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CJ Hopkins: We Can Be the Seeds of the System’s Destruction

A conversation about global capitalist totalitarianism and how to resist it

Debbie Lerman

Apr 29

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I had the pleasure and privilege recently of speaking with CJ Hopkins, one of my favorite writers and public intellectuals. CJ is a great satirist of our time, making me laugh, even while I contemplate with horror the dark direction in which the world seems to be headed.

(The interview is in two parts, due to Zoom issues.)

Part 1

Part 2

I’m publishing the interview today, April 29, 2025, to celebrate the official publication of CJ’s newest book: Fear and Loathing in the New Normal Reich. Order your copy today! Also, read CJ’s article about the new book.

We spoke about the global capitalist system in which, according to CJ, we all live – and what we can do to counteract its seemingly inexorable evolution into totalitarianism. Here is a pdf of the full transcript:

DL Interview With CJH

278KB ∙ PDF file

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The following are highlights of our conversation, in CJ’s words.

THE EVOLUTION OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM – NOT ALL GOOD OR BAD

People need to understand I’m not an enemy of capitalism. We have been trained more and more these days to think in black and white terms – something is either good or it’s bad. History doesn’t work that way. Power doesn’t work that way. Systems don’t work that way.

Capitalism was born from the age of absolutism, from the time when it was the Church and the Kings and monarchs and the aristocracies that determined what reality was and what our values were going to be. Capitalism was born out of that world. And what it did is it decoded all of those old absolutist or despotic values, and it wiped them away, and it replaced them with a value system that is based on the market.

So instead of the King or the Church or some tyrant or despot determining what our values are, the market determines what our values are. And the market has really only one value, which is exchange value.

What capitalism does as an ideological force, is it moves into societies, it wipes away those old values, and it transforms those societies into marketplaces, where the only real operative value is exchange value.

This gets complex, because I’m not an enemy of capitalism. When I say capitalism moved in and it decoded all these old values, I'm talking about values like racism and sexism and all sorts of discrimination and oppression – capitalism was the force that said: OK, we’re not going to operate according to those values anymore. We’re going to wipe those values away.

You can’t transform a society into a marketplace without transforming the people in that society into consumers. And when you strip the monarchies and the despotisms of power, and you re-situate power within the marketplace, democratization comes along with it. So democracy and capitalism are inextricably linked.

There are the democratic principles and rights that we have, which absolutely were and continue to be inextricably linked to the expansion of global capitalism and to the formation and evolution of this global empire that we all live in. That does not mean that power, that the system, the empire, will not set those rights aside whenever it needs to.

This is part of the evolution that I’m talking about. Those rights were absolutely essential during global capitalism’s expansion, during its struggle against Naziism, against Communism, it was very important for us all to believe that the side that we’re on is the side that guarantees us these democratic rights, and that upholds these principles. That ended in 1989 and the early 1990s. The system now has no reason to continue to guarantee us those rights, because there is no external adversary that is offering us another option. We’re all stuck here.

And so part of what’s happening is the system is saying to us: yes, you have those rights, and you will continue to have those rights, because we want you to be consumers, we need you to be consumers, and so we need you to be free to a certain extent, and have liberty and so on. Unless you start to create a problem. Unless you start to rise up and push back and get in our way and interfere with our continued evolution. If you start to do that, we will take those rights away from you in a heartbeat. And we will remind you that you’re living in an empire, and you do not have the power. We have the power, and we will lock you in your home, and we will make you wear a silly mask on your face, and we will inundate you with propaganda, and we will do whatever we want to you. So wouldn’t you rather stop resisting, and go back to the mall and watch Netflix and have a nice time as a consumer?

THERE IS NO CONSPIRING ELITE BEHIND GLOBAL CAPITALISM

If you’re as old as I am, you come from a world where we were trained when we were looking for power, and looking for tyrannical power, to look for something that was centralized. We were looking for a dictator, or we were looking for a cabal, or a conspiracy, a group of people who were orchestrating things. And it’s just not the world that we’re in anymore.

I don’t think that the people who are administrating the system are irrelevant. The system doesn’t operate without the people that administrate it. What I’ve always said is they are absolutely essential, and they are utterly interchangeable. It really doesn’t matter who they are. It doesn’t matter what family they come from, it doesn’t matter what country they come from. None of this stuff matters. They are fulfilling functions. They are performing roles within the evolution of the system. And they are performing the roles and the functions that the system needs them to perform. And if they are not performing those functions, then they will be replaced with someone else who will perform those functions.

