Variations

Fragmentary Theoretical Assays

Preface

The themes expressed in these rough theses and aphoristic fragments do not claim to be especially original. Many of them have already been thought and written down by others: We are repeating them here because we find them relevant to our present concern. Those interested in our inspirations can consult the list at the end.

While we did not feel the need to use the word ‘racket’ in all of these fragments, they nonetheless lie in the broader orbit of ‘racket theory.’ At some points we have opted for nuance, at others for a certain degree of tactical exaggeration. In discussing such a broad array of topics, we are assaying the utility of the concept of the racket as a theoretical northstar.

Ça n’ira pas

We would like to be clear about who we are not. We identify as our enemies the Zionist, chauvinist, and self-proclaimed “anti-fascist” distorters of critical theory. Certain scholars, many of them German and Austrian, have taken it upon themselves to draft the critical theory of Adorno, Horkheimer, and the rest into their defenses of the genocidal project of Zionism. Today we are not surprised when, upon consulting a text allegedly concerned with kritische Theorie, we find mad rants about the threat of Islamo-Faschismus.

Ever the defenders of bourgeois barbarism, these charlatans construct an absolute barrier between the djihadistische, islamistische rackets and the holy European Rule of Law. The presence of exceptional executive powers in the Islamic Republic of Iran becomes justification for the use of the exceptional military powers of NATO against its population. State failure born from colonialism and imperialism becomes justification for interventions guaranteed to re-entrench it. Sectarian violence in Syria is solved by indiscriminate bombing.

Even among those who are smart enough not to explicitly lend their support to imperialist genocide, the “anti-nationalist” reflex, admirably developed against European nationalist chauvinism by Marxists during the first World War, becomes in a horrific reversal a mask for Western chauvinism—an alibi for ignoring the real dominations on the basis of race, nation, ethnicity, gender, sexuality… and counter-movements which necessarily must begin on those terms. “Of course,” they protest, “I do not approve of the present actions of the IDF and Netanyahu’s government, but—” But what! The supposed “critics” who flatten these quite real mediations in a slogan of “no war but the class war” have taken up a political stance monstrously retrograde even in comparison with the “black and white, unite and fight” mentality of Earl Browder’s CPUSA at the moment of its capitulation to capitalism. Their activity is more reminiscent of the PCF’s active participation in the colonial administration of Algeria, albeit thankfully confined to the realm of online posts, moronic pamphlets, academic bickering, and subcultural activity.

If we refuse to remain blind to Zionist violence as Zionist violence, how then should we approach it? For a long time the Zionist movement (and eventually the State of Israel) was organized around the trifecta of the apartheid Zionist labor racket, which violently excluded Palestinians and other Arabs; the settlements and kibbutzim, which exploited and dispossessed Palestinians; and the Haganah-cum-IDF, which murdered them. Then came the era of the internal ethnic and sectarian rackets, a development correlated with the decline of the Labor Zionist racket and growth of the explicitly fascist streak in Israeli politics. The various occupational strategies for turning Palestine into a Bantustan—the collaborationism of Fatah in the West Bank, arming of Yasser abu Shabab’s bandits in Gaza, attempts to recruit the elites of clans and Bedouin tribes, the Oslo Accords—are racket-like in character. The strategies of genocide, meanwhile, dispense with the pretense of exploitation entirely.

Our opponents fail to understand that the perversion of the concept of the racket for dull critiques of Djihadismus—an orientalist discursive construct that has relatively little in common with actual Salafi jihadism (an incredibly marginal political tendency in Palestine)—discredits in advance any attempt to understand the real human tragedy of reactionary Islamism through the lens of critical theory. It is easier to say that a man takes up the gun because of his religion, his greed, or his hatred of Jews than to argue he does it because he is rimaybé, marked from birth as a descendent of slaves and desperate for a life worth living. The petty-bourgeois background of many of the most infamous jihadis suggests an analogy with fascism, but it also suggests an analogy with socialism. Stereotyped, racist thinking will get us nowhere.

All Those Who Toil

At the same time that marriage was contractualized in the United States and the tradition of common law marriage was left behind—a moment that cannot be detached from post-Reconstruction attempts to craft a legal regime that could restore slavery in all but name—the ‘nuclear family’ division of domestic and paid labor took shape. Similar divisions of labor developed around the same time in other centers of developed capitalism such as England and Australia under the influence of surging racketized and reformist labor movements.

In the global south, things developed differently. The exploitation of women in domestic familial work and private wage labor became deeply integrated. In India, construction companies use contractors to hire husband-wife (jodi) pairs from marginalized communities as migrant laborers with little to no social security. The wife is hired not only for construction labor but also for the social reproduction of the family. She is expected to take care of the children, cook, and do all other miscellaneous tasks required to sustain her family. The children that accompany the pairs help with the menial tasks of construction labor when they are not occupied with ragged public schools (if they even have the opportunity to attend schools, given the nature of short term migrant labor). They are trained as construction workers from their childhood due to their proximity with the work.

