A dear friend of mine loves to tell me, “Nothing Ever Happens.” That phrase, with its smug, authoritative aura, stands over every crisis, every shooting, every headline, declaring that none of this can possibly upend the current state of things. As Marxists, we know that there are indeed certain truths which hold through crises real and imagined. The need for ever-rising profits in the Capitalist mode of production, and all that follows from that inexorable, gravitational law, will be true no matter how the bourgeoisie cloak their endless pursuit of greater and greater value-extraction. But something has definitively shifted in the way the Capitalists operate within the heart of their system (that is, America). Whether this happened in the last five years or fifty, there is a clear change in how corporations within the “Global North-” the Imperial Core- have predominantly sought to acquire profits. The focus of the American Capitalists as a class has shifted from value-extraction from the labor of the American working class towards value-extraction from Americans as consumers. This has shifted the core of the modern class struggle, as proletariat exploitation within the United States now more closely resembles the extraction of wealth from colonized countries from prior Capitalist eras. The apparent change towards self-colonization has also shifted the attitudes within the bourgeoisie towards the superstructure which upholds them as a class, breeding a heedless resentment towards what they now see as a limiter upon their wealth. All this and more creates echoes and callbacks towards the colonial era, but most importantly they reveal a desperate attempt by a globalized Capitalist system to find new frontiers to exploit for greater profits. This may all lead to an epochal crisis within Capitalism-but what emerges from that fire will be up to whoever is best prepared for it.

New frontiers have been vital to Capitalism throughout its miserable history. The early enclosure movements and penal societies of proto-Capitalist states used those concentrated resources to expand into colonial ventures; the United States’ de facto colonization of much of the rest of America, and the colonial conquests of the 1800s, stemmed from a need within the Capitalist structure to constantly seek new pools of easily exploitable resources and new consumers for their overproduced goods, so as to constantly increase their profits over one another. These Capitalist-driven states subjected their new markets to all forms of barbarism and social destruction in order to mold them into more productive laborers (those that did not die from the famines caused by their forceful integration into global markets) and more lucrative consumers for the products of American and European industrial production. This system grew more complex with the end of most direct colonial rule, but largely led to the shift in the production of goods to those formerly colonized states, now to build cheap consumer goods to be enjoyed by all classes in Europe and America to a degree. But this did not constitute a new frontier within the Capitalist superstructure; increasingly, crises began to emerge around the overproduction of goods in predictable (at least to Marxists) fashion. Within these crises, a profound change took place within the upper ranks of the bourgeoisie.

Since its advent, Capitalism has always had its purely financial bourgeois, and indeed at any given point in time, bankers and speculators have been counted among the apex of the wealthiest bourgeois circles. But a remolding of the regulatory environment around financial speculation and corporate management led to the apotheosis of financially-focused bourgeoisie over their more industrial-minded class peers. Even some writers within the Capitalist hegemony (e.g. Winner-Take-All Politics by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson) have noticed this change, even if they lack effective solutions to redress it. These bourgeois elements, detached even further from meaningful economic activity, have developed a superstructure of their vision of reality that bears vanishingly little connection with the substructure of Capitalist value extraction. They have taken the torch to the industrial base which formed the basis of their value-generating economy and the regulatory state they developed to make it operate more efficiently, resenting them in the same way Capitalist resentment of all constant capital was described by Bordiga in Murder of the Dead. This financialization of the Capitalist economy has led to a bourgeoisie which is by its nature incapable of thinking beyond quarterly returns, desperately searching for scraps by which to ensure those financial returns regardless of the long-term impacts.

What these “venture” Capitalists are searching for is a new frontier in which their reckless expansion and extraction can satiate itself in. In this quest, they have turned to the working class of the imperial core-not as a labor pool to extract surplus labor from, but as a market for their goods and most especially services. These they endeavor to create with as little expenditure as possible, often with “artificial intelligence” which attempts to remove the proletariat entirely from the equation. But this is not a replacement or supplanting of the Capitalist dynamic-far from it! The machinery of Capitalism still works to build bourgeois wealth even as it chews through its own superstructure which keeps society in its grip. The proletariat in these bastions of Capitalism are not a labor force to be exploited but new colonies to be consumed from within.

