Mortgaged, Extracted, Disconnected: The Seven Classes of the Capitalist Civil War
Meet the seven classes of the Rheopolitical Age, from Denial Authority to the Expelled.
According to Karl Marx, the fundamental structure of capitalist society is defined by two primary antagonistic classes: the bourgeoisie (owners of the means of production) and the proletariat (wage laborers who must sell their labor to survive).
However, Marx and subsequent Marxist scholars acknowledged the existence of additional classes and social strata during his time, including the petite bourgeoisie (small business owners and self-employed artisans who own some means of production but do not exploit wage labor); the lumpenproletariat (a “ragged” proletariat consisting of unemployed, criminals, and those outside the traditional labor market); and landowners, whose income derived from ground-rent rather than industrial capital.
In reality, the petite bourgeoisie and the landowners were the middle class of the time period. Marx’s class stratification was ordered around capital’s relation to labor. The rheopolitical model is the relation of power and capital to flows. The Transnational Capitalist Class exercises denial authority over flows; the subordinate upper classes and Transnational Broker Class service and broker flows; the middle class depends on salary flows, and the working class depend on wage flows; the disconnected precariat have an intermittent access to flows; and lastly, the dispossessed homeless are expelled from the circuits entirely.
Since Marx’s time period, the social stratification has increased, widened and expanded into seven observable classes who are stratified based on their relation to the rheopolitical board.
The Transnational Capitalist Class is a slim spectrum of humanity. Below the four factions, the world’s population is distributed across a class structure that the globalization of power and capital has dramatically reshaped:
DENIAL AUTHORITY — the TCC itself. The defining relation isn’t owning the most; it’s holding denial authority over a chokepoint. This is why the faction leaders are the top of the ladder, and also why the ladder connects to the rheopolitical board: the top stratum is defined by the same criterion as the war itself. Control = denial, not ownership, all the way down from the geopolitical to the class level.
OPERATIONS — who operate the flows. The personnel who run the infrastructure without holding denial authority over it: senior asset managers, central bank staff, compliance architects, platform executives. They can throttle locally but not deny globally. Their loyalty is to the continuity of the system because their position is the system’s operation. This is also the recruitment pool for the Transnational Broker Class, who operate in between the top three classes.
MAINTENANCE — the technocratic professional layer: lawyers, academics, doctors, IT professionals. They don’t operate the infrastructure; they maintain and serve the human and institutional conditions for it — credentialing, adjudicating, educating, legitimating. Salaried security purchased with dependence on the establishment.
MORTGAGED — secured, collateralized, revocable access to flows. The middle class proper: stable salary or small-proprietor income, mortgaged into the system, holding just enough assets to fear disruption. Their defining relation is secured access — and that security is precisely what’s eroding in the West, which is what makes them volatile — they have become unstable due to the upward cash flow, cost of living increase and housing crisis. The middle class that could afford a home after WW2 are increasingly unable to now, and are thus dropping down into the lower classes.
EXTRACTED — the working class: wage labor whose defining relation is that the flows extract from them more than they draw. De-industrialized in the West, newly incorporated in the East — rural farm workers, factory workers, retail workers, steady wage earners.
DISCONNECTED — Those with intermittent, tenuous access — the precariat. Not low income but unsecured relation: gig contracts, algorithmic scheduling, no institutional membership. They touch the flows daily and can be disconnected from them without notice. Intermittency, not poverty, is the category — which is why it produces a distinct political psychology. Urban ghettoized barrio dwellers are one step away from homelessness.
EXPELLED — Those expelled from the circuits. Non-persons. The defining relation is that no faction extracts from them, services them, or courts them. Not the bottom of the ladder but removed from the ladder altogether. During the Christian medieval period, it was impossible for Christians to exist without being a member of the Church. Excommunicates were treated as pariahs; they were forbidden from trading, eating, or conversing with other Christians, effectively cutting them off from community life and legal standing.
The best census anyone has managed of the DENIAL AUTHORITY (TCC) is based on income level, because money is what leaves an empirical trace. The World Inequality Report 2026 puts the figure at fewer than 60,000 people — the top 0.001% of the world’s adults, the number of people that would fit in a football stadium — holding roughly 6% of global wealth, three times the holdings of the bottom half of humanity, a share that has climbed steadily from 4% since 1995.
