Let's Meet in Karaburun: "The Revolt of Crystallized Labor"

**The 20th Karaburun Science Congress convenes this year under the theme "labor/laborers." We will be there with the paper we have prepared on artificial intelligence, the general intellect, and the control of labor.

The paper, the presentation file, and the book it rests on — all three are freely available from today under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. We invite everyone to Karaburun.**

Why does the congress matter?

For twenty years the Karaburun Science Congress has insisted on another way of doing science, in a climate where the academy is steadily narrowing and "productivity" and "impact factor" criteria reduce research itself to a performance metric: collective, free, voluntary, non-hierarchical, and openly partisan — partisan on the side of labor.

This year’s theme is the field we too have been working on for years: labor and laborers. The congress call proposes to take up class relations, production processes, and social struggles within a historical-materialist frame. Among the subheadings are the human–nature relation and the metabolic rift, theories of value and exploitation, capitalism–imperialism–the state, women’s labor and care labor, migrant labor, trade-union struggle, and alternative labor organizations. And one more heading that concerns us directly: the effects of digitization and artificial intelligence on labor.

Another point is at least as important as the theme: the congress rests on free and voluntary participation; contributions from outside the academy and collective submissions are especially encouraged. So this is not a meeting in which "title-holders present to one another." The trade unionist, the workplace representative, and the researcher bound to no institution sit in the same hall with the same right to speak. For a collective that defends the idea of knowledge commons, there is no more natural address.

Our paper: how was collective intellect seized?

The paper we will present is titled "The Revolt of Crystallized Labor: The Seizure of the General Intellect in Artificial Intelligence Models, Mental Taylorism, and the Digital Panopticon."

The paper’s starting point is a simple objection: the artificial-intelligence debate is stuck between two tales that look like opposites. The first is a promise of salvation — the machines will free us from drudgery. The second is a disaster scenario — the machines will take our jobs, then our world. These two narratives have a common function: both make technology the subject, and therefore render invisible the real subject, the class that owns the technology.

In its place the paper proposes a two-thesis frame:

The labor thesis: Artificial intelligence does not abolish labor; it fragments labor, cheapens it, renders it invisible, and controls it.

The knowledge thesis: The condition of its being able to do this is the enclosure of socially produced knowledge — its appropriation as property by patent, copyright, closed code, and private data pools.

These are not separate topics. What Marx in the Grundrisse called the "general intellect" — the conversion of social knowledge directly into a productive force — finds today its nakedest form in artificial-intelligence models. The model does not think; it statistically reproduces the knowledge millions of people have produced over centuries. That is, it is crystallized labor. The question is in whose vault that crystal sits.

From here the paper proceeds under four headings:

Digital enclosure: In the sixteenth century the common lands were enclosed, and the landless peasant was turned into the worker who had no choice left but to sell their labor-power. Today the same operation runs over knowledge: collectively produced knowledge is shut into private pools, then access to that knowledge is rented out. Primitive accumulation is not a finished historical stage; it is an ongoing operation.

Mental Taylorism: Taylor’s stopwatch transferred the knowledge in the craftsman’s head onto paper and handed it to management. The algorithm takes one step further: it observes tacit knowledge, codes it, and makes it directly executable. What the experienced laborer calls "intuition" turns into data, data into a model — and the laborer’s strongest card at the bargaining table, their experience, quietly leaves the table. Braverman’s deskilling thesis is valid again for mental labor.

The digital panopticon: This is where the paper deliberately parts from the liberal literature: digital surveillance is, before it is a privacy violation, an instrument for squeezing surplus value. The privacy frame reduces the matter to an individual-rights problem; the class frame makes it a subject of collective bargaining. The three features of algorithmic management — opacity, unappealability, unaccountability — are for this very reason not technical but political problems.

The techno-feudalism debate: We take the popular thesis seriously, discuss it, and reject it: the observations are right, the diagnosis is wrong. The platform laborer is not a serf but a proletarian whose security has been stripped away; what we are living through is not an exit from capitalism, but the rentierization of profit. The distinction is not academic, it is practical: if you say "feudalism," your remedy becomes the Competition Authority; if you say "monopoly capitalism," your remedy is the property question. A wrong diagnosis produces a wrong treatment.

The paper does not end with diagnosis. The last section proposes a counter-program: concrete clauses that can be put on the collective-bargaining table today (algorithmic transparency, the right to disconnect, the right of organized technical objection), tomorrow’s forms of organization (data unionism, function-based organization, an alliance of technical specialists and field laborers), and the real question on the horizon: knowledge commons.

The materials: all open, all free

We are publishing all the materials before the congress, so that those who cannot hear the presentation can read the text, and those who will hear it can prepare for the discussion in advance:

The paper — The full academic text submitted to the congress, together with an abstract, keywords, nine sections, and a bibliography. Read/download the paper »

The presentation file — The 25-slide presentation we will use in Karaburun. In PDF and an editable format; you can use it in your own education work, workplace meetings, and union branches. Download the presentation »

The book it rests on — Labor in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: The Machine Is New, the Chain Is Old. The expanded form of the paper: four parts, thirteen chapters, three appendices, a Turkey struggle dossier, and a toolkit prepared for use in the workplace. As PDF, EPUB, and Markdown. Download the book »

The original essay — The first text that was the seed of the paper. The Revolt of Crystallized Labor »

All are published under CC BY-SA 4.0: provided you credit the source and share under the same license, you may reproduce, print, translate, adapt, and embed them in your own presentation. You do not need to ask permission. This is not a courtesy; it is a requirement of our thesis: for a text written against the enclosure of knowledge to be enclosed by copyright would be the most visible contradiction that could be constructed.

Our call

Come to Karaburun.

The congress convenes on 3–5 September 2026 in the Karaburun district of İzmir. Participation is free. The final program will be announced on 21 August; as soon as the day and hour of our session are set, we will announce them on this page and on our social-media accounts. For up-to-date information on the congress, the program, and travel details: kongrekaraburun.org

But our real call is not a call to an audience.

The weakest place in this text is that it does not yet sufficiently contain the thing it most needs: workplace testimonies. Building the theory is relatively easy; what will confirm or refute it is what the person at the screen actually lives. That is why in Karaburun we hope to learn more from those who listen to us than from ourselves.

We are looking for these:

Cases. What measures you, how it scores you, which decision it makes automatically? In the warehouse, on the courier route, in the call center, in the code repository, in the hospital, in the university — it does not matter.
Objections. Where do you think the text is wrong? Corrections are stated openly in the version notes; they are not changed in silence.
Experience. An organizing experience we do not know, an unrecorded resistance, a forgotten gain.

The door stays open after the session at the congress, and after the congress as well. Like all our publications, this text is a living document: it is published with a version number, and it grows by criticism.

Because the paper’s entire claim fits in a single sentence: