From Futurism to Techno-Fascism

Technology in Place of Poetry: From Futurism to Techno-Fascism

From Marinetti's 1909 manifesto to Andreessen's 2023 manifesto — who is scripting the future, for whom — and why is labor absent from that future?

On 20 February 1909, a manifesto appeared on the front page of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro. It had eleven points. The fourth declared that "a roaring motor car" was more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace. The ninth ran: "We will glorify war—the world's only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman." Its author, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, was ten years later at the founding meeting of Mussolini's first fascist organization in Milan. One hundred and fourteen years later, on 16 October 2023, Marc Andreessen, founder of one of the world's largest venture-capital firms, published a text titled the "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" and listed Marinetti among the "patron saints of techno-optimism."

Dear Young Comrades,

This essay was not written to spell out the link between an art movement and an investment philosophy. That link exists and is documented; but the real issue is more basic. The real issue is this question: for whom is the future being scripted? Who holds the authority to imagine a society's future; in that imagining, who is subject and who is décor; and does that imagining sustain today's property relations, or interrogate them?

Futurism is a century-long laboratory for this question. For the futurist is, by definition, the person who says "the future will be like this"; and the sentence "will be like this" always conceals the sentence "ought to be like this." In this essay we will try to bring that hidden sentence into the open across three periods: the artists' futurism of 1909, the strategists' futurology of the 1960s–90s, and the "founders'" futurism stretching from the 2010s to today. In all three we will see the same operation: the features of a particular stage of capitalism presented as the law of history and the necessity of the future. We call this, briefly, the beautification of capitalism; but to see beautification as beautification, one must first concede how cleverly it is done.

The essay is long; it has nine sections. We will take up the concept first, then the three periods, then the class structure of the future, the concept of techno-fascism, Turkey's future-scripts, the counter-tradition, and concrete proposals.

First, the concept: the future is a property

In the afterword to the second German edition of Capital (1873), answering those who accused him of "writing recipes for the cook-shops of the future," Marx says something: his job is not to write recipes, but to analyze the laws of motion of existing society. Contrary to what is often assumed, this sentence is not indifference to the future. On the contrary, it is a methodological stance on how the future is to be scripted: the future is derived from the contradictions of the present; it does not arrive from outside the present, as a revelation or a vision.

The attitude that stands at the opposite pole is what Ernst Bloch, in The Principle of Hope (1954–59), calls abstract utopia: a future drawn as the direct picture of a desire, with no bond to the tendencies of existing society. For Bloch this is utopia's cheap form; concrete utopia is finding and drawing out what in present society has not yet been realized but is possible to realize — the "not-yet."

With these two concepts we have a criterion. When we look at a future-script, the question is not whether it is bright or dark; it is which tendency of the present it takes and turns into law, and which contradiction of the present it renders invisible. Read by this criterion, all three waves of futurism show a structure surprisingly similar to one another.

And this: under capitalism, the future is a commodity. A technology company's stock-market value is not the price of today's profit, but of the expectation of future profit. A "vision" presentation is a tool for raising investment. So in this order, a future-script is not an ideological ornament; it is directly an input of capital accumulation. That is why the question of who holds the authority to script the future is a question of property.

First wave: Marinetti, speed, and war (1909–1944)

What did the manifesto say?

What is unsettling about reading the Futurist Manifesto today is not that it is badly written; it is that it is well written. In 1909 Marinetti turned the experience Europe was living — the second industrial revolution, electricity, the automobile, the airplane, urban crowds — into an aesthetic program for the first time. He wanted museums, libraries, academies torn down; he rebelled against what he called "past-ism" (passatismo), Italy's life as a tourist ruin in the shadow of the Renaissance. To see that this rebellion was a product of Italy's late and uneven capitalist development — the gulf between the industrial cities of the North and the agrarian backwardness of the South — it is enough to look at Gramsci.

But the real program inside the manifesto can be summed up in three words: speed, machine, war. And one must see the social content of this triad.

Speed, in 1909, was not an abstract aesthetic value. It was the circulation speed of capital: the speed of goods from factory to market, of money from one investment to another, of the worker from village to city. In the Grundrisse Marx speaks of capital's tendency to "annihilate space with time"; Marinetti found this tendency beautiful. The beauty of speed is the beauty of accelerating accumulation.

The machine appears in the manifesto not as a means of production but as an object of desire. The roaring motor car is an object the worker produces and cannot buy; in Marinetti's eyes it is a sculpture. The labor that produces the machine, the labor that runs the machine, the body crushed beneath the machine — these are absent from the manifesto. The machine appears as if it had been born of itself. This is the aesthetic form of commodity fetishism: a relation appears as a thing.

War is "the world's only hygiene." To read this phrase as a poet's exaggeration is to forget that in 1911 Marinetti went to the Italian colonial war in Libya as a correspondent and wrote poems praising the war; that in 1915 he organized street demonstrations for Italy's entry into the First World War; and that in 1935 he celebrated the invasion of Ethiopia with a manifesto. The hygiene metaphor is no accident: war cleanses society's "weak" elements. This is social Darwinism translated into art.

