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Others writing in the Marxist tradition see autonomism or accelerationism as viable responses to AI-capitalism. Why, in your view, are these insufficient?

Left accelerationism sees in the development of AI a promising tool for socialism, freeing people from wage labor and enhancing possibilities for economic planning. And certain lines of autonomist Marxism manifest a similar enthusiasm, based on the belief that AI development will rest on and empower the distributed techno-scientific knowledge of a still-human — even if cyborg — general intellect. These positions retain the high-modernist confidence in the ultimately progressive direction of capitalist technological development that is part of Marxism. I don’t dismiss the possibility of emancipatory uses of AI. But what is being accelerated right now, in the current trajectory of AI, is capital’s command over, and capacity to dispense with, the worker, and what is expanded is not the autonomy of labor from capital, but capital’s autonomization from the human.

‘Capitalist realism’ is a term popularised by the late political theorist Mark Fisher in a provocative and unsettling book by that name (Fisher, 2009). The term implies that, ever since the fall of Soviet Communism in 1989, capitalism has been the only game in town; the only realistic system of production and distribution to structure globalised human society. Everything else is sheer utopianism in the pejorative sense – naïve dreaming of what can never be.

A phrase that has almost become a cliché, capitalist realism points to a failure of imagination, suggesting that it is now easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. As one looks around the world today, the case for capitalist realism is, admittedly, disturbingly persuasive – as Fisher himself was the first to admit, even as he resisted it. It can tempt one to despair, for it often seems that there is in fact no realistic alternative to what we know today.

In this market socialist society, most shares are pooled into highly regulated mutual funds, which then pursue different investment strategies when trading them on a highly regulated stock exchange. This exchange helps monitor the performance of the firm managers and assess which innovations are performing strongly. To avoid the concentration of market power and capital, the government sets the bar for how much stock any stakeholder can hold in any firm and industry. It also sets the minimum and maximum amount of dividends that each person can receive annually. As the economy grows, dividends can be adjusted to increase by a percentage, or commensurate with inflation. Surplus resulting from distributing only part of the profits allows the more profitable firms to subsidize innovative, but less profitable, activities. In addition, this regime does not tolerate anti-competitive contracts like restrictive employment agreements, strict license agreements, and long patents (although inventions may be attributable to their inventors and may be rewarded through other means like prizes, bonus compensation, or simply very short patents periods).

The model could incorporate elements of democratically-planned, participatory socialism, which emphasizes democracy and individual autonomy in the workplace. Economist David Kotz believes that particular features of this model could foster innovation performance:

The European Union (EU) Commission’s recent proposal for a regulation of artificial intelligence (AI Act) [27] appears to signal a change in approach. Despite worldwide and growing concern for the need to regulate AITs, efforts remain nascent, abstract, and mostly self-regulatory [32], [35]. The EU Commission’s proposal stands out for a different approach: more hierarchical, coercive, and “dissuasive” [27]. It suggests banning some AI uses altogether (e.g., social scoring), certifying and risk-mitigating others (most public uses of AITs), and introducing sanctions1 that are meant to ensure high compliance rates.

The regulation is unlikely to take effect until 2023 and has already been contested by civil society organizations, specialists, and the European Parliament (see [21]). There are likely amendments on the horizon but these tend toward extending (rather than limiting) the proposed protections from some “high-risk” use cases (see [26]).

At an expo dedicated to big data and AI in London, IBM argued that AI ‘takes the machine out of the human’. 25 Rather than fears of replacing humans by machines, tech companies reproduce imaginaries of human creativity and authenticity liberated from machinic-like labour. Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora have argued that these imaginaries of machine labour reproduce AI as a ‘surrogate’ technology, a lesser human. 26 These ‘surrogate’ technologies do not in fact replace the repetitive labour that some humans are called to do, but they are intensifying the repetitive and machine-like labour which has come to be known as ‘microwork’. AI relies on globally dispersed, unpaid or underpaid labour of data cleaning, categorising and featurising. ‘But in reality’, Phil Jones reminds us, ‘the magic of machine learning is the grind of data labelling’. 27 There is no AI without training data, and as training and testing datasets become increasingly massive, they need to be cleaned, curated and improved. This work is done by millions of microworkers, mostly in the Global South. As geographers Mark Graham and Mohamed Amir Anwar have shown, given ‘the geographically untethered nature of digital tasks, workers from different parts of the world can potentially compete, thus creating a planetary market for digital labour’. 28 Rather than seeing AI as a high-tech autonomous weapons system that is a killer robot, or an automated facial recognition system – i.e. as a coherent ‘thing’ Suchman cautioned against – AI is a distributed socio-technical system that is always already produced, circulated, maintained and repaired through dispersed, intensive and underpaid labour.

