Class Tasks in the World of Computing and a Call to Revolutionary Struggle in Light of Selim Başoğlu's Text

An Assessment of Selim Başoğlu's Article "The Class Character of the Future of Artificial Intelligence" in Issue 72 of Teori ve Eylem

My dear comrade Selim; I read the article you wrote for this issue of Teori ve Eylem, titled "The Class Character of the Future of Artificial Intelligence," with great excitement, line by line, pencil in hand.

In this age of ideological fetishism, when bourgeois media, Silicon Valley technocrats, and even some "left" liberal circles market artificial intelligence as a matter stripped of material reality—a class-transcendent, neutral "technological fate" or a divine "transcendent intelligence"—you planted the red banner of class struggle directly on the table. By wrenching the future of artificial intelligence out of futurist fantasies and situating it in the context of production relations, property regimes, and class domination, you achieve tremendous theoretical clarity. Health to your pen and your Marxist will, comrade.

Yet comrade Selim, we must evaluate the horizon you opened in your article with the sharpest tools of Marxist epistemology and Leninist science; when analyzing the "future" of artificial intelligence, we must cry out more loudly the dialectical, mortal contradiction beating in the heart of capital. Allow us to refresh our coffee and carry your powerful text one step further through a dialectical-materialist lens.

The Rejection of Technological Fetishism and Reified Class Power

Comrade Selim, your greatest achievement in the text is to show clearly that artificial intelligence does not serve a neutral rationality but capital's desire for "Real Domination." In examining the future class character of artificial intelligence, you have very well demonstrated how it will be shaped in the hands of the ruling class as an instrument of control and surplus-value exploitation.

Throughout its history, capital has always configured technology as a "class weapon." How right Marx was in Capital, when describing machine-based large-scale industry:

"The machine, which is the most powerful weapon capital uses to subject living labor, break the worker's resistance, and intensify exploitation."

You proceed precisely along this line, declaring openly that the algorithm is not a technical necessity but reified class power. Artificial intelligence will not be a neutral administrator in the future; on the contrary, it will be the cyber-mechanized form of the exploiting classes' strategies of extraction. This materialist starting point is the unshakable backbone of your text.

Epistemological Rupture: From the Expropriation of Muscle Labor to the Invasion of the General Intellect

At precisely this point, comrade, we must bring Marxist epistemology into play and deepen your analysis philosophically. The future class character of artificial intelligence expresses a qualitative rupture from the mechanization of the classical industrial revolution.

Classical capitalism, taking the form of the machine, objectified the worker's bodily and motor capacities (muscle power, manual skill) and incorporated them as constant capital ($c$). In the age of artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs), capital forcibly tears from the social body humanity's historically and socially produced cognitive capacities, linguistic codes, intuitive information processing, and decision-making power, converting them into blocks of code.

Let us recall Marx's famous "Fragment on Machines" in the Grundrisse, comrade. There Marx says that at capitalism's most advanced stage, social knowledge and science will become a direct productive force, and he calls this the "General Intellect."

Capital's artificial intelligence offensive is an attempt to fence General Intellect with capitalist property relations. The future's class character lies here: Capital expropriates humanity's common intellectual heritage through intellectual property laws (copyrights, SaaS subscriptions) and turns it into a cyber authority to re-enslave the working class. Lenin's struggle in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism to defend knowledge of objective reality has today become the struggle to rescue knowledge of our objectified dead labor on the internet from capital's plunder.

The Cyber Crisis of the Law of Value: Capital's Power or Its Impotence?

Comrade Selim, in your article you write with very justified concern about the waves of unemployment, deskilling, and absolute domination projects over the class that artificial intelligence will create in the future. Yet you describe cyber despotism in such absolute and flawless terms that the reader may fall under the illusion that capital will become an "invincible god" through this technology.

Dialectical logic commands us to see the mortal weakness beating in the heart of every power, comrade. What did Evald Ilyenkov, the great name of the Soviet philosophical legacy, say? The essence of human thought, unlike formal logic, is to advance by synthesizing contradictions. As capital automates production and standardizes mental labor, it is in fact blowing up the most fundamental law of the capitalist mode of production: the Labor Theory of Value.

As capital drives living labor ($v$) out of the production process and replaces it with artificial intelligence and robotic constant capital ($c$), it dries up the sole source of surplus value. As productive artificial intelligence drives marginal production costs toward zero, the ground beneath the commodity form and the law of value is shifting.

That capital today tries to turn artificial intelligence into such a savage apparatus of surveillance, control, and dispossession stems not from its strength but from the existential panic it faces before the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall—its compulsion to fence our digital commons and rent them back to us because it cannot produce value. The future before us is not flawless cyber-fascism; it is the future of a dying beast trying to stay upright with a bayonet as the value form collapses.

The Owner of the Future: The "Cyber Post Office" and the Total Worker

Let us expand the struggle vision and class optimism at the end of your article into a more concrete, Promethean alternative, comrade Selim. To optimize exploitation and control, capital is commodifying every moment, every second, every logistics route of production. So what does this mean philosophically and technically?

