Any effective response to the weaponization of AI against the working class will need to have the same strategic patience that brought about past proletarian victories. The movement against techno-tyranny will have to undergo a process of maturation, one where it keeps its core mission but discards the anti-tech liberalism which pervades it right now.
This is how the anti-Flock and anti-data center movements can prevail, to the extent that they successfully defeat the class that’s behind the abuses of AI: by rediscovering the organizational models that let the working class carry out the first wave of revolutions following the 19th century. These revolutions were then able to use industry to lift hundreds of thousands out of poverty, providing a poetic inverse to the old Luddite hatred towards industrial production. The next wave of revolutions will do the same with AI.
For communists in the United States, where our government has made the “AI question” highly relevant by entering a progress race with China, it’s critical that we convey this message to the working masses. As Trump 2.0 accelerates AI development, and thereby condemns the people to ever-more unstable economic conditions, these victims of AI class warfare are being pulled in many different ideological directions.
There’s a growing faction of the ruling class that seeks to halt AI progress, and is using crude Luddite arguments to bring people to its side; there are also a myriad of ultra-leftist tendencies, including of the Unabomber type, that will no doubt gain traction within the radical niche. We must show the people a Marxist synthesis on AI, cutting through all of these reactionary misdiagnoses about how to respond towards the new era’s arrival.
It’s by reaching this balance of thought that we can ground the movement against Trump 2.0’s project within an actual working-class movement, where the laborers and unemployed workers gain institutional strength. This was what the backlash against industrialism evolved into. David Riazanov’s Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: An Introduction to Their Lives and Work summarizes how the anger towards the industrial revolution developed beyond its initial idealism, and transformed into a struggle for putting the workers in control of these new productive forces. Riazanov described how
The Luddite movement, whose sole purpose was the destruction of the machine, was succeeded by a more conscious struggle. The new revolutionary organisations were motivated by the determination to change the political conditions under which the workers were forced to exist. Their first demands included freedom of assembly, freedom of association, and freedom of the press. The year 1817 was ushered in with a stubborn conflict which culminated in the infamous "Manchester Massacre" of 1819. The massacre took place on St. Peter's Field, and the English workers christened it the Battle of Peterloo. Enormous masses of cavalry were moved against the workers, and the skirmish ended in the death of several scores of people. Furthermore, new repressive measures, the so-called Six Acts ("Gag Laws/index.htm"), were directed against the workers.
As a result of these persecutions, revolutionary strife became more intense. In 1824, with the participation of Francis Place (1771-1854), who had left his revolutionary comrades and succeeded in becoming a prosperous manufacturer, but who maintained his relations with the radicals in the House of Commons, the English workers won the famous Coalition Laws (1824-25) as a concession to the revolutionary movement. The movement in favour of creating organisations and unions through which the workers might defend themselves against the oppression of the employers, and obtain better conditions for themselves, higher wages, etc., became lawful. This marks the beginning of the English trade union movement. It also gave birth to political societies which began the struggle for universal suffrage.
This process, where the working masses find ways of defending against capital’s class warfare after being thrown into new exploitative systems, will no doubt play out during our lifetime. One example is how the masses will have to respond to the new paradigm of perpetual, widespread unemployment.
One of the ways our class enemies are using AI against us is by outsourcing essentially all hiring to the algorithms on Linkedin and Indeed, which are designed to filter out any application that fails to match a hyper-specific word combination guideline. This is no mistake. It’s obviously a cover for the big agenda of our ruling class right now: to massively shrink headcount within the workforce, thereby giving the capitalists unchallenged leverage over the workers and making way for Trump 2.0’s accelerated automation plans. Beyond mass surveillance and ecological destruction, this is the biggest way that the enemy is using AI to hurt the working class. And as time goes on, more of these unemployed workers will seek to fight their way out of this engineered poverty.
The “solution” of the petty-bourgeois anti-AI liberals is to turn back the clock on technology, which isn’t feasible; so for the cast-aside workers, the only path forward is to build an independent revolutionary infrastructure. One that’s organized by their own class, because the “lumpenproletariat” can only be organized by others within the lumpen. The role of a workers party in this, as described by William Z. Foster in his history of the Unemployed Councils, is to assist these activities when they arise:
The Unemployed Councils, in the face of widespread police brutality, conducted a mass of activities to bring pressure upon employers, local relief boards, and the city, state, and national governments. They led hundreds of demonstrations on a local and national scale. Some of the most important national mass movements were those on May 1, 1930, with 350,000 participating; on National Unemployment Insurance Day, February 25, 1931, with 400,000 demonstrators, and the turnout, on February 4, 1932, with 500,000 in the nationwide mass meetings. Three times mass petitions with a million signatures or more were presented to Congress. There were also hunger marches from the industrial centers to the capitals in many states. And then there were the two national hunger marches to Washington on December 7, 1931 (1,800 marchers) and December 6, 1932 (3,000 marchers)…
The Party concentrated its entire forces upon making these national marches successful. The manifold activities of the Unemployed Councils, besides making a burning national issue of unemployment insurance, also resulted in securing many immediate relief concessions to the unemployed all over the country. The frightened capitalist class saw that the old game of letting the workers starve it out during economic crises would no longer work. They were dealing with an awakening working class, one which in the next few years would write some epic labor history.
During this new long-term depression, the ruling class has a kind of plan for trying to preempt another revolt like these past ones: make sure that everyone will be able to get some type of welfare, whether through UBI or low-quality food benefits. The plan is to make it so that these dispossessed masses don’t become organized lumpen, just lumpen; the class enemy wants us to react to our conditions by becoming more separated from each other, and more mentally unwell. AI will be the most powerful tool for diverting people’s attention from the class struggle. Yet AI is the greatest threat to the system. By accelerating AI, Trump is taking a gamble on the survival of capitalism, speeding up the timeline of how the capitalists outmode themselves. We’re close to a new wave of working-class revolt, brought on by these growing destabilization events. We must take advantage of this by bringing back the old modes of organizing power.
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