Saving Acemoğlu Does Not Save the Class

The Acemoğlu Debate Three Weeks Later: Who Said What, Who Failed to See What?

Dear Young Comrades,

On 21 August we wrote the class meaning of the quarrel between Acemoğlu and The Economist. Our thesis in that piece was plain: this debate is a family reckoning between two wings of the bourgeoisie — market liberals and social liberals; the working class’s job is not to pick a side, but to take the word “class” that has slipped in through the door and carry it all the way, putting the question of property relations on the table. A month before that we had taken up the fake duel between Acemoğlu and Musk, and tried to show that techno-messianism and liberal reformism are two faces of the same system.

Three weeks have passed. The debate did not die down; on the contrary, replies arrived from all over the world, columns were written in Turkey, Acemoğlu made his own defence, the book came out, and he restated his framework in a new article. In this piece we gather those replies and try to distinguish which of them approach the class question and which keep a careful distance from it. Our aim is not to produce a “who is right” list; it is to redraw the map of the debate in class coordinates.

A Short Chronology: What Happened?

A reminder. On 17 August The Economist, in an unsigned article, declared that “the world’s most influential economist is oddly unconvincing.” There were three objections: the data of the 2001 Nobel work are disputed, the concept of “institution” is circular, and the stance on artificial intelligence is excessively pessimistic. On 19 August Acemoğlu called the piece a “character assassination” and said “there is a much more troubling situation in the background; I will share it one day.” On 21 August the magazine published Acemoğlu’s letter; its closing line was this: “If this is the best you can do against a thirty-three-year body of work, it is your criticism that is oddly unconvincing.”

The content of the letter matters, because it shows Acemoğlu’s line of defence. According to T24 he raised three objections: the article rests on “a few economists speaking anonymously after a few drinks”; methodological limits he has already conceded in his own work are presented as flaws discovered from outside; complaints loosely assembled from different periods and topics are turned into a single story of “unreliability.” There was also a note on timing: the article and the book review appeared six days after his new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, hit the shelves. According to Acemoğlu, artificial intelligence occupied “only half a chapter” in the book; the magazine had made it the book’s centre.

Then the book promotions began. On 26 August MIT News presented the book as a proposal for “working-class liberalism”; Acemoğlu’s sentence was clear: “You need the working class in your coalition, otherwise it means nothing.” On 2 September in Prospect he restated the framework in his own hand: local self-government plus shared prosperity; competition reform, “pro-worker AI,” labour-friendly tax regulation, and the strengthening of unions. Note this: the word property is not on that list. The “troubling background” Acemoğlu promised was still unexplained when this piece was written.

Replies from the World: Five Different Lines

We can gather those who joined the debate from outside into five lines. What separates these lines from one another is not whether they are against The Economist; it is whether they see capitalism as a system.

1. The liberal defence: “Great scholars are not distinguished by infallibility”

On 2 September the Slovenian economist Rok Spruk set out to refute The Economist’s article on methodological grounds. His thesis was simple: turning a dubious finding into the invalidation of an entire research programme is a leap of logic; Acemoğlu’s contribution lies not in giving the right answers, but in posing the questions that those who came after were forced to answer. This defence is sound as sociology of science, but it says nothing politically. The question of how the concept of institution conceals property relations never comes up on this line.

According to Hayri Kozanoğlu in BirGün, Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, Clive Crook of Bloomberg, and Nick Lichtenberg of Fortune also praised the book. In other words, the main body of the capital press stood with Acemoğlu; The Economist was left alone. This confirms the diagnosis in our first piece: social liberalism is the wing that today forms the majority of the bourgeoisie, and The Economist’s attack is a minority reaction from inside that wing.

2. The institutionalist-populist line: “The problem is who will govern”

İbrahim Öztürk’s long essay at ECPS (21 August) ties the debate to the question of “who will govern the next world order.” Öztürk’s most valuable contribution is concrete: he documents that Mustafa Suleyman, who heads Microsoft AI, sits on the board of The Economist Group, along with links to Exor and Goldman Sachs, and says this is not proof of a conspiracy, but shows that “formal editorial autonomy can coexist with a governing ecosystem whose members share exposure to the technologies Acemoğlu wants democratic politics to discipline.” Öztürk also catches the magazine’s inconsistency: the same institutionalist frame is applauded when it explains the failure of authoritarian regimes; it is declared the enemy once it begins to examine concentrated power in Western democracies.

But this line, too, stops somewhere. Öztürk writes plainly that Acemoğlu is a “reformist” and does not propose a revolutionary transformation; even so, he looks for the solution in liberal democracy’s “developing a capacity for reform before the crisis arrives.” His question is “will the order that is rebuilt reproduce the existing winners?” — a fine question, but he stops short of saying that the answer lies in property.

