Artificial Intelligence and the Misery of Human Rights

Young Comrades!

The relentless dialectic of history and class struggle confronts us today with one of capital’s most insidious ideological encirclements. In the castles of the tech giants, in the bourgeois academy, and from the pulpits of international law, a colossal illusion is being staged under the title “Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights.”

But before we begin to dispel this illusion, we must answer a fundamental question with open hearts and without evasion: Why do human rights matter for us Marxists? Why can we not cast aside human rights in the class struggle, and why must we defend this question as a vital philosophical position?

Why Do Human Rights Matter? The Dialectic Between Historical Gain and Bourgeois Illusion

Some shallow and crude conceptions fall into the historical error of dismissing human rights at a stroke as “the lie of the bourgeoisie.” Yet dialectical materialism teaches us to look at events not statically, but within their historical processes.

Human rights are not abstract philosophical favors that fell from the sky. Everything we call a “right” today — from the eight-hour working day to freedom of expression, from the right to organize to the demand for a life worthy of human beings — every position is a historical gain that the working class and the oppressed peoples wrested with their blood, their strikes, and their battles at the barricades.

Human rights are the concrete steps of the struggle of the human species, in its dialectical process with nature and with its own history, to realize its potential — that is, the struggle to “become human.” That is precisely why human rights matter so greatly for us! For rights struggles are:

The effort to lift the human being out of being a mere input or slave of capital and to make them a social subject.
The ground on which the working class organizes, develops consciousness, and prepares its own liberation.

Yet precisely at this point a historical contradiction (a dialectical rupture) appears.

Bourgeois Abstraction: Severing Rights from Their Material Ground

When the capitalist order cannot annihilate outright the rights won with the blood of the working class, it renders them ineffective by abstracting them.

Karl Marx, as early as in his 1843 work On the Jewish Question, exposed this hypocrisy of bourgeois law in all its nakedness. Bourgeois law abstracts the human being from their real social relations (from their class, their hunger, their housing conditions, from whether or not they own the means of production). It defines them on paper as an “equal and free individual.”

Dimension of the Conception of Rights	Bourgeois / Liberal Conception of Human Rights	Dialectical Materialist Conception of Human Rights
Definition of the Human Being	An atomized abstract individual, isolated from society and possessing property.	A social and concrete human being living within definite relations of production.
Character of the Right	Formal and legal equality recognized on paper.	Concrete equality secured by material conditions (economy, housing, work).
Relation to Property	Holds the right of private property above all human rights.	Sees private property as the principal cause of the trampling of human rights at the level of the masses.
Terrain of Struggle	Courts, laws, statutes, and corporate contracts.	Class struggle, ownership of the means of production, and social revolution.

If a human being has no bread to fill their stomach, no house in which to take shelter, and no secure job in which to work, then the “freedom of travel” or “freedom of expression” offered to them on paper is nothing but a vast mockery. The capitalist order, in the name of protecting the right of property, corrodes all human rights from within.

The Hypocritical Function of Human Rights in the Digital Age

Young comrades, in today’s age of artificial intelligence and digital automation, this game of abstraction by the bourgeoisie has leapt to a qualitatively higher stage!

Before our eyes a colossal wheel of dispossession and exploitation is turning. The tech giants (Google, OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and so on) are plundering, under the name of “data,” the language, art, science, and culture produced by the collective labor of all humanity. Cheap laborers of the Global South are condemned to label traumatic data for one or two dollars a day; in the sweatshops of East Asia workers produce chips and hardware in inhuman shifts; AI-supported autonomous weapons expend the right to life in the geographies of imperialist occupation; algorithms hold the working class under surveillance in a digital panopticon.

And what does the bourgeoisie do in the name of human rights while this colossal wheel of exploitation turns? It offers us glittering legal terms such as “Data Privacy (GDPR)”, “Algorithmic Transparency”, “the Right to Be Forgotten”, and “User Consent.”

This situation is no different from a thief telling you, after your house has been plundered and your means of production seized, “You have the right to see the list of items stolen from your house.” Bourgeois artificial-intelligence law muddies the consciousness of the masses by seeking the problem not in the ownership of the means of production and in class exploitation, but in the user agreements of software.

Our Task: Restoring the Struggle for Rights to Its Material Ground

That is why, when we take up the question of artificial intelligence and human rights, we will neither fall for Silicon Valley’s fairy tales of “digital rights” nor regard the struggle for rights as unimportant.

As Prof. Dr. İoanna Kuçuradi emphasizes in her philosophy of value, human rights are the possibilities for the human being to realize their potential and to become human. Yet we Marxists know that these possibilities cannot be preserved in an order in which the means of production belong to a handful of monopolist capitalists.

The real struggle for human rights in the age of artificial intelligence is not to append “ethical notices” beneath lines of code, but the struggle to socialize the artificial-intelligence infrastructure and the means of production that constitute humanity’s common intellect. Rights will take root not in the abstract laws of the bourgeoisie, but in the revolutionary practices of the collective human labor that controls social production!