Capital has with its own hands refuted the thesis of liberal bourgeois economists like Hayek that "Central planning is impossible, because no central calculator can ever compute society's scattered map of knowledge and time." The entire social map of time and need is now instantly measurable and transparent. That is, comrade, the technical infrastructure has objectively matured for socialist planning!

Let us adapt Lenin's immortal "Post Office" metaphor from State and Revolution (1917) to the twenty-first century:

"Before us stands a vast cyber mechanism, equipped to the highest degree with modern technique. This is the ready infrastructure of a socialist economic mechanism. All we need to do is wrench this mechanism from the capitalists' hands, break the property passwords, and place it directly at the command of workers' councils."

What will determine the future's class character is not artificial intelligence's own technical nature but the organized will of the global "Total Worker" body that keeps those networks standing. From the worker mining chips in Congo to the click worker labeling data in Kenya; from the progressive programmer writing code in the office tower to the courier hauling boxes in the warehouse—everyone is objectively a proletarian limb of the same cyber neural network.

Class Tasks in the Digital Factory and a Call to Cyber-Communist Struggle

Comrade Selim; with your pen you tore the gilded futurist veils of the bourgeoisie and placed before us the naked class reality and relations of exploitation beneath artificial intelligence's glittering shell. Yet Marxist dialectics does not content itself with interpreting the world alone; it also piles before us the material will and concrete tasks that will change it.

Facing the cyber panopticon you depict, we must not fall into dystopian pessimism; rather, we must concretize the historical and class tasks before us in three fundamental fronts in order to transform the mortal crisis beating in capital's heart into organized power:

Class Tasks Before Us

• Ideological Front (The Rout of Technological Fetishism): Our first task is to shatter the dense bourgeois ideology enveloping the world of computing. Against technocratic tales that market artificial intelligence as a mystical "Transcendent Intelligence" independent of human beings, we must ceaselessly propagate that it is a statistical sediment of objectified dead human labor on the internet. We must philosophically rout every form of "left" technological determinism that strips science and technology from class relations.
• Organizational Front (The Proletarianization Consciousness of IT Workers): We must confront IT workers (programmers, system administrators, data analysts) whom capital tries to melt into the system with concepts like "creative class," "freelance autonomy," or "tech partnership" with their proletarian identities. Breaking their pride in the office towers, we must make concrete through union and political organization that they are objectively limbs of the same "Total Worker" body as the click worker cleaning traumatic content in Kenya, the courier in the Amazon warehouse, and the code writer in the office tower.
• Tactical and Infrastructural Front (Cyber Planning Cartography): We must already map with a revolutionary eye the vast data centers, logistics algorithms, and cloud infrastructures capital builds to absolutize exploitation. These networks are the ready, established technical infrastructure of the socialist planning mechanism that will be capitalism's gravedigger. Our task is to organize today the theoretical and practical preparation that will break the monopolistic property passwords of this digital post office.

A Comradely Call to the World of Computing: Let Us Turn Keyboards and Servers into Trenches of Class War!

To the progressive programmers, data workers, network administrators, engineers, and all cognitive workers of cyber space in the world of computing!

Comrades! The bourgeoisie uses the blocks of code woven by your hands, the artificial intelligence models you optimize, to rain death on the oppressed peoples of the earth with Lavender and Gospel algorithms. That magnificent social intelligence you have created swings above the working class in factories and warehouses as an algorithmic panopticon whip. This technology, brought into being by filtering humanity's common memory, cannot be surrendered to the monopolistic barons of Silicon Valley's profit lusts and the savagery of imperialist war machines!

Do not allow capital to tear you from the integral knowledge of production and reduce you to "cognitive appendages" of its machines. Your keyboards are not merely tools optimizing capital's profit matrices; they are your weapons on the cyber front of class struggle.

• Build the class's digital solidarity networks against capital's surveillance software!
• Defend open-source, collective commons that push against the boundaries of monopolistic property!
• Raise cognitive strikes and walkouts against your companies' bloody collaborations with militarism and apartheid regimes—from Silicon Valley to Berlin, from Bangalore to Istanbul!

Final Word

Comrade Selim; the theoretical position you opened is a red lantern flung into the cold, cyber-despotic darkness of the world of computing. Our task is not to look at that darkness and weep; it is to pull the plug of that vast social intelligence from the bourgeoisie's profit servers and connect it to the proletariat's planning committees.

The switch is not in the abstract servers in the cloud, comrade; it is in the mines that bring those servers into being, in the keyboards that label that data, and in the hands that write those codes. When the class's common mind, with organized will, reaches for that switch, the property shell of the cyber panopticon will be shattered.

Once again I embrace you in comradely fashion for this magnificent, militant, and mind-opening theoretical intervention. May our path be open, and the point of our spear be sharp!

All Power to Cyber Networks and Councils!