The Cyber Labyrinths of Imperialism — An Epistemological Intervention in Gauthier Hordel's Analysis of Artificial Intelligence

An Assessment of Gauthier Hordel's Article "Artificial Intelligence: A Technological and Imperialist Struggle" in Issue 72 of Teori ve Eylem

Hello, Comrade Gauthier Hordel. I read your article titled "Artificial Intelligence: A Technological and Imperialist Struggle" in this issue of Teori ve Eylem with great theoretical appetite, taking notes as I went.

In this age of ideological illusion, when bourgeois futurists, liberal technocrats, and—alas—some naive circles in the "left" corridor present artificial intelligence as "a borderless, equalizing, immaterial reason that melts boundaries and turns the world into a smooth global village," you placed Lenin's Imperialism theory's crimson banner directly on the table. To pull artificial intelligence out of Silicon Valley's mystifying veils and situate it at the very center of monopoly capital, imperialist hegemonic wars (especially the US–China rivalry), and the new wave of colonialism is a tremendous theoretical gain. Health to your labor and your Marxist will, comrade.

Yet as a Marxist epistemologist and worker of philosophy, it is our duty to carry the revolutionary potential at the heart of your text to its sharpest edge—and to fortify the economic-political line so well displayed in the text with a dialectical-materialist philosophy. Allow me, comrade, after saluting the vital, strong pillars of your text, to fill in comradely and shoulder to shoulder, from the lens of Marxist epistemology, the aspects that remain missing and need to be deepened dialectically.

Theoretical Positions: The Strong and Vital Pillars of the Text

Comrade Gauthier, the greatest contribution your article makes to Marxist literature is to decode artificial intelligence not as a "technological destiny" but as the hyper-industrial stage of finance capital and monopolization.

The Boundless Rejection of Technological Fetishism

In your text you brilliantly show that training and running large language models (LLMs) is the preserve of global cartels (Microsoft, Google, Meta, OpenAI, etc.; Baidu, Tencent) backed by imperialist states, possessing enormous compute power. Lenin's thesis in Imperialism on "the concentration of production in a few giant enterprises and a handful of financial oligarchs seizing the fruits of monopolistic exploitation" is magnificently updated in your text for the cyber age. Artificial intelligence is not a neutral scientific development but the cyber-economic war axe of imperialist states; this starting point of your text is an unshakeable materialist foundation.

The Diagnosis of Cyber-Colonialism

The analysis of exploitation hierarchy you build through the global value chain is very valuable, comrade. Making visible the modern "click slaves" (data labelers) in Kenya, the Philippines, and India who sort the internet's darkest data for 1–2 dollars a day—so that Western or China-centered servers can produce "smooth" AI models—gives your text tremendous empirical legitimacy. Imperialism's plunder of raw materials is no longer limited to lithium and cobalt alone; the Global South's living click labor and social data pools are also subjected to epistemic pillage by cyber centers.

Epistemological Gaps: Aspects of the Text That Must Be Dialectically Fortified

Comrade Gauthier, your article magnificently displays the external competition, market struggles, and technological encirclement of imperialist states and the monopoly capital behind them in cyber space. Yet Marxist philosophy and epistemology compel us to pierce the essence behind appearance (phenomenon), the internal contradictions within external relations.

There are three fundamental epistemological rifts we must fill and expand in order to raise the economic-political line of your text to a higher stage with dialectical-materialist philosophy. Fortifying these rifts will transform our analysis from a mere geopolitical situation report into a revolutionary guide to action.

The Expropriation of the General Intellect and Epistemic Dispossession

In your text you portray artificial intelligence as a "weapon" of imperialist monopolies pointed at peripheral countries, comrade; yet you leave out the ontological nature of the substance that fills the barrel of that weapon—the expropriated knowledge. The phenomenon before us is not an ordinary fixed capital (c) drain, like the loom of the classical industrial revolution that absorbs only the worker's mechanical arm strength. It is the cyber-enclosure of the "General Intellect" concept that Karl Marx brilliantly foresaw in the Grundrisse.

• The Commodification of Language and Common Memory: AI models (LLMs) did not descend from the sky. These models exist by swallowing humanity's hundreds of years of collective linguistic practice, digital libraries, forum posts, artistic production—in short, common knowledge as a fully social substance.
• The Epistemological Subject–Object Contradiction: Capital has appropriated this collective intellectual heritage of humanity in its data centers and then begun selling that same knowledge back to humanity as a paid "subscription service" (SaaS).

The gap here is this, comrade: Artificial intelligence is not merely an instrument of market control; it is a qualitative epistemic dispossession in which humanity's capacity to know, grasp, and make sense of the world is torn from its hands and converted into capital's apparatus of domination (dead labor). When our analysis does not rest on this philosophical foundation, we fall into the error of seeing technology as an objective thing outside class relations (technological determinism).

The Trap of Absolutizing Cyber-Despotism and the Cyber Crisis of the Law of Value

Comrade Gauthier, in your text you have constructed imperialist cyber encirclement as such a smooth, flawless, and absolute hegemonic project that a worker or progressive intellectual reading it may feel dystopian helplessness, a sense of surrender to the cyber panopticon. Yet dialectical logic commands us to seek, within every absolute display of power that capital reaches, its most lethal weakness and existential crisis.

The more capital automates production through artificial intelligence to crush rivals and optimize exploitation, the more it is dynamiting the very ground beneath Marxist Labor Theory of Value:

• The Source of Surplus Value Is Drying Up: As Marx proved, the sole source of surplus value is living human labor (v). Fixed capital (machines, software, algorithms) cannot by itself produce new value; it only transfers its own value to the product.
• The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (LTRPF): The more capital drives living labor out of mental and production processes with AI and inflates its organic composition (c/v) to enormous dimensions, the more it pushes profit rates downward in cyber space—that historical crisis (LTRPF) to its highest level.

Capital's hysterical and aggressive embrace of artificial intelligence today stems not from its unshakeable strength but from an existential panic reflex against the crisis of being unable to produce value. The more AI drives marginal costs toward zero, the more capitalism must erect artificial monopolies and cyber-feudal enclosures to keep the commodity form and price mechanism standing. We must fortify our text not by presenting capital as a "flawless cyber despot" but as a monster drowning in its own internal contradictions and organizing its suicide in cyber space.

The Risk of Geopolitical Reductionism vs. the Global Collective Worker

The third gap—and politically the most dangerous one, comrade—is that the emphasis remains too state-centered (US–China blocs, national rivalries). Undoubtedly the clash among imperialist states is an objective fact. Yet in Marxism the state is not a supra-class arbiter or an independent clique; it is a committee for managing the common affairs of the ruling class. When we reduce the matter only to the frame of "nation-states' cyber war," we risk falling into the trap of bourgeois nationalism or left-populist "domestic and national technology" fetishism.

• The Obscuring of Class Essence: An algorithm written by the Chinese monopoly Tencent and an algorithm written by the US monopoly Microsoft apply the same despotic, algorithmic surveillance over their own working classes. The essence of the contradiction is not between states but between international capital and global labor.
• The Global Collective Worker: While building its exploitation network, cyber-imperialism has for the first time in history bound the global proletarian body materially and digitally through a single nerve network.

The click worker in Kenya cleaning traumatic data, the metal worker in Taiwan at the mouth of suffocating furnaces in a chip fab, the technician cooling a data center in Northern Virginia, and the progressive software developer pulling an all-nighter in an office tower... These are not subjects of rival nations but objectively the shackled limbs of the same cyber value chain—the body of the Global Collective Worker.

We must complete this missing internationalist link in our text, comrade. The exit from imperialist labyrinths is not to erect national cyber walls but, with the organized consciousness of this global proletarian body, to blow the property passwords of the global server networks that built those labyrinths through internationalist will.

The Owner of the Future: The Cyber Post Office and Red Cybernetic Planning

Comrade Gauthier; let us crown the precious anti-imperialist cry of your text with the Promethean, founding program of our Marxist class vision. Imperialist monopolies have digitized every moment, every second, and every logistics route of production in real time to control the world market and optimize exploitation. What does this mean, comrade?

It means the technical infrastructure has matured for socialist planning as never before in history!

Our theoretical task is to adapt Lenin's striking thesis in The State and Revolution, built on the capitalist post office, to the cyber-imperialist infrastructure of the twenty-first century:

"There is before us a vast cyber mechanism equipped with the most modern technique. This is the ready-made infrastructure of a socialist economic mechanism. All we need to do is wrench this mechanism from the hands of imperialist monopolies, break the property passwords, and place it directly at the command of the workers' state/planning soviets."

