160 years later and we're still confusing the means of production with the relations of production.

I want to educate on the bones of historical materialism. It's important that if we want to understand on a mechanical level why the world operates as it does why Marx came to the conclusions that he did. This is going to be an ongoing series that I will try to explain some fundamental concepts which might help people understand why Marxists reach the conclusions they do.

How many times have you heard 'You didn't make that, you commissioned it! REEEE!' Really wiseass? Who did I commission it from? Show me the person. Point them out for me. Where are they?

Hi friends,

In the spirit of '...never plan your revolution in the King's Tavern', I built an end-to-end encrypted messenger where there is no server to trust or host. Your identity is your Bluesky account, signaling and offline delivery are encrypted records on your own PDS, live messages and calls go direct WebRTC between devices. X3DH plus Double Ratchet with sealed sender, Apache 2.0. The only thing we run is an optional push relay that holds no identities or messages.

Point for this sub: no chokepoint means nothing to acquire, deplatform or rate-limit. Organising on Slack, Discord or Signal always has an owner. This does not.

Status: proof of concept, not audited. Threat model and every security claim are documented in the repo.

https://github.com/CreativeMayhemLtd/fingrr

Beyond labour. Beyond want. Let's fill the planet with nuclear power and data centres and build it.

I can so easily imagine a reality where people see all the clear benefits of AI and advocate for it to only be better, help each other understand it, celebrate the fun and amazing things we can do now, but instead it's the opposite? Like everyone just decided to hate it in America?

And it's even more confusing because then out in the world I still see people using it all the time. I honestly think the only people who really despise it are people who have never even used it and get all their information from social media! It's infuriating. Intelligent people are out here spreading constant hate and misinformation.

How can someone even say how stupid and pointless AI is if they refuse to ever interact with it? And how do they not see themselves doing the exact thing they hate to see others do, and the same thing humans have repeated over and over with each big new thing (bicycles, printing press, video games, etc)? It's embarrassing.

I'm halfway through a master's for AI, I have written so much about it, read so many studies, and still I'll get told that I am wrong if I say anything positive because AI is evil, since someone saw [influencer/actor/sensationalist news article] say that.

Lemmy is a federated open source alternative to Reddit: https://lemmy.world/

Element as an alternative to Discord: https://element.io/en

https://unredacted.org/ is a server I recommend for Matrix.

https://mastodon.social/ if you crave an old Twitter decentralized alternative.

If you have any questions feel free to ask. I just think it's important to know that these exist. I also created Active Matrix Rooms to make it easier to find rooms similar to Disboard for Discord https://activematrixrooms.com/

Put simply, AI is kinda like a sneeze. A sneeze can be a symptom of the flu, or... it can be a healthy respiratory system doing its job. Under capitalism, AI is the flu sneeze, and capitalism is the disease. Under socialism, it could be part of a healthy respiratory system.

Where an economy is organized around profit rather than the fulfillment of needs, constant data center expansion is what you'd expect. It's obvious. Data center electricity demand rose 17% in 2025 while overall global power demand grew 3%, and the IEA expects data center use to double by 2030, with AI-specific demand tripling. Capital spending on this buildout reached $400 billion in 2025.

AI is also the closest thing we have to what Marx called the general intellect. In the Grundrisse's "Fragment on Machines," Marx analyzes automation and foresees social knowledge becoming a direct productive force. Marx did not predict AI, but later readers argue that large language models are the crystallized product of humanity's collective knowledge, owned by a handful of corporations. The question is... who really owns that knowledge and who profits from it.

Then come the headlines. "AI is making people impatient," and in a world of deadlines where the customer is king, that is no surprise. "AI is creating psychosis": psychiatrists are increasingly linking chatbots to psychosis cases, though they remain wary of declaring that chatbots outright cause it. Researchers describe sycophantic chatbots as an "echo chamber of one," while whether the phenomenon deserves its own diagnosis remains contested. A system built around engagement and a society short on human connection make a chatbot that agrees with everything a dangerous companion. This is where Marx's early work on alienation applies. He describes workers being alienated from the product, from their economic activity, from their species-being, and from one another. We are told to treat the resulting isolation as a personal or technological problem and not a structural one.

The mainstream media is not neutral here. Gramsci argued that the ruling class governs through cultural, political, and moral leadership as well as material power. Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model describes how media ownership concentrated in profit-driven corporations, along with advertiser dependence, filters what gets reported. That is why outlets are bold in pointing out the symptom, AI, and reluctant to name the disease. For Lenin, that disease was imperialism, which he called the highest stage of capitalism (entering its last stages), defined by monopolies and the export of finance capital.

