Jimmy Dore's Theory of Power, Empire, and Political Manipulation

The Weaponization of "Conspiracy Theory"

At the foundation of Dore's worldview is a critique of how dissent is policed through language. The term "conspiracy theory" functions as a dismissal mechanism, deployed against anyone who ascribes conscious intent to people with power. This framing is, in Dore's analysis, fundamentally absurd. People who are wealthy and powerful consciously pursue power and wealth through organized coordination—this is not speculative but observable. There is no imperialism without imperialists, no capitalism without capitalists. Powerful people meet in physical locations to coordinate their interests: in Congress, at Davos, at Bilderberg meetings. These are not shadowy cabals but open, documented gatherings where elites align their agendas.

Moreover, formal conspiracy is not even necessary for coordinated elite action. People from the same educational and professional backgrounds naturally share agendas, worldviews, and class interests. Their alignment emerges organically from shared social formation. The label "conspiracy theory" thus serves a dual function: it deflects scrutiny from the powerful while encouraging regular people to internalize establishment messages and attack their fellow citizens for questioning the official narrative. The establishment's most effective tool is not censorship from above but the cultivation of reflexive loyalty from below.

The Political Economy of Exploitation: Capitalism Unmasked

The Myth of the Free Market

Dore presents a historically grounded critique of free market ideology. The core claim of free market thinking is that ruthless, selfish behavior by corporations produces optimal results for everyone through the mechanism of the "invisible hand." History, however, offers a devastating rebuttal. In 1890, America had what amounted to the closest approximation to pure free-market capitalism. The result was not prosperity and freedom but contaminated food, child labor, typhoid and cholera epidemics, unsafe working conditions, unrestrained monopolies, mass poverty, unemployment, and environmental destruction. This was not a deviation from the free market—it was its logical expression.

Capitalism, Dore argues, works best for capitalists, not for the people who inhabit the country. The belief that one's preferred economic system benefits everyone is conveniently strengthened when that system serves one's own class interests. Those at the top of the capitalist order have every reason to promote the ideology of free markets, because the ideology naturalizes and protects their position.

Capitalism's Tendency Toward Monopoly

Without regulatory intervention, capitalism naturally tends toward monopoly formation. This is not a corruption of capitalism but its inherent trajectory. The contemporary evidence is stark: three major private equity firms—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street—now own most major companies. The economy has consolidated into a structure where a handful of entities control vast swaths of productive activity. The irony Dore highlights is profound: modern capitalism has resulted in centralized power remarkably similar to what its defenders criticize about communism. The concentration of ownership and decision-making in a few private hands mirrors the centralized state planning that capitalists have spent decades denouncing—except the centralization now serves private profit rather than even a nominal public purpose.

Workers' Rights Were Won Against Capitalism, Not Because of It

Dore emphasizes that every major gain in workers' rights and living standards was achieved through organizing and fighting against capitalists, not through their benevolence. Capitalists actively opposed the eight-hour day, the extension of the voting franchise, the abolition of child labor, environmental controls, the secret ballot, Social Security, pension funds, disability insurance, and worker safety laws. The 40-hour workweek, weekends off, vacations, and safety standards all came from workers' struggles against entrenched capital. Prosperity, in this telling, is the product of democratic struggle against the abuses of capitalism rather than the fruit of capitalism itself. Freedom and procedural democracy resulted from people fighting for their rights rather than being granted them by those in power.

The Scandinavian model illustrates this distinction. European countries like Sweden, Norway, and Denmark demonstrate that capitalism can function with strong social safety nets and regulations while preventing monopolies. But these outcomes were not produced by capitalism left to its own devices—they were wrested from it through political organization and collective action.

Wall Street and the Subversion of Alternatives

In one of his more provocative claims, Dore asserts that Wall Street financiers invented communism to destroy socialism. The implication is that authentic socialist movements—workers organizing for democratic control over economic life—posed a genuine threat to capitalist power, and that the authoritarian variant of communism served as both a controlled opposition and a cautionary tale, discrediting the broader left project by association.

The Mechanics of Empire: Class Analysis as the Key

Why Empire Appears Irrational Without Class Analysis

Dore draws heavily on the work of scholars like Michael Parenti and Thorstein Veblen to articulate a class-based theory of imperialism. The economist Kenneth Boulding argued that empire is irrational because it costs more than what the country gets out of it. The British Empire cost Britain more in India than what it extracted. American investment in the Philippines was about three and a half billion dollars, but the U.S. gave them about six billion dollars in aid. On the surface, these ventures appear to be losing propositions.