The AI industrial landscape is dominated by a small number of companies. Table 1 gives an overview of how much the value of each of these giants (GAFAM and BAT) has increased in the last decade. This table illustrates how the commodification of data, in combination with data extraction, made these companies extremely profitable. The top ten of most valuable companies in the world is now dominated by AI companies (Statista 2020). Their drive for expansion resulted in intense concentration, where each one of them has achieved a highly dominant position in the market (Kaplan and Haenlein 2020; Montes and Goertzel 2019). For example, Google obtained an (almost) monopoly over online search, Amazon and Alibaba over e-commerce and Facebook and Tencent over the US and Chinese markets of social networking.

The drive for growth of AI companies demonstrates that the problem of monopolisation is real: it creates a massive power concentration in the hands of a few players. The AI giants dominate the field and aggressively acquire potential competitors. We face a situation, where there are only a few AI behemoths, who own the expensive computational infrastructure, have access to vast amounts of data to train ML and DL models and can attract the highly skilled AI talent to develop new systems and services. The economic power, expressed in their rapidly increasing value, highlights the point of AI as a GPT creating winners and losers (Trajtenberg 2018). The AI giants are definitely the winners in this context.

Economic Hegemony and Fraud Imperialism as represented by the United States employs hegemony, bullying, and unilateralism, and adheres to double standards in diplomatic policy. At one point, Pompeo publicly admitted and expressed pride in his country’s fraudulent actions. “I was the CIA director,” he said. “We lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses…it reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”62 In the post-Cold War era, the United States dominates the world, free from any powerful checks and balances. It relies on its major advantages of military force, U.S. dollar hegemony, external propaganda, and science and technology to carry out bullying all over the world and to commit fraud both at home and abroad.63 In March 2018, the United States issued a document entitled Findings of the Investigation into China’s Acts, Policies, and Practices Related to Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property, and Innovation Under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which accuses China of “enforcing or compelling US enterprises to transfer technology” and “illegally invading US commercial computer networks to steal intellectual property rights and sensitive business information.” The purpose of this document was to create a pretext for launching a trade war; its accusations are nothing but rumors and do not correspond to the facts. What is the source of China’s technological progress? It flows from the efforts of gifted entrepreneurs who benefit from huge government investments in basic science. As former U.S. secretary of the treasury Lawrence Summers said, “it’s coming from an educational system that’s privileging excellence, concentrating on science and technology. That’s where their leadership is coming from, not from taking a stake in some U.S. company.”64 In provoking its economic and trade conflict with China, the United States has had an obvious intention: to blackmail [whitemail] and suppress China on an overall basis, starting with the trade war and gradually expanding into the areas of science and technology, finance, food, resources, and so on. U.S. authorities seek to weaken China’s strengths in trade, finance, industry, and technology, trying to ensure that China will not pose a challenge to the global hegemonic position of the United States. With its slogan of “America First,” the Trump administration promoted U.S. hegemony and imposed economic sanctions on other economies. Its economic and trade policies were aimed principally at China, but were also directed at traditional allies such as the European Union, Japan, India, and South Korea. Time after time, Washington has practiced economic extortion and containment. It will never be forgotten that as early as the mid–1980s the United States forced Japan to sign the Plaza Accord and induced it to implement a low-interest monetary policy that brought large quantities of foreign capital into Japan. The result was that a surge of short-term demand for Japanese yen caused the country’s currency to appreciate sharply against the U.S. dollar. The influx of foreign capital and the monetary policy of low interest rates brought a soaring increase in Japanese asset prices. Despite the short-term prosperity, the eventual result involved big losses for Japan. The high asset prices meant that the foreign capital was soon cashed out and withdrawn, while the Japanese economy suffered huge setbacks and endured a “lost twenty years.” Political Hegemony and Fraud The United States has always labeled itself a representative of countries advocating democracy, freedom, and equality. Using political and diplomatic means, it spares no effort to impose its political system on other countries, especially the developing states it identifies as “dictatorships.” Former U.S. president George W. Bush identified Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil.” The United States exerts