"The genius of capitalism is that it makes the dominated dream in the language of the dominant."
CHAD SHIELDS
The invisible walls
“There are men,” Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, “who go to their graves without having ever questioned anything.”1 He was writing about the colonized subject, about the peasant who accepts the colonial order as the permanent shape of the world. But Fanon’s diagnosis travels further than its original context. It names something broader: the human capacity to mistake a historical arrangement for a natural fact, to live entirely within a horizon that someone else drew.
This capacity is capitalism’s most durable asset. The exploitation the system produces is real and measurable: wages suppressed below the value workers create, housing priced beyond what ordinary incomes can sustain, healthcare rationed by ability to pay. Exploitation alone, however, does not explain capitalism’s persistence. Systems of naked domination have fallen before, when the gap between what exists and what is possible became impossible to ignore. What distinguishes capitalism is that it has largely closed that gap, not by delivering on its promises, but by making alternatives unthinkable. We live within capitalism as a total horizon of possibility, dreaming in its categories even when we strain against its constraints.
I would argue that capitalism maintains power primarily through an act of imagination: by colonizing the aspirational life of the people it exploits, converting structural domination into common sense. True emancipation, therefore, requires something prior to policy or political organizing: a rupture in our perception of what is natural, what is possible, what constitutes a life well lived. Understanding that rupture requires tools that capitalism’s own intellectual tradition cannot supply. We need Fanon’s psychology of colonial subjectivity, Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, György Lukács’s concept of reification, and Lauren Berlant’s analysis of cruel optimism. Together, these let us diagnose not just what capitalism does to our bodies, but what it does to our minds.
The zone of insufficiency: Fanon and the modern worker
The analysis begins where modern capitalism’s critics often hesitate to begin: with the psyche. Fanon, writing from the specific catastrophe of French colonialism in Algeria, was concerned with what domination does to the dominated at the level of self-understanding. The colonial subject, he argued, is not simply exploited materially. They are made to experience themselves as incomplete, as lacking, as existing in what he called the “zone of non-being,” a psychic territory where one’s humanity is perpetually in question.2
The mechanism is worth examining carefully. Colonial power does not merely extract labor and resources; it also produces a particular kind of subject, one who measures their own worth by proximity to the dominant culture. The colonized person learns to see through the colonizer’s eyes, to internalize the terms of their own degradation. The most insidious form of this internalization is aspiration: the desire not to abolish the hierarchy but to ascend it, to become, in Fanon’s analysis, as close to the master as possible. Freedom, in this frame, means becoming more like the people who defined you as inferior.
Some will object immediately: the analogy between the colonized subject and the modern worker is inappropriate. Fanon was analyzing the specific violence of racial colonialism, a system organized not just around labor extraction but around the production of racial categories designed to justify it. This objection is correct and important. Race and class are not interchangeable. The experience of anti-Black racism or colonial subjugation carries specific forms of violence, dehumanization, and historical dispossession that cannot be reduced to economic exploitation. Flattening Fanon risks both intellectual dishonesty and political harm.
And yet: Fanon himself understood his analysis to carry implications beyond its immediate context. The mechanism he identified, the way domination shapes subjectivity such that the oppressed come to measure themselves by the standards of those who dominate them, extends beyond racial colonialism. It describes, more broadly, the psychology of any system comprehensive enough to function as someone’s entire world. The modern worker confronting a labor market they did not design, measured by standards of productivity and wealth they did not choose, told that their value is precisely what the market will pay for their time, inhabits an analogous psychic structure. They are not in Fanon’s zone of non-being in any precise sense, but they occupy something we might call the zone of insufficiency: a condition in which existence is perpetually framed as inadequate, perpetually in need of more output, more consumption, more proof of worth through market performance.
Sixty miles east of the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, where the global supply chain enters Southern California, the warehouses begin around Ontario and run uninterrupted toward the desert. The Inland Empire, San Bernardino and Riverside counties together, holds roughly a billion square feet of warehouse space, the equivalent of more than seventeen thousand football fields. Nearly one in fifteen working people in the region is employed inside one of those buildings.3 On a summer floor in Fontana or Moreno Valley, the temperature climbs past a hundred degrees. Work is timed in seconds. Wages run about a quarter below the regional average. Turnover is engineered into the staffing model. Mount San Jacinto rises to the west, Joshua Tree spreads to the east, both protected as public land, both available to the dominated for the cost of the gas: a horizon of common ownership the colonized imagination has not yet been taught to read politically.
