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WHAT HAPPENED HERE  
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John Ganz
February 4, 2025
Unpopular Front
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_ 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. _

, Silicon Valley

 

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 _i_n 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
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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 Capital 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
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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. :)

* Silicon Valley
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* Big Tech
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* Oligarchy
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* reaction
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* class consciousness
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* Karl Marx
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