Is a Real Emancipation of Artificial Intelligence Possible?

Dear young comrades,

One of the greatest weapons late capitalism uses to manage mass psychology is to present technology as a "miracle" independent of human beings, of society, and—most importantly—of class struggle. Today the technology giants and their ideological apparatuses market artificial intelligence as a divine intellect descended upon the earth, a neutral scientific leap beyond the human mind. This propaganda, dumped on us from the sterile offices of Silicon Valley and the glossy screens of the bourgeois media, aims to make us feel atomized, defeated, and powerless.

The first task of dialectical-materialist thought is to scrape off this silicon makeup and expose the ruthless class dynamic beneath it. Artificial intelligence is not a mystical power fallen from the sky; it is a weapon of capital shaped within the relations of production of class society. No accumulation of capital grows without contradiction, and as giant monopolies grow stronger they enlarge in the same measure the structural fragilities that will bring their own collapse. Now let us refuse this "virtual depression" imposed on the masses and shake the question from its foundations with a dialectical process analysis.

Shattering the Illusion of Neutrality

Bourgeois science and ideology tell us that technology is "neutral." On their account a piece of software or an algorithm is neither good nor bad; what matters is who uses it, and for what purpose. This is a thoroughly idealist fairy tale that pacifies the masses.

Technology bears the stamps of the mode of production in which it is born. Which direction artificial-intelligence research will take, which data will be processed, and according to which optimization targets the algorithms will be written (for example "to monitor worker performance" or "to trigger the desire to consume") is determined directly by the command of capital. Artificial intelligence is not a neutral instrument; it is a means of production designed to deepen the exploitation of surplus value.

Digital Primitive Accumulation and the Enclosing of Collective Memory

Karl Marx, recounting the birth of capitalism, defines as "primitive accumulation" the fencing-off of the lands peasants used in common and their seizure by feudal lords. What we face today in the digital age is the most colossal "digital primitive accumulation" drive history has seen.

The trillion-parameter artificial-intelligence models that technology giants proudly display today are not a value any company created on its own. These models have been trained on the language, literature, philosophy, visual arts, open-source code, and the everyday digital interactions of billions of people that humanity has accumulated for millennia. In the Grundrisse, Marx names society’s collective stock of knowledge and social intellect the "General Intellect" (General Intellect). The artificial-intelligence monopolies have seized this vast General Intellect of humanity without paying a penny; they have fenced our collective mind with digital enclosures and passed it into private property.

The Transformation of "Living Intellect" into "Dead Labor"

From a dialectical standpoint, an artificial-intelligence model is not a "living consciousness"; it is an extremely condensed accumulation of "dead labor" (c). Just as a machine in a nineteenth-century factory is a crystallization of the dead labor of past workers and is turned into an instrument of control over the living worker, today’s colossal artificial-intelligence models are the crystallized form of the mental data produced by billions of people.

The irony is this: humanity fed artificial intelligence with the data it itself produced; capital then packaged this dead labor and set it back up against the human being in order to isolate living human labor, devalue it, and threaten it with unemployment.

The Dialectic of Artificial Intelligence in the Relations of Production: Constant Capital’s Assault on Living Labor

This vast hoard of seized data is not a passive treasure sitting in the vaults of technology companies. Capital sets the "dead labor" it has appropriated as a weapon directly against living labor in factories, software offices, and call centers.

The fundamental dialectic of the capitalist mode of production is hidden in the organic composition of capital. The bourgeoisie pours trillions of dollars into colossal data centers and GPUs in order to break the bargaining power of human labor (v) in the production process, to abolish the risk of strikes, and to drive wages to the minimum. Yet according to Marx’s law of value the sole source of surplus value is exploitable living human labor. As capital throws workers out the door, it is in fact drying up the source that would produce surplus value. This creates a colossal technological bubble that will, in the long run, trigger the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall with unprecedented violence.

The Proletarianization of the White Collar and the "Reserve Army of the Unemployed"

The bourgeois media sells us this illusion: "Artificial intelligence will free you from boring work; you will do creative and free jobs." Material reality is the exact opposite. Under the conditions of capitalism, artificial intelligence does not free the human being from drudgery; it deskills qualified human labor and renders the human being precarious.

