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Parasites in the care economy

Dear friends,

I've been reflecting on some often theorised yet under-discussed elements of capitalism, which I believe warrant further discussion. Parasitism, or privatisation, is a vampiric process which has driven a great deal of expansionism and exploitation[1]. It also draws wealth from the proletariat, and concentrates it in the bourgeoisie. Working class people, through taxes, payments for goods and services, and other forms of revenue generation, subsidise private corporations who extract 'surplus' from the revenue stream, this repeats all the way down. In some spaces, this exploitation is particularly obvious, and multiplies layers of extraction and wealth skimming. Surplus value that was once retained in the public sector (and theoretically benefiting society collectively) is now extracted as private profit. Joy.

Over time we see this process expanding, subsuming public moneys into bourgeoisie wealth. This creates a contradiction where taxpayers pay more for the same service because we are now funding both the actual work and the profit margins of the private company[2]. Meanwhile, these workers experience more immiseration as conditions worsen despite their labour remaining equally productive and costing more. The broader pattern, where this underpaid worker experiences a chain of privatised services throughout their own life, illustrates how working class folks become trapped in a web of capitalist relations (and we'll look at an example of this in the context of disability services below). We are exploited as workers, then exploited again as consumers of privatised utilities, healthcare, transport, and so on. Each privatised service extracts profit while delivering what were once public goods – yet the same service is delivered – often for less pay for the worker.

We have seen that capitalism holds a strong tendency to expand into all spheres of social life, transforming public goods into commodities and creating new avenues for surplus value extraction. Concentrating vast wealth amongst the wealthy. The state facilitates this process by transferring publicly-owned assets and services to private capital, subsidising capital accumulation with public resources while workers bear the costs through reduced wages and higher prices for essential services. And have you met Woolworths and Coles?

Continuing in this same examination, this morning some news about vital public services flashed briefly across a fast moving news live blog. I'm intrigued by this format for the news, too, where counter-hegemonic observers actually stand a chance at critical analysis because the live blog is not subject to as much editorial and political review as regular articles (thereby exposing casual observers to a more realistic feed of politics).

This post about public service design also had me questioning the propagandist rubbish that the Labor party progress as "good government". The NDIS is a terribly managed service which exemplifies the behaviours above we just discussed the extreme[3]. Parasitic companies skim wealth out of the NDIS and provide subpar or underdeliver promised services to already exploited people with a disability. We see the capitalist state prioritising profit, again, over supporting social reproduction. Yet the Labor government wonders why no one is having babies... But let's spend a moment analysing the supposed overspend of the NDIS in the way the propagandists have advanced it. Taking a step back, we should have a look at the word from the horses mouth[4].

Grattan has spent more time evaluating how to reform Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Reportedly, the scheme has become financially unsustainable and has failed to deliver "optimal" outcomes for people with a disability. The NDIS, introduced in 2013, provides individualised funding packages to people with permanent disabilities. Because of systematic mismanagement and large scale privatisation (oops am I editorialising myself?) costs have skyrocketed from around $2.4 billion to over $41 billion annually, growing at roughly 24% per year. Their report proposes a "rebalancing" of the system by creating stronger "foundational supports" (general disability services available to all people) while making individualised funding "more targeted" (harder to attain) for those with the "most severe needs". They argue this can be achieved by redirecting existing NDIS funds rather than requiring new government spending - essentially moving about 10% of current individualised payments into commissioned services(!!!).

The report reveals the contradictions in the "support" of social reproduction under capitalism through market mechanisms. The NDIS was designed as a market where people act as consumers purchasing services with government-allocated budgets. However, this commodification of care has created exactly the problems we expect in unchecked market capitalism: inefficiency, inequality, and unsustainable cost growth as private providers extract extreme "surplus" value while people with a disability navigate a complex marketplace[5]. Grattan's "rebalancing" could be a partial recognition that market-based individual consumption cannot efficiently organise social care. Jackpot? Not by a long shot. Their answer, moving toward commissioned services and reducing reliance on individualised purchasing, could move toward socialised provision, except we're dealing with a Labor government. The fundamental issue remains: disability support is still conceived as a cost to be managed rather than a collective social responsibility, with the reforms primarily motivated by fiscal sustainability rather than human need.

The institute places emphasis on "foundational supports" essentially acknowledging that "the market" cannot, will not, and could never provide the basic infrastructure of care that people require[6]. Yet the solution remains trapped within neoliberal logic. They seek to reorganise service delivery to be more cost-effective rather than questioning why our obligation to support people with a disability should be subject to budget constraints at all – or even conceived as a cost in the first place. The report's proposed success is that reforms could be achieved "without spending more money" this shows the fundamental ideological limitation: improved care is only acceptable if it doesn't threaten capital accumulation elsewhere in the economy. And certainly, under these same broken logics, reform is not appropriate if it affects private provider wealth skimming.

Labor's panic over the NDIS growing "too big" is a manufactured crisis to distract from the fundamental wealth redirection from public to private. Under capitalism, care for people with a disability is treated as a cost to be minimised rather than a social necessity[7]. The framing of disability support as an unsustainable financial burden shows both capital's logic, and the inhumanity of the Labor party: only labour that produces surplus value is valued, while the costs of maintaining those who cannot be fully exploited for profit are seen as drains on accumulation. Neoliberal capitalism has systematically defunded universal public services where they existed. Research here shows that market mechanisms and commodification only entrench disadvantages faced by people with a disability[8]. The push of the 1970s and 80s towards socialising care, support, and other vital social reproduction services is long gone, and Labor has long been twisted by greed and exploitation and forgotten their working class roots. What we see now is artificial scarcity, and not just in the NDIS, people are forced to compete for individualised underfunded packages, purchase private health care, or languish in underfunded emergency care services because collective, comprehensive support systems have been dismantled. This has happened under Labor and Liberal leadership. And this only serves capital's interests by keeping support costs highly visible and therefore "contestable" – the source of panic in propaganda, rather than embedded in universal, collective, social infrastructure.

