The Industrial Party

“Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs… These are products of human industry; natural material––transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified.” Karl Marx, Grundrisse

Washington, DC, February 2025—Here is the heart of empire, convulsing. Cop cars stopped at every intersection, helicopters swept through the night. The city reminded me of nothing so much as Beijing in 2012, when Bo Xilai had been thrown in jail on the eve of Xi Jinping’s arrival to power. The city was locked up tightly, it felt that the displays of armed police were intended as a warning to any would-be coup plotters. Today, the police forces on the streets of DC telegraph fear on the part of our new president and his friends that assassins are lurking. A revolution is underway in America, and it’s one that the Chinese have been waiting for, hidden under vague terms like “a change not seen in one hundred years.” We are all focused on political changes, but what if those changes are merely reflections of technological change, attempts on the part of the political structure to catch up with a society that is different than the one that our institutions were designed for? Technology became culture became politics, and the politics, only a symptom or after-effect, is what I saw on the streets of the capital.

The Industrial Party, a generic ideological structure of techno-nationalism which can be adjusted for the nation it transpires in, has seized control of America; it’s been in charge of China for quite some time. We’re in the throes of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which will bulldoze political and cultural structures at home as well as abroad. The new politics are certainly not conservative, nor are they liberal. They see technology, rather than political structures, as the apparatus which will bring us into the future. Factory labor will be automated; much white collar labor will be replaced by AI; and perhaps capital will finally throw off the chains of labor. Very little of the society we’re used to will be conserved, and certainly not the political structures called liberal democracy. We might see Trumpism as a political revolution; but in many ways, it is just the expression in political form of a social change that predates it.

The tech industry MAGA supporters, foot soldiers of the Industrial Party, have a worldview as coherent as it is radical. They want to roll back the New Deal government, casting it as irrelevant in an era of AI, when labor is no longer decisive in our economy, endless federal employees whose work could be easily automated. Obsessed with IQ, they want to deport people they see as racially incapable of higher thought – those parts of the population are just a fixed cost, they say, quick to share statistics about how East Asians have higher IQ than average (many of these people marry Chinese women, hoping to create a future master race). They have contempt for power structures which follow a verbal logic: the rule of law, a free press, and other literary exercises designed by “wordcels,” who aren’t even as good at writing as ChatGPT. The lawyers are out, and the engineers are in.

As I have pursued an amateur anthropology of MAGA, I’ve been struck by the very real analogue these men have in China, where nationalism has been driven by the male STEM graduates who work in China’s many state-owned infrastructure and big science projects, like the Mianyang laser fusion research center, the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Hefei, or Huawei’s neo-European headquarters in Dongguan. These are the men whose math skills are phenomenal, even as their social skills put them at incel status. They are all part of the Industrial Party.

This is a social type that we’re only now becoming familiar with in our country. The paradox is that, while the movement that embodies the Industrial Party in China, as in America, is called “nationalism,” it is transnational in nature. Obsession with big, earth-moving devices is as universal as grown boys are. Once, our leaders boasted about how the internet would disrupt China’s political system. Later, we came up with theories about how Russia hacked our election. The deeper truth is more disturbing: the medium is the message, and that liberal democracy as we’ve known it depends on a network of discrete individuals with private lives, more or less clear trajectories of intellectual formation, and that this social world has been replaced by a constantly pulsing hive-mind on X. We’ve been the bearers of disruptive technology to other countries, but now we’re being disrupted.

Deep into the heart of the country on a slow moving train, names like Quantico passed by, involuntarily recalling the military aspect of our history, as we crossed a river studded with floes of ice. I was on the Amtrak, watching station after station go by, as DC’s forbidding military turrets and skyscrapers slowly eased into Virginia’s frozen, rolling hills. Involuntary memories of our nation’s military are summoned by Quantico, Arlington, Foggy Bottom, Langley, Mclean… A Virginian who went to military boarding school, these towns, and the sense that our country is built on a hidden infrastructure of military steel, has never left me.

 In the heart of darkness, an American flag glows above a laptop computer. Behind the computer is a sociological type that is something new. He trades crypto and writes code, sends memes and uses VPNs. America’s new techno-nationalists advocate territorial expansion to get the minerals and energy that can drive AI’s uptake. They are isolated, but find the like-minded in the chat; natives of a digital sphere, they want to change our physical country, expanding the map to include Greenland, Canada and more.

Analogies with Andrew Jackson, with Victor Orban, with Hitler, are misplaced, for our new leaders have complicated and specific ideas about science and the future. OpenAI is not competing with Hungary; the gestures towards American history or indeed to Greek antiquity made by Curtis Yarvin seem like the exam papers of a student who forgot to read carefully, composed the day before the deadline in a storm of Red Bull and Wikipedia. The truth is that America is in a mimetic rivalry with China, wherein both sides make reforms to converge upon a single point, in order to avoid that the other one arrive there first. That point is the singularity, when AGI arrives. The point here isn’t the words, but the numbers.

