Introduction
Never before in human history has a small minority wielded this degree of control over the lives of the majority with such speed and such silence. No armies march in the streets. No laws are proclaimed in parliaments. There are algorithms operating in the shadows, shaping your consciousness, your work, your opportunities, and your future. Artificial intelligence is the most powerful tool humanity has ever produced, and the question is not whether it will change the world, for it is already changing it. The question is: in whose interest will it change it.
Since these ideas were first put forward in early 2025, the pace of development in artificial intelligence has accelerated in a striking and unprecedented manner. Major monopoly-driven corporations in the United States, China, and elsewhere have released new models that far surpass their predecessors, now capable of performing tasks once exclusive to humans: medicine, law, programming, creative writing, scientific research, and beyond.
Alongside this technological acceleration, generative artificial intelligence and autonomous intelligent agents have emerged as a qualitatively new development, transforming these systems into independent actors capable of executing chains of decisions without direct human oversight. This relentless acceleration has made it necessary to revisit and develop these ideas further.
The more the capabilities of this technology expand and deepen, the more control over it concentrates in fewer hands, and the wider the gap grows between those who own it and those who are subjected to it. This equation is not an inevitable fate; it is the product of political and economic choices that can be changed. The trade war over chips and artificial intelligence has revealed a plain truth: this technology has become a first-order geopolitical weapon, and the great powers treat it as an instrument of domination and control. Perhaps the clearest evidence of this is the accelerating military deployment of artificial intelligence in identifying human targets, conducting combat operations, and making life-and-death decisions, in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.
For the first time in human history, it has become genuinely possible to produce what the majority of the population needs with minimal human effort, and to provide goods, services, and knowledge in abundance, without intensive wage labor or traditional bureaucratic structures. Yet these possibilities are constrained and redirected to boost corporate profit, cut wages, and deepen class domination, rather than to liberate human beings from exploitation.
The proliferation of digital applications, widespread automation, and the dismantling of market intermediaries in certain sectors all show that society now possesses tools that could allow for a horizontal, participatory, and community-based reorganization of the economy. Yet this transformation remains shackled by the monopolistic structure that controls technology and directs it toward the maximization of profit.
This is what places on emancipatory and social-justice forces a historical responsibility that cannot be deferred, for they have no choice but to enter the battle over artificial intelligence and technology as a whole with a clear project and genuine capabilities. This is what makes the question of who directs artificial intelligence, and in whose interest, a matter that determines the shape of the world inherited by the sons and daughters of coming generations, and not merely an abstract philosophical question.
The gap between left-wing forces and the empire of digital capitalism today resembles nothing so much as the gap between an ant and a massive elephant: on one side, left-wing and social-justice organizations that largely lack the financial resources, technical infrastructure, and specialized expertise; on the other, monopoly-driven corporate states that possess full control over the digital sphere, data centers spanning continents, and armies of engineers and researchers.
Yet this enormous disparity does not mean the battle is decided in advance. When the ant organizes well and knows where to strike, it is capable of unsettling the elephant and altering the course of the struggle, just as the history of the left itself has proven at more than one decisive turning point. Proceeding from this reality, the battle requires clear policies, tactics, and tangible tools. The following sections set out to sketch the contours of a left-wing vision, addressing the most important fronts of this struggle.
Developing Progressive Artificial Intelligence Systems
First: What Is Possible Now
Developing neutral, democratic, and open-source systems is one of the fundamental approaches available today for countering the dominance of states and corporations over artificial intelligence. These systems must be managed independently and kept as far as possible from the interests of monopoly capital, to ensure they serve the public rather than private power.
Open-source systems give the public and emancipatory forces an opportunity to participate in developing technology in ways that reflect their values. Any individual or group may freely access the source code, understand how it works, and modify or improve it. This approach strengthens collective ownership and innovation, and partially dismantles the grip of monopoly-driven corporations. Openness to public scrutiny also reduces the risks of hidden manipulation and ideological steering, making these systems more trustworthy and independent from narrow corporate interests.
