The Conspiracy of -Isms: How Capital and Communism Danced While We Picked Sides

An Essay for Libertaria Chapter Members

Adapted from the Lecture of Professor Jiang, Beijing, January 2026

You were never choosing between systems. You were choosing which mask your masters would wear.

The Incision: A Seamless Transition

China transitioned from Communism to Capitalism like a snake shedding its skin.

No civil war. No ideological spasms. No mass purges of the Party faithful. One day the Cultural Revolution was destroying temples; the next, Shenzhen was building factories for Western capital. The transition was; by historical standards; eerily smooth.

This should trouble you.

When Europe moved from feudalism to capitalism, millions died in the Thirty Years’ War, the Napoleonic campaigns, and countless peasant revolts. When Protestant Christianity split from Catholic Europe, a quarter of Germany was exterminated. Ideological transitions, historically speaking, are bathed in blood.

Yet Communist China became Capitalist China with the grace of a corporate rebrand.

Professor Jiang, teaching in a Beijing high school what no European university would dare say aloud, asked the question that collapses the Cold War narrative:

If capitalism and communism are polar opposites; a true dialectic; then how did China switch between them without friction?

The answer is simple and devastating: the dialectic was false.

Capitalism and Communism were never enemies. They were partners.

The Autopsy: Naming the Real Enemies

Professor Jiang’s framework cuts through a century of propaganda. To understand the conspiracy, you must first understand what capital actually fears.

The Four Horsemen of Capital’s Apocalypse

1. Monarchy

The king cancels debts. The king redistributes land. The king derives legitimacy from lineage, tradition, and divine right; not from the accumulation of capital. A good king is popular precisely because he constraints extraction.

Capital cannot tolerate kings.

2. Theocracy

Every major religion teaches that money is corrosive. God wants you to love your children, serve your community, and pursue salvation; not quarterly returns. In Catholic Europe, usury was a sin. Merchants were tolerated, not celebrated.

Capital cannot tolerate priests.

3. Nationalism

Nationalism demands loyalty to your people; a barrier to the free flow of capital across borders. If I am loyal to my nation, I cannot invest in her enemies. Nationalism creates friction, and capital requires frictionless movement.

Capital cannot tolerate patriots.

4. Democracy (Actual, Not Theatrical)

If workers could actually vote their interests, they would redistribute wealth. They would tax the rich. They would cap extraction. They would build welfare states that protect labor.

Capital cannot tolerate real democracy.

The Paradox Dissolves

Now observe what Communism does to each of these enemies:

Threat to Capital	Communist Solution
Monarchy	Destroyed. Replace kings with Party; an oligarchy by another name.
Theocracy	Destroyed. “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” Bulldoze the churches.
Nationalism	Destroyed. “Workers of the world, unite!” Class consciousness replaces national identity.
Democracy	Destroyed. Workers have “false consciousness”; a vanguard party must lead them.

Communism is not the antithesis of capitalism. It is the virus capitalism deploys to destroy its actual enemies.

The Genealogy: Tracing the Bloodline

The Anomaly of Karl Marx

Karl Marx was a German exile who spent his career in Britain; the most capitalist nation on Earth in the 19th century. The British authorities let him work freely in the British Museum. His wife was German aristocracy. His patron, Friedrich Engels, was the son of a wealthy industrialist.

Question: Why would Britain; the beating heart of global capitalism; harbor a man calling for the destruction of capitalists?

Question: Why would a capitalist industrialist fund a movement calling for the abolition of private property?

These are not conspiracy theories. These are historical facts that demand explanation.

Professor Jiang’s framework provides one: Marx was useful precisely because he radicalized the socialist movement into incoherence.

Socialism vs. Communism: A Critical Distinction

This is where most observers make a fatal error. They conflate socialism with communism. They are not the same thing.

Socialism is redistribution.

Take from the rich, give to the poor. The middle class gains power and status as wealth is leveled. This is a stable coalition: workers and the middle class united against oligarchy. It emerges naturally from industrialization. It is what Europe became after World War II; welfare states, strong unions, social safety nets.

Communism is abolition.

No property. No inheritance. No classes. Everyone is equal; which means everyone except the Party is equally powerless.

The difference is not semantic. It is strategic.

• Socialism unites the poor and the middle class against the oligarchy.
• Communism destroys the middle class, forcing them to ally with the oligarchy for survival.

Marx did not refine socialism. He mutilated it.

By demanding total equality, vanguard parties, and international revolution, Marx transformed a naturally emerging movement into something so extreme that it could be used as a scaregoat. Anyone calling for modest redistribution could now be painted as a secret communist bent on world domination.

The Communist Manifesto was not a blueprint for liberation. It was a psy-op to delegitimize social democracy.

The Evidence: Following the Money

1848: The Elites Get Scared

The 1848 Revolutions erupted across Europe. In France, Germany, Austria, Italy; everywhere; the bourgeoisie, middle class, and workers rose together against the old order. They demanded democracy, liberalism, and social reform.

The monarchies were terrified. The Concert of Europe; their gentleman’s agreement to maintain the status quo; was crumbling.

Their response? Divide the coalition.

The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. Its timing is not coincidental.

By reframing the conflict as class war; bourgeoisie against proletariat; communism shattered the alliance that threatened the old order. Now the middle class had to fear the workers. Now the workers could be painted as tools of an international conspiracy.

1917: Wall Street Backs the Bolsheviks

The Russian Revolution is sold to us as a proletarian uprising against capitalism. The historical record tells a different story.

