What Happened Here

It's Very Simple Dialectics

I know there’s a lot of news and it’s very difficult to parse it all, but today I’m going to provide a rough and necessarily oversimplified interpretation of the present moment that relies on stylized facts.”

I think we can all agree the key difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 is the alignment of a reactionary fraction of Silicon Valley tech oligarchs with Trump, or rather, the transformation of a significant part of tech capital from an ostensibly progressive, liberal section of capital into a reactionary one.

Very simply put, here’s what I believe happened: In the process of accumulating enormous wealth, the tech-oligarchs created the conditions for their loss of social power and, when they realized this, they got a big dose of class consciousness and turned furiously reactionary. The process is analogous to what Marx thought was taking place in the industrial capitalist economy but transposed into the digital realm: to accumulate wealth, the bourgeoisie needed factories, and the factories needed workers, but the need for workers and their exploitation created a mass, militant proletariat. This is the famous “gravediggers” thesis immortally described in the Manifesto:

The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

Well, we all know that it wasn’t so inevitable after all—the capitalists had something to say about it—but the rise of an industrial proletariat did create the intense class struggles that defined the 19th and the first half of the 20th century.

In the present era, the era of Silicon Valley, the tech bourgeoisie created the platforms to accumulate wealth, but they did not do it below: they required skilled engineers and an administrative bureaucracy, as well as mass consumers, and the platforms connected hundreds of millions of users, just as the factory floors once brought together the working class. But, as in the previous century, the revolution did not come first in the industrialized world, it came where civil society was weak: The Arab Spring demonstrated the revolutionary potential hidden in this new technological advance. In the United States, the tech-bourg remained—for the most part—liberal and in close collaboration with the Democratic party, which was still helping them with their accumulative project. But the internet was a growing hive of leftist activism and it accelerated the spread of progressive ideas, especially among the people whose livelihoods had become precarious because of the same technological advances. It was partly atomizing but also creating its own “revolutionary combination.”

In 2016, you have Bernie Sanders forging a coalition between this new precarious but radicalizing section of the progressive petit bourgeoisie, the professional-managerial workers, and the remnants of an old, beaten-down industrial working class—and it almost worked! As I’ve mentioned before, just as in the case of industrial capitalism, the internet also facilitated the creation of reactionary mobs, an alienated, atomized declassed heap, “the refuse of all classes,” lumpen and viewing social advances and the progressive bourgeoisie as the reason for its downward mobility and loss of social status. In 2016, the tribune of the reactionary mob and the reactionary petit bourgeoisie won the election against an already fracturing liberal coalition. This started a furious counter-push, not necessarily coherent and united—in fact, one with significant and debilitating internal contradictions, among the progressive bloc and its activists—the great demonstrations of early Trumpism, #MeToo, “wokeness,” the new wave of labor activism, the shifting nature of gender relations, and, ultimately, the big one, the George Floyd protests were all different articulations of the progressive counter-thrust. After 2016 showed the reactionary potentials of the internet, the Democratic party started to get more interested in reigning and controlling the power of Silicon Valley, which the tech industrialists viewed as a terrible betrayal, but it was a concession to the shifting class composition of its coalition.

And as all this unfolded, mostly on the platforms the tech-bourg created, with the help of the sympathetic liberal bureaucracy that staffed the platforms and regulated them from the federal government, a section of the tech-lords, recoiled in horror and quickly went from being a friendly, idealistic liberal bourgeoise, paying lip service to progressive ideas, to a reactionary oligarchy, intent on reasserting control. Where they once had been cosmopolitan, suddenly they discovered the virtues of nationalism, where once they had built social media platforms that, now had empowered—or even created, their antagonists— social media was now weak and consumerist; they would return to heavy industry and military tech. Elon Musk looks longingly at the authoritarian techniques of Chinese tech capitalists who brutally work their engineers from morning to night. They allied with the online mob, their bastard offspring. Now they’d sack the politically unreliable managerial layer. And they’d would work furiously on the development of their Manhattan Project, their atomic bomb to drop on the professional-managerial class and replace them permanently with robots. They’d also pump up their bribe system for the lumpen elements: cryptocurrency. They’ve taken their model from the C-Suite to Capitol Hill and are trying to do the Twitter-to-X model in the federal government.

If you don’t want to take my word for it, why not take it directly from the horse’s mouth? Here’s what venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently told Ross Douthat:

Revolution. What I now understand it to be historically is a rebirth of the New Left. So it’s very analogous. I’ve spent a lot of time talking to David Horowitz about this because he lived through it 40 years earlier.

It turned out to be a coalition of economic radicals, and this was the rise of Bernie Sanders, but the kids turned on capitalism in a very fundamental way. They came out as some version of radical Marxist, and the fundamental valence went from “Capitalism is good and an enabler of the good society” to “Capitalism is evil and should be torn down.”

And then the other part was social revolution and the social revolution, of course, was the Great Awokening, and then those conjoined. And there was a point where the median, newly arrived Harvard kid in 2006 was a career obsessed striver and their conversation with you was: “When do I get promoted, and how much do I get paid, and when do I end up running the company?” And that was the thing.

By 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: “[expletive] it. We’re burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.”

…

urse. So I had this moment with a senior executive, who I won’t name, but he said to me with a sense of dawning horror, “I think some of these kids are joining the company not with the intent of doing things for us but destroying us.”

