I. The Currency of Obedience: Why We Keep Feeding the Hands That Starve Us
We don’t just pay with money.
We pay with obedience.
Obedience is the most stable currency in human history.
Empires have risen on it. Religions have sanctified it. Corporations have gamified it.
It’s the invisible transaction that happens before any coin changes hands — the nod, the bow, the quiet “yes” that keeps the machine humming.
Post-structural thinkers like Foucault and Deleuze saw power not as a towering building but as a network.
Power doesn’t simply crush you from above; it flows through you, shapes your habits, defines your desires.
Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle, warned that obedience is disguised as participation.
We believe we’re active citizens, but in reality, we’re spectators in a theatre where the script and stage belong to someone else.
Even rebellion becomes part of the performance, folded neatly into the spectacle itself.
We obey because we’ve been taught to see obedience as survival.
To keep feeding the hands that starve us, we’re convinced those hands are also protecting us from something worse.
And when your cage is comfortable enough, you stop noticing the bars.
The first act of rebellion isn’t refusing their food.
It’s refusing their menu.
II. The Banquet of Bones: A Short History of Cannibal Capitalism
Capitalism is a clever carnivore.
It doesn’t just eat resources — it eats people.
Not in the pulp-fiction sense of gnashing teeth, but in the grinding machinery of debt, rent, wage-slavery, and burnout.
The “banquet of bones” stretches back centuries:
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The colonial empires that devoured continents under the guise of “civilizing missions.”
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The industrial age’s hunger for child labor and expendable bodies.
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The modern gig economy’s quiet, algorithmic feast on the time, attention, and mental health of millions.
In every era, the rich dine on the marrow of the poor.
What changes is the cutlery.
Where once there were chains and whips, now there are contracts and non-disclosure agreements.
Where once there was the overseer’s lash, now there’s the polite email with “per my last message.”
Cannibal capitalism is polite at the table but ruthless in the kitchen.
It will serve you as the main course, and you to tip the chef.
Obedience is the oldest currency in human history — empires, religions, and corporations have all been built on the quiet “yes” that keeps the machine humming.
III. Luxury as Violence: The Soft Power of Excess
Luxury is often painted as harmless — a private indulgence, a personal taste.
However, in a world of scarcity, luxury is always a matter of politics.
Every champagne fountain is fed by a dry well somewhere else.
Every couture gown carries the ghost of the underpaid seamstress.
Every rare gemstone has a history soaked in conflict.
Luxury functions as soft power — the kind that seduces rather than strikes.
It creates a visual language of distance: the rich float above, untouchable, while the rest watch from below, hypnotized by the shimmer.
Debord would say luxury is one of the most perfect spectacles — a visual display of hierarchy, performed in slow motion.
Its beauty is a screen that hides the violence beneath.
Post-structurally, luxury is a signifier — a symbol that doesn’t just represent wealth, but enforces it.
To desire luxury is to internalize the hierarchy it’s built on.
To flaunt it is to participate in the ritual humiliation of everyone excluded from it.
If poverty is a wound, luxury is the salt.
IV. Revolutions in Velvet Gloves: When Resistance Becomes Fashion
Rebellion sells.
Capitalism will sell you the shirt of the revolution, the book of the resistance, the Spotify playlist of the uprising.
Velvet-glove revolutions look radical, but their softness betrays their function: they’re safe, market-friendly rebellions that allow you to feel subversive without changing a thing.
We’ve seen it before:
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Punk as a cultural grenade in the ‘70s, now sold as pre-ripped jeans in luxury boutiques.
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Che Guevara’s anti-imperialist face is printed on sweatshop-made T-shirts.
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Counterculture symbols turned into corporate logos.
Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zone offers a counter-move: moments and spaces that slip under the radar of power, existing outside the spectacle’s gaze, even if only briefly.
True resistance lives here — in the unbranded, the uncommodified, the gatherings too small or strange to be monetized.
When resistance becomes fashion, it becomes a product.
The danger is not that people will wear the symbol — it’s that they’ll stop doing the work.
Style without struggle is just cosplay.
Real revolution doesn’t ask if it’s photogenic.
It gets dirt under its nails.
It loses sleep.
It risks the one thing fashion will never be: comfortable.
V. The Anarchist’s Dessert: Sweet Revenge and Other Tasty Metaphors
If capitalism is the banquet, rebellion is the dessert course — not because it’s frivolous, but because it’s the most satisfying bite.
The anarchist’s dessert isn’t literal cake; it’s the taste of flipping the script.
It’s the stolen lunch hour.
The rent strike.
The graffiti on the CEO’s billboard.
The moment you turn their rules against them and savor the silence that follows.
Dessert is never about survival. It’s about pleasure.
And rebellion needs pleasure.
Without joy, it calcifies into dogma; without sweetness, it becomes another flavorless ideology.
Post-structurally, the anarchist’s dessert is a semiotic disruption — a playful, creative act that defies the expected order.
It says: If the system is going to consume me, I will take a bite out of it first.
Bey’s TAZ reminds us that some of the sweetest acts are temporary — pop-up utopias of resistance where joy and defiance merge into one ungovernable moment.
The system can’t digest these moments because they dissolve before they can be packaged.
The sweetest revenge isn’t watching the empire burn.
It’s watching it choke on its own excess while you dance in the smoke.
Luxury is never harmless — every champagne fountain is fed by a dry well somewhere else.
Closing Feast: Refusing the Menu
Eat the Rich is more than a slogan.
It’s a refusal — a refusal to keep playing host to systems that will happily devour us in return for the illusion of safety.
To eat the rich isn’t about literal cannibalism (though, given climate collapse, who knows what’s on the future menu).
It’s about reclaiming hunger as power, turning obedience into dissent, and transforming luxury’s velvet ropes into nooses for the status quo.
Debord warned that the spectacle feeds on our passivity. Bey offers the antidote — temporary spaces where the spectacle can’t reach us. The challenge is to keep creating them until they connect, until they stop being temporary.
We live in a world where the rich are the chefs, the waiters, and the owners of the dining hall.
They write the recipes, set the table, and decide who gets fed.
To eat the rich is to storm the kitchen, burn the menu, and start cooking something of our own — something messy, nourishing, and impossible to sell back to us in a brand-new box.
And when the feast is over, there will be no dessert.
We’ll save that for the next empire.
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