Why India Needs a No Kings Movement: From Fascist Corporatocracy to Partyless Democracy

Posted on 30th October, 2025 (GMT 11:30 hrs)

A Brief Reflection On Power, Corporatocracy, And The Dream Of A Partyless Democracy

Authored by Partyless Society⤡

ABSTRACT

This essay traces the global and Indian convergences of authoritarian populism, corporate capture, and digital surveillance through the metaphor of kingship. Beginning with the “No Kings” movement in the U.S., it reinterprets democracy as an anti-monarchical ethic — a practice of shared sovereignty rather than submission to personality cults. Through Modi’s curated spectacle of power, the text exposes India’s descent into corporatocracy, pseudology, and ecological tyranny. It ultimately envisions a “partyless democracy” rooted in decentralization, mutual care, and invisible leadership — a republic without kings, parties, or masters.

The “No Kings” protests emerged as a massive, decentralized democratic uprising that culminated on October 18, 2025, when more than 7 million people across 2,700+ locations in all 50 U.S. states, Washington D.C., and several international cities gathered to reclaim the moral centre of democracy. Organised through the collective platform NoKings.org⤡, the movement declared that it was “not a protest against one man but against monarchy in all its modern forms.” Participants wore yellow, symbolizing hope, structural reform, and civic renewal, and marched peacefully under banners reading “No Thrones. No Crowns. No Kings.” Adhering strictly to non-violence, the gatherings combined music, art, and community dialogue to resist the convergence of political populism, corporate power, and digital authoritarianism. The movement’s essence lay not in partisanship but in principle — affirming that democracy is not a spectacle of top-down rulers but a practice of shared sovereignty from the bottom up.

“Bhakti in religion may be a road to salvation of the soul. But in politics, ‘Bhakti’ or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.” — Dr B.R Ambedkar, Speech in the Constituent Assembly of India on 25 November 1949, during the final adoption of the Constitution of India.

I. Where It Begins

When millions across the United States recently marched under the banner “No Kings”, they were not merely protesting a man with a proper name “Trump”— they were resisting an idea: that democracy can coexist with kingship. Their chant was both historical and prophetic — a revival of the revolutionary creed that the people, not a person, are sovereign.

The movement began as a defiant response to Donald Trump’s transformation of democracy into an authoritarian spectacle. What united millions across 50 states was not just opposition to one leader, but a deeper awakening: that the presidential system itself was mutating into monarchy. With military parades, billionaire patronage, white supremacism, war mongering, climate denialism and lawlessness masked as populism, the U.S. seemed to drift toward the very tyranny it once overthrew in its fight to uproot British colonialism.

Under banners reading “No Thrones. No Crowns. No Kings.”, people reclaimed the forgotten language of civic virtue — insisting that democracy must be lived, not performed. Their protests were not a festival of anger but an act of remembrance — a rediscovery that power, once concentrated, becomes its own religion.

India, projected as the world’s “largest democracy”, needs that reminder even more urgently today.

II. The Return of the King

Over the past decade, India has witnessed the slow metamorphosis of democracy into monarchy without a crown. The Modi regime has fused religious extremism, jingoistic nationalism, and crony corporate capitalism into a seamless ideology of control. The leader is no longer a representative but a redeemer — a divine “non-bio-logical” (?!) patriarch whose image adorns ration cards, vaccine certificates, and temple walls alike.

Parliament has become a coronation chamber. Open-ended debate has been replaced by decree. Dissent has been criminalized as “anti-national” sedition, and institutions once meant to check power now kneel before it. What was once the republic of reason has become the empire of manufactured emotion.

The social cost has been immense. Muslims are turned into permanent suspects as so-called “second class citizens”, Dalits into disposable citizens, and women into bearers of fortified purity rather than freedom. The NRC–CAA–NPR triad has bureaucratized exclusion: citizenship reduced to paperwork, belonging made conditional. In a cruel inversion, the poor must prove they exist, while the rich inherit legitimacy by default. This is not governance — it is the caste system reborn in digital form. Journalists, whistleblowers, activists and students now operate in an atmosphere of mass surveillance, censorship, fear, hatred and intolerance.

India is indeed in the state of an undeclared emergency.

III. The Surveillance State

Parallel to this consolidation of power is the creation of a digital panopticon. The DPDPA (Digital Personal Data Protection Act) and the proposed SIR (Special Intensive Revision) of electoral rolls expand state and corporate control over citizens’ data and docile bodies, or bodies condensed into encoded data. Surveillance, once justified as security, has mutated into a tool of subjugation.

