Also published in Resilience.

In North America a belief that capitalism is by far the best economic system has long been an obligatory article of faith for successful politicians. Faith in capitalism is so dominant in public policy circles that most citizens find it hard to imagine that any other system could ever come to supplant capitalism.

But what about this system’s namesakes – capitalists? Do they share the love for the system that has made them and (so far) has kept them rich?

Not so, prolific author and speaker Cory Doctorow has written. In a post entitled “Capitalists hate capitalism,” he writes,

“They don’t want to compete with one another, because that would interfere with their ability to raise the prices their customers pay and reduce the wages they pay their workers. Thus Peter Thiel’s anticapitalist rallying cry, ‘competition is for losers,’ or Warren Buffett’s extreme horniness for businesses with ‘wide, sustainable moats.’” ¹

In many blog posts as well as in recent books, Doctorow has described the extensive efforts by major corporate leaders to first achieve, and then maintain, monopolistic or oligopolistic positions in their various industries. While monopolies in past decades were frequently regulated or broken up in the name of protecting competition, recent business leaders have often felt little need to hide their monopolistic intentions.

Writing about Meta/Instagram/WhatsApp/Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Doctorow writes: “This is the guy who put in writing the immortal words, ‘It is better to buy than to compete,’ and ‘what we’re really buying is time,’ and who described his plans to clone a competitor’s features as intended to get there ‘before anyone can get close to their scale again’.²

But as discussed in the previous post in this series, market rule is one of two key components of capitalism outlined by Alyssa Battistoni in her recent book Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature. The other key element is class rule. While capitalists who have achieved the status of monopolists exhibit only a very conditional love for market rule, there is no evidence their ardour for class rule has waned. On the contrary, captains of industry and commerce court power through increasingly large contributions to those politicians who lower their taxes, reduce profit-hindering regulations, and help them maintain positions at the highest levels of both economic and political influence.

Who’s the boss?

Perhaps the most commonly recognized feature of class rule is that “capitalists control the means of production.” As a consequence they exert direct control over a large portion of many people’s lives: those hours spent at work. In the relationship between capital and wage labour, Battistoni writes, “Capital … is the power to purchase another’s time and decide how it will be used; the ability of one group of people to command the activity of another…” (Free Gifts, p. 58)

This control over where, how, and for what purposes other people labour is a subject to which we’ll return to in the next post. Class rule, however, is more than the control over the working lives of others. Battistoni writes:

“[C]apital is not only title to command the labor of others … but the power to organize production and direct investment more generally. … Owners of capital thus have outsized power not only over the people whose labor they have purchased … but over the conditions of life for many people who have entered into no formal agreement whatsoever …. Capital, then, is the power not only to produce commodities but to produce the physical world, without most people’s consultation or consent.” (p. 59)

In commissioning and opening a factory, capitalists assume control over the working hours of employees who sign up to work in that factory. But that factory may have dramatic consequences for many others who have signed no contract: people living down river or down wind of the factory, for example; people in another province or another country who previously produced similar products and now lose their jobs; people in areas where environmentally ruinous mines are opened, because the factory creates increased demand for a particular mineral.

The power to direct investment is a crucial part of class rule – but as Battistoni notes, the corollary is perhaps equally important:

“[C]lass rule is equally evident in its seeming absences: in the ability to decide what not to produce, to decline to hire a worker, to disinvest from projects or regions, to withhold resources. It lies in the power to neglect those things that don’t promise adequate returns, however needed they might be – and crucially, to do so without being held responsible for the outcomes that might result.” (p. 59)

Due to class rule, decisions over how and where to invest resources are not made through democratic deliberations. Significantly, class rule extends beyond those investments intended to extract profits. Via charitable donations made through foundations that often bear their names, capitalists have outsized, non-democratic influence over which types of music, art and theatre get funding, which hospitals in which locations can afford the best equipment, which types of research universities are able to prioritize, and which projects in Global South countries receive crucial financial lifelines.

A handful of high-profile billionaires have pledged to give away their wealth – but the gifts come with many strings attached. As the teaser to an article by Vasilisa Kirilochkina sums it up: “the performance of billionaire virtue—where giving is grand, but control is eternal.”³

Kirilochkina writes, “According to economist Jeffrey Sachs, ending extreme poverty worldwide would cost an estimated $175 billion per year—less than half the amount America’s ten richest individuals gained in personal wealth in 2023 alone.”

The stated goals of billionaire philanthropy tend to be grand, but Kirilochkina concludes that “while billionaires compete to cure the world, their wealth multiples faster than their giving.” Rare indeed is the billionaire who advocates steep increases in progressive taxation – rates that could reduce wealth and income inequality to the point that billionaires would no longer exist and there would be no need for their gifts.

Capitalists, at least those at the pinnacles of their industries, may have a distinct aversion to being subject to market rule, as Doctorow writes. But as Battistoni writes, they show no such ambivalence about class rule, which gives them non-democratic control over where and how investments are either made or not made.

Footnotes

¹ Capitalists hate capitalism, by Cory Doctorow. pluralistic.net, 09 June 2023. 

² The long game, by Cory Doctorow. pluralistic.net, 20 November 2025.

³ The Big Givers Club, by Vasilisa Kirilochkina, Observer, 6 April 2025.

Image at top of page: The Bosses of the Senate, a cartoon by Joseph Keppler, shows a Senate chamber with the sign “This is a Senate of the Monopolists, by the Monopolists, and for the Monopolists!” First published in Puck 1889, now in public domain. Accessed at Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia quotes a page from the United States Senate website: “Keppler’s cartoon reflected the phenomenal growth of American industry in the 1880s, but also the disturbing trend toward concentration of industry to the point of monopoly, and its undue influence on politics.”