What I worry is that people are still using the Marxist paradigm—the bourgeoisie controlling the means of production, forcing the proletariat to sell their labor—to frame what’s going on, when it seems like this is something different.

Sale of labor doesn’t enter into the current scenario—there’s labor and means of production in the developing world*—this is about extraction of all value from the lower orders of society, regardless of class fraction, to the point that the result is ruin and foreshortened lives. It’s not extraction of labor, it’s strip-mining of human beings.

*there’s a whole other thing going where China and it putative Communism represent the way that comissars and vanguardists—supposedly doing the central planning that keeps the dictatorship of the proletariat rolling—just end up filling the same role as the bourgeoisie, but more concentrated. In the last couple of days, I’ve been thinking that it’s not a coincidence that the two Communist powers have effectively become oligarchic kleptocracies (though with very different components inside the manifold).

The other thing that’s non-Marxian is that at least some of these fuckers are operating within a frame that isn’t about capital. The religious and social conservatives—while they are venal, they are also sincere in their desire to socially engineer the USA…and this kind of decimation is seen as a window of opportunity. The growing neo-reactionary and fascist element think in very similar terms. This is important because it means…again…that there are choices being made outside of the Marxist frame of economic power, and within a framework closer to Foucalt (or, help us all, DeSade). Capital is a means to an end—social engineering—but not the only means.