Corporatocracy means a state that is wholly controlled by corporate interest. Every aspect of it—including the economy, the political system, and even the media, culture, and society—is dominated and shaped according to the agenda of certain corporations (big business, criminal business networks), whether domestic or foreign. Processes in every sphere of economic, political, cultural, and social life are influenced through a range of methods and techniques, so that corporate power is preserved and continuously reinforced.

Because the structure and operating principles of a corporation, in their essence, resemble the structure and principles of a fascist society, corporatocracy is close to fascism. From this comes the term “corporate fascism.” The ideologue of fascism, the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, claimed that another name for fascism was corporatism, because he imagined the fascist state as a union of corporations that would, in practice, constitute power itself. Even if there are differences between Mussolini’s idea of a corporation and the modern one, the similarities are undeniably far greater. According to fascism and to Mussolini’s understanding, a “corporation” was a merger of all enterprises and unions into a single whole—naturally eliminating trade unions as an independent force. Modern corporate monopolies increasingly resemble that fascist notion of the corporation, and their influence over state power—through legalized practices such as lobbying, as well as illegal ones—brings the status quo in some countries close to fascism’s original vision.

Although propaganda presents modern financial-corporate capitalism as the “natural” development of human relations, almost as if it were an extension of the laws of nature, in reality we can speak of a corporate ideology—with its own postulates, beliefs, and concepts. This ideology, as I noted, shares many traits with fascism. Like fascism, it is collectivist, but not social. It is hierarchical and materialist to an even greater extent than fascism (which—judging by its variant, Nazism—can also lean on esoteric myths and legends to bind the masses). Its notion of state and society is reduced to a corporate order aimed at growth, accumulation, and the concentration of power and resources. Society is viewed as a machine or organism, and every person within it has an assigned place. The individual has only functional value and is evaluated by efficiency and usefulness to the system. In the corporate worldview, the human being is merely a means—an object of privatization and a source of profit. The “useful” are exploited to the maximum. The “useless” are marginalized. Exactly as in The Matrix, people are treated as a resource from which maximum value must be extracted, while being kept “operational” through a system of illusions, fears, and ideological delusions.

The basic principles and ideals of this ideology—an analogue to fascist myths of the greatness of Race or the State—are the myths of “efficiency” and “technological progress.” In times of rapid digitization, these myths generate absurd and inhuman visions of a “rational” future, where everything—material or immaterial—has a market price and becomes an object of market relations within a system based on ever-accelerating capital accumulation.

Corporate ideals of technological progress and efficiency are “marketed” in public discourse as naïve yet emotionally captivating fantasies of humanity’s expansion into space—often framed as an analogy to human migration across Earth and the romantic narrative of the Age of Exploration. Grand sermons about humanity attaining a godlike status through technological progress and perhaps merging with machines fill the eyes of corporate technocrats with a fanatical gleam. A picture is painted of ceaseless human ascent, its direction pointing ever more vertically upward. Against these grand visions, the individual—with “small,” deeply human, allegedly “selfish,” even “animal” aspirations—is, of course, nothing. Ecology is brushed aside too: why think about our small planet when we could have the entire universe, if only we “push ourselves” a little?

These fantasies flow from the capitalist idea of endless accumulation and limitless expansion—an idea fundamentally false in a finite world, where life is built on cycles.

Beyond its technocratic (anti-)utopian visions, corporatocracy does not abandon the fascist national myth either—setting it against democratic ideals and human rights. In fact, corporate propaganda is liberal in its choice of tools for controlling public consciousness and attitudes. It is willing to instrumentalize any value, so long as it serves its interests. Perhaps here lies one of its differences from fascism: fascists and Nazis believed their ideological myths, while corporatocrats mainly need others to believe in something—anything—so long as it helps impose corporate power and control over the masses.

Because corporatocracy treats society as a machine in which everyone has a place and function, classes—and even castes—become inevitable. In a fascism-like attempt to standardize classes and present social injustice as unavoidable, a typified image of the “average” person is endlessly reproduced, complete with prescribed patterns of thought and behavior. These patterns channel human values, interests, activities, and pursuits into predetermined directions and stereotypes. The modern, domesticated, and dumbed-down idea of the “modern” family is one such stereotype. It is constantly instilled by politicians, media, entertainment, business circles, advertising, and so on. We all recognize the ad-driven picture: a young, cheerful, smiling family paying off a mortgage, with a car, two children, and a dog—a healthy working family, consumer-oriented and servicing loans; “relaxing” in the evening in front of the TV; the wife in ecstasy over the scent of a new laundry detergent, the husband over a new razor with ten built-in blades and a rotating head.

Such a standardized family model becomes a social-domestic unit that divides and encapsulates people, turns their interests inward, and ensures reproduction. In fact, children too become a resource: they make “human capital” renewable.

The “average” person must not have grand ambitions. Any aspiration outside the stereotype is harmful and unnecessary—reserved only for the “best,” for the “stars” showcased in standardized talent shows, films, series, and sporting events worldwide, demonstrating how much better and more “deserving” they are than ordinary people. As when the football star Zlatan Ibrahimović said during the second wave of the Covid pandemic (or the Covid hysteria): “…but you are not Zlatan—wear a mask.”