From artist to fascist: a chronology

Date	Event
20 February 1909	Futurist Manifesto, Le Figaro
1911–12	Libyan war; Marinetti at the front, texts praising the war
1914–15	Pro-war demonstrations; Marinetti and Mussolini at the same rallies
1918	Futurist Political Party founded
23 March 1919	Milan, Piazza San Sepolcro: founding meeting of the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento; Marinetti among the founders
1920	Break with Mussolini over his accommodation with the monarchy and the Church
1924	Reconciliation in the pamphlet Futurism and Fascism
1929	Member of the Italian Academy founded by Mussolini
1935	Manifesto celebrating the Ethiopian invasion; Walter Benjamin will quote this text
1944	Death in Bellagio, on the territory of the Salò Republic

The lesson to draw from this chronology is not that "the artist later became a fascist." The lesson is this: the content of the 1909 manifesto already contained the political form of 1919. The sanctification of speed, the view of war as hygiene, "scorn for woman," the love of crowds as an aesthetic landscape and contempt for them as a political subject — these were the artistic precursor of fascism. Fascism did not corrupt Marinetti; Marinetti wrote fascism's language ten years earlier.

Benjamin's diagnosis: the aestheticization of politics

In the epilogue to his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935–36), Walter Benjamin quotes at length from Marinetti's Ethiopian manifesto: war is beautiful because it establishes man's dominion over the machine; war is beautiful because it turns the fire of machine guns, the silence of armistices, smells and decay into a symphony. And Benjamin concludes: fascism is the aestheticization of politics. It gives the masses not their rights, but the chance to express themselves; the only way to set the masses in motion without touching property relations is to turn politics into a spectacle. And the logical end of that spectacle is war, because only war can mobilize every technical means while preserving property relations. Benjamin's formula: Fiat ars — pereat mundus. Let art be created, though the world perish. Communism's answer is the politicization of art.

Note this formula; in the sixth and seventh sections we will return to today's politics presented through the aesthetics of "vision," "mission," and "rocket launches" — in Silicon Valley and at Teknofest.

A caveat: Russian futurism

To surrender futurism entirely to fascism is also historically wrong. In the same years in Russia, the Russian futurism that began with Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, and Burliuk's manifesto "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste" (1912) passed to the side of the revolution after 1917; the journal LEF (1923), constructivism, Rodchenko's posters, Mayakovsky's ROSTA windows are products of this tradition. In an article titled "Is Marinetti a Revolutionary?" in L'Ordine Nuovo on 5 January 1921, Gramsci notes that the futurists had a clearer grasp than the socialists of the need to smash bourgeois culture, and that before the war Turin workers supported futurist shows — but in the same piece he also sees where futurism was headed politically.

This distinction is instructive: excitement about the machine alone does not determine a political direction. The same excitement becomes revolutionary when joined to the question of who runs the machine and who owns it, and fascist when severed from that question. Russian futurism asked that question; Italian futurism never did. Mayakovsky's suicide in 1930 and the liquidation of LEF are the subject of another essay; here we record only that futurism had more than one path. We will see by which path futurism came to Turkey in the seventh section; for now this much: it came not from Marinetti, but from Mayakovsky.

Second wave: the strategist's future (1960–1995)

After the Second World War, futurism left art and became a "discipline": futurology. The birthplace of this discipline was not a workshop but a military think tank.

RAND and Herman Kahn

The RAND Corporation was founded in 1948 as a research unit of the US Air Force. Thinking the future as "scenario," the Delphi technique, systems analysis — most of the tools taught today under the name "futures studies" were developed for nuclear-war planning. Herman Kahn's On Thermonuclear War (1960) is a text arguing that nuclear war is "thinkable" and "winnable"; in 1961 Kahn founded the Hudson Institute, and with The Year 2000 (1967) he came to be counted as a founder of civilian futurology.

This birth certificate must be remembered: modern futurology began by thinking the end of the world as a management problem. Kahn's method was to bracket the moral content of a catastrophe and convert it into tables of "acceptable losses." This method would later reappear under the name "longtermism."

Toffler: the "wave" as capitalism's law of nature

Alvin Toffler's Future Shock (1970) and The Third Wave (1980) carried futurology to a mass readership. Toffler's thesis is simple: human history consists of three waves — agriculture, industry, information. The third wave renders obsolete the industrial society's mass factory, trade union, standard job, and nation-state; in their place comes a flexible, decentralized society based on the "prosumer" (producer-consumer).

Look carefully and the ideological operation of this thesis becomes visible. Toffler replaces classes with the wave. The industrial worker is not a class but a remnant of the "second wave"; the trade union is not an organization but an "institution of the old wave." Class struggle is replaced by "conflict" between waves; and the wave is a natural phenomenon — like the sea. No one can form a union against a wave. In Toffler's books the concept of exploitation does not appear; what appears is "adaptation." Those who fail to adapt are left behind by history.

