When John Martin created his 1841 painting Pandemonium, pictured above, he was reacting to the hell that capital had created through the industrial revolution. The palace that Satan stands above was based on the Westminster parliamentary building, which was being reconstructed amid an unprecedented ascendancy for the power of finance. The river of lava was based on London’s River Thames, which had become polluted to the effect that diseases were massively spreading throughout the city. I draw attention to Pandemonium at this moment because it provides a vision of clarity for those who are being left behind amid our new techno-social disruption, where finance capital is using AI to try to bring an advanced dark age.
By understanding the nature of this disruption, we can chart the course towards overthrowing finance capital, and thereby manifesting the greatest breakthrough in human history; a breakthrough where the proletariat has gained full control over AI, letting us further economic growth and scientific progress without being undermined by capitalism’s anarchy of production.
To figure out what kind of upheaval our world is experiencing right now, we need to look at the breakdown that occurred the last time we saw a technological destabilization of this scale. And during that moment, with the rise of manufacturing, there occurred a development that would be integral towards creating the crisis we’re now living through. This was the shift in which, due to the practical necessities of the factory model, the working class became concentrated inside the cities to an unprecedented extent. In his 1845 work Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels explained this process, observing how after industrial production gets introduced…
…Population becomes centralised just as capital does; and, very naturally, since the human being, the worker, is regarded in manufacture simply as a piece of capital for the use of which the manufacturer pays interest under the name of wages. A manufacturing establishment requires many workers employed together in a single building, living near each other and forming a village of themselves in the case of a good-sized factory. They have needs for satisfying which other people are necessary; handicraftsmen, shoemakers, tailors, bakers, carpenters, stonemasons, settle at hand. The inhabitants of the village, especially the younger generation, accustom themselves to factory work, grow skilful in it, and when the first mill can no longer employ them all, wages fall, and the immigration of fresh manufacturers is the consequence. So the village grows into a small town, and the small town into a large one.
The greater the town, the greater its advantages. It offers roads, railroads, canals; the choice of skilled labour increases constantly, new establishments can be built more cheaply, because of the competition among builders and machinists who are at hand, than in remote country districts, whither timber, machinery, builders, and operatives must be brought; it offers a market to which buyers crowd, and direct communication with the markets supplying raw material or demanding finished goods. Hence the marvellously rapid growth of the great manufacturing towns. The country, on the other hand, had the advantage that wages are usually lower than in town, and so town and country are in constant competition; and, if the advantage is on the side of the town today, wages sink so low in the country tomorrow that new investments are most profitably made there.
This is what makes the chaos of the industrial revolution inverse to the crisis of today: the coming of manufacturing represented a moment of unprecedented growth, while in the AI era capitalism is undergoing degrowth. And such degrowth has been happening for a long time now, but only in the post-Covid era is our society starting to grasp what this contraction has been leading to. It’s bringing an unprecedented slowdown of biological reproduction itself, at least throughout the “collective west.”
Overall, such a fundamental breakdown in familial structures isn’t happening in the Global South; it mainly applies to the places where capital has undergone a particular kind of evolution. An evolution that Engels described the beginnings of in 1843’s Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, which illustrated the unevenness of the productive explosion that he recounted within Condition:
Capital increases daily; labour power grows with population; and day by day science increasingly makes the forces of nature subject to man. This immeasurable productive capacity, handled consciously and in the interest of all, would soon reduce to a minimum the labour falling to the share of mankind. Left to competition, it does the same, but within a context of antitheses. One part of the land is cultivated in the best possible manner whilst another part – in Great Britain and Ireland thirty million acres of good land – lies barren. One part of capital circulates with colossal speed; another lies dead in the chest. One part of the workers works fourteen or sixteen hours a day, whilst another part stands idle and inactive, and starves. Or the partition leaves this realm of simultaneity: today trade is good; demand is very considerable; everyone works; capital is turned over with miraculous speed; farming flourishes; the workers work themselves sick. Tomorrow stagnation sets in. The cultivation of the land is not worth the effort; entire stretches of land remain untilled; the flow of capital suddenly freezes; the workers have no employment, and the whole country labours under surplus wealth and surplus population.
In capitalism’s productive imbalance, there is another layer of inequality, beyond the contradiction between oppressor and oppressed nations: the contradiction between urban and rural. Which didn’t start with capitalism, but looks different in the industrial age; with the emergence of manufacturing, the contrast between town and country became magnified. And in the post-industrial phase of capitalism, it’s taking on a new form, one where the ruination of the rural starts a larger domino effect.