Digital Dispossession and the Hypocrisy of Data Rights

One of the greatest ideological baits that techno-capitalism throws before us today is the concepts of “Data Rights” and “Digital Privacy.” Bourgeois law and its international institutions declare a false legal victory by claiming to protect the individual’s “property over their own data.” Yet a dialectical materialist process analysis lays bare beneath this legal framework a colossal mechanism of plunder and dispossession.

The process by which peasants in England at the birth of capitalism were stripped of the pastures and lands they held in common use — “the Enclosure of the Commons” — was explained by Karl Marx in Volume One of Capital as the fundamental dynamic of primitive accumulation. What we witness today in the digital age is, in the fullest sense, the enclosure of social knowledge and of the digital commons.

Digital Primitive Accumulation: The Plunder of Humanity’s Collective Intelligence

The colossal databases used in training artificial-intelligence models (Large Language Models, image generators, automation algorithms) did not fall from the sky, nor were they produced from scratch in the laboratories of the tech giants.

The Plunder of Collective Labor: The dataset in question is the literature, the art, the scientific articles, the open-source code libraries, the debates on forums, and the everyday accumulation of social communication that the human species has produced throughout history. In short, it is humanity’s common collective labor.
The Process of Dispossession: The technology monopolies (Google, Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, and so on) have seized, through digital crawlers and without paying any price, this immense cultural and intellectual accumulation that was open to the public and to humanity’s common use.
Conversion into Private Capital: This plundered collective data has been processed on private servers, transformed into algorithmic models, and declared the companies’ “trade secret” and “intellectual property.”

Thus the accumulation of social knowledge belonging to all humanity has been dispossessed without a single penny being paid, and then transformed into a private object of capital sold back to that same humanity in exchange for monthly subscription fees. This is the greatest enclosure and plunder movement in the history of capitalism.

The Collapse of the Illusion of “Individual Consent” and “Data Privacy”

Bourgeois law confronts users with GDPR (the General Data Protection Regulation), KVKK, and various “cookie consent texts” in order to cover over this mass seizure. We are told this lie: “You decide whether your data will be processed.”

This approach is doomed to collapse, philosophically and in class terms, at two fundamental points:

The Trap of the Atomized Individual: Bourgeois law defines data as “an individual property.” Yet data is by nature relational and social. The way a person uses language, the code they write, or the picture they draw cannot exist as an individual island; it is part of social culture. For artificial-intelligence companies the data of a single individual is meaningless; what is meaningful are the collective patterns formed by the data of millions of people. While bourgeois law defines a false right by telling the individual “protect your own data,” it legally guarantees in the background the seizure of the collective data formed by millions.
Coerced Consent: In capitalist society the individual’s option to say “no” has been taken from them in class terms. To withdraw from digital communication networks, search engines, or professional platforms means that a worker or a citizen is cast out of social and economic life. The “I Accept the Terms of Use” button offered to the individual stripped of the means of production and of the infrastructure of communication is not the digital signature of a free will, but of surrender to capital.

The Bankruptcy of Individual Rights Before Capital’s Right of Property

In the capitalist order, law does not possess class neutrality. The moment the discourse of human rights clashes with capital’s regime of accumulation, bourgeois justice always takes its stand on the side of private property.

Dimension of Analysis	Bourgeois Law and the Illusion of “Data Rights”	Dialectical Materialist Reality
Definition of Property	Data is an object of the individual’s personal privacy; it is protected by user agreements.	Data is the digital form of humanity’s collective labor; it has been seized without payment by capital.
Freedom and Consent	The user transfers their data by free will by pressing the “Accept” button.	Consent is a class imposition created by the necessity of not being isolated from digital life.
Hierarchy of Rights	“The protection of personal data” is presented as a fundamental human right.	Companies’ right of “Private Property / Intellectual Property” over algorithms stands above all individual rights.
Legal Remedy	Imposing fines on companies, regulating “Explicit Consent” and the “Right to Be Forgotten.”	The socialization of the means of production, of data centers, and of algorithmic models.

The Final Stage in the Alienation of Cognitive Labor

The most tragic and dialectical outcome of this entire process of digital dispossession is that living labor is driven from the market by the dead labor it itself has produced.

First Labor Is Stolen: The code written by the programmer, the painting drawn by the painter, the text translated by the translator, the article written by the academic — all are absorbed by the system through data mining.
It Is Transformed into Capital: This stolen labor is turned into the “capability” of the artificial-intelligence model.
It Is Used Against the Laborer: The owner of capital turns to the programmer, the painter, or the translator whose labor they stole yesterday and says: “I no longer need you; the artificial intelligence I trained with your past labor does this work more cheaply and more quickly.”

This situation is the qualitatively deepest dimension of Marx’s theory of alienation: The human being, through the objectification of their own past labor (artificial intelligence) and its passage into the hands of capital, is rendered superfluous and dispossessed by the very power they themselves produced.

