"It is because we live a slow death
that we dream of a violent one.
And even this dream is unbearable to power."
—Jean Baudrillard
American missiles rain down on Germany, annihilating the last bastions of Nazism. While the Soviet Union finishes crushing the Axis forces on the Eastern Front, two G.I.s on leave discuss the fate of Europe with calm indifference. Tired and rather drunk, they take it for granted that from now on, everything in the West will be done to prevent power from ever again concentrating in the hands of a single leader.
It is the winter of 1944, and the world is about to enter a new bipolar dimension, where geostrategic equilibrium between opposing blocs will crystallize in terror.
As the war draws to a close, in London, a scientist involved in intelligence services analyzing the trajectory of V2 nuclear projectiles reflects on the situation in these terms:
"If personalities could be replaced by an abstract power, if the principles of corporate governance could be adapted, could we not envision a rational existence for nations? One of the greatest hopes of the post-war era: to ensure that the fascination exerted by a single individual would never again be possible... We had to work toward this rationalism while we still had the time and the means..."
This surreal atmosphere, bathed in the white glow of radiation, forms the backdrop of Thomas Pynchon's great novel Gravity’s Rainbow, a postmodern meditation on the persistence of the soul after death.
What is decisively at play in this moment is the intellectual or instinctive—yet broadly shared—understanding, among this cast of characters caught in the complexity of a historical sequence, of the West’s maneuvers for the coming half-century.
American elites, eager to curb the belligerent impulses and hegemonic ambitions of former imperialist powers, will gradually lead European leaders away from democracy.
Even before the war, pacifists Freud and Einstein, confronted with the inevitability of armed conflict, corresponded about possible means to avoid war. One advocated the necessity of "subjecting men to the dictatorship of reason," while the other, more subtly but just as ominously, envisioned entrusting the keys of international power to an independent committee composed of intelligent and reasonable judges—capable of administering major sovereign matters through enlightened decisions, without popular influence.
It is true that the idea of popular sovereignty, of collective self-determination, had been severely tarnished by the unanimous vote for Hitler and the horrors that ensued.
It has been conveniently forgotten that Nazism was, first and foremost, an enterprise of the ruling classes and the high industrial bourgeoisie. As Hannah Arendt reminds us in The Origins of Totalitarianism, labor unions and workers' organizations at the time were far too absorbed in class struggle to place the Jewish question at the center of the social conflict.
The German industrial elite, impressed by Italy’s economic revival under fascism and alarmed by the proletariat’s attraction to communism, enthusiastically encouraged the rise of the doctrinal apparatus championed by the man whom the dominant media of the time admiringly described as a "German Mussolini."
And yet, through the relentless, constant, and remarkable propaganda of the bourgeoisie, historical blame has been placed squarely on the people. Popular support for Hitler—even though he swiftly dismantled democracy after his election—remains the most frequently cited argument among the elite to discredit popular consciousness and the democratic process. This conveniently ignores the fact that nearly all key actors of industrial and financial capitalism, institutions, intellectuals, academics, and recognized elites of the time worked tirelessly to create the ideological and societal climate that led to this outcome, and later collaborated extensively with the regime.
It is also through this deliberate reduction of Nazism to a mere “populist” episode, through the stigmatization of the working class, and by ultimately positioning itself as the guarantor of civilization’s survival, that the liberal bourgeoisie succeeded in securing its victory.
Through a sleight of hand so skillful that it convinced even itself that it was acting for the common good—or even for the salvation of humanity—it has "drowned the sacred shivers of religious ecstasy, the chivalrous enthusiasm, the traditional sensibility, in the icy waters of egotistical calculation. It has reduced personal dignity to a mere exchange value." (Marx & Engels).
At the end of a nearly fifty-year historical process, as the fall of the Berlin Wall heralds the advent of a unipolar world, the bourgeoisie worldwide celebrates the absolute triumph of capitalism.
In 1992, the Maastricht Treaty sealed the consensual sacrifice of Europe's sovereign nations. Under pressure from their leaders, European peoples renounced, through the ballot box, their economic autonomy, their power of monetary creation, their independence, and, by extension, their borders, their diversity, their identities. By now, they have long understood that, collectively, they are always wrong. That the elites—who sent 10 million young men to be slaughtered in the trenches of 1914—are, by nature, reasonable people, and that they can be trusted.
