Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War
1.The Berlin Wall - The End of History
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.
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, Silicon Valley, and State Capitalists in the upcoming articles in the series on the civil war within the TCC.
Faction 1: 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.
Faction 2: 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.
Faction 3: The Dark Enlightenment Techno-Sovereigntists – 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.
Faction 4: 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.
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:
