Who Dies for Profit

The Plantation Never Ended

The colonial undertaking drew a great deal of its substance and surplus energy from its ties with all sorts of drives, with more or less openly avowed desires, in the main located below the conscious I of the agents concerned. To exercise a lasting hold over the native people they had subjugated, and from whom they wanted to differentiate themselves at all costs, the settlers had somehow to constitute them as physical objects of various sorts. In this sense, the whole game of representations under colonialism consisted indeed in turning the natives into a variety of type-images.

— Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe

Coloniality and the Construction of Identity

Mbembe’s insight reveals the fundamental mechanism of colonial power: the construction of subjectivities that are not only differentiated but permanently fixed within a political economy of domination. This technique of political and economic control did not end with formal decolonisation; it mutated, embedding itself within the very DNA of capitalism. Identity did not vanish—it evolved as a colonial tool of subjugation. It became woven into the warp and woof of supply chains themselves, manifesting as what I call fractal identities—self-replicating hierarchies: that dictate who labours, who is discarded, and who enforces these divisions.

How Did We Get Here?

The prevailing discourse of colonialism—as something dreadful that happened "out there" to others, for which we must atone—is a tired and outdated critique. Coloniality was never confined to a historical episode; it was a technique—one that began as Mercantilism, a system of domination that conquered and secured trade routes for imperial gain during the Age of Discovery and Conquest. But colonialism did not remain confined to distant shores. Like a Frankensteinian monster, it turned upon the entire supply-chain configuration engulfing both the metropolitan centres and colonial peripheries alike.

This transformation becomes undeniable during the Death World cities of the industrial revolution, the sweeping land enclosures across Europe and Napoleon’s Europe-encompassing Continental System; a colonial supply-chain experiment imposed within the heart of Europe itself, irreversibly transforming it. It reshaped the emerging global colonial system, embedding itself into our institutions, economies, and identities—a legacy that remains with us today.

During the Industrial Revolution, this colonial logic mutated, transfiguring mercantilism into capitalism. No longer limited to the exploitation of distant lands, it imposed its hierarchical structures on every link in the global supply chain. The coloniser and the colonised alike were bound to its logic, their identities reshaped to serve an empire of trade. Colonialism did not vanish—it fused into capitalism itself—a self-perpetuating system of extraction and domination.

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The Creation of Death Worlds

Inherent in coloniality’s methodology was the manufacture of Death Worlds across the globe. These are not aberrations but the inevitable offspring of its necropolitical DNA—a politics of death that thrives on division and destruction. For colonial power to endure, it must fracture societies into perpetually warring factions, each complicit in perpetuating necropolitics against those deemed "other" by the ruling oligarchy. This is not accidental but deliberate: the survival of coloniality depends on the endless reproduction of hierarchies, violence, and exclusion. This is the true function of Death World politics—a necropolitical technique designed to facilitate resource, labour and strategic territorial expropriation, control and population management. Weaponising Identity Through Supply Chain Logic

Once the "other" has been defined as the natural enemy—the embodiment of evil and inherent competitor—colonial and capitalist logic weaponises these divisions to serve its supply chains. It conquers and colonises collective memory, reshaping history into a perpetual struggle between fabricated factions. These groups are portrayed as eternal adversaries, bound together in a narrative of conflict that naturalises division as an immutable law. It is here that we see the organising principle of the Manichaean symbolic structure of the civilisational psyche. Its organising principle always casts identities in oppositional relationships complete with handles for manipulation that the strategist can find with their eyes closed. This is not merely about division; it is about reconfiguring history itself, turning the past and the collective psyche into a tool of control.

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Fractal Identities: The Self-Perpetuating Hierarchies

The structures of colonial extraction did not disappear with the abolition of direct rule; rather, they were transmuted into the logistical architecture of global capital, where extraction, control, and racial hierarchy remain its structuring principles. Its most enduring technology—identity as a means of social stratification—remained firmly embedded within the global supply chain. In this regard the nationalist construction of identity is not merely a cultural or psychological phenomenon—it manufactures fixed caste-like identities, each assigned a specific role within the hierarchy. Once embedded into the structure of global supply chains, these divisions become eternalised in codification—through law, economy, and cultural production—These identities are reinforced through the cultural Symbolic realm—movies, literature, music—until they become internalised as self-evident, unquestioned realities—reified as commonsense and beyond critique. Like fractals, these identities recursively reproduce themselves—manifesting in law, culture, economic policy, and even technological infrastructures—ensuring their continuity across generations. This is why I term them Fractal Identities.

These hierarchies are deeply embedded into the Symbolic structures of our collective psyche and they determine who is subjected to systemic neglect, premature death, and violent repression. Death Worlds—spaces of exclusion and disposability—are not accidental but the logical outcome of these fractalised identities. By fragmenting populations, fostering perpetual antagonism, and justifying exploitation, fractal identities ensure that control remains entrenched and surplus populations remain expendable.

