India’s Solar Boom Has a Waste Problem

Anusreeta Dutta | 07 Jul 2026

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In the coming decade, millions of solar panels will become waste but there is no coherent policy on sustainable disposal.

India’s solar revolution has been touted for over a decade as evidence that economic growth and climate action can go hand in hand. Every new solar park that is opened, every renewable energy target that is set, and every increase in installed capacity is cited as evidence of the country’s commitment to a low-carbon future. India has become one of the fastest-growing renewable energy markets in the world with over 100 GW of installed solar capacity and a high target of 500 GW non-fossil fuel capacity by 2030.

But underneath this success story is an uncomfortable reality that is hardly discussed in public. The same solar panels that are currently the face of India's clean energy transition will start entering the waste stream in unprecedented numbers in the next decade. The question that policymakers have largely ignored is: who will recycle millions of discarded solar panels? Not answering this question risks further entrenching the very environmental injustices that India’s green transition is trying to address.

Green Transition Faces End-of-Life Issue

Discussions on renewable energy in India are largely focused on installation targets, investments and carbon reduction. Policy debates still lack the full life cycle of renewable technologies. Solar panels won’t last forever. Most photovoltaic modules have an operational lifespan of around 25 to 30 years. However, rapid improvements in efficiency mean that many developers replace functioning panels much earlier to maximise electricity generation and profits. As a result, waste generation will most likely begin much sooner than expected.

According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), global solar photovoltaic waste could reach nearly 78 million tonnes by 2050. India, as one of the world's largest solar markets, will play a significant role in this growing waste mountain. Yet there is little evidence that India's waste management infrastructure is ready for this challenge. Instead, the country's renewable energy policies are still focused on deployment and giving much less thought to what happens when these technologies have outlived their useful lives.

Solar panels not considered "clean" waste.

One of the biggest misunderstandings around solar energy is that solar panels are environmentally neutral throughout their lives. While photovoltaic modules provide electricity without pollutants, their disposal offers a far more difficult picture. Traditional solar panels are made from glass, aluminium, silicon, copper, polymers and small amounts of precious metals like silver. Older and thin-film technologies may also contain toxic chemicals, including lead, cadmium and selenium.

If panels are broken, dumped into landfills, or disassembled using dangerous practices, these harmful elements can contaminate soil and groundwater. Persons are also exposed to hazardous substances when handling is not done properly. India has already seen the consequences of poor management of electronic waste. Although the E-Waste (Management) Rules are in place, almost all electronic waste still flows through the informal recycling industry, where workers, who are often migrants and women, recover valuable materials using crude methods, without proper safety equipment. It seems unlikely that discarded solar panels will fare any better unless dedicated recycling services are put in place. Too much irony: an environmentally sustainable technology could end up creating another stream of hazardous garbage if its disposal is left to the same informal systems already struggling to cope with conventional electronic waste.

Policy focused on capacity, not responsibility

India’s solar sector has grown quickly, thanks to significant government support through competitive bidding, subsidies, tax breaks and production-linked incentive schemes to promote local manufacturing. But the policy framework is eerily silent on responsibility for the end-of-life. Solar modules were only recently added to India’s general e-waste law, but implementation is still patchy. There is still no overarching framework to put in place duties for panel collection, transportation, recycling and finance once they become waste. This uncertainty around regulation enables procrastination on environmental responsibilities.

The burgeoning solar market in India is a boon for manufacturers, project developers, importers and distributors alike. But it's unclear who ultimately pays for recycling. Other industries have demonstrated that if there is not enough producer responsibility, the burden will rarely disappear. It is down to municipal authorities, informal workers and local communities instead. And thus, the clean energy transition threatens to externalize the environmental costs onto those with the least institutional protection.

Environmental justice cannot end with carbon reduction

India’s move to renewable energy is often judged by one yardstick: reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But carbon accounting can’t be used in a vacuum to evaluate climate policy. Environmental justice calls for a broader set of questions. Who benefits from investments in renewable energy? Who bears the environmental costs? Who is responsible when technology reaches its end of life?

These issues are particularly significant since many of India’s large solar parks are located in ecologically sensitive and economically marginal locations. Communities have already expressed concerns about land acquisition, grazing rights and biodiversity issues related to utility-scale solar expansion. If the discarded panels pile up in places that don't have enough recycling infrastructure nearby, these towns could be facing environmental problems again, out of proportion. A just energy transition is not simply a matter of replacing fossil fuel pollution with another form of waste.