You cannot stop this wheel by taking refuge in statutes such as “Data Privacy.” The bourgeoisie is not occupied with hiding your data, but with consolidating the domination of capital it has built upon your data. The real struggle for data rights is not about adjusting permissions for the use of data, but about taking from their hands the ownership of the artificial-intelligence infrastructures and means of production that fatten themselves by sucking our data dry!

Digital Surveillance, Imperialist War, and the Trampling of the Right to Life

What is written in gilded letters at the very top of bourgeois human-rights declarations? “The Right to Life” and “Personal Liberty.” Liberal jurists, UN representatives, and the diplomats of techno-capital gather in panels and speak of the inviolability of human life, of the individual’s privacy, and of the necessity that states remain within the bounds of law.

Yet dialectical materialism teaches us to look not at the ornate words that mask reality, but at the relations of power in the material world. In the age of imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, when the technological level reached by the productive forces is placed at the service of capital accumulation and of state-monopoly capitalism, that preached “right to life” remains nothing but a vast lie.

The most advanced, most expensive, and most heavily invested dimension that the artificial-intelligence ecosystem has reached today is designed not for the well-being, health, or liberation of humanity, but to increase the killing capacity of imperialist war apparatuses and to keep the working class under control on the home front.

The Algorithmization of Imperialist War: Dead Labor Turning Human Life into Statistics

Just as capital, since the Industrial Revolution, has reduced living human labor to an object in the process of production, so today the military-industrial complex, through artificial intelligence, reduces human life to numerical parameters, probability calculations, and matrices of “acceptable casualties.”

Targeting Algorithms and Digital Massacre: What we witness today in the geographies of occupation of imperialism and its battering rams (for example, in artificial-intelligence targeting systems such as “Lavender” or “Gospel” used in Palestine) is war changing its quality dialectically. The algorithm processes colossal surveillance data, phone signals, location information, and social-network maps, and within seconds labels thousands of people as “targets to be destroyed.”
The Transfer of Responsibility to the Machine (Ideological Absolution): When the mechanism that decides whether a human being will live or die is presented as “artificial intelligence,” the class and political responsibility for war crimes and mass slaughter is veiled. Bourgeois media presents massacres as “an algorithmic data bias” or “a technical error,” thereby absolving the imperialist state that took the decision and the arms monopolies.
Dead Labor Annihilating Living Life: Marx’s observation for the factory — that “dead labor sucks living labor dry” — has been transformed on the battlefield into “digital dead labor (artificial intelligence) annihilates living human life.” Algorithms trained on the past data of millions of people have been made the coordinators of the bombs raining down upon the heads of oppressed peoples.

The Digital Panopticon: Class Domination and Surveillance Capitalism

The “right to life” is not merely physical survival; it is the human being’s capacity to sustain their social existence free from pressure, threat, and constant surveillance. Yet monopolist capital is using artificial intelligence to build a colossal Digital Panopticon in order to suppress social opposition and to smother the class struggle before it is born.

Predictive Policing and Class Discrimination: Bourgeois states are putting into operation AI-supported predictive policing and biometric facial-recognition systems under the name of “crime prevention.” Because these algorithms are trained on past bourgeois judicial data, they automatically place poor working-class neighborhoods, migrants, and class-oppressed sections into the category of “potential criminal.” The algorithm is not a neutral instrument of law; it is a class weapon that technologically sharpens the bourgeois state’s monopoly of violence.
The Algorithmic Tracking of Union Struggle and Actions: Tech giants (Amazon, UPS, Google, and so on) use AI-based monitoring software to suppress unionization activities in their own warehouses and workplaces. Workers’ gestures, word choices, whom they speak with on breaks, and their social-media movements are scanned by algorithms; workers deemed “risky” are instantly dismissed. What bourgeois law calls the “right to organize” shatters into pieces against capital’s wall of algorithmic surveillance.

A Comparison of Two Approaches in the Regime of War and Surveillance

The gulf between the hypocrisy of bourgeois human-rights discourse and dialectical materialist reality takes its clearest form when military and surveillance technologies are at issue:

Dimension of Analysis	Bourgeois / Liberal Human-Rights Discourse	Dialectical Materialist Reality
Military Artificial Intelligence	A “humanitarian” technology that is “compliant with the laws of war,” has a “low margin of error,” and delivers “precision strikes.”	An instrument that increases destructive power in the imperialist scramble for markets and reduces the human being to a targeting matrix.
Responsibility and Crime	Ethical and legal “grey areas” and a confusion of responsibility arising from the decisions of autonomous weapons.	It is not the machine that is responsible, but the arms companies that produce that weapon, the banks that finance it, and the imperialist state that uses it.
Digital Surveillance	A necessary “public measure” for security, public order, and the fight against terror.	A class apparatus of repression that serves to prevent the organization of the working class and to keep oppressed peoples under control.
The Right to Life	An abstract and universal legal rule written in treaties and protected by courts.	A concrete fact that capital is the first to discard the moment imperialist ambitions and the hunger for profit conflict.
Proposed Solution	Imposing international restrictions on autonomous weapons; writing “Ethical War Algorithms.”	To smash the imperialist war apparatus, to socialize the military-industrial complex, and to abolish it.