Every Aadhaar-linked transaction, biometric scan, and social media post is mined for patterns of compliance. Data replaces dialogue; algorithms replace accountability. India is being re-engineered into a database of subjects, not a community of citizens.

In the name of efficiency, we are being monitored into obedience.

At a deeper level, this marks a transformation in the very nature of power. As Foucault observed, the sovereign’s sword has been replaced by the biopolitical gaze — the state no longer needs to punish bodies when it can program minds. Arendt reminds us that power is born only when people act together; once isolated by fear or data surveillance, citizens cease to be political beings. The modern “king” is not the ruler who commands armies, but the algorithm that commands consent.

IV. Corporatocracy and Cronyism

Economically, India has drifted from capitalism into corporatocracy — a regime where chosen conglomerates rule, and citizens are reduced to consumers. The Adani–Ambani-Piramal nexus epitomizes this capture: a state that serves its selected tycoons rather than its people.

Ports, airports, railways, media networks, energy grids, and even political parties have been swallowed by crony and monopoly capital. In this merger of money and power, the line between public office and private interest has all but vanished.

Beneath this visible merger lies a subtler tyranny: the political economy of obedience. Debt, bankruptcy, waiving off the loans taken by superrich wilful defaulters, welfare conditionalities, and digital credit scoring have replaced the whip as instruments of control. The poor are disciplined through paperwork and promises, while the powerful are indemnified through bailouts and policy. Corporate welfare has become the new divine right, and austerity the punishment for ordinary citizens who dare to dream.

The Farmers’ Movement of 2020–21 represented India’s inaugural No Kings uprising in spirit—an ostensibly leaderless, decentralized rebellion that resisted both state and party authority. Its self-organization, mutual aid networks, and moral clarity embodied a profoundly direct democratic ethos—not in chaos, but in solidarity. However, the state responded with repression, propaganda, and betrayal, ultimately compelled to yield to the farmers’ demands. The persistent tragedy of growing farmers’ suicides serves as a silent obituary for our agrarian soul.

V. The Culture of Totalitarianism

Politically, we have entered an era of totalitarian populism — power disguised as people’s will. Propaganda has replaced policy; devotion has replaced dialogue. The state narrates itself as divine and infallible, while citizens are infantilised into believers.

Universities are colonized by ideology, cinema weaponized into propaganda, and history rewritten to glorify kings, religious extremism and erase dissenting rebels and syncretic ethos. Fear and flattery sustain the new order: question the ruler, and you are anti-national; praise him, and you are rewarded with patronage.

The result is a feudalism of the 21st century — not of lineage, but of capital. The richest 1% controls over 70% of the nation’s wealth, while millions live in precarity. Temples rise, but hospitals decay. Statues soar, but schools and universities crumble.

In contemporary India, the distinctions between state, government, and nation have collapsed into a single monolithic entity — the Bharatiya Janata Party, embodied almost entirely in the figure of Narendra Modi. The BJP today functions not merely as a political party but as the financial, ideological, and symbolic infrastructure of the Indian state itself. According to data from the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), the BJP’s declared income for FY 2023–24 stood at ₹4,340 crore — nearly three-fourths of the total income of all national parties combined. Its total assets exceed ₹6,000 crore, while its election expenditure alone accounts for over two-thirds of all spending by national parties. The now-scrapped Electoral Bonds Scheme revealed the scale of corporate capture behind this dominance: the majority of opaque donations flowed directly to the BJP, often from conglomerates simultaneously benefitting from state contracts and regulatory leniency. As a result, the boundary between ruling party and state treasury, between public governance and partisan interest, has dissolved. Modi’s image now saturates systemically corrupted welfare schemes, infrastructure projects, and even vaccine certificates, transforming political representation into personality cult. India has thus entered a phase where one party equates itself with the nation, and one man with destiny — a conflation that marks the transition from democracy to theocracy of power.