This is a key part of capitalism's contradictory relationship with social reproduction[9]. Capital needs a healthy, educated workforce, but doesn't want to pay for maintaining those who may not be able to contribute as much (even temporarily) to surplus value extraction. The NDIS individualises what should be collective social responsibility, making each person's needs appear as separate cost items rather than part of society's obligation to care for all members. Importantly, though, it is maintained in this way because it funds another parasitic industry – providers and service coordinators who exploit all in their care and employment. Deserving and important people coordinate care, provide care, and seek care. All these people offer great value to society, and yet are depicted in media and discourse as a drain. This is exemplary of capital's consistent dehumanisation and the stripping of human values from civil society (in Gramscian terms). The proposed "foundational supports" will move toward ever more more "means-tested", residual welfare - providing minimal support while maintaining the pressure on individuals to prove their worthiness for assistance. This keeps the focus on managing costs rather than addressing the systemic exclusion that capitalism breeds.

Ultimately, this reflects capitalism's fundamental inability to adequately provide for human needs that don't generate profit. Let's not even get started on housing, real estate companies, and tenancy authorities – parasitic rent seekers. Deep breaths, folks.

Rather than "managing" disability through state bureaucracy and boundless layers of private rent seekers, an indigenist approach could centre our concepts of collective responsibility and kinship [10]. Care might then be organised through community collectives based on Country and recognising that colonial capitalist structures created many disabling conditions through dispossession, cultural destruction, and environmental degradation. Disability support would be understood as a healing of collective trauma while recognising the validity of may diverse ways of being, contributing, and behaving. No more would we need to medicalise and pathologise difference. Alongside this, a Marxist transformation could eliminate the entire market apparatus. No more purchasing services, provider profits, or competitive tendering. Instead, we might see care organised as freely associated labour where communities directly organise to meet each other's needs[11]. People with a disability wouldn't be consumers or clients but participants in democratic planning of support systems. Care workers would be community members rather than employees, with work organised around social need not profit extraction. Resources could then flow based on principles of reciprocity, relationship and (feminist) ethics of care, recognising how racism, sexism, transphobia, and ableism intersect[12]. Rather than individual assessments and budgets, communities might collectively determine support based on relationships and protocols. Queer and trans disabled people, disabled women of colour, and Indigenous disabled peoples would have their experiences centred in how care is organised, moving beyond normative assumptions embedded in current systems. These normative assumptions would be dismantled – not centring (manual) labour in conceptions of wellness.

Our goal should not be "independence" or fuller economic participation. We should strive toward social conditions where all bodies and minds can flourish. Work itself should be transformed: shorter hours, meaningful activity, accommodation as default rather than exception. Technology would be developed cooperatively to enhance autonomy rather than increase surveillance. The artificial separation between "disabled" and "non-disabled" would dissolve as society reorganises around collective interdependence rather than individual productivity[13]. We should also draw on indigenist approaches which recognise disability as part of natural human diversity while also addressing how environmental destruction creates disabling conditions. Care should be integrated with restoration of Country, sustainable food systems, and healing damaged relationships. Away from anthropocentric capitalism towards connecting personal healing and healing Country.

Just a casual restructuring of society. And you know what? The only barriers are human: greed and hate.

Brain and body work,

Aidan

  1. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X16689085 ↩︎
  2. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203119600 ↩︎
  3. https://theconversation.com/understanding-the-ndis-the-challenges-disability-service-providers-face-in-a-market-based-system-57737 and https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2023.2263629 ↩︎
  4. https://grattan.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Saving-the-NDIS-Grattan-Institute-Report.pdf ↩︎
  5. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2020.1782173 and https://doi.org/10.1111/spol.12607 amongst many others ↩︎
  6. Joseph makes sound arguments on this here https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/SWPS/article/view/14059 ↩︎
  7. Campbell looks at how ableness is produced and maintained, which sits well with our discussion of disability as social/political construct under capitalism https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230245181 ↩︎
  8. https://doi.org/10.15353/cjds.v4i2.211 ↩︎
  9. cf., https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2023.1305301 ↩︎
  10. See https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115047 https://doi.org/10.1017/elr.2025.14 https://doi.org/10.1111/hsc.14040 for indigenist perspectives – just three amidst many. ↩︎
  11. Again https://doi.org/10.1111/hsc.14040 ↩︎
  12. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243218801523 ↩︎
  13. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726715612901 ↩︎
,   &  Aidan Cornelius-Bell
capitalism, NDIS, disability, privatisation, extractivism, parasitism, reproduction, health care

No Kings, Same Kingdom: How liberal resistance might reinforce the system

Dear friends,

Recently, we saw the largest protest movement in American history. We also saw this swept away by the capitalist media within a handful of news cycles. But what is practice without theory (well, ... anyway). I think it is worth spending a little time on analysing the underlying ideologies and values of protest movements, particularly when they hold such broad appeal. Through this kind of analysis we might be able to first recognise some fundamental assumptions and a shared epistemology (way of knowing) to elaborate or stretch. I also want to underlabour this writing with Marxist critique, noting that the collapse of Marxian praxis in popular thought is the point of radical departure from engaging the proletariat where they are at. Doing things backwards, let's start with some fundamental challenges of theory in this space first.