The Role of Ideology in Maintaining Fractal Identities

The recursive nature of these hierarchies is what makes them indispensable to capitalism. Capitalism’s genius is not just in exploiting hierarchies but in ensuring their willing reproduction. If caste divisions and wage disparities required constant coercion, the system would collapse under the weight of its own inefficiency. Instead, capitalism embeds these hierarchies within the very desires, fears, and aspirations of individuals—turning systemic inequalities into self-policing social norms. Fractal identities do not simply divide populations—they create self-sustaining identity based mechanisms of control.

From Serfdom to Industrial Capitalism: The Expansion of Caste Hierarchies

This technique of hierarchical control was first refined during the period of European serfdom, where feudal lords managed populations as castes through hereditary obligations, binding people to fixed economic and social roles. However, the enclosure movement violently severed this old feudal order as they sought to commoditise production on their estates to align with global supply chain logic. They privatised common land and denied peasants access to their traditional means of subsistence. Millions of dispossessed rural workers were violently ejected into Europe’s cities, becoming the first surplus populations of industrial capitalism and producing urban Death Worlds.

This was not simply economic transformation—it was social engineering, designed to reorganise economies and strip individuals of communal, local, and feudal protections and reconfigure them into exploitable labour pools. The logic of colonial extraction was no longer limited to the periphery—it was now weaponised against the former peasantry of Europe itself.

However, industrial capitalism did not abolish caste hierarchies; it fractally adapted them to new conditions. The same system of rigid, hierarchical division that had been enforced in the colonies was now reproduced within European industrial cities, where workers were stratified by ethnicity, class, and skill. The transition from feudal subject to factory worker was not just a change in economic relations—it was a transformation of identity, requiring new forms of psychological control.

This restructuring was not a natural evolution but a calculated transition—one in which fractal identities were crafted to ensure social division and prevent worker solidarity. Urban workers were divided along ethnic, religious, and linguistic lines, just as colonial subjects had been. This is why, for example, Irish workers were treated as racial inferiors within Britain and the U.S. —a mimic of how colonial subjects were treated in Africa and Asia where they however by virtue of their colour provided the Symbolic lowest castes of the pantheon of colonial castes. They provided a bedrock of the perpetual and fixed North Star of this imaginary system; they were the perpetual other.

Industrial capitalism, far from dismantling old hierarchies, created new internal frontiers of division within the metropole. These divisions did not disappear with time—they were reinforced through law, housing policies, access to credit and labour segmentation, ensuring that even in an era of "progress," the structural dynamics of caste remained intact.

The feudal bodies formally disciplined by the seasonal rhythms were now in the Death Worlds of the industrial cities, were now disciplined to another rhythm imported from the sugar plantation—time—for once the cane’s juice had been extracted, you had hours before it began to ferment. The plantation’s temporal logic was the clock, producing round the clock shift work still characterises our working rhythms. Slavery didn’t happen to those people over there, from which other people were insulated, it became and inextricable part of our supply chain logic and its infection spread throughout the supply chains; whilst being functionally concealed by what necropolitically must be done or has been done to those ‘other’ bodies

The plantation was not an isolated experiment in domination; it was a prototype for industrial capitalism itself. Slave plantation management techniques—from strict work schedules to overseer enforcement—were later adapted for industrial factories. British industrialists studied Caribbean plantations (which they often owned) for insights on how to discipline factory workers with maximum efficiency.

The plantation’s master was time; the factory’s master was the clock; today, algorithmic governance ensures that exploitation continues under the guise of efficiency—enslaving bodies to a new master, data. Just as the enclosure movement severed feudal bonds to create a class of landless workers, AI automation and algorithmic management are severing the last remnants of labour stability—turning workers into endlessly flexible, disposable units, governed by the invisible hand of machine logic, they rush headlong for the showdown of labour and robotic automation.

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The Colonial Boomerang: From the Metropole Back to the Periphery

Ironically, the very peasants-turned-factory-workers who were disciplined into these new industrial hierarchies would later be exported as immigrants to the Americas. Once there, they were eventually racialised as “white”—a status that artificially elevated them above the formerly enslaved population. This process was not accidental: it was a deliberate racial management strategy, designed to prevent class solidarity between European immigrants and Black freedpeople.

The colonial boomerang does not simply return unchanged—it mutates, adapting the logics of extraction, racialisation, and control to fit the needs of the metropole. Techniques of indigenous dispossession and slave discipline became blueprints for urban policing, surveillance, and labour segmentation in Europe and North America.

The transformation of European immigrants into "whites" was not just a racial elevation but a restructuring of class consciousness, ensuring that they would identify not with the oppressed but with the colonial elite.

Thus, the internal stratification of Europe and America became the basis for global racial capitalism. White identity itself, as constructed in the New World, was a product of colonial fractal identity-making, ensuring that workers identified with their rulers rather than their fellow exploited classes.
Whiteness was not a fixed racial category but a fractal colonial identity—one that could be extended, restricted, or withdrawn depending on the needs of racial capitalism. The Irish, Italians, and Eastern Europeans were at first excluded from whiteness, but by aligning with the structures of anti-Blackness, they were gradually absorbed into its boundaries. In this way, whiteness functioned not as a fixed race, but as a flexible caste system, capable of expanding or contracting to maintain social order.

