Conatus Editorial

What Mexico reveals about the authoritarian reorganization of global capital

In the manner of John Reed, from this side of the wall, we have constructed a summary and expository report that we consider urgent. It does not pretend to exhaust the complexity of the processes it analyzes nor to offer a definitive diagnosis, but to draw an initial map of coordinates that, for those of us who struggle from below, are necessary. It was elaborated by a group of communist militants concerned about the current course of the global crisis and the place that Mexico occupies and will suffer within this violent reconfiguration of capital.

What is presented here is neither a technical inventory nor an exercise in erudition. It is a materialist reading of the devices that traverse the daily lives of millions: tariffs as a form of economic punishment, austerity as internal warfare, forced migration as structural policy, narco-capitalism as territorial management, exclusionary automation, profitable ecocide, and debt as an infrastructure of control. Each section of this report takes a visible phenomenon and inscribes it in the general framework of dispossession that defines our times.

Mexico is not on the margins of this crisis: it is one of its active frontiers. And we are not only speaking of its geographic location between the impoverished South and the imperial North, but of its inscription in a double frontier: the material frontier of economic, migratory, ecological, military capital, and the nonphysical frontier of the crisis, that threshold where forms of life become surplus, social relations dissolve, and violence becomes naturalized as a method of management. The Mexican State is a violent border guard.

This document seeks to intervene there — Where normality has become unsustainable, where war is not the exception but the norm, where the future is not disputed with promises but with organization and rupture. The border, in this sense, is not only a limit: it is the place where history can bifurcate.

Tariffs as economic warfare devices

The imposition of the 25% tariff by the United States on all Mexican exports in February 2025 should not be understood as an isolated event or as a technical foreign policy expedient. Rather, it is the expression of a profound mutation in contemporary forms of economic domination. Far from protecting domestic sectors or responding to diplomatic conjunctures, these measures are part of a structural strategy of economic warfare, by means of which global hierarchies are reordered under coercive mechanisms invested with commercial legality.

This policy directly affects key sectors of the Mexican economy, including automotive, agri-food, and electronics. It generates indirect and secondary effects on cross-border value chains, labor rhythms, and macroeconomic stability. With more than 80% of its exports destined for the United States,¹ Mexico reveals a structural dependence that transcends the trade balance: it is a productive subordination sedimented by decades of neoliberal integration.

But the core of the problem is not economic, but political. Tariffs today serve the function of managing imperial decline, not by expanding markets, but by shielding geopolitical positions through punishment and exclusion. Protectionism does not act as a disruption of free trade, but as its functional reverse: a way of selecting, hierarchizing, and suffocating subordinate links when they threaten to exceed their assigned role.

In this sense, tariffs function as disciplining devices that force countries like Mexico to fulfill extra-trade functions, such as migration control, border militarization, and outsourcing of security in exchange for not being economically strangled. Economic coercion thus becomes a technology of valorization in other ways: articulating trade policy with territorial command and population control.

From a materialist perspective, these mechanisms must be understood as forms of negative valorization: they do not expand capital, but reorganize its reproduction through a logic of selective exclusion. Social mediation through abstract labor and exchange value no longer produces social integration, but rather functional segmentation and the destruction of working-class identity:

The end of the dichotomy between employment and unemployment, the global purchase of labor power, the new structuring of demand, and the expansion of the activity rate are essential moments of this fluidity, which places the contradiction between classes at the level of their reproduction. It also implies, with regard to the determination of class struggle, the disappearance of working-class identity as it had been affirmed within the reproduction of capital.²

In this framework — the real subsumption of capital³ — tariffs do not oppose the market: they reconfigure it as a frontier, as a diagram of hierarchical differentiation.

The disconnection between the valorization of capital and the reproduction of the labor force is not a transitory mismatch, but the dominant logic of restructured capitalism. There is no longer a stable correspondence between accumulation, employment, and social reproduction, but a structural mismatch that expels and fragments. As Théorie Communiste⁴ points out, the dispersion of territories and proletarian bodies is not dysfunction but a condition of functioning. Crisis does not appear here as rupture, but as the normal mode of adjustment of capital: friction as a form of persistence.

Thus, tariffs are not diplomatic symptoms or commercial deviations. They are the economic face of a regime of social reproduction based on regulated exclusion and functional subordination. They operate as thresholds of economic violence, through which capital imposes geopolitical tasks on its peripheries. In the face of this, to think of economic war as an exception is to fail to understand that there is no longer an economy without war.