Unlike the expectations of the early socialists and most liberals, capitalism’s dynamic of constant expansion absorbed, reterritorialized, and reproduced traditional gendered forms of domination rather than eliminating them. The garment industry and spinning mills of Tamil Nadu, which export a sizable portion of its product to the international market, are powered by the labor of teenagers. Girls from very poor backgrounds are contracted for three years, housed in small dorms, and made to work for stipends much lower than minimum wage. However, their income over the course of their three year long tenure is just enough for their dowry as they reach legally marriageable age. The loop is closed, and the racket continues.

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From a purely economic-functional perspective, marriage (and indeed cohabitational relationships outside of marriage) almost appear as a sentimental residue coating the mechanisms of the household system, that uneasy compromise between private property and human existence. The stripping of the vestigial religious trappings around marriage and the abolition of its monopoly on romantic pairing and cohabitation should reduce the family to what economists say it always was: a vehicle for provisioning of commodities to satisfy basic humans needs (food, shelter, etc.), the transmission of property, and pooling of income/wealth. But this does not happen. Every time an antique legal pretense for the subordination of women within the household is struck down, a new or previously dormant piece of law—accompanied by a political-ideological campaign—seems to crop up and ‘inadvertently’ divert the path of progress.

This is not a purely political outcome. The nexus of gendered labor in the household-family locus cannot disappear into the ‘automatic’ mechanisms of value because it brushes up against an objective limit to capital, namely the reproduction of labor power. Both the micro- and macro-rhythms of corporeal human life, insofar as they are even understood, are fundamentally out of sync with the mechanical rhythms of capital’s accumulation, circulation, and turnover. Scientific management of the human body already has a name: torture. The unprofitable tasks of care are therefore bestowed upon non-profit institutions (schools, hospitals, etc.) and individuals.

Legal-political reinforcement of gender—and hence its concomitant forms of exploitation and subordination—can thus be seen, at least in part, as an opportunistic attempt to foist this anomalous labor back on those who, for historical reasons, have little power to refuse it. The housewife phenomenon persists because the domestic work of social reproduction is unprofitable and cannot be made into capitalist production, nor can existing production absorb it as labor-power.

The Game Was Rigged From the Start

It has been said that to transition is to renege on agreements that were previously assumed, albeit never actually signed for. The same goes for coming out in general. Some queer people are lucky, born to kind parents and/or a relatively accepting milieu. Most are confronted with the prospect of giving up the protections of various institutions of social reproduction—the family, the hegemonic order of gender, medical and psychiatric standards of normality—because the forms of domination that accompanied them were unbearable. The simple day-by-day practice of living outside them represents a non-negligible form of resistance against them.

Oftentimes trans people in particular are thrown headfirst into continual underemployment, if not outright unemployment and even lumpen conditions. They may be patronized or brutalized depending on the valences of their class background, social milieu, and particular gender (e.g. the different but overlapping strategies for policing trans women vs. trans men). The grim realities facing queer and trans people bely the accusation—sometimes explicit, sometimes merely implied—that they are somehow an economically privileged group.

Queer people in general and trans people in particular are a small minority of the population with minimal political influence. Why, then, does the granting of very limited legal measures of acceptance provoke such an apocalyptic sense in our enemies? One always finds the same stereotyped accusations: queerness is a threat to the family and children, and therefore the nation and race. It is a threat to “nature,” “man,” and “civilization.” Of course, it is in the obverse that we see the true face of death—empty identity and silent obedience to authority. The mildest suggestion of a queer aporia in the gender regime sets off the obsessive policing instinct of its loyal attack dogs. The passion with which these dogs are called to defend the holy gender relation betrays their correct intuition of how fragile this supposed ‘eternal’ ironclad structure really is.

One can be seduced by a thinking that invokes symbolic abstractions of power like “identity” and “death.” We must never forget that behind the pageantry of gender reaction lurks an all too concrete threat of murder, punishment delivered for the crime of a free participation in life.

Nothing for Nothing

A liberal manager’s lament: his ‘white working class’ brothers in their ignorance fight for austerity (Trump, Le Pen, Reform). His Daily Politics Observer soothingly repeats a watered-down Du Bois ad nauseum in explanation: poor whites did this because in return they receive psychic returns. Is there fruit that hangs lower? Such retreats to psychological compensation arguments is lamentable but understandable given the lack of any clear economic benefits in their political programs. Have elites secured the replacement of material economy by the psychic economy of ideology? We don’t think so. Psychological gratification at the level of social effectivity cannot be engineered by the ruling class so readily, if indeed at all.