pressure on the rulers of such countries, applying double standards on questions of human rights. Using its propaganda, it demonizes these states as “undemocratic” and “autocratic,” while subsidizing nongovernmental organizations and media, as well as inciting dissidents and the opposition to mount “color revolutions” aimed at overthrowing the legitimate governments. Acting at the behest of its military circles and monopoly energy groups, the United States has been a consistently destructive force in the Middle East and Latin America. Syria was listed by Washington among six “evil” countries, and the United States branded the Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad as illegal. U.S. senator John McCain, however, revealed the real purpose behind these moves. “The end of the Assad regime,” McCain stated, “would sever Hezbollah’s lifeline to Iran, eliminate a long-standing threat to Israel, bolster Lebanon’s sovereignty and independence, and inflict a strategic defeat on the Iranian regime. It would be a geopolitical success of the first order.”65 In Latin America, the United States has continued its blockade against Cuba despite twenty resolutions carried overwhelmingly in the UN General Assembly. Meanwhile, the United States is conducting an economic blockade against Venezuela, resulting in the country’s economic deterioration in recent years. Former U.S. vice president Mike Pence, setting aside Venezuela’s elections and popular support for the government, with no consideration of truth—even leaving out the U.S. economic siege war on Venezuela in violation of international law—pronounced: “The Maduro government’s vicious gangs have crippled the economy.… The true cost of the crimes of the Maduro regime cannot be assessed in numbers.… Two million people have fled the result of dictatorship and political repression that’s resulted in deprivation and created conditions near starvation. The United States will continue to help the Venezuelan people restore their freedom. The people will be free.”66 The United States is now applying to China the kind of Cold War policies that used to be employed against the Soviet Union. State department director of policy planning Kiron Skinner describes the fractious relations of the United States with China as “a fight with a really different civilization and a different ideology.”67 The U.S. ruling class knows very well that the socialist system is superior to the capitalist system. Once large socialist countries such as the former Soviet Union and China become rich and strong through peaceful competition, it is inevitable that they are faced with confronting the hegemonic aims of the United States, which seeks nothing less than a unipolar world. Any attempts to promote broad reforms in the outdated imperial economic and political order are seen as a threat to U.S. hegemony. Consequently, the United States has adopted the dual strategy of “contact and containment,” engagement and aggression, which it seeks to pass off as “peaceful evolution.” In reality, the so-called democratic politics in the United States are nothing but an illusion. First, the electoral process in the United States has increasingly amounted to a political fight between the two parties of the monopoly bourgeoisie. As the candidates of different factions of the monopoly bourgeoisie have campaigned for election, they have resorted to rumors, personal attacks, and slanders against their opponents, sidelining the real issue. Second, so-called democratic politics in the United States involve no more than a pro forma and procedural democracy. The pro forma voting system has been reduced to monetary politics, family politics, and oligarchic politics—that is, to an essentially undemocratic “despotism of monopoly capital,” or democracy for the few. Cultural Hegemony and Fraud Former U.S. National Security Advisor Brzezinski believes that “strengthening American culture as the ‘model’ of the world’s cultures is a strategy that must be implemented by the United States to maintain hegemony.”68 U.S. cultural hegemony is manifested principally through its control of media outlets and education, and through the propaganda function, both at home and abroad, of its literature and art, its liberal arts academia, and its values. The United States exports films, music, and literature all over the world. It controls almost 75 percent of the world’s television programs, and owns powerful film and television companies such as WarnerMedia, Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures, and Columbia Pictures, which every year produce dozens of high-budget films involving investments of hundreds of millions of dollars. Research and reporting carried out by the U.S. mainstream media effectively dominate the shaping of world public opinion. The United States also controls the authoritative journals that mold discourse in the area of liberal arts academia, and it is the United States that determines the standards of elite education. The 2020 QS World University Rankings provide an example. The top places in these rankings are all taken by U.S. universities, and this situation provides a powerful tool for spreading deceptive Western “universal values,” Western constitutional views, and neoliberal economic concepts throughout the world. The basic views of the U.S. liberal arts establishment have taken a firm hold on the elites and masses at home and abroad.69 For example, the United