When pundits talk about AI’s disruptions of jobs, as a rule they focus not on the actual working families who are being impacted, but on the “creative class.” We hear about how difficult it’s becoming for those seeking careers in tech, which is something that a fraction of a fraction of the people can relate to; this is commentary that’s created for residents of the high-end metropole bubble. To know what the true effects of this technological upheaval are, you need to look at the experience of the worker, who had already been living through a generations-long collapse prior to when AI became a central issue.
A breakdown that can only be reversed by the proletariat
The decline we’re seeing is not a novel thing, and most of us are aware of this despite the elite media’s pretending otherwise. The question is where to find the genuine class allies, the ones who will join in a collective workers organization and fight for the emancipation of the proletariat. In our search for these allies, a crucial place to look is the “hinterlands,” the areas that have been stripped of their old industry and left to decline. These spaces are among where we can find mass elements which aren’t invested in skimming off the imperial super-profits, like the high-end metropolitans are, and therefore have created a critical buffer against the designs of our ruling technocrats.
Any authentic left-wing organization will not try to rely on the “creative class,” or on its appendages within academia and other PMC spaces. The parts of the masses we need to reach most urgently right now are the trade unionists (who are in position to disrupt the Gaza holocaust), the unorganized workers, and the rural workers especially (as they’ve been the most neglected by organizers). This is speaking very broadly, but these are the demographics we need to orient our practice around. When we’ve gotten the right priorities regarding who to reach, and lived up to the title of proletarian organizers, we’ll be able to gain a real understanding of what this new technological disruption means. Of how the material producers within our society are being impacted by it, and how to lead them towards victory against capital.
Something critical to understand about the proletariat’s relationship to AI is that AI isn’t the worker’s enemy, despite the efforts of the “creative class” to convince us as such. AI is simply a part of humanity’s evolution, one we cannot and should not wish away; and it’s the proletariat that’s capable of building the socialist system which can maximize AI’s usefulness, unlike the creative class which doesn’t know how to coherently respond to AI. Civilization’s progression is making the boutique labor aristocrats outmoded; for those who drive the means of production, this progress will bring unprecedented strength.
When the working class becomes in control of the state, and therefore in control of AI, it will make AI more fully embody the progressive role that it already has; this follows the revolutionary principle Marx described in Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “By heralding the dissolution of the hereto existing world order, the proletariat merely proclaims the secret of its own existence, for it is the factual dissolution of that world order. By demanding the negation of private property, the proletariat merely raises to the rank of a principle of society what society has raised to the rank of its principle, what is already incorporated in it as the negative result of society without its own participation.” This is the vital piece of context behind all the ways AI is right now being used to hurt the working class: by its nature, AI is actually an ally of the workers.
When we understand this, we can figure out how to locate the counter-forces against our techno-dystopia, and to make allies out of these forces. Under our financial capitalist dictatorship, AI is being used to accelerate the rise in unemployment, a crisis which the big banks have explicitly desired to engineer; thanks to AI, companies can trap job-seekers in an endless cycle of fake applications, designed to grow the reserve army of labor and let employers reduce head count. This has countless domino effects; greater unemployment means fewer career prospects, most of all within the rural. The “youth drain” from the rural to the metropole increases, while poverty grows in both the countryside and the cities. Social cohesion becomes even more damaged, and the birth rate further drops.
These are the cascading crises that the post-Covid generation has found itself thrust into; and though this collapse isn’t something new, from 2020 onward its developments have been more chaotic than ever. This is because technology’s progression has accelerated to an unprecedented degree, meaning our lives are being shaken up in ways that leave us blindsided if we aren’t paying constant attention.
Amid these upheavals, there are certain social forces that remain as pillars of the old social order, organized religion being one of them. I have said that the prevalence of America’s religious communities is the only reason I don’t expect America to go the way of south Korea, where falling birth rates and “youth drain” have put the country on a path to virtual extinction. And I know this is a bold claim, but its boldness is proportional to the severity of the destabilization that’s befallen Gen Z; the level of isolation and “terminal singlehood” that’s emerged for those who came of age post-Covid is the new normal.