The Fairy Tale of “Responsible AI” and Imperialist Hypocrisy

Conferences held in the halls of the United Nations or on panels of the Geneva Conventions under the heading “Human Rights in the Military Use of Artificial Intelligence” are pure theater! The same states, while on the one hand signing declarations of “humanitarian artificial intelligence,” on the other hand distribute billions of dollars in military contracts to their own tech giants for the development of autonomous drone swarms, algorithmic intelligence networks, and cyber-warfare software.

Trying to append “ethical codes” to an artificial-intelligence algorithm designed to kill human beings is like covering the blade of the guillotine in velvet so that it may burn the flesh less. The principle of “protecting human value in the singular case,” as indicated by İoanna Kuçuradi, is being uprooted by military algorithms. The moment whether a human being will live or die is reduced to a statistical correlation performed by a computer processor in milliseconds, human dignity and the process of becoming human have been qualitatively zeroed out.

In the age of artificial intelligence, the “Right to Life” and the “Right to Be Free from Oppression” cannot be defended by court articles on paper or by international statutes. The development of surveillance technologies and of military artificial intelligence is not a technological accident, but the objective result of capitalism’s necessity to deepen its apparatuses of decay and repression. Capital needs surveillance algorithms to suppress the anger of the working class at home, and killing algorithms to protect its markets and spheres of influence abroad.

Therefore the only way to strip artificial intelligence of being a whip of surveillance and a machine of death is to liquidate the military-industrial complex that produces these technologies and the imperialist relations of property. The real right to life will be defended not in the conscience of algorithms, but in the organized class struggle waged against the imperialist war apparatus!

The Global Chain of Exploitation: From Hardware Sweatshops to Ghost Labor

Young Comrades!

How do the ideologues of Silicon Valley and the bourgeois media present artificial intelligence to us? As a technological miracle that “lives in the clouds,” is “free of the physical world,” “learns by itself,” and is “sterile”! According to this techno-mystical fairy tale preached to us, artificial intelligence is the product of a pure mathematical intellect that needs no human labor.

Yet dialectical materialism teaches us that there is no “metaphysical” power independent of matter and of human labor. Behind those “sterile clouds” lie capitalism’s most savage, most primitive, and most traumatic relations of exploitation. The artificial-intelligence ecosystem has not abolished the global chain of exploitation and the imperialist international division of labor; on the contrary, it has deepened and multiplied human-rights violations along a line stretching from chip mines to assembly lines, from data-labeling centers to algorithmic courier work.

The Digital Sweatshops Radiating from China and the Misery Regime of “996”

The material existence of artificial intelligence is hardware, chips, servers, and colossal databases. The production of this hardware infrastructure has been loaded onto the back of a savage labor regime established in East Asia — especially in China — and spreading throughout the world.

Foxconnization and Inhuman Assembly Lines: The supercomputers, chip platforms, and technological hardware that run artificial intelligence are produced by the sweat of millions of workers under inhuman conditions in colossal assembly factories (Foxconn and the like) in China (Shenzhen, Zhengzhou, and so on). In factories ringed with suicide nets, these workers labor 12–14 hours a day at robotized rhythms, stripped of their most basic human rights for the sake of capital’s speed.
The “996” Work Regime and the Theft of Time: The “996” model that arose in China’s giant tech companies (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and so on) and has spread like a virus through the global technology sector (working from 09:00 in the morning to 21:00 in the evening, six days a week) is the most concrete proof of how capital seizes the time of living human labor in order to extract absolute surplus value. This model is a class tyranny that uproots the human being’s right to rest, to socialize, and to develop oneself.
The Globalization of Hardware Sweatshops: This high-intensity model of exploitation crystallized in China has been exported to countries such as Vietnam, India, Malaysia, and Mexico, forming a global network of “digital sweatshops.” While the bourgeois academy praises the “creativity” of artificial intelligence, the hardware on which that technology rises is built with the bones and muscle power of millions of laborers in these factories.

The Bloody Foundation of the Material Infrastructure: Mining Plunder and Ecological Imperialism

The extraction of the raw materials required to produce the processors (GPUs) on which artificial-intelligence models are trained rests upon savage rights violations that directly recall the colonial era.

Child Labor and Cobalt Exploitation in the Congo: The cobalt mines required for the manufacture of artificial-intelligence servers, batteries, and microchips are extracted under archaic conditions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The right to life of hundreds of thousands of child and women workers who labor for less than a dollar a day without protective equipment, under the risk of deadly cave-ins, is sacrificed to the profit balance sheets of Silicon Valley companies.
Lithium Plunder and the Seizure of Water in South America: Mining conducted in South America’s “Lithium Triangle” (Chile, Argentina, Bolivia) for the energy-storage needs of data centers and technological infrastructure is drying up local peoples’ water sources, poisoning the land, and causing an ecological massacre. What the Western bourgeoisie calls the “clean digital age” is, for the Global South, a bloody dispossession and ecological massacre.

