In response to imperial anxieties over China’s rise, the U.S. government is now determined to speed up AI’s development. And for the nucleus of the new American communist movement that’s emerged in these last few years, this presents a dilemma. Because the stance that we in this tendency take towards AI is that it’s unequivocally a good thing; no matter how much our class enemies abuse AI, the advancement of machine learning makes humanity exponentially better positioned to enrich itself, with the ultimate outcome being that all labor will become outsourced to machines apart from spiritual labor.
We should stand by this position; yet it can’t be our only response to the destabilization AI is bringing. The U.S. regime’s scheme to weaponize AI against the global working class is something the masses are seeking to defend themselves against. To prove ourselves as the force that can mount this counteroffensive, we must acclimate ourselves to the discourse as it exists in the new age that AI has created. This is a discourse where the bulk of the masses have become alienated from culture war grievance politics, distrust in institutions has created fatigue over duopoly rhetoric, and the concerns of the average person center around how they’ll survive in an increasingly uncertain world. When this is what our target audience as revolutionaries is looking for, we have to be especially self-aware about discourses that ignore the people’s practical needs. We can’t come across like we’re dismissing the suffering caused by this technological upheaval.
In our messaging about technology and automation, we have to tell a story in which all of the chaos today is only one sliver in a massive transformation process. A process that will see the class enemy successfully make use of AI in the short term; but in the long term will have this tool bring the end of capitalism, and enable us to build socialism with an efficiency we never could have imagined.
One part of presenting this Marxist synthesis on AI is the “China pill,” where we use the PRC’s futuristic achievements to show that these technologies can be used for good when the workers are in charge. This kind of agitprop is useful, but we have to connect this narrative with the class struggle as the people are experiencing it. It’s not enough to bring up the eventuality that AI will become used to benefit the workers after the revolution; the China pill is an entrypoint into a greater, psychedelic framework on viewing AI. A framework sees the digital hallucinations which AI is creating for us, and recognizes these influences as being inescapably part of the world we’ll build after the revolution—not things that can simply be erased, as asserted by the bourgeois idealist anti-AI camp.
When we’ve proclaimed that AI is good, we’ve mainly been responding to the liberals who seek the preservation of their creative professional roles. This is not the politics of the working-class people who are seeing the enemy use AI to push them out of all work, and desperately seek a means to resist; these workers may be influenced by the petty-bourgeois liberal views on AI, but they represent a different kind of class interest. The same interest that drove the Luddite movement; not the Luddite movement as it’s been caricatured, but the actual Luddism, which was seeking a practical solution for workers who’d been made into excess by industrialization. Writes Christian Fuchs on why this movement was potentially more compatible with the communist movement than Engels had thought:
Machine breaking means the resistance against the introduction of machinery and “revolts against machinery” (CWCE, 222). In industrialising England, machine breaking was known as “Luddism”, a movement named after its founder Ned Ludd. “This form of opposition also was isolated, restricted to certain localities, and directed against one feature only of our present social arrangements” (CWCE, 222). In the book The Making of the English Working Class, the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson (1966) makes a more positive assessment of the Luddite movement than Engels (see also Fuchs 2016, 2000-2004). He writes that Luddism was not a blind attack on machinery as end-in-itself, but a well-organised movement that attacked the machines of capitalists that laid off workers (Thompson 1966, 564). Luddism was a working class struggle for “a democratic community, in which industrial growth should be regulated according to ethical priorities and the pursuit of profit be subordinated to human needs” (Thompson 1966, 552).
Like Marx and Engels weren’t wrong that the machine-breaking workers were underdeveloped in their way of fighting back, we aren’t wrong about AI being a good thing. It’s not enough to be right, though. You need to show why your politics delivers on what the working masses need. This was understood by the communists who truly grasped the theories of Marx and Engels, and used them to carry out the 20th century’s workers revolutions.
These communists used industry to bring historically unparalleled economic growth, which China is continuing to demonstrate. And at the moments that they won in their respective countries, the old debates over technology weren’t really a hindrance to their efforts; the workers were concerned with bringing a new political solution, and they were ready to embrace the Marxist-Leninist program for building socialism via industrialization.
What may be portentous to our own journey is that in order for this tech vs. anti-tech discourse to be made irrelevant, industrial technologies first needed to be established so thoroughly that any notions about doing away with them had become fringe. And this process took decades. With AI, though, we’re on a timeline that’s becoming more compressed every day. More and more unimaginable things are becoming default realities, at a rate that’s always speeding up. The momentum of historical progress is on our side; we need to take advantage of it by providing clarity about where these changes are headed, and what the working masses must do to turn the shift to their benefit. We must show why the answer, in this stage, is to build a party for the working class; one that can be used to fight against capital’s malign uses of AI, but for the purpose of making all the enemy’s tools into our own.
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