A tacit contract was established between the citizens of the newly forming supranational state and its hidden architects, concealed in anonymous offices in Brussels.
It contained elements of the classic pact, ceaselessly renewed throughout history, as theorized by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan: the people relinquish their power to harm, and in exchange, they receive the protection of the State.
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud warned in 1930 that one cannot sacrifice freedom for security without consequence—that every assertion of a security framework invariably leads to a growing tendency toward aggression.
But no matter—Western civilization was on a high. At the time of Germany's reunification, Francis Fukuyama had proclaimed The End of History, the dawn of a world finally just.
From now on, everyone would share the same inescapable horizon: the bourgeois way of life as the ideal existence, in a globalized world structured around mass consumption. The predatory drive of liquid modernity would extend to all social classes and all continents.
It is always difficult—due to his narcissism, his egalitarian and self-referential neurosis—to make a Western bourgeois, conditioned by a purely materialist and economic vision of human needs and emotions, understand that his position in the world, while certainly comfortable, is not necessarily one to be envied by all of humanity.
The colonialist and hegemonic perspective of the golden age of imperialism persists in a pacified form. The Enlightenment project—to bring civilization and the ideology of human rights to regions still trapped in obscurantism and barbarism—has dissolved into a universal march toward progress, where the Westernization of the world is conflated with the improvement of living conditions for all peoples.
On the horizon of consumption, in this mimetic world, we are all called to share the same dreams, to experience the same desires, to resemble one another, and perhaps even to love one another in an all-encompassing, mirrored relationship.
The dissolution of all conflict—a fundamental aspect of social relations, inherent to any political formation—will be the determined goal of transforming the world into a neutral space. Simultaneously, social relations themselves will dissolve.
The sole aspiration for all will be accession to the bourgeoisie, as the promise of a pacified, borderless world, where human relationships are governed exclusively by "the legal contract and commercial exchange" (Alain de Benoist).
Epistle to the Galatians 3:28—"There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." Just as Paul of Tarsus imposed the paradigm of indifferentiation and universalized the notion of a singular God, liberal bourgeois ideology has established the myth of the Singular Social Body—a classless society where there are no longer dominators or dominated, no longer workers or owners, no longer patriarchy or matriarchy, no longer left or right. Instead, the concept of a universal middle class, with its infinite secondary strata, obscures the somewhat uncomfortable—because radical—antagonism between the owning bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
There will no longer be class struggles based on divergent interests—only technical solutions to problems affecting the general interest. Social order will remain hierarchical in practice, but theoretically, mobility and reversibility will ensure structural balance.
A society that is unequal, yet where everything is reversible. The trap of Capital has closed, and there is no way out.
Meritocracy and the work ethic, as theoretical possibilities for upward mobility and salvation—as the justification for private property—allowed industrial capitalism to supplant feudalism by opposing an archaic world, fundamentally unjust, where social positions and wealth were distributed arbitrarily, by providence or fate.
In those times, no one believed their circumstances were due to anything other than the whims of destiny or divine will. The general acceptance of what appeared to be a natural order was what capitalism abolished.
But by making the economy the foundation of society, it justified the abolition of the feudal duty of protection while legitimizing the exploitative use of profitable property to extract labor from others.
Never leave any space empty, never waste potential. Exploit and maximize everything. Every inch of land, every possession, every object, every being—everything must be profitable, everything must have a use value. The bourgeoisie despises anything that cannot be bought, anything that has no price.
Liberal capitalism, by placing individual emancipation outside the community as its core value, by tearing down all forms of authority—state, religious, union-based, and even gradually the political surveillance apparatus embodied by parties—has secularized and radicalized the Christian concept of free will.
Total reversibility as an ideal of justice is capitalism’s most formidable instrument of seduction and coercion. You have a choice.
What we seek is, therefore, your free will. It is the exercise of your ontological individual freedom—to carve out your place in the global market, to thrive in healthy competition, to fully realize yourself without leaving any part of you fallow, to exploit every inch of your personal terrain to its maximum potential.
You are invited to suffer under the sun of capitalism. Give your best to earn your absolution—or crawl. Take your chance, embrace the risk-reward equation, or live in shame as a failure. Because, never forget: you were all given your chance. Birth privileges, hereditary faculties, inherited capital—real or symbolic—are merely secondary factors. If you succeed, it is because you made it happen. If you fail, it is your own fault. In both cases, you deserve your social position.
