On Turkey's Artificial Intelligence Action Plan (2026–2030)

Dear Young Comrade,

When they place before you Turkey's Artificial Intelligence Action Plan (2026–2030), published in the Official Gazette on 18 August 2026, I hope you will not be swept up in the bourgeois media's technology eulogies or its doomsday prophecies.

The illusion that the modern world of science and technology offers neutral progress is the most powerful ideological veil of our time. Our method is dialectical materialism: we do not believe that machines or algorithms possess a will of their own; we look at the relations of production and property that bring them into being.

Never forget the vital dialectical questions we must ask when examining any document: In whose hands does this technology sit, under whose control, and in whose interest does it work?

Now come, let us together decipher the class struggle and the materialist reality beneath the gilded words of this state document.

Why Now? The Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, and the Role of the State

Comrade, capital never takes a step out of eagerness for "social development." The fundamental reason this plan has emerged precisely today is hidden in capital's own internal contradiction — in the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

The artificial-intelligence revolution drives "constant capital" to enormous proportions through massive data centers and expensive hardware (dead labor), while relatively expelling from the production process the only element that produces value: "variable capital" (living labor). Digital capital, struggling with shrinking profit margins, runs to the state to overcome this contradiction.

Look carefully at the plan's cost architecture: while at least $10 billion in private-sector investment is expected, at least 2% of the public budget will be allocated, and the state will become the corporations' "first customer." At the same time, "sandboxes" will provide companies with legal exemptions. The dialectical reading of this is as follows: the state is socializing the infrastructure costs and risks (loading them onto your bill), while transferring ownership and profit to private capital.

Digital Enclosure and Alienation from the "General Intellect"

The plan heralds the opening of 2,000 public data sets under the banner of a "National Data Library." This is the digital enclosure operation of the twenty-first century — the very process of "primitive accumulation" that Marx described.

These data sets to be opened are not numbers fallen from the sky. They are the diagnostic decisions of a doctor in their clinic, the case-file tendencies of a judge, or the experience of a teacher — in other words, the "tacit knowledge" accumulated by public-sector workers over years. This knowledge in the laborer's head is being handed to corporations as free raw material, without any copyleft guarantee.

We are living through a new generation of alienation, Comrade. What Marx in the Grundrisse called the "General Intellect" is the collective accumulation of social labor. Once these algorithms — trained by the labor of millions — enter corporate ownership, they are stood up against you in the workplace as "fixed capital," measuring your performance or firing you. We are being alienated from the product of our own collective intellect, and dominated by it.

Your Labor Is Not a "Resource": The Reserve Army of Industry

Pay attention to how the plan speaks of you and your class: "Human resources." A neutral input — like coal, water, or data — with no demands, no union, and no objection.

The document promises to train 100,000 application professionals and 10,000 advanced specialists, yet not a single line guarantees employment or wages. This is not a gift offered to you. It is capitalism's deliberate construction of a "reserve army of industry" in order to suppress wages and break the bargaining power of those already employed. The price of any commodity whose supply is inflated beyond its demand falls; under capitalism, your labor-power too is a commodity. While thousands of young people stand at the door ready to do your job far more cheaply, you cannot bargain over overtime or wages inside.

The Illusion of the Cloud: Material Reality and Imperialist Dependency

Do not be deceived by the illusions of terms like "cloud computing" and "digital sovereignty" that bourgeois ideology imposes on you. There is no such place as the cloud, Comrade; there are tons of cable, enormous factories, water, electricity, mines, and exploited subcontracted workers.

The plan targets 1 gigawatt of data-center capacity. In a country that draws 34% of its electricity from imported coal, these enormous facilities will run on the water of basin communities and on imported fossil fuels. On the other hand, under the January 2025 U.S. export-control regime, Turkey is not an unrestricted ally in accessing advanced AI chips but is subject to a "quota" regime. While umbilically tied to imperialism in hardware — the fundamental link of the means of production — the fact that the server sits in Ankara does not change the property relations; this is not a program of "independence" but of "managing dependency."

Your Guide: Illusions vs. Dialectical Class Reality

I leave you the following dialectical comparison table for use in the class struggle:

Capital's Discourse (Ideological Illusion)	Materialist Class Reality
"Career Gateway for 115,000 Specialists"	Inflating the supply of cognitive labor through training with no employment guarantee, and driving wages down.
"Opening 2,000 Public Data Sets"	Appropriating the experience of public personnel and social data as private capital's property (Digital Primitive Accumulation).
"$10 Billion in Private Investment"	Socializing risks through the state budget and incentives, privatizing the profit generated by technology.
"Proportionate and Risk-Based Regulation"	Granting flexibility to capital by ignoring international standards that classify workers' rights and employment as "high risk."
"Digital Sovereignty and the Cloud"	Changing the location of the server while perpetuating infrastructure ownership and dependency on imperialist chip quotas.

Not Smashing, but Seizing Control

Comrade, we will not smash the looms as they did in the nineteenth century. Because our quarrel is not with the technology, but with the capital class the technology serves.

It may appear that they set the agenda. This action plan was presented just one day after the ILO adopted the "Decent Work in the Platform Economy Convention" on 12 June 2026; yet the ILO document that protects workers was swept under the rug. But capitalism produces, with its own hands, the enormous tools that will bring about its own end. The socialist central planning that capitalism calls "too complex to compute" has today become fully possible with this algorithmic power.

Our task is clear:

1. To push the use of automated algorithms in employment decisions into the "high-risk" classification.

2. To impose algorithmic transparency on workers' unions.

3. To fight for models produced from public data to be publicly available.

4. Most importantly: as IT laborers who write this code, to establish our right to "organized refusal" against capital's unethical and anti-worker practices.

Do not succumb to fear and be paralyzed, Comrade. Historical justice is on our side. The hands that produced this machine will seize control of it too.

We want our collective intellect back.

The pamphlet version of this text is also available: BM Turkey AI Action Plan (PDF)