Psychic economy is everywhere in constant interpenetration with the material economy. Money writes “invasion” on the wall. White flight follows, motivated by immediate racial resentment and reinforced through positive economic motivations. Suburban areas come to have genuinely superior infrastructure and tax resources to the ‘inner cities.’ The wages of whiteness take the form of inclusion in ever-shrinking welfare societies, and the willingness to accept the racialized exclusions which those societies always involved. Fantasies of whiteness provide an alibi for this increasing austerity. Welfare is condemned in racially-charged invectives, conveniently omitting mention of the racially exclusive benefits enjoyed by the caucasian contingent—what we might call ‘white-fare.’

Each citation, whether explicit, tends to omit the gist of Black Reconstruction, that actually making good on racist gambles is essentially impossible. The poor white places a poor bet. The contract’s rewards grow little with time. Under the spell of “invasion,” each vote exchanges upkeep for “security” until security takes the wheel. “Invasion” gets bigger still, cast in fulsome neon, on chyron, marquee. Clearly, the ‘forgotten man’ can do no better than a gun bought with what remains. What else can protect the little box whose mortgage is subprime? Money, now “Equity,” may foreclose, but the real box of white fantasy was always the womb, the genetic line of credit, which the gun can certainly protect. After all, strange fruit hangs higher. If all else fails, there’s apples on the sportsbook, with free money on the first parlay.

Stupidity Machines

The appeal to stupidity as an explanation for some social fact is generally an argumentative move that only serves to expose the intellectual debility of its own executor. Submission to this tendency would itself be a submission to stupidity however, a tacit acknowledgement of its impenetrability to the intellect.

Cruelty and stupidity go together. Reactionary attacks on the academy are less explained by the claim that it is a base of principled resistance—it is not—than by the right’s fundamental revulsion at learning and sense that their sadism can be lazily indulged by bludgeoning a victim too cowardly to fight back. (Also, since when have elementary schools been part of ‘the academy?’) It is a testament to the idiocy of the political situation that we are told to avoid “sanewashing” the policies of reaction.

Stupidity is not a scar; it is a festering wound. Through his battles with the sophists, Plato’s Socrates proved that to do evil to another is to make both oneself and one’s victim worse. Thus, cruelty appears as a vector for stupidity. Deprivation and punishment have no educational value, and any society which turns such viciousness into socially load-bearing practices will inevitably turn its back on whatever culture had once been enabled by brutal enforcement of the distinction between hand and head. Today’s plague of stupidity exacerbates the ambient regime of fear inherent to our violent society into an unending chain of moral panics, which today find their cultural expression in a foul cornucopia of AI-generated images and videos.

The explosion of AI propaganda symbolizes the construction of a new Babel—in reverting to the supposedly universal language of images, we will eventually be cursed with the inability to understand one another. Media constructs us as passive consumers and proud reproducers. It is not uncommon for someone to casually announce that they rely on Chat GPT for emotional support. They might as well have just come out as a proud coprophage, for the difference between the proud and shameless consumption of ‘slop’ and eating one’s own shit is one of appearance, not essence.

Fascicules

The ballot box is a lever of fascization, but not because some mythical poor whites are forced to sign on to fascism for economic reasons. The secret ballot of liberalism posits fascism as one ticket among others, a personal choice. (The degree of political divergence between men and women makes it statistically certain that a non-trivial number of heterosexual couples in many countries are made up of a fascist man and a liberal woman). In reality, the ballot is an index of the alienated pseudo-individuality assumed by Citoyen Sujet when confronted by the state.

Even when open fascism does not appear on the ballot, the fascism of imperialism is always a fundamental part of the hegemonic consensus. This is without getting into the islands of fascism that dot liberal capitalist society—Guantanamo Bay, European and American concentration camps for migrants and refugees, Zionist apartheid, prisons in general, your local police precinct, etc. Each of these are socio-magnetic accelerators for what Trotsky famously called “particle[s] of Hitler,” or, better yet, fascicules.

Gregarious

Critics of so-called ‘identity politics’ attack the concrete manifestations of the tendency to associate in the name of a class association which does not presently exist. This is quite an untimely critique, as for most proletarians today class is precisely an abstract social category whose force is only felt negatively (much to the chagrin of contemporary vulgar workerists).

It is just as easy for ‘class politics’ to fall into racketeering as it is for ‘identity politics’ (leaving aside the fact that many forms of ‘identity politics’ simply are class politics in a special idiom). They are both rather elementary political forms of basic human groupishness. Group life is as fundamental to homo sapiens as walking upright and making tools. This is the kernel of truth to liberal hysterics about “tribalism” and its rise—a discourse that runs both class and identity politics through the wash of primitivizing abstraction, ridding them of the impurities of class antagonism that underlie their qualitative unity-in-difference and reducing them to the bleach white husk of pure rackets. If we peer further into the hidden abode of this discursive production a further truth is revealed: That behind the obfuscating immediacy of its product lie the very forces of separation that impart groups themselves with the the violent rhythms and high pressure conditions that characterize their contemporary form and deprive us of the kind of group life given to collective learning.

