Above: the first humanoid robotics 7S store in China’s Optics Valley.
When I say that we need to become “China-pilled” on AI, really I mean we need to become Hegel-pilled, because it’s Hegel’s analysis that shows how China has been able to bring AI into a project for the collective benefit. When the Communist Party of China has embraced this technology, and used it to lift up the people’s quality of life, it’s followed in the same Hegelian logic that’s always made up an integral part of Marxism. In this logic, it’s utterly infantile to demonize a new technology, because tech is only a tool that can be employed by whichever class is in control. And when we have our own workers revolution, we’ll be able to harness AI in all the constructive ways that socialist China is using it.
This is not to say that AI is simply a bad thing under capitalism, and will only start having a good effect after the workers have taken power; this would also be infantile, in the vein of the idealistic western “Marxist” theories that have portrayed “bourgeois science” as something distinct unto itself. We must do away with all such narratives that essentialize the moral roles of technologies, and grasp the critical role tech has within humanity’s development. AI won’t suddenly switch from “bad” to good at the moment the workers revolution comes, because every present and future benefit from AI depends on AI as it exists in the present. The future cannot be separated from the past, and the past can’t be discarded.
These are immutable realities that show why history is a fluid thing, not able to be neatly compartmentalized into different stages. But right now, we’re dealing with a petty-bourgeois ideology that seeks to demonize AI by obscuring this fluidity. That views AI as either being irredeemably evil, or something that could only ever stop being “evil” in the post-capitalist era. And because this view is inherently idealistic, the concept of “socialism” that it promotes is idealistic as well, only capable of leading Marxism down a dead end.
A real Marxist response to AI is one that accounts for Hegel’s wisdom of how a system creates the basis for its own dissolution, which is the role that AI has in relation to capitalism. Hegel said that “The finite not only alters, like something in general, but it ceases to be; and its ceasing to be is not merely a possibility, so that it could be without ceasing to be, but the being as such of finite things is to have the germ of decease as their being-within-self: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.”
Marxists must also understand what it means to sublate AI. Hegel said that sublation requires the negation of the existing reality, but not the annihilation of it: “‘To sublate’ has a twofold meaning in the language: on the one hand it means to preserve, to maintain, and equally it also means to cause to cease, to put an end to. Even 'to preserve' includes a negative element, namely, that something is removed from its influences, in order to preserve it. Thus what is sublated is at the same time preserved; it has only lost its immediacy but is not on that account annihilated.”
It was by using this logic that Marx reached his thesis in The Fragment on Machines, where he observed how the more advanced technology becomes, the more outmoded the capitalist productive mode becomes. AI was always going to be a pivotal factor in pushing this process towards communism. As Michael R. McBride pointed out in 2017, the analysis Marx used let him effectively predict AI, with one standout passage from The Fragment being: “Once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the… automatic system of machinery… set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.”
The problem with the framework of analysis McBride used when interpreting Marx’ message was that it was limited to only one phase in AI’s historical role, the one where the capitalists use AI to consolidate their wealth. McBride claimed Marx had failed to account for this, saying: “The stark reality is that replacing humans with algorithms fundamentally places money and power into the hands of business owners. Or, in the words of Thomas Hodgskin, ‘The road-builder may share profits with the road-user, but the road itself cannot do so.’ That’s the fundamental problem with Marx’s thesis; when a country is 90% of the way towards robo-utopia, it’s a hellish oligarchy. Automation is a huge driver behind the increasing wealth divide of the last 20 years, and it doesn’t show signs of stopping anytime soon.”
But how could Marx, who wrote massive tomes analyzing the ways capital had used technology to take away the rights of the working masses, have made such a naive mistake when thinking about what technology could next do? He didn’t make this mistake, because everything he said was informed by the Hegelian awareness about how history works. When you see that everything contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, it becomes intuitive that automation’s progressive outmoding of human labor is part of capital’s self-engineered extinction. You’ve already trained your mind to look for the universal pattern of self-negation in all things. It’s this understanding of history as being constantly in flux, and unable to be frozen into any final present, that fully contradicts McBride’s view of what Marx was saying:
Marx is positing automation as a sort of “end of history” wherein goods have become so inexpensive to manufacture, and require so little labor, that the current model of capitalism falls apart. Then, what occurs is: “the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them. Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth.” Marx expounds an essentially utopian view of automation here. However, it’s not entirely far-fetched. In the greedy 90’s, could you possibly have imagined the phrase “universal basic income” being taken seriously in intellectual circles? That the New York Times, a mainstream media outlet, would publish an article titled “Capitalism Has a Problem. Is Free Money the Answer?” That Finland would give universal basic income to an entire town?
Even within this limited framework of analysis, it becomes clear that automation’s exponential productive capacity increases have opened up new potential for raising up our collective living standards. Without the dialectical language that Hegel provides, though, the insights of Marx (on technology and on everything else) will be falsely perceived as “utopian.” And liberals or right-wingers will use this misunderstanding to discredit Marx, while “Marxists” will actually internalize the idealistic worldview that Marx supposedly represented. The political solution that lets us defeat capital will have to be based in the same scientific framework which has let eastern Marxism triumph and survive. The lesson to take from China’s spectacular societal advancements is that the workers are capable of seizing control over history, and building something new not by destroying the old but by incorporating it.
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