Above: demonstration by Silicon Valley residents in support of the U.S. war proxy against Russia.
The terror that professional-managerial class creatives are feeling right now is the terror of being replaced. This is something they’ve made clear through their media platforms, where they’ve been stirring up anti-tech sentiments with a special hostility towards AI art. These critiques aren’t about the ecological destruction that corporations are bringing about through their data centers, nor about how AI is being used to surveil the masses and commit war crimes. The anti-AI grievances of the PMC relate specifically to the notion that AI-assisted creativity is inherently unethical, and must be stamped out so we can preserve the old order.
This is a fight for survival by a class that’s being endangered by progress, not just because AI threatens to take their jobs but because it’s brought capitalism closer to extinction. And the way this class will respond to the threat is by embracing liberal fascist neocon politics, more so than they already have.
The system can take certain measures to stop AI from destroying it. This March, when the Supreme Court ruled against AI artwork being copyrighted, it eased some of these existential fears for the moment. The inescapable reality, though, is that these latest technological leaps have brought communism nearer than ever. They’ve enabled China to accelerate its development and further outpace U.S. imperialism; they’ve heightened capital’s contradictions in a way that the ruling class can never reverse; they’ve introduced new productive tools, which always make a ruling class less secure in its power.
The gap between our present reality of artificial scarcity, and the potential reality of universal prosperity under communism, has been expanded by these new tools. Both the monopoly financiers, and the cosmopolitan labor aristocrats whose fortunes are tied in with the financiers, have less of an objective reason to exist than ever. As the banking regime ramps up its wars, we will see this aristocratic labor strata rally behind Washington’s offensive, reacting towards history’s forward march by seeking to destroy as much as possible.
It will be a maniacal version of the reaction from Europe’s aristocrats towards the rise of the bourgeoisie, described in the Manifesto of the Communist Party:
The aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new masters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe. In this way arose feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history. The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.
This is how an elevated class lashes out when its role has been rendered redundant: by appealing to fears of progress, attempting to turn back history through tricks that ironically often involve a “socialist” aesthetic. In the case of the creative class, the reaction has potential to do catastrophic worldwide damage, because these creatives are a critical part of the social base the empire needs for its next assaults.
The way the war machine will rally these cosmopolitans is by bringing them to the ideology of “permanent revolution,” which supports unlimited intervention to enforce the will of the metropolitan intellectual class.
This is how Stalin explained the urban-centric worldview of Trotsky, whose ideas are essential to understanding the politics of today’s metropole PMC:
Trotskyism is the theory of the “permanent (uninterrupted) revolution.” But what is Trotskyism’s conception of the “permanent revolution”? It is the revolution without consideration of the small peasantry as a revolutionary force. Comrade Trotsky’s permanent revolution is, as Lenin says, the “neglect” of the peasant movement, a “game for the seizure of power.” Where does the danger of this lie? In that such a revolution, if one took the trouble to realise it, would end with a complete breakdown, as it would deprive the Russian proletariat of its ally, the small peasantry. This explains the fight which Leninism has been carrying on against Trotskyism since the year 1905. How does Comrade Trotsky estimate Leninism from the point of view of this fight? He regards it as a theory which contains in itself “antirevolutionary” features. (Trotsky “1905,” Russian edition p. 285). On what is this angry remark against Leninism based? On the fact that Leninism always has defended and still does defend the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.
This is the view of the liberals, and the Marxists with liberal prejudices, who believe the MAGA base is incurably reactionary. The growing anti-NATO and anti-Zionist sentiment among MAGA isn’t viewed by the PMC left as evidence of revolutionary potential, because the PMC left sees supporting imperialism as the revolutionary position. From its perspective, anti-imperialism is “antirevolutionary.” It’s out of this mentality that comes the chauvinist perceptions of the global working class, in addition to the American working class; according to the left pro-imperialist worldview, every country that defies the United States is “fascist,” and by extension its working masses are fascist. (Since the working masses are the ones who as a rule support breaking from global finance.) Pro-imperialists use the “I hate the government not the people” qualifier, but this is a cover for their ideology’s true view of the world’s proletariat.
This politics has a particular class base, found within the workers who’ve been urbanized to the effect that they see themselves as separate from the rural workers. The enemies of the proletarian cause have been able to appeal towards this strata, cultivating a liberal reactionary movement that’s now on the rise. To lead the American masses to victory, we must separate this movement from the authentic working-class struggle, not letting the neocon PMC ideology co-opt Marxism. History proves we can successfully break the grip of imperial chauvinist ideologies after they’ve taken hold within the workers movement; key to this is identifying where the contradictions in them exist, and using these contradictions to draw the working class towards the revolutionary position.
Our task in its essence is fairly simple. As Lenin explained: “The only Marxist line in the world labour movement is to explain to the masses the inevitability and necessity of breaking with opportunism, to educate them for revolution by waging a relentless struggle against opportunism, to utilise the experience of the war to expose, not conceal, the utter vileness of national-liberal labour politics.” Amid the first world war, the anti-imperialist side in the socialist movement won the Russian masses, and it did so by proving the revolutionary party to be the most effective at getting the masses what they needed.
The problem reactionaries always face is that they set themselves up against the working class. The creative class neocon movement will face this as well, even as it tries to appropriate working-class rhetoric and aesthetics. Within the Democratic Party, there is an effort right now to appeal towards disillusioned MAGA voters and independents by giving up identity politics, and start centering economic populism. But the different wings of liberal reactionary politics could never unite behind making friends with the modern peasantry and proletariat. The Democrats who aim to gain rural voters aren’t even sincere in wanting to rescue rural America, because liberal globalism views the countryside’s people as expendable.
This hostility towards those outside the metropole bubble comes through in the attitudes of the creative class neocons, and of the intelligentsia members who see the rural masses as backwards enemies. The danger from these elements is that they’re the ones who tend to claim the “Marxist” label, thereby giving Marxism a very bad name among the modern proletariat and peasantry. The authentic Marxists must show the masses how fundamentally opposed we are to what these charlatans represent, allying with America’s working people to resist the banker/PMC alliance.
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