The Nation Needs You To Die
Why the expansion of surplus labor necessitates the renaissance of empire and the end of the nation-state.
We’re living through an era in which three things are happening at once: Imperialist geopolitical practices are proliferating, the working class is becoming a lumpenproletariat,1 and the nation-state is losing legitimacy and coherence.
I think these trends are causally linked, leading to a provisional hypothesis: Expanding the share of the population comprised of surplus labor simultaneously engorges empire and destroys the nation-state.
A while back, I wrote that the industrial form of capitalism needed us. Its primary means of generating profits required mass employment in production processes. Growing populations were associated with more growth and more productive potential. But as we moved from industrial capitalism to whatever the hell is going on now, the masses have become increasingly lumpen:
The oligarchic form of capitalism that dominates today (financialized, rentier-based, asset-inflating at the top, debt-fueled at the bottom) doesn’t need a mass workforce. What looks like the “middle class” hollowing out, shrinking, is the working majority becoming surplus labor. Especially white-collar workers.
Concentrating wealth in AI and military output exacerbates this problem of making a not-working class. Military spending kills job creation; it’s economic waste, an alternative to investment. AI, meanwhile, is a form of automation that de-industrializes white-collar workers. What factory labor has experienced since the 1970s, spreadsheet labor experiences in the age of AI.
This is a grim assessment that helps make sense of the rise of political repression in rich countries. Restive populations must be systematically surveilled, corralled, and disciplined.
As grim as that is, I didn’t take this assessment to its logical conclusion: If the 1% can consolidate wealth and power despite growing unemployment and economic insecurity for everyone else, then the project of encasing both capital and labor within a single entity called “the nation” loses meaning. Oligarchs might continue to justify their actions in terms of “the nation,” but the form of political order that they impose will increasingly resemble empire—a system of exclusion, tiered rights, and pacification for the sake of exploitation, extraction, and dispossession.
In the eyes of industrialists, financiers, and Big Tech, the social contract—to the extent we can say it actually existed—was always a sop. And that conditional luxury (to them) is incompatible with a world of scarcity where they aim to remain in power.
What all of this means is that civil rights and worker protections—things we took for granted my entire life in association with democracy—will be taken away as democracy itself ebbs, oligarchy asserts itself, and the imperialist form of political ordering starts to supplant the nation-state.
I have to stress that all of the above is very provisional. There is undoubtedly a link between nationalism and empire; there always has been. But there hasn’t been enough thinking about how to specify what that relationship is. At the start of Trump 2.0, Mike Brenes and I wrote a piece dubbing ours a “New Age of Nationalism.” I actually wanted it to be a piece heralding the return of empire but that wouldn’t fly with the publisher (Foreign Affairs), at the time.
But in a way, the past few years have been both an age of nationalism and an age of empire. Claims to the nation have been the basis for amassing and exploiting state power in brutal and corrupt ways. Nationalism is the only ideology through which a worker in the national security state can claim to be doing something good in pursuing global primacy or smiting China. And yet, nothing the national security state is up to can claim to be benefiting all (or even most) people who belong to the nation.
So why am I not wallowing in despair?
Because democratic socialism is rising to meet the tide of fascism. Because my friend Will Lawrence (a member of DSA) just won his congressional primary election today in Michigan against two candidates who were leading national-security ghouls (one of which was endorsed by Tony Blinken). And because anti-imperialism seems to be popular again.
As I learned from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, there is no fate but what we make. A bleak prognosis can be a wake-up call.
I’ve hoped that the means of liberation are immanent to the conditions of domination. Suddenly there are signs this is actually true.
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Lumpenproletariat, or surplus labor, are people who exist outside the processes of production; they are people who become extraneous to capitalist social relations of exploitation. The most complete way of eliminating worker power once and for all is to eliminate the working class as a category. Lumpen-izing workers is a kind of “final solution.”