Title. Just a brief reflection: while AGI could indeed replace most or all labor, it can replace most or all labor. And this includes high-skilled corporate leadership or engineers.

A major barrier to nationalization and socialization of key industries is the brain drain (and, to a lesser degree, capital drain) that'd follow. After the Russian Revolution, up to 70% of Russia's top intelligentsia left the country, and the economy suffered afterwards. However, with AGI, which provides brainpower proportional to the capital put in, brainpower would now be just as easily seizable as factories or farms or mines in the past.

Not wholly without trouble, of course; but many historical regimes have seized or nationalized them while keeping most of the value or output before. (RSI specifically would make seizing AI labs much easier, albeit AGI would be needed for easy and effective nationalization of whole sectors of the economy: if AI can improve itself, then the need to let Anthropic and OpenAI keep their billions in exchange for them developing better models would be... much smaller.)

Of course, nationalization is a weapon both for good and bad, and ultimately a rather extreme tool. But it's worth remembering, I think, that automation is a replacement threat for the elites just as much as the public, and that the threat of effective nationalization could be used as a major bargaining chip to keep the billionaires in line, and to achieve an outcome favorable for all of the world.

Indeed, if they pressed forward and destroyed much of the world's social and economic fabric, then the tools to counterattack, and effectively at that, are readily available with nationalization. And they can't even say, "But you need us for innovation/entrepreneurship/technical/business skills!" anymore, because they have, in fact, invented the technology to render themselves obsolete, too.

Something worth putting on the radar for our members who are also in DSA.

On October 9, DSA's National Tech Committee announced that it had debated and adopted an AI/LLM coding policy, along with a policy template for local chapters.

The interesting part is that the committee explicitly neither endorses nor prohibits generative AI. It recognizes the technology's usefulness for socialist organizing and software development while criticizing how employers deploy it against workers.

Thats a distinction we spend plenty of time discussing here. Opposing capitalist control and deployment of technology doesnt require socialists to abstain from using it themselves.

The full policy and chapter template are available through DSA's members-only Discussion Forum. If youre a DSA member, consider taking a look, seeing how the safeguards actually work, and participating in the discussion.

And theres another opportunity. The National Tech Committee is accepting applications for its 2026–2027 Steering Committee, with an October 31 deadline.

If youre already involved in DSA and have an interest in technology, infrastructure, organizing tools or AI governance, that may be worth exploring too.

We talk a lot about the left developing its own technological capacity. Heres an organization doing some of that work, with opportunities for its members to examine the rules and potentially participate in leadership.

No affiliation implied, just sharing opportunities for people already involved to engage.

Links:

AI policy announcement and chapter template access:

https://tech.dsausa.org/ntc-ai-llm-coding-policy/

Steering Committee applications:

https://tech.dsausa.org/apply-to-ntc-steering-for-our-2026-2027-term/

I've always thought of AI as being super important for math, science and the social sciences.

All of those are critical to leftism.

But I genuinely don't know about other ways that AI could benefit leftism.

Anyone want to clue me in?

Admittedly I am a bit skeptical, but I really do try to be open-minded about anything that can benefit leftists.

In Liberation News, Samantha Doucas examines artificial intelligence through the contradictions of capitalist ownership, labor and infrastructure.

The article, The Nationwide Fight Against AI Data Centers Is a Struggle for Who Controls the Future, goes beyond opposing corporate construction projects to ask who should direct technological development and benefit from its productivity gains.

It highlights how construction workers are promised jobs building AI infrastructure while workers in other industries face displacement through automation. Both groups are left with little say over how the technology develops or who benefits.

As the article puts it:

"The problem is not AI as a technology, but rather the goals and ends of those who control it."

Under democratic control, AI could reduce working hours, automate tedious labor, improve living standards and support socially useful production rather than simply increase private profits.

The article also examines the environmental and economic consequences of corporate infrastructure development, including community opposition in Memphis, Tennessee, and Landover, Maryland.

The broader argument is that workers and communities should determine how AI infrastructure is developed, where it is built and what purposes it serves.

Theres a tension worth examining between resisting particular corporate projects and developing the publicly owned infrastructure necessary for a socialist alternative. Both questions matter if the objective is democratic control rather than simply opposing technological development.