Austerity as a war against reproduction

Clara Mattei⁵ has acutely argued that austerity is not simply a fiscal tool, but a technique of internal warfare: a way of preserving the capitalist order in the face of the threat of social alternatives. As in the interwar period, today austerity does not only translate into cuts, but into the deliberate abandonment of regions, the emptying of public services, and the silent expulsion of entire populations to areas of marginality or frontier.

In Latin America, this logic has operated as a multi-scale mechanism of dispossession: weakening of public health and education, erosion of formal employment, and progressive disappearance of social safety nets. More than an adjustment policy, austerity constitutes a class rationality, which impoverishes in a structural way and reorganizes social links according to scarcity. Its objective is not to stabilize economies, but to fabricate disciplined subjectivities, disposable bodies, and disarticulated communities.

This war against reproduction does not act alone. It is articulated with ideological devices that moralize poverty, individualize precariousness, and naturalize deterioration as personal responsibility. In Mexico, regressive fiscal pressure and the withdrawal of the state from welfare functions have produced governance vacuums that are quickly filled by parastatal, criminal or military forms of territorial control.

Far from being a technical response to budgetary emergencies, contemporary austerity is a planned offensive against the conditions of existence of the proletariat. It is intimately linked to the proliferation of authoritarian logics and the reconversion of the State into an active agent of impoverishment and fragmentation. Precarization is not a secondary consequence, but a functional goal.

From a materialist reading, austerity is a technique of differential management of the proletariat. It does not seek to solve a "fiscal crisis," but to produce precarious bodies, indebted and available for any form of residual valorization. Exclusion is no longer a failure, but a structuring principle. It is not a matter of administering rights, but of organizing dispossession. In this context, the State does not disappear: it is rearming itself as the administrator of precariousness. Its withdrawal from social functions is accompanied by its reinforcement in military control, surveillance, and territorial segmentation. Austerity is not merely a reduction in spending: it is an architecture of selective violence, where the reproduction of life becomes an object of management, control, and punishment.

Migration and survival: the global war regime

Forced migration from Mexico and Central America to the United States is not a humanitarian anomaly, nor can it be thought of in isolation from the structural forms of violence that characterize contemporary capitalism. The figure of the migrant today condenses a central tension of the system: he or she is at once a surplus body, a potential labor force, and a subject that overflows state containment devices. This figure embodies what can be called a regime of survival without guarantees, where life is sustained not by the State, but in spite of it, under conditions imposed by dispossession, forced mobility, and biopolitical control.

The U.S.-Mexico border operates as a laboratory for this generalized crisis. It is no longer a geographic line, but a population management device. On the border, multiple forms of control converge: safe third country agreements, militarization of the National Guard, outsourcing of repressive functions, and cross-border detention networks. Far from being exceptional responses, these technologies configure a permanent regime of expulsion, illegalization, and differential administration of life.

The migrant is not a subject without politics, but an active symptom of the collapse of the social pact. Their transit highlights the unfeasibility of the peripheral development model and the impossibility of integrating vast social strata under the national order. The migrant body becomes the target of multiple devices: border control, the remittance economy, transnational informal labor, and geopolitical blackmail. To migrate is not only to move: it is to interrupt the fiction of the "State" as a legitimate container of life, rights, and belonging.

The migration crisis does not confront a "Mexican problem" with a "U.S. solution." It is the localized expression of a global fracture: a system that can no longer guarantee neither land, nor employment, nor basic services, turns movement into a crime and survival into transgression. According to the International Organization for Migration,⁶ between January and April alone, more than 735,000 encounters with migrants were recorded in Mexican territory, a figure that belies any episodic interpretation.

From the critique of political economy, this forced mobility does not represent a dysfunction, but an operative form of capital to displace, segment, and manage its own human surplus. Capital no longer needs to integrate all the bodies it exploits: it can marginalize them, expel them, or use them intermittently, under precarious conditions, and then discard them. In this framework, territory does not guarantee citizenship: it classifies bodies, rhythms, and unequal access to life and work.

Théorie Communiste has described this logic as a structural disconnection between capital valorization and social reproduction. Forced migration, in this sense, is a technique of uprooting that fractures community ties and disciplines through intemperance. The border does not separate two worlds: it functions as an internal operator of capital, which differentiates, selects and channels lives according to their residual value.