The influence of psychological factors in the composition and decomposition of political groups is often neglected at the level of theory. (It is almost as if organization is a method to overcome the brute animal mind, to subdue the spirited and appetitive parts of our souls.) We detect a fear in this neglect, a fear that mere acknowledgment of such factors would debase the political subjectivity of militants and confirm reactionary accusations of resentment and instability. But anyone who has been in a group—that is, anyone whatsoever—can tell you that association invariably introduces new psychological dynamics and does little to suppress preexisting ones. Bion’s simple observation stands the test of time: “It is clear that when a group forms the individuals forming it hope to achieve some satisfaction from it. It is also clear that the first thing they are aware of is a sense of frustration produced by the presence of the group of which they are members.”

Smedley’s Theory

People in the first half of the twentieth century could not decide whether aerial warfare was chivalrous or barbaric—they had forgotten that these terms are coextensive. Fighter planes served to gather intelligence for artillery bombardments and later to protect bombers. It is a testament to the impotence of empathy that warplanes can be an object of admiration after Hiroshima.

Today bombing insulates the masses of the first world, and of the United States in particular, from the realities of war. By permitting, at the technological-logistical level, ‘non-war’ military adventures (they were called “police actions” by the British Empire) to use minimal direct combat personnel, bombing rescued the population from mobilization and the ruling class from the travail of legitimating mobilization.

In the case of drone warfare, combat personnel is entirely forgone. The proliferation of jamming devices in the Russo-Ukrainian war has led both militaries to control their close-range first person view “suicide drones” with spools of fiber optic cable, which after detonation are left eerily draped across the artillery-battered landscape. A bundle of consumer technlogies—VR headsets, hobbyist quadcopters, etc—combine into a militarized cybernetic organism that simulates the suicide of its operator and actualizes the murder of its target. The ‘divine wind’ that possessed Japanese kamikaze pilots is warded off by the technological ritualization of interfacing with death.

Spark

Imperialist genocide is legitimated by the blackmail of extinction. The hypertrophy of humanity’s capacity for destruction has transformed the foundation of the distinction between the sovereign civilization of the first world and abject violability of the third into the former’s ability to initiate a planetary extinction event at will.

Descendants of Cain

How can Americans confront their Pilgrim Fathers? A positive reading: they were a cooperative body, though admittedly not freely associated, seeing as they were contractually bound. Everything in the colony was to be common stock for seven years, so perhaps they were even socialists of some kind. (In the event, they lasted only three before dividing the land they had claimed into separate plots for each family.) A negative reading: they were a unit of productive capital, the proceeds of which would be meted out to the ‘adventurers’ (investors) and ‘planters’ (settlers) after seven years. Omnia sunt communia, but only until the creditors come calling.

Bizarre social set-ups like that of the Pilgrims are one of the more remarkable features of early stage settler-colonial projects. The penal society of New South Wales and early kibbutzim of Mandatory Palestine must also be mentioned in this context. While the settlers of Australia’s ‘First Fleet’ had no say in the matter, the utopian appeal of religious toleration in the case of the Pilgrims and an apparently socialist project in the case of Zionism certainly played an important part in the growth of these settler-colonial movements. Even Thomas More’s Utopia was a colonial endeavor, having been founded by King Utopus, who conquered the peninsula of Abraxa and immediately forced the “rude and uncivilised inhabitants” to dig a massive channel such that the landmass was made into an island.

A common thread in these settler-colonial projects is a pretension to universalism—democracy, socialism, moral improvement, religion—which serves as a mask for the advance of particularity. Indeed, there is a certain destructive intertwinement of the universal and particular that is peculiar to settler-colonialism. The petty sovereignty of the settler emerges from his—and later her—proprietorship in combination with the assumption of the sovereign’s power, which is not merely particular but positively singular, in the specific capacity of violence. De jure claims on territory were (and are) made de facto, in large part, through the parcelized conquest carried out by especially bold settlers who rely on the state to back them up if needed. When individual prosecution of social war against the native begets resistance, the interloper finds themself being struck down with whatever weapon was at hand. For the wages of the settler’s sin is death, a pseudo-martyrdom that lifts up their vengeful spirit to circulate eternally in the world-soul of empire.

Arrows Without Maxims

Going back and reading reports about “fascism” (or the “alt-right”) from the last decade, one is struck by how much attention was given to ultimately ephemeral organizations and personalities. They were never made to last in the first place. The police have always done the job much more effectively.

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We must not allow ourselves to be misled by spatial and magnitudinal metaphors. The fact that so many philosophical and scientific terms are originally spatial metaphors of one kind or another is no reason to surrender to these ingrained linguistic habits.

