Fascist politicians like Donald Trump and billionaire bosses like Elon Musk are reviving the poison of IQ, “genetic superiority,” and human hierarchy. Trump brags about his “good genes… a very high IQ” (Washington Post, 10/2016), reducing people to bloodlines and rankings. Musk pushes a high-tech version of the same lie, claiming “AI will surpass human intelligence by the end of 2026” (World Economic Forum, 01/2026), treating intelligence like a number that can rank workers, machines, and whole populations. Underlying this logic is a racist, sexist logic meant to prime the working class for fascism. Billionaires like Peter Thiel openly defend inequality and attack even the façade of liberal-democracy, insisting that society must be led by a so-called superior few (Cato Institute, 2009). Different voices, same message: some people are meant to rule, and the rest are meant to obey.
These ideas are not new. They are the same old ruling-class lie dressed up in a new language. From Charles Murray to earlier racists like E. O. Wilson, the bosses have always tried to “prove” that inequality is natural. What they call science is propaganda for the ruling class. Today they dress up eugenics in the language of data, genetics, and technology to make that lie seem modern and inevitable, but the goal has not changed: to justify exploitation and prepare the ground for repression and genocide.
This fascist message is clear: if workers are poor, exploited, or discarded, it is because they lack intelligence. This lie must be smashed. Intelligence is not biological destiny. It is produced through the collective labor of the working class.
Working-Class intelligence is social labor
Intelligence does not belong to individuals. It is created through the collective labor of the working class. Every day, workers generate knowledge through cooperation, improvisation, and struggle. A teacher reads a classroom, adjusts instruction, and develops new ways to reach students under pressure. A transit worker carries out an emergency evacuation, coordinating movement, calming passengers, and restoring service in the face of danger. A nurse makes rapid decisions that balance training with the unpredictable realities of a patient’s condition. These are not isolated acts of individual genius. They are expressions of social labor, rooted in shared experience and collective practice.
This intelligence is cumulative. It is built over time through shared struggle, passed between workers, refined in practice, and sharpened as a class project. On the job, workers constantly solve problems that management cannot anticipate. Workers build shortcuts, informal support systems, and collective strategies that keep workplaces functioning despite underfunding, speedups, and outright repression. Without it, production would grind to a halt.
This intelligence is also fundamentally cooperative. It emerges through communication, trust, and coordination. Workers depend on one another, pooling insight and synchronizing action in ways no isolated individual could replicate. Even under conditions designed to fragment and isolate workers, they generate shared understanding. This stands in direct opposition to the capitalist myth of intelligence as an individual asset to be measured, ranked, and rewarded. In reality, intelligence is relational. It is produced between people, not contained within them.
Capital depends on this worker’s social intelligence at every level, yet it refuses to recognize its source. Instead, it extracts knowledge from workers and presents it as the property of institutions, experts, and machines. Training manuals, algorithms, and management techniques are all built on the accumulated knowledge of workers, stripped from its social context and repackaged as capital’s property. What workers create together is turned into a force that disciplines and controls them.
Scarcity, debraining, and the myth of experts
To maintain this system, capitalism makes knowledge scarce. Access to education is restricted, expertise is enclosed within elite institutions, and information is hoarded behind paywalls and credentials. The knowledge produced by workers is taken, concentrated, and repackaged as specialized expertise (LARB, 02/2025). At the same time, the working class is subjected to social debraining. Exhaustion, precarity, and endless distraction fragment attention and prevent collective understanding (Brooklyn Rail, 02/2026). Workers are denied the time and space needed to connect their experiences into class consciousness.
The ruling class then elevates “experts” as the rightful owners of knowledge. These experts claim neutrality, but their authority depends on their alignment with capital. “Experts” are empowered to interpret and manage knowledge extracted from workers while dismissing working-class understanding as uninformed. This creates a false divide between workers. In truth, expert knowledge is itself a crystallization of collective labor.
It is not the property of a cognitive elite, but a derivative of social production. The real conflict is not between intelligence and ignorance. It is between capitalist enclosure of knowledge and the working class’s capacity to reclaim it.
Communist revolution is the only solution
The problem is not flawed IQ tests or biased algorithms. The problem is capitalism itself. This system turns human intelligence into a commodity, ranks workers to justify exploitation, and deploys science and technology as tools of domination (LARB, 02/2024). No reform can fix this. As long as capitalism exists, knowledge will be privatized, intelligence will be weaponized, and fascist ideas will reappear to defend inequality.
The only solution is communist revolution. The working class must seize the knowledge it produces and abolish the structures that hoard, distort, and control it. Under communism, intelligence will no longer serve profit or hierarchy. It will be shared collectively and used to meet human needs.
The artificial divisions of IQ, expertise, and worth will be destroyed, replaced by a society where the collective intelligence of workers organizes production and social life. As the antiracist anthropologist Stephen Jay Gould argued, we will be “less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
The ruling class fears this future. That is why it clings to the language of IQ and hierarchy. But the truth is simple: the working class already has the knowledge to run society. What it lacks is power. That power will only be won through organized, revolutionary struggle. Join PLP!
