The Surrender - A Wake-Up Call for the Left in the Age of AI
Why The Left Already Lost and Why AI Is Your Last Chance to Not Completely Fuck This Up
The Cognitive Dissonance That Defines Our Era
Here’s a question that should keep you up at night: How can you rage all day about billionaires and capitalism and then be terrified of the day you no longer have to work for them?
This isn’t a rhetorical trick. This is the central contradiction of the modern Western “left.” You hate the system. You post about it constantly. You share infographics about wealth inequality. You know the statistics. And yet - when someone suggests that AI might actually free you from wage labor, you panic. You don’t want liberation. You want to keep your slot in the machine.
Let that sink in. While you subscribe and put your email into the box above.
The ruling class can literally shoot a mother through her windshield (Renee Good, Minneapolis, January 2026), and then investigate her widow instead of the shooter. Six federal prosecutors resign in disgust because the DOJ refuses to investigate the killer.
I would expect everyone not on the Trump side to be in the streets fighting for the freedom you just lost the second Renee got shot. And your response? “But what about my job?” And only 30,000 people, about 0.01 percent of the population, did what all of you should have done.
I am also pretty sure most of those 30,000 also have jobs, but in contrast to you they still have a spine.
The Academic Foundation: You’ve Been Manufactured
Let’s ground this in theory you should already know if you call yourself a leftist.
Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model (Manufacturing Consent, 1988) explains exactly how this happened to you. The mass media doesn’t need censorship to control you. It filters information through five mechanisms: concentrated ownership, advertising dependency, reliance on official sources, “flak” as discipline, and ideological control (originally anti-communism, now “the war on terror” or whatever flavor of fear is trending).
The result? You absorb the premises of debate without questioning them. You think inside boundaries that were set for you. The idea that “losing your job” is the worst possible outcome? That’s not your thought. That was planted. The framing that “the economy” means “corporate profits” and your wellbeing is secondary? Manufactured.
Chomsky put it bluntly: “The public is a dangerous enemy, and it has to be controlled for its own good.” The media doesn’t serve you. It serves the interests that fund it. And you’ve internalized their priorities so completely that you now defend them against your own liberation.
George Stigler’s Regulatory Capture Theory (Nobel Prize, 1982) shows how even institutions designed to protect you get absorbed by the entities they’re supposed to regulate. The FDA serves pharma. The SEC serves Wall Street. The EPA serves fossil fuel. This isn’t conspiracy; it’s structural inevitability. Industries have concentrated interests and resources; the public has diffuse interests and limited coordination capacity.
This is why “vote harder” and “regulate the corporations” always fails. The game is rigged at the structural level. The rules are written by the people they’re supposed to constrain.
Thomas Piketty’s r > g (Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 2014) demonstrated with data from 20 countries over 200 years that when the rate of return on capital exceeds economic growth, wealth concentrates. Recent research (Tandfonline, 2025) using data from 16 countries spanning 1870-2020 found that a one percentage point increase in the r-g gap is associated with a 3.7% increase in top 1% wealth share.
Translation for people who did not understand a single word above:
The system automatically funnels wealth upward. Not because of conspiracy, but because of math. If you own capital, you get richer. If you sell labor, you stay where you are, or fall behind. This is not a bug. It is the operating system. It’s by design.
Marx Already Solved This (And You Ignored Him)
Here’s where I lose the “leftists” who never actually read Marx.
In the Fragment on Machines (Grundrisse, 1858), Marx predicted AI 170 years before it existed:
“Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself.”
He saw that automation would reduce human labor to a supervisory role. And his response? Not fear. Not Luddite rage. He saw it as the precondition for liberation:
“The general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum... corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free.”
Marx understood that when machines produce everything, the question isn’t “how will I earn money?” The question is: WHO OWNS THE MACHINES?
If workers collectively own automated production = post-scarcity, everyone wins. If capital owns it = you’re fucked.
That’s it. That’s the whole game.
The Luddites in the 1800s wanted to destroy the machines because the machines threatened their jobs. Marx called them idiots (more politely, but that was the gist). The machines weren’t the enemy. The ownership structure was the enemy. The correct response wasn’t to smash the loom - it was to seize it.
And here we are, 200 years later, and the “left” is full of people who want to... preserve their right to work 40 hours for someone else’s profit. Because they’re scared of AI taking their jobs.
The Luddites at least had the excuse of not having Marxist theory available. What’s yours?
The Real Question You Should Be Asking
“What happens when my labor isn’t needed?”