But this analysis is fatally flawed because it lacks class analysis. Empire appears irrational only when one treats the nation as a monolithic unit with shared costs and shared benefits. The critical insight is that those who benefit from imperial ventures are not the same people who pay the costs. The wealth extracted from imperialism goes to a select few, while the costs are paid from the common treasury of the people. As Thorstein Veblen observed as early as 1909, this division between private profit and socialized cost is the defining feature of imperial economics.

The Division of Costs and Profits

In the British Empire in India, ordinary British working people paid for the cost of empire—funding the military, the colonial administration, the infrastructure of occupation—while the Bank of England and the East India Trading Company received the profits. The same structure persists in American imperialism. When the U.S. military overthrows countries, taxpayers fund the military operations while corporations like Exxon and Shell receive the profits. The public bears the cost; a handful of people get rich. This explains why the U.S. has not won a war in 80 years despite massive military spending—"winning" in the conventional sense was never the objective. The objective is the continuous transfer of public wealth to private hands under the cover of national security.

The Third World as Overexploited, Not Underdeveloped

Dore reframes the standard narrative about global poverty. Most third world countries are resource-rich, yet their populations remain poor. The conventional explanation attributes this to underdevelopment—a lack of modernization, infrastructure, or institutional capacity. Dore rejects this framing entirely. Third world countries are not underdeveloped but overexploited by European and North American powers. Their poverty is not the absence of development but the presence of extraction. The wealth flows outward to capitalist powers, leaving impoverished populations sitting atop rich land. Foreign aid, in this framework, is sardonic theater: it is when the poor people of a rich country give money to the rich people of a poor country. Aid does not remedy exploitation; it lubricates it.

Media as Instrument of Power

The Architecture of Omission

Dore's media criticism focuses not primarily on what mainstream news reports but on what it systematically omits. When mainstream outlets report on attacks against American troops in the Middle East, they do so without addressing why American troops are in the Middle East in the first place. Coverage of retaliatory attacks against American forces omits the context of U.S. bombing campaigns that provoked them. This is not incidental—it is structural. The media frames events in ways that make imperial violence invisible while rendering resistance to it as unprovoked aggression.

The work of Michael Parenti is cited as demonstrating the gap between official narratives and actual political reality. The media does not merely fail to inform—it actively constructs a reality in which the actions of the powerful appear natural, necessary, and benign, while the responses of the exploited appear irrational, barbaric, and threatening.

Internalizing the Establishment Message

The most effective form of propaganda is not the suppression of dissent but the manufacture of consent at the grassroots level. The establishment gets regular people to internalize establishment messages and then attack their fellow citizens who question those messages. This creates a self-policing population in which the powerful rarely need to intervene directly. Citizens enforce ideological conformity on each other, dismissing critics as conspiracy theorists, radicals, or traitors—doing the work of power without being asked.

The Collapse of the Political Binary

What Left and Right Actually Mean

Dore offers precise definitions stripped of cultural baggage. To be left wing means wanting to effect changes in the economic and class structure of a country. To be right wing means wanting to maintain the status quo—a status quo in which 80% of wealth is owned by 2% of the population plus foreign investors. These are structural positions about the distribution of power, not cultural affiliations about social issues.

The claim that the left is inherently atheistic is false, as evidenced by left-wing clergy in Latin America who work among the poor. In Latin America, priests are killed for working among the poor and are labeled as subversives—not because they threaten religion but because they threaten the economic order. The political left includes religious clergy whose commitment to the poor places them in direct conflict with capitalist power, contradicting the manufactured narrative that leftism is synonymous with godlessness.

The Democratic Party's Betrayal

Contemporary Democrats and the liberal class have abandoned traditional left positions entirely. The Democratic Party has become corporatist, authoritarian, anti-free speech, and pro-war. By any meaningful definition rooted in economic and class analysis, the party no longer occupies the left. It serves corporate power while maintaining a veneer of social progressivism that costs its donors nothing.

Binary Thinking as a Tool of Control

Categorizing people as simply left or right plays directly into oligarchs' hands by keeping people fighting each other rather than addressing what matters—the structural concentration of wealth and power. Binary, black-and-white thinking requires less cognitive energy, which is precisely why powerful interests promote binary political categorization. It is easier to dismiss an opponent as belonging to the wrong team than to engage with the substance of their critique. The two-party framework, the culture war, the left-right shouting match—all of these serve to channel political energy away from class analysis and toward tribal identification. As long as citizens are fighting each other over cultural signifiers, they are not examining who owns what, who pays for what, and who profits from what. This is not an accident. It is the architecture of control.