Recycling is also an industrial opportunity

Solar waste is often written off as an economic necessity, with recycling solutions too expensive. Reality is more complex. To recover the materials from photovoltaic modules, specialist equipment is required to separate the glass, aluminium, silicon and precious metals without damaging them. Such infrastructure requires investment, research and technical development. But to see recycling only through the lens of costs is to overlook its strategic importance.

India is heavily reliant on imports for raw materials and components for solar manufacturing. As the global demand for renewable technologies increases, critical minerals such as silver, copper and high purity silicon are becoming increasingly important. Developing domestic recycling capacity can help reduce dependence on imports, improve supply chains and support India’s manufacturing goals under initiatives such as Make in India. Rather than discarding end-of-life panels, policymakers might view them as future urban mines for precious industrial materials. Some countries, including member states of the EU, have already taken steps in this direction, requiring manufacturers to bear the costs of collecting and recycling solar modules under the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive. India cannot afford to wait until volumes of garbage become unmanageable before putting in place such solutions.

Informal sector cannot be go-to recycling option

Perhaps most worrying is that without formal recycling facilities, discarded panels will end up in India's huge informal trash market. The informal recycling sector contributes significantly to the recovery of elements from e-waste. Its employees, however, work under precarious conditions and without occupational safety. Acid leaching, open burning and physical dismantling are still common ways to recover valuable elements.

If photovoltaic waste follows this path, the environmental costs of India’s renewable energy transition will once again be borne by low-income workers, whose labor already underpins India’s inadequate waste treatment infrastructure. So, the question is more than a mere technical one. It's also a political issue. Who will pay the hidden costs of the green economy?

Political Will Needed for Circular Economy

Solar waste is not a problem we cannot solve. That is a conscious policy call. India has a window of opportunity to build a circular economy based on renewable technologies before waste levels soar. It's not just about encouraging private recycling companies. We need mandatory Extended Producer Responsibility for photovoltaic modules, enforceable collection targets, investment in recycling infrastructure, transparent tracking of installed panels and financial mechanisms to ensure recycling costs are built into the economics of projects from the outset.

We should be encouraging manufacturers to design modules that can be easily disassembled and recovered, and public procurement processes should reward items with greater recyclability rather than simply lower prices. And most importantly, renewable energy planning needs to start treating waste management as part of energy policy, not an afterthought dumped on municipal governments down the road.

Beyond gigawatts

India’s solar revolution has indeed transformed the energy landscape of the country. The expansion of renewable electricity is vital to combat climate change and lessen reliance on fossil fuels. But the success of the shift cannot be measured in gigawatts installed or emissions avoided, alone. A truly sustainable energy future must take into account the entire life cycle of renewable technology, from extraction and production through installation, operation and ultimate disposal.

If today’s solar panels turn into tomorrow’s toxic waste, India’s climate strategy risks falling into a familiar pattern: promoting economic growth while postponing environmental costs. India won't have to decide whether to keep investing in solar energy. It ought to. The real question is whether the country will tackle the unintended consequences of its green transition before they become the next environmental crisis. A truly sustainable future for renewables must be circular, responsible and just as well. Otherwise, the promise of clean energy could end up being heaps of discarded solar panels that someone else has to clean up.

Anusreeta Dutta is a columnist, political ecology researcher with prior experience as an ESG analyst.

Nuclear Weapons: Anticipating Armageddon

Zahid Sultan | 13 Jul 2026

The politics of nuclear anticipation from Berlin to Tehran, and the danger to international stability.

In August 1939, on the eve of a war that would redraw the political and moral boundaries of the modern world, a short letter reached the desk of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It bore the signature of Albert Einstein but was, in substance and urgency, the work of Leo Szilard -- a refugee scientist who had already glimpsed the destructive implications of nuclear fission. The letter warned that Nazi Germany might be pursuing a new class of weapon, one capable of unprecedented devastation. It did not present evidence in the empirical sense. It offered, instead, a possibility: that recent advances in physics, if harnessed by a technologically sophisticated and ideologically ruthless State, could yield “extremely powerful bombs.” In the strategic environment of 1939, where uncertainty and fear already structured decision-making, that possibility was enough.

