Addiction Under Empire:

Capitalism is the Opium of the Masses

Capitalism is the opium of the people

In Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, he famously declared that religion is the "opium of the people," a critique not of faith itself, but of the way ideology soothes the suffering imposed by material conditions, offering comfort in place of liberation. Yet in the era of modernity, it is not religion that numbs the masses—it is capitalism infused with the relentless spectacle of our techno-fetishism. Capitalism is the opium of the masses: a system that manufactures the addiction and the distraction, commodifying despair while selling debt and dependency as freedom. Where pseudo-Marxist literalists continue to see religion as a palliative for the oppressed, capitalism has refined this function into a science—offering consumerism in place of community, synthetic pleasures in place of solidarity, and perpetual markets in place of emancipation.

In this light, religion becomes a site of liberation, not submission—a counterweight to the isolating, technocratic machinery of late capitalism. When rooted in justice, compassion, and a rejection of material fetishism, spiritual traditions can illuminate pathways beyond the capitalist totality, challenging the deification of markets and the commodification of human life. It is not faith that numbs us today, but the relentless logic of capital that turns even suffering into a transaction and turns human purpose into data points for profit.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the opioid crisis, where pain—economic, social, and existential—is chemically managed, not to heal, but to sustain participation in a system that thrives on extraction, alienation, and decay. This addiction is not metaphorical; it is literal. Capitalism, in its terminal stage, does not merely dull awareness of oppression—it metabolizes suffering into profit, ensuring that addiction, like poverty, remains.

In an interview with Fox News, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused China of waging a "reverse" Opium War over fentanyl, suggesting that Beijing may be "deliberately" flooding America with the synthetic opioid.

He was referring to the two 19th-century Opium Wars China lost to Britain and France, after which it was forced to buy large volumes of the drug and concede parts of its territory to colonial Western powers, leading to what China calls their “Century of Humiliation.”


Fentanyl and the Specter of Empire

If history repeats itself, it is with the unresolved contradictions of systems unwilling to confront themselves. To say that America’s fentanyl crisis mirrors China’s 19th-century opium scourge is to misread both history and the present. This is not history repeating—it is the reckoning of an empire.

In Qing Dynasty China, opium was a weapon wielded by British imperialists—gunboats enforcing narcotic dependency to fracture the weak dynastic rule of the empire. Addiction was engineered, commodified as a tool of destabilization and subjugation. It was a chemical extension of colonial policy, binding a civilization’s decline to imperial profit.

Fast forward to 21st-century America, and the remnants of industrial Appalachia, the Midwest, and beyond bear witness to a different kind of narcotic devastation—this time self-inflicted. Fentanyl, unlike opium, did not arrive by foreign imposition. It was synthesized in corporate laboratories, legitimized by state regulators, and laundered through the ideological machinery of capitalist healthcare. Where Britain forced opium upon China, America prescribed opioids to itself—transforming pain into profit, and despair into a data point on a shareholder report.

Yet, in a feat of geopolitical projection, U.S. officials now accuse China and Mexico of waging a "reverse Opium War," as if the syringe was planted by foreign hands. This narrative of external blame conveniently erases the origins of the crisis: neoliberal deregulation, pharmaceutical greed, deindustrialization, and the commodification of suffering embedded in America’s political economy.

To invoke the Opium Wars as analogy is to indulge in imperial amnesia. The United States, long an architect of global narcotics economies—from Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle to Afghanistan’s poppy fields—now drowns in a synthetic scourge of its own making. The irony is not just poetic, it is structural.

During its occupation of Afghanistan, the U.S. became the world’s leading heroin supplier. This was no accident of war; it was the byproduct of imperial logistics, where narcotics served both local pacification and global markets. And even after the supply chain was disrupted after the U.S. withdrawal, synthetic opioids like fentanyl surged—not because of foreign malice, but because capitalist economies adapt. Fentanyl requires no fields, no farmers—only labs and deregulated markets, perfectly aligned with the imperatives of profit and control.

