As capital has moved rapidly over the last few years to replace human labor with machinic labor—automation, robotization, AI—it has also accelerated planning and practice in dealing with the working class people rendered “obsolete” or “unnecessary” (from capital’s perspective) by machinization and electronicization.

And it has become more and more apparent that those plans and practices involve straightforward elimination—death. Capital has opened a new period of democide—the active killing off of sectors of the working class deemed worse than useless to accumulation ad profit. Worse than useless because their very existence is actively an obstacle to accumulation, an undesirable cost for capital.

This, democide—and the quickening acceleration of that killing—has become an obsession of capital’s states.

From Neoliberal to Democidal Capitalism

This is noticeable in the so-called liberal democratic states that had, due to pressures by an organized working class, been forced to institute some, even if minimal, social welfare policies to provide some sustenance or support, if inadequate, to displaced members of the working class—in periods where they were unable to sell their labor on the capitalist labor market, or were unable to secure a sustaining wage from the sale of their labor.

Even under the regimes of neoliberalism that we have become familiar with over the past 40 years, there has been some grudging acceptance of these miserly social justice programs—even as the neoliberal project has sought to defund them substantially and/or to break the working class capacity to fight to save them.

Now, under conditions of restricted accumulation and expansive monopolization, capital has determined that even these minimal programs are simply too costly to waste even a precious penny on.

Deregulation-to allow for intensified exploitation and to cut costs of production associated with labor (health and safety, ecological protections, etc.) and tax cuts for capital (and specific capitalists) to allow capital to retain fuller portions of profit are the order of the day.

At the same time capital demands that any and all social spending on of for the working class (or environment) be ended as soon as possible. Capital is unwilling to allow any spending on sectors of the working class it no longer needs as workers or consumers. Instead, that spending must go into the service of capital, solely into “services” that capital needs to enhance accumulation (and to fend off the working class now displaced from the labor market)—military, border security, police, prisons, migrant detention centers, etc.

Infrastructures of Murder

Infrastructures of death—of murder. Machinery for containing, restraining, immobilizing, and killing off the unneeded sectors of the working class.

This has taken spectacularly ghoulish form in the United States with the recent ICE raids and mass detentions and deportations. It has given rise to grotesqueries like the so-called Alligator Alcatraz—a just-in-time produced migrant prison in an Everglades swamp with a built-in moat filled with flown-in alligators. A neo-medieval image if ever there was one.

But this is only a recent manifestation of the murder infrastructure being developed for some time now (and prior to Trump’s re-election). Cop City projects—creating a police municipality solely for repressive forces, to train and operationalize the putting down of working-class dissent (and of the working class itself).

Even as actual living municipalities full of working-class people are starved for services, resources, and infrastructures.

A Murder Drive: Eliminationist Social War

Make no mistake. The ICE raids are carried out in terms of full-blown social war with helicopters, armored vehicles, military units with military weaponry—developed by the state against the domestic population, not a foreign enemy.

And those captured by the state are quite literally disappeared—some imprisoned, some deported to far flung places that are nowhere near their countries of origin. Not, in other words, a deportation as previously understood—an erasure. A quite literal elimination.

This is a capital and its states on a murder drive—the obvious (if unstated, and sometimes even stated) pursuit of a mass culling of the working class.

Strike Speed Against the Perpetrators

This is not an operation with which we can negotiate or reconcile. Its aims are firm—and required by demands of accumulation in the current context. There is no appeal to logic, reason, or shame we can make on its perpetrators. Capital has its own logic, its own reasoning in this—and it has never had any shame. 

And there is no longer any time. The acceleration of democide means that the time for organizing, planning, then acting are also rendered obsolete. Capital and its state servants are out to kill now. This means that opposition must move to a new plane, must gain a new momentum, itself. At a greatly increased rate of speed. This is the speed of the punch, the swing, the strike, the bullet, the missile.

If you know someone is coming to kill you, you do not stop mid-strike to negotiate, to plead, to plan. You strike to end the assault—by any means at your disposal.