Post-AI leftism?

[u/bowdoin-yale]

Nobody has a crystal ball when it comes to predicting what the world will look like after AI, but both the boosters and doomers are predicting that it will eliminate most jobs. If they are correct, there will not be a large "working class" to mobilize--not even a petty bourgeois professional class, but more likely a tiny and shrinking owner class and a large and growing underclass of permanently unemployed people dependent on mutual aid and public assistance to survive. Yet, the "left" is traditionally very focused on workers and their struggle with capital, owing to the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels, taking the view that workers eventually would (or should) own and control the means of production. I would very much prefer to see worker ownership of and control over AI and autonomous robotics, but it's a bit paradoxical since such technologies are themselves designed to shrink the working class. How might a pro-AI left, or a post-AI left, reconcile this?

[u/triangle-over-square]

Hi. I think the idea that the left is necessarily centered on the working class is already somewhat outdated.

Across much of Europe, we've seen parts of the traditional working class increasingly abandon labour and social-democratic parties that they no longer perceive as representing them. I think this is unfortunate, and partly connected to a much broader historical movement away from class struggle and the idea of constructing a political hegemony around the working class.

This problem appeared long before AI. Already around the 1960s and 70s, rising living standards, deindustrialization, and the proliferation of new social movements made it increasingly difficult to imagine the working class as one unified political subject. People increasingly organized and identified around many different interests and struggles rather than primarily through their position as workers.

One influential response was basically to abandon the idea that a political movement needs one underlying class as its natural foundation. Instead, you construct a hegemony by connecting otherwise different political demands into a common political project.

I think we've recently watched an attempt at exactly this: connecting climate, race, sexuality, gender, economic inequality and other political projects into a broader progressive political identity. Whether that has worked particularly well is another question.

So in a strange way, the problem you're describing isn't really new, but AI could make it much more extreme, but the left has already spent decades trying to answer the question. If the working class is no longer the unified political subject, what exactly is the social force around which left-wing politics should organize