During the Ming and Qing dynasties, what is now Afghanistan existed not as a peripheral outpost, but as part of China's broader suzerain domain—a region woven into tributary relations and the expansive networks of the old Silk Road. Here, trade was defined by the exchange of textiles, ceramics, spices, knowledge, and culture—goods that enriched civilizations rather than eroded them. Poppies grew, as they did across Asia, but they were never the focal point of commerce. Opium, in its medicinal form, held a marginal place in traditional pharmacopoeia, regulated by customary medicinal exchange.

It was only with the incursion of British colonialism, when Afghanistan was carved out as a buffer state against Russian and Qing influence, that opium was systematically weaponized. The British East India Company industrialized poppy cultivation in India and funneled the narcotic westward and eastward—not as a commodity of mutual exchange, but as a tool of economic subjugation. Afghanistan, under colonial pressure, became entangled in these circuits of extraction, its fertile valleys reoriented toward serving imperial drug economies rather than sustaining local or transcontinental trade.

As a side note, I want to add that this colonial-era shifted the centers of trade from historic Silk Road civilizations to new gunboat-controlled maritime routes, intersecting trade with naval technology. One of the remarkable aspects of the Belt and Road Initiative is its inclusion of these former centers of trade through an expansive new 21st-century rail system.

Materialist Logic behind Addiction Economies

This is where historical materialism shatters the myth that "history repeats itself." As Mao Zedong observed in The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party. China’s post-Opium War transformation was not cyclical decay but dialectical rupture—a collision between imperial capitalism and the People’s Revolutionary uprising. The Opium scourge remained fresh in the memory of the people as it was estimated that about 40 million people (10% of the population) succumbed to addiction. For perspective, about 1% of the U.S. population has struggled with opioid addiction and about 1 in 500 has died from it over the past 25 years.

America’s fentanyl crisis is not a reenactment of Qing China’s humiliation. It is the unfolding of contradictions inherent in a system that commodifies both ailment and antidote, binding social despair to the logic of markets. Fentanyl is not America’s opium—it is America’s mirror. A reflection of a society where healthcare is privatized, communities are abandoned by capital, and pain is monetized with the fervor of a televangelical spectacle. The true intoxication is not chemical, but ideological—the denial that this crisis is a product of its own making.

The United States may already be in our Decade of Humiliation and not even know it—not because decline is avoidable, but because Washington doesn’t possess the humility to name our downfall. Instead, we externalize blame, militarize borders, and sanctify market violence as freedom.

While today’s China may appear to have adopted capitalist mechanisms—standing as the world’s largest economy when measured by GDP at purchasing power parity (PPP)—one must recognize a critical distinction embedded in “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Unlike Western capitalism, whose growth has historically depended on imperialist extraction and global subjugation, China’s reform era has emphasized people lifted from poverty, where both the state and its people rise together. The success of initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative further underscores this divergence. BRI is often mischaracterized through the lens of Western imperialism, but it is not a project of domination; it is a platform for shared infrastructure and access, fostering connectivity without the coercive undercurrents of colonialism.

Even the narrative of “debt-trap diplomacy” has been grossly distorted by the West. Providing loans for infrastructure—roads, ports, energy grids—is foundational to sovereign development. This stands in stark contrast to Western privatization models, where infrastructure is carved up for investor returns, not national resilience. Firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, and other asset managers do not build nations—they leverage instability, weaponizing capital flows to induce crises, enforce austerity, or precipitate regime change when profits wane.

Historical materialism reminds us that what appears as repetition is merely the persistence of unresolved contradictions. Addiction epidemics, economic collapses, imperial overreach—these are not cyclical fates, but structural outcomes. To invoke "history repeats itself" is to naturalize oppression and disguise preventable crises as destiny. But history offers no such comfort. It unfolds according to the forces we refuse to confront.

In the end, the question is not whether history will repeat—but whether this empire can survive the clarity of its own reflection, looking like an American Perestroika. Until it confronts the material conditions that sustain this cycle of dependency—both chemical and economic—the overdoses will continue. Not only of bodies, but of democracy, dignity, and the very notion of collective care.

History does not repeat. It reckons.