States extols vulgar examples of literary and artistic kitsch as distinguished works of culture, deserving of Oscars or Nobel Prizes. Neoclassical economics (and its counterpart in the form of neoliberalism) is responsible for a string of economic crises and for increased polarization between rich and poor. Nevertheless, it is depicted as a scientific theory that promotes development, increases popular welfare, and is worthy of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. In the United States, works that do not conform to the literary, artistic, and liberal arts canons of monopoly capital are difficult to disseminate via authoritative media, while writers and artists of real distinction are excluded, suppressed, or defrauded. The United States also holds an absolutely dominant position in the global field of cyberspace. Of the thirteen root Domain Name System servers, nine are under the direct control of U.S. corporations, universities, or government departments, while another is directly controlled by a U.S. nonprofit organization.70 Using these root Domain Name System servers, the United States can easily steal global intelligence, carry out network monitoring, and launch cyberattacks. The surveillance program PRISM, revealed by Edward Snowden, shows that the United States has complete control over the hardware and software of networks globally, and is well able to monitor the entire world and strike any other country. Lastly, the United States controls the intelligence alliance known as the Five Eyes (the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), through which it conducts large-scale monitoring activities and exercises cyber hegemony domestically and internationally.71 The cultural hegemony of the United States, its control over liberal arts academia, and the fraudulent use to which these advantages are put also appear in the stances taken by the United States on questions of ideology and values. These stances are always hostile to socialism and communism, and restrict the development of socialist countries. Previously, the United States devoted most of its efforts to smearing the Soviet Union, but the main target is now China. Early in May 1990, Nixon stated frankly: “While rebuilding the relationship with China, it is very important that we continue to pressure them to abandon socialism. Because we will use this relationship to make China’s policies milder. We must stick to this key point.”72 According to survey data from the U.S. Pew Research Center—an organization surely influenced by U.S. cultural hegemony and fraud—74 percent of Chinese college or university graduates love U.S. culture.73 It is a fact that most Chinese liberal arts scholars who have studied in the United States favor its basic institutional academic theories. To varying extents, they worship, flatter, and fear the United States. This seriously affects the confidence of Chinese citizens in Marxist culture, in socialist culture, and in China’s own rich traditional culture, and needs to be eliminated as soon as possible. Military Hegemony and Fraud Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the United States has become increasingly presumptuous and has tended to resort to military force or threats in dealing with questions of international relations. In 1999, U.S.-led NATO forces bombed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, invoking the formula of “human rights above sovereignty.” In 2003, despite strong opposition from other countries, the United States invaded the sovereign state of Iraq. The Iraq War was not authorized by the UN Security Council, and Washington did not have any legal basis for its military intervention. The United States falsely claimed that Iraq possessed chemical weapons of mass destruction. After occupying Iraq, however, the United States found no evidence to prove that Iraq could produce chemical weapons of mass destruction. The real purpose of the United States in fabricating this lie was to control Iraq’s oil resources by military means. The United States has consistently emphasized that its own interests should take first place and that its military advantages are not to be challenged. Although its economic strength has declined in relative terms, the United States is still expanding its arsenal and substantially increasing its defense spending. Since the Cold War, the United States has continued to create various military threats and pressures in Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific region. To consolidate its hegemonic status, the United States has advocated and promoted NATO’s eastward expansion, with the goal of including all the Central and Eastern European countries in NATO’s sphere of influence and thus constricting Russia’s strategic space. In the Middle East, the United States aims to subvert the legitimate regimes of countries such as Syria and Iran by military means, and to support “color revolutions” in the region. In Asia in recent times, Washington has heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula and has also implemented its “Indo-Pacific strategy” aimed at containing China. The U.S. “Indian strategy” is serving to reveal the identity of its military allies and partners. Allies of the United States include Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and Thailand, and its claimed “partners” include Singapore, Taiwan (China), New Zealand, Mongolia; a number of South Asian