Narendra Modi’s public image is an empire of optics — built as much on propaganda as on polished surfaces. From his monogrammed ₹10-lakh pinstripe suit to his rotating collection of luxury sunglasses, pens, and high-end watches, every accessory functions as a symbol of curated power. His official convoy includes a custom-built Range Rover Sentinel and a Boeing 777-300ER aircraft — nicknamed “Air India One” — modified at a cost exceeding ₹8,000 crore, rivaling the presidential jets of major powers. These extravagances contrast sharply with his crafted image of austerity and self-sacrifice. The spectacle of simplicity — fasting on camera, meditating in caves before elections — is meticulously choreographed for mass devotion. What emerges is not a statesman but a spectacle-manager, whose governance is inseparable from self-promotion. Modi’s authoritarian personality thrives on projection: an endless cycle of visual dominance, symbolic control, and emotional manipulation. His sunglasses shield not the eyes from light, but the ruler from reflection — a metaphor for power that sees everything yet refuses to see itself.

Narendra Modi is not merely a politician but a master of deception — a sovereign whose power rests on the deliberate construction of falsehood. His grand promises — ₹15 lakh in every bank account, two crore jobs annually, “acche din” across the nation — have long receded into the background as spectacle replaces substance. Through choreographed appearances, relentless media saturation, and the fusion of political leadership with celebrity branding, he has built a world where myth overtakes reality, and image eclipses accountability. This is not ordinary lying but pseudology — a system of manufactured illusions that converts politics into performance. When the ruler’s image becomes the only measure of governance, citizens are reduced to spectators, managed through emotion rather than empowered through participation. What results is a monarchy of marketing, where truth becomes a slogan, dissent a disturbance, and democracy a televised ritual of consent. The “King Liar” thus emerges not as an aberration but as the logic of a new political order — one in which the spectacle of power permanently replaces the practice of democracy.

Yet India’s deeper inter-cultural memory carries within it potent antidotes to this cult of power. The Bhakti and Sufi traditions — from Kabir’s defiant loom to Lalan Fakir’s wandering ektara, from Basava’s vachanas to Gandhi’s spinning wheel — all sang the same timeless truth: that divinity knows no hierarchy and freedom admits no masters. In their idiom, the cry “No Kings” is older than every empire and younger than every uprising — a rhythm of perpetual rebellion. It reminds us that the soul of politics is not power but participation with accountability; that the highest form of sovereignty is the one that is shared.

“No Kings” was not rebellion but devotion to truth — a refusal to bow before either crown or caste. These subaltern changemakers foresaw the danger of what we now call totalitarian populism: the worship of power disguised as faith.

V.a. The Machinery of Manufactured Mandates

India’s electoral process — once the sanctum of democratic will — now stands compromised by opacity, coercion, and technological manipulation. The BJP’s sustained dominance rests not merely on popular consent but on an intricate architecture of electoral engineering: from EVM opacity and selective VVPAT audits to digital microtargeting through Aadhaar-linked databases and state-controlled media ecosystems. Allegations of booth capturing, voter suppression, and data-driven profiling have become routine, while the 2019 and 2024 elections revealed patterns of voter roll tampering and statistical anomalies that defy transparency norms. The Electoral Bonds scheme further hollowed out the principle of electoral fairness by converting corporate bribery into anonymous legitimacy. As opposition parties and civil society have repeatedly noted, the Election Commission’s silence and complicity mark the death of institutional neutrality. What emerges is not the free mandate of a people but the managed consent of a marketplace — vote-chori as policy, not exception. In this landscape, elections no longer express the republic’s will; they perform its illusion.

V.b. The Saffronized Judiciary and the Manufacture of Legitimacy

If elections sanctify power, the judiciary now baptises it. Once envisioned as the moral compass of the Republic, the Indian judiciary has been transformed into the ceremonial arm of executive sovereignty. What was once a counterweight has become a collaborator. The Ayodhya verdict, which rewarded illegality with divinity, marked the symbolic coronation of faith over fact — the moment when constitutional reasoning surrendered to majoritarian theology. The abrogation of Article 370, and the prolonged silence on hate crimes and custodial excesses have since deepened this pattern of judicial abdication.

As detailed in Once in a Blue Moon’s analyses, this transformation is not accidental but systemic — a saffronization of jurisprudence disguised as judicial restraint. Under Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, the Court speaks the language of liberty while legitimizing laws that entrench digital authoritarianism, such as the Digital Personal Data Protection Act and the expanding architecture of biometric surveillance. In public discourse, Chandrachud presents himself as a reformer; in judicial conduct, he normalizes the surveillance state, the algorithmic courtroom, and the slow burial of habeas corpus under procedural delay. His legacy, as the articles note, is one of performative liberalism masking structural servility — a court that cites Ambedkar while serving the new Manu.

