“We Don’t Need Another Chainsaw: Beyond the Classism of Defeat,” by Jodi Dean, was written in April 2025 as a contribution to be published as an original feature, in Spanish translation, on Revista Jacobin, whose latest issue (number 11, first semester 2025) “La libertad guiando al pueblo,” featuring Dean’s “No necesitamos otra motosierra” (pp. 58-66), is now available on jacobinlat.com.

Elon Musk may be now long gone — in fact, he was never entirely all in —, and his DOGE brigade may have plunged into an even greater disarray, one and the other forever trapped in the impossibility of irreversibly dismantling the very system that self-interestedly curbs the boundless greed of the new lordly class but allows it — to continue parasitizing it — de facto govern.

What remains as actual as ever is Dean’s critique of a Left “asleep at the wheel” of an equally impossible dream: to fight the powerful few without understanding, engaging, and mobilizing the whole roster of the “diverse many.”

“Identification with the powerful is the classism of defeat’s primary driver. Rather than finding strength in numbers, the classism of defeat idealizes strength as the unique characteristic of the powerful man, his chainsaw. This strength isn’t the product of organization and unity. It doesn’t increase as the many come together. On the contrary, the many have to be chopped down to size so that the exceptional one can shine. Their progress is what holds him back. In this imaginary of power, the class is already defeated.”

— Jodi Dean

We Don’t Need Another Chainsaw: Beyond the Classism of Defeat

Last February, in a made-for-social media performance at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Argentinian president Javier Milei showed up with his notorious chainsaw. He presented it to Elon Musk as a gift. Milei had famously taken a chainsaw to the Argentine state, dissolving numerous governmental agencies such as the ministries of Education; Social Development; Women, Genders and Diversity; Culture; Labor, Employment and Social Security; and Environment and Sustainable Development. Now it was Musk’s turn. Musk’s Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) is ostensibly cutting through the US bureaucracy. Delighted with Milei’s gift, Musk made the grunting vroom-vroom engine sounds that are familiar to small children as he waved the chainsaw around the CPAC stage. Later he boasted, “I am become meme” and that he was “living the meme.” The whole performance was embarrassing: a shameless billionaire living out childish fantasies of power and adoration. Milei, too, is no stranger to the awkward performance. His alter ego is the super-hero General Ancap, complete with tights and mask. Were the lives and futures of millions of people not at stake, these chainsaw boys might be funny.

Over-the-top bad boy antics are well-suited to communicative capitalism’s social media battleground. They command momentary attention, amusing casual scrollers and invigorating armies of online fans. MAGA followers, like their conservative siblings worldwide, enjoy owning the libs. Right-wing influencers push the envelope, testing how far they can go before they lose support and get cancelled. Is a Hitler salute too much? What about calling for a third term for Trump despite the fact that the US constitution forbids it? Movement leaders create, feed, and stir up a new base, performing a radicality that they present as bringing down the establishment despite the fact that it emboldens cops and enriches billionaires.

The internationally resurgent right follows the same playbook in country after country. Communists and socialists are enemies whose defeat is urgently necessary, which should surprise anyone who has been awake during the last forty years of neoliberalism. Gender ideology, abortion, and feminism are major threats, assaults on the fundamentals of church and family. Foreigners, immigrants, and racial, national, and indigenous minorities are targeted as drains on the national economy. They appear as parasites sucking the lifeblood out of the body politic or poisoning it by bringing in drugs. Everywhere, the solution is stronger borders and tighter security. Hold the line against acceptable ideologies, insist on the absolute and permanent division of two sexes, maintain the purity of the nation. Its very identity is at stake.

 

Eroding capitalism

Forty years of neoliberal policies enabled enormous stores of wealth to accumulate in the hands of the few. This wealth exerts a political and economic power that protects its holders while intensifying the immiseration of almost everyone else. Wealth-holders seeking high returns don’t invest in production. They rely on rents, speculative finance, and political favors. Services — with their tendencies to stagnation and inequality — come to dominate the economy. Capital’s own processes erode it, disconnecting wage labor from any materially productive economic basis. Wages and salaries are determined politically, linked to the maintenance of class structure.

Repercussions of this shift to a political register, to the capacity to command, appear in the gross inequalities in pay between executives and employees, between upper management and lower-tier workers, between billionaires and the sector of servants. The limits to the heights and depths of compensation are political, dependent on power. Are the holders of wealth able to command tax breaks? Are those who sell their labor power to survive able to unionize? Does debt increase the expansive and extractive capacity of the few while trapping and wiping out the many?

