That capitalism and its bourgeois-liberal political and legal order are incapable of addressing the tasks of the present is not a radical observation. This view prevails right and left, as the rise of reactionary, authoritarian, and national conservativism across the globe continues to demonstrate. From time to time, especially in Latin America, left governments come to power, their range of action constrained by US imperialism and globalized neoliberalism. In the Global North, the left continues to be politically weak, either practically or dispositionally compelled to compromise with the liberal center protecting capitalism.
No tears should be shed for the end of the order that was supposed to have triumphed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. We can celebrate the fact that we no longer have to think in terms of capitalist compromise or take capitalism for granted: capitalism is destroying itself. Our task is to understand this process of destruction—the new dynamics of accumulation—and identify sites of strength and avenues of possibility for building communism instead of acquiescing to neofeudalism. Three dimensions of our present can shape a path toward a communist future: climate change as our general condition, universal basic services (UBS) as an economic vision, and the servant sector as the labor vanguard.
We have to take back, reinvigorate, and extend the promise of UBS as the post-capitalist basis for social and ecological flourishing.Everybody knows that we have to deal with climate change. Temperatures and species loss are rising, extreme weather is increasing, and there’s no getting around it. At a minimum, fossil fuels have to be kept in the ground—despite the fact that the US and other governments are trying to shift the conversation from climate change to energy security. But the project of energy transition demands more than new sources of energy and practices of consumption. As planning replaces profit and we restructure production and consumption globally, we have to find spaces for meaningful life and work for the millions whose livelihoods have depended on the carbon economy.
Failing on this score is a recipe for a deeper climate catastrophe or a deeper climate catastrophe plus fascism. The former points us to countries whose debt or level of development chain them to fossil fuel export or use. So long as imperialism dictates conditions of trade, these countries have no other choice but to produce for global export. The latter path of catastrophe plus fascism indexes the intensification of reactionary politics. Right-wing politicians channel outrage against anything green, environmental, or redolent of climate justice through tried-and-true insinuations of a theft of enjoyment: the left is coming to take your jobs, your way of life, your history, and your freedom.
Communists should place the provision of universal basic services at the core of our vision for the post-capitalist future. Reindustrializing is not a serious option: the environmental costs for such a strategy on a global scale are far too high. A more promising path toward economic viability comes from services. As Dylan Riley writes, “What the planet and humanity need is massive investment in low-return, low-productivity activities: care, education and environmental restoration.”
In most so-called developed countries, education, transportation, and health care are widely recognized as services government is expected to provide. Most also presume some degree of public cultural support and provision—libraries, museums, and the arts—as well as state protection of natural resources in the form of green-spaces, parks, waterways, wetlands, and nature preserves. That people have a right to expect these basic public services is an unsurprising, familiar idea.
Neoliberal privatization schemes undermined public services ideationally as well as materially. Structural adjustment policies in the Global South in the 1980s and “shock treatment” in the former socialist bloc in the 1990s demolished public provision of vital services. In the capitalist countries of the Global North, free-market ideologists insisted that private ownership was more efficient. They convinced taxpayers that the costs of public provisioning were too high and that individuals should choose where their money is spent (a scheme that is never applied to endless war, but that’s another story). Overall, governments were starved and states indebted. The possibilities for collective flourishing seemingly within the reach of so many, both north and south, in the middle of the last century collapsed under the weight of imperialist neoliberal globalization.
We have to take back, reinvigorate, and extend the promise of UBS as the post-capitalist basis for social and ecological flourishing. Under communism, public staffing and funding of such services will employ the millions released from the carbon, consumerist, commodity economy. People will be retrained with an eye toward infrastructural repair, wetland maintenance, land reclamation, forestry, and agroecology. UBS will solve the crises of the hinterlands, reknitting social ties and engaging ever more people in socially necessary reproductive labor: nursing, teaching, cooking, eldercare, and child-minding. Rather than servants of tech lords, we will serve each other and hence the well-being of all—from each according to ability, to each according to need. Within a planned economy, services can and will scale, extending beyond fragmented subcultures and functioning as universal guarantees.
Communists—and everyone else seeking a path toward an emancipatory egalitarian future on our warming planet— should recognize service-sector workers as the vanguard of the UBS struggle. Just as Marx and Engels merged the working-class struggle with the struggle for socialism, so must we knit together the economic struggles of service workers with the political task of building communism. Over the past decade, doctors, nurses, teachers, librarians, warehouse workers, trash collectors, transportation workers, baristas, adjunct professors, and graduate students have been leading the class struggle all over the world. Domestic workers in India, Indonesia, and the US have organized to demand basic labor protections.