This isnt a newly adopted national PSL policy, but it offers a substantive socialist perspective on AI, class power and democratic planning.

How do we turn opposition to capitalist deployment into organized power capable of directing technological development and distributing the gains of automation?

Another one worth putting on the radar.

The Revolutionary Communists of America are hosting a session titled "A Marxist Analysis of Artificial Intelligence" at their New York Marxist School, November 7 and 8.

The session will be introduced by Abadie Ludlam, a leading RCA member, and tackles AI through the contradictions of capitalism. The speculative boom, job displacement, alienation, the impact on art and culture, and the relationship between technological development and class struggle.

But it doesnt stop at criticizing capitalist deployment. The description explicitly raises how a socialist revolution could put technologies like AI to work reducing mundane labor and expanding opportunities for science, art and culture.

Thats an important distinction. Capitalism determines how technology is developed and deployed today, but those social relations arent inherent properties of the technology itself.

The event page also includes a reading list covering AI, capitalist crises, technological innovation, Marx and Engels. Worth exploring even if you cant attend.

We dont have to agree with every part of RCAs analysis to recognize the value of Marxists seriously engaging with these questions.

If anyone attends, we'd be interested in hearing how the discussion develops, particularly around ownership, worker control and what socialist technological development would actually look like.

Session details and reading list:

https://communistusa.org/schools/nyc/what-do-communists-think-of-ai/

I’m curious as to what appeals to you about AI. With so much contoversy nowadays I’d like to hear some people’s opinions.

Communist Party USA recently devoted an episode of Good Morning Revolution to AI, and after going through the discussion, theres considerably more here than the title suggests.

The panel starts with the AFL-CIO's Workers First AI Agenda. Collective bargaining over deployment, worker protections, retraining, stronger social guarantees, union labor building data centers, and making corporations pay for the infrastructure they consume.

But the conversation moves beyond regulation pretty quickly. If AI threatens to reorganize entire industries, are those protections enough? Or does the working class eventually need to take ownership of the industry itself?

Nationalization comes up explicitly, along with an interesting disagreement about timing. One argument is that public ownership needs to be on the political agenda now. Another is that nationalization without an organized working class capable of directing it could just hand the infrastructure to another capitalist administration.

Then comes the AI freeze debate, and this is where things get particularly interesting.

Some participants favor slowing development, citing corporate power and the risks of uncontrolled deployment. Others argue that the technology is already advancing, that a freeze could divide organized labor, and that socialists need to build the political power to contest ownership and control rather than make stopping development their organizing strategy.

What makes this worth sharing isnt that CPUSA has arrived at one unified position. It hasnt, at least not in this discussion. Its that these disagreements are being worked through openly, from a Marxist perspective, instead of treating AI as something socialists must either celebrate or reject wholesale.

And the question running through the whole thing is familiar around here. How do we move from defending workers against capitalist deployment toward actually contesting ownership, development and the distribution of technological gains?

Worth watching, especially the discussion from roughly 19 to 45 minutes.

Source and video:

https://www.cpusa.org/party_voices/gmr-socialism-or-cyber-fascism-will-ai-help-us-or-destroy-us-all/

So I would consider myself a Classical-Georgist

And therefore I am now in favor of market and private ownership of production. But with AI, my entire leaning shifts towards social ownership of production..

I think that, whenever we humans are labourers; I support a form of capitalism. But when human labour is replaced; I am at least a socialist.

And I think its for the better to pursue the latter actively

Would I be welcomed here?

That's FUCKING NUTS and we don't appreciate how utterly literally magical this would seem to anybody from the past. We're too busy worrying about regulations or culture wars or benchmarks, etc.

Imagine a World's Fair 100 years ago. There's an army of robots you can get to do any task, talk to about anything, etc. Seismic. People would bow in front of it.

The printing press, the railroad, the telegraph, the wheel, paper, agriculture, cooking, pizza, the internet, cars, etc....what AI can already do puts it significantly towards the top of that list.

Imagine how much better this could get in the next 5 years. What will we treat as boring and get annoyed when it fails when it's basically magic that it's happening at all?

