Digital Capitalism, the Illusion of "Goodness," and the Material Reality of Class Struggle

The Anatomy of Daily Life in the Age of Digital Shackles and the Bankruptcy of Illusions

The Epic Panorama of Modern Life: From the Morning Alarm to the Night Screen

Just before the sun rises, the alarm of a smartphone running licensed software from a global technology monopoly goes off. The ordinary person's awakening into the modern day also means the first data input of that day being recorded in the machinery of capital accumulation.

The individual who opens their eyes thinks they are a “user” in the very first second they swipe their screen. Yet, in that instant, they are nothing but free raw material flowing into Big Data pools with their mental and sensory existence.

The modern person setting out toward the city or taking a seat at the desk in their home is thrown into a vital scramble amid rising rents, exorbitant food prices, and invisible bills. Bourgeois media and consumer culture sing the same lullaby without pause: “You are a free individual. You are the architect of your own career. Whether you create content, write code, or deliver packages, you work flexibly; you are your own boss!”

Yet the material reality behind the curtain is altogether different:

• The Early Hours (The Workplace and the Screen): The programmer, translator, academic, or writer sitting in an office or at a keyboard at home pours their mind, creativity, and accumulated knowledge into a screen throughout the day. Every line they produce, every algorithmic code they write, every paragraph they translate is scanned and enclosed for free by the web-scraping robots of AI monopolies (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic) before they have even finished their tea. The mental worker keeps working without seeing that the value they create with their own hands is becoming an algorithm that will leave them unemployed tomorrow.

• Midday (Flexible Exploitation and the Street): The young worker racing against time atop a courier motorcycle is consoled by the lie that they are an “independent entrepreneur working per order.” The route written by the algorithm, the time it dictates, and the scraps of wages it deems fit wear down the body with a discipline harsher than the savage factory shifts of the nineteenth century.

• Evening and Night (Consumption and Alienation): When work ends, the individual returns home and wants to rest and “encounter culture.” To read an e-book, listen to a piece of music, or watch a film, they knock on the door of platform capitalism (Storytel, Amazon, Spotify, Netflix). The collective culture they produced during the day is sold back to them in the evening as a commodity behind monthly subscription fees and paywalls. When they get into bed at night, they are left alone with their own loneliness in social media’s algorithmic feed.

Modern humanity’s daily life has become a dialectical trap in which its labor is exploited in the morning, its data is plundered all day, and it pays pocket money in the evening merely to access the culture it produced itself.

The New Dimension of Alienation and the Enclosure of the General Intellect

The concept of alienation (Entfremdung) exposed by Karl Marx in the age of the industrial revolution now operates in a far deeper and more destructive form through the capillaries of the digital age.

The classical industrial worker was alienated from the wheel or cloth they produced. Today’s mental and digital worker is being alienated from their own language, mind, creative capacity, and social memory.

Humanity’s common accumulation of thousands of years—its language, science, and art, or, in Marx’s words, the General Intellect—has been imprisoned within the shell of private property belonging to a handful of Silicon Valley monopolies that hold the means of production. People are made to pay a toll to these monopolies in order to use the collective consciousness that in fact belongs to them.

To conceal this enormous mechanism of plunder, the order of capital continuously produces new harmonious lies and ideological veils:

• Sometimes it tells the tale of “Silicon Valley’s good and philanthropic bosses.”

• Sometimes speculation and exploitation are dressed in moral clothing under the name of “Effective Altruism.”

• Sometimes, under the discourse of “AI Safety,” open-source competition is strangled and monopolistic laws are enacted through the state.

The Ideological Face of Daily Life vs. Materialist Reality

Dimension of Daily Life	The Illusion Sold by Bourgeois Ideology	Dialectical Materialist Reality
Form of Work	“Flexible work, being your own boss, a free freelance life.”	A precarious mental and digital proletariat, deprived of the means of production under flexible conditions.
Use of Technology	Neutral innovations that make life easier and liberate the individual.	Instruments of capital accumulation through which data is enclosed for free and labor is devalued.
Access to Culture and Knowledge	The comfort of reaching infinite content libraries with one click.	The commodification of knowledge and its imprisonment behind paywalls; platform rentierism.
Search for a Solution	Personal branding, self-improvement, ethical consumption, and conscientious choices.	Collective class struggle targeting the private ownership of the means of production and distribution.

Setting Out with the Bare Sword of Truth

Dear comrades,

This work has been written to strip away the harmonious lies of daily life, to see with the naked eye the exploitation machinery of capital as it changes form in the digital age, and to reveal the historical tasks awaiting mental workers.

We will examine every issue that enters our agenda—from AI data plunder to platform exploitation in e-book and audio publishing, from war-capital complexes such as Palantir to Silicon Valley’s displays of fake philanthropy—in the light of dialectical materialism, with class contradictions at the center.

We have had enough of the moralistic consolations of the bourgeois world, tales of “good bosses,” and the enchanting illusions of technological determinism.

We take up the bare, cold sword of truth: what will transform the world is not crumbs of individual conscience, but organized class consciousness that will seize ownership of the productive forces!

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The “Good Capitalist” Delusion: Individual Morality vs. the Structural Laws of Capital

The Dead End of Idealist Logic: The Mistake of Putting the Subject Before Structure

The deepest weakness of bourgeois thought and liberal philosophy is that they read social processes through the intentions, moral qualities, or conscientious choices of agents (subjects). According to this logic, the world is a moral struggle between “bad, greedy bosses” and “good, philanthropic bosses.”