Recent years have seen notable developments in this direction. Open-source communities have proven their capacity to build advanced artificial intelligence models that compete with what market-ruling corporations produce. Recent experiments have also shown that building advanced models does not necessarily require enormous budgets, opening the door to building socially-oriented models with more modest resources.
What is required of global left-wing and social-justice forces is to support open-source artificial intelligence projects, adopt them strategically, and direct them toward emancipatory goals, something that remains largely absent from the official programs of most left parties and movements.
Second: What Is Required in the Long Term
Left-wing and social-justice forces must work, in global coordination, to develop and put forward emancipatory alternatives and transparent applications of artificial intelligence. The goal is to guarantee that technology becomes collective property subject to full public oversight, oriented toward respect for human rights, equality, social justice, and intellectual pluralism.
Rather than remaining the exclusive preserve of wealthy states and large monopoly-driven corporations, artificial intelligence must become a tool for the majority that contributes to solving global and local problems: combating poverty, exploitation, and class inequality; achieving equality and advancing democracy; confronting climate change; and developing more inclusive and equitable educational and health systems. In this way, artificial intelligence is transformed into a global emancipatory project that redefines the relationship between humanity and technology, opening the space for a new model that places technology in the service of people.
Artificial Intelligence in the Service of Manual and Intellectual Workers
Artificial intelligence, if directed in a socialist and social-justice-oriented manner, can be a powerful tool for human liberation and the achievement of social justice. It can analyze complex social problems and offer effective solutions to reduce economic disparities and class injustice. Achieving this goal is not automatic; it requires directing its mechanisms and capabilities toward addressing the roots of poverty, unemployment, lack of basic services, and social discrimination. Advanced data analysis can also monitor social inequalities, enabling the identification of the most deprived communities and the formulation of equitable policies to address structural imbalances in the distribution of wealth and services.
Yet documented studies prove that hiring algorithms developed by large corporate players reproduce the racial and class biases embedded in the historical data on which they were trained. This discrimination does not mean the programmers were consciously racist; it means the logic of exploitation was encoded into the algorithms through data that reflects the reality of societies built on discrimination and class domination. Dismantling this discrimination requires political change and democratic oversight, not merely technical adjustment.
Artificial intelligence can be a powerful tool for supporting labor organizing and trade union struggle. It can help manual and intellectual workers build digitally-enabled unions and solidarity networks, and strengthen their capacity to negotiate with employers and demand their rights. Experiences of tech-powered unions in Latin America and Europe have demonstrated that deploying digital tools to coordinate labor struggle multiplies workers’ capacity for rapid, organized collective action. These tools can also expose the practices of corporations that exploit workers or suppress union organizing, and shed light on the policies of authoritarian regimes that refuse to recognize workers’ right to organize and strike.
Artificial intelligence must be a tool for freeing human beings from routine and exhausting labor, while guaranteeing dignified, stable employment at fair wages. In this model, the labor market is transformed into a more just and open space, where gender, racial, religious, and age discrimination can be eliminated through evaluation systems grounded in competence and skill, freed from the social biases that reproduce existing class structures.
Liberating Science from Monopoly
Rather than becoming a tool that weakens human capacities and produces generations excessively dependent on technology, artificial intelligence can be redirected to become a means of scientific emancipation and creative growth. It should not replace human thinking; what is required is that it expand human capabilities, enable access to advanced knowledge, and free up time from routine tasks.
Emancipatory open-source artificial intelligence systems can be developed to stimulate critical thinking, both scientifically and creatively, by encouraging users to explore knowledge independently through questions that prompt analysis and inference, rather than the passive reception of ready-made answers without scrutiny.