From Rosa Luxemburg[1] to V. I. Lenin[2] the beginning of the 1900s saw this rupture between theory and practice repeat. Notably, across the western world the working class were more allied around a union solidarity than our contemporary conditions. In practical terms we can then assume that there is less theory/practice dynamism now than then. If workers were already willing to grapple with issues of ("inferior") class positions then, workers now, for ideological and hegemonic reasons, are often unwilling to engage beyond immediate conditions. Evidencing this theory/practice rupture isn't difficult. Theoretical debates in the Occupy Wall Street protesters have been discussed elsewhere[3], the Sanders 2016 movement attempted to reconnect the divide but ultimately failed to meet its target[4] and armchair socialists have discussed this point of departure at length (I promise I'm not feeling guilty)[5]. And in other American discourse, protest and activist movements such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal program seek navigation of these spaces – treading lightly often to their detriment.

At this moment, we should detour through accelerationism theory, to lay out some groundwork for what's to come (identifying the point of departure). Accelerationism advocates for speeding up and intensifying capitalism's inherent contradictions and technological dynamics, rather than resisting them[6]. But accelerationism is a 'both sides' tactic – though a hegemonic tactic nonetheless. Right-accelerationists embrace intensification as a means to collapse existing (liberal) democratic structures, viewing societal breakdown as necessary for installing hierarchical, ethno-nationalist orders. Manifestos written by right-wing accelerationists – literal murderers – emphasise chaos[7]. Left-accelerationists advocate for using (capitalist) technology and automation to transcend capitalism. Putting it simply: more of this will equal less of this (I'm scratching my head too). They see a post-work society achieved through technological liberation rather than traditional labour organising. Between accelerationists there is also a point of departure between theory and practice: theorists look for systemic transformation through technological and economic forces, practical movements instead devolve into either nihilistic destruction (right) or techno-optimistic reformism (left) that does not address material conditions. Are you feeling all meta'd out yet? I sure am. Basically accelerationists embody "move fast, break shit" believing that this will somehow manifest in the manufacture of concrete political work required for meaningful social change.

Okay, I've jerked you between theory/practice rupture, accelerationist theory practice divide, and we've landed somewhere ideologically adrift. Let's revisit the point of departure in popular movements rather than in a specific theory. Because as we know, there is no grand unifying theory in activist spaces.

We can see a catastrophic theory/practice divide in activist movements littered through history. The Weather Underground, for instance, demonstrated this dynamic. Emerging from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which had 100,000 members by 1969, the Weathermen faction's adoption of "ultraleft" theory advocating immediate armed confrontation with the government and their belief that mass organisations were unnecessary led them to dissolve SDS entirely and retreat into small guerrilla cells (accelerationist!)[8]. Germany's Red Army Faction (RAF) emerged from the 1968 student movement but similarly destroyed its own base when theoretical commitment to urban guerrilla warfare led them to believe they represented the most "exposed European vanguard" of global revolution, thereby isolating them from the broader left as their tactics became more violent (accelerationist!)[9]. Interestingly, the Black Panthers emerging from grassroots community assistance programs held their ideological roots for longer. By delivering systematic mutual aid everything from large scale free breakfast programs for children to health clinics, and community education[10], activists remained connected to community concerns longer than other movements. With time, however, revolutionary strategy versus community organising became a departure point (...).

Notably, longer lived programs of activism tend to have stronger theoretical connection to grassroots needs. This is an inversion. Social movement theory literature discusses sustained movements requiring ongoing dialogue between theoretical understanding and grassroots experience. Here, for instance, resource mobilisation theory discusses that movements survival may be ensured through resource acquisition and management[11] with adaptability to changing contexts critical to longevity[12] – dialogue and equal distribution of wins (not accelerationist!). Community organising approaches which connect with values of democratic decision-making, Indigenous leadership (and relationality), and concrete winnable campaigns consistently demonstrate superior longevity compared to "vanguard" (frequently accelerationist) models[13]. If you want to read more about connectivity between grassroots needs and activist projects boy have I got you covered in the footnotes[14].

If we return, now, with these schematics to our investigation of the No Kings protests, there are a few theoretical landmines we need to tread carefully around. There is a binding ideology at the heart of these protests – a view that U.S. government should not become a dictatorship. We can pontificate about the lack of voter turnout vs the massive scale of the No Kings protests another time. Fundamentally, it has been shown that the vast majority of American people believe that Trump should not have authoritarian powers[^15]. Great. But upon what ideological base? Fundamentally was the No Kings turnout inspired by notions of democratic preservation? Or is the root ideology behind the protests actually a neoliberal or free market capitalist perspective? And where does the working class fit amongst this?

If we can reconcile the No Kings protest movement as a manifestation of contradictory consciousness[15] (within civil society), we can begin to theorise political connectivity, as well as some points of departure (but let's not overload the brain right this second)[16]. Protesters' rejection of autocratic leadership while they maintain allegiance to liberal democratic institutions reveals a misrecognition of power structures in bourgeois hegemony[17]. A selective critique opposing individual "kings" yet paradoxically preserving the "kingdom" of capitalist "democracy". Read: it is the leader who is wrong, not the system which enables the leader. This shows the breadth of hegemonic ideology. The common sense is that "our (U.S.) system is the best system; that exploitation of that superior system is an individual failing, not a systemic one". Critically, we can, here, recognise that capitalist realism has gripped the "average American". The working class has internalised ruling class ideology. The fundamental focus on personality rather than systemic critique actually serves to reinforce rather than challenge structures and power.