The cut off level for the football stadium attendance is $100 million; at the top of the Forbes 500 there are only a few dozen individuals averaging $50 billion each. These numbers sketch out the outer boundary of the Transnational Capitalist Class, and they are as close as the typical survey of the class can get — because wealth is what the surveys measure.
But this does not reveal an accurate picture about the division that matters. A centi-millionaire fund manager and a platform owner with kill-switch authority over payments infrastructure hold similar portfolios and categorically different power: one operates the flows, the other can stop them. The wealth table cannot see the difference between having and denying — and denying is the standard in the capitalist civil war. The football stadium holds perhaps sixty thousand, but Denial Authority belongs to a fraction of them, roughly 10 percent, with the caveat that this number is an educated guess, because there are no accurate studies done to map out the Denial Authority. The football stadium is the combined Denial Authority and Operations classes.
The civil war at the top is only possible because there is no organized force from below capable of resolving it. The labor movement that once forced the capitalist class toward internal compromise has been dismantled. The socialist alternative that once provided an external challenge has collapsed. The contradictions that used to be managed through class compromise are now imploding within the ruling class itself.
Mortgaged, Extracted and Disconnected
The principal object of competition is not the poor or the rich but the economically insecure majority: the mortgaged, extracted and disconnected whose political allegiance can determine elections, shape legitimacy, and provide the social base for competing visions of economic and political order.
Guy Standing, who coined the term precariat in his book of the same name, claims the precariat is a “dangerous class” not because its members are inherently violent or criminal, but because their chronic economic insecurity and lack of agency make them susceptible to political extremism and prone to destabilizing society.
Standing argues that the precariat lives with pervasive uncertainty regarding income, housing, and rights. This constant stress generates frustration, anger, and anxiety. Unlike the traditional proletariat, the precariat lacks a collective occupational identity or union representation to channel these grievances constructively. Consequently, they feel detached from mainstream society and democracy, creating a volatile political vacuum.
The core danger lies in the precariat’s tendency to vote emotionally rather than rationally. Standing warned in a 2018 lecture that “unless the insecurities, and the fears, and the aspirations of the precariat were addressed as a matter of urgency, we would see the emergence of a political monster“ — a prediction he linked to the rise of populist leaders like Donald Trump and various far-right movements in Europe.
Without a “politics of paradise” (such as Universal Basic Income) to restore security, the precariat risks driving society toward a “politics of inferno” characterized by polarization and extremism. Its eventual political direction may determine whether the Capitalist Civil War ends in a new settlement — or in something far worse.
However, the 2016 election of Standing’s monster revealed a different story: Trump’s primary voters were demographically above median household income, over-indexed on small proprietors, older homeowners, the petty bourgeois — and the often-cited 2018 study by Diana Mutz found perceived status threat a stronger predictor than material hardship. The monster’s voters came disproportionately from the mortgaged under stress — people with something to lose — at least as much as from the disconnected precariat as Standing predicted.
Combined with the mortgaged and extracted, the disconnected represent a political base that is increasingly under stress and thus, they are inclined toward political dysfunction and voter dissatisfaction. The end result is civil unrest and mass protest movements that have already reared their heads: leaderless youth uprisings cascaded across eleven countries and shook governments in 2025 — Bangladesh in 2024 is widely cited as the first Gen Z revolution, followed by Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines, Kenya’s Finance Bill protests, then Madagascar, Morocco, and a “Gen Z march” in Lima, with leaders falling in Nepal, Madagascar and Bulgaria and continuations into 2026 in Iran and Tanzania.
The root causes varied widely across countries — utilities in Madagascar, pensions in Peru, World Cup spending in Morocco, censorship in Nepal — yet the shared themes of inequality, declining standards of living, corruption and democratic backsliding were all apparent.