The process programmers, translators, graphic designers, and academics live through today is "the proletarianization of the white collar." Qualified intellectual labor is being reduced to "a statistical pile of code"; yesterday’s creative laborer is being turned into today’s prompt operator. These masses, left unemployed or driven into freelance work, form a new digital reserve army of labor and are used like a whip to pull down the wages of those still employed.

The "Open Source" Illusion: An Instrument of Monopoly Competition

One of the insidious manipulations that appear in the process analysis is the "open source" (Open Source) artificial-intelligence lie led by giants such as Meta. A tale of digital democratization is told under the slogan "we are freeing artificial intelligence from monopoly." Yet the dialectical filter shows that this is not emancipation, but a war for market hegemony:

Bourgeois Illusion (the Open-Source Tale)	Dialectical-Materialist Reality	Class and Economic Outcome
Freedom and Democratization: Models are opened to the public and the monopoly is broken.	Complementary-Goods Strategy: The aim is to collapse rivals’ business models while preserving the monopoly over the real means of production (data and cloud).	The means of production (servers) remain with the billionaires; the public merely gets the user manual.
Collective Innovation: Developers contribute to the code and improve the world.	Unpaid Labor Exploitation: Independent programmers’ work on "open models" returns to the company as free R&D.	Meta integrates a global army of volunteer workers, to whom it pays not a penny in wages, into its profit cycle.
The Distribution of Power: Superintelligence should not be in the hands of a clique.	Ecosystem Dependence: By standardizing the underlying architecture it binds the software world to its own infrastructure.	An illusion of diversity is created in the lower layers of the market, while a savage monopolization of infrastructure property takes place.

The Power of the Powerless Class, Taken for Weakness: Capital’s Breaking Points

When trillion-dollar technology giants stand on one side and millions struggling with a futureless life on the other, bourgeois ideology instills the idea that we have no chance against this mechanism. Yet the more a structure grows, the more it centralizes, the sharper the contradictions and breaking points it carries within itself become.

The Collapse of the "Cloud" Illusion: The bourgeoisie markets artificial intelligence as an abstract, gravity-free, and clean "cloud." The material reality is that artificial intelligence is a heavy industry consuming colossal amounts of electricity, water, and land. As capitalism severs the metabolic bond it has with nature, the opposition local people will develop around the right to water and energy justice puts these centers directly in the crosshairs. Mass resistance that grows against the handing over of a city’s water to data centers will, in seconds, bury that "cloud" illusion in darkness. The digital is subordinate to the concrete.

The "Invisible Proletariat" and Dependence on Labor: Artificial intelligence is not an autonomous mind. Without the hundreds of thousands of "data labelers" (clickworkers) paid one or two dollars an hour in the Global South, the technicians who keep the model running, and the chip miners, artificial intelligence cannot form a single sentence. Capital, while threatening the white-collar worker with artificial intelligence, ignores this new proletarian mass it has itself created. The organization of these digital slaves creates an asymmetric power that can paralyze the system with a single keystroke.

The Realization Crisis: By excluding living labor and impoverishing the masses, the bourgeoisie is destroying the market in which it would sell the services it produces. When the unemployed masses cannot consume, those colossal investment bubbles are doomed to burst.

Bourgeois Illusion (Capital’s Show)	Dialectical-Materialist Reality	The Class’s Field of Action and Struggle
Infinite Power and Cloud Technology	Artificial intelligence is a heavy physical industry consuming colossal amounts of water and electricity.	The right to water, local ecological assemblies, and physical infrastructure blockades.
Autonomous and Unmanned System	Artificial intelligence depends on the exploitation of millions of cheap digital workers.	Global unionization of data labelers and supply-chain strikes.
A Flawless Economic Model	Because the unemployed masses will be unable to consume, a crisis of overaccumulation is near.	Exposing the private ownership of the productive forces and the demand for expropriation.

