

Relationship to financial infrastructure: They weaponize it. Sanctions, asset freezes, the expulsion of enemies from SWIFT, dollar dominance as coercive tool. They don’t want to reform the existing infrastructure — they want to use it as a weapon to subdue and force imagined enemies into a global imperial project.

Their ideological core was forged in the 1990s. The Project for a New American Century — Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld — produced Rebuilding America's Defenses in 2000, calling for regime change in Iraq, expanded Middle East presence, and global missile defense. The document famously suggested such ambitions would require a "catalyzing event." The 9/11 attacks provided one. The 2003 Iraq War followed.

The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 and Stephen Miller picked up the torch in 2024, and currently, Stephen Miller, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, drives much of Trump's hardline agenda. NBC News has called him “the untouchable force” in Trump's White House.

The Millerites and Finkians are aligned but disagree on method. The Millerites believe in imposing order through force—regime change, permanent bases, the unapologetic projection of American and Israeli military power. The Finkians believe in organizing order through multilateral agreements, stakeholder governance, the patient architecture of institutional legitimacy. One builds aircraft carriers; the other builds committees. Neither trusts democracy, but the Millerites at least pretend to need a popular mandate, while the Finkians long ago abandoned the people and moved into the boardroom.

Fatal weakness: Every act of financial weaponization accelerates the de-dollarization that will eventually destroy the infrastructure they depend on. They are consuming the foundation of their own power. The cost of war is not sustainable economically. The total cost of the US war in Afghanistan is estimated to be between $2.3 trillion and $2.6 trillion, according to research from Brown University’s Costs of War Project. The Trump administration’s war against Iran is estimated at $51 billion, or roughly a billion dollars a day.

The Imperialists’ endgame is not global control in the Davos sense — it's permanent hierarchical dominance with the United States (and its closest allies) at the apex. The core military doctrine of the Imperialists is Full Spectrum Dominance, it explicitly calls for U.S. military supremacy across land, sea, air, space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum — the ability to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the full range of military operations. This isn't rhetorical. It's the organizing logic of the U.S. defense budget, ~750 overseas bases, and the weapons purchasing of the military-industrial complex.

The Davos faction wants integration — a single, harmonized governance architecture where capital flows frictionlessly across a managed global system. The Imperialists want hegemony — a stratified order where American hard power, the dollar, and the alliance system (NATO, AUKUS, the Israel-Gulf security architecture) sit permanently above everyone else. From a distance these look similar — both project American power globally — but their endgames are structurally opposed.

THE THIRD FACTION - THE STATE CAPITALISTS

Build parallel infrastructure.

Xi Jinping’s CCP oversees the Chinese one-party developmental state and the Belt and Road Initiative, the most ambitious infrastructure project in modern history. China is the primary State Capitalist power; Russia, Iran, India, and the Gulf states operate as variants and sometimes-aligned partners, each running its own version of state-directed capitalism inside a broader resistance to the Western rules-based order.

Russia is existentially at odds with both the Davos and the Imperialist factions who oppose Russia’s war in the Ukraine. The same is true for Iran, currently waist-deep in a war with the Imperialist faction. India plays its cards carefully, swinging from one faction to the other depending on context. The Gulf states likewise have their own state capitalist agenda that does not always align with China.

The CCP’s vision is a multipolar world order in which each sovereign bloc governs its own developmental capitalism. Sovereignty is non-negotiable — not transferred upward like Davos, not dismantled like Silicon Valley, not projected through hard power like the Imperialists, but defended and replicated as the organizing principle of a new world order. The Belt and Road Initiative is their Great Reset: a physical and financial rewiring of global connectivity away from Western chokepoints.

Their relationship to the financial infrastructure is constructive rather than managerial, weaponizing, or destructive. China is not duplicating Western financial architecture — it is building interconnected alternatives. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the New Development Bank, the CIPS yuan clearing system, the BRICS financial architecture, and Project mBridge offer parallel rails to SWIFT. The goal is not to seize the existing system but to render it non-essential in key corridors. mBridge has already processed over $55 billion in cross-border transactions, operating outside the dollar-clearing architecture entirely.

Fatal weakness: The parallel project requires sustained coordination among states with very different interests. Russia, India, Iran, and the Gulf are square pegs in the round hole of Chinese state capitalism. And developmental legitimacy — pointing to hundreds of millions lifted from poverty — only holds as long as development continues.