This model, laid bare, appears to most as hyper-deterministic and ultra-violent—a sadistic experiment in radical ecology, social Darwinism, and ruthless hygiene, as cruel and cynical as Bernard de Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees (1714), where “the worst among us” are encouraged to maximize their most natural inclinations toward selfishness, under the premise that “private vices make public virtues.” Their actions, through the mysterious workings of providence, supposedly benefit the weak, and much like the “first in line” (a more modern phrasing), these predators, unknowingly working for the greater good, are the engines of the economy and must, in the general interest, be revered and empowered.
This proposition, exposed for what it is, is terrifying. And yet, it is the foundational matrix of liberalism and, by extension, capitalism. No nuance, no reform aimed at making this system more equal or humane will ever fully erase its original architecture.
But one of capitalism’s most extraordinary strengths—aside from its plasticity, its unique ability to mutate and adapt to all technological and societal evolutions—is its power of seduction.
More than its capacity to reify and commodify even that which opposes it, capitalism’s seductive power lies in the belief that it can be amended, that its excesses can be corrected, tfhat the inevitable march of Progress—which serves as its temporal compass—can be steered in a direction favorable to humanity.
If capitalism can always be amended, then it can never be fundamentally challenged. It is thus inescapable and remains the only conceivable system of production and social organization in the foreseeable future—provided it is regulated and applied within reasonable limits.
The real problem, however, is that it can only claim to create a just world if it expands to encompass all of humanity. If it is confined to a national or community framework, it contradicts its own logic. This is why it cannot tolerate diversity in any form.
Capitalism is inherently hegemonic, and believing itself to be the ultimate good of humanity, beyond political categories, it can only perceive those who oppose it as enemies of all mankind. This is why capitalism is, by nature, totalitarian.
The communist utopias of the 19th century long believed that capitalism’s contradictions would lead to its self-destruction. But after the collapse of state-driven socialist experiments, leaving behind the well-known consequences, capitalism now has nothing left to do but what it does best—on a global scale, freed from all obstacles and competition: seduce, sell itself, and impose the market economy everywhere.
And so, under the high patronage of the Single Currency, the Single Market, and perhaps soon the Single Government—with judges administering the codes and regulations of the global market—the liberal bourgeoisie has triumphed over what remained of human communities and traditional societies in the West.
The goal is no longer to make Europe a melting pot of diverse cultures united beyond their differences by a common heritage or political ideal. Instead, it is to turn it into the sum of the largest number of consumers in the world—consumers molded into a single model, conditioned to desire the same objects, manufactured by the same people, for the same people.
An area still defined, but perhaps not for long, as it aims to expand. The deepest anxiety of globalized capitalism, its obsession, is running out of space.
The defenders of the Euro and the Maastricht Treaty promised the French eternal peace, full employment, a general improvement in living conditions, privileged access to consumption, friendship between peoples, renewed economic growth, and that the programmed dismantling of the industrial fabric would clear the way for new jobs focused on the digital transition and personal services.
The official statistics provided by certified institutions regularly show an increase in the standard of living in Europe.
But the simultaneous collapse of fertility rates (Europeans no longer reproduce) and suicide rates (Europeans no longer hope for the future, so their life is no longer an immense and inconsolable disappointment, but simply a long dream of death) suggests the psychological decay of these European populations twenty years later, thrown against each other by free-trade agreements into a zone of maximum economic competition.
So then, what remains of the promise of universal fulfillment, set in stone, by the Maastricht Treaty?
VIOLENCE
The pockets of violence, contained only by sensory exhaustion, are on the verge of bursting.
As the world shrinks, as differences are erased, as cultures become standardized and masses homogenized.
The liberal bourgeoisie and the Maastricht elites sold us an open world, where cultures would meet, nourish each other through exchange, and grow stronger in friendly altruism. Instead, the free circulation of capital and people has flattened urban landscapes, deserted the countryside, and scattered human communities.
Every capital city now has its hideous streets, lined with those garish, repulsive storefronts—those international chains that are everywhere, invading everything—so that cosmopolitan rich zombies can continue their only known reflexes: buying, owning, and feeling at home everywhere.
