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).
Marx and the scholars after him acknowledged other strata — the petite bourgeoisie of small proprietors and artisans, the lumpenproletariat of the unemployed and the criminal, the landowners drawing ground-rent rather than industrial profit. In practice the petite bourgeoisie and the landowners were the middle class of the age. Marx ordered his classes by capital's relation to labour.
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 the stratification has widened into seven observable classes, each defined by its 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 reshaped:
TRANSNATIONAL CAPITALIST CLASS — those with denial authority — 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 why the ladder connects to the rheopolitical board: the top stratum is defined by the same criterion as the war itself. Control means denial, not ownership — all the way down from the geopolitical to the class level.
MANAGERIAL ELITES — 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 work in the seam between the top three rungs.
TECHNO-PROS — the technocratic professional layer: lawyers, academics, doctors, IT professionals. They do not 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.
MIDDLE CLASS — 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 exactly what is eroding in the West, which is what makes them volatile. The upward drift of cash flow, the cost of living, the housing crisis: the class that could buy a home after 1945 increasingly cannot, and is dropping down.
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.
PRECARIAT — Those with intermittent, tenuous access — the disconnected. 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. The ghettoized barrio dwellers are one step away from homelessness.
NON-PERSONS — Those expelled from the circuits. The homeless, barrio, ghettoized urbanites, dalits. 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 pariahs; they were forbidden from trading, eating, or conversing with other Christians, effectively cutting them off from community life and legal standing. In the global capitalist society, having no capital is the greatest sin.
Counting the top of the ladder
The best demographic census anyone has managed of the 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, a football stadium’s worth — 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 average $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 wealth cannot see 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 table cannot tell having from denying — and denying is the standard in the capitalist civil war. The stadium seats perhaps sixty thousand, but those with denial authority belong to a fraction of them, maybe a tenth, and that figure is an educated guess, because nobody has mapped them. The stadium is the combined TCC denial authority and managerial elite classes.
The war at the top is only possible because there is no organized force from below capable of ending 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 once managed through class compromise now implode within the ruling class itself.
The Demoted
The seven rungs answer one question — where are you located on the class ladder? They cannot answer another that turns out to matter more: where were you before?
Not everyone on a given rung arrived the same way. Some were born to it. Some climbed. And some fell — dropped down from a higher class while retaining the memory of their former status. Call them the Demoted: those who materially inhabit a lower rung while retaining the class consciousness, the expectations, and the status-claims of a higher one.
The Demoted is not an eighth class. It is a diagonal that cuts across all seven. There is a demoted operations man and a demoted professional, a demoted region and a demoted heir. What binds them is not income but class-memory — a remembered status against which their new economic reality registers an undeserved fate and social theft. That memory is the variable.
This is why demotion is not dispossession. The long-extracted and the expelled carry no baseline; they were never anything but working poor and impoverished. Their grievance runs without class-memory of better times. The Demoted carry the memory with them. The dispossessed ask for bread. The Demoted ask for their social status back. The first is a claim on the future; the second is a claim on the past — which is why the politics of the Demoted is restorationist by structure, not by accident. It needs no plan, because the destination already existed.
The evidence was in front of us but mislabelled. The 2016 election was read as the revolt of the precariat, Guy Standing’s “dangerous class” finally at the ballot box — the Trump “political monster” reared his head. But Trump’s primary voters ran demographically above median household income, over-indexed on small proprietors and older homeowners — the 2018 study by Diana Mutz found perceived status threat a stronger predictor than material hardship. The metric that forecasts the monster is not how little a person has but how much they remember having. That is class-memory, measured. The monster’s base came from the middle class under stress — people with something to lose — as much as from the disconnected precariat below.
The Demoted also supply the voice. They furnish organic intellectuals across every class, because a person who has dropped down a class can still speak the language of the rung they lost and they can name the grievance in the language of the standing that was taken. Peter Turchin’s frustrated counter-elite is the same mechanism at the top of the heap: credentialed aspirants demoted from the seats they were trained to fill. The counter-elite is not a separate species. It is the Demoted at the top of the ladder — the apex slice of a much wider cut.
Middle Class, Working Class and the Precariat
The principal object of competition is not the poor or the rich but the economically insecure majority: the middle class, working class and precariat whose political allegiance can determine elections, shape legitimacy, and provide the social base for competing visions of economic and political order.