Ghost Labor and the Traumatic Data Workers of the Global South

An element as vital as hardware for the “safe” and “moral” operation of artificial-intelligence models (Large Language Models, image generators) is the cleaning of data. The lie we are taught is that the algorithm learns by itself. The material reality is Ghost Labor.

The Exploitation of Being a Human Filter: Artificial-intelligence models cannot by themselves distinguish the content of brutality, pornography, child abuse, hate speech, and violence in the raw data scraped from the internet. Hundreds of thousands of young workers in countries such as Kenya, the Philippines, India, Uganda, and Venezuela are employed to clean this colossal heap of refuse.
Capital’s Hunger for Absolute Surplus Value: In data-labeling centers in Nairobi, Kenya, companies that subcontract for tech monopolies such as OpenAI or Meta (Samasource and the like) work workers for misery wages of one to two dollars an hour. Exposed for 8–10 hours a day to videos and texts of murder, torture, and rape, these workers suffer severe psychological traumas and are deprived of the most basic health security.
The Hierarchy of Imperialist Dependence: The Global North (Western monopolist capital) keeps in its own hands the high-value-added stages of “software development,” “capital ownership,” and “marketing,” while dumping upon the Global South the dirtiest, most traumatic, and most deskilled portion of this technology — digital drudgery.

Analysis Table of the Global Artificial-Intelligence Supply Chain and Human Rights

The following table summarizes clearly the global chain of exploitation that capital has built in the digital age and the hypocrisy of bourgeois human-rights discourse:

Link in the Chain of Exploitation	Geography / Site	Working Conditions and Rights Violations	Bourgeois / Corporate Discourse (Illusion)	Dialectical Materialist Reality
Mineral Extraction	Congo, Bolivia, Chile (Global South)	Child labor, deadly mining conditions, seizure of water sources, and toxic poisoning.	“Sustainable supply chain” and “green technology transition.”	Digital colonialism and ecological primitive accumulation.
Hardware Production	China, Vietnam, India (East Asia)	996 work regime, 12–14-hour shifts, de-unionization, and suicides inside the factory.	“A regional employment drive and technological production capacity.”	Hardware sweatshops (digital sweatshops) and the hunger for absolute surplus value.
Data Cleaning (Ghost Labor)	Kenya, Philippines, Uganda, Venezuela	Labeling traumatic violence data for 1–2 dollars an hour; psychological devastation and precarity.	“Artificial intelligence’s capacity for self-learning and the sterile algorithm.”	The weaponization and exploitation of the capacity for human empathy, and digital drudgery.
Cognitive Laborers	Western Metropolises, Silicon Valley	Algorithmic metrics in hiring, excessive workload, the devaluation of mental labor.	“Flexible and free working opportunities for the creative class.”	The proletarianization of cognitive labor and its alienation to dead labor.

Kuçuradi’s Ethical Opening and an Anti-Imperialist Class Synthesis

Prof. Dr. İoanna Kuçuradi’s philosophy of value holds that human rights are not a legal article on paper, but the possibilities for the human being to realize their potential. According to Kuçuradi, to reduce a human being to the status of a mere “instrument” is the greatest ethical violation that can be inflicted upon them.

Of what “possibility of becoming human” or “human dignity” can one speak for a worker who labels images of child abuse for a dollar for ten hours a day in Nairobi, or who assembles chips in the shadow of suicide nets under the 996 regime in Shenzhen?

The Weaponization of Human Sensibility: Capital steals the data labeler’s “capacity for human empathy and knowledge of value”; it uses and consumes that capacity as a raw material for training the algorithm. The human faculty of ethical evaluation is paralyzed for the sake of sterilizing the machine.
The Bankruptcy of Abstract Rights Discourse: While United Nations or European Union representatives publish “Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence” declarations in the West, the ink of those declarations dries with the blood and sweat of the Global South’s workers. Bourgeois right is a luxury for those at the top of the imperialist hierarchy, and for those at the bottom an invisible cordon of slavery.

We must see the limits of the human-rights debates conducted around artificial intelligence. The problem cannot be solved by Western tech companies setting “better supply-chain rules”; the problem is directly the imperialist wheel of exploitation itself. The fate of a Kenyan worker sweating in a data-labeling center, of an assembly worker crushed under the 996 regime in a hardware factory in China, and of a Western programmer deskilled and confined within Silicon Valley’s templates is common: both stand under the domination of the same global capital, of the same digital dead labor.

The only way to lift human rights out of being abstract legal articles and to make them a concrete reality is to weave an anti-imperialist and class line of struggle that unites the invisible workers of the Global South with the digital proletariat of the Global North. Rights will be won not by the promises of the tech giants, but by breaking the global chain of exploitation upon which those giants stand!

