Class Struggle and the New Tech Right

Over the last six years, a growing cadre of tech capitalists has broken ranks with the Democratic Party, styling their exit as a heroic act against the dictatorship of woke. It was not long ago that these same figures appeared as committed members of the center-left; now many openly support the Republicans or have even joined the farthest right fringe, seeking to build a new ideologically self-conscious right-wing political tendency. Observing these shifts, some have suggested that today’s billionaires have simply indulged in the ancient social proclivity known as greed. But this doesn’t explain the shift; “No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change” was, of course, Biden’s promissory note to the elite. Many tech capitalists, like Peter Thiel, claim that the excessive moralism of “wokeness” was to blame for other tech capitalists coming to his side. A “broad consensus among the good tech founders [and] startup CEOs [think that woke has] gone way too far. I talked to a lot of these people. A lot of them are [...] centrist Democrats.” But this explanation only begs the question; many tech executives subscribed to a progressive worldview until they didn’t. What provoked the tech elite’s great realignment to the right? 

The answer lies in the dynamics of class struggle initiated both within and beyond the office walls of tech firms. In what follows, I argue that the the culmination of layered class battles—uneven, jolting, and often politically underdeveloped stirrings that interpenetrated various layers of the working class, from the streets of Oakland to sleek Silicon Valley offices—is what moved tech owners to try on the likeness of Andrew Tate. Neither “woke” nor state regulatory action was decisive—it was class struggle that shifted and re-polarized the tech elites.

Tech capitalists’ explanation of their political and ideological transformation as the product of “woke” cultural politics—and the repetition of this framing in media commentary—obscures this dynamic, at best rendering tech worker organizing as downstream of the machinations of elite higher education. We need to understand this pivot otherwise in its material and ideological dimensions. Materially, tech capitalists’ rightward shift was a retreat to a political pole unafraid to support direct confrontations with unruly workers and their non-tech allies in the name of order, hierarchy, and accumulation. Unlike the Democrats, whose coalition requires preserving capital’s prerogatives while managing and containing working-class left demands, Trump’s Republican Party assembled a coalition ecstatic about a political style organized around indifference to suffering in general, and eagerness to inflict pain on its perceived enemies in particular. Ideologically, tech capitalists’ narration of their move rightward as a result of “woke” politics not only attempts to displace perceptions of tech worker agency, but, more perniciously, renders links between tech worker politics and the larger ecosystem of class struggles invisible. In its place was a version of the right-populist formula: woke elites who had manipulated and supported undeserving parts of the working class against those deemed legitimate.

Electoral Polarization, by Force

During the 2010s, and accelerating greatly by the end of 2011, a massive influx of tech capital transformed the Bay Area, foreshadowing today’s K-shaped economy. Although the great tech “disruptors” fancied themselves as doing things differently, they initially held to some standard presumptions of classical liberal thought. The notion that tech capital would “do no evil,” as Google put it in the early 2000s, assumed that technological progress engendered total social progress, even as massive fortunes accrued. In this self-image, tech firms projected themselves as builders of a new, better world. As tech capital transformed the Bay Area, its corporate leadership projected a self-assured paternalism that grew in almost direct proportion to tech’s centrality to California’s economy.

The tech capitalists’ presumption that what was good for them constituted a general historical good for all rested on a ballast of class assumptions. Until recently, tech management saw its white-collar workforce as an extension of itself. The discourse of the “team” obscured clear wage and authority gaps in a startup logic that proudly pitted its nimble horizontality against the dusty hierarchies of aging corporate standard bearers. This kind of startup thinking was a comforting myth, making the remarkable benefits granted to tech employees seem independent of labor-market pressures to recruit and retain skilled workers. Worker benefits were generally lavish, including perks like unlimited time off, free freshly made food, artisanal coffee and beer, trendy office designs, and, relative to almost all other workers, excellent pay for anyone outside the firm’s kitchens and janitorial closets. Funded by immense amounts of capital in search of productive inputs, and high on the ideals of tech’s ideological radiance, the industry was, at least for some time, permeated by a “progressive” utopianism.

Tech capitalists' presumptions—of firm uniformity expressed through the discourse of the horizontal team, conditioned by the idea that the industry was a general social good—began to deflate by the mid-2010s due to an upsurge of tech worker politics. Initially, much of the tech worker militancy took the form of direct actions. On November 1, 2018, more than 20,000 Google employees and contractors walked off the job over workplace issues like sexual harassment, forced arbitration, and discrimination. That same year saw other actions. Microsoft employees staged protests and submitted a petition with over 300 worker signatures demanding the cancellation of contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Similarly, Salesforce workers staged protests and submitted a petition asking the company to cancel its business partnerships with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Soon after, in 2019, thousands of Amazon workers walked out demanding climate pledges, and Wayfair workers walked off the job, demanding the company stop selling furniture to state facilities used to detain immigrants. 

