This book asks a question that is at once old and urgently contemporary: has class struggle become obsolete? Against both the triumphalism of “the end of history” and the moralistic complaint that the masses have grown apathetic, it proposes an analytical variable: the gravitational mechanism of association.
Through a historical sequence—from the primacy of nation in agrarian-feudal societies, to the direct class gravity of industrial capitalism, to the split gravities of the digital age (renascent nationalism at the macro level and identity-, taste-, and singularity-based bonds at the micro level)—it reinterprets feminism, environmentalism, and identity politics as displaced, uneven, yet still progressive forms of class struggle.
Engaging critically with post-Marxism, it insists that the material base and the capital-labor antagonism remain decisive. The new bonds are a genuine advance in human richness, but without reconnecting to material interest they risk becoming depoliticized enclaves.
The book argues that AI-driven mass unemployment will produce a social—not merely physiological—crisis of survival, recentering class interest while also making possible a higher unity of collective struggle and individual freedom. Here Is Rhodes: Begin the Dance of Roses! is a political intervention: partisan, predictive, and written for those who would act.
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