Truth and Class War
Post-Truth, AI, and the Battle for Working-Class Reality
Morning Comrades.
Even though today’s topic, truth in the age of AI and what’s coming, might seem like a departure from the last few months, it isn’t but rather, a deeply troubling development, that, as so much “development” provided by our innovative capitalist overlords, no one asked for let alone needed, is here and it applies to every aspect of our common revolutionary struggle for liberation. This whole dispatch was set off by the release of Google’s VEO3 a few days and to explain what that is in their own words: “…a powerful new AI video model that creates full videos from text prompts—with audio included. Revealed at Google I/O 2025, Veo 3 adds lifelike sound, speech, and music to its already stunning visuals. From comedy shows to ancient history lessons, creators are using it to produce viral, high-quality content in minutes.” - fact is, that within 48hrs all social media platforms were already swamped with these videos and honestly, I couldn’t tell that most of them were fake, not real and we are now entering a new era of truth, or rather an additional layer of class based weaponisation of truth.
In every society, the struggle over what is true is also a struggle over what is possible. Truth is not a luxury of philosophy or an abstract virtue, it is a condition for freedom, justice, and collective action. When truth is distorted, obscured, or manufactured by those in power, so too is our ability to understand the world and change it. For the working class, truth is not just a matter of knowledge, it is a weapon of liberation. In an age dominated by misinformation, spectacle, and algorithmic manipulation, reclaiming truth is not a nostalgic gesture toward objectivity, but a revolutionary necessity for our future. Understanding what truth is, how it is produced, and who it serves becomes essential to confronting the crises of the present and building a world beyond exploitation.
What Is Truth? A Philosophical and Materialist View
Truth, in classical Western philosophy, has been defined in abstract and idealist terms. The correspondence theory asserts that truth is what matches objective reality. The coherence theory defines truth as that which fits consistently within a given system of beliefs. The pragmatic theory claims that truth is whatever proves useful in practice. These frameworks dominated Enlightenment thought and were foundational to liberal political rationality, but they ignore the historical, class-structured conditions under which truth becomes meaningful or legible.
Truth is not an abstract absolute but a social and historical process. As Karl Marx famously wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach, “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question.” For Marx, truth arises from the dialectic between human beings and the material world through labour, struggle, and transformation. This view holds that truth is produced through praxis, that is, through the collective action and reflective practice of human beings embedded in class society.
Truth as Political Terrain
Truth is not politically neutral, it is a weapon of class rule. Throughout history, dominant classes have maintained power not just through economic control or state violence, but by shaping what counts as true. Antonio Gramsci called this process cultural hegemony: the imposition of the ruling class's worldview as “common sense.” This hegemonic truth is not simply propaganda, it is internalised and reproduced by institutions, media, and daily life.
For the working class, this ideological production of truth is a central obstacle to political consciousness. Under capitalism, dominant “truths” often justify inequality (e.g., “poverty is due to laziness”), mystify exploitation (“the market rewards talent”), and suppress alternatives (“there is no alternative to capitalism”). These narratives function to naturalize capitalist relations, thereby suppressing revolutionary potential.
However, history also shows that oppressed classes develop counter-hegemonic truths. Revolutionary movements from the Paris Commune to the October Revolution, to anti-colonial struggles have exposed the lies of the ruling class by forging truth through collective experience, material analysis, and political rupture. In this sense, truth is not a fixed object but a site of class conflict: a battle over what can be said, who can speak, and how the world is understood and changed.
Post-Truth and the Internet: The Fracture of Reality
In the early 21st century, the crisis of truth entered a new phase: the so-called “post-truth” era. Popularized after the Brexit vote and Meta’s deep involvement here and in Donald Trump's election in 2016, the term suggests a world where objective facts have less influence than emotions, beliefs, and algorithmic manipulation. But post-truth is not merely a problem of ignorance or disinformation, it reflects a deeper rupture in the infrastructure of capitalist truth itself.
As Fredric Jameson observed in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, late capitalism fragments meaning, collapses history into spectacle, and erodes coherent narratives. Jean Baudrillard developed this further through the concept of the simulacrum: a copy without origin, where signs no longer refer to reality but to other signs. In the digital age, the internet becomes the primary site of hyperreality, where simulation overtakes representation.
The Internet and the Marketisation of Truth
The internet, far from creating a democratic public sphere, has become a marketplace of narratives. Every tweet, post, and comment is mined for data, converted into engagement metrics, and fed back into the algorithm to produce more of what “works.” This is what Jodi Dean calls communicative capitalism: a regime in which expression is endless, but meaning is suppressed, and political will is dissolved into feedback loops of outrage, distraction, and commodification.
For the working class, this condition is disorienting and disempowering:
Disintegration of Shared Reality: Truth becomes personalized, sorted by algorithms into “filter bubbles.” Workers no longer access a shared world in which political consensus, or even collective understanding, is possible. The very conditions for class consciousness are undermined.
Rise of Reactionary Politics: In the absence of class analysis, the internet becomes fertile ground for fascist mystification, conspiracies, and scapegoating. Exploited workers are fed algorithmically tailored myths that redirect anger away from capital and toward immigrants, women, racialized people, or fabricated elites.
