The Trump wing has decided what path it wants: the unrestrained acceleration of AI, and thereby the lumpenization of what remains of the working class. When this happens, the faction of the ruling class that seeks to restrict AI won’t be able to undo it. Not in a substantial way that rescues the masses from their living standards collapse.
This is something critical for the working-class movement to recognize: neither wing of bourgeois politics is able or willing to turn back the timeline of labor outsourcing. The further automation goes, the more parts of the economy will be made permanently inaccessible to the workers, or rather the former workers. Capital’s incentive to keep these new tools is too great; which is why as these tools bring the system closer to breakdown, we’re going to see our rulers scramble.
With the newly unemployed masses, what they’ll do is offer up welfare benefits in meager forms, designed to prevent these cast-aside individuals from finding prosperity or purpose. This is what lumpenization means: putting people into conditions of forced idleness without the resources to get out, leading them to go down paths of self-destruction. We’ve seen this with the rise of men who are “not in education, employment, or training;” NEETs are prime recruitment targets for Nazism, mass shooter fandoms, and other trends that are associated with unemployed youths. The U.S. military has recently been appealing to this demographic through its messages about giving people a purpose, and ICE has been very successful in recruiting “excess” men.
In all these cases, the driving logic of the appeal is that society can’t be repaired, at least not through anything you do while fighting for these causes. The end goal is to fight, and get individual release. This is distinct from what’s being promised by the social-democrats, who say they can fight against AI-created job loss through reforming capitalism; whereas these “progressives” are rallying petty-bourgeois liberals against AI through idealist proposals of change from within, the new fascist movement tells lumpenized Americans that accelerationism will only keep destroying their lives, so they’ll have to become ultraviolent or else continue languishing.
In the fight against these different ruling-class lies, the workers movement’s task is to show what the alternative path looks like. This path is a civilizational struggle; not the racial nationalist LARP of the Hitlerites, but a real shared fight between all who will join in the right side of the class war. We are here to bring the working masses into the effort at reconciling AI with our collective needs, like Lewis Henry Morgan said we’d need to do with all other aspects of modern civilization:
Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the state to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners. The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations.
A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past. The time which has passed away since civilization began is but a fragment of the past duration of man’s existence; and but a fragment of the ages yet to come. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes.
There is a way to stop this bewilderment from creating apathy, and bring the unorganized into the struggle against the usurers: create structures that let the people actually build on their gains in this fight as they put more time into it. The core reason why America’s leftist orgs have stagnated is because they don’t offer anything beyond simply building a movement, and this trap of “movementism” is very easy to fall into. This is because it’s what our cybernetic system has conditioned us to view politics as: a mechanistic process, where you can succeed by playing according to a predetermined script.
As this cybernetic order grows its self-reinforcing abilities, and excludes ever-more people from participating in it, the reaction from these left-behinds is increasingly to opt out of the old modes of politics. For those who aspire to be revolutionaries, this is something critical to understand: now that masses are no longer interested in the tired culture war battles, and have become overwhelmingly alienated from the duopoly parties, the only way to appeal to them is by truly showing your credentials as someone outside the system. Copying grievance politics will only repel them, just like copying wokeism will. You’ll also find yourself isolated if you simply retread the classic revolutionary aesthetics and phrases.
The only way to be seen as a credible leader by people who’ve been untethered from the system is through forging your own path. We already have a good idea of what this looks like: giving unorganized workers the ability to fight for their rights in the workplace, building community aid projects, forming coalitions in your community to fight against evils like Flock cameras and Epsteinite abusers. Because our rulers have chosen full-throttle AI acceleration, what we now also know is that all of these processes will accelerate. The proletarianization and lumpenization of society’s more privileged elements will grow at a faster rate than many have thought.
The anti-AI wing of our rulers will tell us this means we must rally against historical progress itself; we must combat this by presenting the Hegelian view of how history works. This is the view that all contradictions which arise are part of a larger story, a story where what’s already come into being will become absorbed by what follows.
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