Flies in the Spiderweb

History of the Commercialization of Existence—and Its Means

By: Jorge Majfud

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

“Flies in the Spiderweb is a remarkable book, a powerful denunciation and a harbinger of everything we are experiencing in today's world.”
Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Flies in the Spiderweb analyzes the narrative hijacking of the modern world from the origins of capitalism to the current post-capitalism. In this journey, the author revisits the birth of private property as a particular and exclusive civilizing paradigm and the commercialization of human and environmental existence as dominant traits of the contemporary individual, passing through the exportation of a northwestern “new man” to the rest of the world through northwestern imperialism, the destruction of the free market, slavery, the imposition of Anglo-Saxon culture, the dehumanization and continuous massacres of colonized peoples in the Global South, to arrive at the narrative of progress, freedom, democracy, and the Free World. The author develops his analysis from the perspective of a historical dynamic (Reverse Progression Model) by which power elites appropriate the expansion of independent or critical ideas, just as feudal lords appropriated liberalism and then slave masters appropriated corporate democracies until they imposed the current economic dictatorships, administered by financial corporations. All this under the narrative of freedom and human rights, which is why the “most brutal empires of the Modern Age were proud democracies.” To operate, social elites will alternately hijack feudal and monarchical models through the imposition of a convenient narrative dogma; especially through the media and fossilized institutions such as churches, governments, parliaments, justice systems, advertising agencies, secret agencies, international banks, the issuance of global currencies, and all kinds of institutions tasked with managing the fluctuating interpretation of the dominant dogma.