Dialectical materialism rejects this moralistic approach in unequivocal terms. For idealism reverses cause and effect. Morality, compassion, or conscience do not determine the material foundation of social production; on the contrary, they are superstructural reflections of existing relations of production.

Karl Marx set out this relation with complete conceptual clarity in Volume I of Capital:

“Individuals are dealt with here only insofar as they are the personifications of economic categories, the bearers of particular class relations and interests.”

No matter how gentle, cultivated, artistically sensitive, or humanist a capitalist may be as an individual, from the moment they exist on the economic stage they are nothing other than the personification of capital (Personifikation des Kapitals). Capital carries out its own laws of motion through their body and mind. The capitalist’s “free will” cannot leave the narrow corridor mapped out by the laws of capital accumulation.

The Logic of Capital Accumulation and Compulsory Competition (Konkurrenz)

Capital is dead labor that moves with the drive to expand itself and produce surplus value. Its basic formula, the circuit G - M - G' (Money - Commodity - More Money), possesses an endless character. The sole aim of this circuit is the quantitative growth of the money invested.

But what happens if a capitalist personally wishes to halt this desire for growth, to “be content,” and to distribute all surplus value to workers or society?

Dialectical-materialist analysis of the process shows us its inevitable result:

1. Competition as an External Coercive Necessity: Under capitalism, competition is not the inner desire of capitalists but a law of external compulsion imposed by the market on every capitalist.

2. Concentration of Capital and Technological Renewal: To survive in the market, a company must continually renew its means of production, invest in new technologies, and reduce unit costs. The source financing these investments is surplus value extracted from the worker’s unpaid labor.

3. The Mechanism of Liquidation: If a “good” boss refuses to appropriate surplus value, pays workers far above the market average, and reduces the profit margin to zero, they are crushed by the cost advantage of the other “ruthless” capitalists with whom they compete. The company loses profitability, cannot renew its capital, cannot obtain credit, and finally disappears from the market through bankruptcy.

Therefore, the market mechanism systematically filters out the “good” capitalist. Those who remain standing on the market stage are not the most moral individuals, but those who adapt most perfectly to the laws of capital accumulation.

Contemporary Masks: “Conscious Capitalism,” ESG, and Greenwashing

Late capitalism periodically invents new “human” packaging to absorb its internal crises and the accumulating anger of the masses. The most current appearances of the myth of the “Good Capitalist” are these:

• Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Standards: Finance capital distributes “social responsibility” and environmental scores while measuring companies’ profitability. This does not mean capitalism has acquired a human face; on the contrary, it means nature and social ethical values themselves are turned into financial assets (commodities) that can be sold on the stock exchange.

• “Conscious Companies” and the Example of Yvon Chouinard (Patagonia): The transfer of Patagonia’s founder’s company shares to a “nature-protection foundation” was presented in bourgeois media as “proof that capitalism can be reformed.” Yet the material reality is this: the company still exploits cheap labor power in the Global South, maintains capitalist property relations in its supply chain, and, apart from changing the destination of its surplus value, does not touch the mode of production itself.

• “Doing Well by Doing Good”: This motto used by technology monopolies is the most refined form of legitimizing exploitation. When a platform company provides free internet to poor people in Africa, it does not do so for “philanthropy”; it does so to make billions of people dependent on its digital network, people whose data it will scan and to whom it will sell advertising in the future.

Individual Moralism vs. Dialectical Materialist Reality

Dimension of Analysis	Bourgeois Idealist / Moralistic Approach	Dialectical Materialist Reality
View of the Capitalist	A good- or bad-hearted, conscientious or insatiable individual.	The personalized bearer of the laws of capital accumulation.
Source of Exploitation	The boss’s personal ambition and moral decay.	Private ownership of the means of production and the G - M - G' circuit.
Nature of Competition	The fair race of free entrepreneurs in the market.	A law of external coercion forcing capitalists to exploit continuously.
Search for a Solution	Educating bosses, practicing “ethical” consumption, encouraging philanthropy.	Changing property relations and socializing the means of production.
Systemic Improvement	Creating humane capitalism through “conscious companies.”	The condemnation of reforms to liquidation within the capitalist mode of production.

Historical Process Analysis: The History of the Failure of Seeking the “Good Boss”

Attempts to draw a “human oasis” out of the order of capital are not new. Historical materialism has documented how market laws destroyed every one of these attempts:

1. Utopian Socialism and the Robert Owen Experiment (Early Nineteenth Century): Scottish industrialist Robert Owen reduced working hours, abolished child labor, and provided housing for workers at his New Lanark factory. However sincere Owen may have been personally, this model could not become a general rule. Rival factories produced cheaper goods by exploiting workers fourteen hours a day, and Owen’s enterprise declined in the face of market competition.

2. The Welfare State and Paternalism (Mid-Twentieth Century): In the face of the threat posed by the socialist bloc after the Second World War, capital granted concessions to the working class. Yet when the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) asserted itself in the 1970s, capital cast aside that “humane” face and launched the neoliberal offensive.