Current developments reveal a glaring contradiction. The systems that have demonstrated a remarkable capacity to accelerate scientific discovery remain the preserve of those who can pay, governed by the logic of corporate profitability rather than the priorities of human need. In practice, diseases that do not generate sufficient profit go untreated, and renewable energy research beneficial to humanity is delayed in favor of research that serves corporate interests. This contradiction makes clear why the question of who owns artificial intelligence cannot be separated from the question of what it discovers.
Digital Cooperatives
Cooperative artificial intelligence projects can be built, drawing on the participation of manual and intellectual workers, engineers, researchers, and social activists, with the aim of harnessing technology in the service of the common good. Participation here must not mean merely the presence of these groups as end-users of technology designed by others. The aim is to involve them from the very outset in defining the problem, setting priorities, and shaping the solution.
Factory workers know from daily experience which tasks drain their physical energy without adding real value. Nurses know which administrative burdens steal their time from patients. Teachers know which bureaucratic procedures prevent them from devoting themselves to genuine education. This accumulated lived knowledge is, in its essence, design knowledge no less important than technical expertise, and ignoring it produces systems that solve phantom problems or serve goals remote from the needs of those they claim to serve. This is evident in the Data Workers Inquiry project, where data workers designed their own algorithms to expose corporate exploitation, and in the Decidim platform, built by citizens and engineers together to manage resources locally.
In the genuine digital cooperative, manual and intellectual workers, trade unions, and local communities are the actual owners of the tool they use, rather than mere subscribers paying fees for access.
Toward Community Sovereignty Over Technology
Transparent and democratic community oversight of technology is essential. To achieve it, digital power must be redistributed so that technology becomes community-owned and deployed in its service, rather than wielded as a corporate instrument. This requires building participatory institutions and platforms that allow the public to examine how algorithms are designed and applied. It also requires establishing elected popular oversight bodies at both the local and international levels, with broad representation encompassing workers, academics, human rights advocates, and technical experts, to ensure fairness and accountability in the development and operation of artificial intelligence systems.
Despite the relative value of European legislation in the field of artificial intelligence, it remains limited in impact because it operates within the same market-ruled logic that produced the problems in the first place, frequently resulting in the legal entrenchment of monopoly domination rather than its genuine dismantling. What people need goes beyond these steps toward genuine community oversight endowed with real authority.
Laws must be enacted and binding guidelines issued that compel developers to embed values of justice and equality at the design stage, with community review imposed on all systems prior to their release. Oversight bodies must be granted genuine powers to review algorithms on an ongoing basis, monitor any embedded biases that could lead to discrimination or exploitation, and retain the capacity to intervene and impose binding regulatory standards.
From the Logic of Profit to the Logic of Need
The reorganization of production and distribution is one of the fundamental pillars of the left’s vision for artificial intelligence. This technology can be used to build systems of democratic collective planning grounded in reliable data and oriented toward social need, allowing resources to be directed efficiently toward meeting the actual requirements of society. These systems rely on careful analysis of demand and consumption, enabling the production of necessary goods and services according to real needs, while avoiding the chronic overproduction that characterizes the capitalist system.
Global supply chain crises in recent years have exposed the fragility of globalized corporate production and its dependence on speculation and monopoly, opening a genuine discussion about the necessity of alternative planning models grounded in reliable, democratically governed information. Artificial intelligence can play a decisive role in restructuring supply chains, reducing waste, directing production toward the most underserved regions, and enhancing environmental sustainability. Intelligent logistics systems can also enable more efficient distribution of goods and services and identify optimal routes for reducing carbon emissions.
Moreover, artificial intelligence can bring about a radical transformation in socially-oriented cooperative production, enabling cooperatives and community enterprises to benefit from intelligent technologies to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and ensure equitable distribution of resources among members. Technology can serve as a tool for building a solidarity economy, helping poor communities achieve economic independence through shared production and equitable distribution of available resources, freed from the grip of monopoly capital.
Dismantling Algorithmic Patriarchy
Left-wing and social-justice forces must struggle for the design and development of artificial intelligence systems that uphold gender justice and contribute to achieving full equality. In 2024, a comprehensive academic study testing artificial intelligence systems in resume screening across nine different professions found that these systems favored female names in only 11% of cases compared to male names.
