SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: the recent 22-point manifesto from Palantir Technologies is the confession that imperialism can only survive through war.

Translated from Spanish

The technological bourgeoisie has stopped pretending: the recent 22-point manifesto from Palantir Technologies is the confession that imperialism can only survive through war. This outburst of sincerity ushers in a new era in the development of the productive forces, where AI rises as the mechanism of capital's survival against its own historical contradictions. In response to this publication, characterizations of technofeudalism, technofascism, or simply fascism on Palantir's part have not been lacking, which reveals the inability of a sector of the communist movement that seems not to grasp the phase change we are in. To combat figures like Musk, Thiel, and Karp, a rigorous reading of this manifesto is necessary.

Palantir does not seek to be a mere government contractor, but rather represents a specific bourgeois fraction—the new Silicon Valley technological bourgeoisie—in its dispute for hegemony over the U.S. deep state. In this intra-bourgeois struggle, where the extractive industrial bourgeoisie, Wall Street financial capital, and the bureaucratic caste compete, this new startup bourgeoisie that Palantir represents aspires to impose its total dominance by supplying the algorithmic infrastructure to the state. Its offer to the state is not just software; it is the promise of an unprecedented fusion between the technological monopoly and the repressive apparatus, using our data as raw material to sell it back to the state itself in the form of surveillance.

By proposing the total integration of AI into the defensive and military apparatus, they seek to resolve one of capitalism's deadly contradictions. Artificial Intelligence represents an existential threat to the very foundations of capitalism: by generating the material conditions for near-absolute automation of production, it expels living labor from the production process. Since only living labor generates surplus value, this development sharply exacerbates the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and worsens the crisis of overaccumulation and valorization of capital. The objective conditions for a post-capitalist system are on the table.

Precisely for this reason, the technological bourgeoisie needs to redirect AI. Instead of integrating it massively into production to free the worker from the burden of labor, they divert it toward military surveillance, social control, and geopolitical deterrence. The militarization of AI and the imposition of a permanent climate of armed peace act as an artificial mechanism for absorbing excess capital. This is not a technological advance for human well-being, but the creation of new market niches funded from the public purse to minimize the capital-labor contradiction and protect the current structure of property.

Aimé Césaire was right to speak of a “terrible shock in return” and explain that the violence exercised by imperialists on the periphery ends up returning to the metropolis, and the application of Palantir's practices is no exception. This company has trained and professionalized its military technology in the genocide of Gaza, and now these practices return to the imperialist core countries as a boomerang effect. Without going any further, Palantir's technology has been used by ICE for monitoring, surveillance, and detention in the U.S., and it will be used massively to discipline and repress the working class.

The era of 21st-century authoritarianism looms. Those who see fascism in Trump, Abascal, Meloni, and other political leaders are losing sight of the structural change that companies like Palantir and capitalism in its current stage of development represent. The real threat to the working class has always been, is, and will be capitalism and its constant adaptation to technological development, which the bourgeoisie always uses against the workers. This new authoritarianism aligns with the tenets of neoreactionism and the Dark Enlightenment of figures like Nick Land or Curtis Yarvin: total, predictive, physical, and mental control through the internet and artificial intelligence. This proposal to militarize AI responds to the urgency of restructuring capital's profitability and preparing for the struggle over the reconfiguration of global spheres of influence against powers like China and Russia.

At the same time, the manifesto distills a chauvinistic and supremacist Westernism, implicitly categorizing civilizations between those "functional" ones that deserve to prevail and those "backward" ones that can be discarded. This is the same ideological inheritance that justifies neocolonial siege and absolute contempt for the victims of the imperialist war machine. The deployment of militarized AI will inaugurate a new international hierarchization. The gap between countries that monopolize these new tools and those subordinated to them will generate new forms of neocolonial domination. It is imperialism's adaptation to the algorithmic era, where the national sovereignty of peripheral states will be directly annulled from the servers of Big Tech.

It is not a problem of the development of the productive forces, of technological development itself. We must not fall into neo-Luddism because the error does not lie in AI or its development, but in the regime of private property. The tools that Palantir designs today for predictive counterrevolution, imperialist war, and profit maximization are the same tools that, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, this processing capacity would optimize the distribution of resources, debureaucratize administration, and enable truly rational and revolutionary economic planning.

The challenge posed by Palantir's advance demands the formulation of a new What Is to Be Done? adapted to the conditions of 21st-century hypervigilance. Overcoming harmless performative militancy is the first step, and taking seriously the current repressive reality is the second. No movement, party, or organization that considers itself communist can be considered as such if it does not take into account the new conditions and rules of the game that the bourgeoisie is imposing on us. Rethinking militancy, improving the clandestine work aspect, and professionalizing the security of communist activity is mandatory if we truly want to advance in the class struggle.

The day will come when companies like Palantir are completely expropriated and all their technological advances are put at the service of the working class.

Oier Pérez Mancisidor
@OierPerezM

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Palantir

@PalantirTech

Apr 19

Because we get asked a lot.

The Technological Republic, in brief.

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

2. We must rebel