The origins of that fear lay not in intelligence reports or intercepted communications, but in the internal evolution of European science itself. In late 1938, German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, working in Berlin, identified the process of nuclear fission. Their former collaborator Lise Meitner, having fled Germany due to Nazi racial laws, correctly interpreted the phenomenon: the splitting of the atom released enormous energy, orders of magnitude greater than conventional chemical reactions. The discovery was quickly disseminated across the transnational scientific community, but its geopolitical implications were immediately apparent to a small group of physicists, many of them emigres who understood both the scientific potential and the political danger. If a sustained chain reaction could be achieved, the energy released might be weaponised. The science was uncertain, the engineering challenges immense, but the conceptual threshold had been crossed.

Within Germany, these developments prompted the formation of what became known as the Uranium Club, an informal network of scientists, including Werner Heisenberg, tasked with exploring the military applications of nuclear fission.

The programme was never a fully integrated, high-priority weapons project. It was fragmented across institutions, underfunded relative to other wartime priorities, and shaped by internal disagreements over feasibility and timeline.

Heisenberg himself appears to have concluded that a bomb was theoretically possible but practically unattainable within the duration of the war, given the industrial scale required for isotope separation or plutonium production. German efforts focused as much on reactor development as on weaponisation, and even those reactor experiments failed to achieve a self-sustaining chain reaction. In retrospect, the German programme was far from producing an atomic bomb.

None of this, however, was visible to policymakers in Washington or London. The opacity of the German system, combined with its demonstrated scientific capability, generated a condition of radical uncertainty. For Szilard and his colleagues, the danger did not lie in what Germany had demonstrably achieved, but in what it might achieve if left unchallenged. This was not an irrational fear. It was, rather, a rational response to incomplete information under conditions of high stakes.

Szilard understood that the United States possessed the industrial capacity and scientific talent to pursue its own nuclear programme, but that without political authorisation, such an effort would not materialise in time. Einstein’s signature lent authority to the warning; Roosevelt’s decision to act transformed that warning into policy.

The Manhattan Project that followed was unprecedented in scope and ambition. It mobilised thousands of scientists, engineers, and workers across multiple sites, from uranium enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge to plutonium production reactors at Hanford and the weapons laboratory at Los Alamos under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

What distinguished the American effort was not merely scientific ingenuity but the integration of science, industry, and State power into a single coordinated enterprise. The US did not simply research the possibility of a bomb; it built the infrastructure necessary to produce it at scale. By 1945, this infrastructure had achieved what the German programme had not even approached: the successful detonation of a nuclear device in the Trinity Test.

The irony, visible only in retrospect, is that the chain of events leading to Trinity was set in motion by a threat that never materialized. When the Allied Forces, through the Alsos Mission, investigated German nuclear facilities in the final stages of the war, they found no bomb programme nearing completion. German scientists, including Heisenberg, were themselves surprised when they learned of the American success. The asymmetry between perception and reality was profound. The US had acted on the assumption that Germany might acquire a nuclear weapon; in doing so, it created a weapon that transformed the structure of international politics.

This distinction between capability and anticipation is not a historical curiosity. It is the foundational logic of the nuclear age. The decision to pursue the bomb was not based on confirmed intelligence but on worst-case reasoning under uncertainty. Policymakers judged that the cost of inaction, should Germany succeed, would be catastrophic; therefore, action was justified even in the absence of proof. This logic has proven remarkably durable. It underpins doctrines of deterrence, pre-emption, and non-proliferation, all of which operate on the premise that potential threats must be addressed before they fully materialise.

In contemporary geopolitical discourse, this logic is most clearly visible in the ongoing tensions involving Iran, the US, and Israel. Iran’s nuclear programme occupies a position structurally analogous to that of Germany in 1939, though the historical contexts differ significantly. Iran possesses the scientific expertise, industrial infrastructure, and technological base to enrich uranium and develop advanced nuclear capabilities. It maintains that its programme is for civilian purposes, grounded in its rights under international law. Its adversaries, however, interpret these capabilities through the lens of latent weaponisation. The concern is not that Iran has already built a bomb, but that it could do so, perhaps rapidly, if it chose to cross the threshold.

This condition of strategic ambiguity generates a familiar pattern of behaviour. Israel, perceiving an existential threat, has engaged in covert operations, cyber activities, and targeted strikes aimed at delaying or disrupting Iran’s nuclear progress. The US has pursued a combination of sanctions, diplomatic engagement, and military signalling to constrain Iran’s options and maintain leverage.