The universe shrinks when countries look alike. And the sad truth is that people are traveling less. Soon, they will not travel at all. The countries are the same. And the people are the same. The landscapes are identical, the consumer goods are identical, and if the dreams are identical, then people themselves inevitably become identical.
"The coefficient of reality is proportional to the reserve of imagination that gives it its specific weight. When the map covers the entire territory, something like the principle of reality disappears."
—Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976)
The process of derealization is underway. And the urban, liberal, cosmopolitan bourgeoisie suffocates in its own boredom, in its own weariness of being. The world it has created is too much like itself—too narrow, too unreal. It no longer has access to cold, to matter. Everything is lukewarm, and nothing has spirit anymore, nothing has essence. Bourgeois bodies, liquid, slip into abstraction. Into the draft of air conditioners, into airplanes, into the clouds.
As Lacan suggests, the real is what resists us. And nothing resists bourgeois lukewarmness anymore. Nothing resists the liquid air, the vapor. The only persistent affect that still grips them, that still awakens them—the one inherent in their way of life, the one they always carry, beyond reality, always within them, welded to their flesh—is fear.
Fear of the poor. Fear of the people. Fear of popular insurrection. Fear that the fantasized reunification of the scattered, atomized, isolated working classes will overturn their privileges and dismantle the virtual world they have created—for the misery of many and the benefit of a few.
Fear of the return of matter, fear of the face of the absolute Other—the one that was cast away to establish difference, in revulsion and horror—the one that was discarded like rot. Not the face of the migrant, not the face of the leper, but the face never reflected in their mirrors, never seen at their doorstep, the deeply unsettling face of radical otherness: the face of the proletarian, marked by the scars of a life of labor.
It is this primal, almost primitive fear that the Yellow Vest movement in France, with its unification in the streets of Paris, gave form to.
Fear of the face of the native, the sedentary, the anthropological and cultural invariant—the one who does not move, who does not adapt, who does not go fast enough. The one who has not severed his bonds with the human group, the one drowning in the ocean of globalization, the one pushed far away—out of sight, out of mind. The enemy.
Fear of the little people—the ones they wanted to erase. The ones imagined as brimming with negative, unhealthy emotions. The ones seen only as a threatening collective entity, caricatured as a motley, howling mob—whom Emmanuel Macron, in a remarkable slip of class unconscious, called "a hateful crowd," or "the return of the 1930s."
The class enemy. The true enemy—the one that makes all superficial divisions within the bourgeoisie evaporate: right and left, young and old, Catholics and atheists, conservatives and progressives, intellectuals and merchants.
The bourgeoisie instinctively knows how to unify across its branches when its interests are threatened. It knows how to identify its true enemy, how to locate, designate, and even name it: the real enemy is in the streets, on the Champs-Élysées. It is the Yellow Vest. It is the working class.
And it knows how to invent impressive rhetorical and sophistic artifices to justify the astonishing level of violence it encouraged to suppress the revolt and protect its assets. Bourgeois intelligence has never functioned as effectively as when it comes to defending the republican order—which could just as well be called its shopfront.
François Bégaudeau, in his genealogy of bourgeois stupidity (Histoire de ta Bêtise, 2019), reminds us of what the educated, liberal bourgeoisie had nearly succeeded in erasing: its fundamentally commercial origin and nature. How nearly all its thoughts and value judgments can ultimately be traced back to a merchant’s instinct.
One of the deepest debts we owe to the Yellow Vests is that, at the cost of their own blood, they revealed the true face of the liberal, republican, progressive, and open-minded bourgeoisie: a clique of hateful shopkeepers, ready to send in the troops to defend their privileges.
And that class struggle is a movement initiated from the top of the social pyramid, striking downwards—not the other way around.
The Yellow Vest movement is, above all, a defensive action—against the destruction of a way of life, against the dismantling of the welfare state—a collective action whose primary goal is survival.
It has become commonplace in mainstream media to speak of “the people's resentment toward the elites.”
But the objective truth, observable in reality, is the deep, longstanding, acrimonious resentment of all dominant classes—petty and grand bourgeoisie alike—against the working people.
Their visceral disgust for anything popular. For the clothes of the people, the pleasures of the people, their speech, their banter. For their quiet dignity, their defiant pride. For their honor and their audacity.
In the wake of Brexit, May 1968 figurehead Daniel Cohn-Bendit raged on Radio France, on the verge of a breakdown: "We need to stop saying that the people are always right!" In other words: we’ve had enough of the people.