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The racket designates a social form that drifts between functions of redistribution, exploitation, domination, protection, and production. The question is whether or not such a concept designates a historical reality, or if it can at least lead us to one.

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The Fifth Monarchist tract “A Door of Hope” called for the abolition of the right of primogeniture and overthrow of the “Nimrod spirit and monopolies of elder Brethren.” How tame partible inheritance has made us!

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The Bolsheviks introduced the slogan “turn the imperialist war into a civil war.” The inverse could be the slogan of fascism.

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The racket is the social structure adequate to class society in its monopoly form. Solidarity is its mediating force which, by conflict and conceit, at once transforms the particular racket into the horizon of the individual and transforms the collective of such reified persons into that which may overstep this boundary. Solidarity is the law, but it is no guarantee.

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Even those who exit, and seek to lay hold of greater legislative and executive powers beyond its walls, tend to find themselves, sooner or later, playing racket sports in the grounds of the vampire castle.

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The podcast is the radio of austerity. No singular sovereign voice but rather a thousand little führers legislating, on a casual basis, the necessity of precarity and its incessant grind, bookended by ad reads.

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Two strategic moves of contemporary reaction: closing ranks and forcing buy-in.

Multiple Choice Question

For all its faults, there is still something admirable in Bakunin’s obsession with the lumpen, with cossacks, bandits, and vagabonds. The fatal flaw was that he could only see the excluded as harbingers of destruction, assigning any positivity they possessed to the dynamism of their Slavic blood and leaving serious social analysis by the wayside. In this context, we can say that Bakunin’s consistency provides a refreshing contrast to Marx’s moralistic and largely arbitrary distinction between the “reserve army of labor” and “paupers” on one hand and the “actual lumpenproletariat” on the other. Marx told two marginally different stories about the origins of these two groupings: the former were a product and necessary condition of capitalist production and the latter was the spoiled refuse of all the ruined classes of history. In both of these stories, Marx chose not to emphasize the fact—of which he was well aware—that informal labor, including many of its ‘criminal’ varieties, was a necessary element in both the reproduction of the working class and in the valorization process of capital. Perhaps he couldn’t figure out how to fit it into the argumentative structure of Capital. The actual reason doesn’t matter.

Conditions of informality and nebulous, sub-legal wage agreements are hegemonic in many parts of the world. While some arrangements may be classified as mere formal subsumption of labor under capital, it can be comfortably said that most are structured from the ground up in line with the institutions of mature capitalism. Companies hire workers on short contracts without granting legal recognition of the workers as employees subject to rights and benefits. Workers are constantly cycled out. A large reserve of labor waits, ready to sign these contracts in hopes of being those whose diligence and work ethic would finally translate to full time employee status. Informality is the state of constant insecurity: the displacement of people from one occupation to another and from one location to another.

Alongside informal employment, one inevitably finds two other sources of income in the ‘grey economy.’ Firstly, there are the forms of small proprietorship so miniscule in scale and laden with self-exploitation that describing them as “petty bourgeois” seems euphemistic, if not sarcastic. (Although one must not lose sight of the genuine petty capitalists in the so-called informal sector.) Secondly, there are the various less than legal ways of earning money: sex work, theft, fraud, trade in illegal goods, begging, etc. All three factors might be practiced in the same household, or by the same person at different times. Add to this a preponderance of debt—owed to either traditional loan sharks and moneylenders or modern microfinanciers—and circular patterns of migration between the city and the countryside, and a basic picture of the situation begins to emerge.

From Marx to Adorno, the utopian hope that capitalism would give the conditions for socialisation of production was never realized. The functioning of capitalism has always been highlighted by its integration of traditional forms of hierarchy and conditions of informality. Throughout capitalism’s long history, there was never a period of truly liberal free competition and social security for workers. Spatial metaphors that place the so-called surplus population ‘outside’ of the circuits of capital are grievously outdated. Even during its brief heyday in the Global North, capitalism functioned through the dispersion of informality and the mobilization of traditional and direct forms of domination. This is only more so the case in the Global South. The household labor of lower caste women and the production of luxury products throughout the world are part of the same process.

The Dissection of God

Ambedkar wrote that caste is a graded hierarchy: thousands of groups tediously segregated and placed in a rigid order of rank, most of them content with their relative position. At least they aren’t the untouchables excluded by civilised society: those who are occupied with sanitation work, manual scavenging, and the dead. The ones who clean are the ones excluded, or rather polluted; women, like the lower castes, are ‘naturally’ polluted as they bleed, bear children, and are bound to take care of the household. Thus the long history of the Indian subcontinent has been a history of caste rackets based on the exclusion of dalits and women, rackets that effectively monopolised whole industries into their enclosures and subsumed everyone who came in contact with them. The Buddhist social reformers, the Muslim empires, the British Raj, and the Christian missions were all deeply integrated within caste society. Contrary to what Indian law would have us believe in an attempt to exclude positive discrimination from non-Hindu Dalits, castes do not have a religion apart from the Brahminical domination that ties the subcontinent together. After all, no one wants to clean their own shit.