The process of external colonization did not just promise economic gains to the imperial core. The fields of anthropology and history-or at least those fields as dominated by white supremacist concepts such as racial evolution-salivated at the “opportunities” afforded them by research subjects made available at gunpoint. The data acquired by these colonial-backed research efforts held enormous value for Capitalists, both to inform their understanding of human activity and misinform the working classes by cooking up a factual basis for the social realities they created through the Capitalist superstructure. As social and personal data was used by imperialists in other countries in the furtherance of social control, these self-colonizers, social media companies and advertisers, and AI hucksters most of all, collect and sell the personal data of self-colonized subjects for financial gain. Beyond that enrichment, the bourgeoisie seek the social power they believe lies behind those endless digital insights into our lives. Certainly there is some potential influence to be wielded with such data in hand, but only if that hand is a bourgeois one that can feed those insights into their capital-derived power. But these actions are not without effects of their own. Like the observation principle in quantum physics, the act of observing the mass of society can have profound impacts-these data-brokering bourgeoisie are not acting from a position of god-like remove from those they observe any more than their skull-measuring colonial predecessors. The universal presence of bourgeois power over the working classes is what sustains the mass gathering of social data, creating commodified spaces of social interaction that trap proletarian lives like flies in amber.

The destruction of native industries was a key factor in the success of the colonial endeavors of the past, forcing dependency on the production of the colonial network. The self-colonizing present, however, is an intensely individual process, and so this destruction of capability is at the personal level among the working class of America. The self-colonial economy seeks to create those dependencies by offering subscribable services for every activity imaginable. Want your meals planned out or even cooked for you in advance? Want your pets and children cared for so you don’t have to? Want a carefully curated selection of literature with which to endlessly distract yourself from the realities of your own world? Want someone to sleep with your wife for you? The wonders of Capitalism will provide you with any part of your life for a monthly/quarterly/annual fee, so you don’t have to do it yourself. The promotion of all these “convenient” services is not simply to extract from the worker-consumer, but to improve the efficiency at which they do their jobs, forcing them to further lean into their own self-colonization. Labor may no longer be the primary route of exploitation for the Capitalist system, but the wages of the working class must still be fueled only to form this new economic frontier to serve as a captive market for their “finished goods”-now no more than a routine of life to be billed for.

This dependency comes with a second benefit to Capitalists-providing a replacement to their superstructure that they themselves have gleefully dismantled. The more that cooking, entertainment, even thinking are all reduced to reflexive actions done by something else, the more the conscious attention of the worker can be focused on labor. Thus captured, any pretense at quality products can be cast away, and the capabilities of the working class to perform these actions independent of any commodified service begins to wither away. Even our own minds are not safe from this atrocious depredation, as the ever rising artificial “intelligence” industry replaces our human experiences to the median of its datasets. AI is being used to writer our loved ones’ eulogies, provide us with our opinions, even raise us from death to provide false witness on the trial stand. The drive to commodify our very cognition should stand to everyone as the final proof of the inhumanity of the Capitalist system nothing is sacred, nothing safe, from its rapacious need to profit more and more. It is the clear wish of our self-colonizing masters that we forfeit our human existences to their machines, letting our minds atrophy to leave only labor.