This figure—who has always been close to power and continues to embody the improbable fusion of liberalism and libertarianism—at least had the merit of being clear, even honest.
The working-class vote sealed Britain’s exit from the European trap. The democratic framework allowed the people to express a concrete political response to the will of the elites. The technocratic project of merging European countries into a supranational state—and then, by extension, into a vast global market they will call The United States of the World—would proceed without the English.
Cohn-Bendit, who had once tried to forge alliances with Renault factory workers in 1968—only to find the gates closed—was plunged into near-fury. The people had defied him once again.
It is unbearable for this generation—who killed their parents (to free themselves from authority) before killing their children (to escape responsibility)—to encounter resistance.
If French leaders no longer have economic sovereignty, no longer have monetary control, and have chosen submission to Germany and an exit from History, it is certainly not so that the people might take back their future and regain agency over their destiny.
The resentment of the ruling classes toward the people is an old problem, one that directly correlates with the objective deterioration of living conditions for most French citizens.
The extreme concentration of economic activity in the capital and major cities has led to overpopulation, overcrowding, urban saturation, and a shrinking personal living space, which in turn results in an atrophy of intimate life. Noise, advertising, constant social pressure, and anonymity overload the psyche and suffocate imagination and inner life.
Promiscuity, combined with the extreme mobility of individuals (due to the proliferation of short-term rentals and the decline of long-term housing), which is inversely proportional to social mobility, has destroyed social bonds and pushed people to see others primarily as potential adversaries, competitors, or even enemies.
The constant rise in housing prices, driven by real estate speculation, has not only made homeownership inaccessible to most people but has also elevated property owners to absurd levels of patrimonial wealth, completely disconnected from wages. This growing gap borders on indecency, derealizing and delegitimizing the intrinsic motivation for salaried work.
Real estate values skyrocket exponentially, but salaries stagnate, while the unemployment rate remains structurally stable. The liberal bourgeois generation of May '68, which benefited from 30 years of economic growth, has definitively sacrificed the youth of its country.
This pathological situation of social paralysis also explains why urban youth find themselves unable to revolt against a system that humiliates and crushes them.
Universities, having become holding tanks for an excessive age group, no longer serve any purpose except to keep students’ bodies out of the job market for as long as possible.
The devastating effects of a repetitive, futureless lifestyle, punctuated by endless exams whose only real function is to test subjects’ ability to adapt and conform to the system and its discourse, lead to depression, sometimes suicide, collective anomie, and a sense of derealization and desubjectivation.
The physical consequences of prolonged studies are also harmful. Sitting for long hours, lack of physical activity, frequent partying, and poor diet throughout the endless duration of tertiary education often result in weakened, easily fatigued bodies that are less resilient to physical effort and hardship.
By the age of twenty-eight, at the end of their university cycle, students are released into the world in such a state of physical and psychological exhaustion that they are simply no longer capable of rebelling.
The prolonged material dependence on their parents, who have sacrificed them, creates an artificial attachment and deeply ingrained loyalty to their elders, making any form of rebellion even more impossible. The ontological debt seems infinite, and the deprivation of freedom is total.
Demographer Emmanuel Todd, in his latest book (Les Luttes de classes en France au XXIème siècle, 2020), emphasizes the perverse effects of educational stratification. The fact that over 40% of young people aged 19 to 34 have pursued higher education and hold a state diploma—even one of no real value—ultimately leads them to believe themselves genuinely superior to the rest of the population.
This form of endogamy, a consequence of the ever-expanding mass of graduates, translates into a growing portion of youth living in an intellectual bubble, developing a more or less conscious contempt—or at the very least, a lack of solidarity—toward the 60% of young workers or unemployed individuals without degrees, most of whom are concentrated in the areas that geographer Christophe Guilluy calls “peripheral France”.
It is tragic that the heart of France’s societal inequality is concentrated in this age group, which is paradoxically the first victim of a profoundly unjust and unequal social structure.
History teaches us that all great revolts that wrested social gains from the dominant class in the name of equality were led by the youth, and that the average age of revolutionaries hovered precisely around twenty-eight years old.
