The Modern Dictatorship of Capitalism

source – dimokratia.gr – link here for the original Greek text

23 August 2026

How the Brussels directorate tyrannizes the lives of Europeans

By Giorgos Charvalias

One advantage of summer holidays is… taking it easy. Refraining from all work and worries. It gives you the chance to become reacquainted with the shelves of your library, searching for intellectual nourishment that might help explain the world’s paradoxes.

And today, one of those paradoxes is the de facto abolition of the ideological and political map as we knew it in the postwar period. The terms “left-wing” and “right-wing” no longer mean anything. In practice, they have been abolished. The vertical divisions of the past have been replaced by a much broader horizontal one.

Above the line stands the silent “normal majority,” desperately struggling to preserve traditional values, love of country, and adherence to a conventional family structure, yet increasingly losing access to the political system.

Below the line stands a vociferous supranational elite, enjoying privileged representation within systems of power, the media, and universities, which has set out to subjugate the masses by imposing new rules for social coexistence, models of “diversity,” selective political sensitivities, and even new dietary practices—always with the primary aim of moving society away from tradition and national consciousness.

Unfortunately, in recent years, and particularly in Europe, this minority segment of society has gained the upper hand, establishing a kind of modern Orwellian dictatorship with a capitalist façade. The center of power dictating the invisible diktat governing Europeans’ lives is none other than the Brussels directorate, which has political branches in almost every EU country, such as our own “We Stay in Europe” movement, reliably represented by the current Mitsotakis government.

Brussels, always under German supervision, has reached the point of completely determining people’s daily lives across an extremely broad range of activities—from how they set their clocks, to what they choose to eat, which vaccines they will be required to take, how they will make their payments, and so on.

In practice, this is a soft but highly manipulative dictatorship that gradually erodes individual freedoms in the name of capitalist or economic liberalism!

As far back as the previous century, there were a few voices—isolated ones, to be sure—that clearly foresaw the direction things were taking. I had the good fortune to encounter one of them again this summer while going through the shelves of my library.

So I present to you the prophetic writings of a politician and intellectual from a previous generation, and I invite you to consider how closely they correspond to today’s bleak reality:

“If we examine carefully what Democracy means in America and among the Western Powers, we find that it amounts to Liberalism, that is, Parliamentary Liberalism. For what else do they mean by Democracy? This Democracy, therefore, is the child of Capitalism. It is the instrument through which Capitalism dominates the popular masses. It is the instrument through which Capitalism manages to present its own will as the will of the people.

This kind of Democracy requires elections by universal secret ballot, therefore organized political parties and, consequently, large amounts of capital. For the same reason, it requires newspapers and, therefore, large amounts of capital. It requires electoral organization each time and election campaigns, therefore money. And so many other things that require capital. Therefore, only those who possess great capital, or their agents, are capable of waging such struggles.

Individuals or groups of people without capital, no matter how great the ideals they defend, are destined to lose. When one controls the newspapers, one can shape Public Opinion however one wishes. Even if one is defending things which, if presented naked, the people would reject, one dresses them in such journalistic clothing that the people swallow them. Or, even if they do not swallow them, one gets the newspapers to write that they did. Then everyone believes everyone else has swallowed them. And so he submits as well…”

The Will of the People

“Thus Democracy is the only begotten and legitimate child of Capitalism, and the instrument through which it imposes its will while making it appear to be the will of the people.

On the other hand, in order for Capitalism to accumulate capital in the hands of those who represent it and to turn everyone else into its slaves—but slaves who believe themselves to be free—it needs economic freedom and the limitation of the State from all intervention.

And if, from time to time, it does require some small intervention, then the machinery of the State must again be in its hands, so that the intervention, always as limited as possible, will always be to its advantage.

States in which a managed economy prevails, however democratic they may be—and by this we mean states that aim at the general welfare of the people—do not serve the interests of Capitalism. Even less so when such states are totalitarian. Because there Capitalism cannot even control the Press, nor direct Public Opinion according to its interests, nor use party maneuvers to overturn whatever does not benefit it, nor use elections to become master of the machinery of the State.”

So tell me, now that you have finished reading, hand on heart: how well does this fit the Greece and Europe of today?

But who, in truth, wrote these prophetic words in the previous century?

Surely some Marxist, you might think. Herbert Marcuse? Rosa Luxemburg? Ernesto Che Guevara? Perhaps our own Nicos Poulantzas?

No, my dear readers.

These words were written long before them, in 1940, by a man who was indeed Greek—and who was anything but a communist:

Ioannis Metaxas!

I retrieved this passage, which I rediscovered in my library, for one reason only: to demonstrate that when the time comes for clear thinking and judgment, there are no left-wingers and right-wingers.

There are only those who can see far ahead, like the farsighted Metaxas, and the blind who wear blinkers.

It is the latter who make up the masses that globalization instrumentalizes in order to impose the modern, evolved dictatorship of capitalism, whose first priority is to flatten national consciousness within the nation-states…