Two Monsters
The ballot box and the street uprising are now two monsters that the four factions of the TCC will need to reckon with, sooner or later. The four factions face the same population and have reached four different conclusions about what it is. This is usually described as competition for the allegiance of the voting public, as if four rivals were courting one prize. Only one of them is courting.
The Imperial Nationalists are the populist whisperers, speaking from political pulpits to the mortgaged, extracted and disconnected in nationalist terms. The rally, the slogan, the tariff wrapped in a flag sold as a jobs program, the border sold as wage protection — a patriotic sermon, that the deep state or the globalists or the socialists abandoned you, but we see you. Whether the offer is ever honoured is beside the point; the sales pitch is real, and it has delivered ballots. This is the one faction whose political model actually requires the dissatisfied’s active allegiance — its route to power runs through elections, and elections run through the angry and the insecure.
Silicon Valley does not court the mortgaged, extracted, disconnected. It manufactures it, and recruits from its own product. The gig platform is not a policy toward precarity — it is precarity, given an interface: algorithmic scheduling, no institutional membership, disconnection without notice. From this population the faction recruits a slice, often framed in libertarian Ayn Randian terms. It appeals to the downwardly mobile youth, mostly male, who should be upwardly mobile. The Network State offers exit rather than security, but only to the chosen few. Bitcoin is offered instead of the pension, the social media influencer instead of the credential, the promise that the institutions which failed you were never worth joining. The best they can offer is Universal Basic Income, a severance package, to a class slowly replaced by algorithms, AI and robots. The unemployed can always drive Uber.
Davos does not address the mortgaged, extracted, disconnected, other than vague references in McKinsey risk reports. Davos’ audience is governments, shareholders, and itself. Reskilling initiatives, social safety nets, inclusive capitalism: the programs are real, but the Davos vocabulary is third person, that looks at spreadsheets not persons. No one at the WEF forum asks the disconnected, the extracted and mortgaged for anything, because the faction needs nothing from it except quiet acceptance and compliance. Reporters are allowed inside the annual WEF conclave creating a false transparency — the real meetings are behind closed doors, and the press is loitering in the lobby. The goal is to manage the volatile population so it doesn’t destabilize the systems the faction operates. Keep the capital flowing. Davos prefers risk management to public debate. The mortgaged, extracted, disconnected are a systemic risk.
The State Capitalists have no courtship problem, because they have no allegiance to win. There is no election campaign or ballot to prepare speeches and raise funds. The state’s relation to their own mortgaged, extracted, disconnected — the migrant workforce, the delivery riders, and the surplus young graduates lying flat without motivation or options — has been strained. A notable development came in April 2026, when China’s Ministry of State Security released a video arguing that promotion of “lying flat” represented ideological infiltration by hostile foreign forces seeking to weaken Chinese youth and national cohesion. This marked a shift from treating the phenomenon mainly as a social trend toward framing it partly as a national security issue.
The announcement kicked off widespread social media ridicule, even normally pro-government nationalist commenters and netizens asking: “Is being unable to find work, buy housing, or afford children is also caused by overseas forces?” China attempts to deal with socio-economic issues by enforcing state programs: employment provided, infrastructure built, surveillance extended, while independent organizations are suppressed on social media and groups dismantled. Stability is not offered; it is imposed.
The four factions have unique solutions to domestic crisis: courted, recruited, managed, administered. A voter, a user base, a risk, a subject. The factions do not merely offer different answers to the insecurity of the lower classes — they disagree about what kind of problem it is. Just like their fundamental disagreements on power, capital and time, the four factions’ disagreement on social crises is the fracture itself, visible at the level of class. A unified ruling class would have settled on one relation. Four incompatible relations is what a civil war looks like from below.
And this is why none of the strategies can succeed. Winning over the mortgaged, extracted, disconnected would mean ending its precarity — and precarity is load-bearing in all four accumulation models. The Imperial Nationalists need the social unrest; resolve it and the rallies empty, the flags are rolled, the political sermon loses its passion. Silicon Valley’s margins are made of the flexibility it would have to abolish because the gig economy is the model. Davos requires the labor-market fluidity its safety nets are designed to make tolerable rather than to end. The State Capitalists’ growth model runs on low wage-earners’ duty to keep quiet and go to work. Each faction courts, recruits, manages, or administers a condition it cannot afford to cure. The turbulence at the bottom is increasingly mirrored at the top because the TCC is collectively manufacturing its own instability by feeding off the instability at the bottom.
