By the Basic Needs Electoral Committee of the League
Technofascism is the open, terroristic dictatorship of corporate capital in the era of digital production and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The resistance to the rapidly advancing police state is setting the United States on fire. Many blame individual politicians, but it is important to see beyond the personalities. Technofascism is driven by the inability of the private property economy to meet the needs of the people.
AI can create either a dismal future for humanity or the best future the world has ever known – depending on who owns and controls it. It can enslave us all to the pursuit of profits for billionaires or it can be used for the benefit of all humanity. The outcome is up to the working class, which has enough people power to defeat the corporate money power – if it unites.
ECONOMIC BASIS OF TECHNOFASCISM
We think of Trump and MAGA as the disrupter, but it is actually the revolutionary new technology that is driving the change we are experiencing. Just as the steam engine ended previous ways of living, digital technology and AI are ending life as we knew it in the twentieth century. Digital technology is slashing the need for human workers – first manual labor and now knowledge workers. AI is behind not only the Elon Musk purge of government workers, but also the mass layoffs in Silicon Valley. We are at a critical turning point.
The problem for corporate billionaires is that digital AI undercuts the basis of the capitalist economy, which depends on wage labor to generate profits and also provides a means of survival for workers – a job. The questions obsessing corporate capitalists today are how can they keep their wealth flowing without the same capacity to continue exploiting human beings and why should they support the working class with programs like public education, Social Security, food stamps, and Medicaid/Medicare when they no longer need them for production? Increasingly, the ruling class views working class needs as a roadblock to extracting maximum profit.
THE MAGA REGIME
For the MAGA regime, the answer is to move rapidly to the fascist form of state. Through DOGE, it is allowing corporations to manipulate state power to extract wealth from the public treasury. It undermines all our remaining civil rights and constitutional protections in order to attack and punish any section of the working class that resists. Armed men in ICE uniforms are terrorizing migrants, attacking protesters and seizing people with no warrants, no proof, no hearings and no appeals and flying them out of the country to concentration camps.
MAGA leaders attack the working class as parasitic and useless. They challenge the very existence of people of color, seniors, poor people, people with disabilities, queer and trans people, youth, women, non-citizens and migrants. They kill all government programs that benefit working people.
Immigrants are scapegoated with the lie that they steal jobs and resources, when actually it is digital devices and robots that are replacing humans in the workplace. Protesters are branded as terrorists. Resistance to Israeli genocide is attacked as a threat to national security. Blacks, people of color and the unhoused are blamed for the systemic failures of capitalism. “Christian nationalism” provides false religious justification for racial and gender hierarchies.
THE ‘NETWORK STATE’
In his 2022 book, “The Network State: How to Start a New Country,” Silicon Valley programmer Balaji Srinivasan defines the Network State as “a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.”
Another Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Curtis Yarvin, has shown how a Network State can be created inside an existing country and, in particular, inside the U.S. government. He argues that democracy is too slow and clumsy to use in the digital 21st century, and advocates for a CEO who “will run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts, probably also taking over state and local governments. Most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems.”
The more traditional fascist Steve Bannon claims that the Trump administration is creating the Network State now: “Everything Elon Musk and his tech cronies are doing to our government is what Balaji Srinivasan spelled out in his network state cult manifesto – a tech CEO takeover of a government, the purging of institutions, the rise of crypto corruption as a dominant economic force, the quest for new territory.” Technofascism is actually betraying much of Trump’s MAGA base by cutting the social programs many of its members depend on.
STRATEGIC RESISTANCE
More than five million people turned out nationwide on April 5 to demonstrate their fierce resistance to the attacks on electoral democracy and social welfare. This is what Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts was referring to when he said the implementation of Project 2025 fascism “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” The working class has no choice but to rebel. The Trump administration is already using violence against them. It pardoned the January 6 paramilitaries. It is deploying ICE as a political police agency, unrestrained by any law or court. It is preparing to invoke the Insurrection Act to transform the military into a mercenary force, accountable to no one except billionaire corporations. But in spite of all this, there is still nothing as powerful as an organized working class, inspired by the vision of the better world that is possible.
Defeating fascism requires a strategy and a plan, based on organizing and educating the workers, and keeping their struggle on course. We dare not allow ourselves to be led back into the fold of the pro-corporate Democrats, whose failure allowed for the emergence of MAGA in the first place. Mistreatment of workers by a ruling class that no longer needs them will not stop until the working class wins the fight to overturn corporate private property and build a cooperative economy that guarantees everyone’s basic needs.