Tech worker activism eventually gave way to various forms of labor organizing. Here, the Tech Workers Coalition’s (TWC) pioneering efforts, which modestly began in 2014 and accelerated through the present, stand out. TWC’s approach generally reflected a mix of autonomous and solidarity unionism, and the organization took the form of an informal network of rank-and-file workers. Efforts like TWC challenged assumptions about cohesion between tech workers and tech management, instead promoting class-based solidarity that aligned white-collar tech workers with the largely subcontracted workforce that modern tech firms depended on. Eventually, more entrants joined the labor movement: Kickstarter workers unionized in 2020; Google workers signed union cards in 2021; Activision workers voted to form a union with CWA in 2022; and in 2024, CWA-union NYT tech workers went on strike with mixed results. 

By the time of Donald Trump’s 2024 election, workplace petitions, walkouts, protests, and eventually union drives and workplace actions became a regular feature of the industry’s landscape. Far from purely a focus on economic matters in the workplace, workers’ activity often intersected with street-level social movements. Demands for racial justice amid the George Floyd movement of 2020 circulated, and pressure was placed on employers around issues related to Palestinian solidarity in the midst of Israel’s exterminationist invasion of Gaza. Though later organizing methods mirrored the traditional labor movement, most fights focused on firm control. With wages already relatively high in the sector, and vulture regional industries like real estate ready to erode further wage gains, workers often expressed their power through intervening in their companies’ investment and partnership decisions. Tech worker action didn’t only indicate a shift among tech workers; it ultimately forced tech owners to polarize in a new way, eventually building toward a larger political sea change.

This upswing of class struggle facilitated a profound crisis of self-perception for tech capitalists. Tech workers’ new militancy rudely interrupted the liberal assumptions tech executives had long held about their industry, detonating the classless ideology epitomized by the team and forcing managerial prerogatives out of their ideological hiding places, where workers could challenge them. Signs of this shift began in the early 2020s. In 2020, Brian Armstrong of Coinbase declared that the company would no longer allow any focus on political issues after ongoing disputes emerged around racial justice questions, and encouraged dissenting workers to quit. In 2021, Jason Fried of Basecamp declared all political questions banned from work communications, leading one-third of workers to leave. In 2024, Peter Thiel floated the idea that executives should purge the workforce, replacing workers with those from non-progressive regions, and that “extreme wokeness” was a problem for tech elites. In a 2025 interview with The New York Times, Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm tightly associated with the tech industry, proclaimed that worker “revolt” and a “Great Awokening” had gotten out of control, leading tech capitalists like himself to exit the center-left. 

Class fights kicked off elite realignment, but the techie battles were not mirror images of the classical class struggle. Here, we can ask a question orthogonal to elite tech polarization: Why had tech workers, many of whom have departed from erstwhile conformist positions typical of a middling-class layer, moved towards the left? 

The political unsettlement of professional-managerial politics could foreseeably have moved in other directions. For example, tech worker politics could have expressed itself through professional-style organizations, seeking to structure itself as a credentialed partner in the wider tech capital miasma. In other words, tech workers could have moved in another direction, one oriented towards reaffirming their importance in the larger American class hierarchy. But broader class struggles outside tech undermined these status-quo routes by dimming the tech industry’s general social shine. While these struggles unfolded unevenly and without coordination, they successfully intruded on the industry’s optimistic ideological utopianism, eroding tech’s ideological mirage to recast the “team” as what it actually was—a hierarchical firm. As we shall see, the political force behind tech worker activities must be understood as arising from outside tech proper. 

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The Class Struggle Engine

Historically, it would not have been apparent that well-paid white-collar workers—many of whom held positions closer to engineering than skilled labor—would find themselves fighting class battles against management. We cannot take the politicization of these workers for granted. As Poulantzas observed in Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, these emerging white-collar jobs constituted a kind of “new middle class,” offering supervisory advantages over oneself and others, privileged access to knowledge, organizational authority, and a relationship to managers that departed from manual labor. At the same time, these employment positions have never been immune to dynamics of capitalist accumulation. In Labor and Monopoly Capital, Braverman described office work as fundamentally inseparable from capitalist dynamics, making employment susceptible to classic managerial power, leading to dynamics such as deskilling, routinization, and the transfer of knowledge from workers to technological fixed capital. The intersection of relative privileges in the labor market with the demands of capital’s accumulation process produces a lopsided class layer: ideologically receptive to managerial sway, yet continually exposed to conditions other workers have long endured. 

All of this makes the sequence of worker militancy and managerial backlash curious, especially considering that the AI-powered automation of tech work—with all the trappings of a classic managerial offensive with the implementation of new labor-saving technologies—followed tech worker organizing — a sequence in line with Mario Tronti’s important argument that capitalist technological and organizational dynamism is driven by class struggle from below. But if managerial attacks didn’t politicize an already contradictory class layer of tech workers, what did? 

