Third, when everything is capital, labor disappears as a category, as does its collective form, class, taking with it the analytic basis for alienation, exploitation, and association among laborers. Dismantled at the same time is the very rationale for unions, consumer groups, and other forms of economic solidarity apart from cartels among capitals. This paves the way for challenging several centuries of labor law and other protections and benefits in the Euro-Atlantic world and, perhaps as important, makes illegible the foundations of such protections and benefits. One instance of this illegibility is the growing popular opposition to pensions, security of employment, paid holidays, and other hard-won achievements by public-sector workers in the United States. Another measure of it is the absent sympathy for the effects of life-threatening austerity measures imposed on Southern Europeans amid the 2011–2012 European Union crises.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 64