Neoliberalism’s anxious capitalists and rentiers ally with the extreme right, relying on them to redirect popular anger away from wealth holders and toward others who can be victimized, hated, excluded, and killed. Popular anger is real, and the CEOs, tech-lords, and billionaires don’t want to be the targets of it. Right-wing ideology supplies the language of grievance that enables the anger to be expressed while reinforcing the conditions that cause it. As the success of Bolsonaro, Modi, and Trump attests, the right has succeeded in positioning itself as the radical opposition to the dominant order, the voice of the many fed up with their declining life chances as the few accumulate ever greater stores of wealth and privilege.

Unable to launch an effective response, the left is wracking its brain trying to figure out where we went wrong. Why are we losing? Why don’t people like us? Envious of the edgy power of anarcho-capitalists, tech-lords, Christian nationalists, and the rest of their sexist, racist alliance, some on the left advise us to take on elements of the far-right agenda in order to be more attractive to the working class. Since the left has lost its place as the voice of anti-establishment opposition, they think we should take some lessons from the right.

Most attractive to these leftists is the right-wing attack on “woke” — that recent installment to the worn-out culture wars franchise fighting cultural Marxism, political correctness, identity politics, social justice warriors, gender ideology, cancel culture, critical race theory, and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion). Left opportunists are urging us to stop attending to concerns related to race, ethnicity, sex, and gender and concentrate on class. They rightly point to the broader patterns of economic decline: increasing inequality and decreasing economic mobility; rising inflation and declining life expectancy. People are working harder but struggling more to pay for basics like housing, transportation, education, and something like a future for their children. Highlighting this fact of the impact of four decades of neoliberal globalization on working and middle classes, left opportunists see the success of the far-right in countries like Italy, Argentina, and the United States and conclude that the difference that makes a difference is diversity. If only the left would stop appealing to diversity, we could focus on class and win.

The problem with this argument is not that it’s class reductionist. It’s that it exemplifies the very identity reductionism it ostensibly rejects. The working class comprises people of different sexes, genders, sexualities, ethnicities, nationalities, religions, abilities, ages, and so on. The attack on “woke” relies on the fantasy of a traditional masculine authority — the good citizen, provider, and head of the family. Rather than signifying class and prioritizing economy, anti-woke politics remains within a cultural register. It distracts from the very attack on the conditions of life and work it purports to prioritize, in effect functioning as a message force multiplier for the right. It should highlight the conditions that have undermined citizenship, eroded the ability of waged labor to secure the means of subsistence, and diminished the quality of working-class life.

Classism of defeat

Oblivious to the actuality of people trying to sell their labor power to survive, the anti-woke left offers a classism of defeat. Workers in this concept are not the powerful producers whose combined efforts build a better world. They are victimized men left behind by feminism, disrespected by elites, and lost in an economy where the majority of workers are in services. Blaming “woke” provides an outlet for frustration and ressentiment. It invites people to identify with the strong by punching down and attacking the weak just like the rich boss leaders do (it’s better to be on the side of the winners than the losers). If it weren’t for those Black people, feminists, and queers, the rest of us would be doing just fine.

Identification with the powerful is the classism of defeat’s primary driver. Rather than finding strength in numbers, the classism of defeat idealizes strength as the unique characteristic of the powerful man, his chainsaw. This strength isn’t the product of organization and unity. It doesn’t increase as the many come together. On the contrary, the many have to be chopped down to size so that the exceptional one can shine. Their progress is what holds him back. In this imaginary of power, the class is already defeated; there’s no need to try to build and organize it. Joining the right in piling on attacks on the diverse many barely getting by in an economy structured to benefit asset holders in the global north isn’t just a bad strategy for the left. It’s not a left strategy at all.

The element of defeat in the classism of defeat cannot be underestimated. It marks the dissolution of the socialist block, deindustrialization, and declining union power. When leftists blame identity politics for the weakness of the working class, they are mistaking a symptom for a cause. Left fragmentation into multiple issues and identity isn’t the cause of left weakness. It’s a symptom of the fact that class no longer names a position of power in the struggle for a better, common future. The majority of workers today are not producers whose combined and centralized forces are emblematic of progress, development, and modernity. Most workers are in services. Like servants, their jobs are meeting others’ needs or catering to their desires.

Across the imperialist capitalist system, the rate of economic growth is slowing. The delinking of accumulation from production that we see with the rise of services is a general phenomenon in a system with players who have enormous differences in strength, wealth, technology, and capacity. When some win, others lose. China’s economic growth in the first decades of the twentieth century occurred in a context of low rates of worldwide economic growth. The market share of Chinese firms increased, while that of other countries— the US, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa— declined. Accompanying China’s industrial success, and compounded by its economic slowdown around 2013, was the deindustrialization of poor and middle-income countries throughout the world. Already facing deagrarianization, severe indebtedness, and weakened state capacity as a result of structural adjustment policies, countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Iraq, Nigeria, and Venezuela decomplexified their economies and resorted to exporting raw commodities, particularly natural resources like oil and gas. While commodity prices were high, these exports could fund significant poverty-reduction measures. In states without the requisite popular mobilization and political will, export proceeds to feed the luxury consumption of elites. When prices dropped, millions were pushed into insecure, informal service work.

