The Trump-Musk Doctrine: Death Is OK!

[Prairie Gates]

2. We're post-biopolitics now, as the philosophers might say...

Neo-feudalism was always going to abandon biopolitics, which was capitalist in its essence. The writer of the piece sees in the phrase "There are more important things than living" an extreme desire to "keep the capitalist economy moving." But nothing could be further from capitalist ideology and practice, which must attach itself to and appropriate life as its only concrete means of appropriating labor power. He's right that the MAGA movement abandons this project, but that's precisely what makes them post-capitalist and neo-feudalist. Sixties revolutionaries dreamed of a post-labor world - but the MAGA movement's fundamental ideology is post-labor: rentierism, automation, violence through a warrior class, devotional state religion. Capitalism and the modern state concerned itself with life because it still needed to extract value from living workers. This group feels that those days are historically over, so it's no surprise that the state's concern with life can be dispensed with. Of course, that very concern is what has kept most of us alive.