countries such as India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and Nepal; and various Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia. The United States further proposes to strengthen its cooperation with Brunei, Laos, and Cambodia. In addition, it will work together with traditional allies such as Britain, France, and Canada to protect so-called Indo-Pacific freedom and openness.74 With the increase in China’s national strength, various U.S. scholars have been eager to invoke the Thucydides trap, claiming that it is difficult for Sino-U.S. relations to escape from this logic. But the truth, as China’s president Xi Jinping has pointed out, is that there is currently no Thucydides trap. Such a trap might, however, be created if the United States and its allies repeatedly make strategic miscalculations involving great powers.75 It may be asserted that it is the military hegemony and fraud of the United States that provides the root cause of the widespread instability, constant local wars, rise of war threats, and refugee crises around the world. Neoimperialism Is a Parasitic and Decaying Late Imperialism As Lenin stated, Imperialism is an immense accumulation of money capital in a few countries.… Hence the extraordinary growth of a class, or rather, of a stratum of rentiers, i.e., people who live by “clipping coupons,” who take no part in any enterprise whatever, whose profession is idleness. The export of capital, one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism, still more completely isolates the rentiers from production and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country that lives by exploiting the labour of several overseas countries and colonies.76 In the era of neoimperialism, the number of rentiers is increasing sharply, and the nature of the rentier countries is becoming more pronounced. The parasitism and decay of a small number of capitalist countries is further worsened, as can be seen specifically in the following aspects. First, the United States employs its military, intellectual property, political, and cultural hegemony, as well as the U.S. dollar, to plunder the wealth of the world, especially that of developing countries. The United States is the world’s largest parasitic and decaying country. As evidence of this, we may take the trade between China and the United States. China sells to the United States goods produced by cheap labor, land, and environmental resources. The United States does not need to produce anything in order to buy these goods; it can simply print banknotes. With the money earned, China can then buy only virtual assets such as U.S. treasury bonds, and provide finance for U.S. consumer lending and outward expansion. The United States exports to China securities to which value cannot be added, while China exports to the United States mainly physical goods and labor services. The National Health Report released by the National Health Research Group of the Chinese Academy of Sciences shows that the United States is the country with the most hegemonic dividends in the world, due to the position of its currency, while China is the country with the largest loss of hegemonic dividends. For the year 2011, U.S. hegemonic dividends totaled $7396.09 billion, corresponding to 52.38 percent of the country’s GDP, and the average hegemonic dividends obtained per day came to $20.263 billion. Meanwhile, the sum lost by China totaled $3663.4 billion. In terms of labor time, about 60 percent of the working hours of the Chinese workforce were effectively given without recompense to serve international monopoly capital.77 Second, military spending has increased, which in turn increases the burden on working-class people. Neoimperialism leads and promotes military-related scientific and technological research, the development of advanced weapons, and the expansion of military production. As the People’s Daily observed in 2016, “the military-industrial complex supported by monopoly capital and the cultural hegemony formed on the basis of colonialism have prompted the western countries to intervene in other countries’ affairs at their will.”78 Neoimperialism has thus become the initiator of regional turmoil and instability, and the engine of war. Over the past thirty years, the United States has spent $14.2 trillion on waging thirteen wars.79 Meanwhile, lack of money hinders improvements to the living conditions of the U.S. people in areas such as medical insurance. Exorbitant military spending has become a heavy burden on the country and its people, while the parasitic monopolies in the arms industry have reaped immense profits. According to statistics of the British Institute for International Strategic Studies, official U.S. military expenditures in 2018 came to $643 billion, and in 2019 will reach $750 billion, more than the sum of the military spending of the world’s eight next largest military powers. Since the end of the first Cold War, the United States has launched or participated in six major conflicts: The Gulf War (1991), Kosovo War (1999), Afghanistan War (2001), Iraq War (2003), Libya War (2011), and Syria War (2011).80 The addiction of monopoly capitalism to war is a manifestation of its parasitic and decaying nature. This barbaric characteristic of the system runs counter to civilization and threatens the shared future of the human community. It proves that neoimperialism is the primary root of war.