Given the economically transformational role of the industrial proletariat, the socialist left has long viewed it as the historical subject that will send capitalism to its grave. Peasants and the petite bourgeoisie have been viewed as regressive social forces. These days the latter are disparaged as the professional managerial class (PMCs). So, despite the leading role of peasant and national liberation struggles throughout the twentieth century, much of the left retains as an article of faith an attachment to industrial labor.

This attachment to the industrial proletariat has prevented the contemporary left from producing a program adequate to the change in conditions of labor. It’s also anachronistic as it fails to attend to ways that organizing service, domestic, and informal workers has been a persistent demand within communist circles. For example, in the 1930s and 1940s Black women in the Communist Party of the United States conducted substantial research on the conditions of household labor, urging the party to prioritize this work as a means for reaching the Black working class. Similarly, from the 1970s through the present, feminists have drawn attention to the immense amount of unpaid labor necessary for social reproduction. This labor is simultaneously separated and isolated in private households and indispensable to the circuit of capital. Instead of rejecting feminist analyses as identity politics, the left needs to incorporate them into an analysis of class and labor today, an analysis capable of seeing and amplifying the class struggle before our eyes: the widespread struggles of the sector of servants.

 

Free from shame

Chopping down the state is the means for chopping down the many. Neoliberal austerity was a pruning, a trimming back in the name of inciting entrepreneurs and invigorating markets. Since not much is left, a harsher neofeudalization has been set in motion where open predation and plunder are the order of the day. Rather than operating as capitalists who acquire wealth by investing in production, the already wealthy pursue political strategies to force social wealth up to themselves. These strategies don’t involve seeking advantages that will give them a competitive edge. They aren’t about growing the economy or baking a bigger pie. They’re about taking a bigger piece.

With this accumulation strategy, players don’t try to win in the markets. They used “extra-economic power” to change the game. Musk is an obvious example of a billionaire using political means to ensure special access and privileges, but most any billionaire fits the bill. Under neofeudalism, wealthy asset holders use political means for their own direct enrichment, urging governments to conform to the dictates of capitalist imperialism by cutting taxes, ignoring laws against monopoly, accepting arbitration and international dispute resolution settlements and so on.

Neofeudalism is an anarcho-capitalist ideal. Like the rest of the conservative movement, Milei and Musk cloak themselves in liberty. “Long live freedom, damn it!” Milei cried in Davos. Freedom from what? Taxes, regulations, expectations of decency, responsibility toward other people. Conservative partygoers in DC for Trump’s inauguration gloated that they no longer had to conform to liberal norms. They could now say “faggot” and “retard” and ignore people’s preferred pronouns. What remains unstated is why decency toward another person is such a burden.

While anarcho-capitalists pretend that market freedom is freedom, what they really unleash is naked predation and plunder. New forms of power, or, better, forms of power associated with older practices of fealty and alliance, replace legal regulations. In the words of legal theorist Alan Supiot, government by men replaces government by law. Freed from the constraints of state law, one acts in accordance with one’s place in the networks of power, deferent to those above while hoping to be able to count on the loyalty of those below. Without self-consciousness or irony, US media tracked the parade of tech lords bending the knee to Trump after the 2024 election. Milei, having announced Argentina’s allegiance to the US and Israel, exhibited the behavior befitting a vassal. His gift of the chainsaw was symbolic tribute, a playful way to kiss the ring of his liege lord, not the act of the leader of a sovereign state.

The acceptance of vassalage as the price of power accounts for one of the more surprising values shared by the right’s emergent coalition of tech-lords, anarcho-capitalists, and Christian nationalists — shamelessness. Undignified ways of dressing and acting — grown men playing with chainsaws —  indicate that one is free from the fetters of social norms. For the powerful, this freedom extends to freedom from law, regulations, promises, and truth. There is no shame in criminality and lying — and it’s naïve to expect anything else from those with the power to get away with it. Israel’s impunity is but one example here, perhaps an indication of why the far right in Argentina and Brazil wave the Israeli flag.

The task of the left is to unite the sector of servants against the new lordly class. We cannot do this if we make their shamelessness our own. On the contrary, we have to highlight the ways the multiple fronts on which our class is fighting are part of the same struggle against neofeudalizing capitalism in an imperialist epoch. Those who neglect struggles around immigration, gender, and race fail to recognize how our potential and our strength comes from combinations of the many. They’re asleep at the wheel, dreaming of a past forty years of neoliberalism has put behind us. But we’ll wake them up.

Featured image: Elon Musk and Javier Milei at the 2025 CPAC. Photo: José Luis Magana / AP.

Jodi Dean