Thinking about migration under the paradigm of the survival regime not only makes structural violence visible, but also allows us to understand the contemporary mutations of sovereignty. In a world where the management of scarcity becomes political, the migrant embodies the figure-limit of the crisis: an embodied testimony that exclusion is no longer the exception to the system, but its operational core.

Narcocapitalism: accumulation by expulsion

As Théorie Communiste and Endnotes have pointed out, capital does not require stability and peace to accumulate. It can operate through fragmentation, direct coercion, and the territorial organization of death. Violence is not a failure, it is an adaptive rationality of post-neoliberal capital. In this framework, drug trafficking appears not as disorder, but as a structural tool for the management of the surplus proletariat.

On a geopolitical scale, drug trafficking also functions as a device for imperial intervention. The war on drugs justifies direct U.S. interference in security policies, military cooperation, and border control. This generalized militarization consolidates a model of social warfare where crime, economy, and governance form a functional continuum.

Drug trafficking is not limited to the trafficking of illicit goods. Its existence makes it possible to sustain local regimes of violent land acquisition, dominating migratory routes, informal labor markets, strategic territories, and marginalized urban areas. Violence does not respond to an irrational logic: it is an economic instrument of territorial restructuring, a technology of command over surplus bodies.

This legally criminal form of valorization is not on the margins of legal capitalist logic; rather, it radicalizes its content. In territories where the wage and the law have collapsed as mediators, the illegal economy operates as the nucleus that organizes social reproduction. Proletarian life becomes subject to armed power, which replaces the law and the wage as regulatory mechanisms.

In Mexico, this form of valorization has deeply penetrated institutions, articulating networks that connect cartels, business sectors, security forces and state actors. This network should not be interpreted as a "criminal conspiracy," but as a complex form of governance, where the distinction between legality and illegality is dissolved under criteria of armed profitability and logistical control. The result is a regime of overlapping sovereignties that orders daily life in terms of profitable violence.

Late Fascism and Disaster Nationalism

Richard Seymour⁷ defines "disaster nationalism" as an authoritarian way of managing the breakdown of the liberal order. It does not seek to solve the crisis, but to dramatize it in order to impose regressive responses: border closures, militarization of the territory, persecution of migrants, criminalization of protest. This apocalyptic rhetoric does not announce solutions, but the differential management of the catastrophe as a political model. Alberto Toscano⁸ formulates it in other terms: late fascism does not mechanically reproduce historical fascism, but recovers its structural functions — suppression of class conflict, restoration of order, racialized exclusion — now within eroded democratic regimes.

This mutation manifests itself in Mexico in the form of the permanent militarization of civilian life, the expansion of extractive projects under rhetoric of modernization, and the systematic criminalization of poverty. Political power allies with organized crime and the armed forces to produce a new logic of sovereignty, where territorial control replaces the law as a form of government. It is not a matter of maintaining the social pact, but of administering its ruin with an iron fist.

This new type of fascism does not pretend to build consensus or future. It is oriented to the present as an administered state of exception. Its aesthetic is that of perpetual crisis, where surplus lives become internal enemies, manageable only through surveillance, repression, or abandonment. In the words of Walter Benjamin, it is politics turned into a spectacle of death: an order that no longer promises redemption, but punishment.

In this context, deindustrialization does not free up time or redistribute wealth. It dismantles stable jobs, degrades working conditions, and throws millions into precarious forms of subsistence: underemployment, gig economy, forced migration or illicit economies. Jasper Bernes⁹ already warned that the crisis of industrial work did not imply its disappearance, but its reconfiguration as systemic degradation: work without rights, without future, without community.

Mexico illustrates this shift. Converted into an assembly platform for global value chains, it has experienced partial automation without integration. The jobs created are fragile, poorly paid, and easily replaceable. Added to this is an informality that affects 56% of the employed population. The result is not a "modern" economy, but a survival regime where productivity coexists with exclusion.

Faced with this labor crisis, the State does not redistribute: it criminalizes. It does not protect: it militarizes. Poverty is not recognized as a structural problem, but as a threat. Thus, the absence of future becomes a matter of national security, and automation becomes an instrument of expulsion, without compensation or collective horizon.