The political form of this thought became clear in the 1990s. In 1994 the Progress and Freedom Foundation published a declaration titled "Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age"; the signatories were Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler. The declaration argued that cyberspace was a "frontier without limits," that public regulation would close that frontier, and that property must be extended into the digital realm. Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich distributed Toffler's The Third Wave to members of Congress and wrote a foreword to the Tofflers' 1995 book Creating a New Civilization.

Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron's 1995 essay "The Californian Ideology" named this compound: the discourse of individual freedom taken from 1960s counterculture, fused through technology with the neoliberal market faith of the 1980s. Hippie and yuppie shook hands at the computer. The future this ideology saw was a network in which everyone was free; what it did not see was whose cables, whose servers, and whose workers carried that network.

Fukuyama: the closure of the future

The last word of the second wave was spoken by Francis Fukuyama: "The End of History?" (1989) and The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Fukuyama's thesis was that liberal democracy and the market economy were the final point of humanity's ideological evolution. This is not a future-script; it is the closure of the future: thereafter there would be only technical improvements; fundamental principles would not change.

Recall that the "last man" in the book's subtitle is taken from Nietzsche; in our Nietzsche essay we saw that this figure coded the worker's demand for eight hours and insurance as a symptom of degeneration. The danger Fukuyama saw at the end of history was precisely this: a satisfied humanity that no longer struggles. The answer to this anxiety, in the 2010s, would be a new futurism that returned to speed and hierarchy in order to break "stagnation."

The sentence Fredric Jameson wrote in 2003, later popularized by Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism (2009), summarizes this period: "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism." Futurology changed everything in the future — work, family, city, body — but it did not change property. Property became the fixed point of the future.

Third wave: the "founder's" future (2010–2026)

Now we come to today. And we will see that today's futurism, unlike the first two, says its own name openly.

The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

On 16 October 2023, Marc Andreessen, founder of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), published the "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" on the company's site. The text takes the form of a proclamation in short sentences and begins "We were told a lie": that technology destroys jobs, lowers wages, increases inequality; whereas technology is humanity's "only source of growth." According to the manifesto, "the market," "together with technology," is "the twin engine of growth"; "anything that isn't growing is dying"; "artificial intelligence is a universal problem-solver for our civilization's development"; and "there is no material problem that more technology cannot solve."

The text has a list of "enemies," and the list is instructive. Enemy: "existential risk," "sustainability," "ESG," "Sustainable Development Goals," "social responsibility," "stakeholder capitalism," "the precautionary principle," "trust and safety," "tech ethics," "risk management," "degrowth," "limits to growth." That is, the enemy is every concept aimed at scrutinizing technology's consequences. The manifesto says "we are not victims, we are conquerors"; "we are the apex predator; the lightning works for us."

And at the end of the text there is a list of "patron saints." Alongside Hayek and Friedman stand Nietzsche, the English philosopher Nick Land, and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Andreessen quotes the seventh point of Marinetti's 1909 manifesto, changing a single word. Marinetti had written: "There is no beauty except in struggle. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man." Andreessen struck out "poetry" and put "technology" in its place.

This one-word change alone carries the thesis of our essay. In 1909 poetry, in 2023 technology; but the rest of the sentence — struggle, aggression, forcing to kneel — is the same. And the source of the quotation is the man who declared war "the world's only hygiene" and ten years later helped found the fascist party. Andreessen may not know this; if he does not, that shows why even those who do not know still need this language. If he does, there is nothing left to say.

Accelerationism: e/acc

The movement behind the manifesto is called effective accelerationism (effective accelerationism, abbreviated e/acc). Begun by the physicist Guillaume Verdon, who appeared on social media in 2022 under the pseudonym "Beff Jezos" and whose identity Forbes revealed in December 2023, this current speaks in a "thermodynamic" idiom: the direction of the universe is the increase of entropy, the flow of energy into more complex structures; technological capitalism is the highest form of that flow; everything that slows it — regulation, ethics, "decelerators" (decels) — is against the direction of the universe.

This is the purest form of the beautification of capitalism we have seen so far. Toffler had made capitalism a "wave"; e/acc makes it the second law of thermodynamics. Capital's necessity of growth is no longer a social relation but a requirement of physics. In our Nietzsche essay we said that the "will to power" was the transposition of capital's necessity of accumulation into ontology; e/acc performs the same operation, this time in the language of physics. The method is the same: to present the historical as natural, the social as cosmic.

Longtermism and "astronomical waste"

The other branch of the third wave looks at first glance like the opposite of accelerationism: longtermism, which calls for caution against the "existential risk" coming from artificial intelligence. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom's 2003 essay "Astronomical Waste" is this current's founding text. Bostrom calculates as follows: if humanity colonizes the galaxy and spreads as digital minds, numbers on the order of ten to the thirty-eight human lives become possible in the future; anything that delays reaching that future by a century is the "waste" of that many lives. William MacAskill's What We Owe the Future (2022) popularized this thought.

In an article published in First Monday in 2024, Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres showed that these currents — transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism — form a bundle whose common roots reach back to the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century; they named the bundle "TESCREAL."