As yet unwritten, and not very praxiological of me, I would rather use criticism of Trump to criticise American fascism as a systemic power. Sure Trump is a terrible person, but the system inflicts much greater ripples of intergenerational pain. This system exists to enable people like Trump all the way down. It isn't "Trump" its the entire political/economic system. Any critique (activism), here, which fails to address this is fundamentally doomed to repeat until such times as protest is made illegal – and the U.S. is well on the way to following Australia on this. Yet, this is a point of departure, because by and large the American people believe that their system is egalitarian – even when no one they know is benefiting from it. This is the colonising of minds – an epistemic war – to reinforce the status quo. The debate of American fascism parallels Gramsci's analysis of fascism as capitalism's authoritarian response to organic crisis[18]. There has been widespread recognition that the United States Government exhibits fascistic tendencies through its history of settler colonialism and racial violence[19]. There has been widespread recognition of the U.S. as a neocolonial empire, acting as a regional bully to ensure capitalist survival[20]. There has been more analysis than we could possible cope with in a lifetime, yet none of it appears to organically connect to grassroots struggles. Gramsci identified fascism as a latent possibility within bourgeois democracy. But the recognition of this has been forestalled by the strength and power of rapidly accelerating hegmeonic ideology supported by technological advancement (hello again accelerationism!). We're seeing the ruling class hope for passive revolution[21], where they absorb and neutralise opposition and maintain fundamental power structures [22]. We saw this with the media rapidly phasing the protests out of the news cycle – and we've seen this globally as capitalist hegemony spreads and metastasises.

The tension between spontaneous protest, organised revolutionary action, and reform sits in Gramsci's dialectical understanding of spontaneity and leadership[23]. While some dismiss protests as ineffective performance (particularly liberals), others recognise their potential as sites for political education and organisation. Spontaneous movements contain embryonic elements of conscious leadership that need be developed through democratic collectives to flourish as organic intellectuals. The challenge becomes transforming diffuse discontent into collective will which sits unified (enough) politically to create action guided by revolutionary theory and strategy, and systematic critique needs to sit at the root of this. The challenge as with all activist movements, is challenging the hegemony, the power of the status quo. Challenging the person (i.e., Trump) is an easier, more politically acceptable, move (though increasingly ICE's war of manoeuvre is making this less the case) within mainstream American ruling ideology promulgated amongst civil society. However, as we've discussed at length here on mind reader, the structural colonial, capitalist, anti-worker, anti-ecological, and anti-human ideology and institutional apparatus is much deeper rooted than an unchecked fascist controlling an unprecedented number of soldiers and nuclear warheads. The fact that the questions is not "how does anyone have this level of power" blows my mind every time.

This is a divergent point for me, and for many other socialist thinkers, from organic protesters. The average American (white, able bodied, straight and cisgender, middle class, middle age, male) thinks Trump should be subject to law. The average intersectionally disadvantaged person (this is the quantitative majority) needs the system to be reformed in order to have any quality of life. The problem is acceptable political discourse is constrained so strongly to the needs of the former group that meagre reforms are all that are allowed to be discussed[24]. How do we shift the discourse away from acceptable "centrist" (verging heavily towards fascist) discourse in such a way that even allows all those oppressed to speak for their struggles? Because the traditional intellectual apparatus is based on a capitalist ontological frame which demands control of (epistemological) discourse such that language which challenges oppression is impermissible[25]. And holding, strongly, this way of thinking – if it happened that I were in a position of leadership amidst the No Kings movement – would likely become an area of significant tension with those mostly comfy white dudes.

Let's take an example of a pro-socialist education movement (because this draws from my lived experience of organising large scale activism). In identifying, post-mortem, the ruptures of theory and practice which disintegrated the movement I would name hegemony, intersectionality, and economics as fundamental points of break. Chiefly, hegemony makes it difficult for any activist movement to gain sufficient momentum for change. This includes the full weight of the ideological apparatus of the hegemony, the media, education systems, police, government (fines, etc.), and so on. The intersectional rupture becomes twofold: (1) those with a marginalised identity failing to holistically connect with the movement; (2) those connected with the movement not seeing their needs met by the leadership of the movement, or seeing the leadership move away from a position which validated their needs. This micro-fracturing of allegiances, needs, ideas, thought and so on repeats across all persons participating in the movement regardless of their relative stature. Anyone with a friendship group would likely also be familiar with such politics[26].

To be clear, I commend the democratic and largely transformative way these protests were intentioned. The use of peaceful protest, broad appeal, and anything which shows Trump for the fascist capitalist dictator he is has my tick of approval (not that anyone asked). However, the points of departure towards change – desperately needed positive systemic change – make this a difficult space for praxis. It's paradoxical –

Our systems need to change, faster than ever, because they are changing faster than ever.

Convincing people that their view of change, for instance, "Trump must go" is not "radical" enough, without collapse into accelerationism is nearly unimaginable (and thereby rupturing the protest movement for "valid" ideological reasons, rupture nonetheless). The average American discourse in particular is so allergic to anything resembling socialism, that even equity initiatives are often looked upon scornfully. Yet those casting the scorn are often those who would benefit most from reform. This is the nature of hegemonic media, education, and systems control[27]. Breaking the way of thinking, working, might be achieved incrementally but it can't be achieved through departure. "You're being to radical", "you just want to break shit", etc. which are critiques hurled by right-accelerationists seeking technological engulfment of the proletariat for fascist ends. And still acceleration into violence is the last thing I, personally, and many socialists would want, so... Regardless, the critique remains as long as capitalism defines our shared ontology and revokes agency for one's own episteme.

