Big Tech's Class War Politics

Why Silicon Valley Bolted Right

In the post-election blame game, progressives have been a favorite target of the center who want to pin the Democratic debacle on left-wing overreach. Now one of the stories pundits like Matt Yglesias and Noah Smith are telling is that the mean left-wingers alienated their old friends in Silicon Valley with their stream of criticisms directed at our tech overlords and forced them to go right-wing.

Henry Farrell

has a very good piece on his Substack about the limitations of the “spurned lover” theory of tech defection. Using the work of Mark Blyth, Farrell posits that there was a crisis that opened the terrain for a political and intellectual shift:

My hypothesis is that we are living in the immediate aftermaths of two intertwined crises. One was a crisis in the U.S. political order - the death of the decades-long neoliberalism that Friedman and others helped usher in. The other was an intellectual crisis in Silicon Valley - the death of what Kevin Munger calls “the Palo Alto Consensus.” As long as neoliberalism shaped the U.S. Democratic party’s understanding of the world, and the Palo Alto Consensus shaped Silicon Valley’s worldview, soi-disant progressivism and Silicon Valley could get on well. When both cratered at more or less the same time, different ideas came into play, and different coalitions began to emerge among both Washington DC Democrats and Silicon Valley. These coalitions don’t have nearly as much in common as the previous coalitions did.

What struck me is that what Blyth is describing sounds identical to what Gramsci calls a “crisis of authority” or “crisis of hegemony:”

Mark’s answer is that you cannot understand such ‘great transformations’ without understanding how ideas shape collective interests. Roughly speaking (I’m simplifying a lot), when institutional frameworks are stable, they provide people with a coherent understanding of what their interests are, who are their allies and who are their adversaries. But at some point, perhaps for exogenous reasons, the institutional order runs into a crisis, where all that seemed to be fixed and eternal suddenly becomes unstable. At that point, people’s interests too become malleable - they don’t know how to pursue these interests in a world where everything is up for grabs. Old coalitions can collapse and new ones emerge.

It is at this point that ideas play an important role. If you - an intellectual entrepreneur - have been waiting in the wings with a body of potentially applicable ideas, this is your moment! You leap forward, presenting your diagnosis both of what went wrong in the old order, and what can make things right going forward. And if your ideas take hold, they disclose new possibilities for political action, by giving various important actors a sense of where their interests lie. New coalitions can spring into being, as these actors identify shared interests on the basis of new ideas, while old coalitions suddenly look ridiculous and outdated. Such ideas are self-fulfilling prophecies, which do not just shape the future but our understanding of the past. A new institutional order may emerge, cemented by these new ideas.

I think we are in a crisis of hegemony moment: neoliberalism is dying, but its replacement is yet to be born. And, as in pre and post-hegemonic times, the field of politics is fragmented and incoherent, there’s no hegemonic class or portion of a class that’s able to lead, so everything reverts to “the economic-corporate phase,” when different social interests seek their own short-term benefits rather than coalescing behind a vision of social development. The capitalist class as a whole is having trouble advancing or even understanding its interests: it seems hopelessly fractured. This is how Alex Browne understands the situation in his piece “Class Cleavages” for Phenomenal World:

The phenomenon at play among finance’s support for Trump, then, is best understood not as a wholesale shift toward the Republican Party within the financial sector. Instead, it is symptomatic of the deep disorganization of the American capitalist class. The phenomenon within the hedge fund and private equity sectors is, above all, a lack of classwide organization. Without a national business organization to coordinate action among the business lobby—itself increasingly composed of spectacularly rich individuals with few stakeholders in their personal enterprises—individual capitalists are left largely to assess their interests alone. And without the perception among the ownership class of a credible threat to their way of life, there’s little need for such national organization to expand beyond its current sectoral and idiosyncratic short-term obsessions. American capitalists have thus not only lost the ability to discipline politicians, but also the ability to organize themselves.

The same can be said for Silicon Valley: It should be noted at this point that it was not all of Silicon Valley that defected to the right—tech was one of the sectors still mostly loyal to the Democrats—but a fraction, specifically of entrepreneurial capitalists, that backed Trump. I’d like to add a back-of-the-napkin class analysis to Farrell’s picture. This tech-right fraction views itself as a futurist avant-garde. Since Silicon Valley is already the avant-garde of capitalism, they see themselves as an avant-garde of an avant-garde. And I’d argue that since Silicon Valley is the sector that makes the fastest and most far-ranging developments in the forces of production—basically, machines and how we interact with them—it is sort of a stand-in “capital as such.” (In the Grundrisse, Marx describes the apogee of capitalism as the subsumption of labor under the totalizing power of machinery.)

I believe what this avant-garde is doing is attempting to usher in a post-managerial capitalism: it is first and foremost an attack on the ideology, employment structures, and political organizations of the professional-managerial class, those you might shoehorn into an orthodox framework as “the progressive petit bourgeoisie” or, when they lack property, “knowledge workers.” The tech-capitalist avant-garde are taking back control over the means of production and the systems of communication and knowledge dissemination. They don’t share their more pragmatic-minded tech colleagues’ worries that immigration restrictions will lower their ability to staff complex organizations, because they want a post-labor future or, at least, want labor not cossetted but more subordinated. They take their inspiration from openly authoritarian models of capitalist development, like Singapore and apartheid South Africa. One obvious model is turning Twitter into X: lay off the managerial layer, replace things with AI wherever you can, and ensure ownership domination of content. DOGE’s imagined attack on the civil service and bureaucracy in government is a similar offensive on the “PMC.” This is clear-eyed class war on the part of the capitalists. There were signs of radicalization in the steadily proletarianized section of the “cognitive elite:” increased pace of white-collar workplace unionization, a growing interest among college-educated young people in socialism and the labor movement, “wokeness” causing workplace problems, the multi-racial uprising during the George Floyd protests, the Bernie Sanders movement, etc. In this class war, the Silicon Valley capitalist class has forged an alliance with the reactionary mob also facing the prospect of (relative) pauperization under current conditions: lumpen elements unable or unwilling to form any class consciousness and who instead turn to crypto schemes and ideologies like racism, nostalgia for unalloyed male chauvinism, and religious obscurantism. On an ideological level, the reactionary tech avant-garde shares these anti-solidaristic visions of social domination. (Notice how this mob shrieks with delight when it sees glimpses AI destroying both the employment and standards of taste of the educated middle class.) The tech capitalists also have a natural set of allies in the family-owned capitalist class that has always struggled against both organized labor and the onus of federal regulations.

My original read on this equation was that did not have the makings of a hegemonic bloc: it was just another short-termist way to overcome the problems of the current crisis. This is why I thought fascism was a decent analogy: Gramsci saw fascism not as a hegemonic or counter-hegemonic politics, but as the Caesarist use of force and charisma to try to break the deadlock. I felt supported in this read by the right-wing reliance on counter-majoritarian institutions. But if this coalition manages to grow its majority support, and to win the working and middle classes over to its hegemonic vision, then this interpretation must change. I still think that these pretensions to a sweeping ideology are sort of cheap and scammy and the immediate interest of capital is to do another big shakedown under Trump: I don’t rate too highly their ability to accomplish a big structural realignment. I think the vision of capitalism that this class has is so brutal and cruel that they can’t develop a long-lasting social settlement, but who knows what they will do if they can’t win consent?