3. The Digital Era and Philanthropic Feudalism (Twenty-First Century): Today, colossal capitalists from Bill Gates to Jeff Bezos perform a spectacle of “saving the world” through their foundations. Yet these foundations are ideological instruments for securing tax exemptions, shaping state policy according to corporate interests, and laundering excessively accumulated fictitious capital.

From Individual Conscience to Class Struggle

Dear comrades,

Seeking a “good boss,” an “ethical stock investment,” or a “humane monopoly” within the limits of the order of capital is chasing a mirage in the desert.

The essence of the problem lies not in individuals’ morality, but in the regime of private property that appropriates the means of social production. Capitalism is not a moral problem; it is a problem of property and class.

We reject the harmonious lies of moralistic humanism. We defend not taking refuge in the conscience of individual bosses, but organized class consciousness that will send the order of capital represented in their persons to history’s dustbin by socializing the means of production!

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“Philanthropy” and “Effective Altruism”: The Moralistic Cover for Exploitation

Philanthrocapitalism: Returning as Alms What Was Stolen from the Exploited

As it appropriates the surplus value it produces, the capitalist mechanism of exploitation creates an ever-deepening abyss and accumulating anger in society. For the order of capital to sustain itself, that anger must be absorbed and exploitation covered with a moral veil. This is the historical and institutional answer offered by philanthrocapitalism (philanthropic capitalism).

This understanding, theorized by nineteenth-century steel and railroad baron Andrew Carnegie in The Gospel of Wealth, has reached its peak today in the immense foundations of figures such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and George Soros.

From a dialectical-materialist standpoint, philanthrocapitalism has three fundamental functions:

• 1. The Legal Instrument of Tax Avoidance and the Laundering of Surplus Value: Foundations established by billionaires are the most legal means of shielding capital from tax systems. The capitalist who appropriates the tax that the state would collect for public health, education, and infrastructure transfers that resource to their own foundation, escaping the tax burden while continuing to manage a public resource as if it were personal property.

• 2. Directly Shaping the Political Superstructure: Under the name of donations, philanthrocapitalists shape public policy, educational curricula, and global health programs—for example, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s influence over the WHO—according to the long-term profit strategies of their companies. Public will is paralyzed; it is not the people but the capitalist’s foundation board that decides what society’s needs are.

• 3. Ideological Laundering: Poverty, hunger, and epidemics are direct results of the capitalist mode of production. The ideology of philanthropy presents these systemic results as “fate” or “misfortune,” then declares the capitalist who caused the problem to be the “savior.” The return of a few million as alms from the trillions stolen is turned into a spectacle for producing legitimacy.

Silicon Valley’s New Religion: Effective Altruism and the Tale of “Earn to Give”

The most refined, mathematized, and insidious form of philanthrocapitalism in the digital age was born in Silicon Valley: Effective Altruism (EA).

This philosophy, frequently embraced by figures such as crypto swindler Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, has been theorized by bourgeois academics such as Will MacAskill and Nick Bostrom.

At the core of this doctrine lies the dogma of “Earn to Give.”

“Make as much money as possible in the capitalist system, become a monopoly, exploit, speculate on the stock market; then make rational and scientific donations with the billions you have earned!”

This dogma, when passed through the dialectical-materialist sieve, reveals the following disgusting equation:

• The Mathematical Rationalization of Exploitation: The logic of “Earn to Give” legitimizes a company’s ruthless exploitation of its workers, destruction of nature, or dispossession of the masses through financial speculation. The rationalization “the more I exploit, the more money I can transfer to charities” is an ideological narcotic that erases capital’s moral guilt.

• The SBF Scandal Was Not an Accident: Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the FTX crypto exchange, called himself an “Effective Altruist” while stealing billions of dollars from customers. SBF’s collapse was not an isolated fraud; it was the natural and inevitable result of the logic, “earn at any cost; after all, you will donate it.”

The Illusion of “Longtermism”: Plundering the Present and Performing the Rescue of the Future

The most dangerous derivative of the Effective Altruism movement is the idea of Longtermism, which has become a weapon in the hands of technology monopolies.

According to this view, the suffering, poverty, or exploitation of people living today is insignificant; what matters is preserving virtual simulations and galactic civilizations in which trillions of digital human minds will live in the future. In accordance with this fictional vision of the future, the greatest danger is defined as the “risk of AI destroying humanity” (AI Doom / Existential Risk).

Dear comrades, this is an ideological illusion, and its dialectical function is this:

1. Making Concrete Exploitation Invisible: AI giants (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) exploit data workers in Kenya, who label traumatic images for $1.32 an hour to train their models and lose their mental health. Chips are made through the blood of children in cobalt mines in Congo. The ideology of Longtermism wholly conceals this concrete, living exploitation and shifts attention to the tale, “Will AI destroy humanity a thousand years from now?”

2. Regulatory Capture: The lobbying in parliaments and millions invested in political campaigns by CEOs such as Sam Altman or Dario Amodei, accompanied by cries that “AI is very dangerous; it may destroy humanity,” are not intended to protect humanity. Their purpose is to impose state licensing requirements in the name of “safety,” ban independent open-source developers, and close the AI market off for their own monopolies.