Patents are not merely a license bestowing a right for a limited period. Patents also exist as financial instruments136 used to increase shareholder value 137 and accumulate capital. As such, intellectual property can be a very devious instrument brandished by the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. As instruments of corporate (and class) power and ownership over the productive assets of society, patents and intellectual property can be decisive existential weapons used to create and broaden inequality and destabilise the democracy of the modern state. In a more innocent time, Mr. Justice Brandeis claimed that we had to make an existential choice. Our choice comes down to the fact that “[w]e may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both. 138 Or, more recently, as David Cay Johnston puts it, in terms of funding democratic institutions and in accordance to the logic and process of globalisation: Corporations are busy moving intellectual property such as patents, trademarks and the title to the company logo to entities organized in tax havens like Bermuda. These corporations then pay royalties to use their own intellectual property, allowing them to convert taxable profits in the United States [and Canada] into tax-deductible payments sent to Bermuda and other havens that impose little or no tax. You pay for this through higher taxes, reduced services or your rising share of our growing national debt. You also pay for it through incentives in the tax system for companies to build new factories overseas and to reduce employment in America, [Canada and Britain]. 139

Whereas the slave relationship is ‘posited directly by force’ the worker’s relationship to capital is mediated by exchange (Marx 1993: 769). As Marx argues, it is a law of capital to create surplus-value, but ‘it can do this only by setting necessary labour in motion – i.e. entering into exchange with the worker’ (1993: 769, 399). Thus while the capacity to labour is a necessary condition for producing value, the sufficient condition is social and specifically concerns how ‘the silent compulsion of economic relations’ (Marx 1990: 899) force one class of people to sell their labourpower to a class of capitalists in exchange for a wage so that they can buy the commodities they need to survive. After this exchange, the capitalist is in possession of variable capital because the use-value of this unique commodity, i.e. labour, makes it ‘a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself ’, i.e. greater than what the capitalist paid as a wage (Marx 1990: 301). The capitalist is thus not interested in labour as the concrete activities that yield use-values, but only as an abstract activity that lasts for a definite length of time, because only abstract labour posits value. The existence of labour as an abstraction in terms of time is the condition of possibility for the valorization of value because only then is it possible to distinguish between necessary labour-time and surplus labour-time. For Marx, the technical term exploitation refers to the difference between the value of labour-power, as reflected in the wage, and the necessary part of labour-time, and the value living labour valorizes as reflected in surplus labour-time. Against the resistance and struggle of workers, capital always strives to increase the time in which the worker works beyond necessary labour-time. Surplus-value thus arises from the fundamentally antagonistic relationship between capital and labour, i.e. capitalists and workers.

