Life is a calamitous accident. Absent the mediation of authentic choice, we are cast into an existence as ‘beings-towards-death’ (Sein-zum-Tode), to employ the terminology of Martin Heidegger. It is a fundamental impossibility to exist in the world without being entirely of the world; the system precipitately despoils us of the agency required to exercise free will, imposing instead the narrative of man as use-value—the very substance of the commodity—who abandons the primordial state of Nature to embrace a market economy, the definitive hallmark of the fallibility of modern political agents.
Consequently, neither does capital guarantee felicity, nor does labour possess the capacity to dignify the human condition. On the contrary, such socio-economic conventions operate as loci of servitude, authentic and inescapable traps. In the primordial stages of civilisation, labour was conceived as divine retribution: the Book of Genesis—the inaugural text of the Pentateuch—recounts the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, condemning humanity to earn bread solely by the sweat of its brow.
During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the wage system served as little more than a metamorphosis of slave labour: a reformulation that perpetuated employer oppression through the trade of transformative effort. The proletariat continued to alienate itself, offering its existence as mere merchandise to ensure its own subsistence. Today, the ‘new socialism’ for the global elites—overseen by the world’s most formidable fortunes—designs and manages policies of inefficient expenditure for the majority. Within this framework, the Welfare State (sustainable only whilst there exists a sufficient reservoir of necessary labour power) reveals itself as a vast Ponzi scheme prioritised to satisfy the apex; the asymmetry of power consecrates a normalised exploitation lacking any apparent resolution, oriented toward objectives of a purely extractive nature: the averting of losses through the systematic prejudice of the other party. Fifty years ago, the chief executive of an American multinational commanded a salary twenty times that of an average worker; today, that remuneration is 354 times superior.
Meanwhile, the observations of sociologist Anselm Strauss describe a world in permanent reconstruction where conflict promotes a ‘negotiated order’. Yet, let us not be deceived: this equilibrium—profoundly instrumentalised—rests upon correlative social strata that form the foundations of a closed, airtight pyramid. The bedrock of this structure is constituted by the working class: that most numerous labour force whose function is purely productive and whose weight within the bureaucracy is rendered merely symbolic.
On the threshold of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, gene-editing (CRISPR), neurotechnology, the exponential development of Artificial Intelligence, and transhumanism update the post-humanist dream sketched by Julien Offray de La Mettrie in L’Homme Machine (1747). For his part, the historian Yuval Noah Harari postulates in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016) that the hyper-technological impact upon the social fabric could crystallise, in less than three decades, in the emergence of a new social group: the ‘useless class’. This phenomenon would imply not only the loss of employment but the definitive stripping of the individual’s economic and political relevance in the face of algorithmic autonomy.
In the throes of the twenty-first century, the global population will reach eleven billion. With life expectancy on the rise, demographic ageing threatens to collapse the social order by the year 2100—the prelude to a drastic population contraction. Faced with this horizon, will the plutocracy resolve to institute a planned obsolescence by means of genetic alteration? If so, we would definitively transmute into useless entities with an expiry date. Or, perhaps, have we not already reached that state?
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