İoanna Kuçuradi’s Conception of Human Rights and a Dialectical Materialist Synthesis

While the bourgeois world squeezes the question of artificial intelligence and human rights into the parenthesis of a “legal statute” or a “corporate contract” and empties it of content, there stands before us one of the most towering figures of Turkey’s and the world’s philosophical heritage: Prof. Dr. İoanna Kuçuradi. The Philosophy of Value and the theory of Human Rights that Kuçuradi developed offer us invaluable means for collapsing, at the epistemological level, that abstract, hypocritical structure of liberal human-rights discourse which protects bourgeois property.

Yet the task of a Marxist philosopher is not to adopt as it stands a philosophical theory that defends a radical human-centeredness; it is to subject it to dialectical critique within its own historical and class limits and to bring it to a material-revolutionary synthesis.

Kuçuradi’s Radical Intervention: From Legal Formalism to “Human Possibilities”

İoanna Kuçuradi’s conception of human rights rests upon a radical rejection of bourgeois positive law. Bourgeois law regards rights as a body of rules “bestowed by states,” “recognized by laws,” or “signed under contracts.” Kuçuradi, by contrast, finds the source of human rights not in laws, but in the possibilities of the human species (in the process of becoming human).

Rights as “Human Possibilities”: According to Kuçuradi, human rights are the protection of the human being’s potential to produce value, to think, to engage in artistic creation, and to act ethically — a protection that cannot be left to the whim of individuals or to the favor of states. A violation of human rights is not merely the breach of a law; it is the prevention of the human being’s realization of their own possibilities and the instrumentalization of the human being.
The Exposure of Structural Fraud: Kuçuradi strikes at the “human rights” chatter of today’s world and of the artificial-intelligence ecosystem precisely at this point. The “human-rights guidelines” proclaimed by the tech giants rest not upon knowledge of ethical value, but upon conjunctural group norms (moral judgments) shaped according to the interests of capital.

The transformation of the human being into an algorithmic input within the artificial-intelligence ecosystem, and the standardization of cognitive labor and the stripping away of its faculties, constitute, from the standpoint of Kuçuradi’s ethics, a crisis of becoming human. For the moment the human being transfers their capacity for decision-making and their possibility of philosophical and ethical evaluation to the statistical inductions of algorithms, they are smothering with their own hands their own possibilities of being human.

The Limit of Epistemological Enlightenment: “Lack of Knowledge,” or the Contradiction of Property?

As successful as Kuçuradi’s philosophy of value is in exposing the hollowness of positivist bourgeois law, it collides with its idealist and historical limits when it comes to the solution of the problem. Kuçuradi ties the violation of human rights and the transformation of artificial intelligence into an instrument of domination that robotizes the human being fundamentally to the following philosophical cause: the lack of knowledge of ethical value, conceptual confusion, and lack of education.

Dialectical Materialist Correction: That a Silicon Valley monopoly condemns workers in the Global South to label traumatic data for a dollar an hour while training artificial-intelligence models, or works workers in East Asia under the 996 regime in the shadow of suicide nets, is not because those company CEOs or programmers “lack knowledge of ethical value”!

Capital, in order to sustain its objective existence, to compete with its rivals, and to increase its rates of profit, must exploit living human labor, expend human dignity, and instrumentalize the human being. Teach the bourgeois class as much of Kuçuradi’s philosophy of value as you like; so long as the private ownership of the means of production and the drive for profit continue, capital will continue to use artificial intelligence as a whip of exploitation and surveillance. The root of rights violations is not a mental “lack of knowledge” or a “conceptual illusion,” but the insurmountable class contradiction between the level reached by the productive forces and capitalist relations of property.

Dialectical Materialist Synthesis: From Abstract Possibility to Material-Revolutionary Reality

The synthesis of İoanna Kuçuradi’s humanist and value-centered ontology with Marxist dialectical materialism determines the philosophical and practical position of the struggle for human rights in the age of artificial intelligence.

Kuçuradi shows us what is being expended: The human being’s potential for liberation, the capacity to produce ethical value, and human dignity.
Marxism shows the material cause of this expenditure and the path to its elimination: The private ownership of the means of production, alienation, and class struggle.

Under capitalism, artificial intelligence steals the human being’s cognitive possibilities and transforms them into an automaton dependent on the rhythm of the machine (a robotized human). The human being’s creative faculties are swallowed by “dead labor” (the algorithm). Therefore the protection of human rights cannot be consigned to texts on paper or to individual consciences. The human being’s “possibility of becoming human” is possible only through the revolutionary practice that will free living labor from the domination of this dead labor.