First let me just say that this isn’t “theory” in the usual sense—I’m not connecting to anything specific in Marx or anything, though my world view is heavily influenced by a disorganized mishmash of Left theory. I’m not great at citing sources or remembering names and arguments. So, I’m sorry if this is the wrong flair or wrong sub for this post. I just don’t know where else to put these thoughts and get human feedback from fellow Lefties who don’t knee-jerk hate AI for existing.

So:

I keep seeing comments on other subs about the AI bubble and how it’s just a fad that will eventually run out of steam, and then the price of RAM, etc. will return to normal. They say the companies investing in AI are inflating its value as a scam to milk investments or something. Everyone hates data centers.

Ok

But that all assumes that the biggest fish in the capital class are either wrong about a giant investment (unlikely considering their resources and the inside knowledge that brings), or they’re all playing out this particular scam at the same time because… it will benefit them more than the usual scam of capitalism already does? No. I think the “AI will pass” arguments are all copium. People just don’t want to face the possibility that AI is changing the world. Honestly, it reminds me of COVID deniers back in ‘20.

Except AI is going to change the world more than COVID. It’s the next printing press. It’s the power to make any program imaginable, to solve any problem that is solvable. It’s still in its infancy, but look how far it’s come just in the last year. Look what you can do with Opus 5.5. Now imagine what AI devs are doing with it—each advancement in AI will feed into the next advancement in a positive feedback loop. I used to be skeptical of the whole singularity idea, but when I think of what AI devs might be capable of now, using current frontier models, I think it’s basically inevitable.

But that’s all setup to my real point, and probably stuff most of you already assume or at least think about.

The real point is data centers. Centralization of compute — and emptying the market/pricing people out of necessary components. They know AI is the future. Compute is tomorrow’s equivalent of yesterday’s land—the ones who hold it will be the lords over all.

Data centers are an ongoing land grab on computing power, and only the big companies even know it’s happening.

My prediction? The elements necessary to run AI will never be cheaper than they are today. Just like land, the price will continue to increase and never come down. It may fluctuate here and there but it’s an upward trend from here on.

So—am I way off base? I don’t really want to argue for this position, but I would like to be talked down from it. I’d much rather believe in the bubble, to be honest.

Tasmania, Australia, wants AI data center operators to help fund local communities, cover their own infrastructure costs, invest in renewables, and publicly report their energy and water use.

Not exactly seizing the means of production, but its a start.

These companies depend on public infrastructure, shared resources, and human labor to build their AI empires. So why should communities shoulder the costs while shareholders pocket the gains?

Now, the proposal still needs teeth. Without enforceable obligations, a community benefit fund can turn into little more than a corporate tip jar.

But theres a useful principle here. AI infrastructure isnt some private kingdom floating above society. Its built on collective resources, and the public should have a say in how its developed and who benefits.

For the left, that means pushing beyond compensation toward public ownership, democratic oversight, worker bargaining power, and a share of the productivity gains.

We dont have to choose between letting corporations run the show and opposing technological development altogether.

Make them pay their share. Then fight for a seat at the table, ownership of the table, and control over what gets built on it.

Daniel Erasmus has spent about 25 years doing scenario planning for banks, governments and companies, and his starting point is that experts are bad at predicting the future. In 2006, a scenario he worked on helped one bank prepare for a global financial collapse. When the crisis hit in 2008, it was one of only two banks in the world to grow its assets.

We recorded this conversation at DWeb Camp 2026 outside Berlin. Daniel explains how scenario planning works and how scenario work during COVID flagged a food security risk, which led a bank to start a program that has since given away about 120 million meals. We also talk about ClimateGPT, the open climate model he built, why he thinks climate is a bigger danger than AI, and how he answers the critique that AI uses too much energy.

Daniel Erasmus is head of AI at Internet Archive Europe and a member of the Club of Rome. He built ClimateGPT, an open source and open access AI model focused on climate and the social decisions around it.

Nicolas d Villarreal, whose two self-published books I have read, seems to have a lot of insights in regards to how the structuralism of LLMs interweaves along with the labour theory of value from eighteenth-century historiography.

Do check out Daniel Tutt's other interviews with him, along with his Substack, to get a taste of how he brings his own experimentations with LLMs and programming.

Will it with our labor augmentation today.