Iran, for its part, has expanded its nuclear activities incrementally, calibrating its actions in response to external pressure while preserving the option of further escalation. Each actor is operating not on the basis of definitive knowledge but on the anticipation of possible futures. The result is a dynamic in which policy is driven by projections rather than certainties.

The parallel with 1939 is not exact, but it is instructive. Then, as now, the central question is not what an adversary has done, but what it might do. Then, as now, the absence of complete information amplifies the role of fear in decision-making. The difference lies in the scale of the consequences.

In 1939, the atomic bomb existed only as a theoretical possibility; today, it is an established reality, with multiple states possessing arsenals capable of global destruction. The margin for error has narrowed accordingly. Miscalculation in the present context carries risks that are not merely regional but systemic.

For states that do not possess nuclear weapons, the implications of this history are deeply ambivalent. On one hand, the case of Germany suggests that even the perception of a potential nuclear capability can provoke pre-emptive or preventive responses from more powerful actors. A state may become the target of containment strategies, sanctions, or even military action not for what it has achieved, but for what it is suspected of intending.

On the other hand, the persistence of nuclear arsenals among established powers reinforces the perception that possession of such weapons confers a form of strategic immunity. States that have crossed the nuclear threshold are rarely subjected to direct military intervention, whereas those that remain below it are more vulnerable to coercion.

This dual message -- restraint invites pressure, acquisition invites stability -- creates a powerful incentive structure within the international system. It does not guarantee proliferation, but it complicates efforts to prevent it. The normative framework of non-proliferation, embodied in treaties and institutions, rests on the promise that security can be maintained without nuclear weapons. The empirical record, however, is more ambiguous. It suggests that security is often understood in terms of capabilities rather than commitments, and that trust is frequently subordinate to strategic calculation.

The legacy of the German nuclear programme, such as it was, lies not in what it achieved but in what it provoked. It demonstrated that the perception of a threat can be as consequential as the threat itself, and that actions taken under uncertainty can produce outcomes that redefine the parameters of international politics. The Manhattan Project was a response to a hypothetical danger; its success created a permanent condition of existential risk. The nuclear age, once initiated, cannot be reversed. It can only be managed, with varying degrees of success and failure.

In assessing the current tensions surrounding Iran’s nuclear programme, it is therefore insufficient to focus solely on technical details or immediate policy options. The deeper issue is the persistence of a strategic logic that prioritises anticipation over verification and treats uncertainty as a justification for action. This logic is not inherently irrational; under certain conditions, it may be the only viable basis for decision-making. But it carries inherent dangers. It can lead to overestimation of threats, escalation of conflicts, and the entrenchment of adversarial relationships that might otherwise be mitigated.

The question that confronted policymakers in 1939: what if the adversary acquires the bomb first, remains unresolved in a broader sense. It continues to shape the behaviour of states, the design of institutions, and the trajectory of conflicts. The case of Iran illustrates the enduring relevance of this question, as well as its limitations. Acting on the basis of worst-case assumptions may prevent certain outcomes, but it may also generate new risks, some of which may be more difficult to control than the original threat.

The history of the atomic bomb’s origins is often told as a story of scientific triumph or moral reckoning. It is, more fundamentally, a story about decision-making under uncertainty. The scientists who warned of the bomb, the policymakers who authorized its development, and the military planners who deployed it were all operating within a framework defined by incomplete knowledge and high stakes. Their choices were shaped by fear as much as by evidence. The world that emerged from those choices is one in which fear continues to play a central role.

In this sense, the most enduring legacy of 1939 is not the weapon itself, but the mindset that made its creation seem necessary. A world organised around the anticipation of worst-case scenarios is a world in which the line between prudence and overreach is constantly blurred. The challenge for contemporary policymakers is not to eliminate uncertainty -- that is impossible, but to manage it in ways that do not reproduce the most dangerous patterns of the past. Whether that challenge can be met remains an open question, one that will determine not only the future of Iran’s nuclear programme, but the stability of the international system as a whole.

The writer is a Kashmir-based independent researcher. The views are personal. Email: Zahidcuk36@gmail.com

When Meta Kills the Lock on Your Door

Aniruddha Jena | 02 Jul 2026

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What Instagram’s encryption rollback really means.