This algorithmic bias is not an isolated technical error. It is a reflection of women’s absence from the design and development process, and an expression of the logic of male dominance encoded into the very structure of the technology industry, where women still constitute less than 15% of artificial intelligence researchers at the world’s leading technology companies. UN Women has described how artificial intelligence systems learn from data saturated with stereotypes, reproducing gender biases and restricting opportunities, particularly in employment, credit, and judicial decisions. UNESCO documented alarming evidence in its 2024 study of the prevalence of regressive male gender stereotypes in generative artificial intelligence.
A graver challenge lies in the endeavors of certain authoritarian states with patriarchal religious systems to build their own artificial intelligence frameworks, with the aim of entrenching male-dominated value systems and consolidating control over women through more sophisticated and harder-to-resist tools.
These systems deliberately encode gender discrimination into their core objectives, from social surveillance to restricting women’s digital presence and imposing behavioral standards derived from conservative religious interpretations. Confronting this requires left-wing, social-justice, and feminist forces to wage struggle on two fronts simultaneously: challenging the algorithmic bias of monopoly-driven corporations on one side, and opposing projects of religious patriarchal automation that seek to convert technology into an instrument for reproducing male power under the cover of national sovereignty and cultural relativism on the other.
Algorithms must be trained using comprehensive and diverse data that fully reflects women’s experiences and roles beyond stereotypes. Governments must be pressured to adopt legislation compelling companies to prioritize gender diversity in their technical teams. Masculine-coded language must be removed from artificial intelligence systems and gender-neutral language developed to help undermine structural discrimination.
Halting the Militarization of Artificial Intelligence
The present reality reveals that the largest investment in artificial intelligence globally is concentrated in the military sector, rather than in healthcare, education, or addressing the climate crisis. Autonomous weapons capable of making the decision to kill without human intervention have become a documented reality. Artificial intelligence is deployed today in identifying human targets and conducting combat operations across many regions of the world, amid an accelerating retreat of human oversight over these fateful decisions. This is not an abstract ethical question; it is fundamentally a class question. Whoever owns these weapons possesses an unprecedented capacity to subjugate populations and suppress resistance.
Every effort must be made to redirect artificial intelligence toward becoming a means of promoting world peace. Left-wing and social-justice movements can lead global initiatives to pressure governments and international institutions to enact strict legislation preventing the development of artificial intelligence for military purposes. Artificial intelligence should equally be employed to document war crimes and human rights violations, contributing to the accountability of authoritarian regimes, states, and corporations that seek to militarize technology and harness it for war. Making the public an active party in the struggle against the militarization of technology means building a global resistance movement capable of pressing for an end to this inhumane use of technology.
Artificial Intelligence Confronting Digital Repression
The present reality indicates that artificial intelligence is being deployed to erode democracy rather than strengthen it, through algorithmic manipulation techniques that feed extremism and deepen political polarization for commercial and political purposes, and through forgery and disinformation tools that have become more sophisticated and harder to detect than at any previous time.
Current developments reveal a disturbing and accelerating expansion in the deployment of these technologies within the repressive apparatus of authoritarian regimes. Facial recognition systems are now used extensively to monitor protests and political gatherings, and the automated analysis of digital content has become a systematic tool for targeting activists, dissidents, and journalists. Amnesty International has documented how certain states have weaponized social media and digital tools to suppress youth protests.
This digital repression takes multiple and increasingly dangerous forms. At one end lies systematic digital demoralization, fed by algorithms designed to spread a sense of powerlessness and the futility of change. Further along comes digital arrest through the restriction and deletion of accounts on spurious grounds. At the extreme end sits digital assassination through the complete erasure of dissidents’ online existence. To this is added voluntary self-censorship, where activists impose restrictions on themselves out of fear of bans or account closures. Human Rights Watch has documented numerous cases in which technologies sold by Western companies were used to track dissidents and facilitate their arrest, making these companies effective partners in human rights violations.