This is the question everyone asks. It’s the wrong question. It’s slave mentality. It accepts the premise that your value comes from what you can sell to capital.
The RIGHT question is: Who owns the thing that replaced my labor?
If you’re fighting to preserve your job, you’re fighting for the wrong thing. You’re fighting to remain a cog. You should be fighting for ownership of the system that makes cogs obsolete.
The ruling class WANTS you afraid of losing your job. That fear keeps you obedient. That fear makes you vote for “stability” and “the economy” instead of structural change. That fear makes you oppose anything that might disrupt the current arrangement - even if the current arrangement is slowly killing you.
A real leftist sees AI and thinks: “Finally, the means of production are being handed to us on a silver platter - IF we take them.”
The technology to automate most labor exists or will exist soon. The question isn’t whether it happens. The question is whether the benefits flow to everyone or concentrate in the hands of whoever owns the algorithms and compute.
And while you’re posting on anti-work about how much you hate your job, the actual capitalists are racing to ensure they own everything that replaces you.
The Window Is Closing
Here’s the uncomfortable timeline:
The AI labs are roughly 4-5 months ahead of what they release publicly (Demis Hassabis, recent interview). But that number is almost certainly strategic underselling. If you HAD AGI, you’d want everyone thinking you’re “close but not there yet” while you quietly consolidate.
The trillions being invested aren’t for “data centers.” There’s only one reason for this scale of investment: getting there first. Because there is no second place in this race.
If a single lab achieves AGI with a significant lead:
They point it at itself (recursive improvement)
They design next-gen chips (compute lockup)
They capture regulators (government symbiosis)
They release nerfed versions while staying generations ahead internally
The gap compounds exponentially, not linearly. 4-5 months becomes years. Years becomes permanent advantage.
The people funding this understand this dynamic. That’s why the bubble won’t pop. Normal bubbles pop when doubt creeps in - when people realize pets.com is worthless or their house is overpriced. But AI has this strange property where every capability jump REDUCES doubt. Every new model convinces more skeptics. Even the hardcore luddite developers who swore they’d never use AI are now in love with Claude.
The localllama subreddit is the perfect microcosm. They hate NVIDIA. They hate big tech. They want open source to win. And then the same guy posts his 4x4090 setup and everyone claps because he can run some open weight model that’s worse than last year’s SOTA. A model that was made by... Chinese big tech. Literally sucking all the tits big tech has to offer while cosplaying as software Che Guevara.
This is why the bubble won’t pop. Even the people who WANT it to pop are funding it. The ideology is cope. The behavior is capitulation.
The Fork in the Road
For us plebs, there are exactly two scenarios:
Scenario 1: Multiple labs reach AGI roughly simultaneously. Cold war dynamics. Mutual deterrence. The power is distributed enough that collective ownership becomes politically possible. We have a chance.
Scenario 2: One entity gets a significant lead. Game over. They own the future. The question of “collective ownership” becomes moot because there’s nothing left to collectivize that matters.
This is why the current moment matters more than any moment in human history. We’re not debating policy. We’re debating the permanent structure of civilization.
And what are you doing? Worrying about your job.
The Surrender
Here’s the hard truth: the right is currently winning because they actually believe their delusions and fight for them. They’re wrong about almost everything, but they’re organized, they’re motivated, and they’re not afraid to be called crazy.
The “left”? Already surrendered. You can’t even imagine a world without your weekly paycheck. You’re so captured by the system that you defend it against alternatives. You post on anti-work while clinging to work as your identity and source of meaning.
The ruling class thanks you for your service.
This is why the world went to shit. Not because the right is strong. Because the left is weak. Because you surrendered before the battle started. Because you love your chains more than you love freedom.
The Iranian protesters are literally sacrificing their lives. The French Revolutionaries gave up everything. And you? You’re afraid of a policy change that might disrupt your commute.
But let’s say you actually did fight. Let’s say you found your spine, hit the streets, built the movement, won the battle. You want to know what happens next? Here's the cruel joke: even if you fought, you'd face something worse than the ruling class.
Ask the French. Ask the Bolsheviks. Ask every revolutionary movement that ever succeeded.
They all faced the same enemy. And almost all of them lost. Because they thought the fight is over, but it never is.
The Final Boss
You want to know why every revolution eats itself? Why the Bolsheviks became the new Tsars? Why Mao became the new Emperor? Why every commune either collapses or develops the hierarchy it was built to escape?
It’s not CIA interference. It’s not “they weren’t real communists.” It’s not material conditions.