The Davos response to the State Capitalists has been telling. Officially, Schwab insisted that “stakeholder capitalism… is clearly the best response to today’s social and environmental challenges,” and that adopting it is essential for China and other emerging markets. Unofficially, the WEF has had to accommodate the reality that the parallel infrastructure is no longer hypothetical. The arena’s custodians have begun acknowledging, publicly, that the world they were built to manage is slipping out from under them.

THE FOURTH FACTION - SILICON VALLEY

Privatize the infrastructure.

The nouveau digital riche have entered the halls of American state power directly. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Sam Altman — men whose wealth owes its allegiance to digital platform monopolies, payment infrastructure, and the emerging AI stack — have moved from funding politics to occupying it. Musk was appointed head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after contributing roughly $288 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign. Vice President JD Vance came directly out of Thiel’s orbit, representing the first time this faction has held executive office rather than merely financing it. The faction is no longer lobbying the state from outside; it is inside the gates.

A MAGA loyalist will object: Musk campaigned for Trump, Vance is the Vice President. But look at what he’s doing, not what he’s saying. DOGE didn’t capture USAID — it demolished it. That’s not nationalism. It’s sabotage from inside the state.

Musk’s team of mostly young engineers, drawn from his companies, gained access to sensitive government systems at the Office of Personnel Management, the General Services Administration, and USAID. The stated aim was efficiency; the reality was demolition. USAID, which Musk characterized as a “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists,” was not reformed but dismantled — the agency is essentially defunct.

This is the critical point, and it is easy to miss if you think that the global elite are a single coordinated bloc. USAID was not a drag on American capital. It was one of the softer instruments through which American-led globalism projected itself abroad — development financing, NGO networks, the whole apparatus that political scientists like Joseph Nye used to call “soft power.” The Davos faction treats such institutions as allies in its long-term goals. A rising faction pursuing its own vision of global capitalism would normally seek to capture and redirect that machinery toward its own ends. Silicon Valley moved to destroy it. Demolition is categorically different from capture, and it is clear evidence that the assumption that the global elite share an agenda, and merely argue over the details, no longer holds.

Silicon Valley’s ideological inspiration comes from Curtis Yarvin, originally writing under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, now on Substack, Gray Mirror. Yarvin’s Dark Enlightenment rejects not merely liberal policy but the legitimacy architecture of liberal democracy itself — what he calls the “Cathedral,” the interlocking authority of media, academia, and civil-service bureaucracy. His proposed alternative, neocameralism, reinvents the state as a corporation governed by a techno-monarch CEO, with citizens recast as shareholders whose sole political right is exit. Yarvin is not a household name, but his influence travels through people who are: Vance has cited him directly; Thiel has funded the broader intellectual ecosystem around him. Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto echo his premises. Yarvin has claimed that Thiel is “fully enlightened” — meaning, he is dark enlightened.

What matters here is not whether neocameralism is a workable system of government (because it isn’t) — what matters is the four factions no longer speak the same political language. Davos offers a vocabulary of expertise, stakeholder governance, and managed globalization; it still pays rhetorical tribute to liberal-democratic norms even as it hollows them out. The Imperial Nationalists require a popular mandate — MAGA, nationalism, the flag — to authorize the projection of hard power. Silicon Valley, through Yarvin, rejects both vocabularies. It does not appeal to expertise, and it does not appeal to the people. It appeals to exit. The State Capitalists talk about the multipolar world, where regional hegemons create a balance of power.

This is what makes the current moment a genuine fracture rather than a family quarrel.

The dystopian vision of the Dark Enlightenment is the Network State: privately governed digital-territorial enclaves, corporate sovereignty detached from the nation-state form, and a financial infrastructure built outside the institutions the other factions control. Cryptocurrency and blockchain are central to the Network State.

Thiel’s original PayPal vision was explicitly about creating money beyond government reach. Crypto is not simply a speculative asset class but an infrastructural project — payment rails, settlement systems, and stores of value that operate outside both the dollar-clearing architecture that Davos built (SWIFT, the IMF, the BIS) and the sanctions regime through which the Imperialists project financial power. If the global elite were a homogeneous blob with a shared stake in the existing dollar-denominated order, none of this would make sense.