Wealth concentration flows toward Denial Authority, to the four factions, without coordination — wealth transfer is systemic, not intentional. Operations is a loyalty mechanism, the outer class circle protecting the Denial Authority. Maintenance increasingly isn’t able to trade loyalty for advancement. The Maintenance rung is itself sliding — higher academic institutions are replacing tenured staff with lower wage part time staff to save costs; junior-lawyers are suffering proletarianization turning them into wage-earners; and tech layoffs — as of July 2026, the tech sector remains the epicenter of workforce reductions, with over 165,000 jobs announced globally by mid-2026.
The system from top to bottom is unstable, insecure and volatile. The gradient of insecurity is creeping up the ladder, not just churning at the bottom. Although their extreme wealth has insulated them from much of the turbulence, they are aware that popular uprisings may overthrow national regimes, but the infrastructure stays untouched. The storms can rock the boat but they have secure quarters, behind gated communities, tucked away on private ranches in Wyoming and Hawaii.
New Zealand has emerged as a premier bolthole for wealthy Americans, particularly Silicon Valley tech elites and financiers, who view remote properties as “apocalypse insurance” against geopolitical instability, pandemics, or societal collapse. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, is a notable figure in this trend, having purchased extensive land on the South Island and received citizenship after only 12 days in the country, citing it as a “utopia” aligned with his views.
The Transnational Capitalist Class keeps lavish quarters on the upper decks of a ship. Below decks, the second-class cabins, the steerage, the cargo hold and the engine room where the stokers feed a raging furnace. There is no port of call on the passengers’ tickets. The expelled passengers were tossed overboard, adrift in open water. No horn sounds, no boats lower, no search is mounted. The ship does not slow. The wake closes.
On the bridge, four officers fight over the helm. There was never a captain — only a stretch of calm water, years ago, when the officers agreed on a heading and mistook their agreement for a map. Each is now convinced the others will run her aground. None can throw the others overboard; none dares leave the bridge, because a hand off the wheel is a hand ceded.
And the storm does not pass, because it is not weather. It is the sea itself now.
About this series: Building on the fracture of the Transnational Capitalist Class outlined in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, this article forms part of a book-in-progress, The Capitalist Civil War. It is an ongoing investigation, into the emerging conflict between four factions of the global elite: Davos Institutionalists, Imperial Nationalists, Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns, and State Capitalists. Each chapter explores a different aspect of that struggle. If you want more of this kind of elite-power analysis, paid subscribers make this work possible.
Here is the project so far. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.
INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War
CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War
CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class
(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe
CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?
CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class
(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven
CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party
(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking
CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?
(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit
CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry
(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.
(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta
CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War
CHAPTER 9: The Four-Clocks Problem
CHAPTER 10: The New Grand Chessboard
CHAPTER 11: The War Inside the Panopticon
(COMMENTARY) Hats Off to the Conspiratorial Commentariat
(COMMENTARY) Musk’s Trillion Dollar Coronation Inside the Cathedral
CHAPTER 12: The Blackwell B200 Kill Switch
CHAPTER 13: The Layered Global Map
CHAPTER 14: The Transnational Broker Class
CHAPTER 15: How to Rule the World and Why Nobody Can
(COMMENTARY) Conspiratorial Answers to Evil
CHAPTER 16: Rheopolitics: The Power to Deny
CHAPTER 17: Permanent Planetary Turbulence
"This (imperialist nationalist) is the one faction whose political model actually requires the dissatisfied’s active allegiance — its route to power runs through elections, and elections run through the angry and the insecure."
So what will happen if and when when this faction is weakened and subdued somewhat by the others?
I will mourn, not celebrate - but our media will project many scenes of celebrations around the world by people who will realise before too long that there really was nothing to celebrate about their final reduction and consolidation into total slavery:
https://off-guardian.org/2026/07/05/america-was-never-the-problem/