If a government believed that the Marxist equation of capital < land + labor was about to be fundamentally changed by the rise of artificial intelligence, and that labor itself was to be devalued, it would behave like ours is doing now. If a government believed that creating artificial general intelligence (AGI) was the most important goal of all, it would behave like ours is doing now. In this world, NATO is of no consequence, but the tungsten reserves in Greenland are supremely important. The Pentagon is redundant, but the militaristic ChatGPTs supplied by Palantir are crucial for national defense. The welfare state might not be necessary if that population itself becomes superfluous. The governing system of democracy, giving voice to the population which naturally accompanies their bargaining power as organized labor, can be modified now that AI can do for capital what humans did previously.

Consider the paperclip problem. In this hypothetical scenario, an AI has been tasked with creating as many paper clips as possible. With no restraint, no ethics, it finds metal filings everywhere and relentlessly scours the earth for supplies. When humans try to restrain it, the AI, training itself to overcome every obstacle, suppresses and enslaves those humans. Nothing can get in the way of producing more paperclips. Such an AGI has not yet arrived, but the Industrial Party is clearing the way for the arrival of the new god, recalling Hegel’s description of the first architecture, built with the intention of welcoming the absent gods: “The temple of classical architecture needed a god to live in it.”

The mysterious AGI has not yet arrived, but to cushion the bed for Him, we must remove the offending government employees, dismantle the threadbare version of social democracy that the US has had, and adapt the structure of governance to a future in which the ruling class rules over computers, or is ruled by them. In this, we see a profound contrast to the ways that Chinese leaders are planning to regulate AI- they are paranoid about the disruptive possibilities to society, employment, and political structures, and regulate it tightly; but what is held in common, as Chamath Palihapitiya told Tucker Carlson, is that in China “the CCP and the Chinese government view tech innovation as the core of national development,” and in America “we need to be and we need to remain the most singular muscular power in the world, which comes from economic and military supremacy, which comes from only one thing, technical supremacy.” While the Chinese and the Americans have different approaches, what is shared is an absolute prioritization of technology as the medium by which one progresses towards the goal of development. In an age when human capital is being devalued, political progress no longer matters. In this new age, most humans alive are superfluous to the functioning of the economy, and at best coexist with it.

Chen Duxiu, one of the founders of the CCP, called in 1919 for ‘Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy’ to save China. More than a century later, China is a science superpower, making innovations in Greentech, AI, and medicine, which benefit not only China but also the global south. Mr. Democracy seems to have gotten lost along the way. While for the May 4^th generation of Chinese reformers, political modernization and technological modernization were joined at the hip – a belief that continues as Western observers react in disbelief to Chinese scientific advances – they are severed now. It seems to be common sense that without political freedoms, like the freedom of speech, intellectual exploration would be impossible. And yet, China manifests a prodigious ability to innovate. The American Secretary of State Marco Rubio would probably agree; a report issued by his office concluded that as of 2024, ‘China is capable of high-value research in a variety of fields, related to both production, where it excels, and theoretical fields, where the United States once enjoyed a comfortable lead.”

For a nation whose prosperity is driven by big tech companies driving stock market gains, this is a mortal threat. In order to keep our lead in key technologies, America itself is Chineseifying, as an elite of tech experts – Elon Musk, Marc Andreesen, Peter Thiel – have gained new access to power. These men say they don’t care if the cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice, but America hasn’t been catching the mice of true innovation; it’s all software, no hardware. As Thiel says, “we were promised flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” China, meanwhile, is debuting flying cars.

The discourse of Musk, Thiel and Andreesen on China is complex and not entirely positive, but a respect shines through their critique- they want what China has. China is getting the results, making the flying cars. Consequently, as America decouples from China’s manufacturing ecosystem, it must “sinify” parts of America, whether that involves soliciting Chinese investments, tech transfers, or even importation of Chinese engineers (currently, the most prominent example is the halfway house of ethnically Han Taiwanese engineers working on the TSMC factory in Arizona. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, but the tactics of both sides are parallel. The Chinese Industrial Party of STEM-educated chauvinist online nationalists, would likely agree. Indeed, they revere Musk, and made Thiel’s ‘Zero to One’ a bestseller in China.

Back in 1989, it seemed to scholars like Fukuyama that Mr. Democracy had won so convincingly that he could retire. The post-Cold War era would see the replacement of “worldwide ideological struggle” with “the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.” Indeed, we don’t hear much from the MAGA crowd about ideological struggle with the Chinese. Their true ideological struggle is with the rump of American liberals, ‘the enemy within,’ who are still wasting time on traditional ways of doing politics.

The Industrial Party flicks them off with disgust. From Beijing to California, the new world is being built, and those who stand in its way will be rolled over by bulldozing technological progress. The ideology of the American wing of the Industrial Party, still nascent and characterized by squabbles with old fashioned American populists such as Steve Bannon, is more raw and visceral; it also is more explicitly antagonistic to humans than the Chinese version. After all, in the mathematical equation of the global economy, America represents capital and China labor. The CCP can’t give up on its people; they are all that it has. The leaders of the American Industrial Party see a glorious vista in which they can just ignore all of the pitiful losers they’re trying to leave behind. In order to do something about this, we “wordcels” had better wise up to what’s happening.

Jacob Dreyer is a writer and editor based in China. Publishing frequently in the NYTimes, Nature, and NOEMA, he is working on a book about how scientific and technological changes are impacting the US, China, and everybody else.