And yet — this is the faction’s central contradiction, and the reason the fracture is unlikely to resolve in its favor — Silicon Valley’s project depends on the infrastructure it is dismantling. The Network State requires functional electrical grids, semiconductor supply chains, and enforceable property rights, which is to say it requires exactly the state capacity that DOGE attempted to gut — and failed to gut. Musk himself has called the DOGE initiative only “somewhat successful,” falling far short of his original $2 trillion savings goal. The $288 million he contributed to the Trump campaign likely yielded minimal net fiscal benefit.

Many in the MAGA coalition are under the impression that Musk, Thiel, and the Silicon Valley technocrats are on their team. They are not. The faction’s endgame is not a restored American nation but an exit from it — sovereign enclaves, private currencies, a post-democratic corporate monarchy.

The old elite consensus, the one Francis Fukuyama mistook for the end of history, has fractured — and the faction delivering the sharpest blow is not coming from outside the capitalist order but from deep inside the Transnational Capitalist Class.

An Organic Crisis

A shared language of legitimacy is what allows rival factions to fight and still exist as a coherent, consolidated class. Take away the shared language and you do not have factional competition anymore. You have something closer to what Antonio Gramsci, writing from a fascist prison in the 1930s, called an organic crisis — a moment when the old order can no longer command belief and the new one has not yet been born, and in this period of transition, morbid symptoms occur.

Returning to Davos 2026:

The Davos faction — Fink, Carney, the WEF as institution — publicly conceded that the architecture they built can no longer function, and applauded the eulogy. Then, two days later, Fink tried to keep the show going by hosting Elon Musk on the same stage, talking up Tesla’s stock to the room, and asking the audience for a second round of applause when the first was thin. This is not a faction in command. This is a faction trying to absorb Musk after his failed DOGE project.

The Imperialists faction— Trump and the Kushner Gaza plan — used the Davos stage to denounce the Davos consensus, threaten allies with tariffs, post annexation maps, and unveil empire-as-investment-opportunity in real time. The Imperial faction came to Davos to break it.

The State Capitalist faction — China, unmentioned but everywhere in the subtext — exerted gravitational pull on every move that followed. Carney’s speech was read in Beijing as an opening; within a week, Trump was threatening 100% tariffs to keep Canada from drifting toward a Chinese trade deal. China didn’t need to attend Davos to shape it.

The Silicon Valley faction — Musk, who had previously dismissed the Forum as “an unelected world government,” accepted Fink’s invitation, took the stage, and used it to mock Trump’s newly-unveiled Peace Summit — “is that P-I-E-C-E, a little piece?” — sitting beside the Davos faction’s chief steward. The Silicon Valley faction will accept the Davos platform when offered. It will not accept the Davos rules.

This is not a family quarrel inside a unified ruling class. This is four factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class, each pursuing an incompatible vision of how transnational capital should be governed, colliding in public on the most prestigious stage that capitalism has ever built for itself.

The arena is no longer the arena. It is the battleground.

This is the Capitalist Civil War. The rest of us did not vote for any of these four factions. But we will live inside the world whichever one wins — or, more likely, inside the wreckage of their war.

This article is a chapter in an ongoing series I’m working on. It’s a work in progress, organized as it will eventually appear in my upcoming book, The Capitalist Civil War. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

CHAPTER 9: The Four-Clocks Problem

On the evening of November 9, 1989, large crowds of East Germans gathered at the Berlin wall, armed with hammers, chisels and rope. These men and women were dubbed Mauerspechte (wallpeckers) and by the morning of November 10, sections of the wall were demolished, allowing free transit between the Communist East and the Capitalist West.

The Cold War was over.

Within two years, the Soviet Union collapsed, ending almost 70 years of communist rule.

Political philosopher, Francis Fukuyama, in his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, made a remarkable observation:

“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

The Iron Curtain was pulled back, the Soviet Union dissolved and Deng’s China integrated into global markets. For a brief moment, it genuinely looked like liberal democratic capitalism had no serious rival. Fukuyama was not making a triumphalist claim so much as a practical one: without an ideological competitor, there was no longer an upward political battle — we had reached the plateau.