Bourgeois Ideology vs. Dialectical Materialist Reality

Dimension of Analysis	Bourgeois Ideology (Effective Altruism / Philanthropy)	Dialectical Materialist Reality
Source of Poverty	Misfortune, inadequate resources, or “irrational distribution.”	Private ownership of the means of production and the appropriation of surplus value.
Role of the Philanthropist	Visionary hero who saves society and the future.	A bearer of capital who launders surplus value through tax avoidance.
“Earn to Give”	A moral path turning enrichment into social benefit.	An ideological illusion laundering exploitation and speculation.
AI Risk	An existential danger: AGI consuming the human species.	The devaluation of labor, enclosure of data, and dispossession.
Ultimate Solution	Billionaires’ “ethical” decisions and rational donations.	Class struggle, abolition of private property, and socialization.

Historical Process Analysis: From Religious Alms to AI Lobbying

The “goodness” packaging of the order of capital has changed qualitatively throughout history in parallel with the development of productive forces:

1. The Age of Religious Alms (Feudalism – Early Capitalism): A primitive regime of charity conducted through church and foundation, in which poverty was legitimized through the word of God, the rich purchased heaven, and the poor were made to submit to their fate.

2. Institutional Philanthropy (Twentieth Century / Industrial Capitalism): The Rockefeller and Carnegie model. Huge foundations established by industrialists who repressed workers’ bloody strikes in order to project the image of a “philanthropic boss” before the public and gain tax immunity.

3. Tech-Altruism and Digital Lobbying (Twenty-First Century / Late Capitalism): The era of SBF, Gates, Amodei, and Altman. The most fetishized phase, where philanthropy becomes fully integrated with stock-market speculation, AI monopolization, and lobbying to buy state policy.

Not Alms but Rights; Not Philanthropy but Class Struggle!

Dear young comrades,

While ornate tales of “altruism” fall from the conscience of capital owners, the trail they leave behind is one of poverty, precarity, and plundered nature.

Those gleaming foundation libraries, AI ethics boards, and philanthropy prizes offered to us are each bloody spoils of the surplus value stolen from the working class and mental workers.

We have had enough of billionaires’ alms, the charlatanry of Effective Altruism, and the theater of “we will save the world with AI”!

What we need is not capital’s favor, but our right to the entirety of the value we produce.

What we need is not philanthropy, but organized class struggle that will dispossess the technology and financial monopolies holding the means of production!

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Silicon Valley’s “Maverick” Heroes and the Infrastructure Wall

“Techno-Anarchism” and the Libertarian Illusion: The Sovereignty of Property, Not Code

To conceal systemic crises and monopolization, bourgeois media and technology culture periodically throw “maverick geniuses,” “founders coming to crash the system,” or “libertarian technologists” onto the stage. The decentralized protocol moves of former Twitter founder Jack Dorsey (Nostr, BitChat, Bluesky), Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike’s encrypted messaging architecture, or Telegram founder Pavel Durov’s discourse of a “stateless and uncensored” platform market the following fantasy to the masses:

“There is no need for revolutionary class struggle to break the monopoly of capitalist states and giant corporations; correctly written open-source code, a cleverly designed encryption algorithm, or a decentralized protocol will liberate humanity all by itself!”

Dear comrades, this discourse is Libertarianism (anarcho-capitalism) and techno-idealism, among the most insidious derivatives of bourgeois ideology.

This idealist deviation seeks the foundation of social relations not in the economic base and forms of property, but in abstract software code. Moving under the slogan “Code is law,” this understanding misses dialectical materialism’s most basic principle: software, code, or data do not live in an abstract realm of ideas independent of the material world; they operate on concrete means of production whose ownership rests in the hands of capital groups.

The Materialist Wall: Physical Infrastructure and the Monopolization of the Means of Production

No matter how “decentralized,” “encrypted,” or “libertarian” an application you design at the software level may be, there is an insurmountable wall of material infrastructure that it must cross to meet society.

When Karl Marx explained the dialectical contradiction between productive forces and relations of production, he emphasized the determining role of the infrastructure. Today, the physical infrastructure of digital productive forces collides with the following walls of property:

• 1. Hardware and Ecosystem Monopoly: An application you freely design—for example, Signal or BitChat—depends on Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store to reach the public. These two giant monopolies that hold ownership of mobile operating systems can wipe even the most “libertarian” application from the digital map with a single algorithm update or contract termination.

• 2. Physical Infrastructure and Server Monopoly (Cloud Monopolies): Even decentralized protocols are hosted in the background on the servers of gigantic data centers such as Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), or Google Cloud. Finance capital, which controls the electricity, cooling systems, and physical servers, has the power to throw the switch at any moment.

• 3. Network Infrastructure and Internet Service Providers (ISPs): The fiber-optic cables, submarine data lines, 5G base stations, and GSM networks through which information flows are private property either directly of imperialist states or of telecommunications monopolies fused with the state.

Thus, the dialectical reality is this: every move toward “liberation” at the software level is neutralized when it collides with the wall of private ownership over hardware, servers, and network infrastructure.

Unless the ownership of physical means of production is socialized, the order of capital will either absorb and commodify the “maverick” applications that rise on its own infrastructure or suffocate them by cutting off infrastructural access.

A Historical Lesson: From Utopian Capitalism to “Maverick” Technology (The Robert Owen Parallel)

Silicon Valley’s current effort to establish open-source islands “alternative to the system” rests philosophically and historically on exactly the same dialectical dead end as nineteenth-century Utopian Socialism.