Caste society is an unending initiation ritual. It begins even before birth, as the Brahmin astrologer prescribes the auspicious time of birth and name for the child based on the movements of the stars. Then come the rituals of the girlchild entering puberty—for she is ready to reproduce her caste—and the very tedious marriage customs ordained by the Brahmins. Any resistance to the predetermined initiation and its cyclical history becomes a grave threat to caste society; neither hints of romance between individuals from unequal castes nor even simple physical entry into upper caste spaces are permitted. These norms are to be punished by extreme violence or murder if breached. The Brahmin would rather kill his own daughter than be initiated into a Dalit world. The famous dharma or duty of Hindu mythology is the duty of being bound to caste rackets, of following their intricate rules and rituals. Rather than affirm the universality of everyone’s duty to the other, the myth affirms the totality of caste relations. No wonder that the deity King Rama became the favored figure of modern Hindutva. The avatar who would subject his wife to the ordeal of fire to save the honor of his caste becomes the model of duty bound Hindus, who imagine themselves saving the honor of their religion against the perceived threat of the Muslim invaders.

Caste is far from being a national-religious bulwark against Islam. Indeed, castes exist only insofar as certain groups can dominate other groups ‘below’ them. The upper castes have access to superior conditions of social reproduction and are availed of the need to dirty their own hands. They dominate others and thereby exclude themselves from manual labor. As Ambedkar argued, castes are “enclosed classes” maintained throughout their long history by endogamy and its necessary presupposition: control over women’s bodies. In capitalism, caste society is fully integrated into a capitalist division of labor that reproduces and maintains its enclosure. As Dalits are relegated to the informal economy and bound to undignified, unseen labour, the so-called caste Hindus are allowed to enter into formal contracts recognized as workers, bosses, and Maliks. Caste society is racket society par excellence.

Chinga la Migra

Exploitation of—and subsequent dependence on—migrant labor is a feature common to many countries in both the Global North and Global South, from Singapore to South Africa. The presence of legally designated Untermenschen has become something natural for those lucky enough to possess citizenship. Despite their undeniable presence within the ‘host country’ both physically and socio-economically as nannies, manual workers, intellectuals, neighbors, and more, they are marked as outsiders. Such a hegemonic system of brutality invariably wrongs the migrant, but the citizen is likewise scarred by the stability of their own identity and position. The mere existence of the legal category of ‘citizen’ is a sign of social dysfunction, a veritable mark of the beast branded on the body politic possessed by the devil.

This dysfunction operates via a meshwork of legal, ideological, and interpersonal layers; put most succinctly, it operates like a racket. Take for example the infamous kafala system in the GCC countries. In the popular consciousness, kafala evokes a uniform system of migrant labor administration, one that has little variation among the GCC countries. It elicits an impression of an exceptional site of exploitation, isolation, and degradation. In fact, it is often thought about as modern day ‘slavery.’ While these impressions contain truth, they remain obfuscatory, reinforcing the false self-conceptualization through which the racket presents itself.

In brief, the kafala system is a worker-sponsorship regime of migrant governance, one that can be broadly conceptualized as a nexus of governmental policies and laws common to all GCC countries, despite some key differences between them. A large portion of the labor importation facilitated by the kafala system is domestic labor, a sector usually seen as external to the labor relation of migrant-citizen. Indeed, the migrant domestic laborer in the Persian Gulf reveals the true nature of the kafala racket not as an exceptional site of labor exploitation, but as an exemplary one. The purity—if we can call it that—of the kafala system sheds light on the luxury fashion sweatshops of Italy, strawberry farms of California, and industrial exploitation of rural Hukou workers of China. It exists only through a contingent configuration of the grotesquely uneven international division of labor, where the state outsources labor governance onto the family unit. This arrangement has become both the primary structure of class antagonism and an indispensable element of social reproduction in the GCC countries.

From this lens, the kafala system reveals itself as an exemplary racket: it posits a false opposition between international labor norms and national sovereignty, equates the citizen-migrant and employer-worker relations, and, most importantly, reframes structural labor relations as interpersonal ones. We can see how this racket’s inside/outside dynamic enables delusion at all levels: the sovereign state appears to defend citizens against encroachment of their “rights” by international forces, thus citizens feel duty-bound to protect the state’s honor. The citizen manages the impossible task of keeping permanent residents as perpetual outsiders, guarding a guest-host fiction that depends on willful blindness—the ultimate expression being lawmakers raised by migrant domestic workers now advocating nationality quotas against their own social mothers.