And for those who are not Zlatan, the message is: know your place. What remains are work and family; they must be everything. Since people are treated as a resource to be exploited, it is “natural” that the system will hammer home work, family, and children as primary values—precisely those behaviors that are functional and useful to the system, even when stripped of inner meaning. The spiritual life of the “average” person is meant to be exhausted by identification with the “whole” (the corporation or the state) and a sense of belonging to it. The meaning of life must be reduced to being “useful” to that whole. Preventing personal growth and the emergence of unwanted interests and ambitions is achieved in countless ways. Even in a seemingly democratic world, stress, lifestyle, lack of free time, obstacles to development, endless survival and household burdens, and the responsibility of raising the next generation do not match our ideals of freedom and self-realization—yet they hold the individual firmly within the psychological, social, and economic frame required by the system.

In order to legitimize this standardized model of life as “normal” and “natural” in public consciousness, conservative (corporate, populist) propaganda goes as far as claiming that this view of the human being is the essence of Western culture—allegedly threatened by “neo-Marxists” with their ideas of human rights and social justice. Naturally, the spiritual heritage of Ancient Greece, Renaissance ideals of the Human Being, modern humanism, and other foundational philosophical and social currents of Western culture are simply omitted, as if they never existed. If they appear at all in public discourse, they are labeled “neo-Marxism,” “communism,” or sometimes “extreme individualism,” in an attempt to discredit and uproot them. (In fact, corporate—or oligarchic—propaganda almost always attaches the adjective extreme to terms that denote left social or economic positions. Thus normal left positions are anchored on the far end of the spectrum, while the “center” is moved rightward—but more on that in the following chapters.) In its pursuit of control, corporate-capitalist propaganda tries to install profitable behavioral models in people and declare them “culture,” while any critique of the status quo or exploration of alternatives is denounced as barbarism, decay, and communism.

Just as it uses technology in industry, corporatocracy uses technology on the human being as well. Psychic and social technologies are part of corporatocracy’s anti-human technological paradigm. They serve goals of programming and subordinating society to technocratic and dystopian visions. New advances in psychology, sociology, and information sciences increasingly help place humanity inside a technological matrix, regardless of human will—and sometimes in spite of it. Yet the ambition is for everything to unfold with minimal open conflict. Hence the strategy: values, attitudes, and desires are subtly and covertly replaced, so that the individual is molded according to the plans and whims of social engineers—without ultimately feeling oppressed by the assigned role, and without developing the will to resist the new order. The social engineers aim to replace coercion with psychological conditioning and to transform the human being into a programmable biological unit without will or individuality—serving the “grand” plans of self-intoxicated corporatocrats and technocrats who have crowned themselves “masters of the world.”

Corporate propaganda increasingly pushes the image of the human being as nothing more than a set of biological algorithms. Concepts of Spirit and Soul are denied; even the notions of Good and Evil are undermined; moral relativism is promoted. Free will is reframed as merely a function of biological algorithms—which, of course, makes it unfree and thus “negligible.” This, in turn, can be used to justify interference in human consciousness, violations of human rights, and restrictions on freedom. In the “ideal” world of corporations, there is no longer good and evil, freedom, honor and dignity, inspiration, joy, passion—everything must be replaced by a collective servile euphoria and mindless obedience to rationalism and efficiency.

In the works of the American psychologist B. F. Skinner, these nightmarish visions of the human being and society are presented as objective science and an ideal of development. In his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), Skinner depicts the human being as nothing but a function of the environment. He is the creator of so-called radical behaviorism, which treats the individual as an object to be conditioned with positive and negative stimuli, while ignoring deeper psychological processes and the very idea of an inner self or soul. Although his concepts are officially rejected by much of mainstream science, they are embraced by certain political and business circles and further developed in various centers aiming to achieve control over human spirit and behavior. Behaviorist conditioning is upgraded into psychological programming.

In our era of massive capital concentration, corporations gain increasing power to influence and infiltrate governments, and to subordinate political and business classes to their interests and policies. Corporate fascism spreads covertly on a global scale, eroding democracy and attempting to swallow it completely. This happens through the shrinking of the social role of the state, the trimming of democratic mechanisms, lobbying, corruption, cartelization, monopolistic positions, media manipulation, institutional infiltration, societal infiltration and division into antagonistic classes and groups, pressure on labor markets, public procurement schemes, and more. Democracy is more and more reduced to a façade—a curtain whose function is to sustain the necessary illusions so that everything can proceed relatively smoothly.

Despite living in what are supposedly the richest times in human history, the majority of people have little real choice and, consumed by survival, never reach personal fulfillment. Those who realize this and do not fit the behavioral models imposed by the system—those who refuse to submit—are portrayed as “savages,” “egocentrics,” enemies of progress, and become targets. The system tries to turn them into outsiders and reduce their lives to a battle for physical survival—for themselves and their descendants. Its vise grips the individual in every domain of social life through the dependencies and conditions installed there. These conditions, together with a multitude of techniques—among them the newest advances in psychology and information science—act synergistically to create the matrix of human consciousness, from which individual escape is difficult, even impossible for most.

In the following chapters we will examine how this matrix is imposed through conditions in politics, the economy, society, education, the media, and culture; and later we will focus specifically on strategies of psychological and social control through which the present order takes shape inside our heads.