The aspiration that results is the system’s greatest achievement. The person working a warehouse double shift in one of those buildings does not, typically, want to abolish the warehouse. They want to become the warehouse owner. This is the predictable outcome of living inside a total horizon, not a failure of intelligence or political consciousness. When the only stories widely available about a better life are stories of individual ascent within the existing system, that is the only story available to dream.
The architecture of common sense: Gramsci and Lukács
What the warehouse worker confronts is not just constrained material conditions but a foreclosed imagination. Antonio Gramsci developed his concept of cultural hegemony to explain how that foreclosure becomes possible: why subordinate classes so often consent to arrangements that serve dominant interests. Hegemony operates at a deeper level than propaganda, beyond simple lies told loudly enough to be believed. It is the more thorough work of making a particular class's worldview into the common sense of society as a whole, into the background assumptions that organize perception before anyone sits down to think.4
Capitalism operates hegemonically in this sense. Its core assumptions, that work generates worth, that poverty reflects personal failure, that freedom consists in choosing between consumer options, are not typically presented as ideological positions. They are not labeled and defended; they simply appear as the way things are. A child raised in a capitalist society does not learn “capitalism is the best economic system.” They learn to be embarrassed about poverty, to admire the wealthy, to experience time not spent in productive labor as waste. These lessons arrive through family, school, media, and the daily texture of social life. By the time we are old enough to question them, they feel less like ideas than like organs: components of ourselves that preexist our consciousness of them.
This is what György Lukács called reification, and it deserves careful attention because it names something we all experience but rarely articulate.5 Reification is the process by which social relations, things that human beings create and that could be arranged otherwise, come to appear as fixed, objective, and natural: forces of geology rather than products of human choice. The market is the paradigm case. We speak of “market forces” and “market signals” as if the market were a geological formation rather than a set of human institutions governed by humanly-made rules. The “invisible hand” is, of course, a hand. It has fingerprints, and they belong to identifiable people who have made identifiable choices about property laws, labor regulations, and financial architecture. Yet we experience it as something above and outside us, something to which we must respond rather than something we have made and could unmake.
Mark Fisher captured this dynamic with characteristic precision in his account of capitalist realism: the widespread sense that capitalism functions as the very medium of reality itself, not merely one possible economic system among others, such that imagining its end requires greater effort than imagining the literal end of the world.6 Proposals that challenge the terms of the existing system rather than merely negotiating within them begin to feel like errors rather than political options.
The practical consequence is a particular kind of political inertia. When the terms of the existing system feel like the terms of reality, reform proposals that stay within those terms seem responsible and serious, while proposals that challenge the terms themselves seem utopian and naive. The advocate for a higher minimum wage is a pragmatist; the advocate for democratic control over production is a fantasist. This hierarchy of seriousness is itself a product of hegemony. It does not reflect which proposals are more technically feasible. It reflects which proposals remain legible within a worldview that treats capitalist social relations as permanent.
The mirage of mobility: cruel optimism and the aspiration trap
In 2011, Lauren Berlant gave this dynamic its most precise contemporary formulation. “Cruel optimism,” she argued, describes a relation in which the object of desire is itself an obstacle to flourishing: a situation in which we remain attached to possibilities that are actually working against us, not because we are foolish, but because those possibilities feel like the only available way to make sense of our striving.7
The American Dream is the paradigmatic case, and the gap between the expectation and the underlying data is worth stating plainly. Surveys consistently find that most Americans believe they or their children will end up substantially better off than their parents did. The actual data on intergenerational mobility tells a different story: the share of Americans earning more than their parents has fallen from roughly ninety percent for those born in 1940 to about fifty percent for those born in the 1980s, and the United States ranks among the lowest of wealthy nations on cross-national mobility measures.8 The dream of meritocratic ascent is, for most people who hold it, statistically unfounded.
Yet the cruelty Berlant identifies is not simply that the dream is false. It is that the dream is necessary. The person working two jobs while raising children on an inadequate income cannot afford, psychologically, to conclude that the system is rigged and that their efforts are structurally constrained. That conclusion offers no immediate comfort and no immediate alternative. The dream of “making it” supplies what the reality of the situation withholds: a sense of agency, a narrative that connects today’s sacrifice to tomorrow’s reward, a reason to keep going. Berlant is not mocking the dreamer; she is analyzing the function the dream performs and the cost it exacts.
The cost is political. “Hustle culture,” the ideology of individual effort and relentless self-improvement as the solution to structural problems, is not a distraction from capitalism’s contradictions. It is one of capitalism’s primary mechanisms for managing them. When a warehouse worker’s response to inadequate wages is to pick up a side hustle rather than organize with coworkers, the system has succeeded not through coercion but through aspiration. The desire for a better life has been redirected away from structural demands and toward individual performance. The hierarchy remains intact.