Gosh, we're so many layers deep that even I've lost track! Let me simplify in bullets before we say farewell to one another for the moment:

  • No Kings effectively targeted a fascist leader;
  • The fascist leader is both symbolic and literal embodiment of capitalist fascism, and hegemony (an accelerationist capital-techno-fascism);
  • Critique of the fascist leader is already extremely difficult and receives little airtime due to His hegemony;
  • Broader critique of the system which enables this leader is not on the table with No Kings – both from a left and right wing perspective (because it is close to disintegrating anyway due to the weight of hegemony);
  • Discussion of the limited airtime (coverage) is largely off the table for American discourse;
  • Critique of capitalism is seen as "communist" and flagged as dangerous due to educational hegemony;
  • Points of rupture between idealised ideologies and idealised lived realities create discord and paradox which can destroy movements;
  • Everything else already seeks to destroy anti-capitalist movements; and
  • Well, stalemate.

There's a real need for genuine empathy and education in moving liberals toward more radical leftist ideologies. We're just not sure they're interested unless they're made personally uncomfortable. Still, I remain hopeful that compassion and empathy will win.

Yikes,

Aidan.

  1. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/index.htm ↩︎
  2. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ ↩︎
  3. https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/occupy-socialist-anarchist/ ↩︎
  4. https://theconversation.com/bernie-sanders-says-the-left-has-lost-the-working-class-has-it-forgotten-how-to-speak-to-them-243160 ↩︎
  5. cf., https://www.law.georgetown.edu/denny-center/blog/labor-unions-capitalism/ ↩︎
  6. for a relatively clear explanation: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationism-how-a-fringe-philosophy-predicted-the-future-we-live-in ↩︎
  7. https://theconversation.com/a-field-guide-to-accelerationism-white-supremacist-groups-using-violence-to-spur-race-war-and-create-social-chaos-255699 ↩︎
  8. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Weathermen ↩︎
  9. https://doi.org/10.1080/10576109308435925 ↩︎
  10. https://bppaln.org/programs ↩︎
  11. cf., https://doi.org/10.1086/226464 ↩︎
  12. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2329496519850846 for one example ↩︎
  13. https://doi.org/10.3390/urbansci2010023 and also https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0899825619300089 ↩︎
  14. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378013002197 https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1096877/full https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10162496/ ↩︎
  15. look no further than https://search.worldcat.org/title/14965368 ↩︎
  16. I could do another whole dispatch looking at collective structures of subalterns (in Gramsci's originary sense) but I'll just drop this here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/089356902101242242 ↩︎
  17. This is another can of theoretical worms, but: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt18dzstb.13 ↩︎
  18. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137334183_3 ↩︎
  19. An absolute must read: https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240 and a bit more if you're on a spree https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520273436.003.0005 ↩︎
  20. https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580900015002005 and https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818630-5.01020-4 ↩︎
  21. https://doi.org/10.7202/016590ar ↩︎
  22. an interesting analysis of this kind of structure https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt19b9jz2 ↩︎
  23. cf., https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199457557.001.0001 ↩︎
  24. https://doi.org/10.17813/maiq.4.2.d7593370607l6756 ↩︎
  25. Don't get too bogged down here, but there's useful sketches in: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm ↩︎
  26. This is a whole poststructural epistemic mess, but the ideas are nonetheless important: https://doi.org/10.1086/669608 ↩︎
  27. Old faithful: https://chomsky.info/19890315/ ↩︎
,   &  Aidan Cornelius-Bell
capitalism, theory/practice, counter-hegemony, hegemony, protest, activism, rupture

You look nice today (or, the ‘values’ of capitalism)

Dear friends,

Last week I shaved my head. Not a foreign experience, but foreign enough that I’m noticing feeling that I have always had but is now obvious in my conscious mind. Why tell you this? It feels similar to a critical awakening, that moment when you understand exactly what someone who carries knowledge really means when they say something profound. From the advice we receive, to the theory we read, the disembodied nature of much of our work and lives keeps us inside the capitalist frame. Making small changes, be it reading theory and finding a positional reality from that theory or exposing nerves through bravery or shaving which make us feel present is the human antidote to that disembodiment.

We humans are remarkable machines able to keep ‘grinding through’ but also able to perceive and transform our surroundings. Engagements with people, place, community, theory, reality, and so much more are fundamentally transformative to us – and this occurs regardless of us being conscious to it.

Today, from this embodied base, I want to talk about values and ethics, because I am noticing the humanity in the system and want to use my admittedly (relatively) small voice to raise that wherever possible. To find and reconnect with the emotional self that has been deliberately obscured through enclosure, colonisation, and so many more subtle (gruesome) technologies.

Capitalism, and particularly neoliberal capitalism [1], demands a handful of values, each of these comes with ‘caveats’ or negatives that directly undermine the 99%. Let’s examine some of the neoliberal capitalist traits:

  • • economic efficiency: money for the wealthy,
  • • individual liberty: militant individualism, concomitant with blame apportionment to the less ‘fortunate’ (itself a construct),
  • • intense wealth creation: for the 1% oligarch class,
  • • creative destruction: the constant change to justify more transactions, and
  • • unbalanced risk/reward alignment (favouring the capitalist every time).

These give rise to a range of resultant values desirable of worker (humans). This conceptualisation automatically makes us think in particular ways, from the language used to understand values and ethics through to the propaganda that maintains such ways of thinking. For instance, if humans are depicted in language as ‘workers’, workers inherently ‘do work’, ergo workers are human and around we go in an endless propagandist/linguistic loop. Rather than dwell in circles of stupidity, let’s do some examination instead.

Extrapolating wildly from capitalism’s ‘stated values’ [2], we might hypothesise the following desirable traits in those workers. And, to do some hard labour, let’s balance the ideal vs the authoritarian likelihood which we see played out through Trumpian politics. Our derived ‘personal’ values might be:

personal responsibility

In which we take initiative for our own economic advancement and never ask for external support.

Or, in an authoritarian turn, degrades into blame-shifting downward (punching down). Workers bear all responsibility for failures (even and especially systemic ones) while receiving no credit for success.