To see the class content of longtermism, a simple operation is enough. If there are ten-to-the-thirty-eight digital lives in the future, today's eight billion humans are a rounding error. The moral weight of a child dying of hunger today is negligible beside the weight of trillions of digital minds that do not yet exist. This is Herman Kahn's table of "acceptable losses" rewritten at cosmic scale. And the practical consequence is this: every resource that would be spent to reduce today's exploitation must be redirected to the "future" — that is, to AI laboratories, space companies, and the institutions that manage them. Longtermism is a veto, in the name of the future, against redistribution today.

Accelerationism and longtermism are presented to the public as rivals: one says "accelerate," the other "take care." But both share the same premise: the future will be determined by a small minority that holds technology; the only debate is how fast that minority should go. The people, the worker, elected institutions have no share in this decision; at most they appear as "decelerators" or "risk."

The abandonment of democracy

This futurism's political program has also been written openly. In a 2009 piece titled "The Education of a Libertarian" for the Cato Institute's Cato Unbound, Peter Thiel writes: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." In the same essay he writes that since 1920 the increase in welfare recipients and the granting of the vote to women turned the concept of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron; as exits he points to cyberspace, space, and new settlements to be founded on the open seas.

Curtis Yarvin, writing from 2007 onward under the pseudonym "Mencius Moldbug," argued for replacing democracy with a "CEO-monarch," running the state like a company, and "retiring all public employees"; Nick Land named this thought the "Dark Enlightenment" in 2012. Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State (2022) proposed "cloud-first, land-last" communities in place of the nation-state; Quinn Slobodian's Crack-Up Capitalism (2023) documented how this thought was put into practice as special economic zones, charter cities, and tax havens.

And on 28 February 2025, on Joe Rogan's show, Elon Musk said: "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy." This sentence is the 2025 version of 1909's "war is the world's only hygiene." Empathy protects "the weak"; protecting the weak cuts speed.

Gil Duran's 2026 book The Nerd Reich and recent work by writers such as Quinn Slobodian and Émile Torres show that this world of thought is not a collection of oddities but a coherent political program. The name of this program is, with increasing frequency, techno-fascism. We will discuss how apt the concept is in the sixth section; first, let us see the common structure of the three waves.

The class structure of the future: who is subject, who is décor?

When we set the three waves side by side, we see that each has a subject and a décor in its future. The subject is the one who makes the future; the décor is what happens to it.

Period	Subject of the future	Décor of the future	Where is labor?
Marinetti (1909)	Artist-warrior, young, male	Crowds ("multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution" — as landscape)	The maker of the machine is invisible; the machine seems self-born
Kahn / Toffler (1960–80)	Strategist, manager, "knowledge worker"	Industrial worker ("remnant of the second wave")	Obsolete; if it fails to adapt, left behind by history
Andreessen / e/acc (2023)	"Founder," "builder," "apex predator"	"Decelerators," regulators, "victim mentality"	A "material problem" for AI to solve
Longtermism (2003–)	Future digital minds and the philosopher-engineers who speak for them	Today's living eight billion humans	A rounding error

What this table says is simple: in every wave of futurism, the labor that will produce the future has been cut out of the picture of the future. Who cast Marinetti's automobile, who laid the fiber-optic cable that carried Toffler's "third wave," who labeled the data that trains Andreessen's AI — these questions are not asked in any of the three waves. They are not asked because when they are asked, the property structure of the future-script becomes visible.

The oldest and most honest literary depiction of this invisibility is older even than futurism. In H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895), the traveler who goes to the year 802,701 sees humanity split into two species: the beautiful, idle, childlike Eloi who live on the surface, and the Morlocks who live in darkness underground and run the machines. Wells imagined a future in which class division had become a biological division; and the novel's harshest detail is that the Morlocks eat the Eloi — that is, that the producers finally consume the consumers. Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) constructs the same structure visually: gardens above, machine below; and the film's resolution — "the mediator between the hand and the brain must be the heart" — is the most famous cinematic formula of class collaboration.

Today's futurism does not even have Wells's honesty. Wells at least showed the Morlocks. In today's future-script there is no Morlock: AI "learns by itself," the rocket "lands by itself," data "accumulates by itself." Once labor has crystallized into the machine, it is presented as the machine's own capability. In our Karaburun paper we called this "the expropriation of the general intellect": what millions of people have written, drawn, solved, and labeled crystallizes inside a model, and the owner of that model presents that crystal as their own "invention." The third wave of futurism is the ideology of this expropriation: the future belongs to the owners of expropriated general intellect.

And this: in every wave of futurism the subject of the future is male, and this is not a detail. Marinetti wrote "scorn for woman" into the manifesto. The gender structure of Silicon Valley's "founder" cult, Thiel's treatment of women's suffrage as a development that spoiled "capitalist democracy," Musk's sentence "empathy is weakness" — these sit on the same line. The subject of the future is a figure exempt from care labor, who does not see care labor, and who counts the life care labor produces as "weakness."

Techno-fascism: is the concept apt?

The word "fascism" is easily spent; that is why the concept must be tested against its definition in the Marxist tradition.