3. The left-reformist line: “To speak of the worker is counted as blasphemy”

Alberto Garzón, Spain’s former Minister of Consumer Affairs and former federal coordinator of Izquierda Unida, put the debate’s name right in Jacobin on 26 August: “For The Economist, mentioning workers’ interests is heresy.” According to Garzón, the magazine attacked Acemoğlu not for theoretical flaws but because he placed the working class’s interest at the centre of technology and economic policy. The sentence of the economist Mònica Martínez Bravo quoted in the piece is telling: “What strange things happen when a Nobel Prize–winning economist writes a book that puts the working class at the centre of economic policy.”

This line is the closest to our diagnosis; but Garzón also underlines the point: Acemoğlu is not heterodox, he is a mainstream economist. That is, the violence of the attack comes not from the radicalism of the idea being defended, but from capital’s present intolerance. This says more about the current state of class struggle than Acemoğlu’s book does: the bourgeoisie is so cornered that it cannot even tolerate the mildest proposal from inside its own ranks — “let’s take the worker into the coalition too.”

4. The development-economics critique: “Institutions conceal colonialism”

Jostein Hauge of Cambridge, in a statement on X, drew a distinction: The Economist’s article may be bad, but that does not invalidate left critiques of Acemoğlu’s institutional theory. After the Nobel, Hauge had criticised the frame that reduces colonialism to a matter of “good and bad institutions.” Critiques published in the same period on Developing Economics and Links stressed the same point: the story of “inclusive institutions” renders invisible the fact that the West’s wealth rests on colonial plunder, slave labour, and unequal exchange.

The historian Nicholas Mulder’s piece of 25 August completes this line from another place. Mulder writes that the thesis “secure property rights produce development” — the myth of the 1688 Glorious Revolution — has been refuted by historians: property was already secure enough before 1688, and after 1688 it was systematically violated through enclosures, expropriations, and colonial expansion. The West’s development became possible not by protecting property, but by a state capacity that could reorganise property when necessary. This is the academic language of what we said in our first piece under the heading “Lesson 4: What is missing from the map — Imperialism”: primitive accumulation is the real story hidden under the concept of “institution.”

5. The Marxist line: “Working-class liberalism is an oxymoron”

Immediately after the book’s publication, before the debate had even exploded, Özcan Buze wrote on 8 August that “working-class liberalism” is conceptually impossible. Buze’s argument is historical: liberalism was never born as a philosophy against the order; Locke was a partner in the slave trade, the Glorious Revolution was a constitutional compact of partnership, and in June 1848 the French bourgeoisie opened cannon fire on the workers of Paris four months after its alliance with them. Liberal freedom is asymmetrical: capital crosses borders freely, the worker cannot. Buze’s sharpest observation is that the book slides from class exploitation to a cultural stratification between “the credentialed and the uncredentialed”; that slide covers over property relations. The conclusion: “The proposal to ‘incentivise’ oligarchs to empower workers does not touch property; it is an adjustment of distribution, not a structural change.”

Our first piece also stood on this line. Now there is a new contribution to this line from Turkey; we will come to it below.

The Debate in Turkey: A Classless Story of a Quarrel

The Turkish press followed the debate widely. But the manner of following is instructive: the great majority of reports and commentaries constructed the quarrel as a matter of identity or reputation, and either never saw the class question or greeted it from the edge and passed on.

The “Turkish Nobel laureate” narrative

Look at the headlines. Türkiye Today and Turkey Unfolding put the “Turkish Nobel laureate” forward; Ermeni Haber ran the same story as “Armenian economist”; Timeturk and Karar, with headlines of “smear campaign” and “character assassination,” built a frame of an attack on one of our own. Habertürk, Bloomberg HT, Cumhuriyet, and Euronews Turkish presented the debate as “what the sides are saying,” a polemic between two famous names.

The problem with this narrative is this: it leaves the content of the debate entirely outside — in whose hands will artificial intelligence be, who will pay the bill for technological change, is the working class a political subject or a coalition component. Acemoğlu’s ethnic or national identity says nothing about the class character of the economic programme he defends. The reflex of “they attacked our boy” is one of the oldest tools for stopping the working class from thinking about its own interest: the class question is hidden behind the national question.

The “liberalism’s civil war” narrative

In Serbestiyet, Yunus Emre Erdölen (30 August) reads the debate as “a civil war that will determine the future of liberalism”: on one side The Economist defending classical liberalism, on the other Acemoğlu wanting to renew liberalism with “working-class liberalism.” Erdölen’s observation overlaps with our diagnosis — yes, this is a family quarrel. But Erdölen does not think there could be something outside this family; he praises Acemoğlu’s “system-internal reformist leftism” and leaves socialism outside the discussion. In this piece “the working class” is a voter category; not a side of the relation of exploitation.