Responsibility is weaponised to justify cutting social supports while simultaneously removing workers’ agency to make meaningful choices about our conditions.

productivity and efficiency

In which we maximise ‘output’ and minimise waste of time and resources.

Or, in an authoritarian turn, is reduced to crude metrics detached from ‘actual value’ creation. Work intensifies as rest periods, safety measures, and long-term sustainability are sacrificed for immediate output.

Workers face algorithmic management systems with ever-increasing targets and diminishing returns on our efforts.

adaptability without curiosity

In which a willingness to be taught new skills and to accept ‘pivots’ as market change.

Or, in an authoritarian turn, enforcement of compliance with frequent, arbitrary changes. Workers must continuously adjust to new demands without questioning our purpose or seeking improvements.

work ethic

In which we are dedicated to our task, disciplined and commit to ‘quality’ as defined by the capitalist.

Or, under the authoritarian turn, devolves from any notion of intrinsic motivation to performative displays of busyness and loyalty. Actual effectiveness matters less than visible suffering and sacrifice. Long hours become a virtue regardless of output, leading to burnout and presenteeism rather than ‘contribution’.

rational self-interest

In which we make decisions which benefit ourselves economically above all. This one doesn’t need a flip side. But it’s never rational.

contractual integrity

In which we bind ourselves to agreements and building a reputation for reliability.

Under the authoritarian turn, this becomes fundamentally asymmetrical. Employers/authorities unilaterally change terms or selectively enforce provisions, while workers face severe consequences for increasingly minor infractions.

It’s a bleak and shadowy world under the Trump/Musk oligopolist future, and it’s one that capitalism as a cancer has been driving us towards for over a century. With the achievement of global domination, even amongst the most remote communities, capitalism’s need for domination and control now grows to our minds. This frontier – the one that separates current day ‘western’ nations from the neo-Antipodes [3] – sees minds as the last landscape for subsumption of humanity into capitalist ‘value creation’. Be it neuralink [4] or the near inescapable pressure of hegemony, the active manipulation of our minds by capitalism is a project well underway. And so well equipped are languages, such as English, for the task of carving our lives into pieces that refuse mesh with our lived reality that we’re going to need to take a detour through linguistics for a second to orient ourselves. Stay with me, friends, we’re nearly there.

The English language subtly facilitates a separation between humans and our labour. Most notably, English has preference for nominalisation which transforms active processes into abstract entities – “production has increased” rather than “workers have produced more” – effectively removing human agents from the narrative. The passive voice construction further enables this distancing by allowing complete omission of actors, as in “products were manufactured” without specifying by whom. Moreover, English’s economic terminology – phrases such as “human resources”, “labour costs”, and “productivity” – conceptualises people as interchangeable components in economic processes rather than fulsome individuals.

Similarly, English creates distance between people and their emotional experiences through linguistic externalisation. Emotions are frequently framed as separate entities that act upon us (“fear gripped her”) rather than embodied experiences. Our language’s reliance on container metaphors, being “in love” or “full of anger”, reinforces this separation and treats emotions as distinct substances or locations separate from us. This externalisation creates conceptual boundaries between people and our feelings – all this distance manufactured in the way our language is shaped. Ever wondered why board meetings use such abstract language in their papers and discussions? Hmmm.

The rigid subject-verb-object structure of English further reinforces these separations by linguistically distinguishing actors from what they act upon. When we say “I built the house”, the structure creates inherent distance between builder and creation. This grammatical foundation, combined with increasingly specialised economic vocabulary, makes it remarkably easy to discuss products, processes, and emotions as detached from human experience. While this linguistic distancing enables certain forms of abstract thinking, it also facilitates a conceptual separation that has been used to normalise the alienation of workers from our labour and people from our emotions. This, a power move, a deliberate separation, a capitalist initiative, serves the particular economic and social arrangements that reinforce the hegemony of the 1%. So the method of exchange of ideas itself is deeply coloured by the capitalist ontology that frames our economic mode – thereby also conditioning the ontological reality in which we exist.

These linguistic patterns serve capital’s interests, making the relations of production appear as natural, inevitable facts rather than socially constructed arrangements that could be transformed. Just as capitalism extracts surplus value from labour while obscuring this exploitation, English extracts human agency from discourse while presenting this separation as “how language naturally works”. Oh it is but the deepening logic of commodity fetishism, casually penetrating even our grammar for the world. A joy – sorry do I come off as not thrilled?

When language habitually separates humans from our labour through passive constructions and nominalisation, it naturalises the value of ‘productivity and efficiency’ as abstract imperatives divorced from human experience. Workers are linguistically transformed into resources that should maximise our output, rather than creative beings engaged in … any kind of activity. The grammatical distancing mirrors and strengthens the ideological distancing required to view humans primarily as productive units. Moreover, the externalisation of emotions in English (“anger overtook me”) linguistically reinforces the value of rational self-interest by framing emotions as disruptive external forces to be controlled or suppressed rather than integral aspects of decision-making. This supports the capitalist ideal of the worker as a rational calculator unswayed by emotional considerations. Similarly, the subject-object distinction in English grammar reflects and reinforces contractual integrity as a value that requires clear boundaries between parties. This linguistic structure facilitates thinking about labour relationships as transactions between separate entities rather than collaborative human endeavours.

Under an authoritarian turn, these linguistic patterns become even more significant. As language increasingly obscures human agency in economic processes, it becomes easier to demand personal responsibility from workers while denying us power. The conceptual separation enabled by language makes it possible to maintain contradictory expectations – workers bear all responsibility for outcomes while having minimal control over conditions, precisely because our linguistic structures allow us to conceptualise labour apart from labourers.