They’re professional activists in their own minds, first and foremost. And it just turns out the way to exercise professional activism right now, most effectively, is to go and destroy a company from the inside. All-hands meetings started to get very contentious. Where you’d get berated at an all-hands meeting as a C.E.O., where you’d have these extremely angry employees show up and they were just completely furious about how there’s way too many white men on the management team. “Why are we a for-profit corporation? Don’t you know all the downstream horrible effects that this technology is having? We need to spend unlimited money in order to make sure that we’re not emitting any carbon.”

So you just take the laundry list of fashionable kind of radical left-wing positions of that time, and they’re spending a huge amount of time at the company, basically organizing around that. And I will say, in fairness, I think in most of these companies this kind of person never got to be anywhere close to 100 percent of the work force.

But what happened is they became, like, 20 percent, maybe 30 percent. And then there’s this big middle of “go along, get along” people who generally also consider themselves Democrats. And they’re just trying to follow along with the trends.

So you take this activist core of 20 percent, you add 60 percent of “go along, get along” people, and all of a sudden the C.E.O. experiences, “Oh, my God, 80 percent of my employees have radicalized into a political agenda.” What people say from the outside is, “Well, you should just fire those people.”

But as a C.E.O., you can’t fire 80 percent of my team. And by the way, I have to go hire people to replace them. And the other people at the other companies are behaving the same way. And I can’t go hire kids out of college, because I’m just going to get more activists. And so that’s how these companies became captured.

Have you noticed how everything is now labeled “woke” and/or “Marxist.” This is not just propaganda, it’s also the recognition that the communication revolution that the tech-lords ushered in is hostile to their interests—there is ultimately a contradiction between democracy and their continued rule. As Marx wrote in the Eighteenth Brumaire:

This was not merely a figure of speech, fashion, or party tactics. The bourgeoisie had a true insight into the fact that all the weapons it had forged against feudalism turned their points against itself, that all the means of education it had produced rebelled against its own civilization, that all the gods it had created had fallen away from it. It understood that all the so-called bourgeois liberties and organs of progress attacked and menaced its class rule at its social foundation and its political summit simultaneously, and had therefore become "socialistic." In this menace and this attack it rightly discerned the secret of socialism, whose import and tendency it judges more correctly than so-called socialism knows how to judge itself…

He goes on to write, “Society is saved just as often as the circle of its rulers contracts, as a more exclusive interest is maintained against a wider one. Every demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most shallow democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an “attempt on society” and stigmatized as “socialism.” And so the reactionary tech-oligarchy and its mob turn on the democratic republic because it no longer suits. Watch how quickly the most formal, democratic, and liberal universalism becomes castigated as “woke” or “cultural Marxism.”

To save themselves, the tech-oligarchs must attack the very notion of universality as such—hence their abandonment of liberal universalism for racism, nationalism, masculine domination, etc., because they represent a conspiracy, a shrinking, exclusive interest against a larger one. They are attacking first and foremost the State and the Bureaucracy, the civil servants: everything that Hegel identified in The Philosophy of Right with the universal, general interest of the whole society against the particularity of “bourgeois society,” the chaotic mass of self-interested businessmen. They want the State to appear just as particularistic as they are and destroy its legitimacy. Indeed, they have to attack the system of recognition—meritocratic honors rather than mere wealth and power—and of right—the rule of law and regular administration. They are the “rich rabble” par excellence that thinks “it can buy anything.”

Musk’s total idiocy is structural: it goes back to the very origin of the Greek term idiotes, a person who cannot understand the shared political life of the city. These people cannot understand that their wealth and power are not their sovereign creations but the shared product of the wider state and society that supports and sustains them. Cryptocurrency is the perfect embodiment of this structural misrecognition: its advocates say it represents wealth outside of the state and society, but its notional value is wholly determined by its price in fiat money, created and sustained by the state. (It also functions a lot like “race” and “IQ:” as a repository of social value that provides a haven from degradation, but I’ll address that another time.) Here’s the thing: They can only see corruption around them because they are wholly corrupt.

You might say, “But, John, let’s get real: there was no real revolution, this reaction is all just an overreaction.” Yes, but I think Marx is right when he says the bourgeoisie “judges more correctly than so-called socialism knows how to judge itself…” Technology was and is creating a huge social upheaval that potentially threatens them and they saw this. They understood more clearly than the protagonists themselves and so struck first. And perhaps too early. I don’t think the technological advances—the forces of production—are quite to the point that makes the types of people—the relations of production—they need to help administer and accumulate their wealth simply superfluous. They are going to engender a counterattack of some sort.

Two things are missing from this picture: the foreign policy situation, which shows how China and its rapid advances weigh on the tech-oligarchs' minds, and the very real issue of how Trump’s program can continue to win mass consent, but I will have to address that later.

For now, a la Jerry Springer, let me leave you with my “Final Thought.” I know everyone has their pet “type of person” or identity category they want to blame for all of this: the wokesters, the trans people, the liberals, etc., etc.. but my plea to you is this: try to view things objectively as much as possible. Trump recently said, “We all have certain hatreds.” His political future depends on it. But where do these things come from and why? Try to think in terms of relations, not static categories. For the sake of comprehension, we have to use fixed notions, but in reality, no one occupies one simple role in their life. People have multiple roles and interests in society and their opinions and politics will reflect the needs of and the contradictions between those roles. And things change: people can go from being reactionary to progressive to revolutionary, sometimes all in a single day! Look at how Silicon Valley is changing. Why do the vibes shift? Because capital moves. But so can your mind. You have nothing to lose but your chains. :)