• Nineteenth-Century Utopian Socialism (The Example of Robert Owen): Industrialist Robert Owen established a “humane factory” called New Lanark in Scotland, where capitalist exploitation had reached its peak. He reduced working hours, opened nurseries, and provided workers with a humane life. Owen believed this “ethical island” he had founded within the capitalist system would set an example for other bosses and change the entire world.

• Historical Bankruptcy: Owen’s utopian island could not become a general model in the face of savage market competition and the logic of capital. While appreciating utopians such as Owen and Fourier, Marx and Engels made this uncompromising observation in The Communist Manifesto: without waging class struggle, targeting political power, and radically changing ownership of the means of production, isolated “islands of paradise” cannot be created in the bosom of the system.

Today’s techno-utopians developing “free software” on GitHub or building P2P (peer-to-peer) networks as alternatives to capital platforms are the Robert Owens of our day. Their well-intentioned efforts are condemned to remain small hobby islands in the immense ocean of technology monopolies that own the infrastructure.

Bourgeois Libertarian Illusion vs. Dialectical Materialist Reality

Dimension of Analysis	Bourgeois Libertarian Illusion (Techno-Utopianism)	Dialectical Materialist Reality
Path to Liberation	Correctly encrypted code, P2P protocols, and open-source software.	Class struggle and the socialization of the means of production and distribution.
Systemic Power	The abstract mathematical logic of software and algorithmic anonymity.	The physical ownership of data centers, fiber cables, and chip factories.
“Maverick” Entrepreneur	A visionary genius who topples the system from within and bypasses capital.	An actor operating within capital’s infrastructural limits, postponing crisis.
Purpose of Use	A tool to provide individual freedom and uncensored communication.	A tactical tool for social action when combined with physical togetherness.
Ultimate Fate	Capitalism’s spontaneous extinction as technology advances.	The integration of technology into capital unless property relations change.

Process Analysis and the Example of Aaron Swartz

The process by which the order of capital neutralizes “maverick” technological moves unfolds in three dialectical phases:

Phase I (Libertarian Leap – Thesis): A new technology (Bitcoin, Signal, Telegram, Nostr) developed against the pressure of capital or the state appears on the stage. At first, with its decentralized character, it seems beyond capital’s control.

Phase II (Infrastructural Bottleneck – Antithesis): As the number of users grows, the application’s server, bandwidth, and hardware costs become enormous. Software becomes dependent on finance capital, which owns the physical infrastructure.

Phase III (Absorption by Capital – Synthesis): The “maverick” project is either commodified through funding or acquisition—as with Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp—or, as with cryptocurrencies, turned into a toy of fictitious-capital speculation on exchanges.

The most concrete and tragic example of this dialectical trap is Aaron Swartz. Swartz was not merely a libertarian “who wrote code”; he was an activist who practically attacked the shell of private ownership around knowledge.

When he sought to download millions of scientific documents imprisoned behind JSTOR’s paywalls from MIT servers and open them freely to the public, he faced the relentless fury of bourgeois law and the state apparatus. Swartz paid with his life for the reality not of abstract code but of property law and state violence.

For Swartz had not built a “clever application” within the limits of capital; he had mounted a direct practical attack on property relations.

From Individual Revolt to the Socialization of Infrastructure

Dear comrades,

Silicon Valley’s narrative of “maverick heroes” is an ideological fairy tale designed to detach young minds from revolutionary class struggle and draw them into the passivity of “saving the world by writing code.”

Encrypted applications, P2P networks, or mesh systems are undoubtedly tactical and temporary instruments of defense for striking workers, masses in the streets, or exploited mental workers. Yet none of these tools can abolish capitalist property relations by itself.

The issue is not writing a better application; it is taking the vast servers, fiber lines, chip factories, and communications infrastructure on which that application runs out of capital’s hands—that is, socializing them!

Abandon dreams of technological utopia; focus on organized class struggle that targets the material ownership of the tools!

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From Palantir to the Technology Worker: Individual Conscientious Refusal or Collective Class Consciousness?

The Myth of the “Creative Class” and Mental Proletarianization

For decades, bourgeois sociology and liberal economics have tried to position programmers, data scientists, and systems architects above class contradictions. They were bestowed with titles such as “creative class,” “digital aristocracy,” or “free capitalists.” High salaries, flexible working hours, colorful offices, and espresso machines were used as an ideological narcotic preaching that this group was not subject to relations of exploitation.

Dialectical materialism pulls away this pink curtain and looks at the objective conditions of production: no matter how high a technology worker’s salary may be, they do not own the means of production.

1. The Reality of Propertylessness: The programmer does not own the algorithm they code, the server on which they store data, the chip technology running the software, or the resulting intellectual property. The employment contract signed with the company transfers their mental labor to capital from the outset.

2. Deskilling and Automation: Just as capital deskilled artisans in the nineteenth century by putting them into the assembly-line system, it is now reducing programming through AI coding tools to the level of standardized, replaceable, flexible manual labor.

3. Material Reality: The technology worker owns only one thing they can sell on the market—their mental labor power—and is a mental proletarian who must sell it to a capitalist to survive.

The crisis erupting around companies that produce technology for Palantir, Google (Project Maven), Amazon (Project Nimbus), or Israel’s war machine is connected to this mental proletariat beginning to recognize its own class position and the objective consequences of the labor it produces.