From Passive Reactivity to Material Action: Creative Instruments of Struggle

A tweet posted on social media, an angry critique written to an algorithm, or petition campaigns that bring a soothing of conscience do not damage the wheels of capital. On the contrary, they supply a flow of data to capital’s platforms. This "digital catharsis" in which the masses are imprisoned must be surpassed, and we must pass to direct, material, and asymmetric actions.

• Data Strikes and Digital Sabotage: The oxygen of artificial-intelligence models is data. When the flow of data is cut, algorithms become functionless. Artists’, programmers’, and the people’s use of "data poisoning" (data poisoning) tactics against algorithms’ plunder of human labor must be turned not into an individual protection, but into an instrument of collective digital sabotage.

• The Historical Alliance of Mental and Manual Labor: It is a condition that engineers in technology offices, the laborers of Silicon Valley, grasp themselves not as a privileged caste but as a "mental proletariat." System architects’ refusal to write code for military projects and for modules that will lead to the slaughter of workers is the direct use of power that comes from production.

• Expropriation Instead of "Ethics Laws": The "Artificial Intelligence Ethics Laws" issued by the bourgeois state merely give legal security to the monopolistic structure. The struggle is not to beg the state for ethical algorithms; it is to demand that computing power, data centers, and models be expropriated directly and transferred to social property.

Cyber-Socialism or Techno-Barbarism

Dialectical materialism tells us that technology is not determinist. Instruments are neither emancipatory nor enslaving; everything depends on the relations of production and the property regime. Under capitalism an autonomous algorithm is an apparatus of exploitation that drives the worker into hunger; in a classless society it is a lever of emancipation that shortens compulsory labor time.

If the regime of private property over the means of production is not liquidated, what awaits us is techno-barbarism: a new digital feudalism in which mental and manual labor are discredited, ecology is swallowed by data centers, and the masses are governed in algorithmic echo chambers.

Yet if the working class organizes and transfers these means of production into social property, cyber-socialism lies on the horizon: a real revolution of free time in which working hours are dramatically reduced by handing all drudgery over to automation, and in which the profit drive is replaced by cyber-socialist planning that centers ecology and human need.

Dimension of Analysis	Late Capitalism (Techno-Barbarism)	Classless Society (Cyber-Socialism)
Fundamental Aim	To maximize surplus-value exploitation and profit.	To raise social welfare and human development.
Working Hours	To threaten with unemployment and work people more cheaply/flexibly.	To reduce compulsory hours and create creative free time.
Ecological Effect	To plunder water and energy for profit (metabolic rift).	To carry out planetary economic planning in harmony with nature.
Form of Property	The private property of technology monopolies (c).	Common public property open to the use of all humanity.
The Position of the Human Being	A digital slave whose data is seized and who is surveilled.	A conscious subject who plans their own history and explores the universe.

You Cannot Be Free in the Cyber World Without Liberating the Earth

Dear young comrades,

The most insidious, most poisonous illusion late capitalism sows in our minds is the lie that the digital world, the internet, or artificial intelligence is a "classless," "boundless," and "free" parallel universe detached from material reality. Modern technology showmen and bourgeois futurists constantly preach that we can be saved by fleeing the crises on earth (climate disasters, poverty, housing crises) into utopias of "Cyberspace," the "Metaverse," or "Web3."

As a modern Marxist philosopher we must smash this idealist sophistry with the hammer of dialectical materialism: The cyber world is not a spiritual realm floating in the sky; it is a superstructure institution umbilically bound to the mud, blood, copper, and exploited labor of the earth.

Until the property relations on earth are overthrown, every "freedom" sought in the cyber world will amount to nothing more than a digital prison cell the bourgeoisie has painted with pixels. Let us analyze this truth in depth through three dialectical processes:

The Dialectic of Base and Superstructure: The Material Weight of the "Cloud"

Capital presents technology as an aesthetic illusion. Our files are in the "cloud," our algorithms are "wireless," our artificial intelligence is "virtual." Yet dialectical materialism teaches us that no superstructure (the cyber world) can exist independently of its own material base (the physical world).