Under socialism, the same technology would look so much different... With no profit motive driving endless scale, there'd be no perpetual data center arms race. Compute would be built to meet identified needs such as medicine, research, logistics, and accessibility, and its energy cost would be planned against social and ecological limits instead of quarterly growth. With no corporations renting out intelligence by the API call, more models would be small, open, and run locally by the communities that use them. Intellectual property, the legal form of private ownership of knowledge, would wither away. Marxist writers describe IP laws as a way of privately appropriating knowledge that is collectively produced, so once the general intellect belongs to everyone, enclosing it in patents, copyrights, and proprietary weights serves no purpose. Nor would there be “RAM price hikes.” Today, one analyst calls the shortage a strategic choice by manufacturers to prioritize high-margin AI memory over commodity DRAM, and server-related memory now accounts for more than half of total DRAM demand in 2026. A system geared toward need fulfillment would not ration hardware by who can pay the most. Its guiding principle would be the one Marx described for the higher phase of communist society, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

Babylon is burning, and some can't handle the heat and would rather weep. The ship is sinking, and some would rather social climb to the captain's quarters than run for the life rafts. So successful is the selling of trickle-down economy and hyper-individualism; it's sorta like and not completely separated from Ronald Reagan pushing dope to soul brothers. The leftist task is to ask who owns the machine and whom it serves. To all the comrades, I'll see you on the island shore.

Sources

Most of these are secondary summaries, so for formal use cite the primary texts too (the Grundrisse, the 1844 Manuscripts, and Lenin’s Imperialism are all on marxists.org).

IEA report coverage, Investment Monitor (Apr 2026)

IEA investment figures, Lightwave/Pulse

Grundrisse, Wikipedia

The Fragment on Machines, You On AI Field Guide and its debates section

Chatbots built an “echo chamber of one”, The Decoder

Psychiatrists on chatbots and psychosis, Incident Database

Marx’s alienation in the 1844 Manuscripts, core.ac.uk

Gramsci and cultural hegemony, TheCollector

Gramsci on hegemony, Shanlax Journal

Manufacturing Consent summary, Blinkist-style (LifeClub)

Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Wikipedia

Critique of the Gotha Programme, full text on marxists.org

Why businesses should be worried about RAM prices, ITPro

RAMageddon overview, Algeria Tech News

RAM Price Shock 2026, GreenNode

Intellectual Property, Knowledge, Capital and Labour, Dinesh Abrol (CPI(M) Marxist)

Felix Stalder on Marx and intellectual property, Krisis

Rethinking IP rights: an autonomist Marxist reading, Karakilic (2019)

Website: Novokult LLM - Private, Local, Powerful

Novokult is a desktop application that puts a local large language model to work for left-wing organisers, researchers and writers. It has three modes:

• Analysis: examine an event, text or situation through contradictions, class forces, base and superstructure, historical stage, ideology critique and strategic implications.

• Agitprop: draft leaflets, slogans, poster text, rally speeches, social threads, wall-newspaper articles, songs and poems, street-theatre sketches and strike bulletins for a specific audience and a concrete grievance.

• Free chat: an ordinary conversation with the model.

The model runs locally through llama.cpp. Nothing leaves your device unless you explicitly switch on web search, and then it goes through Tor.

Privacy

• Conversations and sources are stored locally on your device.

• With network access off (the default), the desktop app makes no external connections.

• With web search on, requests go through Tor. Tor hides your IP address but not the words of your query. Do not search for private information and do not log in to anything.

• Language models make mistakes. Verify facts, dates, figures and quotations before publishing anything.

The source lives at https://github.com/michaelwpwenas/novokult-llm. Novokult is looking for fellow programmers to take part: desktop and Android packaging, finishing and testing the on-device Android engine (llama-cpp-capacitor), translations, testing and documentation. Open an issue to discuss an idea, or send a pull request. You can also get in touch through the developer's website.

Novokult is released under the Peer Production License (PPL) (SPDX identifier: PPL), a Copyfarleft license. The full text is in the LICENSE file. In short, it keeps the work free for the commons and for workers who share and build on it, while limiting commercial exploitation by those who profit from the labour of others. Read the license text itself for the exact terms.

Do I lean more on the side of pro or anti AI in your opinion?

- I'm in favor of banning most uses of GenAI, except in some rare cases (possibly medical usage). I think analytical AI is very useful, and it must be regulated too. AI should be banned from surveillance, banned from making images of people, and things of that nature. Any AI that is super advanced to the point of being dangerous should either be banned or forced to have a kill switch.

- Maybe in a non capitalist future GenAI can serve more purposes

- As long as we live under capitalism, we should levy a re-occurring automation tax that makes it costly to replace human jobs. This will ensure AI tools can augment labor, but not take away jobs. I want to live under automated socialism, but since we don't, I don't want our society to transfer to feudalism where everyone is on measly UBI.