The same frame is in Finansın Gündemi: “he proposed working-class liberalism and became The Economist’s target.” The proposal is presented as courage; that the proposal does not touch property is never asked.

The “geopolitics-state” narrative

In Yeni Şafak, Turgay Yerlikaya (7 September) sets Acemoğlu beside Bernie Sanders and relays the observation that “the great capital created by the technology giants has brought with it an exploitation of the working class.” So far, so good. But the piece then moves straight on to NATO STRATCOM reports, hybrid war, and US–China rivalry, and ties the conclusion here: Silicon Valley is an extension of the US state, so the hope of democratic oversight is empty. The word exploitation appears, but the subject of exploitation does not: neither an exploiting class nor a resisting class. Capital is presented as a feature of “the West”; it never occurs that capital in Turkey uses the same tools of algorithmic management against the same workers. Harici’s “critical of Western institutions” line falls into the same trap: criticising The Economist is taken to be criticising capitalism.

This narrative belongs to a genre we might call “classless anti-imperialism.” It binds capital to a geography and exploitation to an external power; it renders the class relation inside invisible. For the worker the result is clear: he joins hands with his own boss for “national technology.”

A partial class vision: Kozanoğlu

Hayri Kozanoğlu’s BirGün piece (25 August) is among the first commentaries in Turkey to put the class question plainly. Kozanoğlu notes that Acemoğlu “does not give sufficient weight to class contradictions and forms of property” and does not use the socialist literature; he positions him as “not a socialist, but a social democrat seeking solutions from inside the system.” Correct. But Kozanoğlu’s real emphasis is elsewhere: the “real threat” comes from figures with a “techno-fascist tendency” such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk; the evidence is insufficient to say that global capital has launched a systematic attack. So the debate turns into a debate on defending social democracy against the “techno brothers.” This is the very construction we objected to in our Daron–Elon piece: choosing the “lesser evil” of two bourgeois wings. Kozanoğlu sees class, but he sees class not as a subject but as an object under the protection of social democracy.

Return to the class relation: #ayrım

The debate’s most substantial contribution in Turkey was Demet Yılmazkuday’s piece in #ayrım, “Acemoğlu’s Return to Class” (8 September). Yılmazkuday traces Acemoğlu’s thirty-year trajectory: from the institutions of Why Nations Fail to the power relations of Power and Progress, and from there to the latest book’s “working-class liberalism.” For Yılmazkuday this is an advance — but the advance stops “without questioning the structural nature of class relations.” Acemoğlu’s “countervailing powers” are a corrective mechanism that does not question capitalism’s dynamics; he analyses class struggle but does not go as far as class power. And Acemoğlu’s concept of a “non-Marxist class” is a narrow reading that defines class by occupational categories rather than relations of production. The piece’s closing question summarises the whole debate: “Is calling class back into the analysis the same thing as analysing the class relation?”

No, it is not the same thing. That is the whole point.

Comparison: Who Sees What?

Line of commentary	Against The Economist?	Does it see class?	Does it ask about property?	Does it take class struggle as a subject?
Liberal defence (Spruk, Wolf, Crook)	Yes	No	No	No
Institutionalist-populism (Öztürk / ECPS)	Yes	Partly ("countervailing powers")	No	No
Left-reformist (Garzón / Jacobin)	Yes	Yes	Indirectly	Partly
Development economics (Hauge, Mulder)	Draws a distinction	Yes (colony/plunder)	Yes (primitive accumulation)	No
Marxist (Buze, #ayrım, Knowledge Commons)	Beside the point	Yes	Yes	Yes
Turkey "Turkish Nobel laureate" narrative	Yes	No	No	No
Turkey "liberalism’s civil war" (Serbestiyet)	Yes	As a voter category	No	No
Turkey "geopolitics-state" (Yeni Şafak, Harici)	Yes	As a word	No	No
Turkey partial class (Kozanoğlu)	Yes	Yes	Notes it	No (object of social democracy)

What is striking when you look at the table is this: being against The Economist is almost everyone’s common ground, but that common ground explains nothing. The real dividing line is in the right-hand columns: the line that asks about property and takes class struggle as a subject is a small minority of the whole debate. Until that minority grows, the “Acemoğlu debate” will remain a décor between two wings of capital.