A variety of class struggles percolated across the geographies where tech work was organized, but these fights were never reducible to high-powered tech firms. These other class struggles provided tech workers with the political vocabularies, reflexes, and tactics that fueled the tech worker rebellion. An adequate genealogy cannot be developed here, but three approximate political events can be identified that largely sculpted class organization and mobilization in the SF Bay Area: the 2009 street battles that arose after Oscar Grant was murdered by police in a BART transit station, the 2009-10 California student movement against tuition hikes and austerity, and the 2011 Occupy movement, whose militant apotheosis rested in Oakland, where an anti-capitalist political rhetoric coupled with mass action resulted in the shutdown of the Oakland Port alongside International Longshore and Warehouse Union workers. Between these moments, an array of anti-austerity mobilizations and new patterns of self-organization staged themselves across the SF Bay Area. Ultimately, these movements—one challenging the authority of the state’s repressive apparatuses, another arrayed against erosion of high-quality public education, and the third contesting growing inequality and the state’s complicity in it—were the catalytic nodes from which further class battles would be waged. 

These movement events gave way to a cascade of attempts by working-class people to focus their movements’ political energy on urgent problems facing the Bay Area’s working class,  problems irreducibly linked to the growth of the tech industry. These struggles often staged themselves at the level of social reproduction, where tech’s disruptions became first-order problems for everyday working-class people. A primary contestation began around 2013, with housing struggles in places like SF’s Mission District, as capital inflows to tech companies produced eye-watering costs that persist into the present. Non-tech workers organized at tech campuses, like SEIU-USWW, which began organizing tech security guards as early as 2014 and won union recognition in 2017. Take, for example, the infamous controversy around tech buses, which used uncompensated public transportation infrastructure to whisk tech workers from gentrifying neighborhoods to lavish tech campuses without interfacing with the public. This gave rise to Google bus protests, in which Google buses were regularly blocked, and their passengers—some of whom would become the future tech militants—heckled.  All of this took place amid an atmosphere politicized against tech—a regional vibe that now resembles 2026’s national mood around data centers. 

Episodic class struggles outside of tech appeared not only as discrete challenges to capital and the state, but also as moments of ideological recalibration that proliferated an increasingly popular counter-hegemonic narrative around social and political power. These challenges to capitalist authority are the essential background for tech worker militancy. Episodes of class struggle not only confronted the power of capital and the state, but also punctuated hitherto mystified relations between worker and management. A chain reaction of politicization ensued. Class struggles outside tech altered tech workers’ activity; tech workers’ self-activity, in turn, radically reoriented the politics of tech capitalists toward Trump, and beyond. Against this truth stands tech capitalists’ preferred narrative that, if it were widely accepted, portray tech worker organizing as an expression of elite university miseducation, rather than as an extension of a wider ensemble of popular class struggles. Here, a prerequisite for right-wing populism articulated: tech labor politics are puppets of cultural elites, and popular left struggles languish as ineffective and forgotten. 

What’s Next?

It has become fairly routine for socialists to search the electoral cycle for signs of life. Doing so usually returns bleak results. Tim Barker, writing in NLR’s Sidecar, portrayed the 2024 presidential election as a contest in which the working class did nothing as a class. This interpretation rests upon established facts about US politics: that parliamentary vehicles for and by the working class hardly exist. The polarization of tech elites had clear implications for politics, as the 2026 US midterm elections demonstrate. Enormous flows of cash from tech barons flowed into Republican war chests, and the tech elite’s pugilism towards CA’s proposed billionaire tax successfully fended off the one-time tax. In San Francisco, perhaps as an acknowledgment that shifting tech’s geographic home base is difficult, huge efforts have been made to root out left, and even progressive, politics. Elite action, rather than bottom-up activity, appears to have shaped the electoral map. Yet the usual forms of punditry easily overlook how class struggles have indelibly shaped the actions of electoral agents by not only transforming the electoral calculus but also shifting elite allegiances. It is hard to imagine that the Republican Party would have been so thoroughly routed had the AI proselytizers not been forcibly polarized into the Republican Party camp. An anti-AI position has developed in the Democratic Party, as has an anti-tech oligarch narrative, but no serious person can think that the Democratic Party’s status quo power brokers would have made this pivot had tech capitalists not already largely abandoned them. If we miss how class politics extends itself into the electoral field, we lose track of the real undercurrents of official politics, opening space for those with electoral power to claim their victories as products of their own virtuous gamesmanship. 

Left liberals often portray workers and the unwaged poor as passive victims of the power elite and its social structure. But here, something different happened: the most powerful individuals in US society were moved by social forces outside of their control. Class fights, however uneven and uncoordinated, became an engine of both electoral and ideological transformation, forcing many tech elites to clarify their political intentions while also pushing them into an increasingly uniform political camp. As it turns out, the working class has had a major electoral effect.

Mark Zuckerberg has rebranded himself as a man’s man, a guy who acts with authority at the helm of a $ 1.8 trillion company. But a cursory look at Zuckerberg’s political life shows that, even by the stilted metrics of conservative heroism, he is hardly the kind of Great Man who shapes history. We have no reason to elevate Zuckerberg, Musk, or those like them to history-maker status. Better to understand what has driven tech owners toward the politics they claim to have chosen.

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