The Naked Peak of Alienation: Code Becoming a Death Machine

The concept of alienation, theorized by Karl Marx in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, has reached its most extreme and tragic point in history in the technology sector.

Marx defines alienation through four main moments. The process experienced today by a programmer at Palantir or in the defense industry is the direct concretization of these moments:

• 1. Alienation from the Product: The abstract sequence of logic (code) emerging from the programmer’s keyboard becomes objectified in the hands of capital and wholly independent of its creator. That code is now an immigrant-tracking algorithm, an unmanned aerial vehicle guidance system, or a mechanism of mass surveillance. The worker becomes completely alienated from the object they produce; the product stands before them as an alien and hostile force.

• 2. Alienation from the Act of Production: The software-development process ceases to be a free act in which human beings display their creative mental abilities. It becomes a soulless, repetitive, alienated act of compulsory work subordinated to the needs of capital accumulation and the military needs of the state apparatus.

• 3. Alienation from Human Essence (Gattungswesen, species-being): The species-being of the human as a social being is to beautify nature and society and make life easier. But when the programmer’s labor becomes a tool that bombs masses, hunts refugees at the border, or listens in on civilians, the worker becomes alienated from their own human species-being.

• 4. Alienation from Other People: Alienated from their product and their own essence, the worker becomes alienated from the oppressed peoples targeted by the systems they code, from people in the geography where bombs fall, and even from the colleague working at the next desk on the same project.

Refusing to work at Palantir or similar military-surveillance companies is not an ordinary “career choice.” This act is a human and class response by the mental proletariat to its own crisis of alienation. The worker grasps that the monster they have created with their own hands will return to devour humanity and themselves.

The Limits of Individual Moralism and the Reserve Army of Labor

The recent refusal by young engineers graduating from universities such as Stanford, MIT, or Oxford to interview with Palantir, their protests of its booths, or their refusal to sign contracts are extremely valuable. Yet we must subject this stance to dialectical critique.

When a programmer says, “In conscience, I will not take part in Palantir’s war and surveillance projects; I refuse this job,” they remain within the limits of individual moralism.

Dialectical materialism explains why this individual refusal alone cannot stop the machinery of capitalist production:

1. The Reserve Army of Labor Steps In: Capitalism, by its nature, continually creates an army of unemployed and precarious people—the Reserve Army of Labor (Industrial Reserve Army). The place of an engineer who individually refuses the work for ethical reasons is immediately filled by capital. Another programmer with student-loan debt, dependent on a visa, or afraid of unemployment is placed in that chair.

2. Capital’s Power of Substitution: An individual refusal of conscience does not hinder Palantir’s or capital’s profit margin or military contracts. Capital buys off or overcomes individual moral resistance by offering higher salaries or stock options.

3. The Illusion of Conscientious Cleansing: The act of individual refusal offers the person the relief of “I did not dirty my hands.” But this stance does not transform the system itself; it only nourishes the individual’s illusion of remaining “clean” within the system.

Thus, the dialectical leap must lie here: individual conscientious refusal (moralism) must give way to collective class consciousness and action (praxis) that targets the infrastructure of production.

Individual Conscientious Refusal vs. Dialectical Materialist Class Consciousness

Dimension of Analysis	Individual Moralism (Moralistic Stance)	Dialectical Materialist Class Consciousness
Subject of Action	A singular, isolated programmer acting by conscience.	An organized, unionized mental proletariat that has forged class alliances.
Rationale	Personal morality, religious/human values, desire to “remain clean.”	Exposure of alienation and the aim of paralyzing the imperialist war apparatus and exploitation.
Effect on Capital	Weak. The reserve army of labor steps in; the seat is quickly filled.	Strong. The power to collectively withdraw code, data, and labor / strike.
Limits	Remains a personal stance in the labor market; does not transform the system.	Unites the struggle with data labelers, logistics workers, and workers in the field.
Ultimate Goal	Avoiding dirty companies and working at “ethical” companies.	Socializing the means of production in technology and defense industry.

Process Analysis: The Technology Worker’s Leap in Consciousness and the Labor Front

The historical development of technology workers’ class consciousness and forms of struggle follows three dialectical phases:

1. The Age of Techno-Utopian Blindness (1990s – 2010s): The myth: “We are making the world a better place.” Programmers saw themselves as an elite community exempt from capitalism’s exploitative relations, liberating the world. Alienation had not yet reached consciousness.

2. The Crisis of Alienation and Individual Shock (2010s – 2020s): Palantir, ICE scandals, AI targeting systems used in Israel’s genocide in Gaza (The Gospel, Lavender), and mass surveillance. The technology worker saw that the code they produced was a weapon of catastrophe. Individual refusals of conscience, work stoppages, and moralistic reactions erupted.

3. Collective Organization and Class Action (Present and Future): Recognition of the inadequacy of individual reactions. The formation of organizations such as Tech Workers Coalition and No Tech for Apartheid. Workers staging sit-ins at Google and Amazon and forcing the cancellation of military projects (Project Maven) through mass pressure. The phase in which individual conscience evolves into technology strikes and union organization.

Technology workers’ struggle cannot succeed as long as they isolate themselves from other sectors. Dialectical materialism calls on us to build a comprehensive Labor Front:

• Alliance with the Data Proletariat: The highly paid programmer and the traumatized data-labeling workers in Kenya and the Philippines who sift images of violence and murder in AI models for $1–2 an hour are parts of the same production chain.