Today’s young graduates are also experiencing a dizzying decline in the quality of education. Access to knowledge is more restricted than ever due to the degradation of grammar, science, language, and history education. The May '68 generation, paradoxically, took knowledge and studies less seriously (since they understood their primary function as instruments of power acquisition), yet they were still able to use their knowledge as a weapon to overthrow the previous generation, because they surpassed their elders in learning.
Today’s elderly, the architects of educational decline, the deconstructors of schools and universities, on average, enjoy a higher level of instruction than their descendants. As such, they exercise not only financial and institutional power but also symbolic power—a power derived from knowledge.
Thus, we are witnessing a complete reversal of the concept of social mobility, a particularly cruel downward transclassism.
Whereas in the past, social mobility allowed the children of farmers and workers—at least in theory—to enter public service or liberal professions, and thereby the bourgeoisie and property ownership, today’s bourgeois children are experiencing downward mobility themselves.
Today’s bourgeois objectively live in relatively mediocre conditions, permanently indebted for their downtown apartments, trapped in an overcrowded, increasingly unlivable environment. Their sons will become underpaid civil servants or proletarianized employees, living in the suburbs, holding worthless degrees, and partially dependent on their parents’ financial support.
Their grandsons will belong to a new-generation subproletariat, entirely dependent on both the state and their families—temporary workers, precarious, without status, without degrees, without employment contracts, unable even to rent a studio apartment.
And it is this grandson, pushed to the periphery by the cruelty of liberal capitalism, far from the cities, invisible, marginalized, ignored by the dominant bourgeoisie, upon whom violence will be inflicted first.
The urban, educated petty bourgeoisie is wrong to despise him, for it will meet the same fate once the ruling class’s revenge on the people is fully realized.
It is they, the people of the roundabouts, who suffer the ruling class’s sadistic policies—the destruction of industrial infrastructure, the dismantling of state-subsidized factories that bosses eagerly relocate while falsely citing excessive taxation.
It is they who suffer blackmail over mobility, being forced to abandon their roots, their emotional ties, their habits, their natural environment, just to find work far from home—only to be called lazy, “refractory Gauls” if they refuse.
It is they who are told to “just cross the street” to find a job, when the “street” is sometimes tens of kilometers long.
It is they who suffer the desertification of villages, the disappearance of local businesses, cafés, places of social life and community. Loneliness and isolation, left in the wake of the village community’s dissolution.
It is they who suffer food poisoning from mass distribution, chemical-laden industrial agriculture, soil and water pollution from toxic waste.
It is they who suffer class contempt—the insults of the ruling class, the obscene news reports on 24-hour channels that, under the guise of showing interest in their plight, accuse them of owning a TV, a car, or a video game console. They are put on trial for not being poor enough to complain.
It is they who endure the sadistic policies of liberal governments, the rising cost of fuel, and who are branded as dirty polluters, underqualified, idiots, alcoholics, “people who are nothing”, selfish children of the nation who, despite all the “pedagogy” given to them, fail to grasp the necessities of the common good.
As if it were the poor who were destroying the planet, and not capitalism.
And when the working class rises up, the ruling class responds with repression. A repression so extreme that, after weeks of clashes, in a state of media-induced euphoria, of hallucinatory depersonalization, or outright psychotic break from reality, several political figures and intellectuals publicly, in more or less direct ways, called for one thing: To be done with the Yellow Vests.
In his general analysis of capitalism, Karl Marx emphasizes the role of what he calls the automatic subject. The dematerialization of transactions, currency, resources, and labor—alongside the atomization of the entire social body—has given rise to an unprecedented phenomenon: an autonomous model that exceeds the framework of neoliberal anthropology.
Emerging as if by spontaneous generation, as a consequence of the acceleration of the production machine through the exponential function—what Deleuze and Guattari referred to as “the liberation of decoded, deterritorialized flows” (Anti-Oedipus, 1972)—a new international class has self-generated, eluding all institutional conditioning and the despotic machinery of states. It has supplanted the logic of consumerist commerce and traditional power structures.
This global hyperclass, in stark contrast to the social endogamy, conformity, and ideological homogeneity of traditional market and state actors, is composed of individuals from vastly diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and personal trajectories.
Their convergence is not rooted in shared ideology or institutional affiliation but in the specific mode of life granted to them by their media status or celebrity. They distinguish themselves through their unique relationship with the summit of the social pyramid—a relationship defined by a total inversion of the algebra of need.