The descent began earlier with Justice Ranjan Gogoi, whose tenure epitomized the trade between judicial loyalty and political reward — culminating in his post-retirement Rajya Sabha seat. Yet the malaise now exceeds individual careers: it is the institutionalization of fear and favour. The collegium system functions as an opaque priesthood; sealed covers replace transparency; and contempt laws are weaponized to discipline dissenting lawyers, journalists, and citizens. The judiciary, which once claimed to be the guardian of constitutional morality, has become a curator of executive legitimacy.

The crisis is not merely of corruption but of conversion — from a secular constitutional court into a sacralized arbiter of the Hindutva state. What we are witnessing is not a failure of justice but its theocratic rebranding. Judicial delay, selective urgency, and moral evasion now function as tools of governance. The courtroom has become the new durbar: dissenters are punished as heretics, and obedience is rewarded as wisdom.

In this theatre of sanctified submission, the judiciary no longer interprets the Constitution — it consecrates the ruler. India’s saffronized judiciary thus completes the circle of post-democracy: elections manufacture mandate, media manufactures consent, and courts manufacture legitimacy. The rule of law has been replaced by the law of rule.

VI. The Ecological Question: Kingship Over the Earth, Not Kinship With the Earth

Corporatocracy is not only a political danger but an ecological catastrophe — a regime that mistakes dominion for development and consumption for un-civilization. The same ideology that sacralizes rulers also sanctifies extraction. Forests, rivers, mountains, and minerals are no longer seen as living commons but as royal assets — to be leased, mined, and monetized in the name of progress and development as subscribed by the WB-WTO-IMF extortionist trio’s debt-traps. In this model, the earth is not a living mother to be nurtured but an empire to be conquered. The climate crisis, then, is not a natural disaster but a political theology of domination — the outcome of treating nature as a subject under the crown of capital.

From Adani’s coalfields in the Hasdeo forests to Vedanta’s mining ambitions in Niyamgiri, and now to the colossal Great Nicobar Project, India’s ecological zones have become sacrifice zones — territories offered at the altar of capital where indigenous life, fragile ecosystems, and biodiversity are traded for quarterly profits. The Nicobar project, presented as a vision of “strategic development,” proposes mega-ports, military bases, airports, and smart cities over one of the most biodiverse and seismically sensitive regions on Earth — home to the Shompen and Nicobarese tribes, mangrove forests, and coral reefs that act as natural climate shields.

Climate denialism and extractivism thus form the twin pillars of the new monarchy of capital: one hides the crisis, the other harvests it. Environmental clearance becomes ritual obedience; displacement, a metric of growth; and the destruction of indigenous habitats a symbol of “national progress.” The republic has been replaced by a resource empire — a kingdom that thrives on conquest, not coexistence.

Against this, a partyless democracy must also be an ecological democracy — one that restores reciprocity between humans and the earth. Self-rule cannot end at the ballot; it must extend to the biosphere. The village forest, the watershed, and the atmosphere itself must be reclaimed as political entities — commons with their own rights and custodians. To say “No Kings” is therefore to refuse not only political sovereignty but ecological tyranny.

The cry of “No Kings” is inseparable from the cry of the earth itself — a plea for kinship over kingship, for stewardship over ownership. Only when the soil, the river, and the air are treated as fellow citizens in the republic of life can democracy transcend its anthropocentric illusion and become truly planetary.

VII. The Ethos of No Kings

To understand why No Kings resonates across continents, we must see it not as an American spectacle but as a global rebellion against hierarchy itself.

Its ethos is clear:

Power must always remain answerable, not absolute.

The people are not a chorus for leaders, but creators of their own future.

Democracy is not the periodic worship of rulers, but the daily practice of equality.

The movement’s decentralized model — thousands of autonomous, self-organized gatherings — mirrors the very world it seeks to build: participatory, horizontal, and plural. It is prefigurative politics — the revolution not deferred to the future, but enacted in the present.

A No Kings movement in India would draw from this spirit, fusing it with indigenous traditions of self-rule: the panchayat, the gram sabha, the anarchic communitarianism of Gandhi’s “oceanic circles,” and the solidarities of Dalit–Adivasi resistance.

The deeper philosophy of “No Kings” is not nihilistic but natal — an Arendtian faith in the human capacity to begin again. Against Nietzsche’s will to power, it asserts Gandhi’s will to self-rule; against Foucault’s governmentality, it insists on the ethics of mutual care. Every assembly that deliberates without hierarchy enacts a small resurrection of the political.