What Three Weeks Have Taught Us

The word class has returned; class struggle has not

Garzón is right: even Acemoğlu’s saying “working class” drove a section of the capital press into a fury. That shows the power of the word. But the Prospect article and the MIT promotion show the same thing: Acemoğlu’s working class is not a subject that makes its own history, but a component that “needs to be taken into the coalition.” For him the working class must be taken into the coalition, because otherwise liberal democracy cannot stand. That is, class is liberalism’s life insurance. In Marx’s frame, class struggle is the motor of history; the working class is not taken into a coalition, it builds its own. The difference between these two views is what we said in our first piece under the heading “Lesson 3”: the gains of the twentieth century are not liberalism’s gift, they are rights the working class tore out by force. Acemoğlu credits those rights to liberalism and then says “if we repair liberalism, the rights will come back.” Historical cause and effect have been reversed.

The property question is still not on the table

Buze, Mulder, and Yılmazkuday arrive at the same point from three different directions: Acemoğlu’s programme is about distribution, not relations of production. “Incentivising oligarchs,” “pro-worker AI,” “strengthening unions” — none of these asks who owns the data that trains AI models, the data centres that run those models, the rent those data centres produce. Yet as we said in our Daron–Elon piece, AI models are humanity’s crystallised collective labour; their private ownership is the expropriation of the “general intellect.” That expropriation cannot be corrected by distribution; it is corrected only by changing the property relation. The Economist Group–Microsoft AI link that Öztürk documents also supports this point: the proximity between the magazine’s editorial line and the interest of Suleyman’s company is not a “conspiracy,” it is the normal working of capital. Property also determines who will write what.

Class blindness in Turkey, a continuity from right to left

What we see when we look at the commentaries in Turkey as a whole is that class blindness does not belong to a particular political camp. “Turkish Nobel laureate” nationalism, “liberalism’s civil war” liberalism, “Silicon Valley is an extension of the US” statism — all three do the same thing: they hide the class relation behind another relation (nation, family of ideology, interstate rivalry). The result is that the worker in Turkey finds no place for himself in this debate. Yet the subject of the debate is precisely his life: the algorithmic management of couriers in the gig economy, the mental Taylorism of computing labourers, the reserve army of labour made visible by the broad definition of unemployment figures. While Acemoğlu’s “pro-worker AI” is debated in Boston, the courier in Istanbul works twelve hours that same day on the app that AI manages.

Kozanoğlu and Yılmazkuday are important exceptions in this picture. But Kozanoğlu’s emphasis that “the real threat is the techno-fascists” carries the risk of substituting “defending the lesser-evil bourgeoisie” for class struggle. Techno-fascism is a real threat — we have written on that separately — but what is to be defended against it is not social democracy, it is the working class’s own organised power. Social democracy cannot stop techno-fascism, because it does not touch the concentration of capital on which techno-fascism feeds.

Concrete Tasks for Young Comrades

Following this debate should not remain an intellectual exercise. A few suggestions:

Reading: Read Acemoğlu’s Prospect article and Buze’s critique side by side. Opposite each of Acemoğlu’s proposals, write the question “does this proposal touch property?” At the end of the list you will have a programme of distribution, not a programme of transformation. This exercise is a method you can use whenever you read a reformist programme.

A method for reading the news: Pick ten news reports or columns in the Turkish press related to this debate. In each, look at whether the words “worker,” “class,” “labour,” “property,” “capital” appear, and if they do, in what sense. If the word is there but the subject is not, you are facing class blindness. We used this method when we assessed Evrim Ağacı’s opposition video as well.

Discussion group: In the union, association, or school society you belong to, open a discussion not on “Is Acemoğlu right?” but on “What does Acemoğlu’s programme mean in our workplace?” Try to make concrete what “pro-worker AI” would look like in a call centre, a warehouse, a software company in Turkey. This question brings the abstract debate down to the everyday ground of class struggle.

Writing: Write a short text showing the class blindness of the commentaries in Turkey and send it to us. There are surely other pieces to add to the lines we have counted in this article; let us complete the map of the debate together.

Dear comrades,

Three weeks ago we said “take the class discourse that has come in through the door and carry it all the way.” The balance sheet of three weeks shows this: the discourse came in but is being kept waiting in the corridor. In the world, Garzón, Buze, Mulder, Hauge; in Turkey, Yılmazkuday and partly Kozanoğlu are trying to bring it inside. The mainstream press, right and left, has blocked the door with debates of identity and reputation.

Our job is to take this debate forward from the place Acemoğlu left it. Acemoğlu called class back into the analysis; we will put the class relation — that is, exploitation and property — at the centre of the debate. Acemoğlu invited the working class into liberalism’s coalition; we will defend the working class’s building of its own coalition — its union, its chamber, its party. Acemoğlu wanted AI steered in a “pro-worker” direction; we will say that AI is crystallised collective labour and that that labour must return to its owner, that is, to all of us.

Instead of watching the debate as a spectacle between two wings of capital, let us be the voice of the third side — the only real side. When that voice is organised, no magazine can brush it aside as “oddly unconvincing.”

With love and solidarity.