Domination and Profit Extraction Through Forced Dependency and Violence
A Shared Tactic of Control by States, Corporations, and Criminal Enterprises
Abstract
Forced dependency is a potent mechanism of domination through which individuals are rendered reliant on another for their wellbeing, basic survival and social participation. While widely condemned when deployed by cartels and criminal enterprises, similar methods are institutionalized and legitimized within neoliberal governance and market capitalism. Framed as efficiency or policy necessity, these structures obscure coercion behind legal and economic norms. This short paper explores the anatomy of forced dependency, drawing critical parallels between its criminal and institutional manifestations. Through case studies, sociopolitical theory, and an analysis of structural power, it reveals how forced dependency erodes autonomy, enforces compliance, and relies on both structural and physical violence to maintain control.
Domination and Control Through Forced Dependency
Forced dependency is a coercive strategy rooted in the manipulation of human need. It entails the deliberate engineering of conditions in which individuals or populations cannot survive, participate, or flourish without access to resources controlled by an external authority. Although commonly associated with overtly criminal enterprises such as human trafficking networks or drug cartels, this same mechanism is routinely employed by modern states and corporate systems under the guise of legality, efficiency, and public order. While the actors differ in public image and institutional framing, their core objectives and operational logic remain aligned: manufacture reliance, eliminate alternatives, punish resistance, and enforce compliance through fear, deprivation, and the targeted use of structural or physical violence.
Tactic One: Manufactured Need and Chokepoints
Every system of domination begins with the manipulation of fundamental human needs, what might be called need addiction: food, housing, healthcare, income, connection, and safety. Criminal traffickers, for example, often lure victims with promises of employment, education, or escape from violence, only to establish control through addiction, coercion, and terror once dependency is secured (Polaris Project, 2023). Similarly, neoliberal states and corporations insert themselves between people and the basic goods of life by privatizing public services, dismantling welfare systems, and commodifying access to essentials (Harvey, 2005). Through this process, they monopolize the means of survival and create economic chokepoints through which obedience can be enforced and profit reliably extracted.
Tactic Two: Elimination of Alternatives
To maintain forced dependency, viable alternatives must be systematically dismantled. This is evident in the increasing criminalization of off-grid living, homelessness, and informal economies, activities that are increasingly targeted by municipal ordinances and national policies designed to enforce conformity to centralized systems (Mitchell, 2020). Simultaneously, public infrastructure such as healthcare, housing, and education is defunded or sold off to private interests under neoliberal reform agendas, making community-based or self-sustaining solutions economically and logistically unfeasible (Klein, 2007). By eliminating pathways to autonomy, both criminal enterprises and neoliberal institutions funnel individuals into systems they control, extracting obedience, compliance, and profit through legal or illicit means.
Tactic Three: Monopolized Access and Coercion
Once alternatives are eliminated, the monopolization of access is actively enforced. Drug cartels, for example, control access to illicit substances and leverage addiction to maintain dominance. Corporations similarly monopolize access to food, housing, healthcare, energy, and digital infrastructure, often conditioning service on consumer behaviour, compliance with terms, or subscription to proprietary systems. States, too, may enforce dependency through bureaucratic gatekeeping, where access to essential benefits, housing, or medical care is contingent upon “cooperation” or submission to institutional norms (Wacquant, 2009). Punishments for resistance can include algorithmic exclusion, deplatforming, debanking, or medical abandonment, forms of “soft” coercion that obscure their punitive nature behind the veil of procedural neutrality and administrative policy.
Tactic Four: Punishment, Violence and Necropolitics
When compliance through fear or deprivation and despair fails, coercion escalates into punishment and overt violence. Criminal actors may withhold addictive substances, deploy threats against loved ones, inflict physical torture, or inflict sexual violence to enforce submission. In parallel, corporations and states implement punitive measures such as eviction, denial of essential services, child apprehension, incarceration, and police brutality. Dissenters; whether protesters, whistleblowers, or everyday resistors are surveilled, criminalized, or silenced. In some nations, such as Canada, disabled or chronically ill individuals who resist institutional neglect are increasingly funnelled toward euthanasia programs like Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), framed as expressions of personal agency while driven by economic deprivation and social abandonment (Weinstock, 2022). This marks the final evolution of dependency-based control: the normalization of structural violence and physical force under the rhetoric of policy, choice, and legality.
The Illusion of Legitimacy
The key difference between state, corporate, and criminal applications of forced dependency and violence is not the tactic itself, but its framing and scale. Criminal traffickers are rightly condemned for entrapping, manipulating, and harming or killing individuals. Yet when governments and corporations employ the same strategies, using economic instruments, legal mechanisms, digital infrastructures, and militarized violence, their actions are reframed as governance, innovation, and economic efficiency. The criminal wears a ski mask; the executive wears a suit. But both wield control over essential resources, deploy fear and coercion, and convert human vulnerability into profit or power.
Conclusion: A Shared Logic of Domination
Whether it manifests in the criminal underworld, corporate boardrooms, or bureaucratic state policy, forced dependency operates according to a shared logic: control people by controlling their needs. In a just society, dependency would be met with care, and need with collective solidarity. But under neoliberalism and authoritarian capitalism, these principles have been replaced by monetized control and punitive abandonment. The harms of forced dependency are not peripheral; they are embedded in the central architecture of modern domination. Recognizing this continuity across sectors is essential if resistance is to be not only effective, but ethically grounded.
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References
Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.
Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. Metropolitan Books.
Mitchell, D. (2020). Mean streets: Homelessness, public space, and the limits of capital. University of Georgia Press.
Polaris Project. (2023). Human trafficking 101: Understanding the basics.
Wacquant, L. (2009). Punishing the poor: The neoliberal government of social insecurity. Duke University Press.
Weinstock, D. (2022). Vulnerability, autonomy, and euthanasia: Reassessing the ethics of MAiD. Canadian Journal of Bioethics, 5(3), 12–21.