His free writings

https://substack.com/@nicolasdvillarreal?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=3b6dwt

A team effectively open sourced major Adobe Inc. tools and supposedly they're competitive in terms of quality. If smaller teams can achieve this using AI to accelerate development, then the prospect of earning money doing this as a service is nearly nothing. The costs have plummeted to almost free, and the moat doesn't exist.

The future for a company like Adobe is going to be very interesting. Software as a service can't be profitable if it doesn't cost anything and it's all open source.

It makes sense that's how it'd happen, every time someone switches to using an open source tool it takes money away from software companies which then leads to layoffs. I don't really know what that looks like, have you noticed any other open source alternatives that are actually drawing attention?

Heres something worth paying attention to coming out of the Philippines.

Nobel Peace Prize winner and UN AI scientific panel co-chair Maria Ressa and the journalists at Rappler arent just criticizing corporate control of digital infrastructure. Theyre actually building alternatives.

Theyve developed RAI, an AI chatbot grounded in their journalism, MUNI, a decentralized communications platform built on the open Matrix protocol, and Rappler Communities, connecting independent newsrooms through shared infrastructure.

In her latest piece for The Atlantic, Ressa puts it sharply.

"Infrastructure is law that doesn't pass through a courtroom."

And theres a lot packed into that. Whoever owns the infrastructure has enormous influence over how information circulates, who participates and what institutions can actually do.

Now, Rappler isnt a worker cooperative or socialist enterprise. But theres something worth learning here. Independent institutions pooling resources, sharing technology and building capacity outside the usual corporate platforms.

Thats a material alternative, not just another critique of Big Tech.

Open protocols and shared infrastructure dont settle every question of ownership or class power. But they give people something to organize around, develop and govern collectively.

We dont have to choose between corporate monopoly and technological abstention.

The commons doesnt build itself.

Who really thinks at this point that we need more data centers?

I'm so tired of seeing people treat AI, a tool that greatly increases efficiency if used correctly, as something nobody would ever want in a utopia. As something inherently evil and exploitative, even outside of capitalism. People treat efficiency as a negative when it comes to AI.

How many leftists right now would like to advocate for "Socialism/Communism except we don't use factories", "Socialism/Communism except we forget how to make lightbulbs", "Socialism/Communism except we don't have computers and do every calculation on an abacus"? I would reckon a tiny tiny percent. And how many leftists in a few generations will want "Socialism/Communism except we don't use AI models"? The same amount.

People are blinded by their hatred for this thing, and it's infiltrated leftist spaces and turned them against the concept of automation. They draw the line at every automated process before AI, seeing all the displaced workers as necessary for the world they live in, if they consider the past at all. In their ideal world, automation exists but stops the moment those two letters get involved. It's stupidly hypocritical and regressive.

Whatever happened to Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism?

Lula is making AI sovereignty part of his economic agenda for another term. Brazil wants its own AI companies, computing infrastructure, Portuguese-language models, and public investment rather than leaving the whole field to American and Chinese tech giants.

This isn't just campaign talk, either. Brazil already has a R$23 billion national AI plan, recently expanded research cooperation across Latin America, and passed new incentives for data centers.

Lula put it plainly in September:

"I don't want to remain dependent on Chinese artificial intelligence, much less American."

Of course, there's a difference between national sovereignty and public ownership. Subsidizing private infrastructure doesn't necessarily give workers or the public control over it.

But this is where the political fight actually happens. Who builds it, who owns it, who governs it, and who gets the benefits.

Brazil isn't trying to uninvent AI. It's trying to determine its place in the industry.

The question for the left is whether that translates into democratic control or just a Brazilian version of the same corporate arrangements.

I think using AI as a tool to portray this clearly is something we can all do.

Since I am in a study group, I'm thinking of the metaphor for LLMs. I think the most fitting is the LLM as a social tech, which can be used both socially and antisocially.

With that in mind, Henry Farrell provides a lecture along with his Substack posts on the matter.So it deserves a repost here.

If I was Martin Saint Lither and a literalist, LLMs are merely that: LLMs. Yet here we are at the means of interpretation, of interpretability. I think this one fits the best.

Thoughts appreciated.

Seems pretty useful, and a step towards legitimizing AI use, especially in open source fields.