Fukuyama’s end of history was making an explicit promise, not just that capitalism won, but that its victory would produce a convergence — a shared elite consensus, multilateral institutions managing remaining disputes, gradual democratization of capitalist peripheries, and a stable global order governed by technocratic expertise rather than ideological combat. This is the vision the World Economic Forum was built to serve. It is the vision the WTO, the post-Cold-War expansion of the EU, the NAFTA framework, and the Washington Consensus all rolled into one.

2. The Organic Crisis

The absence of an external ideological enemy did not stabilize the ruling class of global capitalism. It revealed contradictions that the external enemies had been suppressing.

This is a manifestation of Gramsci’s concept of an “organic crisis”, where a ruling class faces both a structural breakdown and a crisis of legitimacy — a moment when the old order can no longer command belief, the new order has not yet been born, and “in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

The Cold War forced discipline on Western capital. Defense contractors, financiers, industrialists, and technology firms all had reasons to accept the rules of the Bretton Woods system because the alternative communist model did not promise them the same dividends. That threat disappeared in 1991. For the first decade following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the inertia of institutional habit kept the consensus intact.

The Washington Consensus emerged as the ad hoc financial arrangement promoted by the IMF, World Bank, and U.S. Department of the Treasury that advocated for a neoliberal, market-led approach characterized by trade liberalization, privatization of state-owned enterprises, deregulation, and fiscal austerity to control inflation and reduce budget deficits.

However, things quickly began to slide sideways and nations like Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and Colombia experienced significant economic hardship. By the late 1990s, a cascade of crises—Mexico’s Tequila Crisis (1994), East Asia’s financial collapse (1997–98), Russia’s default (1998), Argentina’s implosion (2001–02)—had revealed the Consensus’s fragility.

Austerity programs, while intended to stabilize economies, often exacerbated poverty and inequality, leading to widespread criticism of their one-size-fits-all approach. The Washington Consensus’s failures created a legitimacy crisis for the Davos project among the elites, not just among victims. These failures were visible to elites in Buenos Aires, Lagos, and Jakarta who drew a conclusion the Washington institutions did not want them to draw: the system was not neutral, and participation on its terms was not safe.

Then the 2008 financial crisis shattered any remaining bubble of optimism.

The 2008 financial crisis was the Washington Consensus’s reductio ad absurdum. Deregulation (including the repeal of Glass-Steagall) enabled banks to build vast exposure to mortgage-backed securities and derivatives; belief in self-correcting markets produced a myopic failure in lending; and the interconnected system that was supposed to distribute risk turned out to transmit it, converting a U.S. subprime crisis into a global meltdown.

The crisis exposed the economic fragility of unfettered markets, revealing that the “end of history” was not a stable endpoint but a system prone to deep internal crises. The destruction of the Twin Towers shattered the political utopia of the end of history; 2008 shattered its economic foundation. 2008 was the moment when the cost of maintaining Davos-style managed globalization became visible to factions of the capitalist class, who began to calculate they could defect. Bailouts saved the financial system but destroyed the legitimacy of Davos.

The intellectual bankruptcy of the Davos project profoundly undermined the justice and legitimacy of market capitalism.

By 2016, the naysayers grew to an exodus, and Brexit was the result. In the UK, the government’s response—austerity—imposed severe cuts to public services and social welfare, disproportionately affecting ordinary citizens while banks were bailed out. This economic hardship and perceived injustice fueled widespread disillusionment, creating fertile ground for populist movements. Research indicates austerity contributed to approximately 190,000 excess deaths between 2010 and 2019, linked to "deaths of despair," reduced ambulance response quality, and declines in life expectancy, particularly in poorer areas.

Trump’s 2016 election represented the ascent of figures who explicitly rejected Davos. The fracture was unmistakable. By 2025, after a second Trump presidency, with Musk appointed to DOGE and Vance in the Vice Presidency, the Silicon Valley faction was inside the gates of the American state and demolishing the institutions the Davos faction built.

This is not a story of external challenges to capitalism such as rising populism, left resurgence, anti-globalization movements, though all of these matter. It is the story of capitalism’s internal contradictions surfacing once the external pressure that suppressed them was removed. The Capitalist Civil War is within the ruling class, not between the ruling class and its critics.

3. The Transnational Capitalist Class

Globalization has produced a genuinely transnational class of capital owners, managers, and political allies whose interests and loyalties are oriented toward the global economy rather than any particular nation. The Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC) is not simply “rich people.”