Comparative Synthesis Table of Approaches to Human Rights

We can clarify the human-rights debate within the artificial-intelligence ecosystem through three different philosophical traditions with the following table:

Dimension of Analysis	Liberal Bourgeois Law (Illusion)	İoanna Kuçuradi’s Ethics of Value	Dialectical Materialist Synthesis
Definition of Human Rights	Formal and abstract rules on paper, recognized by the state or by law.	Universal “human possibilities” that enable the human being to realize their potential.	The social and material freedom in which the human being, freed from exploitation, takes hold of their own destiny.
Cause of Violation in Artificial Intelligence	Legal gaps, algorithmic coding errors, and breaches of data privacy.	Lack of knowledge of ethical value, conceptual confusion, and the instrumentalization of the human being.	The ownership of the means of production and of the artificial-intelligence infrastructure by a handful of monopolist capitalists.
Status of the Human Being	An atomized consumer and “data owner” who approves the contract.	A human being whose subjective faculties have been transferred to the machine, who is “robotized,” and whose value is expended.	A proletarian dispossessed and alienated by their own collective mental labor (AI).
Guarantee of Rights	Legal regulations such as the EU AI Act, courts, and corporate ethical statutes.	Human-rights education and philosophical awareness grounded in knowledge of ethical value.	The socialization of the artificial-intelligence infrastructure, revolutionary practice, and socialist planning.

The Struggle for “Becoming Human” in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

We cannot abandon the human dignity and the possibilities of becoming human that İoanna Kuçuradi Hoca defends to the mercy of Silicon Valley’s monopolist capitalists or to the hypocritical statutes of bourgeois states!

Every day that the artificial-intelligence infrastructure (colossal data centers, chips, algorithmic models) remains in private ownership, human rights will continue to be violated, the workers of the Global South will continue to be exploited, and the human species will continue to kneel before the machine it itself has created.

The real Human Right is to strip artificial intelligence of being an instrument of exploitation and surveillance and to transform it into an instrument that radically shortens socially necessary labor time. The human being can “become human” — by occupying themselves with philosophy, art, and science — only to the extent that they free themselves from the wheel of necessary material production and create free time for themselves. The struggle for human rights in the age of artificial intelligence cannot be confined within the bounds of legal statutes. This struggle is the struggle to wrest humanity’s collective intellect from the hands of capital and to socialize the means of production. Rights will take root not in the conscience of algorithms, but in the revolutionary will of organized humanity that seizes the productive forces!

Process Analysis and Conclusion: The Future of the Struggle for Rights

With the scalpel of dialectical materialism we have cut through the ideological fog screen laid before us by the bourgeois media, the charlatans of Silicon Valley, and their extensions in the academy. We have torn off techno-capitalism’s mask of “human rights”; we have laid bare, in its naked reality, the dispossession, exploitation, surveillance, and bloody imperialist aims behind the artificial-intelligence ecosystem.

The question we must now ask is this: We have made our philosophical diagnosis; so how shall we build the future of the struggle for rights?

The Bankruptcy of a “Rights” Discourse Without Class Vision and the Exposure of Bourgeois Illusion

Traditional human-rights struggle and liberal civil-society activism (NGO-ism) have suffered a complete philosophical and practical rout before the wave of artificial intelligence and digitalization. The cause is not a “methodological error,” but a class blindness. Every human-rights discourse devoid of class vision, that does not open property relations to debate, is condemned to remain within the bounds of the capitalist order and, in the end, to absolve that order’s crimes.

The Bankruptcy of Abstract Legalism: Class-blind human-rights advocates treat artificial-intelligence violations as if they were the individual errors of “ill-intentioned companies” or “careless programmers.” They consign the problem to lawsuits to be opened in the courts, to EU statutes, or to companies’ ethics boards.
Complicity with Capital: A “digital rights” struggle that does not target the private ownership of the means of production is no different from begging the thief to “be more polite” while he is robbing our house. In the capitalist order, law is the will of the ruling class crystallized as statute. Therefore it is naive to expect bourgeois law to prevent monopolist capital from using the technology in its own hands (artificial intelligence) to crush the classes.

A “digital human rights” discourse that does not place class struggle at the center is nothing but the public-relations (PR) makeup that techno-capitalism needs. So long as you do not touch its property, capital will grant you as many panels on “data privacy” or “algorithmic transparency” as you like!

Organized Struggle and Institutional Duties: A Call to Parties, Unions, and NGOs

We cannot abandon the struggle for digital rights to the conscience of liberal dreamers or of the tech giants! The class assault conducted through the artificial-intelligence infrastructure must be placed at the center of organized struggle.