The material infrastructure of that universe you take for "cyber freedom" or "boundless digital space" is this:

• Minerals extracted with the blood of child workers in the cobalt mines of the Congo.

• Lands seized by imperialist companies in Bolivia’s lithium deposits.

• Monopolies of millions of kilometers of fiber-optic cable laid on the ocean floor.

• Colossal, reinforced-concrete data centers that swallow a town’s entire water and electricity need on their own.

If this physical infrastructure (servers, energy grids, mines) is the private property of a handful of trillionaires, it is physically impossible for the code, the algorithms, or the virtual avatars that run on that infrastructure to be free. In a world where hardware is enslaved, software cannot be emancipated. Every "democratic" movement of yours in cyberspace is a temporary favor dependent on the owner of those servers throwing the switch or changing the algorithm.

The Illusion of Digital Escape and Modern Alienation

Modern art and mass culture pacify the masses by deliberately pumping a dystopian aesthetic (universes in the style of Cyberpunk or Ready Player One, for example). According to this bourgeois illusion, the real world is polluted, rotten, and beyond saving. The only remaining course, then, is to put a VR (virtual reality) headset on our heads, or to take refuge in social media’s echo chambers and live "freedom" with our digital avatars.

This is the twenty-first-century counterpart of the function Marx spoke of as religion being "the opium of the masses." The cyber world is modern humanity’s technological opium.

• The marketing of buying NFT mansions in the digital world while you cannot pay your rent in the real world.

• Having the wind taken out of you with the illusion of "boundless freedom of expression" in the digital world while your union rights are stripped away in the real world.

• Masses who cannot intervene in the material means of production living a false intoxication of power through "virtual lynchings" or "hashtag campaigns" on platforms such as Twitter or Reddit.

This is a dialectical decay. The more the human being is alienated from the power to change their own material conditions of life, the more tightly they cling to the digital simulations capital offers them. Capital, in turn, turns this virtual soothing of the masses’ conscience into a colossal "data extraction" and adds profit to profit.

The Real Arena of Class Struggle: From the Keyboard to the Switch

Young comrades, using "open-source" software, switching to encrypted messaging networks, or taking refuge in decentralized blockchain projects does not smash the bourgeoisie’s monopoly. These are attempts to create little digital islands for yourselves in a capitalist ocean; yet capital continues to determine that ocean’s water level and its waves.

For a real emancipation we must turn the direction of action from digital results (the screen) to material causes (the means of production).

Bourgeois Illusion (Virtual Freedom)	Dialectical-Materialist Reality (Material Freedom)
Freedom is being able to write anything on the internet without censorship.	Freedom is the fiber infrastructure and the data centers that provide that internet being in public ownership.
In the digital universe (the Metaverse, games) we can create a classless profile and be equal.	Class inequality on earth (who owns the hardware and the energy) directly determines the algorithm and access in the digital universe.
The artificial-intelligence and Web3 revolution will decentralize authority.	So long as infrastructure costs (GPUs, servers) remain colossal, the greatest monopolization of capital in history is taking place under the lie of decentralization.
Technology is a neutral field independent of politics and class struggle.	Technology is a class weapon developed to throw living labor (the worker) out of production and maximize surplus value.

Bringing Action Down to Earth

To seek freedom in digital networks is to look at a fake picture of a window drawn on a prison wall and imagine one is breathing clean air. Our task, however, is not to watch that picture, but to smash that material wall with a sledgehammer.

Every crisis in the cyber world (censorship, surveillance capitalism, algorithmic manipulation, the theft of data) is a result of the private ownership of the means of production on earth. You cannot change the effect without attacking the cause.

For this reason the struggle must be waged not behind screens, but in the energy grids that power those screens, in the steel server fields that store that data, in the technology offices that write the code, and in the factories that produce the hardware. Until the alliance on earth of technology laborers and manual laborers is built, until infrastructure facilities are transferred to social property (expropriation), algorithms will not be emancipated.

No war that is not won in the mud of the earth, in its streets and on its production lines, can be won in the pixels of the cyber world.

Freedom is not a virtual simulation; it is a material form of production!