In the fall of 2023, daycare workers in Ireland, baggage handlers in Italy, hotel workers in Los Angeles, and nurses across six US states were just some of those in services carrying out labor strikes. We have to follow their lead, recognizing their struggles as carrying within them the promise and potential for a world economy orientated toward common flourishing.
The general category of services is stratified and differentiated. Not all service work is paid. And not all service work is socially necessary, as many of those trapped in what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs” would be the first to say. When Marx was writing, there was immense variety and differentiation among the crafts, tasks, and skills that rising capitalism was concentrating, mechanizing, and transforming. He could see the underlying commonality in the production of value, value that capitalists claimed for themselves. What we should see in the rise of the service sector is the subversion of capitalist value. Just like unpaid domestic labor, much of this work—not all—is unproductive from capital’s standpoint but nonetheless useful and necessary for social reproduction. Its aim isn’t private profit; it’s meeting needs.
Jason E. Smith’s analysis of the specific power of US teachers’ strikes in 2019 is helpful for theorizing the political potential of organized service workers. For one, their power is “attributable not to their place in the technical division of labor but to their place within the social division of labor, since the withdrawal of their labor compels the interruption of work across a given locale.” An industrial work stoppage forces capitalists to negotiate by bringing production to a halt; if the factory owner wants to make a profit, production has to continue. When teachers strike, it’s not just the work of education that comes to a halt. The impact extends as parents and caregivers have to scramble to find childcare, often having to take off work themselves. Teachers’ strikes are self-generalizing (in ways that strikes in higher education, for example, are not).
For another, teachers’ strikes have a directly political content. The 2019 teachers’ strikes “represented a spirited defense of the public sector as a cost necessary for the reproduction of society.” Teachers strike not just for their own good but for the good of their students. When they demand smaller class sizes, greater educational resources, school nurses, and an improvement of working conditions, they are fighting for the betterment of society more broadly, resisting the initiatives that undermine education for poor and working-class students and give upper-class households more excuses for retreating into private enclaves.
As sites for labor struggles, few services have this same self-generalizing-plus-public-good “double whammy.” Transportation strikes come close. They can self-generalize insofar as people can’t get to work, thereby expanding the strike, and they can make apparent the necessity of transportation for social reproduction. Nurses’ strikes don’t easily generalize beyond specific hospitals and clinics, even as they are clearly struggles in which the public has a significant stake. People need reliable care from competent medical professionals and want to avoid needless pain and suffering. Employers want employees healthy enough to show up for work. Strikes of warehouse and hotel workers can bring specific operations to a halt, but don’t easily generalize beyond themselves, although they can inconvenience those whose work depends on particular supplies (such as those in the building trades) or gatherings (like conferences and conventions).
Given the disparity among services with respect to the power their labor action can potentially command, Smith is skeptical about the future of class struggle. He’s especially attuned to the way that hinterlandization itself operates as a limit to the self-generalizing power of service-sector strikes: in areas from which capital has already withdrawn, whose infrastructures have already been dismantled, people are an expendable surplus. Smith writes:
Today the children and grandchildren of these surplus people remain trapped in collapsing cities, far-flung suburbs, and rural ruins. They scrape by on part-time precarious work and tenuous lines of extortionate credit, commuting to and from work an hour each way, surveilled by heavily armed cops as they make their way home from bus stops. Some run rackets and hustles, while others sink into depression or drugs. Prison is always near.
In the hinterlands, strikes of service workers may be harder to generalize because the people, the area, have already been written off. Nobody really cares if hospitals, schools, stores, and agencies close down; that’s the way things were going anyway.
Smith leaves open another path as he describes the revolts of the gilets jaunes occurring in France around the same time as the transportation strikes: struggles in the hinterlands that don’t take the form of labor actions. Located in key points in neither the social nor the technical division of labor, the gilets jaunes demonstrations tended to be disorganized and limited to Saturdays. With most of the protestors coming from “a world of insecure employment, rural poverty, and increasing inequality,” their demonstrations targeted the inequity of France’s fuel tax. The poor were being required to make sacrifices while corporations and wealthy urbanites were not.
This French struggle resonates with those in the US hinterlands where poor and working-class people feel—rightly or not—that they are forced to bear burdens that the privileged avoid: protests in rural communities against zoning, masks, vaccines, and gun laws; organized defense of the police (Blue Lives Matter); opposition to immigrants and refugees; and efforts to eliminate “controversial” books from public libraries (librarians have emerged as fierce defenders of readers and books in the face of this onslaught).
