Let me tell you something nobody in politics wants to say out loud.
Capitalism works exactly the way it’s supposed to.
That’s the problem.
When you build a system around accumulating capital for the people who own the capital, that’s what you get. More and more accumulating for fewer and fewer people. It’s not a bug. It’s the design. And if nothing pushes back against it, it just keeps going — until the gap gets so big the whole thing becomes unstable.
That’s where we are. And it’s about to get a lot more extreme.
AI isn’t coming. It’s here. And what it does — what it’s already doing — is make it possible to produce more with fewer workers. Which is great news if you own the system. It’s a different kind of news if you are the worker. Because the efficiency gains go up the chain, not down it. They always have. They always will, unless something pushes back.
Now here’s the part people get wrong.
I’m not saying capitalism is evil. I’m not saying we need to tear it down or replace it with something else. I’ve lived long enough to watch that movie and I know how it ends. What I’m saying is that capitalism — left to run without any counterweight — produces a predictable outcome. And that outcome is not good for most of the people living inside it.
So what’s the counterweight?
That’s the question nobody’s organizing around. And it’s the one I keep coming back to.
Here’s the way I think about it. Capital organizes. That’s just what capital does. Pharmaceutical companies organize. Health insurers organize. Banks organize. They hire lobbyists. They fund campaigns. They show up at every hearing, every regulatory comment period, every low-visibility meeting where the real decisions get made. They have staffs with institutional memory. They don’t take election day off. They don’t get distracted by the next news cycle.
They have a long-term plan.
We don’t. And that’s not a personal failing. It’s a structural problem. Ordinary people have jobs and families and a thousand other things pulling at them. They don’t have a lobbying shop. They don’t have a staff. The only organized civic activity most people ever participate in is voting — and voting is one day every two to four years. You can’t run a long-term strategy on that.
Meanwhile the power players are running their strategy every single day of every single year regardless of who wins the election. Because they’re not organized around elections. They’re organized around influence. And influence doesn’t stop when the polls close.
So here’s what I think the actual problem is, and I want to say it plainly.
We act like the answer to organized capital is better politicians. It’s not. Better politicians help. But they come and go. They get voted out. They get distracted. They take the money too. The answer to organized capital is organized people. Not organized around one election or one candidate or one cause — organized across time, across issues, with institutional memory that doesn’t disappear every four years.
Now before I go further I want to get ahead of something. The minute you talk about an organized counterforce to capital, somebody reaches for a label. Socialist. Communist. I want to get there first.
Socialism is government owning the means of production. That’s not what I’m talking about. Under what I’m describing, your doctor stays in private practice. The hospital stays private. The drug company stays private. What changes is that people are organized enough to push back on all of them when they operate against the public interest. That’s not socialism. That’s just symmetry. Capital organizes to represent its interests. People organizing to represent theirs is the exact same move. Call it a parallel, not an opposition.
Now I want to talk about proof. Because this isn’t a theory. We have a hundred years of evidence that organized people work. And we have just as much evidence that capital knows it.
The clearest example is labor. When workers started organizing in the early 1900s — forming unions, going on strike, demanding a share of what their work produced — the response from ownership wasn’t to negotiate. It was Pinkerton agents with guns. It was the Colorado National Guard firing into a tent colony of striking miners and their families at Ludlow in 1914. Thirteen children and women died. It was copper company vigilantes rounding up 1,200 striking workers at gunpoint in Bisbee, Arizona in 1917, loading them into boxcars, and dumping them in the New Mexico desert.
You don’t do that to something that isn’t working. You don’t send armed guards against people who don’t have power. The violence was capital’s own admission that organized people are the one thing that actually threatens concentrated wealth.
But here’s what I want you to take from the labor story. It’s not just a labor story.
Labor figured out how to organize around one slice of life — your job, your wages, your working conditions. And it worked well enough that capital spent a century trying to dismantle it. But the same dynamic that plays out between workers and employers plays out on every issue that affects ordinary people. Every single one.
Your health insurance company denies a claim your doctor ordered. You are one person with a phone and a stack of paperwork. They are a corporation with $22 billion in annual profit, an army of lawyers, and lobbyists on Capitol Hill who have been building relationships with the people writing healthcare law for decades. That’s not a fair fight. It’s the same imbalance as the mine owner and the worker. Just a different arena.
A data center company wants to put a facility in your neighborhood. Hundreds of millions of dollars of investment. Diesel generators running around the clock. Noise. Trucks. Property values. They show up to the zoning meeting with environmental consultants and legal teams and a presentation that took six months to prepare. You show up with your neighbors and whatever you could find on Google the night before. Same imbalance. Different arena.