But let’s not collapse into language, or despair, we have an opportunity through language to change things.

Resistance to capitalism’s values emerges primarily from the body. Bold claim, ey. This is the site where productivity demands, emotional management, and contractual obligations are most acutely felt and most persistently contested – in our very bodies. The embodied subject refuses complete reduction to economic utility through (even small) practices of defiance. Choosing rest despite productivity imperatives, experiencing emotions that disrupt rational calculation, or creating physical spaces where different values can flourish, for instance. This resistance operates linguistically when we deliberately restructure our speech to foreground human agency, replacing passive constructions with active declarations of collective power. “We built this” instead of “this was built” – naming and actively centring agency in language as an act of political assertion, and not a particularly hard one at that. Similarly, we might honour embodied temporality (hunger, fatigue, desire, illness) that follow organics which are incompatible with capitalist time, this can constitute a temporal rebellion against the demand for constant acceleration. Our bodies here might become a site where alternative values can be physically enacted through practices which capitalism cannot easily recuperate, for instance shared joy without consumption, communal pleasure requiring no purchase, or collective grief that builds solidarity rather than isolation. Hello resistance.

Embodied resistances don’t seek some mythical pre-capitalist purity [5] instead we construct new possibilities (within and) against existing conditions, recognising lines of flight [6]. Resistance includes performative contradictions that exploit the gaps between prescribed roles and lived experience. Be it “quiet quitting”: the worker who appears productive while doing nothing of market value, or the activist who creates temporary autonomous zones where hierarchies (temporarily) dissolve – active or passive, resistance is everything against these capitalist values and ethics. The spatial reappropriations create real spaces where dominant values are suspended, and alternatives practiced – counter-hegemonies. What makes such resistance particularly potent is its recognition that power is productive, and thus, effective resistance doesn’t just defy capitalist values but actively creates alternatives through (embodied) practices, or praxes. The body that refuses to separate itself from its labour, that insists on experiencing emotions as integral rather than external, and that builds community through shared vulnerability enacts a politics where abstract values are constantly brought back to their material consequences, challenging the linguistic and conceptual separations upon which capitalism depends.

So, you know, preaching a practice I’ve yet to master – get back in your body, folks.

With love,

Aidan

  1. which I’ve begun elsewhere to argue is fading away in favour of something much worse – a fascist capitalism. ↩︎

  2. these are extremely hard to pin down in an agreeable way. And therein lies some of the problem, the actual ‘pain’ that is capitalism demands indescribability – and through its production of language tropes creates division and distraction from its reality. Nasty piece of ‘intellectual’ work. ↩︎

  3. here I mean to say ideological communities which may fall beyond the reach of deep-seated post-neoliberal capitalism through their ideological distance from capitalism’s western centre. ↩︎

  4. Musk’s literal mind control project. ↩︎

  5. And just what the fuck would that even be, let’s be real, none of us have a non-polluted view of what “pre-capitalism” was anyway. Everything is told through interpretation on interpretation. Get out of here “cave man living”. ↩︎

  6. Hello Deleuze – no, I still don’t understand your work. ↩︎

,   &  Aidan Cornelius-Bell
capitalism, values, embodiment, counter-hegemony, resistance, ethics

Broken sleep, broken worlds

Dear friends,

You may have observed that I’ve been pondering the nature of our broken worlds, in particular how this has deep effects on our bodies. From immovable structures, (self)imposed or otherwise, to external features of capitalist system(s) which offer a guise of stability and security but, in reality, limit human agency to capitalist realism, we are conditioned to work above all. This is of interest to me, as I continuously engage with friends and colleagues who suffer with physical ailments derived from constant exposure to high-stress environments. We are so conditioned with this that even our language fails adequately describe how aversely we react to our experienced environments, and often exact even further tolls on ourselves by internalising that which should be processed communally. Just today, I was talking to friends about self-imposed structures that condition agency under the guise of anti-capitalist movement, but in reality, exact tolls on mental health that are tantamount to the same violations of self and community. Sound familiar? No? Let me expand.

Let’s first turn to First Peoples’ perspectives on the role of emotional, cultural, social and place-based tolls on the body. Experienced through connection with country and community, the phenomenon of embodied trauma shows a severing, or disconnection between a person and their community, country or role. We might understand across much of the global south and in First Nations communities the world over that existence is fundamentally relational and cyclical. Here, disruptions to right relations (i.e., caring for country, community, and so on) manifest as embodied distress. For many knowledge systems, there is an inherent recognition that human bodies exist within intricate webs of kinship, relationship, and responsibility that extend beyond human communities to include more-than-human relations, ancestral connections, and spiritual dimensions, as well as connections to place. Colonial capitalism has systematically targeted these relational networks through land dispossession, (cultural) genocide, and the imposition of extractive temporalities that sever these connections as they did in enclosures before them.

The enforced separation from land-based practices, ceremonial rhythms, and intergenerational knowledge transmission creates conditions where trauma becomes inscribed in both ‘individual bodies’ and in collective, intergenerational experience, bodies, lands and thought. Globally, a great deal of First Nations healing traditions understand wellness as emerging from balanced relationships between physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions — a harmony of (eco)systems that oppressive systems deliberately disrupt through the colonial project’s ongoing violence.

First Nations frameworks for understanding embodied distress may centre concepts of balance, reciprocity, and cyclical time that stand in direct opposition to capitalism’s linear extraction, accumulation, and exploitation. Our body’s manifestation of illness under stress represents, not personal ‘malfunction’, a profound truth-telling about the violation of natural laws and proper relations — the body bearing witness to the unsustainability of systems that fragment our fundamental interconnectedness with all relations. So, yeah, our systems are pretty fucked for us as humans — and this is nearly universal.