The CEO of a multinational corporation headquartered in New York but with operations in forty countries does not share the economic interests of American workers in his own city. He shares the economic interests of his counterparts in Zurich, Singapore, and São Paulo.

Some notable members include Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Larry Fink who epitomize this class who are overwhelmingly male dominated. Others, such as Masayoshi Son at SoftBank and Mukesh Ambani at Reliance, represent a sophisticated class of entrepreneurs who operate across multiple centers of global financial power.

This class has fractured. Not weakened, not challenged from the outside, but split internally. C. Wright Mills, writing in 1956, Mills, already understood that a ruling class could be coherent enough to rule but fractured enough to fight internally. He described in his book, The Power Elite, a ruling class in the American mid-century that was coherent across sectors (corporate, military, political) but capable of internal conflict. “Within the higher circles of the power elite, factions do exist; there are conflicts of policy; individual ambitions do clash. There are still enough divisions of importance within the Republican party, and even between Republicans and Democrats, to make for different methods of operation.”

The TCC had a moment of post-Cold-War stability and internal consolidation.

That moment has ended.

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4. The Four Factions

There is a civil war among the global ruling class. They have split into a four-way divorce with irreconcilable differences.

Here is a brief overview of the four factions within the TCC. I will refer to them as Davos, Imperialists, State Capitalists and Silicon Valley in the upcoming articles in the series on the civil war within the TCC.

The First Faction: The Davos Globalists – DAVOS

WEF, Schwab, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, the European technocratic establishment, Freeland, Carney, Soros-adjacent NGO networks. Their model: dissolve national sovereignty upward into transnational institutions — WHO, IMF, BIS, carbon markets, CBDC infrastructure. Keep democratic forms as legitimizing theatre, while real power sits in public-private governance networks. The Great Reset is their roadmap. Stakeholder Capitalism is their model.

The Second Faction: The Imperial Nationalists – IMPERIALISTS

Netanyahu’s coalition, elements of the neoconservative establishment, the military-industrial complex. Their model: American/Israeli hard power dominance, not multilateral governance. Unilateral force projection rather than institutional management. The Kushner Gaza plan is this faction’s recent project — dispossession as development, empire as investment opportunity.

The Third Faction: Multipolar Sovereign Development Capitalists – STATE CAPITALISTS

Xi Jinping’s CCP, the Chinese developmental state apparatus, the BRI infrastructure network, aligned Global South state-capitalist elites, the Gulf sovereign states, and Russia — all of these represent the Fourth Faction. Their model: state-directed capital accumulation under firm party or sovereign control, with global expansion through infrastructure dependency and parallel institutions. Sovereignty is non-negotiable — not dissolved upward like Davos, not demolished like Silicon Valley, not projected through hard power like the Imperialists, but defended and replicated as the organizing principle of a multipolar order. The Belt and Road Initiative is their roadmap. The BRICS+ is their parallel model to Davos’ multilateralism.

These four factions do not coexist peacefully. They are locked in a protracted civil war over the future financial architecture of global power — and that civil war is the subject of this series.

The Fourth Faction: Dark Enlightenment Techno-Lords – SILICON VALLEY

Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, Curtis Yarvin as house philosopher, JD Vance as political trojan horse. Their model: demolish the existing institutional architecture — what Yarvin calls the Cathedral, and what I’m calling the Davos network — and replace it with naked corporate-oligarchic governance. No multilateral pretense. The CEO as king. DOGE is the destructive phase. The Network State is their vision of a digital-first, highly aligned online community that evolves into a sovereign political entity by crowdfunding physical territory and seeking diplomatic recognition.

5. The Terrain — Financial Infrastructure

The four factions are not primarily fighting over territory, ideology, or culture — though all of these surface in the conflict. They are fighting over the financial infrastructure through which global capital moves. Whoever controls this infrastructure controls the world. Whoever successfully builds alternatives to it fragments the existing order.

The financial infrastructure at stake is not a single system but a set of interlocking networks. At the foundation sits the US dollar clearing system (CHIPS) — every major international transaction ultimately settles in dollars, routed through correspondent banking relationships that American regulators supervise. SWIFT sits on top: the messaging network coordinating cross-border payments between 11,000 financial institutions across 200-plus countries. Above both, the Bank for International Settlements in Basel sets the capital adequacy standards every central bank implements — the closest thing the world has to a global banking regulator. The IMF converts financial distress into structural compliance through lending conditionality. The World Bank and the web of multilateral treaties enforcing intellectual property rights, investor protections, and trade rules complete the architecture.