The aspiration trap functions because it is not entirely false. Some people do ascend. Some individual efforts do pay off. This is precisely what makes the dynamic cruel rather than simply deceptive: the exceptions are real, and they are continuously amplified, while the structural conditions that make most people exceptions to the exception remain invisible. Every story of individual success confirms the logic of individual striving; every story of collective demand remains marginal, threatening, or simply absent from the culture’s dominant narratives. Each lottery winner is national news. The actuarial table that makes the lottery a tax on desperation is not.
Yet the cruel optimism dynamic is not total, and the gaps are worth naming. There are domains in which Americans, including the same Americans who buy lottery tickets, refuse the lottery logic and accept the actuarial table. The fire department is one. The public library is another. The beach in California, made permanently public by the California Coastal Act of 1976, is a third. Californians who would not tolerate a public option for healthcare will fight a billionaire to the state supreme court over a stretch of sand. The dissonance is the data. It tells us that the colonized horizon is not seamless, that the imagination has already been ceded ground in specific domains, and that the political work ahead is partly the work of extending the vocabulary of the commons into the domains where it has been forbidden.
The semantic prison: what happens when we lack the words
There is a further difficulty, one that compounds every other. If capitalism is the primary language available to us for describing our social world, how do we articulate a world beyond it? Language is not simply a vehicle for expressing pre-formed thoughts; it is the medium in which thinking happens. The concepts available to us constrain what we can think as well as what we can say.
The semantic prison operates through translation. Dissatisfaction with capitalist conditions tends to be converted back into capitalist terms. The person who feels that something is fundamentally wrong with how their time is organized, how their days are spent, what their labor produces and for whom, reaches for the available vocabulary and finds “I need a better job.” The underlying intuition, that the entire structure of wage labor might be the problem, cannot be easily articulated because the words for saying it are not in common circulation. “I need a better job” is immediately legible. “I need a world organized around human flourishing rather than capital accumulation” sounds like a slogan, or an error, or both.
The semantic prison, however, has gaps. Californians know what it means for a thing to belong to everyone and to no one, because they have words and practices for the beach, for the public library, for the urban park, for the museum that charges no admission. The vocabulary of the commons exists in our language, just unevenly distributed. We accept it without strain in some domains and find it unintelligible in others. The question worth asking is why the same person who would defend coastal access against billionaire fence-builders cannot conceive of healthcare on the same model. The words are not missing. They have been allowed to apply only in domains the system has already decided it can afford to cede. The political project is the extension of the vocabulary we already possess into the domains where it has been forbidden.
Fanon noticed something analogous in a different context. Bourgeois society, he wrote, hardens. The categories through which dominant culture organizes experience become fixed, and social life becomes organized around their maintenance. We stop experiencing history as a process still unfolding and start experiencing it as a settled arrangement, as a series of facts rather than a series of choices that could have been made differently and might still be.9
Consider the person who grew up in a house with no outside windows. They would experience the walls not as walls, but as the edge of the universe. Their sense of what is possible, what constitutes space, would be organized entirely by that architecture. Now ask them to describe the outside. They would translate: bigger rooms, perhaps, or different walls. They would reach for the only items available to them. The imagination does not transcend its conditions by wishing; it requires exposure to what those conditions have excluded. This is why the survival of alternative traditions, labor history, socialist thought, utopian fiction, feminist economics, indigenous political philosophy, matters beyond the merely academic. These traditions are windows. They offer the experience of a different set of categories, a different grammar of social life, that makes alternative arrangements legible and therefore thinkable.
Reform, rupture, and the question of decommodification
None of this means that reform is worthless, and precision matters here. Higher wages are better than lower wages. Stronger labor protections are better than weaker ones. Union contracts that reduce the arbitrary power of employers over workers’ lives are genuine victories that matter enormously for the people who win them. The argument is not against reform but about the horizon within which reform operates and whether that horizon itself should be a subject of political contestation.
The limit of purely reformist unionism, what labor historians call business unionism, is that it negotiates better terms within a structure it leaves unchallenged. The wage bargain is improved; the fundamental premise of the wage bargain, that workers must sell their time and capacity to whoever controls capital, is accepted. A better cage is still a cage. This does not mean the workers inside should refuse improved conditions. It means we should not mistake improved conditions for the end of the analysis, or allow the achievement of modest reforms to exhaust our political imagination. Unions should be the beginning of the conversation, not its conclusion.