Indeed, contrary to what Emmanuel Todd ironically refers to as “the state-financial aristocracy” (formed by the top 1% of the French wealth hierarchy, combining financial-industrial oligarchy with high state administration), these individuals are no longer dependent on the system that gave birth to them. On the contrary, it is now the system that depends on them—chasing after them desperately, unable to grasp their reality or exert any form of control, regulation, or authority over them.
The representatives of this global hyperclass exhibit traits “that escape all Oedipal, familial, or personality-based references” (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 1972).
One can also observe the absolute resistance of the stereotypes they embody to traditional frameworks of knowledge. Psychology, sociology, and ethnology are powerless to construct a general analysis around them.
These parameters, combined with the sheer novelty of the phenomenon, make it impossible for the humanities to study them as an object of research or fully grasp their influence on the course of history.
This hyperclass could perhaps be examined through the lens of Dany-Robert Dufour’s definition of the Deleuzian schizo:
"(...) the schizo can be defined as a mode of subjectivation that escapes the major dichotomies traditionally foundational to identity: neither man nor woman, neither son nor father, neither dead nor alive, neither human nor animal. Rather, it would be the site of an anonymous, indefinite, multiple becoming—that is, it would present itself as a crowd, a people, a pack, traversed by varied and possibly heterogenous external investments." (Le Divin Marché, 2007).
The Kim Kardashian subject, with a number of Instagram followers exceeding twice the population of France, possesses more political influence than all European leaders combined.
The fact that she has not distinguished herself in any specific field or that her fame is tied to no artistic or cultural discipline—she is neither an actress nor a singer, nor even a model, let alone an athlete, nor does she even fit traditional beauty standards—yet remains simply born rich—is enough to measure the ongoing virtualization of capitalism.
She is the return of the repressed of liberalism, the blinding mirror reflection of the work ethic and meritocracy. The return of election in the mode of transcendence and divine right, where the accident of birth overrides all subsequent voluntary operations.
Her image has the power to sell any product—whether a consumer good or an immaterial ideological construct—simply by associating with it, by claiming personal affiliation, preference, or usage, or merely by being depicted in possession of it.
Such a personality wields more influence than any candidate for the highest office in the United States and could entirely shift the course of an election—if not outright win it—should she choose to engage in the political game for amusement, for challenge, or out of sheer cruelty.
Her husband, Kanye West, is the conceptually ideal standard-bearer of the Deleuzian schizo. His trajectory outlines a linear curve of social ascent that appears to have no finality or limit.
Having transitioned from producing hip-hop instrumentals to performing, then into fashion design, the commodification of merchandise, industrial leadership, activism for African American empowerment, and influence in contemporary art, he planned to run for the U.S. presidency in 2024 under the Republican Party—not in 2020—so as not to "interfere" with Donald Trump’s candidacy, which he supported. He claimed that by then, his fashion factory would have created so many jobs that his political credibility would be undeniable.
Yet, overtaken by impatience and a certain childish impulsiveness, he sabotaged his initial plan by abruptly announcing his candidacy on Twitter on July 4, 2020—just four months before Election Day.
His last-minute entry into the electoral battle was predictably a failure, garnering only a little over 60,000 votes. Due to its hasty nature and erratic execution, his campaign had only met the criteria to appear on ballots in 12 of the 50 U.S. states, making a victory impossible.
One shudders to imagine what might have happened had the 43-year-old artist taken this endeavor seriously.
Following an analogous pattern, young rappers like Trippie Redd, Post Malone, and Lil Pump achieve global fame through the random workings of algorithms.
Drawing the attention of record labels purely based on the number of views their videos accumulate—sometimes reaching billions—they sign multi-million dollar contracts before turning 18, achieving in mere hours, with no particular effort, through sheer chance and the total deregulation of information distribution, levels of wealth and influence equal to or surpassing what the traditional oligarchy amasses over a lifetime of patrimonial optimization and the exploitation of others’ labor.
Beyond the infinite expansion of human opportunity, the prospect of leading the world’s foremost superpower, for a given period, appears as a mere game, trivial, inconsequential—one more challenge to social determinism and the last resistance of institutions.
There is no limit to individuation, just as there is no territorial, environmental, moral, or natural limit to the infinite expansion of the constellation of possibilities of being.
As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, is the schizophrenic the terminal subject of capitalism, just as the depressive and the paranoid were those of despotism, and the hysteric was that of the territorial machine?