• Unity with Logistics and Industrial Workers: The worker laboring under the pressure of robotic systems in Amazon’s warehouse shares an interest with the engineer developing the software for that robotic system.

• Collective Data and Code Strike: The greatest power technology workers possess is collectively withdrawing the mental capacity that operates the means of production. The decision, “We will not write another line of code, we will not maintain this server, we will not transfer this data to the military model you are processing,” has the same class character as throwing the factory switch.

Not Heroism, but Class Praxis!

Dear young comrades,

We salute the stance of young engineers refusing to work in Palantir or similar death machines. But we cannot freeze this stance into individual “moral heroism.”

The matter is not merely one of “cleanliness,” confined to keeping our conscience safe from capitalism’s filth. The matter is transforming the power of mental labor into an organized class weapon.

History will crack its shell when the technology workers of the future grasp that they are not isolated geniuses in ivory towers, but the mental proletariat at its keyboards.

Go beyond individual conscientious refusal! Organize in technology unions and united labor fronts!

For the code flowing from the keyboard will become instruments that liberate humanity from weapons through which capital surveils and destroys the masses only and exclusively in the hands of our organized class!

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Comparative Analysis: Idealist Illusion vs. Materialist Reality

The Epistemological Charter of Ideology: Why Is Illusion Produced?

Whenever the regime of accumulation enters a deep infrastructural crisis, bourgeois ideology doubles its speed in producing harmonious lies and gauzy concepts in the realm of the superstructure. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels showed in The German Ideology:

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: that is, the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”

In the age of late capitalism, conceptualizations such as “good capitalist,” “ethical entrepreneur,” “effective altruism,” or “AI safety” are not humanist ideas that emerged by accident. They are ideological apparatuses designed to conceal the irreconcilable contradiction between the private ownership of the means of production and the collective character of social production.

The idealist worldview detaches phenomena from matter; it constructs them on a vertical plane through abstract moral principles and individual intentions. Dialectical materialism, by contrast, grasps phenomena in their historical movement, their material foundations, class functions, and internal contradictions.

The conflict between these two worldviews is not merely a theoretical debate; it is a political line of demarcation that determines from what position class struggle will be waged.

Table of Systematic Comparison

The following table comprehensively summarizes the qualitative opposition between the harmonious lies of bourgeois idealism and the unshakable reality of dialectical materialism:

Dimension of Analysis	Bourgeois Idealist Illusion	Dialectical Materialist Reality
Motor of Historical Change	Individual intentions, genius entrepreneurs, ethical choices, and ideas.	Class struggle between productive forces and relations of production.
View of the Capitalist	Visionary leader guiding society and creating employment.	The personalized bearer of the laws of capital accumulation (G - M - G').
Status of the Technology Worker	A “creative class” and free mind living in an ivory tower.	A mental proletariat deprived of the means of production and alienated from its labor.
“Goodness” and Philanthropy	Rational altruism (Effective Altruism) that solves poverty and risk.	An ideological cover that launders surplus-value appropriation, avoids taxes, and puts the public to sleep.
Approach to Technology	A classless, neutral tool that liberates spontaneously.	Infrastructure shaped by class needs and dependent on physical property.
Individual Resistance (Palantir, etc.)	Personal conscientious cleansing, a moral refusal of work.	An initial stance overcome by the reserve army of labor, meaningful only if transformed into a collective strike.
Ultimate Goal / Solution	Reforming capitalism with “ethical” rules and finding good bosses.	Abolishing property relations and socializing the means of production.

The Dialectical Function of Illusion: The Pump That Drains Young Minds

After making this comparison, we must ask the following dialectical question: why does the order of capital keep these idealist illusions alive continuously?

The answer lies in the ideological security need of capital accumulation.

Young, educated, dynamic minds who pass through higher education, see injustice in the world, witness the plunder wrought by AI, and recognize that companies such as Palantir facilitate human slaughter carry immense explosive potential for the system. If these young minds encounter the dialectical-materialist method, the mental proletariat and manual proletariat will unite and target capital’s infrastructure.

This is precisely where the tales of the “Good Capitalist,” “Effective Altruism,” and the “Maverick Tech Hero” come into operation as a pump:

1. Channeling Anger into Harmless Paths: Young people’s desire for justice is diverted from class struggle toward “working at ethical companies,” “writing open-source code,” or “donating to charities.”

2. The Illusion of Fixing the System from Within: Youth are fed the lie, “You do not need to take to the streets, unionize, or question property; become a good programmer, work at the right company, and fix the world with your code.”

3. Conscientious Pacification: The young person who rejects Palantir through an individual protest is pacified by thinking they have stepped outside the system, while relations of production continue to operate robustly in the background.

An Epic Call to Comrades: Shatter the Illusion, Organize the Truth!

Dear young comrades,

This comparison between idealist illusion and materialist reality has not been presented to you as a theoretical exercise. This table is a political map of every key pressed on the keyboard before you, every project you work on, and every day you live!

Leave behind the harmonious lies offered to you by the bourgeois world, its packaging of false goodness, and Silicon Valley’s “ethical” fairy tales.

See the truth:

• There are no conscientious bosses; there are laws of capital accumulation!

• There is no neutral technology; there is private ownership of the means of production!