Guy Standing coined precariat in his book of the same name, and called it a “dangerous class” — not because its members are violent but because chronic insecurity and lost agency leave them open to political extremity. The precariat lives with pervasive uncertainty over income, housing, and rights; the stress breeds frustration and anger; and, unlike the old proletariat, it has no collective occupational identity or union to route the anger into. So it detaches from mainstream society and democracy, and a volatile vacuum opens. The conspiratorial commentariat are sucked into this vacuum because conspiracy provides two things: an answer to the riddle of evil and a recognizable enemy to project blame.
The danger, Standing argued, is that the precariat votes from feeling rather than interest. He warned in a 2018 lecture that unless its fears and aspirations were met “as a matter of urgency, we would see the emergence of a political monster,” and he tied the prophecy to Trump and the European far right. Without a politics of paradise — universal basic income, restored security — the precariat would drive society toward a politics of inferno.
He was right about the monster and wrong about its address. The monster came less from those who never had a place than from those losing one. Standing’s category tells you a person is insecure. The Demoted tells you why the insecurity turns incendiary rather than merely miserable: it is loss, not lack. Combine the middle class sliding down, the working class squeezed, and the precariat cut adrift, and the base under stress tilts toward dysfunction and revolt. The result is already visible in the street.
Two Monsters
The ballot box and the street uprising are now two monsters the four factions will have to reckon with. Leaderless youth uprisings cascaded across eleven countries and shook governments through 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 governments falling in Nepal, Madagascar and Bulgaria and continuations into 2026 in Iran and Tanzania.
The triggers varied widely — utilities in Madagascar, pensions in Peru, World Cup spending in Morocco, censorship in Nepal — yet the shared themes held: inequality, falling living standards, corruption, democratic backsliding. The street monster and the ballot monster share a parent. Both are the Demoted made political.
Four Factions, Four Relations
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 public, as if four rivals were courting one prize. Only one of them is courting.
The Imperial Nationalists are the populist whisperers, preaching from political pulpits to the Demoted class members 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 Demoted. 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 Demoted, 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 middle, working and precariat classes 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 Demoted 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 middle class, working class and 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 as a national security threat.
The announcement drew open ridicule, even from nationalist commenters: is being unable to find work, buy a home, or afford children also the fault of overseas forces? The state answers socio-economic strain with state programs — employment provided, infrastructure built, surveillance extended, independent organizations suppressed and dismantled. Stability is not offered. It is imposed.
Courted, recruited, managed, administered. A voter, a user base, a risk, a subject. The factions do not merely offer different answers to the insecurity below — they disagree about what kind of problem it is. As with power, capital, and time, their disagreement over the social crisis is the fracture itself, made 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.
The Youth Horizon
The youth horizon is the barometer. It reads the distance between what a generation was promised and what it is allowed. The young with an education and no prospect are the Demoted in their purest form — not fallen from a rung they held, but denied one they were raised to expect. Class-memory need not be lived to be inherited. A cohort taught to anticipate prosperity and status, then refused it, mourns a place it was barred entrance from — they will not go gentle into that good night.
The Western outlook has inverted. Where the young once assumed the world would improve, a historic shift has put happiness among the under-30s in North America and Western Europe below that of their elders. High housing costs, inflation, and job insecurity have bred a financial nihilism, and the political disillusionment and declining mental health that go with it. A 2026 IPPR study found life satisfaction among England’s 16-to-24s down from 62% in 2010 to 44%; in the most deprived areas, from 55.9% to 34.7% — over half of the youth are discontent with their lives.
The educated young have always been the sharpest critics of the order that credentialed them. University students and young professionals were the operational core of the Hong Kong protests, between 68% and 80% of participants degree-holders, most aged 20 to 29. Occupy Wall Street spread to more than a hundred campuses in 2011, driven by tuition, debt, and a dead graduate market. Students led Black Lives Matter across Boston, Columbia, Purdue, Brandeis. The pattern is old and the fuel is the same: elite overproduction manufactures credentialed young people with no seat at the table, and their alliance with the disconnected precariat is historically an explosive combination — Turchin’s counter-elite married to Standing’s dangerous class.