On May 8, 2026, Meta quietly shut down one of the more consequential privacy features it had ever introduced on Instagram: end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for direct messages. The company’s stated rationale was straightforward to the point of being dismissive: very few users were opting into it, so it was being removed. That explanation, however convenient, obscures a far more complex set of trade-offs that deserves serious public scrutiny, particularly in a country like India, where Instagram’s user base runs into hundreds of millions and where the regulatory landscape around data is still finding its footing.

To understand why this matters, it is worth understanding what end-to-end encryption actually does. In a standard messaging environment, data is encrypted in transit, meaning it is scrambled between your device and the platform’s servers, but the platform itself can decrypt and read it.

E2EE goes a step further: messages are locked in a way that only the sender and recipient can ever unlock them, and even the platform operator cannot access the content. When Instagram introduced the optional E2EE feature in late 2023, it was deploying the Signal Protocol, the same cryptographic architecture that underpins WhatsApp. As of this month, that protection no longer exists on Instagram, regardless of whether you had it turned on.

Meta’s argument that low adoption justifies removal is, at best, circular. Adoption was low partly because the feature was never made the default. Unlike WhatsApp, where E2EE is automatic and invisible to users, Instagram required deliberate opt-in, and the platform did little to promote it.

The internal contradiction within Meta’s own product suite is telling: Facebook Messenger, the company’s other major messaging platform, rolled out default E2EE for all personal chats and calls in 2023. Instagram launched the same optional feature in the same year and then reversed it three years later. It is difficult to reconcile these two moves as anything other than a deliberate choice to treat Instagram’s user base differently.

Removing a privacy feature because people did not voluntarily go looking for it is not a neutral business decision; it is a choice that effectively downgrades the privacy floor for every user on the platform, including those who never knew the feature existed.

There is, however, a legitimate and important counterargument that privacy advocates have tended to under weigh. Child safety organisations and law enforcement agencies have long raised an alarm about the role of strong encryption in shielding serious abuse from detection. Facebook and Instagram together have historically accounted for over 85% of global referrals of child sexual abuse material from technology companies.

In the UK alone, data shared by social media platforms contributes to approximately 800 arrests of suspected child sex offenders and the safeguarding of roughly 1,200 children every month. End-to-end encryption, implemented at scale without compensating safety mechanisms, would make this kind of detection nearly impossible. This is a real and documented cost, not a hypothetical one.

The honest answer, then, is that there is no clean resolution to this tension. Strong encryption protects ordinary users, journalists, activists, lawyers, and anyone else with a reasonable expectation of private communication. It also, as a mathematical consequence, extends the same protection to those who would use private channels for serious harm. The question is not whether encryption is good or bad, but whether the specific architecture of a given platform, with its particular user base and social functions, makes it a suitable candidate for end-to-end encryption without additional safeguards.

It is also worth placing this decision against the broader direction of the messaging industry. The technology sector’s trajectory over the past decade has been, overwhelmingly, toward more encryption rather than less. Signal, widely regarded as the benchmark for secure messaging, provides default E2EE for all messages and calls. Apple’s iMessage deploys it by default between Apple devices. Viber does the same for personal chats. Even Telegram, often criticised for making E2EE optional rather than default, has moved incrementally toward stronger protections.

Against this backdrop, Instagram’s rollback is not merely a corporate product decision; it is a conspicuous regression at a moment when the rest of the industry is moving in the opposite direction. That should prompt questions about motivation that go beyond the low-adoption explanation Meta has offered.

What makes Meta’s decision troubling is not that it removed E2EE per se, but that it did so without articulating a coherent alternative framework for user privacy. The company has pointed users toward WhatsApp as the appropriate venue for sensitive communication, which is a reasonable suggestion, but it does not absolve Instagram of the responsibility to be transparent about what is now technically possible with message data.

Without E2EE, Meta can, in principle, scan message content for moderation and safety purposes, serve it in response to lawful government requests, and potentially use it to refine advertising and AI systems, subject to applicable legal constraints.

For Indian users, this is not an abstract concern. India is one of Instagram’s largest markets, and under the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2025, the Central government has explicit authority to direct data fiduciaries to share user information. With E2EE gone, Instagram DMs are no longer beyond the reach of such directives.