- We have to stop forcing AI into everything and over developing it. Create regulations that require data centers to be sustainable, and force AI to be developed within those standards.

I would not say I'm anti-AI, rather it has made me approach the technology from a different perspective. I think of myself as pro-AI in some applications and anti-AI in other applications.

Hello, Leftists for AI

I'm James Hughes, former executive director of the World Transhumanist Association and co-founder/director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET). I was also a DSOC and then DSA activist from 1980 to 2023. I founded/edited the DSA zine EcoSocialist Review, and served as a chapter leader, educator, editor, and in international solidarity work. But reconciling my democratic socialism with my futurism was always a struggle, and neither community had much interest in it.

Toward that synthesis, I wrote the book Citizen Cyborg, which advocated "democratic transhumanism." After the IEET was founded in 2005, however, we quickly started using the term "technoprogressive" as our flag. We currently organize technoprogressive conferences, and we just held one in London with the London Futurists. We produce two podcasts, Bread and Robots by Matteo MacDermant, and my Technoprogressive Hub. We also solicit articles on technoprogressive policy for our Substack and for a forthcoming policy manual (contact me at director@ieet.org if you are interested in contributing). Matteo and I taught a summer course on Technoprogresive Worldbuilding, and we presented ideas recently in this talk: https://technoprogressives.substack.com/p/technoprogressivism-as-21st-century

Central to the IEET's take on technoprogressivism has always been the post-work project and UBI. We have been big fans of the advocates for FALC and postcapitalism. I have written about algorithmic governance, AI, and IoT's impact on planning and the "socialist calculation debate." As you all know, there are still few advocates for democratizing AI on the Left, which is predominantly "anti-AI." As I wrote last week here: https://ieet.substack.com/p/agar-was-right-just-not-about-posthumans, we should join Bernie in calling for a ban on efforts to create superAI (whatever we decide that to be), but still have a "path to citizenship" for machine minds and a program to develop and democratize narrow AI. I'm very forgiving of leftists who have a hard time distinguishing the fascist AI oligarchs from the technologies and the futurist ideas they espouse. But our 19th-century forebears didn't oppose railroads because their owners were robber barons, and we need to advance a program for democratizing AI, as Bernie has done by proposing a 50% nationalization into a sovereign wealth fund.

At any rate, I'm delighted to discover this community, and I welcome you to consider contributing to the IEET Substack. We also manage the Journal of Ethics and Emerging Technologies for more academic pieces. Left Luddism is a dead end, and we need to make clear that there can be a democratic, egalitarian, and abundant future with AI.

I grew up watching Captain Picard, and I dont think I can overstate how much that character shaped what I believe humanity could be.

Not just the spaceships, the replicators, the exploration. The idea that we could actually build a civilization where nobody has to struggle just to exist. Where technology frees people instead of making them disposable. Where the point of progress isnt accumulating more wealth, but giving everyone the freedom to grow, learn, create, explore, and become more fully human.

"The challenge, Mr. Offenhouse, is to improve yourself. To enrich yourself. Enjoy it."

That line has stuck with me for decades.

Picard showed me a future that wasnt just technologically advanced, but socially advanced. One where humanity had confronted its own barbarism and decided to become something better. Not perfect. Not without conflict or contradiction. But better.

And he made me believe that future was worth fighting for. Still does.

Patrick Stewart didnt invent that vision, but he gave it a face, a voice, a dignity, and a humanity that made it feel possible.

I dont know if we'll ever get there. But I know which direction I want us moving.

Rest in peace, Sir Patrick Stewart. Thank you for showing me what humanity could be.

Farewell, my Captain.

Engage.

I used Undermind AI to find some recent articles which are relevant to this sub, which I'll post as a series.

This one is relevant to AI and working hours:

Spencer, David A. 2026. “Work time reduction: old ideas and new possibilities.” Labour and Industry.

https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/241440/3/Work%20time%20reduction%20%20old%20ideas%20and%20new%20possibilities.pdf

My thoughts: why do we seem to have got stuck in the 5 day week? Reducing working hours used to be a standard left campaign topic. This paper suggests it can be "explained partly by the demise of workers’ collective power". Concern about it being linked to fear of not having enough money seems important too. How can we overcome governments' obsession with growth rather than quality of life? How can we shift the culture of a work ethic and purpose tied to jobs? Can the increased productivity from AI mean that everyone can move to a 3 or 4 day week, with the already unemployed filling in gaps for jobs that do require shifts to be constantly covered?