In the U.S. Civil War Draft Riots of 1863, working-class Irish mobs lynched Black Americans and burned Black institutions, cementing their place in the racial hierarchy not through shared European identity but through complicity in anti-Black violence.

This underscores that whiteness was not a stable category but a fractal colonial identity, one that workers could "enter" if they aligned with the interests of racial capitalism.
The construction of whiteness was in reality not a racial project—it was a class containment strategy. The American ruling class feared the emergence of clear worker alliances that could overthrow the many iterations of the plantation economy and so created the fractal racial categories to insulate against this.

This was not an abstract fear. Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, saw Black and white indentured servants rise up together against the planter elite. In response, Virginia’s ruling class formalised the category of "whiteness" in law—legally separating Black enslaved people from white indentured labourers.

This is the root of racial capitalism—whiteness offered privileges as an incentive to create separation from blackness; it was about breaking class unity with racial segregation before it could become a revolutionary threat. But even with this a mixed intermediate class was a danger which could collapse the edifice and so miscegenation laws, cultural categories and embedded cultural violence was recruited to create stable fractal boundaries.

The prison complex, urban policing and the Israeli import of American style racism and Jim Crow to manage Palestinian bodies, reveal the arbitrariness of the categories and methods against the streamlined purposes and outcomes – resource, labour and strategic territorial expropriation, control and population management. When Christian Arabs began arriving in the US through Ellis and Angel Island immigration processing centres they were categorised as Caucasian a category which is itself an etymological absurdity, just contrast this with the discourse now.

The Post-WWII Era: The Continuation of Caste Logic Through Immigration

A stark example of colonial violence being internalised within the metropole is the Paris Massacre of 17 October 1961. During the Algerian War of Independence, the French police, under the orders of Maurice Papon, violently suppressed a peaceful demonstration of around 30,000 Algerians protesting against a discriminatory curfew. French authorities responded with brutal repression, killing an estimated 200 to 300 demonstrators. Many were beaten unconscious and thrown into the Seine River. This massacre was covered up for decades, with the French government officially recognising it only in 1998. In 2021, President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged it as an “unforgivable crime.”

This event underscores how the violence and logic of colonialism, once enacted on the periphery, were turned inward. The same systems of control and division that sustained extractive economies abroad were reconstructed at home, ensuring the continued segmentation of the workforce and the repression of surplus populations. Just as colonial powers racialised and exploited populations abroad, they now applied these tactics within their own borders, maintaining racialised labour pools and reinforcing hierarchies of exclusion.

The Ongoing Evolution of Colonial Control

The modern reconfiguration of colonial logics through anti-immigrant sentiment is not an aberration; it is a predictable function of capitalism’s survival strategy. By weaponising internal divisions, the ruling class redirects discontent away from systemic economic extraction and toward artificial enemies, ensuring that the cycle of oppression remains intact. These divisions are not merely ideological but structural, designed to maintain a supply of disposable labour populations. The resulting antagonisms obscure the true machinery of oligarchic economic extraction, keeping the focus on manufactured conflicts rather than systemic exploitation.

This process is part of a broader industrialisation of identity, in which racialised, gendered, and class-stratified bodies are disciplined into specific economic roles. These roles reinforce hierarchies of extraction and exclusion, ensuring that certain groups remain marginalised and exploitable. In this way, the colonial logic of control continues to evolve, adapting itself into new systems of oppression while maintaining the same underlying structures of domination.

Coloniality did not simply boomerang back to the metropole; it became an omnipresent logic, shaping the global economic order. The same extractive systems that justified colonial conquest and plantation slavery now function through globalised supply chains, border regimes, and industrialised identity politics. The infrastructures of control—from prisons to surveillance, from urban policing to drone warfare—are all refinements of these colonial techniques, ever mutating, ever adapting.

And yet, systems of control do not persist without resistance. The same fractures that manufacture Death Worlds also generate sites of contestation. The question is not merely how these systems evolve—but whether we will allow them to continue unchallenged. Are we prepared to overgrow them?

We have spent centuries protesting injustice in the hope of reform, but can the dynamics unleashed and harnessed by the nation state and fractal identities be reformed?. As a multipolar world arises will these structures that sustain these hierarchies, and sustain supply chain logic, dissolve or resolve by themselves? Is it protest that is or building? What new models of governance, relating, solidarity, and economic organisation are required?

I know that if we fail, we will not only inherit the Death Worlds of the past—we will be complicit in constructing the ones of the future. The time has come not merely to critique—but to unmake the world that coloniality built, but not by opposing it, but by overgrowing it. Overgrowing the Death Worlds that we have inherited.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

— The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

Coloniality undeniably built our current world. What will it take to become the world breakers and world makers who overgrow and create something anew? There is one thing that I know with certainty, and that is that, what we do from now on is telling us who we are!

Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch.

Where the danger is, there also grows the saving power.

—Patmos, Friedrich Hölderlin

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