In the hinterlands, class struggle often takes the form not of a labor struggle but of a social-reproduction struggle. Rent strikes, cost of living demonstrations, and protests against raising the retirement age and increasing bus and subway fares are all class struggles. And even as the struggles in the hinterlands appear to be those of the surplus of the surplus, they have national impact. Throughout the US, Canada, the UK, and the EU a rightward political march is driven by the growing anger of the hinterland’s dispossessed. This shift to the right isn’t inevitable. It’s about organizing, offering a politics, interpreting grievance, and imagining a future.
The decline and abandonment driving hinterlandization gives the hinterlands its place in the neofeudal landscape: they are sites for call centers, enormous warehouses (“fulfillment centers”), server farms, pipelines, energy and transportation hubs, and landfills and dumps. These are the sites that make possible consumption in the urban core, forgotten but indispensable. None is immune to sabotage, bombing, or blockade. Whether there are people who refuse to live in the old way, and whether there are enough people who feel that political struggle can usher in a new way, is a matter of organizing. When the left concentrates on the cities, the hinterlands become vassals of the right. The right promises to protect them, to build the walls, fund the police, and secure the weapons they imagine as vital to their defense.
Nothing is set in stone, especially as increasing numbers of people are forced to migrate to survive. The only certainty is that struggles will intensify, not the direction they will go. This is where the left has to fight: to provide a vision of future flourishing. UBS is key to this vision: health, education, parks, and libraries; regenerated environments and rebuilt infrastructures. Such services aren’t handouts; they are suppositions for life and work on a warming planet.
Ending the domination of the asset holders and tech lords, eliminating the very existence of a billionaire class, is crucial for the flourishing of people and the planet.There is a practical material reality behind recognizing service workers as the vanguard of the class struggle. Services are the sector where employment is increasing. Across the globe, job growth is in services, especially personal services. This creates a problem for capitalism because of services’ challenge to the value form. Much of this work exceeds value; ill-suited to commodification, it fails to be confined within the terms of the capitalist circulation of value. As Gabriel Winant writes of healthcare workers: they are “collectively indispensable yet individually disposable.”
The use value of care work is immeasurable even as it rarely commands an exchange value sufficient for its own reproduction. That this work is necessary for life but insufficient for capital accumulation is already spelling the end of capitalism: faced with growing service economies, asset holders rely on non-capitalist accumulation strategies. The strategy for communists has to be accepting and furthering the end of capitalism while championing crucial service work, especially that which is indispensable to social and ecological reproduction.
A society in which most labor is in services is oriented toward meeting needs. At present, as capital’s own dynamics are coming under laws of motion no longer recognizably capitalist, these needs are configured within the social manor: the many serve the few. Those who work from home depend on deliveries from those who don’t, on those whose working conditions deprive them of access to essentials like toilets. That the current capitalist economy is, like the old feudal one, oriented around the consumption needs of the lords creates specific contradictions. In the US, for example, there are shortages of nurses even as hospitals are closed.
During COVID-19, clinics nurturing the vanities of the rich laid off their medical personnel while doctors and nurses at overcrowded hospitals got infected and died. We all know the contradictions around housing: massive shortages in affordable apartments while a global class of asset holders buys up everything it can. Just like public transportation before it, the conditions of air travel decline—not just delays and cancellations but growing numbers of near-miss collisions—as the rich fly above it all in their private planes. Services are meeting the needs of those who can pay, while those of us who can’t are denied them.
Because those who can pay pay so much, because their consumption is excessive, unlimited, they are disproportionately responsible for the climate catastrophe. According to a 2022 Oxfam report, the carbon footprint of one of the richest billionaires is over a million times that of someone in the bottom 90 percent. The social manor is the political and economic form that the environmental crisis is taking. From super yachts and private islands, land-hoarding and asset hiding, to investment in the corporations driving up carbon emissions, billionaire neofeudal lords are bringing the entire world to its knees.
Ending the domination of the asset holders and tech lords, eliminating the very existence of a billionaire class, is crucial for the flourishing of people and the planet. Service workers are the vanguard of this struggle. The strikes and struggles of nurses and teachers; of sanitation, transportation, warehouse, and domestic workers; and of renters, debtors, pensioners, and students points toward the imperative of universalizing basic services. Health, housing, and education are basic rights, not privileges of the few.
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From Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle by Jodi Dean. Copyright © 2025. Available from Verso Books.
