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Introduction: The Return of a Familiar Shadow
In a prior Substack article, “Nexus: From Capitalism to Fascism,” I argued that capitalism and democracy are structurally incompatible: the former operates as a hierarchy of coercion driven by scarcity and infinite growth, while the latter depends on equality, transparency, balance and collaboration. It concludes that as market fundamentalism intensifies, capitalism’s inherent authoritarian dynamics tend to evolve toward fascism—unless we consciously replace market economics with a new, sustainable, cooperative economic order, as a root cause adjustment.
In this follow-up, I take a broader historical view to reach a similar conclusion, tracing the recurring pattern of fascistic development as a reaction to market economics—by which capitalism is the natural attractor state, and thus synonymous with it—arising from its cyclical, inherent, and emergent instability.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://peterjoseph.substack.com/p/the-ghost-in-the-machine-capitalisms