This process is not a "flaw" correctable by Keynesian policies. It is a structural reorganization of labor as a form of subordination without integration. The problem is not the scarcity of employment, but the structural impossibility of reabsorbing the surplus labor force. The logic of segmentation, surveillance, and debt replaces the wage as a social bond.

The result is a tragic paradox: an economy that no longer needs workers and a society that cannot survive without them. Technology does not free time, but imposes its capture; it does not democratize life, it disciplines it. Late fascism manages this contradiction without resolving it, aestheticizing the ruin and displacing the crisis towards the most vulnerable bodies.

From automation to expulsion: no job, no future

Aaron Benanav¹⁰ dismantles the technocratic narrative that attributes mass unemployment to the advance of automation. What defines our era is not an excess of productivity, but a chronic insufficiency of growth. This "weak demand for labor" arises not from technological development, but from the prolonged stagnation of capital, overaccumulation, and the relative collapse of traditional industrial sectors.

Automation does not represent a liberation of human labor, but rather its displacement without transition. Far from generating well-being or free time, technology operates as an instrument of regressive reorganization: it destroys stable jobs, makes those that survive more precarious, and imposes a logic of replacement without redistribution. Instead of integration, forced obsolescence is imposed.

Mexico embodies this paradox. The productive reconversion has inserted it into global chains as an assembly platform. Partial automation has not brought technological unemployment, but rather a multiplication of fragile, poorly paid, and easily replaceable jobs. Added to this is a structural informality that turns work into an area of risk, not security. The State, instead of mitigating this trend, reinforces it: it criminalizes poverty, militarizes the territory and manages exclusion as if it were an individual deviation, not a systemic consequence. Thus, automation is not a utopian promise of liberation, but a mechanism of expulsion functional to capital in crisis.

What appears here as technical progress is, in reality, an expression of the structural incapacity of capital to absorb its own labor force. There is no crisis of employment: there is a crisis of valorization. Capital no longer needs to, nor can it, achieve accumulation via social integration. As Endnotes¹¹ points out, abstract labor no longer requires universalizing the wage, but managing the human surplus through fragmentation, debt, and surveillance.

This massive expulsion from the wage relation is not accidental. It is constitutive of the contemporary regime of accumulation, where the subsumption of labor ceases to be expansive and becomes exclusive. Instead of producing integration, automation produces superfluous proletarians, bodies without a place, lives stripped of horizon. Potential immigrants.

The result is an economy that does without workers, and a society that cannot do without work. Technology, in this scenario, does not democratize time: it disciplines it, captures it, turns it into debt and algorithm. The future is not automated: it is canceled. What remains is the differential management of ruin, under the ever-failing promise of a progress that no longer arrives.

Ecological crisis and violent extractivism

The world burns. Environmental devastation is not a side effect of global capitalism: it is its operative condition. Capital needs to continually expand over new territories, unexploited raw materials, and populations without guaranteed rights. In this framework, extractivism — mining, energy, agriculture, or tourism — appears not as a deviation, but as the structural matrix of accumulation in vast areas of the Global South.

In Mexico, this logic is expressed in megaprojects such as the Maya Train, the Interoceanic Corridor, or the expansion of the energy frontier. These interventions not only destroy fragile ecosystems, but also displace communities, fragment social fabric, and militarize entire regions under the promise of "development." It is a sacrificial ecology, where life becomes a technical obstacle and nature an infrastructure for rent.

The IPCC Sixth Assessment report¹² warns that southern Mexico will be one of the regions most affected by climate change: droughts, loss of biodiversity, water crisis. But these processes do not operate alone: they are accelerated by a corporate capture of the environmental discourse, which turns the ecological crisis into a new frontier of valorization. Carbon credits, "green" mining, or clean hydrogen do not solve the problem: they reorganize it under forms of climate speculation.

Extractivism is not only an economic model: it is an authoritarian form of government. It involves surveillance, criminalization, militarization of territories and systematic repression against environmental defenders. Under this logic, the Earth itself is subsumed as a means of production, and the destruction of the living becomes manageable, profitable, plannable. This integration of nature into capital is not an accident: it is its logical outcome. Territorial expansion is neither linear nor peaceful, but contradictory and violent. Théorie Communiste has pointed out how this real subsumption of nature produces territorial segmentation, paramilitary control, and dissolution of community ties as conditions of accumulation.

