Becoming Materialist

Applying material analysis in geopolitics, domestic policy, and political reasoning.

To stay materialist, not propagandized, and keep up with how an empire moves, you must follow policy papers and think tanks; never the news, or any narrative.

Whether you’re on the liberal or conservative pipeline, the propaganda strategy is the same. The ruling class wants to cultivate a society that is removed from learning tools to materially analyze the world around them so citizens can be easily malleable and swayed by simply hearing what they wanna hear. Both these pipelines influence that words, optics, and speeches are politics; that simply the act of speaking should be taken as an action of itself. Our superstructure has long known that its wise to produce pressure release media every once in a while, both in political theatre, as well as regular film and TV. It’s strategic and wise to allow anti-capitalist and stick-it-to-the-man (or a shitty corporation) media into our culture. Consuming this media makes people feel seen, validated, and has a temporary pacifying effect. Picture it as a pressure valve that releases some steam that societally may otherwise build up too much.

Liberal and conservative pipelines will have their talking heads, such as Nick Fuentes, openly hating Israel when it becomes popular opinion, but they will offer nothing to actually challenge them in any way. On the contrary, they keep people herded into supporting the same system that creates and maintains Israel. We know from the Epstein files that Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein were behind the creation of some of the far-right 4chans and Reddit channels themselves to disseminate some kernels of truth of propaganda to serve as a pressure release as well as effective MAGA media strategy. The ruling class bets on turning politics into something consumable, entertaining, superficial, and numbing that never offers any meaningfully challenging solution. What they fear most, is people tuning out these dead-end divisive pipelines, and learning how to be materialist thinkers.

Applying materialism to geopolitics

RAND’s Extending Russia report published in 2019, 3 years before Russia’s full scale operation into Ukraine tells us more than any media outlet could ever convey. RAND is a high-level planning agency for the US military; its main funding and clientele being the US Department of Defence itself. Just like Which Path to Persia by the Israeli-backed Brookings Institute which clearly outlined the step-by-step measures for future balkanization attempts as well as the latest coup attempt in Iran, this 350-page report is a blueprint on how the US plans to enforce global hegemony and overextend Russia. Particularly how US plans to topple Putin’s government, hinder Russia’s exports and energy sector (especially with its main market, Europe) and block any future pipeline expansions. Critically, the report itself acknowledges that most of its proposed measures are escalatory and would provoke counter-escalation. Remember, the US wants full control over all oil and tech markets, and the NATO alliance exists to secure trade routes, pipelines and ports under US control. The trade route and oil restructuring from the Libyan and Afghanistan NATO missions historically validated this already.

The RAND report mentions stressing Russia’s relations and projects with China. As we’re seeing already, Chinese pipelines and key Belt and Road infrastructure have already been damaged, some even fully shut down, thanks to Western-backed proxies carrying out targeted attacks on key BRI ports and railways along China’s borders in Pakistan and Myanmar. RAND outlines how to use multilateral sanctions to trigger a brain drain within Russia, essentially getting Russia’s brightest citizens to immigrate to the US. Some measures stated have already occurred with unfortunate success, such as the endless lethal aid to Ukraine, sanctions as coercion, as well as deliberate backing of rebels in Syria to force Russia to retreat from Syria. When Assad fell, Russia did in fact have to end support for Syria to focus its efforts and resources on Ukraine. Other measures have not yet been taken, such as a ploy for regime change in Belarus to oust their pro-Russian government. The report also compares Russia’s Internet to China’s, saying it is far less interventionist and censored than China therefore the cyberspace would be the most effective avenue for foreigners to infiltrate and foment internal discord in their society. At the crux of it all, they wish to deprive Russia of any revenue to fund their social programs and national defence and force a choice of either capitulating to US-led global capitalism or face economic strangulation.

In 2016, NATO also launched the largest military exercise since the Cold War on Russia’s borders, accurately named Anaconda. What do anacondas too? They strangle. It was a joint drill of over 30,000 troops across 24 countries. Ukraine itself was also doing joint operations with NATO back in 2021, a full year before Russia’s invasion. The RAND report itself acknowledges plainly that during the 2014 Wales Summit, NATO agreed to aid Ukraine with command, control, communications, computers, logistics, cyberdefence, military personnel, and medical support. Materially, Ukraine is defacto integrated into NATO. The only reason they don’t officially announce this is to capitalize on the narrative of plausible deniability to the public that Ukraine is not officially a member of NATO. Anyone who knows the mechanisms of NATO also knows it has always been a pretty informal alliance too.

Let’s be straight. The US wants to install another neoliberal government like Boris Yeltsin in Russia to gain access to the oil markets of the most resource rich country in the world. That has always been its plan. Under Putin’s firm state capitalism, they can’t do that. Russia is a fortress they cannot penetrate under Putin.

Applying materialism to political reasoning

Be careful with false equivalence in politics. False equivalence is a fallacy where issues that are meaningfully different get oversimplified as having equal weight or similarities. This usually happens when people don’t have all the context, facts, and history about a topic, so the mind will focus on superficial similarities.