At the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935, Georgi Dimitrov defined fascism as "the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist, and most imperialist elements of finance capital." This definition has three elements: a particular fraction of capital (the most concentrated, the most reactionary); a form of rule (open dictatorship, abandonment of the parliamentary form); and a method (terror). Classical fascism adds a fourth element: a mass movement. Mussolini and Hitler could not have come to power without putting the masses into the street.

Now look at today. The most concentrated fraction of capital today is digital monopoly capital: data, computing power, AI models, and platforms are in the hands of a few companies. This fraction's ideologues have openly written the abandonment of democracy (Thiel, Yarvin). As for method, in place of classical terror there is algorithmic control — in the phrase of our Karaburun paper, the "digital panopticon" — and the intertwining of defense-technology companies (Palantir, Anduril) with the state.

The mass-movement element is different, and that difference is the meaning of the "techno-" prefix. Techno-fascism is fascism that does not need a mass party. Platform and algorithm take over the function of mobilizing the masses: the mass does not take to the street, it looks at the screen; and the feed on the screen does what the mass party did — the organization of feelings, the pointing out of the enemy, the making-visible of the leader — without a central organization. What Benjamin called "the aestheticization of politics" is today the social-media feed itself. The live rocket launch, the "vision" presentation, the billionaire's "great man" image: these are the digital counterparts of the 1930s square rallies, and they serve the same function — giving the mass the chance to "express itself" without touching property.

There is one more historical parallel. Jeffrey Herf's Reactionary Modernism (1984) shows how, in Weimar and Nazi Germany, engineers, technocrats, and writers such as Ernst Jünger combined admiration for the most advanced technology with hatred of the Enlightenment, reason, and equality. This compound Herf called "reactionary modernism" — most advanced in technology, most backward in politics — is the historical prototype of techno-fascism. The distance between Andreessen's manifesto line "the lightning works for us" and the "total mobilization" of technology in Jünger's The Worker (1932) is shorter than often supposed.

One honest caveat on the concept: techno-fascism today is a tendency, not a completed regime. The "open dictatorship" element in fascism's classical definition still operates in most countries inside the parliamentary form, hollowing it out from within. Using the concept as the name of a tendency is correct; using it as if it were a completed fact is both analytically wrong and politically paralyzing — because one does not struggle against something completed; one only mourns it.

Finally, a note on the "techno-feudalism" debate. Some writers say platform owners are new feudal lords collecting "rent," and that capitalism has ended. We do not share this view. The line from Marinetti to Andreessen is not a feudal line but the ideological line of monopoly capitalism: accumulation, competition, the necessity of growth, war — all of these are features of capitalism's most concentrated form. The "feudalism" label does exactly what the futurists do, only in reverse: it carries capitalism outside the present, this time into the past. What we face is not new; it is the monopoly stage Lenin described in 1916, equipped with digital means of production.

Domestic futurism: from Nâzım to Kızılelma

The history of futurism in Turkey confirms the essay's thesis to an unexpected degree; but to see this one must distinguish the three separate lives the word "futurist" has lived in this country.

First life: the machine that came by Mayakovsky's path

The first futurist text in Turkish came from a socialist's pen. Nâzım Hikmet met Mayakovsky during his Moscow years of 1922–24 and in 1923 wrote the poem "Makinalaşmak istiyorum" ("I Want to Become a Machine"): "trrrrum, / trrrrum, / trrrrum! / trak tiki tak!" This poem was written fourteen years after Marinetti's "roaring motor car," with the same excitement about the machine; yet it is not the owner of the machine who speaks, but the one who makes it. Nâzım's machine is not an object of desire but a symbol of production — and of the power of the producer. The "We Are Smashing the Idols" campaign he launched in 1929 in the magazine Resimli Ay targeted the literary authority of Abdülhak Hâmit and Mehmet Emin Yurdakul, and was the direct counterpart of Marinetti's "let us tear down the museums" gesture — but the direction of the demolition was reversed: Marinetti was destroying the past to found an aristocracy in the future; Nâzım, to make literature the people's property. Ercüment Behzat Lav's books of the 1930s, S.O.S. (1931) and Kaos (1934), are a second example fed by futurism and Dada.

So Turkish literature took futurism not from Milan but from Moscow; the "Russian futurism caveat" of the second section is, in this country, not a caveat but a tradition.

Let us also note that an Ottoman futurology existed. Celal Nuri İleri's three-volume "history of the future," Tarih-i İstikbal (1913–14), was written in the same years as Marinetti and constructs Western technology as the empire's only salvation: there is the machine; there is no question of the class that will own it. Republican-era future-scripts can also be read along a class axis. The third part of Yakup Kadri's novel Ankara (1934) is set in an imaginary Ankara of the 1940s and is a statist development utopia. Ahmet Ağaoğlu's Serbest İnsanlar Ülkesinde (In the Land of Free People, 1930) is a liberal utopia. The "Simeranya" of Peyami Safa's novel Yalnızız (We Are Alone, 1951) is the exact opposite of futurism, a mystical land of escape — and Peyami Safa was among the fiercest attackers of Nâzım's "machine poem." This polarization shows that the debate on the future in Turkey was already set on a class axis by the 1930s: on one side the producer's machine, on the other either the state's machine or escape from the machine.