The French Revolution was just such a combustible mix: Educated lawyers, journalists, and professionals found advancement blocked under the Ancien Régime while urban workers and peasants suffered economic hardship. The revolutionary leadership disproportionately came from the educated bourgeoisie rather than the poorest classes. The end result was the Reign of Terror that led to over 30,000 dead by guillotine and execution.
David S. Meyer, author of The Politics of Protest, puts the energy plainly: “When you’re talking about people who are 16 or 26, there’s a sense of possibility, urgency and potential that is hard to recreate outside of that. Young people are more willing to take risks and are potentially more able to see injustice as something that can be remedied.”
But the horizon is stormy and the ship is not seaworthy. The young are learning that we have entered an era of permanent planetary turbulence. They can protest, occupy, blockade, and vote governments out — and still fail to find a path to lasting power. The problem is not merely that elites resist. It is that power has moved. Power has left the nation. The decisive centres are no longer held inside national governments but strung across transnational networks of finance, technology, production, logistics, intelligence, and alliance.
A revolution may swap one regime for another, but the new government must still negotiate with capital markets, oil majors, hyperscale cloud providers, semiconductor monopolies, the platforms, the regulators in Brussels and Basel, and the great-power rivalry centred on Washington and Beijing. Sovereignty survives in law and is constrained in practice by infrastructures no single state commands.
Gramsci’s organic intellectuals sought to build a national counter-hegemony. Turchin’s counter-elites compete to capture the state. Yarvin’s Cathedral maps the ideological architecture of the American regime. In each case the state is the unit and the trophy. But the state is now only one node in a larger transnational system. The struggle is no longer over who governs the nation but over who governs the infrastructures through which nations are governed.
We have entered the Rheopolitical Age. When power is the ability to permit or deny flows — capital, data, energy, semiconductors, cloud, payments, logistics — the trophy is no longer the state. It is control over the circuitry of circulation itself. That is a more fundamental claim than Gramsci, Turchin, or Yarvin makes, because it moves the seat of power from the institutions of national legitimacy to the transnational systems of interdependence.
The pro-Palestinian university encampments since 2023 looked like a domestic quarrel over American universities and American support for Israel. Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Brown — students demanding divestment, met with arrests, suspensions, federal intervention. These are Ivy League centers of education — the upper class kids of the wealthy preparing for a bleak horizon.
The object of their protest is a global network of flows. University endowments are invested through global asset managers. Research money comes from governments, corporations, and philanthropies operating across borders. The platforms that amplify the protests are multinationals. The images of Gaza travel over submarine cables, hyperscale cloud, and content-moderation systems owned by transnational firms. Arms production runs through multinational supply chains. Oil markets, shipping lanes, insurance, sanctions, SWIFT — the United States, Israel, Iran, the Gulf, Europe, China, and Russia all hold overlapping interests. The protest happens at a university. Its object is a valve.
Traditional political theory asks: where is sovereignty?
Rheopolitics asks: where are the valves?
Why None of Them Can Win
None of the strategies can succeed. Winning over the Demoted 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 now mirrored at the top because the TCC is collectively manufacturing its own instability by feeding off the instability beneath it.
Wealth concentration flows upwards to the TCC, to the four factions, without coordination — the transfer is systemic, not intentional. The managerial elite are a loyalty mechanism, the outer class circle protecting the TCC. The techno-pros increasingly are not able to trade loyalty for advancement. The techno-pro 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 August 2026, the tech sector remains the epicenter of workforce reductions, with over 170,000 jobs announced globally by mid-2026. The gradient of insecurity is creeping up the ladder, not just churning at the bottom. The Demoted are being minted at every level at once.
The very wealthy know it. Their fortunes have insulated them from the weather, and they are aware that an uprising may topple a national regime while leaving the infrastructure untouched. The storms rock the boat; they keep secure quarters behind the gates, on private ranches in Wyoming and Hawaii. New Zealand has become a premier bolthole — remote land as apocalypse insurance against instability, pandemic, or collapse. Peter Thiel bought heavily on the South Island and took citizenship after twelve days in the country, calling it a utopia.
The Transnational Capitalist Class keeps lavish quarters on the upper decks. Below are the second-class cabins, the steerage, the cargo hold and the engine room where the stokers feed a raging furnace. No port of call printed 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/