It’s the town vs. country part of the imbalance that’s playing an integral role in today’s social breakdown, because the accelerating decline in the rural’s economic vitality is a critical factor within all aspects of the collective west’s collapse. The rural masses have always been viewed as a “surplus population” by the ruling class and its collaborators; and because financial monopolies have been allowed to de-industrialize the rural, while expanding their domination over land ownership, both the rural and the urban could be set up for the pandemonium that’s now afflicting them.
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The economic war against the countryside is an overlooked explanation for the birth rate crisis. In many places throughout the collective west, it’s re-creating the conditions of south Korea, where working-age people have migrated to the metropole and become too overworked to start families. Such is the process we’re seeing play out among the post-Covid generation, which came of age when the breakdown in our old social strictures had reached a critical point. 2020 was when house prices, rent, employment, cost of goods, and all the other parts of our lives reached such a dire state that the outcome would be a biological freeze.
We are now the better part of a decade into this era, and our society is being forced to come to terms with the existential reality that it faces. The question of why so few younger people are starting families anymore keeps growing larger in the discourse; there are many “gender war” psyops that seek to divert these conversations into individualistic blame-games, but such victim-blaming cannot get rid of the underlying issue. The majority of the post-Covid generation is not on track to do what human beings have always been doing, and this will have repercussions. Repercussions that the ruling social system will try to manage by economically discarding the “left-behinds,” diverting their anger towards left vs. right divisions, and consolidating monopoly financial control over a declining civilization. Or at least this is what the future will look like if the post-Covid generation stays inert, and the workers movement stays tethered to its outmoded old ways of operating.
Gen Z’s arrested development is a mandate for us to embark upon a new type of revolt. A revolt whose character is still about the central contradiction of workers vs. capital, but which gains its rallying strength and propaganda power from a specific type of outrage. The outrage that comes from seeing yourself and your community fall into ruin, and then having the ruling institutions construct artificially prosperous enclaves; centers for expensive housing and boutique establishments that hegemonic media pretends are representative of the collective modern experience.
It is important that we connect with the anger against this particular development, because it’s an anger that lets us delineate between authentic working-class politics and its enemies. When the financial monopolists make way for the gentrification of our neighborhoods, and then present this as genuine growth, the workers are forced to reckon with just how complete their disenfranchisement is. The representatives of this gentrification politics often try to imitate the aesthetics of working-class politics; the left wing within the elites describe themselves as “progressive,” and the right-wing employs its own version of this tactic through superficial “populist” rhetoric. Yet the material contradictions are never overcome through these branding exercises, and they’re now bringing about an unprecedented type of social calamity.
What we are experiencing is the logical conclusion of the war against family which Marx and Engels described in The Communist Manifesto. This was a process where, as the authors observed, every family relationship became defined by its potential to generate profit for the owning class:
The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour. But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus. The bourgeois sees his wife as a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women. He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production. For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.
What would happen when the central goal of the owning class switched from maximizing industrial, to scaling it down? When capitalism transitioned to its monopoly stage, financial speculation became the primary means for gaining profits, and our rulers decided to degrow the economy? What came about was the next phase within this dismantling of familial relations, which was the destruction of conditions that let the average person start a family in the first place. In the age of technological finance monopoly, it no longer matters to our elites whether the population can replace itself, and keep producing in the way it used to. We were always headed for a scenario like this; from the start, the capitalist class believed there’s such a thing as a natural “surplus population,” and had an urge to reduce it. Now is when they’re fully embracing this mentality.
This is reflected by what finance capital invests in amid the decline of our civilization. The “growth” our ruling class prioritizes is increasingly centered around tech ventures that feed the war machine; which are projects that involve the gentrification of our struggling communities, via the transplanting of tech experts from wealthy metropolitan centers. This has brought about a degenerated version of the dynamic Engels described, in which depression for the rural makes new investments more opportune there; in low-population, impoverished places like my home of Humboldt County, California, the trend has become for urban professional-managerial class members to relocate here. Cal Poly Humboldt has set us on this path by shifting towards the “polytechnic” model; which, in an isolated place like our town, means that the local economy will lean onto investments from the intelligentsia wing of the military-industrial complex. Meanwhile, the rural “youth drain” problem worsens, as Cal Poly students are increasingly priced out of moving here permanently.
It’s rural dystopian scenarios such as this one that exemplify a global-scale problem, and that are why the overall collapse has become so severe. The rural is part of the foundations for a civilization, and when the rural gets hollowed out, the civilization can no longer function. For the workers movement to escape inertia, and rally the post-Covid generation, it must reorient itself towards being a largely rural project. One that’s capable of rebuilding the social relations which have existed since time immemorial, and are now being taken away from urban and rural alike.