Thus, for AGIs to produce surplus-value they would have to enter into this same antagonistic relationship, meaning they would have to be proletarianized and turned into wage-labourers (Kjøsen 2013a; 2018). But to do that the AGIs would have to be able to sell their labour-power, and if they are the private property of others this would be impossible. When discussing how the capitalist can find labour-power at the market, Marx explains that a precondition is that individual members of society must be ‘free in the double sense’ (1990: 272). First, they must be free subjects in a legal sense so that they can become the free proprietors of their labour-power. In other words, they cannot be slaves or serfs. Second, they must be free from owning any means of production required for realizing their own labour-power. Thus true to the form of bourgeois freedom, the doubly-free worker is still dominated; having no property with which to produce their means of subsistence forces doubly-free workers, on the threat of survival, to sell the only property they own, labour-power, to someone else (Marx 1990: 271–3). Thus the proletarianization of AGI would be dependent on its legal status: either as property or as a property-owning legal person. If AGIs do not become doubly-free workers, their introduction as replicants of human labour would, by slowly or quickly pushing human labourers completely to the side of production, lead to fulfilling the prophecy of capital’s autonegation in the ‘Fragment on Machines’.

The unreality of postulating the sustainable solution of the grave problems of our social order within the formal and legal framework and corresponding constraints of parliamentary politics arises from the fundamental misconception of the structural determinations of capital’s rule, as represented in all varieties that assert the dualism of civil society and the political state. The difficulty, insurmountable within the parliamentary framework, is this that since capital is actually in control of all vital aspects of the social metabolism, it can afford to define the separately constituted sphere of political legitimation as a strictly formal and legal matter, thereby necessarily excluding the possibility of being legitimately challenged in its substantive sphere of socioeconomic reproductive operation. Directly or indirectly, capital controls everything, including the parliamentary legislative process, even if the latter is supposed to be fully independent from capital in many theories that fictitiously hypostatize the “democratic equality” of all political forces participating in the legislative process. To envisage a very different relationship to the powers of decision making in our societies, now completely dominated by the forces of capital in every domain, it is necessary to radically challenge capital itself as the overall controller of social metabolic reproduction.

What makes this problem worse for all those who are looking for significant change on the margins of the established political system is that the latter can claim for itself genuine constitutional legitimacy in its present mode of functioning, based on the historically constituted inversion of the actual state of the material reproductive affairs. For inasmuch as the capitalist is not only the “personification of capital” but simultaneously functions also “as the personification of the social character of labor, of the total workshop as such,”53 the system can claim to represent the vitally necessary productive power of society vis-à-vis the individuals as the basis of their continued existence, incorporating the interest of all. In this way capital asserts itself not only as the defacto but also as the dejure power of society, in its capacity as the objectively given necessary condition of societal reproduction, and thereby as the constitutional foundation to its own political order. The fact that the constitutional legitimacy of capital is historically founded on the ruthless expropriation of the conditions of social metabolic reproduction—the means and material of labor—from the producers, and therefore capital’s claimed “constitutionality” (like the origin of all constitutions) is unconstitutional, is an unpalatable truth which fades away in the mist of a remote past. The “social productive powers of labor, or productive powers of social labor, first develop historically with the specifically capitalist mode of production, hence appear as something immanent in the capital-relation and inseparable from it.”54

This is the question that vexed us as we set out to write The Tragedy of the Worker. From the vantage point of the present, the history of capitalist development is, as Marx expected, the history of the development of a global working class, the proletarianisation of the majority of the world’s population. But the very same process of that development has brought us to the precipice of climate disaster. Our position, to recall Trotsky’s rationalisation of War Communism in 1920, is in the highest degree tragic.

It is now clear that we will pass what scientists have long warned will be a tipping point of global warming, accelerating the already catastrophic consequences of capitalist emissions. How do we imagine emancipation on an at best partially habitable planet? Where once communists imagined seizing the means of production, taking the unprecedented capacities of capitalist infrastructures and using them to build a world of plenty, what must we imagine after the apocalypse has befallen us? What does it mean that as capitalism has become truly global, the gravediggers it has created dig not only capitalism’s grave, but also that of much organic life on earth?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the holy grail of capital accumulation and socio-political control in contemporary societies. Consequently, companies and governments are rapidly adopting AI as a fundamental tool to increase productivity and efficiency. However, the deployment of AI has also shown great potential for harm, especially for racialized women, non-binary people, and groups in other vulnerable situations like platform workers, immigrants, and refugees. The AI industry is predominantly located in a few countries, which increases the wealth gap between high-income economies in the Global North that produce these technologies, and low-income countries in the Global South that consume these technologies and provide the data for the AI industry to grow. Therefore, this hegemonic industry is contributing to the deepening of systemic inequalities globally.

To respond to the growing concerns of civil society about the negative impacts of AI, large tech corporations have developed ethical frameworks to reduce the potential harm associated with the deployment of AI technologies. In general, these frameworks provide narrow technical fixes to socio-technical problems, and in many cases, are just part of a broader strategy for ethics washing. However, UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, signed by 193 states in November 2021, provides a more comprehensive approach to AI risks. The framework considers the complete AI lifecycle (design, development, deployment, use, and disposal) and pays special attention to gender equality, cultural diversity, and the environment. However, to see this or any other ethical framework materialize, we need to remember that AI is a matter of power. It is used as a geopolitical tool that allows the concentration of wealth, knowledge, and control. This power concentration generates global asymmetries that contribute to the reproduction of oppressive systems such as capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy.