Second life: Toffler in Turkish

The second wave arrived in Turkey in the 2000s, and in an institutional form. The Futurists Association was founded in 2005; among its founders were Alphan Manas and Ufuk Tarhan, and the association later took the name Turkish Futurists Association. The products of this line — Tarhan's book T-İnsan, corporate talks delivered under the adjective "futurist," "digital transformation" consulting, TEDx stages — are the domestic version of the Toffler–Kurzweil line. The future is the future of the "adapting individual" and the company; the words union, wage, property do not appear in this discourse. Its effect is institutional, not intellectual: it lives in human-resources departments, executive trainings, and congress opening speeches. It deserves no more than a footnote; but what the footnote says matters: in Turkey the title "futurist" has settled as the title of the employer's consultant, not of the worker.

Third life: official futurism and the name of a weapon

What truly deserves mention is the third life, because today in Turkey the owner of the future-script is neither an artist nor a consultant; it is the state itself.

The "2023 targets" were announced in 2011; then came the "2053 vision"; "2071," the thousandth anniversary of Manzikert, was invoked as a horizon; in October 2022 "the Century of Türkiye" was declared. These are not calendars; they are claims of political ownership of the future. To name a year is the most elegant way of saying who will be in power in that year. Fukuyama had closed history with liberal democracy; official futurism closes it with a century.

The aesthetics of this script confirm Benjamin's formula at almost textbook level. Teknofest, held since 2018, mobilizes the mass as a rocket and unmanned-aerial-vehicle show: hundreds of thousands of young people join the spectacle of a technology that is not theirs, with the chance to "express themselves." Property is not touched; excitement is organized. Togg is the domestic version of Marinetti's "roaring motor car": in the promotions there is the automobile; there is no one who works in the factory that produces it, at what wage, and with what union. The machine is visible, labor invisible — the common structure of the three waves operates here exactly as elsewhere.

And a name. In Turkish mythology Kızılelma (the Red Apple) is the ideal goal that recedes as one approaches it; that is, the oldest Turkish form of the idea of the future is the name of a horizon. That this name was given to the unmanned combat aircraft that made its first flight in 2022 can be read as a marketing choice. We read something else: the myth of the future has become directly the name of a weapon. When Marinetti declared war "the world's only hygiene" in 1909, he had tied the future to an aesthetics of war. A combat aircraft named Kızılelma forges the same link in a single word: the future is something that flies and strikes. This is proof that techno-fascism can be domestic rather than imported, and that the "reactionary modernism" compound we described in the sixth section — most advanced in technology, most backward in politics — has found its own language in Turkey as well.

Set the three lives side by side and Turkey's map of futurism appears: the futurism of those who produce the machine (Nâzım), the futurism of those who manage the machine (the association), and the futurism of those who arm the machine (Kızılelma). The first is today the weakest; and the only thing this essay says for Turkey is that that first line can be reclaimed.

Counter-tradition: reclaiming the future

Futurism must not be left to the futurists. Because imagining the future is a front of class struggle, and on that front we too have historically been present.

Eight hours was a future-script. In 1886 in Chicago the slogan of the workers who struck for eight hours was "eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will." That was utopia for its day; the bosses declared it "economically impossible." Today it is law — and under attack. What Bloch called "concrete utopia" was exactly this: the possible that has not yet been realized, inside the present.

Bogdanov's Red Star (1908) was written a year before Marinetti's manifesto. In the novel there is a socialist society established on Mars; production is planned according to need by a central statistical system; everyone works at the job they choose, and working hours are short. The difference between Bogdanov's Mars and Musk's Mars is not a difference of technology — both have rockets. The difference is this: on Bogdanov's Mars the means of production are common; on Musk's Mars, as the "Occupy Mars" T-shirts say, they are a company's property.

Cybersyn (Chile, 1971–73). The Allende government, to a design by the British cybernetician Stafford Beer, built a system that linked nationalized factories by telex network and collected production data in real time. Computing capacity was less than today's mobile phone; but the question it asked is still not being asked: for whom is data collected? In Cybersyn, factory data came before workers' committees and planning institutions. Today the same data is collected to supervise the worker. The coup of 11 September 1973 also destroyed Cybersyn's control room; this shows not that technology has no political direction, but that it does.

Soviet cosmonautics. Yuri Gagarin's going into space in 1961 was more than a state achievement: it was the product of a public science program, a public future-script. Today space is being re-privatized through "Occupy Mars" and private rocket companies; we discussed this in our "Space Dossier." That cosmism sits in Bostrom's bundle is no accident: the same sky means two different futures according to the property relation.

The common feature of this counter-tradition is this: the future is scripted not as a minority's vision but as the producers' plan. Vision comes from above and asks for belief; plan comes from below and asks for participation. One believes in the futurist's future; the worker's future is organized.