What emerges is not a green capitalism, but a technocratic management of collapse. The promises of sustainability and resilience function as ideological anesthesia, while the regime of valorization reconfigures the boundary between useful life and disposable life. As Endnotes warns, even the climate crisis can be absorbed by capital as an opportunity for business and control. Ecological critique cannot be limited to correcting externalities or designing state-managed green transitions. What is required is a break with the very logic of valorization: to decommodify the Earth, the body, and time, before they are completely converted into functional waste.

Financialization of life and debt as a form of control

Financialization marks a decisive shift in capital: accumulation is no longer based primarily on the production of commodities, but on the extraction of rent over the time of life. Credit is imposed as the key to access to existence and debt as a political device of subjection. In Mexico, informal microcredit, the over-indebtedness of households, and the privatization of services illustrate this shift: according to the ENIGH 2022, more than 75% of urban households maintain some kind of liability and a growing proportion allocates more than 40% of its income to interest payments.

Debt does not operate only in the economic sphere: it is a technique of government. By individualizing collective deficiencies — health, housing, education — it shifts responsibility from the State to the debtor, fragments solidarity and moralizes poverty ("bad payer," "irresponsible"), neutralizing any structural reading. At the same time, it provides the State with an instrument of control without resorting to redistribution: capturing resources via financial markets while disciplining popular consumption.

This regime does not oppose, but coexists with authoritarian economic nationalism. As Merchant¹³ warns, credit can expand even under anti-globalist discourses, because financialization and protectionism share the function of managing inequality without questioning the logic of valorization. The indebted homeland is sustained by indebted citizens.

Financialization represents the integral subordination of social reproduction to fictitious capital. Wages cease to guarantee life; credit scoring takes their place. Endnotes stresses that exploitation does not disappear: it is rearticulated in future contracts on the ability to promise work and income. Subjectivity is measured, scored, and put on value like "human collateral."

Debt, therefore, is neither a mere macroeconomic problem nor a moral defect: it is an infrastructure of domination that captures present and future, accelerates the rhythms of life, and dissolves the possibility of community based on shared time. Financial inclusion does not empower: it atomizes. By turning every need into a line of credit, it shifts politics towards individual risk management and turns precariousness into an insured market.

Breaking with this architecture requires de-fetishizing credit as a "right of access" and restoring it to its status as a chain that privatizes reproduction. As long as life depends on compound interest, any promise of social reconstruction will be subject to the logic of collateral. The alternative, then, is not more debt at better rates, but to decommodify the material foundation of existence.

Conclusion: terminal capitalism, permanent war

The phenomena analyzed are not fragmentary episodes or symptoms of a passing crisis. They are the gears of a regime of accumulation reorganized under conditions of prolonged decomposition. Far from announcing its collapse, capital shows its capacity to transform imbalance into method, violence into administration, and scarcity into technology of power. The "crisis" does not interrupt reproduction: it structures it.

Tariffs, austerity, forced migration, narco-capitalism, exclusionary automation, extractivism, and debt: each of these devices contributes to the production of a political economy of expulsion, where labor is no longer a mediator of integration, but a problem to be managed. Populations become mobilizable surplus, borders become filters of valorization, and bodies become functional or disposable units, depending on the moment.

In this landscape, the frontier — economic, ecological, military, digital — no longer delimits sovereignties: it modulates unequal access to life and rights. As a technology of capital, it manages mobility, segments links, redefines the reproducible. The "crisis frontier" is not just a place: it is the global diagram of a form of domination that normalizes war as a form of social organization.

Reformist responses — humanitarian, institutional, or technical — are insufficient in the face of a regime that does not need to resolve conflict, but to manage it infinitely. Even dysfunctionality can be absorbed as an opportunity for valorization: climatic collapse, massive migrations, structural unemployment, armed violence. Everything can be governed, everything can be priced.

Thinking from this reality requires abandoning the fetish of development, the nostalgia for the social state, and the fiction of progress. It is not a matter of restoring a lost equilibrium, but of interrupting the extended reproduction of the catastrophe. The outside of capital is not guaranteed, but neither is it closed. It opens up where bodies refuse to continue to be administered as waste, where time is reappropriated, where the community refuses to become an accounting balance.

Faced with the integral administration of ruin, the challenge is not to govern it better, but to stop producing it.

Conatus is a transnational collective of communists translating and producing situated theory in and from Latin America, with a base in Mexico. Learn more about them at their website.