You need insulin to stay alive. The manufacturer has raised the price 1,200 percent since it was invented. You are rationing doses because you can’t afford the full prescription. They spent $31 million lobbying Congress last year to make sure nobody changes that. You spent nothing because you don’t have a lobbying budget. You have a needle and a vial you’re trying to make last. Same imbalance. Different arena.
School funding. Drug pricing. Hospital consolidation. Housing costs. Campaign finance. Every one of these issues has the same basic structure — a power player with organizational infrastructure on one side and affected people without it on the other. And on every one of these issues, the power player wins the long game not because their position is right but because they are organized and we are not.
People are fighting back on all of these right now. Parents showing up to school board meetings. Neighborhoods organizing against data center siting. Patients pushing back on prior authorization denials. Workers forming unions at rates not seen in fifteen years. The energy is there. The anger is real. The ground-level knowledge of what these systems actually do to real people is irreplaceable.
But it keeps burning out. Because fighting back without infrastructure is like building on sand. Every campaign starts from scratch. Every victory has to be defended again two years later when the administration changes. Every group of organizers eventually exhausts itself and disperses and the knowledge they built goes with them. Meanwhile the power players are still there. Same staff. Same relationships. Same long-term strategy. Just waiting.
That’s where the modern version of suppression lives too. It moved out of the streets and into the boardrooms a long time ago. The guns became lobbyists. The Pinkertons became law firms that specialize in keeping workers from organizing. And when that wasn’t enough, capital wrote it all down in a plan.
In 2023 the Heritage Foundation published a 920-page document called Mandate for Leadership. Most people know it as Project 2025. Written with a $22 million budget, by over 100 conservative organizations, largely by former Trump administration officials. Among other things it is a detailed operational plan for dismantling organized labor in America.
Not in general terms. Specifically.
It calls for allowing states to ban unions outright — even breaking existing contracts mid-term. It would make it illegal for employers to voluntarily recognize a union even when the majority of their own workers want one. It proposes creating company-controlled fake unions to replace real ones. It calls for gutting the budget of the National Labor Relations Board — the federal agency whose only job is to protect workers’ right to organize. And it would allow corporations to hire union-busting consultants in secret, so workers being pressured during an organizing drive would have no way of knowing who was behind it or how much was being spent against them.
Here’s the detail that tells you everything about why they felt the need to write it. At the time Project 2025 was published, workers were winning union elections at the highest rate in fifteen years. Seventy percent win rate. People were organizing and it was working. So capital did what capital has always done when organized people start to win — it organized harder. Just in boardrooms and policy documents instead of in the streets.
The Pinkertons were visible. You could see them coming. Project 2025 is 920 pages of dense policy language that most people will never read. Same goal. Designed to be invisible to the people it targets.
And Project 2025 is one document about one slice of the problem. There are equivalents in healthcare. In pharmaceutical pricing. In data center regulation. In campaign finance. In every arena where organized money meets unorganized people. They all have their version of a long-term plan. We have election cycles.
Now here’s something I want to be direct about. Because it matters for understanding what we’re actually trying to do here.
We don’t have a position on what the right answer is on any particular issue. Not on healthcare policy. Not on what to do about drug prices. Not on how your community should handle a data center proposal. Those conclusions belong to the people living with the consequences.
But here’s what I do believe. Every issue has a most reasonable answer. The data points there whether anyone names it out loud or not. The problem is that most people never get the chance to find it — because the information they need is buried, the conversation is fragmented, and the system that’s supposed to represent them is oriented toward the people funding it instead.
We don’t know what the American people actually think about most of these issues. And honestly neither do they. Not because people are stupid or checked out — but because the fragmentation is deliberate. A divided public can’t organize. A public that’s fighting with itself doesn’t look up at the institutions extracting value from it. Keeping people in separate information silos that feel like communities but function as traps — that serves concentrated power. It always has.
Look at what happened on tobacco. On leaded gasoline. On seat belts. The public didn’t move on those issues because someone told them what to think. They moved when accurate information became widely available and the deliberate confusion installed by the industries profiting from the harm started to break down. The conclusion found itself. It always does when the conditions are right.
The conditions are what’s missing. Not the intelligence. Not the will. Not the anger — God knows there’s enough of that. What’s missing is the infrastructure that lets people find the conclusion the evidence is already pointing toward. The organized long-term counterforce that doesn’t burn out between elections. The table where the real conversation can happen over years instead of news cycles.
Labor figured out how to build that for one slice of life. It worked well enough that capital has spent a century trying to dismantle it — and is still trying, in 920-page policy documents most people will never read.
The question is whether we can build it for all the other slices too.
That’s the gap. That’s what I got frustrated enough to try to do something about.
Whether it works is up to all of us.
This article was researched and drafted with AI assistance under human review. See our full AI and editorial practices.