Our minds are always comparing and contrasting everything around us, we naturally try to understand the world by drawing comparisons almost all the time or defaulting to binaries, so it’s a very common fallacy. How many people drew a false equivalence between Ukraine and Palestine before they actually learned more? Western Marxists draw false equivalences even now between social democracy and Marxism-Leninism as being equally revisionist, when social democratic revisions happen as part of a state serving the same ruling elite that has not yet been overthrown, while Marxist-Leninist states have undergone socialist revolution to seize power and establish a people’s republic. This is a key distinction. The same also happens in seeing all major world powers as carrying the same weight in the world when it’s not only very empirically untrue, but erases the struggle of nations who have to become strong and cunning enough to resist the stated American goal of total unipolarity, foreign interventions, encroaching military bases, and complete tech and oil market dominance. China forming good economic trade deals with its neighbouring countries and beyond is a clever counter to the American aim to absorb all of these countries under its military and economic sphere to be weaponized against China.

When there is an empire that openly says they want no rivals and don’t want to share the world, and people call any action to resist that order as what’s imperialist, they are drawing a false equivalence that erases global dollarization, market control, sanctions, and the trillion-dollar US military complex. In media and debate, false equivalence can also look like presenting two viewpoints as equally valid when empirical evidence or balance of power heavily favours one side, often to create a misleading sense of neutrality. The usual “both sides” narrative, which can often also look like a moral false equivalence, or asserting that two actions are ethically identical despite very differing context. A great example of this is comparing the violence of the oppressed towards an oppressor for the purpose of liberation to the violence of the oppressor towards their subjects for the purpose of domination.

Applying materialism to domestic policies

A sober and materialist conversation about data centers and AI will center capitalism. Firstly, data centres are not just used for AI. Every photo people back up to a cloud, every email in our inbox, and every file on our drives lives in a data center. They power every website and app. When we open a TV streaming service, scroll TikTok, check oour bank balance, we are pulling from a data center from somewhere far away. They host the databases and software that businesses use for payroll, inventory, customer records, and internal comms like Slack and Discord. Data centers are non-negotiable infrastructure these days that run global finance, emergency services, supply chains, and medical research. That said, new data centers in the Global North versus the Global South aren’t to be analyzed in the same light. The Global South can embrace nationalized data centers and AI development as a means to ensure digital sovereignty and protect themselves from US tech totalitarianism, a weapon which it will inevitably wield during its decline, and one which the world has allowed it to consolidate a dangerous amount of hegemony in for far too long. In the Global North, the rise of new data centers under Palantir surveillance, AI under late-stage capitalism, and the current descent into fascism is indeed concerning.

On the environmental question and data centers, golf courses consume much more water than data centers, yet we’re never talking about this despite golf courses being much more futile for humanity. A data center’s water cools essential computing; a golf course’s water keeps grass green for leisure and contributes to drought in neighbouring areas. Golf courses in the US use about 2 billion gallons per day for irrigation, compared to 449 million gallons per day for data center. So, 4.5 times more water than all US data centers combined. Even on the world scale, agriculture consumes 70% of the world’s freshwater. Producing just 1kg of beef requires roughly 15,000 liters of water. The second-largest industrial usage is textiles, consuming 20% of global water use; around 200 liters for every kilogram of fabric produced, and often in water-deprived regions as well. However, much more environmentally harmful than all of these combined and the single greatest contributor to climate degradation is the elephant in the room never discussed, the Earth-killer that is the US military. It seems to me we have a much deeper systemic issue than data centers here. It is capitalism that harms our environment; capitalism that makes AI use threatening, rather than beneficial to our future.

AI does have the potential to be liberatory for humanity under communism, not capitalism. China believes AI is something that shouldn’t be concentrated in one country to develop, but a global co-operation and exchange. Over the next 5 years, they will be offering developing countries over 5,000 new AI training and development opportunities across the Global South. This is a massive technology and skill transfer to developing countries, completely opposite to the American AI strategy which is to hoard the high-level knowledge of this technology for themselves to preserve its hegemony. The US knows it cannot win the AI war, especially not with China Robin-Hooding it for the Global South which would allow the Global South to massively catch up in development. So we must be critical when AI fear-mongering becomes in fact a strategy to both avoid criticizing AI under capitalism, as well as but counter China to keep the Global South in the US sphere.

Materialism > Idealism

Materialist analysis has to reflect the conditions we are at, not just where we want to be.

An ideal is like a node, not yet connected to our current timeline, sometimes not anywhere near connected; there’s no existing branches yet for this node to connect to. Materialists know we have to build those branches first. Regardless of the speed at which this happens, those branches will need to get built for that node to attach, there’s simply no way around this. We won’t grow a tomato plant in a frozen tundra, without changing the conditions for it first. This is uncomfortable because building these branches requires expanding directly from the current conditions we are in. When the current conditions are not great, not where we want to be, whatever expands from this reality, will still contain a bit of that contradiction to be resolved.

When times are urgent and we have a planet to lose and fascism to stop, this is not the time for purity or idealist traps. We’re not going to resolve every issue at once, but we can focus on the one that is most impactful with the most trickle down effect, such as ending the profiteering US military complex. The more materialist we become, the more likely we are to trigger people from time to time. It’s going to happen, so it’s best to learn to handle it as effectively as possible. It’s much easier to be mass appealing when we communicate in slogans or faraway ideals that could actually become reality someday, but much further down the path from where are now, and sometimes not even in our lifetimes. It’s more comforting, but more ineffective at building.

Sometimes we have to ask ourselves, do we wanna be right, or do we wanna be effective? How moral and right are we really if we let purity stand in the way of ending war, imperialism and genocide?

Buy me a coffee instead.