What lies beyond that conversation is the project of decommodification: the systematic removal of the necessities of human life from the logic of the market. Healthcare, housing, education, time itself: when these are provided as social goods outside the wage relation, the power of the employer over the worker changes fundamentally. A worker who does not fear illness, homelessness, or the inability to educate their children has a categorically different relationship to the labor market than one whose survival depends entirely on maintaining employment. Decommodification is not abstract; the historical and contemporary examples are concrete. Vienna’s municipal housing program provides quality housing to more than sixty percent of the city’s residents through a non-market model. The Nordic welfare states demonstrate that substantial portions of social life can be organized outside market logic.10
The American examples are closer to hand than they appear. The public university, the public library, the national park, the fire department, the public beach, Medicaid/Medicare: each is a domain in which the United States has already decommodified a significant portion of social life and treats the decommodification as natural. The argument that decommodification is foreign to American political culture collapses on contact with the actual American built environment. The question is not whether Americans can accept decommodified goods, since we already have, in many domains. The question is why the political imagination treats the existing examples as exhaustive rather than as precedent.
The answer returns us to where we began: the colonized imagination. When the market has become the medium of reality, proposals to organize life outside it seem to violate something fundamental, to threaten not just economic interests but ontological stability. This is why the political work of decommodification requires the prior work of perceptual rupture: the demonstrated, visceral experience that the walls are not the edge of the universe, that what lies beyond them is not void but possibility.
Starting a new history
Fanon ended The Wretched of the Earth with a call to start a new history. Europe had proposed a model of humanity organized around accumulation, extraction, and the hierarchy of civilizations, and that model had produced catastrophe. The task, he argued, was not to imitate the dominant model but to invent something genuinely new: to produce human beings who no longer dreamed in the currency of their own exploitation.
The task is not less urgent because the horizon we inhabit is capitalism rather than formal colonialism. The mechanism is the same: a total structure of experience that makes itself feel like nature, that converts historical choices into permanent facts, that mobilizes aspiration as a mechanism of control. The first act of emancipation is perceptual. To see the walls as walls.
This recognition does not by itself change anything. Seeing the walls does not open doors; that requires organization, political will, and sustained collective action. But it is the necessary prior condition for wanting them opened, for understanding that what lies beyond is not chaos but another possible arrangement of human social life. Freedom, understood adequately, is not proximity to wealth. It is the collective power to determine the conditions of our own existence: to decide, together, what we will produce, how we will care for one another, and what constitutes a life worth living.
We already dream. The question is whose language we dream in, and whether we are willing to learn another.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 40.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 8-10. Fanon develops the “zone of non-being” as the psychic space produced by colonial racism: a condition in which the colonized subject exists outside the recognition of full humanity that the colonial order reserves for the colonizer.
For warehouse footprint, employment share, and wage data, see UC Riverside Inland Empire Labor and Community Center, "The State of Work: Transportation, Distribution and Logistics in the Inland Empire" (2024), and "State of the Unions: California Labor in 2024" (2025), chapter on Inland Empire warehouse organizing. As of 2023, the Inland Empire contained approximately one billion square feet of warehouse space; the average non-supervisory warehouse worker earns roughly seventy-five percent of the regional average wage; Latinos make up forty-two percent of the regional workforce overall but nearly sixty-two percent of warehouse workers.
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 12-13, 323-343.
György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 83-110. Lukács develops reification through an extension of Marx's account of commodity fetishism in Capital, arguing that under capitalism, social relations take on "the fantastic form of a relation between things."
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009), 1-2.
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 1-2. Berlant’s full formulation: “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.”
For an overview of the gap between American Dream expectations and underlying mobility data in the labor and employment context, see "Developments in the Law — Labor and Employment," 136 Harvard Law Review 1585 (2023), particularly Chapter I on work-life balance. The foundational empirical study is Raj Chetty et al., "The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940," Science 356, no. 6336 (2017): 398-406, which finds that the share of children earning more than their parents fell from roughly 90% for those born in 1940 to 50% for those born in the 1980s. On comparative cross-national mobility and the inverse relationship between inequality and intergenerational mobility, see Miles Corak, "Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility," Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, no. 3 (2013): 79-102.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 314-316.
On Vienna’s Gemeindebau program, see Justin Kadi and Lisa Pellner, “Social Housing in Vienna: Lessons for Other Cities,” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8, no. 3 (2015): 421-436. More than sixty percent of Vienna’s residents live in subsidized or municipal housing; rents are set well below market rate. On the Nordic welfare model as partial decommodification, see Gøsta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 21-29.