VIII. Beyond the King: Towards a Partyless Democracy

To demand No Kings in India is not merely to replace one regime with another — it is to reimagine the structure of governance itself. Political parties, once instruments of democracy, have become its gatekeepers. Elections have become marketplaces of emotion, where power is auctioned to the highest bidder.

A partyless democracy — envisioned by thinkers from Jayaprakash Narayan, Rajni Kothari to Vinoba Bhave — is not utopian nostalgia. It is an urgent necessity. It demands that decision-making return to the local: the ward, the village, the collective, the tangible community. It privileges participation over representation, cooperation over competition, commons over corporations.

The anarchist intuition remains prophetic: power corrupts not because people are bad, but because power isolates. The solution is not better rulers, but fewer rulers — and more citizens capable of self-rule.

To make this vision tangible, one must imagine federations of local assemblies, cooperative digital platforms, and citizen data trusts — spaces where decisions flow upward from the commons rather than downward from authority. The future of democracy will not depend on institutions alone but on ethics: a culture where freedom and care coexist, where equality is practiced, not proclaimed.

A partyless democracy is not the absence of organization but its radical democratization. It replaces hierarchy with federated coordination: rotating councils, transparent digital forums, and cooperative decision-making. Disagreement becomes deliberation, not division. Leadership exists, but only as facilitation — temporary, accountable, and recallable. The grammar of power changes: from ruling to relating.

Across the world, experiments like Russia’s Mir communes, Israel’s Kibbutz, Rojava’s democratic confederalism and the Zapatistas’ autonomous municipalities have shown that governance without kings or centralized leaders — and without parties — is possible. They govern through assemblies, not armies; through rotation via “Right to Recall” and Referendums, not representation. These movements, though small, reveal that decentralization is not chaos but choreography — the rhythm of a society that governs itself.

The infrastructure of freedom must now be rebuilt in code and community. Cooperative digital architectures — open-source, non-extractive, transparent — can embody the ethics of self-rule. Economic democracy must accompany political democracy: production by cooperatives, not conglomerates; data as commons, not commodity. Only then can technology serve the republic rather than replace it.

IX. The Tao of Invisible Leadership

Long before the contemporary state codified power into bureaucratic hierarchies, the Tao Te Ching offered a radically different conception of leadership — one rooted in humility, compassion, empathy, invisibility, and alignment with the natural order. Lao Tzu’s ideal ruler, the sage-king, does not command obedience or manufacture consent. S/he leads by withdrawing — governing so lightly that the governed scarcely feel governed at all. “When the best leader’s work is done,” says Chapter 17, “the people will say: we did it ourselves.”

This principle of invisible leadership resonates profoundly with the dream of a partyless democracy. In contrast to the neoliberal obsession with charisma, visibility, and central authority, Taoist governance affirms the politics of absence — a quiet, self-effacing facilitation where power circulates, not concentrates. The wu wei (effortless action) of leadership is not indifference, but an ethical refusal to dominate. It means creating conditions for self-organization rather than enforcing compliance.

In this light, the true statesman is not the one who performs sovereignty, but the one who renders sovereignty unnecessary. The best polity, like water, sustains all without striving, and occupies the lowest place. It corrects without coercion, nourishes without possession.

Taoist political philosophy thus converges with the anarchist and Gandhian intuition: that leadership should vanish into collective strength, and authority dissolve into cooperation. The “No Kings” ethos, at its most profound, is not the abolition of coordination but the disappearance of command. It is what Gandhi glimpsed in his “gram swaraj,” what Vinoba Bhave practiced in the Sarvodaya villages, and what Lao Tzu described as leading without leading.

In an age of algorithmic power and performative populism, the Tao’s counsel feels almost subversive. It reminds us that the more visibly leaders lead, the more invisibly citizens are ruled. A genuine republic must invert this equation — cultivating the invisible art of collective agency. When people reclaim that quiet strength, the leader’s role, like the Tao itself, becomes everywhere present yet nowhere imposed.

That is the essence of No Kings: the politics of disappearance, the leadership of letting-go — where the republic does not shine through its rulers, but through the radiant ordinariness of the governed.