Such atrophy on a class level leads to a cognitive regression en masse, something the self-colonizing Capitalists are more than eager to encourage. Rarer than ever is the media with complicated storytelling or truthful depictions of real struggles. With their captive audience of subscribers, media producers limit their output to uninspired nonsense, circuses for a new Rome that claim the Rome of old possessed some ennobling civic virtue hidden away by foreign infiltrators, and was not an empire forged on psychopathic brutality and rapacious greed-discursively whitewashing the new Rome in the guise of what came before. A morally upright (but more importantly, non-revolutionary) belief is the key weapon these heroes wield against the distresses which emanate from material difficulties of their setting. Their on-screen opposition, even those that mimic the historical examples of Fascism, are proponents of some radical change towards a “new” revolutionary state. And whatever revolution they propose may even be allowed to be reasonable or sympathetic, until the villain engages in some inexplicable act of violence at odds with the story itself, allowing the narrative to finger-wag about individual violence and calls for revolution so as to mask the social murder and material depredations at the heart of the status quo that the hero defends. Such media, pushed out by the terabyte, de-primes the self-colonized audience, leaving them unreceptive to revolutionary calls and dependent on the promises of the current system on a deeply emotional level.

Proof of this childish political mindset is found in the current electoral politics of America, the epicenter of the self-colonizing moment (as it has been the center of the colonial movement since the Cold War). The nominal left party, the Democrats, operate on blind trust in the extant political system, refusing to face unpleasant realities even as it costs them political power-victims to the same short-term thinking of their Capitalist leash-holders. The self-colonized politic is plainly apparent here-no opposition party, the Democrats refuse even the lamest calls to social democracy in order to stay true to their real purpose-absorbing and defusing movements that spring up from this society’s material contradictions which might otherwise seriously destabilize the self-colony. Their moderate opposition, as in the colonial past, will never be successful unless the bourgeoisie allow them to be-false victories bought by promises of further collaboration.

Of course, there are few accusations that can be leveled at the Democrats in which their opposite number is not ten times worse-and more besides. If the Democrats are the bedtime blanket of childish self-colonized politics, the Republicans are the screaming tantrum. As the process of self-colonization wreaks more and more havoc on the comforts of the labor aristocracy and petit bourgeoisie, the need to distract the self-colonized from the loss of their treats, and more importantly find scapegoats for that loss, finds an electorally successful home in the Fascism of the Republican party. The need for visceral, orgiastic satisfaction in the increasingly proletarized middle class is met by waves of Fascist violence urged on by their golden calf, their anti-Christ, Trump. Moved here and there by their childish seething, the foot-soldiers of American Fascism do not even begin to approach or grasp the realities of the present moment, but careen towards the libidinal triumphs dangled in front of them by their self-colonizing masters.

The self-colonizing bourgeoisie know full well the power of such mindless pleasure-seeking in neutralizing their colonial subjects-or at least understand its value as a creator of the addictive self-colonized subject. The sports-betting industry, a newly ascendant predator at the bourgeois feast, wields the promise of numbing triumph to its disarmed prey. In their omnipresent signage, these kings and lions and their grinning celebrity cameos hold out the lure of easy money, of constant and imminent interaction with the game on their screens, of practically being a player themselves-only this is still the gambling industry, and everyone knows the house always wins. Yet the billions upon billions “made” by this industry are treated as equal to the stolen fruits of proletarian labor-and in truth, is there a difference to the self-colonizing financial bourgeoisie? Of course not-the source of profit has never mattered to any Capitalist so long as that profit continues to grow. And the bourgeois financiers of the self-colonizing moment, nothing matters more than finding the next neck to sink their teeth into.

As Marxists, then, what is to be done? This is not a process that can be waited out-these processes will leave the worker only more dependent on the Capitalist system for every aspect of life, and too checked-out from it all to stand with us in marching towards a better world. But at the same time, the nature of this self-colonial relation breeds a clear response to the increasingly blatant contempt that the Capitalists hold towards the working class, something that can be Capitalized on to fuel agitation within the working class. Those who believe they will form some new colonized elite within the self-colonized nation must be disabused of such notions, shown how uncaring the Capitalist masters are towards their sycophancy. Lastly, community structures independent of Capitalist economics can be a useful tool in stymieing their formation of a pliable self-colonized state. We cannot expect this Ouroboros to fully consume itself-the head must be cut off for the body to live.