Tech Monopolists and Troubles Ahead
Apparently the proceeds from Palantir Co-Founder and CEO Alex Karp’s “Instant #1 New York Times Best Seller”[1] have already begun to dry up, prompting his April 20 post, “The Technological Republic, in brief,”[2] which was released out into the X landscape via the official Palantir X account. Last year’s 320 page tome reduced down to 22 points and only about 1,000 words is a significant improvement for those who want fascists to talk less. Hopefully this pattern will continue and he will lose even more of his words, recovering to the point that he shuts up entirely!
Jokes aside, the situation is quite serious, as we will see. The post provides political reasoning for Karp’s own bourgeois accumulation. He sees himself as a member of an “engineering elite” that has an “affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.”[3] We would assume such a line from an AI defense company, a company dependent on the alliance it makes with government for its sustenance which secured a lucrative contract from the U.S. DoD to the tune of a $10 billion just last year.[4] Mr. Karp’s allegiance to nationalism alone is not too alarming. What is alarming is the ability he is gaining to bring political form to that line, to mold it together with nationalist populism and basic reaction, and release ideological products out into the public that propagate that line and agitate against the liberal society. In other words, his role as a fascist ideological producer.
His post has garnered national attention, and is a budding example of fascist ideological production in action, solidifying the fascist movement and propagating political goals to those sections of society capable of building it. For one, he adds furious momentum to the populist notions of “tech-bro” saviorism widely associated with Elon Musk (who Karp defends in point 16 of the post);[5] notions that are growing increasingly common within the masses, and increasingly fascistic. More than this however, his work is directly and politically uniting a contingent of up-and-coming tech monopolist capitalists, a section that, if given the proper conditions, will constitute themselves as a leading material force for fascism in the United States. We talk about this contingent and the rise of fascism in more detail in our article, Donald’s Dismantlings and Understanding Fascism.
Mr. Karp’s post clearly reveals how these tech monopolists view the people; namely, as consumers to be appeased, with a sick, idealist dialectic being created in which the “ruling class” (Mr. Karp does, indeed, use this term) is “forgiven” of its “decadence” so long as “they are capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.”[6]
Reminder that “economic growth” for Mr. Karp is GDP growth and the growth of bourgeois capital. Similarly, “security,” that is, the support of the military industrial complex and the police state, is sound business sense for a major stock-owner in a defense software company. When Mr. Karp preaches “security” (or, we will call it what it is, militarism) now, at a time when he believes he has cornered the AI market with the military, he is proposing “free trade” as he sits at the height of a monopoly, inviting all manner of government agencies and private corporations to adopt AI security services, of which his company is the primary provider. He admits this openly when, after fascistically advocating for a country to utilize “hard power,” he specifies that “hard power in this century will be built on software”[7] – exactly what he provides! Surprise, surprise! While militarism is in the interest of Palantir and Mr. Karp’s stock portfolio, this personal interest to accrue profit is merging with the wider interests of a fascistic section of disgruntled mid-level capitalists (these being the tech capitalists) and petty bourgeois (these being their “tech bro” supporters), a section he fosters the growth of and brings political form to in the course of his literary and ideological production. We must understand, comrades, this is how movements are made. A prominent literary career for Mr. Karp and others like him builds a dangerous fascist alliance throughout society, sounding the death knell of liberal society all the louder and uniting all kinds of reaction around common goals.
We did say the situation is serious. How do Communists overcome troubles like these, contradictions that seem to fall hard against us; too enmeshed in the underpinnings of the productive forces for our fragmented movement to oppose them in any real, that is, general and practical, way? Mr. Karp is not alone in his views, and if Luigi squished his Goomba tomorrow another “Mr. Karp” of a similar economic level would reveal themselves and take his place in the superstructure so-to-speak. We cannot win against Mr. Karp or any other fascist in a real way except by hard work, study, and organizing. We can’t do it with anything less than the completion of a global Communist revolution. We put forward a plan for this kind of organizing in our pamphlet, Where to Begin When We Already Started? Revisionism and Organizational Strategy. While we organize for the socialist revolution, we move through these kinds of big troubles as comrades by understanding their contradictions, and understanding what Lenin called the “scientific prophecies” of Marxism,[8] which speak of their eventual “solving” under the banner of the proletarian cause.
As it stands, there is a very comforting “prophecy” for us regarding these fascist tech monopolies. The fact is that the grand palace of capital upon which many of these tech giants sit is a very precarious house of cards; their corporations propped up by very risky investments made by financiers who, filled with visions of cornering new extremely lucrative tech markets and being another Facebook or Google (a modern bourgeois version of the El Dorado myth),have made extremely speculative investments, believing the big talk of the tech companies, and following their lead because of their admittedly enormous global footprint, even while these companies’ profits are meager compared to the amount of investment capital coming in. These financiers and tech “entrepreneurs” have created whole industries which exist in a “bubble” of unreturned financial capital, with the companies subsisting off of routine rounds of investment from financial capitalists. This trend is part of capitalist-imperialism itself, but is especially prominent in the AI industry, as it is a new and rapidly growing industry. A Time article predicting the bursting of this “bubble” from just last month says that “there’s a Grand Canyon-sized gap that will be hard to cross” regarding the ratio of investment/profit, citing that some of the biggest software companies plan to invest a combined $670 billion in AI infrastructure, which dramatically outpaces what the biggest AI companies -- namely, OpenAI and Anthropic -- bring in annually, a combined profit of only $44 billion.[9] Obviously, $44 billion is a lot of money, but profit at this range is certainly not enough to provide adequate investor returns on the amount of capital now going into AI industries. This kind of outpacing will only lead to the companies’ failure when the financiers that back back them face any amount of crisis, and “give up” so to speak on the “future” returns in speculative technology in order to shore-up their own portfolios in a more practical way, selling stock, and often changing the currency-form of a good portion of their capital entirely if the crisis is deep enough. As the tech ships sink, there’s a good possibility they will take down a good portion of the general economy with them. This will be a dramatic decline in the capitalists’ ability to project power as a whole, and a period of immense opportunity for us and the proletarian class. This is the “prophecy” we should take heart in, one that spells doom for all the current “Karps” of the world and victories for the people.
Holding onto this “prophecy,” we commit ourselves even more to the cause of humanity’s liberation through the socialist revolution, and we perform our work harder, braving and preparing for the contradictions that come.
Endnotes
[1] Amazon. Product page for The Technological Republic. Accessed on 20 Apr 2026. https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Republic-Power-Belief-Future/dp/0593798694.
[2] @PalantirTech. “Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief.” X. 20 Apr 2026. https://x.com/PalantirTech/status/2045574398573453312.
[3] Ibid.
[4] U.S. Army Public Affairs. “U.S. Army Awards Enterprise Service Agreement to Enhance Military Readiness and Drive Operational Efficiency.” U.S. Army. 31 Jul 2025. https://www.army.mil/article/287506/u_s_army_awards_enterprise_service_agreement_to_enhance_military_readiness_and_drive_operational_efficiency
[5] “The Technological Republic, in brief.”
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Lenin, V. I. “Prophetic Words.” Pravda No. 133. 2 Jul 1918. Lenin Collected Works. Vol 27. Progress Publishers. 1977. Pg. 494.
[9] Sitaraman, Ganesh & Ramzanali, Asad. “We Must Prepare For an AI Bubble Now.” Time. 26 Mar 2026. https://time.com/article/2026/03/26/we-must-prepare-for-an-ai-bubble-now/.