Now two new battlegrounds are opening at the top of this stack. Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are being built by every major economy simultaneously, and the fight is over whose oversight regime they fall under — BIS and IMF for Davos, private stablecoins for Silicon Valley, mBridge-style multilateral CBDCs outside Western control for the State Capitalists. Crypto infrastructure runs parallel: blockchain and decentralized exchanges are Silicon Valley’s exit ramp from the financial infrastructure. Whoever controls this stack — or breaks it — controls the shape of global power in 2040.

6. Why This Is Not a Family Quarrel

This fracture is substantively different from "elites sometimes disagree." The factions have lost a shared language of legitimacy, not merely a shared set of policy preferences. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu understood this distinction precisely — legitimate language, he argued, is never simply a neutral medium of communication but "the authorized language" of those who hold symbolic power, the language that gets to define what counts as a valid claim at all. When factions no longer share that authorized language, they cannot negotiate, because they cannot agree on what would count as a legitimate resolution.

Davos speaks the language of expertise, stakeholder governance, managed globalization. It still pays rhetorical tribute to liberal-democratic norms even as it hollows them out. The Imperialists speak the language of populism, nationalism, the flag — they require democratic legitimation to authorize the projection of hard power. Silicon Valley rejects both vocabularies. It does not appeal to expertise. It does not appeal to the people. It appeals to exit.

The State Capitalists speak a fourth language — developmental legitimacy, sovereignty, civilizational continuity. The CCP does not claim to rule by popular mandate in the Western sense, nor by stakeholder capitalism, nor by neo-cameralist corporate logic. It claims to rule because it has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and defended Chinese sovereignty against Western pressure. This is a legitimate story but it is incompatible with the other three.

This is what makes the current moment a genuine fracture rather than a family quarrel. Factions that share a language of legitimacy can fight and still stick together as a class. The language of the four factions has split into four “dialects” of global power. More on this in an upcoming article.

At Davos 2026, Mark Carney — former Bank of England governor, and now Prime Minister of Canada — stood alongside Larry Fink and told the assembled elite of the Davos project that “we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” The rules-based international order, he said, had been “partially false” all along; the time had come for middle powers like Canada to “take the sign out of the window” and stop performing compliance with a system that no longer functions as advertised. He called for “variable geometry” — coalitions of the willing rather than universal institutions. This is not a critic of Davos speaking. This is Davos speaking about itself.

7. The Stakes

The current moment is a Gramscian organic crisis internal to the global ruling class. The Transnational Capitalist Class has fractured into four factions fighting a Capitalist Civil War over the financial infrastructure of global capitalism — a fracture whose lines are blurred by academics, journalists and political commentators alike who view the TCC as a homogenous blob.

Signs of this civil war are sometimes subtle, sometimes overt: such as USAID being dismantled rather than captured; Musk calling Davos “boring af” and questioning its legitimacy. The Kushner Gaza plan (dispossession-as-development) and China’s Belt and Road Initiative are explicit alternatives to Western development finance.

We’re not going to resolve the civilizational crisis in this blog. We’re going to outline the fracture — examine the cracks, faction by faction, contradiction by contradiction — and argue that this internal Capitalist Civil War changes how we should understand our political moment.

We’ll go through the factions in greater detail in the next article, beginning with the First Faction — Davos, then march through the other three factions.

The stakes are very high. The Capitalist Civil War within the ruling class is not a spectacle, though it sometimes seems like a circus. Its outcome will determine whether the next global order is built on dollar-clearing multilateralism, weaponized financial empire, privatized corporate enclaves, or parallel state-capitalist blocs — and none of these options, on current evidence, is likely to serve the people on whose labor and lives the entire system rests.

Gramsci observed that the transition period produces morbid symptoms — and they are everywhere visible. But symptoms are also diagnostic. The Transnational Capitalist Class is not an invincible monolith. It is fracturing from within, dividing and conquering itself. That is not quite good news — but it is the truth. And the truth is where we start.

For the first article in the series:

It’s a work in progress, organized as it will eventually appear in my upcoming book
The Capitalist Civil War. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

CHAPTER 9: The Four-Clocks Problem