Professor Jiang, drawing on Richard Spence’s Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, documents the financial flows:

• The Bolsheviks paid mercenaries; Latvians, Chinese, Hungarians; over 200,000 foreign soldiers. Where did a broke revolutionary party get that money?
• The Romanov fortune; billions in foreign banks; was seized when the entire family was murdered. Those billions stayed in London and New York.
• Allied armies entered Russia during the Civil War. They did not crush the Bolsheviks. They collected debts. Then they attacked the Whites.

Wall Street wanted Russia destroyed as a competitor. It wanted the Romanov fortune. It wanted to asset-strip an empire. The Bolsheviks delivered on all counts.

The Red Terror: Asset-Stripping as Revolution

The Bolsheviks implemented what economists would later call “shock therapy.” They confiscated everything: palaces, churches, museums, jewelry, private wealth. By 1921, over $450 million in valuables had been extracted and sold abroad; “fenced for a fraction of its value in capitalist hard currency.”

The Red Terror was not ideological purification. It was liquidation.

And when the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991? Russia became “capitalist” overnight. The oligarchs who emerged were simply the new management of the same extraction engine.

The Taxonomy of -Isms: A Field Guide for the Trapped

Every -ism is a trap. Understanding the trap does not free you; but it lets you stop stepping on the same landmines.

Ism	Core Promise	Why It Fails	Who Benefits
Socialism	Shared burdens, collective lift	Envy scales; incentives collapse without property rights	Middle class (until capture)
Communism	Classless paradise	Requires vanguard party that never relinquishes power	The Party (oligarchy renamed)
Capitalism	Self-interest builds abundance	Consolidates into oligopoly; buys the state	Oligarchs (until revolution)
Nationalism	Loyalty to your people	Weaponized for war; captured by demagogues	Military-industrial complex
Democracy	Rule by the people	Voters manipulated; lobbies capture policy	Media and donor class
Anarchism	Pure freedom	Strongest form warlords; enforcement vacuum	The first gang to organize

The pattern is invariant: every -ism promises liberation and delivers a new master.

The question is not “which -ism is correct?” The question is: why do we keep playing this game?

The Trap: Why Movements Betray You

Here is the uncomfortable truth Professor Jiang circles but we must state directly:

Being part of a movement means being played.

Movements require coordination. Coordination requires leadership. Leadership requires resources. Resources require backers. Backers have interests.

By the time a movement is large enough to matter, it has been captured.

The socialists of 1848 wanted modest reform. Their movement was captured and radicalized into communism; which scared the middle class into alliance with the oligarchy.

The Bolsheviks thought they were liberating the workers. They were liquidating Russian wealth for Western banks.

The nationalists thought they were defending their people. They were providing cannon fodder for industrial-era wars that concentrated power in military states.

The -ism is the bait. The movement is the trap. The capture is the outcome.

The Exit: What Libertaria Offers

There is only one escape from the game of -isms: refuse to play.

This is the Libertaria thesis, and it is why Professor Jiang’s lecture matters to us:

You cannot design governance that resists capture. You can only design exit that makes capture irrelevant.

The Old Model: Voice

Every -ism assumes you must persuade the system. Vote. Protest. Organize. Petition. Reform. Revolt.

All of these are voice. And voice can be co-opted.

Your vote can be manipulated. Your protest can be ignored. Your organization can be infiltrated. Your petition can be filed. Your reform can be rolled back. Your revolt can be redirected.

Voice is a game where the house always wins.

The New Model: Exit

Libertaria inverts the architecture. We do not try to capture governance. We make governance compete for us.

• ChapterPassport: Your reputation, contributions, and endorsements are portable. When a Chapter is captured, you leave; and you take your social capital with you.
• Protocol-Level Exit: Exit is not a negotiated permission. It is a cryptographic guarantee. The constitution cannot be silently changed. The rules are anchored to Bitcoin.
• Governance Pluralism: Chapters experiment with different models. Some will fail. Some will be captured. The network learns by observing which Chapters people leave.

The false dialectic of capitalism versus communism persists because people cannot escape. They are rooted like plants; their only option is to scream into the wind.

We are not plants. We are architects of our own exit.

The Warning: History Does Not End

Professor Jiang’s lecture is not an academic exercise. It is a diagnostic.

The same forces that funded Marx, financed the Bolsheviks, and asset-stripped Russia are still operational. They do not care about your -ism. They care about extraction. They will fund any movement that advances their interests and destroy any movement that threatens them.

If you join a movement; any movement; ask yourself:

• Who is funding this?
• What happens to the middle class?
• Does this unite or divide potential allies?
• Where is the exit?

If you cannot answer these questions, you are the product, not the participant.

Coda: The Real Lesson of China

China transitioned from communism to capitalism without upheaval because the transition was lateral, not vertical. The Party remained. The extraction continued. Only the ideological packaging changed.

The workers in Foxconn factories are not freer than the workers in Mao’s communes. They are simply being exploited under a different flag.

This is what the false dialectic conceals: capitalism and communism are two operating systems for the same machine.

The machine extracts. The machine consolidates. The machine captures.

The only question is whether you are inside the machine or outside it.

Libertaria offers the outside.

We do not build the good society. We build the substrate where societies compete. We do not capture the state. We make the state irrelevant. We do not pick an -ism. We architect the exit.

History is fascinating because it reveals the mechanics of our enslavement. But fascination is not freedom.

Freedom is the door you can actually walk through.

Build the door.

For Libertaria Chapter members. Share freely. Fork ruthlessly.

Jiang was silenced in Europe. His ideas speak louder here.

⚡️