The struggle must therefore be waged for the establishment of strict international and domestic legal frameworks criminalizing the use of artificial intelligence to manipulate public opinion and violate human rights, alongside the formation of global solidarity networks to monitor violations, the boycott and blacklisting of companies that sell surveillance technologies to authoritarian regimes, and the development of data encryption and communications security technologies to protect activists and dissidents.
Artificial Intelligence Confronting Environmental Collapse
There is a profound contradiction that demands frank confrontation. Training large artificial intelligence models consumes enormous quantities of energy and water, and their operations produce quantities of carbon dioxide equivalent to millions of flights annually. Reliable reports have revealed that some major data centers consume enough water to supply entire cities. This means that artificial intelligence in its current corporate form does not help solve the environmental crisis; it deepens it, even as companies claim to be deploying it for sustainability. Any serious emancipatory alternative must place this contradiction at the core of its priorities.
Artificial intelligence must become a contributing mechanism in environmental economic planning, with its analytical capabilities deployed to regulate production according to the actual needs of society. Through socially-oriented models for its management, more efficient use of resources can be achieved, waste reduced, and technological development directed toward transformative environmental solutions, such as improving renewable energy systems and sustainable water management.
The use of artificial intelligence in projects that destroy the environment must be prohibited, and the licensing of any artificial intelligence technology linked to an assessment of its environmental impact, alongside the building of intelligent systems to monitor corporate compliance with environmental standards. This requires developing systems that reduce excessive energy consumption and advance full reliance on renewable energy. Within an emancipatory framework, this technology can be redirected to become an effective instrument for protecting natural resources and building an economy grounded in environmental justice, serving society and the planet together.
In the Physical World and the Digital Realm Simultaneously: Toward an Effective Digital Left and a Militant Left Digital International
Artificial intelligence is a mirror of the society that produces it, accurately reflecting the power relations that control its direction, funding, and priorities. When monopoly-driven corporations, great powers, and even certain authoritarian states are the ones building and financing this technology, they build it according to their own logic: the logic of maximizing profits, deepening class domination and political control, and reproducing exploitation and repression in forms that are more sophisticated and harder to resist. When the military and security sector is the largest investor in artificial intelligence development globally, this is not coincidence; it is an explicit expression of the true priorities of capitalism in its digital phase.
Yet this mirror is not an inevitable fate. Either artificial intelligence continues as an instrument of class domination in the hands of a minority that uses it to control production, distribution, consciousness, and politics, or we make it emancipatory collective property that liberates the majority from the burdens of exploitation. Achieving this is neither easy nor close at hand, given the enormous current imbalance between the forces of the left and the forces of digital capitalism.
What we are speaking of is a long-term, cumulative project requiring vast human, technical, and organizational energies, as well as time, perseverance, and the capacity to endure setbacks and move beyond them. The difficulty of the task, however, does not imply its impossibility. The history of the left is replete with struggles that appeared impossible at their outset and concluded in radical transformations in the balance of power.
The digital left that masters work in the field and excels in deploying digital space simultaneously is the left best positioned to confront a capitalism in its digital phase that masters both and deploys them to reinforce its dominance. At the global level, this means building a left digital international capable of confronting the planetary hegemony of digital capitalism with its own tools and in the language of its era, bringing together left-wing and social-justice forces around the world in a shared project that places technology in the service of the masses, emancipation, justice, and equality.
What has been set forth in these pages is not a romantic dream beyond reach. It is a real political battle unfolding now, and every day that passes without left-wing and social-justice forces engaging it with awareness and organization is a day in which the structures of digital domination become more entrenched and harder to dismantle. Technology has never been neutral, and today it is less neutral than at any previous time. What is built today, however small it may appear, is the seed of the future we want.
No comments:
Post a Comment