Our vision cannot be a cyber Luddism that curses technology. We will not blow up those data centers; we will seize the management protocols, codes, and property of those data centers! We will rescue artificial intelligence from the hands of imperialist war machines (Lavender, Gospel algorithms) and profit hunger and place it at the service of Red Cybernetic Planning Soviets that will foster fraternity among peoples, the rational division of resources, and the healing of the "metabolic rift" between nature and humanity.

Final Word, or a Red Manifesto: The Global Plunder of the General Intellect and the Tasks of Cyber-Internationalism

Comrade Gauthier Hordel; with your pen you have very successfully exposed those insidious, monopolistic, and colonial gears in the cyber labyrinths of imperialism. You showed us that cyber space is not merely a technical arena but a merciless and savage field of class struggle. Yet Marxist dialectics, faced with this dark tableau before us, does not command surrender but organizing the revolutionary will that will collapse that labyrinth.

To avoid leaving the planet's and the class's future to the mercy of Silicon Valley and imperial centers, we must reconstitute the final horizon of your text on the axis of The Global Plunder of the General Intellect and The Tasks of Cyber-Internationalism, as a militant call.

The Global Plunder of the General Intellect: The Wave of Cyber-Enclosure

What we face today under the name of artificial intelligence is the largest and most organized dispossession movement in history. After appropriating rivers, land, and factories, capital is now seizing humanity's greatest social common—the General Intellect.

The vast intellectual substance that humanity has produced through centuries of collective practice, language, science, and culture is being plundered and patented in imperialist monopolies' data centers. This cyber-colonial mechanism, fed by the Global South's living click labor, is being turned back against humanity as a weapon to enslave it anew, to build algorithmic panopticons, and to designate targets for imperialist war machines. Stopping this plunder is not only an economic struggle but a fight to defend humanity's capacity to know and make meaning!

The Concrete Tasks of Cyber-Internationalism

Against this global plunder, a populist "domestic and national technology" fetishism that hides behind national borders cannot be the remedy. Against the rulers' global algorithm, we must stretch the proletariat's global and internationalist cyber nerve network. Cyber-Internationalism places the following historical tasks before us:

• Positional Warfare on the Cognitive Front: We must build algorithmic counter-hegemony lines that wrest artificial intelligence from its role as the bourgeoisie's mechanism for manufacturing consent, ideological manipulation, and false consciousness production. We must turn the rulers' cyber apparatuses into revolutionary counter-information weapons that map global capitalist exploitation, environmental plunder, and imperialist war crimes.
• Organizing the Body of the Global Collective Worker: We must raise to consciousness the click worker labeling data in Kenya for one dollar a day, the metal worker producing chips in Taiwan, and the progressive software developer writing code in an office tower as objectively proletarian limbs of the same cyber value chain. We must unite digital and physical exploitation fronts in a single internationalist union and political line.
• The Rescue of Digital Commons: Against capital's intellectual property walls and monopolistic software systems, we must bend the global open source movement that defends humanity's common intellect and rejects ownership onto a class and revolutionary axis.

Final Call: Whose Hand Is on the Switch?

"What they call the 'cloud' is not a sacred and smooth spirit hanging in the sky, comrades—it is nothing other than the expropriated flesh, blood, and living labor of the earth, its rivers, and the working class!"

While imperialist monopolies digitize every moment of production to control the world market and optimize exploitation, they have—for the first time in history—built with their own hands the vast technical infrastructure that socialist planning requires. The technical infrastructure has objectively matured for a cyber-communist world.

Our task is not a reactionary machine-breaking (Luddism) that demonizes technology. We will not blow up those data centers; with the organized will of the global Collective Worker body that created those data centers, we will break the property passwords of that network!

The switch of capital and imperialist war machines is in the hands of the global proletariat that defends nature and labor. That switch will be thrown by organized will—and this time not for monopolistic profit but for the dawn of those Red Cybernetic Planning Soviets, where borders and classes are abolished, humanity's common intellect is liberated, and nature's metabolic rift is healed!

For this vital, mind-opening, and militant intervention I salute you again with all my heart and embrace you comradely, Comrade Gauthier. May the point of our spear remain forever sharp against the rulers' cyber fortresses!

All Power to Cyber Networks, Internationalist Commons, and Soviets!