The kafala system’s displacement of labor governance onto families represents just one variation among migrant labor rackets. Across different contexts, these systems share a common logic of mystification, though their specific mechanisms vary considerably. In India, internal migrant labor operates through caste and kin networks that create their own form of displaced governance and funnel workers into specific industries in the urban centers. The workers do not have any attachment to the place or region, only to their own caste groups and the industry—workers are hired from distant villages precisely because it hinders effective class solidarity. Development projects that displace the native population and highly polluting industries have an especially large section of migrant workers, who become a scapegoat for the misery caused by the industry. Indian labor is also strongly represented outside of the subcontinent: manual workers go to the Gulf, and intellectual workers try to find a more permanent home in one of the countries of the First World. The United States’ H1-B visa for skilled workers is especially prized.

But H1-B has come under fire recently. In the controversy amongst the American right about the H1-B visa program and similar schemes, it is hard not to see the extreme white nationalist side of the debate as the bad conscience of its “globalist” counterpart. H1-B is merely a legal formalization of the type of domination that employers have been able to exert over migrant workers of all skill levels for decades, with deportation being among the most severe acts of domination at their disposal. The US deportation legal regime emerged from many of the worst bodies of Anglo-American law: English common law on “vagabonds,” the fugitive slave laws, and late 19th century anti-Chinese legislation. (With regard to the latter, we cannot forget the unhappy history of the American labor movement, however weak it was, in legitimizing anti-immigrant legislation.) The practice of deportation intersected with citizenship law—which was explicitly racial until the 1950s—and the social institution of race. The resulting non-identity of legal-racial, social-racial, and citizenship statuses historically made it very easy for the state (with consent from capital) to deport both resident Mexican nationals and Mexican-Americans with legal citizenship.

The Republican Party (and the ruling class in general) probably does not actually have a worked out plan for immigrants—how could they devise a solution when they cannot even agree on what the problem is? We can still offer our own hypothesis, however. The dream brewing in the minds of the politicians who float the possibility of a ‘special military operation’ in Mexico and demand ICE gestapo squads be sent into every barrio is precisely that of an updated version of the old Bracero program that would take inspiration from the modern kafala system, if not some even more entrenched system of apartheid. (When Trump opines that “people who live in the inner city” can no longer be forced into agricultural labor, is he not giving the game away?) By removing immigrants from society at large, they hope that the citizenry will forget that they are anything other than disposable bodies that can be deported to free-fire zones or concentration camps when they’ve exhausted their utility for capital.

Such an attack inevitably provokes a response, however. The level of ongoing resistance against rapidly fascisizing immigration authorities in the US and the centrality of anti-immigration politics to the so-called populist right globally are confirmations of Marcuse’s hypothesis that the regime of preventative counter-revolution in the first world is organized precisely against international revolution.

And Still…

With the development of modern industrial technology, the problem of temporal particularism is posed. The state of humanity’s material culture means that even defensive campaigns can make us all worse off in the long run. One often hears the argument that the politicians who fight against ‘responsible’ climate politics do not care because they will not be around to experience the consequences. They have annihilated the future and turned away from its morbid face in order to maintain their position in the mutilated present, from which everything both good and bad seems thinkably infinite. It is the second childhood of capitalist society.

And yet, it is too easy to attribute evil to age. The bellicose posture of the United States’ gerontocrats less resembles the senile rage of a declining Faustian West than it does the premature senescence of a punch-drunk fighter who is still tough enough to hurt everyone around him. (The recent announcement that the UFC plans to hold an event at the White House in 2026 suggests that the elective affinity between brain injury and reaction may be even greater than we are suggesting.)

Fossil Fuel

With the invention of the steam engine the inert carbon stores of extinct plant and animal matter were transformed into the fuel for the expansion of the capitalist form of commodity production. Rather than acting as mere objects of labour like other extracted resources, fossil fuels immediately appeared as a means of labour: actualized as the lifeblood of the machines to which the workers were made mere appendages and, in this way, rendered just as lifeless as the long dead creatures burning in the furnaces. This was traditionally understood as a dual process of transformation and actualisation, the work of an active human industry upon a passive nature. However, here we see the roles dialectically reversed: set free from the land by human hands, the dead could now be put to work once more as a force of production by which those hands would be transformed, shackled and shackling all life to the same fate.

Now, flash forward 200 years into the future.

Here the internal combustion engine and its commercial reproduction have become ubiquitous. The dead now increasingly function not only as the lifeblood of production but also that of circulation. Humanity and commodities are freer than they ever were before and, so transformed, their labour and their price may be actualised anywhere on Earth. Commodities flow from where they are cheapest to produce to where they command the highest price. Workers find themselves commuting ever greater distances at ever greater velocities to ever greater personal cost, whether that be from suburb to city or by migratory flows attracted to whatever mass of capital is revving its engine. On the highways, skyways, railroads and shipping routes, everywhere the dead keep us hurtling towards extinction.