• There is no individual salvation or chance to remain clean; there is collective class struggle!

Clear your mind of capital’s ideological opium. Rather than withdrawing to islands of individual morality, organize the united power of mental and manual labor.

For what will change the world is not the mercy of philanthropic billionaires, but our organized class consciousness, set into action by grasping the truth!

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From Individual “Goodness” to Collective Liberation — The Future Is Us!

Dear Young Comrades, True Owners of Mental and Physical Labor!

We know the deep loneliness and suffocating feeling you experience in capital’s data centers, surveillance towers, isolated home offices, and the cold shadow of algorithms. Late capitalism has woven over you not only a web of economic exploitation, but also a gigantic ideological web that whispers that “everything is your own fault or your own choice.”

At the historical crossroads we have reached today, there is one final poisoned apple offered to you by the bourgeois world: the illusion of “remaining clean” by withdrawing to islands of individual conscience.

Silicon Valley’s false prophets, the charlatans of “Effective Altruism,” and the liberal spokespeople of the order continuously prescribe the same pacifist formula: “The system may be bad, but you be a good person. Work at the right company, consume ethical products, reject projects that trouble your conscience, and become an individual hero by writing the magic code that will change the world.”

Tear this tale apart and throw it away!

In the merciless laboratory of history, dialectical materialism has proven this truth again and again: in a system built on the private ownership of the means of production, individual good deeds cannot stop the machinery of exploitation resting upon shoulders; on the contrary, they function as oil that conceals the creaking of those gears.

The fact that you personally have not soiled your hands does not prevent the capitalist death machine from finding someone else in the “Reserve Army of Labor” to work in your place. Someone else will write the war code you refuse; someone else will take the exorbitant monopoly salary you reject. Capital will record individual crises of conscience as a minor cost deviation and continue on its way.

So the time has come to stop being moralistic “spectators” and become historical subjects who intervene in history’s dialectical flow. What we need is not individual absolution of conscience, but systematic destruction and reconstruction!

The Transition from Individual Conscience to Class Praxis

We must clearly determine the coordinates of the transition from the pacifying moralism of bourgeois ideology to transformative Marxist class praxis:

Dimension of Analysis	Pacifist Bourgeois Moralism (Illusion)	Revolutionary Class Praxis (Materialist Reality)
Stance in a Crisis	“I will not be complicit in this crime; I will quit.”	“I will stop production, shut down the server, withdraw the code!”
Method of Struggle	Ethical consumption, refusing a résumé, individual resignation.	Technology unionism, digital strikes, collective bargaining.
Organizational Goal	Fleeing dirty companies and finding “good” companies.	Building a broad Labor Front and bringing every company to its knees.
Historical Horizon	Taming capitalism from within through conscience.	Socializing the means of production and abolishing property.
Definition of the Subject	The moral, talented individual in an ivory tower.	The exploited, dispossessed mental proletariat.

The Historical Alliance of the Keyboard and the Wrench

Capital monopolies spend billions of dollars to separate the engineer who writes code from the data labeler in Africa, and the data scientist who designs an algorithm from the motorcycle courier sweating under the whip of that algorithm; they build artificial class walls between them. By saying “You are not like them; you are the creative class,” they isolate mental labor.

Yet the objective reality is clear: an AI engineer in Silicon Valley and a packing worker in an Amazon warehouse are different gears in the same capitalist machine. One produces that machine’s mental software, the other carries its physical load; yet both are dispossessed workers alienated from the value they produce and from the means of production.

Our liberation lies in tearing down these artificial walls. The future will be built when the encrypted world of the technology worker and the sweaty world of the industrial worker unite; when the keyboard and the wrench stand side by side on the same class barricade.

We Will Take Back Our Common Intellect (General Intellect)!

As Marx foresaw with genius, the internet, AI algorithms, and immense data libraries today are humanity’s “General Intellect.” The accumulation of thousands of years of language, art, science, and social interaction has been imprisoned in the private-property shells of a few technology monopolies (OpenAI, Google, Meta, Palantir), encircled by “digital fences.”

They grew by stealing the language we speak, the texts we produce, and our digital footprints. Now they sell this collective intelligence that belongs to us back to us as a weapon, a threat of unemployment, and an apparatus of surveillance.

We will not submit to this!

Our struggle cannot be confined to begging for “fairer algorithms” or “higher royalty payments.” Our ultimate goal is to wrest these productive forces, humanity’s common inheritance, from the hands of the capitalists who enclose them. If we produce, then we will govern! We will not stop until servers, fiber networks, data centers, and code libraries become the common commons of humanity.

And the Final Word...

Never despair in this age when darkness is most intense and capital appears invincible. No matter how high capitalism builds its towers, it cannot abolish the contradictions in their foundations—the labor-capital contradiction. They are compelled every day to reproduce their own gravediggers—mental and physical labor—more equipped and more massive than before.

Leave dreams of individual salvation behind. Tear away capitalism’s false masks of “goodness.” Take up the bare sword of truth! Come together in unions, professional organizations, and committees.

You are not alone; you are not helpless. You are the ones who write the code, process the data, run the machines, and create life! The moment you throw the switch, capital’s paper empire will collapse.

Leave fear to the masters of capital. Close ranks!

Another world is not merely possible; it is an objective necessity.

There is no liberation alone: either all of us together, or none of us!

THE FUTURE IS US!