In a “western” paradigm, the human body exists as a biopsychosocial system where trauma becomes inscribed upon both psychological memory and a kind of somatic reality. The body’s stress response mechanisms, evolved for acute survival situations, become chronically activated under persistent socioeconomic pressures, leading to allostatic load and physiological dysregulation. I’m going to hurl some more words at you now and we’ll regroup in a moment — don’t hold your breath. Neuroendocrine pathways, particularly the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal, translate emotional distress into inflammatory cascades, immunosuppression, and literally altered gene expression through epigenetic modifications. With capitalism’s increasing precarity, fascist authoritarian turn, and global distress, comorbid with relentless productivity demands and insecure socioeconomic conditions, creates a state of perpetual hypervigilance that fundamentally contradicts our neuro/biological need for rhythmic alternation between engagement and restoration. This systematic mismatch between our ‘evolutionary design’ and contemporary socioeconomic structures manifests as embodied distress — the body’s material critique of systems that violate its fundamental requirements for regulation, connection, and meaning. So, yeah, capitalism also messes up our sleep patterns, capacity for rest and renewal, and we get into even more trouble.

Sleep offers a fundamental ‘neurobiological rhythm’ where the brain undergoes essential maintenance processes: synaptic homeostasis, memory consolidation, and metabolic waste clearance. Capitalist temporalities systematically destabilise and disrupt this through productivity imperatives and chronobiological destabilisation [1]. First Nations frameworks understand sleep as an important liminal and connective state which supports connectivity with ancestral knowledge, wisdom from dreams, and other spiritual dimensions, an ontologically rich experience. Colonial capitalist temporalities deliberately fragmented these through ‘settler time’ [2] the imposition of mechanistic, production-oriented temporalities that sever people from rhythms and dream-based knowledge systems which secure to cultural continuity and healing practices.

From this position of understanding physical effects of capitalist “structures” on the body, we should now turn briefly to how we engage with this as human ‘agents’ against systemic capital/colonial ‘structure’. Or engage once again with the structure and agency debate to try and negotiate some space for individual and collective resistance to (self)imposed harms.

We’ve discussed before how the tension between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ exists within a dialectical framework where subjects are simultaneously constituted by and constitutive of social structures. Foucault offers a prominent example in which he discusses how power operates through repression and through productive processes that shape subjects’ self-understanding and perceived possibilities [3]. Althusser offers interpellation, which discusses how ideological state apparatuses produce subjects who misrecognise our structural determinations as freely chosen identities [4]. And late capitalism’s particular innovation lies in its capacity to subsume resistance through commodification while naturalising its contradictions through increasingly sophisticated cultural technologies that manufacture consent while concealing structural violence behind ‘discourses’ of individual responsibility and meritocratic fantasy [5]. So, there are myriad theoretical frames through which to understand capitalism’s bullshit. Some of them empower us to take action as resistance, such as literally ‘sleep as resistance’, others suggest that structural reform must be negotiated or seized through activist transformation. But either way, the violence of capitalism is long conceived as a physical violence – whether by spear or by ideology.

First Nations conceptualisations, on the other hand, fundamentally reconfigure structure-agency binaries through relational ontologies, where personhood emerges through kinship networks extending beyond individual humans into communities. Agency exists far beyond individual autonomy through responsible participation within complex reciprocal relationships across deep time [6]. Colonial capitalist structures operate through what ongoing settler colonial governmentality and violence and deliberately targets First Nations relational autonomy through ontological impositions that fragment collective governance systems and connection to country. Resurgence movements have conceptualised decolonial agency beyond ‘individual liberation’ (‘take the white hand’) as the revitalisation of governance systems, ceremonial practices, and language reclamation that restore proper relationships. There’s powerful resistance offered here, and more powerful futuristic thinking available in relation and conversation.

Contestation of these interlocking systems of ‘embodied exploitation’ requires multi-dimensional approaches grounded to ‘the transformation of silence into language and action’ [7]. Prefigurative politics that embody different temporalities and ontologies such as degrowth movements, create practices that honour biological rhythms and ecological limits while resurgence frameworks articulated centre Country’s reclamation and revitalization, also serving as pathways toward communal healing. Disability justice movements offer crucial insights into sustainable activism ways of being that honour bodily limits and interdependence as sources of wisdom rather than limitations to overcome [8]. These convergent movements gesture toward social arrangements fundamentally organised around care relationships rather than capital accumulation, where thriving becomes possible through the cultivation of social infrastructure which recognises vulnerability and interdependence as foundational to human flourishing rather than impediments to productivity.

Food for thought,

Aidan

  1. c.f. Matthew, W. (2018). Why we sleep: Unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. Scribner. ↩︎

  2. Rifkin, M. (2017). Beyond settler time: Temporal sovereignty and indigenous self-determination. Duke University Press. ↩︎

  3. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Pantheon Books. ↩︎

  4. Althusser, L. (1976). Positions (1964-1975): Freud et Lcan, la philodphie comme arme de la révolution. Éditions sociales. (no, I didn’t read this in French, I just couldn’t find my reference for the English translation) ↩︎

  5. Jameson, F. (2005). Postmodernism, or, The cultural logic of late capitalism. Duke Univ. Press. (yes, we’ve been calling it late capitalism since as early as 1991) ↩︎

  6. Simpson, L. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. University of Minnesota Press. (strongly recommend) ↩︎

  7. https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/silenceintoaction.pdf ↩︎

  8. Piepzna-Samarasinha, L. L. (2018). Care work: Dreaming disability justice. Arsenal Pulp Press. ↩︎

,   &  Aidan Cornelius-Bell
time, sleep, trauma, bodies, capitalism, colonialism