Next figure:

The angel of history is at a crossroads. Where one great car crash unceasingly takes shape. The headwinds of onrushing vehicles fill its wings, blowing it back seemingly in all directions. Can this catastrophe be averted? Could we not have changed course? With what, then, does it end? If there exist answers to these questions, they are to be found in the fragments, the fossils, recoverable from that one immense pile of rubble on rubble already accumulated by the roadside. These dead actualities of history are too the figures of a world not-yet living. While the dead remain doomed to labour upon the living and transform us into living-dead, both remain but fuel for progress.

Protocols

Conspiracy theorists are beholden to the positivistic illusion that, because everything must supposedly decompose, in some metaphysical-epistemological way, into individuals, the most efficient way to discover the truth is biographical investigation of individuals. The man who storms a pizza place in search of tortured children is closer to science than the one who believes the truth lies in an exegesis of half century-old tabloids and pulp literature. What unites them is the untimely belief in the power of truth for the purposes of propaganda, a belief which the theorist cannot maintain forever when faced with the unbearable futility of his interventions. The consequent lamentation for the errance of the deceived masses leads inevitably to a (shockingly pleasurable!) elitist turn inwards, the coining of shibboleths and code-words, and esoteric writing practices. The discourse that ultimately emerges is just as inscrutable, exclusive, and partial as the “academic” paradigm it was originally organized against.

Well, There’s Your Problem

‘Conceptual engineering’ is a dead end. Disinfected of any germ of radicality that may have once persisted in it. The conceptual assembly line of the academy produces, post hoc, the pretext for whatever the ruling class are already doing, while at the same time delimiting the discourse such that any theoretical resistance can be simply reincorporated into the ideological infrastructure. The view of solidarity that such thought has produced is one of pragmatic collective action amongst various interest groups, a rationality which still retains the essence of social domination. This racket realism is what Horkheimer called “the mind of class society in its streamlined form.” It does not regard the concept from the perspective of transformation but constructs schemas and categories by which these groups would articulate themselves in prearranged forms and in prearranged ways “completely alien to their own nature.” When the people, or the concept, will not comply with his purposeful rule, the engineer throws up his hands in mock surrender. The engineer’s concept was not wrong; it just needed some tinkering. There are blind spots in our thinking—no doubt! But it is simply a matter of review and refinement. Put the hammers down, you luddites! The system will be working soon.

Teleology

It seems that, to a greater extent than the other classes in capitalism, the petty bourgeoisie (whatever it may be that is designated by this term) can only achieve unity by first dividing itself and waging an ‘internal’ struggle. Whatever coherence the concept obtains at the level of theory emerges out of historical struggles whose outcome was not (and is not) predetermined. Where one particular occupational cohort—say, public school teachers—stands in the political situation is not an immediate consequence of its relation to capital or the state.

The political ambiguity of this amorphous ‘stratum’ sandwiched between the proletarian and the capitalist is as objective as it is immense. Even the degree to which they genuinely or even approximately enjoy the powers of private property (or mere usufruct ‘possession’) varies according to the vicissitudes of the economic conjuncture. Even the traditional petty bourgeoisie are often scarcely more than parasitic entities dependent on large firms. It makes little difference whether one interprets their position as order-givers subject to constraints from above or order-takers given limited powers over those below them. Their activity is structured by the division between intellectual and manual labor at the technical level, the social level, or both; this division is, in turn, part of the bedrock of class society—not something that can be abolished with the stroke of a pen. All attempts to introduce more ‘current’ or empirically specific substitute concepts are doomed to failure because they implicitly deny the fundamental multivalence of the object under scrutiny.

List of People Whose Ideas We Took

In the absence of a traditional bibliography, please accept this (non-exhaustive) list of people whose ideas we have appropriated in the production of this text. It is alphabetized for your convenience.

Adorno, Theodor W.
Akomfrah, John
Ambedkar, B. R.
Anders, Günther
Banaji, Jairus
Benjamin, Walter
Berardi, Franco “Bifo”
Bion, Wilfred R.
Bloch, Ernst
Breman, Jan
Butler, Judith
Cooper, Melinda
Deleuze, Gilles
Du Bois, W. E. B.
Endnotes
Ekbia, Hamid
George, Edward
Gleeson, Jules Joane
Guattari, Félix
Hamadah, Faisal
Harman, Chris
Horkheimer, Max
Kraus, Karl
Marcuse, Herbert
Marx, Karl
Mills, Charles
O’Rourke, Elle
Rose, Gillian
Sakai, J.
Toscano, Alberto
van der Linden, Marcel
Winant, Gabriel
Wolfe, Patrick