Shifting the Balance of the Class War

[Donnachaidh]

http://truthout.org/shifting-balance-class-war/1301443200

There’s class warfare, all right but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning. — Warren Buffet

When the history of the early 21st century is debated a hundred years hence, perhaps a central point of contention will be the variant forms used by capitalists to wage class war against other human beings during the so-called Neoliberal epoch. But capitalist strategy is not indeterminably variant when it comes to matters of life and death. “Structural violence” boils down to the principle that capitalism is irrevocably a system of thanatopolitics — the rule of the dead over the living.

The dead labor of accumulated surplus labor time, machines, and the fancy abstract financial instruments of cognitive capital rule over the living labor of actual bodies. Increasingly, the working class is the same as the condition of a bare life; the new permanently unemployed and devalued service sector proletarians are the generalized Homo sacer subject to a state of economic exception.

Arizona state laws are currently proposing to effectively ban undocumented persons or their U.S.-born citizen children from seeking admission to hospitals. This is a perverse moment in the exercise of biopower. The telluric rationale is that “these people” will self-deport rather than face the dire consequences of children or elders dying from lack of access to medical care. These attacks are subsidized by billionaire support of Tea Party activists.

More at the link --