At this point a historical duty falls upon all socialist parties, unions, mass organizations, and NGOs — first and foremost upon rooted human-rights organizations such as the Human Rights Association (İHD):

The Establishment of Technology and Human Rights Commissions Is an Urgent Duty: İHD and similar rights organizations must, without delay, establish within their structures special desks/commissions on “Artificial Intelligence, Technology, and Digital Rights.” These desks must not be clubs in which academics produce abstract theses, but class monitoring centers that map algorithmic exploitation in the factory, the digital tracking of couriers, the savage working conditions in data-labeling centers, and surveillance technologies.
Unions’ Line of Digital Struggle: Unions must add to collective bargaining agreements not only wage clauses, but concrete class clauses such as “Limitation of Algorithmic Control,” “the Right to Strike Against Digital Surveillance in the Workplace,” and “the Prohibition of Dismissals Due to Artificial Intelligence.”
The Programmatic Renewal of Parties: Revolutionary and socialist parties must immediately cease regarding artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure as a futuristic detail. The demand for “the Socialization of Artificial-Intelligence Infrastructure, Data Centers, and Communication Networks” must enter among parties’ urgent programmatic demands.

Dimension of Analysis	Liberal / Reformist Conception of Rights (Class-Blind)	Organized Class-Centered Struggle for Rights
Focus	Individual data privacy and user consent.	Ownership of the means of production and digital dispossession.
Aim	To get companies to publish “ethical principles.”	The socialization of the artificial-intelligence infrastructure and popular control.
Method	Court cases, lobbying, and EU-funded panels.	Organized class action in the factory, in the field, and in the street.
Institutional Stance	Taking refuge in corporate ethics boards and bureaucracy.	Establishing Technology Commissions in İHD, parties, and unions.
Horizon of the Future	The dream of “humanitarian” algorithms within capitalism.	A new world in which the human being is liberated through socialist planning.

The Human Being of the Future and the Vision of a Liberated World

What do Silicon Valley’s transhumanist elites promise us as the human being of the future? A techno-fascist nightmare that reduces the human body and mind to a “software update,” that uploads consciousness to chips and discards our biological existence, that transforms the human being into a mechanical automaton!

Our dialectical materialist human horizon, by contrast, consigns these mechanical fantasies to the dustbin. In the modern and free world we envision, the “Human Being of the Future” is not a mechanized cyborg, but the fully developed, many-sided human species (homo duplex) that writes its own history free of exploitation with collective intellect!

When the artificial-intelligence infrastructure is taken from the hands of a handful of capitalists and made the common property of all society (a public good), a qualitative leap will take place in the history of humanity:

The Radical Reduction of Necessary Labor Time: The drudgery that today enslaves humanity for 10–12 hours a day for monopolist capital will be transferred to machines through artificial intelligence and automation. This technological possibility, which will radically reduce socially necessary labor time, will serve directly the development of humanity.
Free Time as an Instrument of Becoming Human: As Karl Marx indicated, the realm of true freedom begins where the realm of necessity (material production) ends. The human being freed from necessary labor will gain immense free time in which to occupy themselves with philosophy, art, science, sport, and ethical action.
The Human Being of the Future: Not a “robot” dependent on the rhythm of the machine, but the free social individual who uses artificial intelligence as an instrument of social planning, who is at peace with nature and with their own species, and who endlessly develops their creative faculties and possibilities.

Beyond Historical Prophecies, the Material Dawn of Liberation

This, comrades, is the whole matter! When we dispel the ornate, mystical, and techno-utopian fog screen that capital and its intellectual guards have woven around artificial intelligence, the naked truth that remains is nothing other than humanity’s millennia-long class and dialectical march.

Today Silicon Valley’s property-owning technocrats seek to opiumize humanity with fairy tales of “the mastery of artificial intelligence,” to make hunger and exploitation forgotten with transhumanist fantasies. Against these colorful illusions of the modern world of art and science, our barricade is clear: The machine is not a god, a subject, or a moral judge; the machine is the datafied, frozen form of the collective intelligence produced throughout history by millions of workers, craftspeople, scholars, and artists — that is, “digital dead labor”!

We cry out once more the great philosophical truth that İoanna Kuçuradi Hoca has insistently carved into humanity’s memory: This degenerate order, which robotizes human beings and humanizes robots, expends human dignity by reducing ethics to a corporate regulation. Yet that unique human dignity and those possibilities of becoming human to which Kuçuradi points cannot be preserved within capital’s digital dungeons, on the assembly lines of algorithmic exploitation, and within the property bounds of a few technological monopolies. Human dignity will attain its real material ground only at that revolutionary dawn when living labor is freed from the domination of this digital dead labor and the productive forces are socialized.

We will surrender neither to an archaic Luddism (machine-breaking) that curses technology, nor will we kneel before capital’s technological fetishism. We will wrench this colossal common intellect of humanity from the hands of that handful of capitalists! Artificial intelligence will be stripped of being, in the hands of capitalism, a whip of exploitation that condemns the human being to unemployment, precarity, and alienation; under common social ownership it will be transformed into a real torch of liberation that radically shortens humanity’s necessary labor time and enables every individual freely to realize their own artistic, philosophical, and human possibilities.

The future will be written not by a passive “ethical prescription” that takes refuge in the conscience of programmers, but by the collective human will that will take into its hands the ownership of the productive forces. The struggle to become human is not over; on the contrary, within the contradictions of the digital age it is only now entering its most magnificent, most naked, and most resolute phase!