And a final reminder: Franco "Bifo" Berardi's After the Future (2011) begins with the centenary of the Futurist Manifesto and says that the twentieth century was "the century that trusted the future," and that this trust is over. Mark Fisher in the same period spoke of the "slow cancellation of the future." There is something true in these diagnoses: the neoliberal period effectively cancelled the working class's future-scripts — eight hours, the social state, planning. But what was cancelled was not the future; it was the worker's future. Capital's future was never cancelled; on the contrary, from Marinetti to Andreessen, it has continued to be written without interruption. The history of futurism shows that one side's ceasing to imagine the future did not stop the other side's imagining.

Comparative table: what the futurist sees, what we see

The futurist's claim	Historical-materialist assessment
Speed is beautiful; everything that cuts speed is reactionary.	Speed is capital's circulation speed. The question to ask is not "how fast" but "for whom, with whose body." The eight-hour workday also "cut" speed.
The machine is humanity's victory over nature.	The machine is crystallized labor. When the labor that produces and runs it is cut out of the picture, the machine-owner's victory looks like humanity's victory.
Technology is the only source of growth; anything that isn't growing is dying.	The necessity of growth is not the universe's law but capital's. Presenting the social as cosmic is futurism's basic operation.
The market is a discovery mechanism; regulation kills discovery.	The market is the discovery mechanism of those who have property. The demand for regulation is the demand of those without property to take part in discovery.
Trillions of future lives outweigh today's billions.	Speaking in the name of what does not yet exist is the oldest method of silencing what exists today. The "acceptable loss" table grows more dangerous, not less, as its scale grows.
Democracy is the obstacle before speed and freedom.	Correct diagnosis, wrong side: democracy really does cut capital's speed. That is why the futurist is its enemy; that is why we want to expand it — into the workplace, the algorithm, the plan.
The "founder" builds the future alone.	Nothing is built alone. The founder myth presents the expropriation of the general intellect as one person's "vision."
War / struggle / aggression is the condition of creativity.	Class struggle is real; but what the futurist calls "struggle" is not between classes but the struggle of the "strong" against the "weak." In 1909 its name was hygiene; in 2025 it is "empathy is weakness."
Empathy is civilization's weakness.	Empathy is the subjective form of care labor. Those who count it as weakness are those who do not see care labor and count the life that labor produces as free.
The future is in space; Earth is a launch pad.	Space, like Earth, is defined by the property relation. The difference between Bogdanov's Mars and Musk's Mars is not in the rocket but in the title deed.

If we reduce the table to a single sentence: the futurist presents the features of a particular stage of capitalism as the law of the future; we say those features are historical — that is, changeable.

Three common mistakes

First: sliding into hostility to technology. Rejecting the machine, AI, and space in reaction to futurism is to fall into Marinetti's trap: leaving admiration for technology to him and taking "past-ism" for ourselves. The lesson of Russian futurism, Cybersyn, and Gagarin is the opposite: the problem is not the machine but the owner of the machine. The left positions itself not against technology but on the question of technology's ownership.

Second: mistaking accelerationism and longtermism for alternatives to each other. Choosing a side between those who say "accelerate" and those who say "take care" skips the question of who holds the decision about the future. Both leave the decision to the same minority. Our position is not the middle of these two but outside them: the decision must belong to the producers.

Third: settling into the pessimism that "the future is over." Berardi's and Fisher's diagnoses are valuable as a finding; as a program they are paralyzing. The cancellation of the future is the cancellation of the worker's future, and what has been cancelled can be reclaimed — because it was once scripted. Eight hours was once a utopia.

Concrete proposals

None of these will change the order. But they will leave you better equipped at every encounter with futurist discourse — in a presentation, an investor letter, a "vision" document.

1. Read the manifestos from their own text. Marinetti's 1909 manifesto is short and available in Turkish; Andreessen's 2023 manifesto is open on a16z's site. Set the two side by side and compare the seventh point. This fills an evening reading group and needs no other commentary.

2. Ask every future-script three questions. (a) In this future, who is subject, who is décor? (b) Which tendency of the present has been made into law here? (c) Which contradiction of the present — wage, property, control — is invisible in this picture? These three questions turn even the brightest presentation into a class map.

3. When you hear the word "vision," remember the word "plan." Vision comes from above and asks for belief; plan comes from below and asks for participation. A company's vision against a union's plan: this is the most concrete form of reclaiming the future. The tasks in our Computing Labor dossier are pieces of that plan.

4. Apply Benjamin's formula to current examples. Watching a live rocket launch, an AI "launch," a billionaire's stage speech, ask: which property relation is being turned into an aesthetic spectacle here? The aestheticization of politics is not a concept; it is something you watch every day.

5. Read and tell the counter-tradition. Bogdanov's Red Star is available in Turkish; Eden Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries (2011) on Cybersyn is the standard; the introductory section of Bloch's The Principle of Hope is enough for the concrete/abstract utopia distinction. The shortest way to show a young comrade that imagining the future is not the right's monopoly is these three texts.

6. Diagnose domestic futurism — and reclaim Nâzım. Ask Teknofest, Togg, and Kızılelma the same three questions: who produces this machine, at what wage, with what union; and where is the worker in this future? Then reread "Makinalaşmak istiyorum" / "I Want to Become a Machine." The first owner of machine excitement in Turkey was a socialist; leaving that excitement to official futurism is abandoning our own tradition.

