The new feudalism is going to be defeated the same way the old feudalism did: a new productive paradigm makes the old one outmoded, prompting revolutionary upheavals. And socialism, the next dominant mode, will be something that’s actually capable of resolving feudalism’s contradictions. After capitalism overthrew feudalism, inevitably it ended up re-producing feudalism’s structures; capitalism reached its monopoly stage, and the monopolies created a lord-and-serf relationship with the workers. Now, after neoliberalism and the 2008 collapse have sped up the re-feudalization process, the lords of the 21st century have gained new tools for enforcing their rule. They’ve created tech monopolies, which have made it so that our personal data, information exposure, job security, employment prospects, and collective economic stability are ever-more connected to AI. AI that’s in the hands of the most sinister corporate entities on the planet, like Meta and BlackRock.
Techno-feudalism’s promise is that it will bring humanity to the next stage of evolution by giving us new tools; but as long as the lords control these tools, these tools will be used to reinforce all of our society’s inequalities. To divert attention away from these obvious contradictions in their system, the tech lords have employed a series of psyops; the main one they’re now using is “Silicon Valley MAGA,” where Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have sold their oligarchic agenda as something anti-establishment. But this psyop will fail, because it isn’t supported by tangible reality. Right-wing big tech’s narrative about it fighting the deep state is an attempt to imitate the aesthetics of revolutionary politics, while it worsens the system’s evils. To find a technological project that’s genuinely revolutionary, we can look to China.
In the PRC, the introduction of this century’s technologies has not brought about a dystopia, despite what the anti-Chinese “social credit” narrative says. In China, social media has become a means for proliferating content that actually enriches people’s minds; there’s a striking contrast between Chinese and U.S. social platforms, in that the former haven’t become dominated by content which harms people’s mental health. Instead, they promote content that’s designed to uplift the spirit; to help motivate someone towards living their life more fully, and embrace community, relationships, and creativity. The vast majority of Chinese internet users feel like social media has had a positive impact on their lives; which is what happens when this tool isn’t designed for profit, but rather for advancing the collective wellbeing.
Communism has provided China with the foundations needed for outcompeting the imperial hegemon. And because of this deep societal strength, all other aspects of China’s technological innovations have an inherent advantage. When China has implemented AI in education, this AI is strengthening a school system that’s already spectacularly effective. When Chinese companies like DeepSeek create the globe’s winning AI products, this amplifies the PRC’s already unprecedented economic growth.
A growing number of the USA’s people have been noticing the successes of China’s societal model; and they’re becoming pro-China ironically in reaction to their government’s attempts at suppressing such views. In the last month, as the imperial state has tried to ban TikTok, many Americans have migrated towards another Chinese app: RedNote, or Xiaohongshu. As Carlos Garrido observed in January about the blowback from Washington’s war on TikTok:
Even with all the censorship on the American version of the app, this was not enough. Their control was tubular, and leakages to their censorship edifice became evident. Videos showing the truth about key geopolitical events, especially the barbarity of the Zionist entity’s genocidal assault on Gaza, would continue to go viral, reaching millions of Americans. Such a disavowal of the ‘official narratives’ of the U.S. empire could not go unpunished. Banning the app completely was the only ‘solution’ the elite could come up with. These are the actions of a desperate empire in the midst of a deep crisis of legitimacy. As could have been expected, the intent to censor the truth by banning TikTok turned into its opposite, into the great migration onto the Little Red Book app by millions of American ‘refugees.’ Videos are now going viral of American creators saying quite explicitly that they will rather give their data to Xi Jinping than the U.S. government. The propaganda, clearly, is no longer working on a population struggling with paying bills and drowning in debt.
Our ruling class is accelerating its crackdown against these foreign technologies, working to complete the TikTok ban as soon as possible while illegalizing RedNote and DeepSeek. The goal is to isolate American society from information that threatens capitalism’s existence, whether this information is about the genocide or about socialism’s achievements. And the techno-feudalists are capable of implementing such a repressive plan, but this can’t save their system.
U.S. communists and our allies will continue using the new technologies to help shift mass consciousness. We’ll carry out social media campaigns to further expose the genocide, cultivate more American-Chinese solidarity, and bring the workers into labor organizing. Should our enemies succeed in shuttering our platforms and criminalizing our orgs, we’ll have to reckon with that obstacle; but even the most extreme repressive measures won’t reverse the breakdown of the capitalist productive mode.
Our ruling class is scrambling to mitigate a collapse, and the longer revolution gets delayed, the more this class will be able to damage our society. Capitalism has already made it inevitable that we’ll experience an ecological crisis, and see greater climatic disasters; the thing our class enemies will try to do amid these upheavals is wage a civil war against the country’s own people, wherein our communities experience ever-more violent crime and political terrorism. It’s how they aim to keep us divided and unorganized while they continue the corporate looting of our communities. There will be a growing amount of blackouts during these times, brought about by infrastructural collapse or even false flag sabotage attacks; the country’s people will be increasingly forced to survive through dire scenarios, resembling the cataclysms that our foreign policy has brought to so many other places.
Depending on how far this collapse goes, for many of us the 21st century’s technologies will be made inaccessible, as we’ll be navigating a scenario where large parts of the power grid have been destroyed. But these technologies will still exist; China is only going to keep building itself up, and innovating further. This American dark age also won’t last; not if we’ve gained the collective organizational power needed to win during the class war’s next stage. So many of U.S. imperialism’s victims have been able to triumph after getting thrown into truly apocalyptic situations. And they can often find ways of utilizing today’s technologies, even when the enemy has targeted electrical infrastructure. Palestine’s resistance forces have been fighting on the social media front, and winning, since the campaign to demolish Gaza began.
Ours is a global age of civil wars, and we’ve entered into this age largely due to the rise of techno-policing. The same new repressive technologies that are used against the Palestinians have been exported around the world. This means that as new revolutionary upheavals appear, more of the globe’s masses will need to adopt tactics like the ones the Palestinians have embraced. In the United States, the counterinsurgency will have the greatest strategic advantage in the cities, where police are best positioned to crack down and the techno-lords have the most control. In the rural areas, though, the revolutionary forces will be able to navigate more freely, and to provide crucial aid towards the struggles of those trapped inside the metropoles. Communists will be there to aid both the urban and rural masses in this confrontation with their oppressors.
Through the power of the collective, and through utilizating our new tools for revolt, we will isolate and defeat our capitalist dictatorship. And we’ll be able to do so while pointing towards the image of China, which shows what waits for us when we’ve won.
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