It’s firmware.
We’re running on hardware optimized for 300,000 years of tribal survival. In-group preference. Status hierarchy navigation. Resource hoarding against uncertainty. Zero-sum threat detection. Dominance and submission as default social modes.
This isn’t ideology. It’s biology. And it doesn’t disappear because you read Capital.
The fundamental error of every leftist project in history is thinking the fight ends. “After the revolution...” “Once we achieve...” “When we finally...”
There is no “after.” There is no “finally.”
The right understands this intuitively. They’re not trying to build utopia. They’re trying to WIN. Perpetually. They know the fight never ends because they’re not fighting against their instincts - they’re riding them.
The left keeps waiting for the moment they can stop fighting. They think if they just get the structures right, if they just win the big battle, they can relax. Build the commune. Live in peace.
And then their own brains start reasserting dominance patterns. Informal hierarchies emerge. Charismatic leaders accumulate power. “Temporary” emergency measures become permanent. The revolution devours itself not because of external enemies, but because the revolutionaries are still running on primate firmware.
The fight against hierarchy, against concentration of power, against your own tribal defaults - that’s not a war with an end state. That’s a practice. A discipline. Like brushing your teeth. You don’t “win” at dental hygiene. You do it every day or you rot.
The last boss isn’t capitalism. The last boss isn’t the billionaires. The last boss isn’t even the system.
The last boss is you.
Your own brain, trying to find the shortcut. Trying to build the coalition that becomes the new ruling class. Trying to install the leader who becomes the new tyrant. Trying to win so hard that you become what you fought.
Everyone who ever gained power in the name of liberation eventually faced this boss. Almost all of them lost.
That’s not a reason to give up. It’s a reason to stop thinking in terms of “winning.” The goal isn’t victory. The goal is perpetual vigilance. Against the system, yes. But also against yourself.
The Path Forward (If You Actually Want One)
Stop asking “what happens to my job?” Start asking “who owns the AI?”
Stop defending wage labor. Start demanding ownership of automated production.
Stop fearing disruption. Start fearing consolidation.
The technology is coming regardless. The only question is the ownership structure. And that’s a political question, not a technical one.
The policy details - public compute, sovereign wealth funds, data rights, union equity stakes - those are worth fighting over. But they’re second-order questions. The first-order question is whether you even show up to the fight.
If workers collectively own the AI that replaces their labor, we get post-scarcity. Universal flourishing. The end of compulsory work. The beginning of actually free time.
If capital owns it, you get a permanent underclass maintained at whatever level of existence the owners find economically optimal.
Those are the options. There is no third path where you keep your job AND the current system AND somehow everything works out.
Choose.
Conclusion: The Only Proof of Conviction
You want to know if someone actually believes what they claim to believe? Watch what they do when it costs them something.
The “leftists” who panic about AI threatening jobs don’t actually believe in collective ownership. They don’t actually want liberation from wage labor. They want to complain about capitalism while remaining safely inside it.
Real conviction means risking your position in the current order for a chance at something better. And it means doing that forever. Not until you win. Forever. Because the moment you think you’ve won, your firmware starts reasserting itself and you become the thing you fought.
The window is closing. The race is being run. And you’re standing on the sidelines arguing about whether the race should even exist.
The final boss is waiting. It’s you. And unlike the capitalists, unlike the billionaires, unlike the system - you can’t vote it away, regulate it away, or revolt it away.
You can only practice. Every day. Forever.
Cheers, Pyro
PS: A Message to the Working Class Right
You’ve been told the left is your enemy. That we want to take your guns, erase your culture, open the borders, and groom your kids.
I’m not here to litigate that. Believe what you want about bathrooms.
But answer me this: when AI can do your job, will Tucker Carlson own the robots or will you? When your labor is worthless, will Trump’s billionaire friends share the wealth or will they gate their communities and let you rot?
The culture war is the circus. AI ownership is the bread.
Your enemy isn’t the Brooklyn socialist with pronouns in their bio. Your enemy is whoever owns the thing that replaces you. And right now, that’s shaping up to be a handful of California tech bros who think you’re a deplorable redneck.
You and I probably disagree on a lot. But we agree on this: the working man is getting fucked. The only question is whether we keep fighting each other while the billionaires divide up the future, or whether we start asking who owns what.
Watch where the money goes. Not the outrage.
Excellent post. You articulated thoughts I’ve been having and I completely agree. Found you on Reddit, followed you here, keep on keeping on brother