Maybe I can just give an example that will piss a lot of people off. I’ve used Elon Musk as an example of this. If you look at the role and the function that Elon Musk has played since he jumped onto the scene, he and all of his global capitalist partners: Elon Musk didn’t buy Twitter. Elon Musk and an incredible number of global capitalist entities and Saudi royalty and oligarchs bought Twitter. X Holdings Corp is the name of the company.

When they bought Twitter, at that point, it was completely delegitimized, and people saw it as infiltrated by government censors and woke ideologists who were censoring people and deplatforming people and what have you.

So Musk comes in, he “buys Twitter” and announces: OK now it’s going to be “free speech Twitter,” it’s going to be “free speech X.” But I think it’s actually more censored, more visibility filtered now than it ever was during the days of bad old Twitter. He didn’t create a free speech platform. But what he did is he rebranded a product. And the rebranding was brilliant: it went from the old woke Twitter to now it’s the hard right, far right Twitter.

What Musk did, his role, his function within the system: he corralled this right wing populist resistance energy, he corralled it into a market demographic, and started relentlessly advertising to it, propagandizing it, and just pumping out messaging, and in essence, he neutralized it.

There was back in 2016 and during the Covid era, there was this amorphous, undefined resistance force that was pushing back. Yes, a lot of it was coming from the right, but there were also old lefties like me, and people from all over the spectrum, that were pushing back. Musk’s takeover of Twitter and everything that has happened since went a long way to corralling and containing the right-wing populist resistance. And it fed seamlessly into the MAGA movement when Musk went MAGA with Trump and what have you. And if you look now, that energy is completely neutralized, it’s completely contained, it’s completely manipulatable. It is no longer dangerous to the system.

What I’m trying to get at: this was not an evil conspiracy on the part of Elon Musk. I don’t care about whether Elon Musk even knows what he’s doing. But if you look at the moment when he comes on the scene, and this happened with Twitter and with that right wing populist resistance, what happened is exactly what the system needed to happen at that point.

WHAT CAN WE DO TO DISRUPT THE GLOBAL CAPITALIST TOTALITARIAN SYSTEM?

People hit me with that all the time. And people get angry with me and say: what do you suggest, CJ? What’s the solution, what’s the answer? And I don’t know what the answer is. But I do know one thing: If we cannot apprehend what we’re actually dealing with – there is no solution. There is no way to fix anything if we can’t even see the system that we’re living in, and how it’s operating and how it’s evolving.

Voting cannot change the system anymore

The one thing that could be done, that would have to be done, to make the electoral system in the United States meaningful in any way is to somehow put a Chinese wall around the elected government in terms of money and corporate influence and control. In the U.S., by the time you’re voting for someone, you’re voting for people who have already been bought and paid for. Those are your choices.

The only way to get around that is to somehow create a system where those who are serving in government, whether in Congress or what have you, have to have a Chinese wall around them in terms of money and corporate power and influence. How do you get there? I have no idea how you could possibly get there from here.

Resistance comes from the values we want to live by

I think the fundamental problem comes down to values. I’ve described global capitalism and the evolution of global capitalism as this ideological machinery that wipes away all values and replaces them with a single value, which is exchange value, which is the value of the marketplace. It wipes away values.

The resistance comes from the values that it has been wiping away. It comes from people with religious values. It comes from people with social values. It comes from people with traditional values. And this is a reactionary resistance, and I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. It’s a resistance saying: We want to hold on to our old values. We don’t want global capitalism to wipe them away and turn us all into interchangeable consumers.

Inevitably, if we ever get to the point where we can have an intelligent discussion about what’s actually happening, people will have to ask the question: How can we impose values on this global capitalist system that we live under? Being such a heterogeneous population – just look at the United States, at how conflicted and heterogeneous it is, and then expand that throughout the entire world. How do we get to a point where people can start restraining the forces of the global capitalist system based on their values? Based on values that they decide democratically?

I don’t know how we get there, but I know that if we cannot see what we’re actually up against, if we can’t see how the system that we all live under operates, and where it is going, and how it is evolving, we’re never going to get to a place where we can explore those questions.

I like to think of the weirdos like us as a contrast to the reactionary forces that are trying to stop the evolution, stop the advancement, of global capitalism. I understand these reactionary forces, I don’t condemn them, I understand them: they’re pushing back trying to retard it and trying to hold on. I don’t see myself that way. I see myself more as one of the seeds of death that’s inside the system as it evolves. And that perhaps, through my writing and talking and thinking and contaminating people, perhaps I’m influencing the way that the system ultimately reaches its ultimate form and what becomes possible after it collapses. Which, every system eventually does.