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To truly figure out where the proletarian struggle will need to go in order to overcome the obstacles it faces today, we’ll have to carry out investigations. Investigations of the conditions within the parts of society that are being left behind, which entails a turn towards the rural. When Mao recounted his party’s experience with pivoting towards the countryside, this was the real essence of his advice: not to simply copy the Chinese revolution, but go deep into the masses, and gain an intimate understanding of their needs. Wrote Mao:
The experience of the Chinese revolution, that is, building rural base areas, encircling the cities from the countryside and finally seizing the cities, may not be wholly applicable to many of your countries, though it can serve for your reference. I beg to advise you not to transplant Chinese experience mechanically. The experience of any foreign country can serve only for reference and must not be regarded as dogma. The universal truth of Marxism-Leninism and the concrete conditions of your own countries--the two must be integrated. If you are to win over the peasants and rely on them, you must conduct investigations in the rural areas. The method is to investigate one or more villages and spend a few weeks there to get a clear idea of the class forces, the economic situation, living conditions and so on, in the countryside. The principal leaders, such as the general secretary of the Party, should themselves undertake this work and get to know one or two villages; they should try to find the time, for it is well worth the effort. Though there are plenty of sparrows , it is not necessary to dissect every one of them; to dissect one or two is enough.
It’s when we grasp this part of our task, in which we must rigorously study our conditions and most of all familiarize ourselves with the left-behinds, that we gain the holistic perspective which can let us move forward amid the pandemonium.
When Marx and Engels talked about how capitalism had uprooted the old society, and how manufacturing had further transformed social relations, they did so with the awareness that all of this represented the foundations for the next stage in humanity’s evolution. The capitalist era, and the technology that’s come about during it, are the prerequisites for building a society that’s classless and stateless. This is one of the biggest parts of Marxism which anti-communists obscure: that Marx and Engels didn’t want to simply discard the progress capitalism brought, because they knew socialism can only come about within the context of an unprecedented historical shake-up.
By the time that China had its revolution, and this translated into new momentum for the popular struggles within the imperialist countries, the chaos which capitalism brings had created new shifts in consciousness; ones that left behind a legacy we can still build on, even after all of the 20th century’s working-class setbacks. Mao said about this development that “we must take people’s consciousness into our consideration. When the United States stopped bombing North Vietnam, American soldiers in Vietnam were very glad, and they even cheered. This indicates that their morale is not high…The student strike is a new phenomenon in European history. Students in the capitalist countries usually do not strike. But now, all under the heaven is great chaos. Mainly in Europe, in the United States, in Latin America, and in Japan, there are student strikes.”
This was the context in which Mao famously spoke of there being a favorable chaos: when capitalism’s war machine, the central vehicle through which it survives, had created contradictions that a critical proportion of the people couldn’t reckon with. Now that the imperial hegemon has expanded its world war to Venezuela, so much that Venezuela’s people will be forced to activate plans for armed resistance, this kind of pandemonium is going to reappear in a more advanced form. Washington’s hope is that it will only need to take minimal action in order to destroy Venezuela’s revolution, but the country’s people have prepared well for a fight. Because this will have to be a major fight, the American people will likely see their government enter into another sustained war. Because this war will be even more impactful for Americans than Ukraine or Gaza have been, popular resistance from them is inevitable.
Whether this resistance can be sustained, and turned into a catalyst for workers victory, depends on whether we break the workers movement out of its inertia. The inertia that’s mirrored by the problems our civilization as a whole is facing, where we’ve found ourselves trapped in a system that refuses to stop running even though its foundational social order is already dead.
Because the societal norms of the boomer era have vanished, the bulk of the post-Covid generation has been left with truly nothing to lose. And this has the potential to do great harm to the revolutionary cause, because unlike the Global South peoples who we’re seeing mobilize right now, those within this left-behind population don’t have the motivation which comes from fighting for a family you’ve started. They don’t have spouses or children, they only have their existing families and (hopefully) their friends.
Can a generation be rallied to fight for the future, when they’ve been cut off from creating the next generation? Absolutely this can be done, if we give these victims of the pandemonium clear direction on their stake within the class war. It may be that the generation of the pandemonium will get organized towards the class struggle through a desire to defy the ugliness of big tech’s agenda. To stop the gentrifiers, technocrats, and banking elites from being the ones who get to define what humanity is. They’ve pushed us aside, but in doing so they’ve created pandemonium. And this pandemonium could be what brings their defeat.
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