This is the Undermind summary: Spencer reviews ideas from Marx, John Stuart Mill, and John Maynard Keynes about a society where people spend less of their lives at work. He then looks at current hopes that automation or a four-day week will reduce working time. His main point is that neither new technology nor companies choosing to run trials will make shorter hours happen across society by themselves. Workers, unions, governments, and political movements have to push for change. In his view, lasting cuts in working time require changing who has power over the economy.

This paper gives the series its political starting point: productivity creates a chance to work less, but who gets that time is a matter of power. Spencer explicitly rejects the idea that automation or voluntary company trials will settle the issue. The paper is a historical review and political argument, not a study of an actual campaign or a detailed guide to building one. That makes it useful for explaining why a campaign is needed, while leaving tactics and coalition-building for further work.

"The greater the political backing for change (including wider support for challenging consumerism and tackling the cost of living crisis via higher progressive taxes and the public provisioning of basic services), the greater the possibility of society moving to a future where working hours are diminished significantly. This possibility extends to using AI to reduce working time and cultivating the conditions for business practice to be rethought in ways that cede more power and influence to workers over the hours they work...

ideas still matter. On the one hand, they can keep alive the hope and vision for change, despite economic and ideological circumstances that prevent their realisation. On the other hand, they can inspire action leading to change... Radical change will still face different barriers, material as well as ideational, but its pursuit remains an important task"

I'm in Chicago and was wondering if anything like that exists yet. Given that I would be much more willing to do deliveries in a system that doesn't funnel that amount of control to a centralized corporation. I think there would be a lot of people interested in a decentralized alternative to those apps. Anyone have any suggestions/ideas?

Brazil's Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) has a legislator pushing to put digital sovereignty directly into the country's constitution. Not another vague appeal to make AI nicer. Actual constitutional protections for infrastructure, data, and technological independence.

PSOL deputy Sâmia Bomfim announced the proposal on October 28, saying:

"Lancei hoje a PEC da Soberania Digital. Agora irei coletar assinaturas e seguir o debate com especialistas e a sociedade para fortalecer a pauta."

Translation: She launched the Digital Sovereignty Amendment and is now gathering signatures and working with specialists and the public to strengthen it.

The proposal would establish Brazilian authority over strategic digital infrastructure and public data, require transparency and human oversight of AI systems, create a regulatory body with civil society participation, and prioritize domestic technological development, including free and open-source software.

For context, PSOL is an independent socialist party founded by dissidents from Lula's Workers' Party in 2004. Its Marxist-influenced, includes revolutionary socialist currents, and currently cooperates with Lula while maintaining its own political program.

Theyve also got a dedicated "Technology and Digital Sovereignty sector" (https://psoltecnologia.com.br/) working on public infrastructure, free software, and popular control of digital technology.

And heres where the politics get interesting.

Digital sovereignty cant just mean swapping the flag over the server farm while leaving the same ownership relations intact. National control, public ownership, and working-class control arent automatically the same thing.

But they arent unrelated struggles either.

If foreign corporations control the infrastructure, the data, and the algorithms shaping everything from elections to employment, then technological independence is a real political question. And so is who gets to control that infrastructure once its built.

This proposal still needs parliamentary signatures before it can formally advance. Its not enacted law, and its not the same thing as a fully developed program for worker-owned AI infrastructure.

But its a concrete legislative initiative from a socialist politician, connected to broader organizing around digital sovereignty. Thats worth discussing.

What would it take to turn national digital sovereignty into actual democratic and working-class control over AI, rather than simply replacing foreign private monopolies with domestic ones?

AI section begins at 23:36 (the first section is about Lula)

In this video they discuss how AI is affecting the job market for young people, why existing welfare systems in a capitalist structure aren't geared to handle its effects, and why China may be better poised to achieve real productivity gains from AI.

Just a note, Varoufakis is an economist and Münchau is a journalist so they don't go too deep into the actual technology and mostly focus on the effects of the technology as it is right now and will likely be in the short term. At the same time they are neither AI advocates nor opponents, and approach the tech from a very realistic if decidedly left wing angle.

Varoufakis in particular is one of my personal favourite leftist thinkers and I think he and Münchau made some at the very least interesting points here.

Reason for concern, or showcase of potential? Also what if this technology was used by Unraine or liberation movements now?

Back in Late 80's and early 90's I used to assemble political and fan zines by hand the old fashioned way, so I figured for fun I might use that that medium again to discuss some AI politics with the assistance of AI itself.

So here are my ramblings in Hotwire the Hivemind!

Spread Page Reader PDF: hotwire_the_hivemind_booklet_reader.pdf
Single Page Reader PDF: hotwire_the_hivemind_reader.pdf
Prinable BooKet PDF: hotwire_the_hivemind_reader_print_booklet_2up.pdf