The ‘Undead’ Workers of the US and Why They Matter in Trump's Tariffs

In a strange twist to the saga of the tariffs imposed by Donald Trump, a particular image of the American worker emerged with tremendous force and rather enduring power.

This image hardly appears in the intellectual discourses of economists explaining the subtleties of global trade; nor does it appear in the views of seasoned commentators and pundits. It appears in a viral video. 

An AI-generated Chinese troll video shows American workers, who are unhealthy, obese, spiritless in zombie-like slow motion. They are in fact working in a factory so out of sync with the machines and work flow, testifying to a dysfunctional and diseased system. Viewers surely get the jitters.

 Instantly viral into the millions, people relished this video, left, right and centre. Scores of such videos and memes trolling the United States over Trump’s tariffs have descended on the internet.

The spoof video hits hard as it generously grants US president Donald Trump his MAGA – ‘Make America Great Again’ – utopia where manufacturing does indeed take place in the US with American workers. And then what happens? The pathetic helplessness of American society is revealed, just about falling short of a dystopic reality of the American working class, precisely that which Trump and MAGA claim to reverse.

The video is not saying that the (American) workers are underpaid; or that workers do not have rights, or that they are not diverse, laid off by say technological change and the like. 

Instead the Chinese are simply saying that your workers cannot work. “Our” workers are very efficient as human bodies but your (American) workers are incapacitated, decrepit. That’s very damning. The workers are now being presented as undead humans, languid and spaced out.

 The American worker is then a completely junk human, no longer needed by the productive apparatus in any way – not just one ejected by automation or the AI revolution, but not even one worth surveilling over; one whose data and tracked behaviour might not qualify as good inputs for machine learning. Neither DeepSeek nor ChatGPT might want the data of this class of people, unless as rare exceptions or as examples of fossilised patterns of behaviour.

They are so out of the Matrix that they can only be thought of as the undead, vegetating human organism. If the US is a living, thriving economy, then it is only because this undead mass has been replaced by the immigrant worker in the productive process.

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So far so good. The story of the undead, however, does not end here.

Now, the tariffs, as part of MAGA politics, can be seen as seeking to instil life into this undead mass. They appear to be an attempt of a society at touching base, checking its basic raw human capacity. 

As we know, fentanyl-trafficking was the initial reason given for the tariffs placed on Canada and Mexico. This also must be seen as tied into Robert F Kennedy Jr’s health agenda. Somebody said it right: falling birth rates are for the right-wing MAGA what climate change is for the left-liberals. This also puts into perspective MAGA’s stance against abortion.

This brings us very close to the trope of race, blood and soil. That this has been incited by the coded message of the Chinese troll video shows how the basic thrust of geopolitics today segues into a particular kind of domestic politics.

We have here the worker as pure human material connected to the community, where community itself might be a shorthand for race, blood and soil. Even the proletarianised worker, the wage worker, supposedly rootless and very much of the world at large, now appears to be this kind of human material, contiguous to the community.

The Trump tariffs are done in the name of an imagined society of the “producer” and the “warrior”, maybe harking back to the time of the Confederates; to the warrior-producer, who will procreate and multiply his kind profusely. Think of how all this ties with Elon Musk supposedly fathering some 14 children, a highly messed up messaging pandering to the MAGA base.

One has to be careful with this hillbilly elegy, with the notion of the idyllic industrial town and its community life. Apart from the white racialist bias, it is in fact symptomatic of the rise of the new mode of capital. MAGA’s supposed working class base, the undead worker in the video, must confront Trump’s solid backing for the new AI-powered capitalism and the oligarchs the world over. And of course, the US must beat China in being the world leader in AI, right?

The undead worker, in its different iterations, is caught up in the reproduction of the dominant system. Political power in the US then must today seek to legitimise itself by invoking the undead worker. Trump might be the corrupt billionaire but he understands this reality of power very well. This is why he has carried out the tariffs in the name of the American worker and the need to revive manufacturing.

There is however another dimension.

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The undead worker might pivot away from MAGA and refuse to get subsumed in the new forms of oligarchic or neo-feudal capitalism. 

Unlike the active productive worker, the undead worker is well placed to look beyond the immediate. The immigrant worker or the active unionised worker in the service sector or logistics might be very militant but a bit too well integrated in the overall reproduction of the system as a whole. 

We must not forget that the undead in the US would include a large section of the black population. It is well known that companies prefer employing immigrants over black workers. That is part of the reason why scholars who call themselves Afro-pessimists use a term called “social death” for the condition of blacks, which again brings us close to the notion of the undead.

The undead is well placed to pronounce an infinite judgement on the system. The undead worker might never be the new revolutionary worker as such, but the “unionised worker” might be the actually dead worker – for instance, in the Leninist sense of being stuck in the mire of economism and unable to make that political leap. The undead can have a power transcending the living – or, let's say, the barely living, those who are actually the living dead.

The undead is part of deep organic time and points to the immortal and the infinite. The undead worker lives beyond its death revealing a power far greater than that offered by life. The reader might be here reminded of Sigmund Freud’s notion of the death drive – the urge to return to a primordial soup, transcending the kind of life which does not include death, and which fails to see life beyond death. Now we know that what Freud means by death has so much to do with life. Death drive is more thoroughly infused with life than life itself.

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While the undead is most acutely highlighted in the American manufacturing worker, the super-efficient Chinese worker and the most productive immigrant worker, too, partake in it. This is what makes possible the slogan “workers of the world unite”. 

Perhaps we cannot already suggest that the undead worker stands for the common revolutionary flesh of all workers. But if we do make that claim, then, more precisely, we can say that the undead worker is the mystical double of this flesh.  That could point to the deep, subterranean basis for internationalist solidarity between the working classes of different countries, or those of the US and China. Denying it is the most reactionary element in the viral video, one which engages in the worst kind of geopolitical rivalry. 

The sentiments and politics behind that AI video are reactionary at multiple levels. There is a grim foreboding of what is in store for the Chinese working class: that they must sacrifice it all for Chinese big capital, or some would say, “Chinese socialism”.

We now know what we find unfulfilling and lacking in most leftist critiques of Trump tariffs. They might say, often very correctly, that these tariffs are actually about enriching the billionaires through tax cuts and it's about oligarchical capitalism; or that it is racist, secretly favouring the white working class. That has been the mainstay of Bernie Sanders and Alexander Ocasio-Cortez. 

They, however, overlook the working class and its inner transformations opening up new horizons of revolutionary politics and what could be a possible politics beyond the subjective intentions of those in power. Not just in the political programmes of the leftists and progressives. The worker, even as the undead, or perhaps particularly as the undead, remains the central fulcrum of political power as such. The Trump tariffs testifies to this.

Saroj Giri teaches Politics in University of Delhi.

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