Not because it was good.
But because it opposed.
Because it forced a conversation that no longer exists.
The Soviet Union was a failure.
But it was a useful failure—because while it lived, the Market was not god.
It had to justify itself.
Labor had leverage. Governments had shame.
The West had to pretend it stood for something beyond consumption.
Then the wall fell.
And so did the conversation.
The Contradiction Collapsed
History, as Marx knew, moves through contradiction.
But this wasn’t his alone.
Plato sought truth through dialogue—through opposites in tension.
Hegel turned contradiction into the engine of becoming: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
Heidegger said truth was not correctness, but uncovering—ripping open what hides.
Even Thomas Kuhn, darling of the technocrats, admitted:
progress comes not from smooth evolution, but from crisis.
Civilizations do not grow by agreeing with themselves.
They grow by arguing with themselves.
For a moment, the Soviet Union embodied that argument.
Not perfectly. Not even well.
But loud enough to force the West into restraint.
While it lived, capital had to play nice.
Welfare. Unions. Education.
Not because it wanted to—
but because it feared the alternative.
When the USSR collapsed, capitalism did not triumph.
It calcified.
It stopped answering questions—because no one was left to ask them.
Capitalism was a lie
The greatest trick the system ever played
was convincing you it existed.
There was never a “free market.”
No pristine arena where value met competition.
From the beginning, markets were built on:
- Land that was taken
- Labor that was forced
- Trade that was rigged
- Prices that were set
Capitalism was never about freedom.
It was about control—just dressed in liberal clothing.
When the West said “free market,”
what they meant was: free to exploit, free to extract, free to exclude.
Free for the strong. Chained for everyone else.
What we call capitalism is just managed scarcity,
protected wealth,
and ideology enforced through logistics.
The Market is not natural.
It is a designed environment—
where every rule serves the ones who made them.
And you were taught to call that freedom.
From Capitalism to Techno-Feudalism
You are not living in capitalism anymore.
You are living in a post-market illusion.
A curated, subscription-based enclosure.
The new lords are platforms. The new serfs are users.
You do not own. You rent.
You do not build. You scroll.
You do not speak. You post.
Techno-feudalism doesn’t extract surplus value from labor.
It extracts behavior.
Attention. Data. Identity.
You are not a worker.
You are the product.
And when it breaks?
You will not rise.
You will livestream your burnout.
You will monetize your collapse.
The Hypocrisy of Soft Power
Yes, the Soviet Union crushed its own people.
But capitalism did something subtler—
and no less monstrous.
It crushed someone else’s.
If you lived in Nigeria, Chile, Vietnam, El Salvador—
you weren’t choosing between socialism and democracy.
You were choosing between which empire would extract you more efficiently.
The Soviets ruled through concrete.
The Americans ruled through credit.
One sent tanks.
The other sent loans, consultants, plastic trash. And tanks.
Both shaped the “Third World.”
Neither intended to set it free.
The China Problem
And now? There is a new heretic.
China doesn’t sell dreams. It builds roads. Ports. Cities.
It doesn’t promise freedom. It promises functionality.
And that, for the West, is intolerable.
In China, the party does not change — but the policies do.
In the West, the parties change — yet policies never do.
So who governs? And who just performs governance?
The West doesn’t fear China because it’s authoritarian.
It fears China because it works differently — and still works.
Because if the world can be governed another way,
then the lie of market inevitability unravels.
Capital is not above political power.
A system designed to keep oligarchs under control with a
promise of wild riches.
And we are left with something worse than fear: choice.
The Death of the Conversation
We don’t need the USSR back.
We don’t need gulags or purges or cold breadlines.
But we do need opposition.
We need contradiction.
We need the terror of an alternative.
Because without it, capitalism isn’t a system.
It’s a gravity well.
A silence.
A monologue pretending to be consensus.
We miss the Soviet Union—
not for what it was,
but for the noise it made.
Because now, we live in the death of discussion.
No questions. No dialectic. No debate.
Just growth.
Just content.
Just a room where everyone agrees—
because there is no one left to argue.