The global hyperclass certainly appears as an absolute production of liberal capitalism—yet an autonomous one, operating beyond the machinery of production and consumption. Relative to the system, it exists in excess.
Liberated from the prison of the superego and the dictatorship of the reality principle, the global hyperclass will be at the forefront of all technological, metaphysical, and civilizational mutations that will shape humanity’s trajectory in the coming years. It will pioneer space conquest, predictive medicine, and the application of scientific discoveries, particularly in genetics, and could very well live for 1,000 years.
European leaders and their oligarchic allies, breathless and outpaced, chase after the destiny of the global hyperclass, yet they realize that the exponential function of the system they themselves rely upon has slipped beyond their control—that in this game of Russian roulette, they are merely at the summit of the losers’ pyramid.
The global hyperclass has, for better or worse, outdated the state-financial aristocracy and the liberal bourgeoisie. It has relegated the polytechnic graduate, the senior civil servant, the parliamentarian, and the financial director to an undesirable rank within human existence—into the same mud as those from whom they had always sought to differentiate themselves.
It has equalized the world of merit into a compact, homogeneous form—one that it observes from afar, much like the ancient gods, with irony and indulgence.
Humiliated, ridiculed by the global hyperclass according to their own system of values, French leaders—already stripped of their power by European institutional control—have only one recourse left: to take out their frustrations on the working classes of their own population.
Meanwhile, the liberal bourgeoisie channels its bitterness and resentment toward the people by actively supporting the dismantling of the welfare state, the labor contract, and the pension system, in a desperate and embittered alliance with the ruling elite.
The repeated efforts of the high administration—through the mediation of the police and by exploiting the low incomes of the protesters—to suffocate the revolt have ultimately succeeded in dispersing the Yellow Vest gatherings in Paris.
The media, obedient to power, mock the supposed exhaustion of the social movement. The Yellow Vests, financially drained by the costly trips to the capital and subjected to unprecedented judicial and police repression, can no longer, provisionally, continue their fight every Saturday.
In total, 24 eyes gouged out, 5 hands torn off, 2,500 injured, and 11 dead among the protesters. 13,000 LBD (rubber bullet) rounds fired, 4,942 stun grenades, and more than 3,000 tear gas canisters used by the police. The €22 million worth of riot control equipment ordered by Macron’s government at the beginning of his term, specifically to enforce the planned liberal reforms, has fulfilled its purpose.
Tonight, on the café terraces of the capital, in the city-center apartments where every square meter is worth a year’s wages for a proletarian, in the narrow alleys of the museum-city, sold off piece by piece to oligarchs from around the world, the liberal bourgeoisie revels in laughter, in a mixture of euphoria and terror.
It celebrates what it surely perceives, in its class unconscious, as a military victory of the rich over the peripheral underclass.
If we analyze them collectively, coldly, empirically—if we closely examine what their lives are made of—we begin to understand the viciousness with which they applauded the judicial and police repression, the hallucinatory brutality, the grotesque government-sanctioned violence unleashed upon the bodies of the Yellow Vests.
The liberal bourgeoisie, drained, eyes rolled back, watched from their Parisian living rooms as disturbing images looped endlessly on 24-hour news channels. They saw unsettling scenes from the roundabouts: scenes of mutual aid, of working-class solidarity, of fraternity they never could have imagined.
Social bonds, friendships, human communities forming around simple, universal values. Isolated individuals—previously strangers—meeting for the first time.
People talking, rebuilding society, creating a shared space where understanding and goodwill once again became possible. Despite their precarious circumstances, despite the harshness of daily life, they found a sense of joy in their struggle.
In François Ruffin’s eye-opening documentary J’veux du soleil, they were even seen laughing, singing, getting angry, then joking again, others falling in love.
It was precisely this—the sight of poor people smiling—that infuriated the liberal bourgeoisie.
Confronted with these images, they were forced to face their own solitude, their emotional desert, their moral bankruptcy, and their spiritual emptiness.
They were forced to look into the abyss of their own gray, dreary, lifeless existence, cold as death.
This is their darkest secret, now laid bare.
It was the sight of happiness on the faces of the poor that drove them to madness. To the anger of the Yellow Vests, to a few broken shop windows and burning trash cans, the bourgeoisie responded with torn-off hands, gouged-out eyes, and hatred.