Jacob Dreyer in The Ideas Letter:
“Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs… These are products of human industry; natural material––transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified.” Karl Marx, Grundrisse
Washington, DC, February 2025—Here is the heart of empire, convulsing. Cop cars stopped at every intersection, helicopters swept through the night. The city reminded me of nothing so much as Beijing in 2012, when Bo Xilai had been thrown in jail on the eve of Xi Jinping’s arrival to power. The city was locked up tightly, it felt that the displays of armed police were intended as a warning to any would-be coup plotters. Today, the police forces on the streets of DC telegraph fear on the part of our new president and his friends that assassins are lurking. A revolution is underway in America, and it’s one that the Chinese have been waiting for, hidden under vague terms like “a change not seen in one hundred years.” We are all focused on political changes, but what if those changes are merely reflections of technological change, attempts on the part of the political structure to catch up with a society that is different than the one that our institutions were designed for? Technology became culture became politics, and the politics, only a symptom or after-effect, is what I saw on the streets of the capital.
The Industrial Party, a generic ideological structure of techno-nationalism which can be adjusted for the nation it transpires in, has seized control of America; it’s been in charge of China for quite some time. We’re in the throes of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which will bulldoze political and cultural structures at home as well as abroad. The new politics are certainly not conservative, nor are they liberal. They see technology, rather than political structures, as the apparatus which will bring us into the future. Factory labor will be automated; much white collar labor will be replaced by AI; and perhaps capital will finally throw off the chains of labor. Very little of the society we’re used to will be conserved, and certainly not the political structures called liberal democracy. We might see Trumpism as a political revolution; but in many ways, it is just the expression in political form of a social change that predates it.
More here.
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