Epistemic Alienation: Just as the worker is alienated from the product of their labour, they are now alienated from the truth of their own condition. Information overload, media manipulation, and digital commodification of belief systems make it harder to identify, let alone fight, systemic oppression.
State and Corporate Repression: The crisis of truth enables both state and corporate actors to justify censorship, surveillance, and algorithmic policing. Under the guise of combating “disinformation,” digital platforms, often in partnership with governments, target anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and radical organising.
In essence, post-truth is not the breakdown of all truth, but the crisis of bourgeois liberal truth in the age of neoliberal decline. Capitalism can no longer guarantee the ideological coherence it once could through mass media and public education. The internet exacerbates this, turning epistemology into a battlefield ruled by commodified chaos.
Generative AI and the New Stage of Ideological Automation
Generative AI such as ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and now Google’s VEO3 marks a qualitative shift in how truth is constructed, accessed, and contested. These systems do not merely retrieve or distribute information; they generate new content, synthesising language and imagery in ways that simulate authority without grounding in verification or lived reality.
Trained on massive datasets that reflect historical biases and capitalist ideology, generative AI reproduces not objective reality, but the ideological sediment of the internet. It produces a kind of machine-generated consensus: statistically probable, semantically coherent, but politically inert. In doing so, it extends the post-truth condition into an era of synthetic ideology.
Crisis of Epistemic Authority and the Political Disintegration of Class Consciousness
In bourgeois democracies, political legitimacy depends on maintaining some system of epistemic authority, whether through science, journalism, or institutional expertise. Generative AI undermines these systems by flooding the public sphere with infinite, unverifiable content. As the difference between real and fake collapses, power shifts not to truth but to those who control the platforms, filters, and access.
This already has serious consequences for the working class:
Authoritarian Drift: States respond by centralising control over speech under the banner of fighting misinformation. What counts as “true” becomes a matter of executive power, and dissent, especially from us and is reframed as deviant, unsafe, or destabilising.
Class Disorientation: Workers struggle to identify who is lying, who is trustworthy, and what the stakes really are. This fractures solidarity, erodes confidence in organizing, and replaces analysis with memes, emotional appeals, or algorithmic nihilism.
Truth, in this context, becomes both a battleground and a casualty. The epistemic tools of collective emancipation: historical analysis, dialectical reasoning, political education are drowned in a sea of machine-generated content.
Ideological Capture by Capital: AI as a Weapon of Political Reproduction
Generative AI systems are owned, shaped, and deployed by capital. They are trained on the language of the ruling class and filtered to serve the ideological boundaries of mainstream liberal discourse. Even when asked to produce “radical” content, they often reframe it through sanitized, marketable lenses.
AI systems increasingly generate:
Corporate Communications: From HR policies to marketing, AI shapes internal and external ideology, often presenting anti-union propaganda or efficiency narratives as neutral policy.
State Bureaucracy: In social services, criminal justice, and immigration, AI is used to assess “risk” and manage populations, often reproducing structural racism and classist assumptions.
Public Discourse: As journalism, education, and public information are automated, AI systems push liberal-capitalist norms while suppressing radical critique, often through content moderation or strategic hallucination.
For the working class, this means:
Silencing of Radical Voices: AI-driven moderation tools disproportionately target activists, labor organizers, and marginalized communities. What cannot be commodified is often erased.
Normalization of Ideological Bias: Capitalist values are presented as common sense, not through debate but through algorithmic default.
Automation of Consent: AI flattens complex political conflicts into “balanced” summaries that obscure exploitation. It enforces political quietism in the name of neutrality.
In sum, generative AI becomes not merely a tool of production, but a machinery of ideology, reproducing capitalist realism at scale and speed.
Reclaiming Truth as a Tool for Emancipation
Truth under capitalism is not merely distorted, it is manufactured, privatised and wielded as an instrument of class domination. The internet and generative AI are not neutral technologies but ideological infrastructures that shape what can be known, felt, and imagined.
We suffer not only from economic exploitation but from epistemic subjugation. Without access to truthful representations of our condition and a means to organise around them, we workers remain divided, misled, and politically paralysed.
But history also teaches that truth can be reclaimed. Revolutionary truth emerges from collective struggle, from the building of organizations, the development of political education, the forging of solidarity, and the practical confrontation with oppressive systems.
In an age where capital produces hallucinated realities and simulated consensus, the task of communists and revolutionaries is to construct materialist counter-realities grounded in the lived experience of the oppressed. This means confronting AI, not as an enemy of truth per se, but as a site of class struggle over who controls meaning, reality, and the future.
As Marx insisted, the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. Today, that change must begin with the recovery of truth—not as an abstract idea, but as a collective practice of resistance, organization, and liberation.
As always, thank you for your time and attention.
Yours, warmly,
V.
References
Marx, Karl. Theses on Feuerbach. 1845.
Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks. 1929–1935.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. 1991.
Dean, Jodi. Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive. 2010.
Berardi, Franco "Bifo". The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. 2012.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. 1981.
Lenin, V.I. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. 1909.
Dussel, Enrique. Philosophy of Liberation. 1977.