By Musa T. Bey

Introduction: This System Was Never Meant to Heal Us

Capitalism is not broken. It is operating exactly as designed—a system built to dominate, dehumanize, and dispossess. It was born from slavery, colonization, land theft, genocide, and enclosure. Its DNA is parasitic, feeding off human labor, land, and spirit. But what is less often confronted—even in radical spaces—is that capitalism is not just an economic structure. It is a psychological regime, a totalizing way of being that manipulates minds and shapes emotions to serve power.

It conditions us to love our chains. To internalize self-hatred. To view suffering as normal. To blame ourselves for our pain. It programs us to fear collectivity, worship productivity, and numb ourselves through consumption. And through this psychic warfare, it ensures its own reproduction—even as it crushes bodies, spirits, and the earth itself.

This article is a revolutionary indictment of the psychological and pathological warfare waged by capitalism. It is a call to awaken the revolutionary mind—not just in thought, but in spirit. Because no movement for liberation can win unless it breaks capitalism’s hold on our hearts, habits, desires, and dreams.

I. Capitalism’s Psychological Warfare: Break People to Rule Them

From the slave plantation to the modern workplace, capitalism has always understood that in order to control bodies, it must first conquer minds. It trains people from birth to accept hierarchy, to submit to authority, to distrust others, and to silence their own instincts.

This psychic assault takes many forms:

• Alienation: People are cut off from their own labor, creativity, emotions, and community. The worker becomes a machine, the consumer a number, the child a future laborer.

• Fear: From the threat of unemployment to the violence of police and debt, capitalism keeps people afraid—afraid to rest, to organize, to speak, to dream.

• Self-blame: Depression? Your fault. Poverty? You didn’t hustle. Burnout? Try self-care. Capitalism depoliticizes suffering, treating collective trauma as personal failure.

The result is a population that can’t see its own oppression—or worse, defends the very system that devours it.

II. The Capitalist Mind is a Colonized Mind

For the colonized, especially Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples, capitalism is not a neutral economic model—it is a continuation of war. It was forced onto our ancestors through chains and guns, and now it is maintained through media, policing, and cultural domination.

This system has invaded our psychology with toxic myths:

• That our worth is tied to productivity

• That rest is laziness

• That joy must be earned through suffering

• That we are replaceable, disposable, and only valuable when we perform

This is internalized capitalism, and it is a sickness. It kills the imagination. It turns us against ourselves and each other. And it is reinforced every time we measure our lives by metrics of money, status, and grind.

Revolution begins with the decolonization of consciousness. It demands we unlearn everything capitalism taught us about our worth, our power, and our purpose.

III. Capitalism’s Manufactured Madness: The True Cause of the Mental Health Crisis

Under capitalism, mass mental illness is treated as a coincidence. But we know better. Depression, anxiety, addiction, suicide, isolation—these are not personal malfunctions. They are symptoms of a genocidal system that mutilates the human spirit.

You are not broken. The world is. A system that forces millions to work themselves to death while a few live in obscene luxury is not sane. A society that polices trauma with prisons, schools, and forced labor is not healthy. The madness is structural.

And yet, instead of dismantling the system, capitalism offers therapy apps, pharmaceuticals, and individual “self-care” rituals—band-aids on a bullet wound. What we need is not coping, but collective revolt.

IV. Capitalist Patriarchy and the War on Intimacy

Capitalism’s rule is reinforced through the destruction of love, care, and kinship. Patriarchy is not a side effect—it is a weapon. By dividing labor along gendered lines, criminalizing tenderness, and turning households into units of survival, capitalism ensures its emotional reproduction.

Men are taught to conquer, not connect. Women are expected to care, but never rest. Queer and trans people are targeted for refusing to obey these scripts. This emotional regime creates intimacy dysfunction, abuse, isolation, and intergenerational trauma.

But revolution is also emotional insurgency. To build a new world, we must practice a new way of being—one rooted in cooperation, care, vulnerability, and the destruction of gendered domination.

V. Media, Technology, and the Digital Plantation

Capitalism has mastered the science of consent. Through media, surveillance, and algorithmic manipulation, it shapes how people feel, think, and act—without them ever realizing it.

Social media turns self-expression into branding. News outlets manufacture fear and confusion. Advertising exploits insecurities. Surveillance technologies monitor every click, purchase, and scroll. We are not free—we are being managed.

This is the digital plantation. It doesn’t just steal data—it programs behavior. It weaponizes distraction to disorganize dissent. It rewards conformity and punishes resistance.

Revolutionary consciousness must pierce through this fog. It must teach people how to see clearly, feel deeply, and remember what it means to be human in a system designed to turn people into machines.

VI. The Spirit of Resistance: Capitalism Cannot Heal What It Was Built to Destroy

Capitalism is spiritually dead. It desacralizes the earth. It turns ancestors into statistics, sacred lands into profit margins, rituals into commodities. It severs our connection to the divine, to the collective, and to our own inner knowing.

But our people carry ancient memory. Our ancestors resisted empire, even in chains. They prayed, they rebelled, they loved each other through the worst horrors imaginable. That spirit lives in us.

Revolution is not just strategy—it is ceremony. It is remembering the sacredness of life, the power of collective joy, the healing in shared struggle. We must fight not only for survival but for wholeness, for liberation that is emotional, spiritual, and ancestral.

VII. Building the Revolutionary Human: Healing as Political Warfare

We do not need to become better capitalists. We need to become revolutionary humans—rooted in history, fearless in imagination, and grounded in collective care.

To do this, we must:

• Build revolutionary mental health practices rooted in abolition, collective care, and anti-capitalist healing

• Create spaces for political education that reveal the system’s psychological grip and train people to break it

• Practice emotional militancy—refusing to numb ourselves, refusing to turn on each other, refusing to perform for empire

• Reclaim joy, rest, creativity, and community as weapons against burnout and despair

• Train a new generation of organizers who understand that the battle is waged in both the streets and the soul

Liberation is not a lifestyle brand. It is not self-help. It is not mindfulness without militancy. Liberation is the destruction of a system that feeds on human suffering, and the construction of new life in its place.

Conclusion: We Are the Storm, and We Are the Cure

Capitalism will not fall by critique alone. It must be unmasked, uprooted, and overthrown—in our economy, our culture, and our minds. The ruling class fears more than armed resistance—it fears healed, connected, politicized communities who can no longer be manipulated, divided, or bought.

The Left Black working class, the colonized, the incarcerated, the queer and trans poor, the landless peasants and freedom dreamers—we are the bearers of a new world. We are not broken—we are the proof that even centuries of empire cannot kill the desire for freedom.

Let us rise—not just in protest, but in practice. Let us build not only barricades, but schools, clinics, kitchens, and revolutionary relationships. Let us reclaim our minds, our bodies, and our futures from this dying empire.

Because we are not here to reform capitalism.

We are here to bury it.