For civil society actors, investigative journalists, lawyers, and political organisers who may have used Instagram’s messaging feature under the assumption of some elevated privacy, this represents a material change in their risk environment. That assumption was always somewhat optimistic given that E2EE was never the default, but the complete removal forecloses even the option.

The broader lesson from this episode is structural. Privacy protections on commercial social media platforms exist at the pleasure of the platforms, subject to regulatory pressure and business incentives. The Internet Society has long argued that encryption is not merely a technical feature but a prerequisite for meaningful freedom of expression and secure civic participation. If that argument has merit, and there is substantial evidence that it does, then leaving the encryption question entirely to the discretion of private companies is an inadequate governance arrangement.

India, as it develops its data protection ecosystem, has an opportunity to think carefully about baseline encryption standards for platforms operating within its jurisdiction. The DPDP framework addresses how data is stored and processed after it is collected; it does not, as yet, prescribe minimum cryptographic standards for what is collected in the first place. That gap deserves legislative attention.

The Instagram rollback is a useful prompt to ask a more fundamental question: should the right to a private digital conversation be contingent on whether a corporation finds the feature commercially worthwhile?

The answer, in a constitutional democracy with a recognised right to privacy, ought to be ‘no’.

The writer teaches at the School of Management, Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi (Himachal Pradesh). He is also a King’s College London – Charles Wallace India Trust Visiting Fellow. The views are personal.

 

The Left and Breaching Capitalism’s Digital Fortress

Rezgar Akrawi | 01 Jul 2026

How can movements confront a digital capitalism that has become technologically advanced to an unprecedented degree?

Servers and cables. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The battle for socialist liberation in the twenty-first century cannot be fought with the weapons of the last century. In an era in which algorithms hold sway, in which the influence of artificial intelligence over media, culture, education, and labour continues to expand, and in which economic policies and strategies are formulated on the basis of big data and algorithmic analysis, the left finds itself confronted with an existential question: how can movements that still organize themselves according to traditional logic confront a digital capitalism that has become technologically advanced to an unprecedented degree?

This text is not merely a call to develop tools; it is a call to transform organizational and intellectual consciousness toward a deep understanding of the nature of the digital battle. The gap in question is not simply a gap in “technical mastery”; it is a gap in grasping that digital space has become a class battlefield in which capitalism dominates, programs, and subjugates, while the left suffers from a diminished presence and the absence of a clear digital vision. Closing this gap is no longer a luxury; it is a condition for the survival of the left itself, since today’s battle is waged in algorithms and networks just as much as it is waged on the ground.

The struggle over technology is not a battle against science; it is a battle against the monopoly that dominant powers hold over it in order to boost their profits. Artificial intelligence should not be regarded as a threat in itself, but rather as a field of struggle whose features are shaped by the balance of social, political, and economic forces. Recent years have witnessed an unprecedented acceleration in the concentration of digital power within a limited number of giant corporations that control the infrastructure of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and global data, granting them economic, political, and cultural influence that at times surpasses the influence of numerous states.

Technology as Capitalism’s Means of Overcoming its Crises

When confronted with crises, capitalism resorts to reproducing itself through advanced scientific tools that allow it to overcome challenges without touching its exploitative core. In the 2008 crisis, technology and scientific methods were used to rescue the financial system while loading the cost of the losses onto the working classes. During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, capitalism managed to overcome the crisis by reinforcing automation, artificial intelligence, and remote work, which ensured the continuity of production through new mechanisms that reduced reliance on human labor and increased corporate profits, at the cost of unstable working conditions for millions.

With the broad surge of artificial intelligence since 2023, capitalism has entered a new phase of restructuring the labor market. Reliance on automation and intelligent systems has expanded across numerous sectors, and growing concerns have emerged over the future of millions of jobs, even as technology companies achieve enormous profits as a result of their monopoly over the new digital and knowledge infrastructure.

These policies show how capitalism benefits from science as a tool for structuring the system and ensuring its continuity. At times, it even borrows certain socialist ideas, such as state intervention, as temporary measures to guarantee stability, only to retreat from those gains once the crisis has passed and to reproduce exploitation through more advanced mechanisms.

Scientific Flexibility and the Digital Revolution as a Modern Class Struggle

In light of these challenges, the left must draw on scientific progress by reformulating its discourse and its tools in a scientific manner. This requires using modern tools to analyze social issues and developing a realistic discourse along with flexible organizational mechanisms capable of attracting young people who have grown up in a world dominated by technology. Investing in scientific tools does not mean identifying with capitalist values; it is a strategy for harnessing them in the service of social justice and reducing class inequality, as a step toward building a more humane socialist system.