7. Script the future in the organization. The futurist's future is one person's dream; ours is a meeting's decision. Three people at a workplace answering together the question "how do we want to work here in five years" is more futurist than any manifesto — because the only future with a chance of being realized is the one scripted by those who will realize it.

In 1909 a poet wrote that a roaring motor car was more beautiful than a Greek statue, and ten years later sat at the founding meeting of the fascist party. In 1960 a strategist calculated that nuclear war was winnable and became a founder of futures studies. In 1980 a journalist replaced classes with waves, and the Speaker of the House distributed his book to members of Congress. In 2003 a philosopher calculated that ten-to-the-thirty-eight digital minds not yet born outweighed today's eight billion humans. In 2023 a venture capitalist gathered this entire line into a single manifesto and wrote Marinetti's name at its head.

The continuity of this line is not a conspiracy. It is a class's need, at every stage, to write its own property relation as the law of the future. Futurism is the aesthetic and philosophical form of that need; techno-fascism is the political name of that form at the moment when it sees democracy as a cost.

This line is uninterrupted in Turkey as well: from Celal Nuri's machine-admiration to "futurist" consultants, from there to an official calendar that names a century and to a combat aircraft called Kızılelma.

And against this line, at every stage, there was another future-script: eight hours, Red Star, Nâzım's machine, Cybersyn, Gagarin, the plan. The common feature of these scripts was that they thought the future not as a vision but as the producers' decision. Today that script is weak; but it is not absent. And the reason it is weak is not that the other side imagines better, but that we for a time separated imagining from organizing.

Young comrade, when someone one day tells you "the future will be like this," the question to ask is clear: where do you stand in that future — as the one who makes, or the one who is made? If the answer is "the one who is made," that future is not yours; and believing in a future that is not yours is the least laborious way of carrying today's property into the future.

The future is a property. And property can be reclaimed.

Comradely, Knowledge Commons

Sources

First wave: futurism and fascism

F. T. Marinetti, "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism," Le Figaro, 20 February 1909 — English translation, Italian Futurism archive
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935–36), in Illuminations — epilogue: the aestheticization of politics
Antonio Gramsci, "Marinetti the Revolutionary?", L'Ordine Nuovo, 5 January 1921 — Marxists Internet Archive
Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, 1984
Franco "Bifo" Berardi, After the Future, AK Press, 2011
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895); Fritz Lang, Metropolis (1927)

Second wave: futurology and the Californian Ideology

Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, Princeton University Press, 1960; Kahn & Wiener, The Year 2000, 1967
Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970); The Third Wave (1980)
Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, Alvin Toffler, "Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age", Progress and Freedom Foundation, August 1994
Richard Barbrook & Andy Cameron, "The Californian Ideology", 1995
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (1992)
Fredric Jameson, "Future City", New Left Review 21, 2003
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009)

Third wave: Silicon Valley futurism

Marc Andreessen, "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto", a16z, 16 October 2023
Vice, "Major Tech Investor Calls Architect of Fascism a 'Saint' in Unhinged Manifesto", October 2023
Nick Bostrom, "Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development", Utilitas, 2003
William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future, Basic Books, 2022
Timnit Gebru & Émile P. Torres, "The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence", First Monday, April 2024
Peter Thiel, "The Education of a Libertarian", Cato Unbound, April 2009
Balaji Srinivasan, The Network State, 2022
Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, Metropolitan Books, 2023
Gil Duran, interview on The Nerd Reich (2026) — San Francisco Standard, 28 July 2026
Transnational Institute, "The Rise of the Techno-Tyrants: Silicon Valley's right-wing"
Vladimir Tismaneanu, "Muskism, Futurism, Fascism"
Artforum, "Palantir, Anduril and the aesthetics of avant-garde fascism"
Paris Marx, "The religion of techno-optimism", Disconnect

Turkey

Nâzım Hikmet, "Makinalaşmak istiyorum" / "I Want to Become a Machine" (1923) — in 835 Satır (1929); Bütün Şiirleri, YKY
The "Putları Yıkıyoruz" ("We Are Smashing the Idols") debate, Resimli Ay, 1929 — Nâzım Hikmet's essays on Abdülhak Hâmit and Mehmet Emin Yurdakul
Ercüment Behzat Lav, S.O.S. (1931), Kaos (1934) — Bütün Eserleri, YKY
Celal Nuri İleri, Tarih-i İstikbal (1913–14), 3 volumes
Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, Ankara (1934), İletişim; Ahmet Ağaoğlu, Serbest İnsanlar Ülkesinde (In the Land of Free People, 1930); Peyami Safa, Yalnızız (We Are Alone, 1951), Ötüken
Gila Benmayor, "Türk fütüristleri nihayet örgütlendi", Hürriyet, 2005
Türkiye Fütüristler Derneği, "Hakkımızda ve Kurucularımız"
Knowledge Commons, "Space Dossier" (September 2026) — on the science–militarism relation and the privatization of space