X. Reclaiming the Republic

The Indian Republic was never meant to be a temple of obedience. It was conceived as a living dialogue between freedom and responsibility — fragile, plural, and therefore beautiful. That promise has been betrayed, but not extinguished.

To say No Kings today is to reclaim that dialogue — to restore the Republic’s forgotten grammar of plurality. The Constitution envisioned India not as a single, uniform organism but as a Union of States — a federation bound by consent, not coercion; by plurality and diversity, not domination. Against this spirit, the present regime has sought to standardize the nation into a monolith: one flag, one faith, one market, one commodity, one leader. The federal mosaic has been replaced by a unitary empire, where the Centre behaves like a throne and the States are reduced to obedient vassals.

To affirm the Union of States, then, is itself an act of resistance. It is to remind the rulers that sovereignty in India was meant to flow horizontally through cooperation, not vertically through command.

To say No Kings is to reject both divine rule and digital rule, both the monarch and the algorithm. When the State behaves like a king, when corporations become its courtiers, and when citizens are reduced to data points — the only moral act left is disobedience.

The true Republic will not be built in Parliament or party offices. It will rise from assemblies of care, from federal solidarities, from networks of mutual aid that reanimate the cooperative spirit of the Union.

Let the Republic return to its circle. Let the gram sabha be the Parliament, the forest the Constitution, the river the Bill of Rights. Let the Republic once again become a union of differences, not a uniform marketplace of obedience. For the world does not need more rulers — it needs more relations.

No Kings. No Parties. No Masters. Only People.

That is not a slogan — it is a summons.

Appendix: The “No Kings” Mobilisation — Structure, Sponsorship, and the Neoliberal Paradox (Post-Democratic Reflections)

The “No Kings” wave represents a striking case of twenty-first-century mobilisation: vast in reach, decentralised in appearance, yet reliant on a national organisational backbone. While thousands of local volunteers ran events independently, coordination infrastructure—digital platforms, toolkits, legal support—flowed through a coalition centred on NoKings.org and allied groups such as Indivisible. Indivisible’s publicly available records indicate multi-million-dollar grants from major philanthropic actors, including the Open Society network, helping explain the movement’s logistical reach. Such funding is not inherently problematic, yet transparency remains uneven: NoKings.org lists no donor ledger, and the existence of a partisan No-Kings PAC blurs the boundary between civic movement and electoral apparatus. The outcome is an ambivalent formation—a genuine democratic surge still shadowed by the branding and capture logics it strives to resist.

Yet this ambivalence is symptomatic of a deeper paradox of our time — the revolution with sponsorship. In the neoliberal age, dissent no longer merely contests power; it often arrives pre-packaged within the circuits of capital that fund, frame, and broadcast it. Revolt becomes a form of revenue. Protest movements, even when anti-establishment, operate within a terrain managed by philanthropic foundations, data platforms, and media economies that thrive on visibility. What emerges is not pure hypocrisy but structural entanglement: a revolutionary will constrained by managerial infrastructure.

The crisis of the Left and Right—each reflecting the other’s extremes—further compounds this. Under the lens of woke identity politics, the moral grammar of inclusion often mirrors the disciplinary tone of the very authoritarianisms it opposes. Speech codes replace censorship, social branding replaces deliberation, and the rhetoric of safety mutates into a new form of surveillance. Thus, the anti-authoritarian begins to resemble the authoritarian—not in motive, but in mode: both rely on policing, purity, and fear of contamination.

In this light, the “No Kings” movement stands as a mirror of post-democratic performance. It channels a legitimate yearning for decentralised power while revealing how even rebellion is subsumed into the political economy of attention. As Colin Crouch observed, post-democracy preserves the rituals of participation while draining them of substance. Protest becomes a licensed spectacle, livestreamed but leashed, where every shout for freedom becomes metadata for prediction and governance.

The neoliberal state no longer suppresses revolt by force; it absorbs it. Outrage fuels engagement; engagement fuels profit; profit sustains the same corporate platforms that mediate dissent. Thus, rebellion becomes both feedback loop and fuel — the engine of its own capture.

The task ahead is therefore not only political but architectural: to imagine movements beyond platform dependency, beyond philanthropic scripting, beyond the simulation of inclusion. A truly partyless democracy must also be a platformless democracy — one that reclaims the means of communication, resists algorithmic domestication, and rebuilds the commons of truth, slowness, and solidarity. Only then can the cry “No Kings” recover its radical clarity: a call not merely against rulers, but against rule itself.