If the previous industrial revolutions transformed the equations of production through the machine and steam, then electricity, then computing, the current phase, founded on artificial intelligence, big data, and digital platforms, is reshaping production, labor, knowledge, and human communication in a manner that is more profound and far-reaching. In this era, data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence systems have become central tools for reproducing domination in relatively invisible ways, through influencing public opinion, directing individual and collective behavior, and controlling access to knowledge and information.

Yet most left organizations remain digitally backward, which places them in a position of weakness. This lag reflects a failure to grasp that digital development has become an existential condition for socialist struggle. The left’s lack of modern digital and knowledge tools places it in an unequal confrontation with a capitalist system that owns the global platforms, the data, and the computing and artificial intelligence infrastructure, tools that grant it an unprecedented capacity to shape consciousness and influence social and political behaviour.

Reclaiming the Initiative

While the left is currently losing one of the battles because it treats technology as a secondary tool, the war has not yet been decided. Victory requires translating vision into concrete programs of action grounded in the conscious use of technology. The left cannot remain in a defensive position; it must become an active party in reshaping the future of technology so as to integrate it into its liberatory project.

Even so, technology is no substitute for conscious human organization. Real power lies in organized human beings capable of harnessing these means in the service of their goals. Artificial intelligence is an effective tool for mobilization, organization, and analysis, yet it will never replace the solidarity and grassroots work that remains the primary engine of change.

Toward Left Digital Alternatives: Breaching the Fortress and Liberating the Tools

As a left, we have historically succeeded in offering alternatives in the fields of economics, justice, and politics, yet today we face a fateful challenge: we have not yet developed a comprehensive, alternative digital vision capable of breaking capitalism’s technological grip. The most important dialectical lesson we must absorb is that technology is not a “neutral tool” that falls from the sky; rather, it is a class battlefield par excellence. The fundamental problem does not lie in the essence of artificial intelligence or automation, but in the “relations of ownership” that govern them, that is, in the monopoly that major corporations hold over these tools in order to deepen class conflict, surveil the masses, and standardize human consciousness in the service of accumulating profit.

On this basis, it is no longer sufficient for the left to stand in the position of “critic” or “spectator,” since it must put forward new and bold mechanisms for using technology within democratic, participatory, and transparent frameworks. We need a “popular artificial intelligence” that operates under societal oversight and is developed through digital cooperatives, aiming to distribute wealth and organize production in the service of genuine human needs rather than the whims of the market and the strengthening of domination and militarism. We also need open-source models, progressive digital platforms, and cooperative technological initiatives that are not subject to the logic of commercial monopoly, and that allow communities and the masses to participate in managing knowledge and data and in developing new technologies.

A genuine confrontation requires us to “breach the digital fortress” of capitalism, which means entering into the very heart of the technical process, and understanding the logic of algorithms in order to dismantle them and rebuild them with a liberatory orientation. Merely standing at the walls of this technology and crying out in condemnation of its exploitation will change nothing in reality and will leave the left isolated within outdated intellectual ghettos.

We are called upon to take possession of the tools of our age, since just as Marx and Engels transformed the economic and philosophical sciences of their time from tools that justified the existing order into a theoretical and practical weapon in the hands of the working class, the left today is called upon to be an active and programming force in this arena. We must move from the position of the “passive user” subject to the terms of capitalist platforms, to the position of the “alternative producer” who puts forward a technology that is communal, open, and liberated.

The struggle over artificial intelligence is no longer simply about the future of technology; it concerns the future of labour, democracy, culture, and social justice. Without an active left presence in this field, digital capitalism will continue to determine the direction of technological development in the service of its own interests and will continue to control the development of the human mind and the human future.

The true strength of the left lies in its ability to integrate grassroots human organization with digital mastery, so that digital space becomes a supportive and effective arena, not a substitute for struggle; rather, a wing on which it can soar toward a more humane and more just socialist future.

Rezgar Akrawi is a leftist writer and researcher focused on technology, AI, the digital revolution, and the development of contemporary leftist thought and practice in response to these transformations. He works as an expert in systems development and e-governance and is a theorist of the concept of the “Electronic Left.”

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Courtesy: Breakthrough News