The capitalist abuses of AI have reinforced this trend, and provided the first visible pieces of evidence that the next generation will be at least as lonely as Gen Z; there’s been a rise in “AI girlfriends” among young teens, which isn’t even the core source of the problem but rather a symptom of it. More than ever, the standard is to grow up isolated, socially stunted, and desperate for the bare minimum parts of the human experience. Everyone up to the millennials had been born early enough to escape being defined by this dark shift, which is why our society hasn’t yet reached a more extreme birth rate crisis; but time marches on relentlessly, and it’s going to become apparent that what’s happening with Gen Z is not a fluke. It’s a terminal illness of capitalism’s new era, one that’s gone overlooked within both mainstream discourse and our social movements.
The role of the hinterland’s traditional communities
This is where the counter-force to the crisis comes in; and this counter-force is largely located in the hinterland, away from the metropolitan centers. America’s religious communities are the only place where Gen Z still has the social structures that are conducive to starting families, and I say this as an atheist who was raised secular. What should Marxists do with this information?
We need to respond to it by bringing our working-class politics into this especially cohesive part of the masses; not to the effect that we act like religious conservatives are the “most advanced” among the people, but in a way that makes American Marxism account for the actual conditions of today’s America. Conditions which include a breakdown of biological reproduction in most parts of society, and need to be analyzed accordingly. What I am advocating is not to curate Marxism for a religious audience, which would be unnecessary and would miss the point; but rather to incorporate these realities of fertility crisis and “youth drain” into how we speak and operate. These developments are a wake-up call for the communist movement within the “collective west,” one that compels us to stop acting as if we were living in the world of a generation ago.
As for how to bring Marxism to a religious element that’s deeply anti-communist: firstly, our society in general is anti-communist, as ruling-class propaganda has pervaded all levels of education and media. Second, the average American does not hate “communism,” but hates a caricature of communism, one that’s been crafted to mirror their own banking regime. Marxists can and will make communism into a popular counter-force against this regime; and part of how we’ll do so is by applying the dialectical principle which Marx described in his Critique. This is the principle where counter-forces to capitalist modernity, like religion, get their power by speaking to a real alienation from what capital is doing to us; and where therefore, the only way to defeat these reactionary political forces is by ending the sick social order that they’re reacting to. Wrote Marx:
The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Therefore when I say that the hinterlands are where we can find how to defeat capital, and that religious structures are a buffer against this collapse, I do so with the awareness that historical conflicts can’t be resolved simply by supporting the good side within a given dispute. America maintains strong collectivist elements, ones that will stave off the kind of depopulation scenario that south Korea has experienced; but these elements exist as a reaction to history’s progression. As a means for pushing back against the destructive machinations of capitalist modernity, which seek to destroy community and the family. It is a good thing that these religious counter-forces exist, but any honest Marxist analysis will account for this context in which they exist, where the condition of class society has perpetuated a need for religion.
This bleakness and alienation within our social system is going to get worse the longer the capitalists maintain control over AI. And this will create greater reactions from these traditionalist societal forces, in a way that parallels the reactions from the liberal “creative class.” Yet if we understand dialectics, we’ll know how to guide the elements with revolutionary potential towards the path of class struggle.
We must show these Americans who seek an escape from this collapse, from this dystopia, that the proletarian cause is completely compatible with such a desire. If all that socialism truly means is the revealing of the proletariat’s nature as the material arbiter for civilization, then socialism can be embraced by all who share an interest in freeing ourselves from the present social order, which seeks to keep this reality hidden. When we go into the rural, the hinterland, and the other overlooked parts of the masses, what we’re doing is finding the others who lack ties to the ruling lie; the lie which says that the proletariat has no meaningful role, and that the collapse we’re experiencing is incurable.
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