Moreover, the United States has invested at very high levels for more than 70 years. The United States substantially ramped up its defense R&D investment in the 1950s to levels comparable to today’s spending. While it is true that in inflation-adjusted terms, defense R&D totals in the 1950s were lower than today’s, that is mainly because of the lower complexity of that era’s technological frontier, not because of some subsequent policy shift to greater emphasis on defense R&D investment.Footnote11 The continuing drive to push the military-technological frontier has kept R&D spending high all along, and the overall spending trend has increased in parallel with the increasing complexity rather than lagging behind. While R&D budget increases have not been constant, their cycle (including as shown in Figure 1) has Footnote12crested and troughed at very high levels. Annual spending has not dropped below 55 billion USD (in 2018 dollars) since 1983, and in several years, it has been very close to 100 billion USD. That high level of spending, year-in and year-out, has a cumulative effect, because it builds a foundation of tacit knowledge, experience in integrating complex systems, and human capital that understands the specialized parameters of military systems, which often differ from those of even high-end civilian systems. For comparison, the much-hyped Chinese defense budget (not the Chinese defense R&D budget) did not exceed the level of U.S. defense R&D spending until the late-2000s. Cumulative Chinese defense R&D investment is surely quite modest in comparison to cumulative U.S. defense R&D investment.Footnote12Footnote13

The intensity of U.S. interest in defense research began at the start of the Second World War, with scientists rather than the military. American scientists had been frustrated by the failure of the military to use them effectively in the First World War, when they were confined to military laboratories and subject to military discipline. Led by Vannevar Bush of MIT, they approached President Roosevelt and gained their own organization to manage wartime research, what was eventually called the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). That organization, not the military, directed the effort to develop the atomic bomb, radar, and many of the other significant technical advances of the war.Footnote14

Innovation is the lifeblood of progress, and in the context of the military, it is a crucial component of keeping pace with today’s rapid technological evolution. The multifaceted challenge of innovation—which requires understanding emerging threats, leveraging cutting-edge technology, and overturning established paradigms within tactical doctrine—is not merely pivotal; it is a strategic imperative. Tactical innovation, a subset of the broader military innovation ecosystem, must be driven by the on-the-ground practitioner and is based on four key pillars: ground-up ideation, rapid prototyping, deliberate fusion of technology and tactics, and the emergence of novel concepts.

Ground-up ideation, the first pillar, is problematic for most militaries—including the US joint force. Typically, military tactical organizations spend most of their training on doctrinal approaches, proficiency on mission essential task lists, and preparation for future deployments. This schedule is not necessarily conducive to an innovative mindset. Rather, it often hinders junior military members by limiting their ability to institute any meaningful change. While the need for the training and task proficiency is categorically correct, a parallel, integrated effort must be encouraged. Ground-level soldiers have the knowledge and intimate details of tactical applications that many at higher echelons no longer possess. Their understanding of the equipment, the application of its use in tactics, and the doctrinal templates used during training form the bedrock of tactical innovation. Upon this bedrock, creativity can solve contemporary challenges facing the tactical practitioner, igniting novel solutions that are impossible in an innovation pipeline driven from the top down.

For others, technical change plays a central role in the innovation process, usually in conjunction with organizational change. McIntyre notes that innovation requires a synthesis between novel technology and the doctrinal and organizational changes required to “create a revolutionary effect” on the battlefield.33 In other words, technological innovation alone does not have the “self-sustaining momentum” to produce an effective military innovation.34 Goldman and Eliason argue that there is a relationship between hardware and software. Hardware refers to the technology used to fight, such as artillery and bombers, and software refers to “the organizational or human application component of an innovation or technology,” such as doctrine, tactics, recruitment, and training.35

However, while technological change often accompanies innovation, alone it is rarely enough.36 As the distinction between the invention of the tank and the adoption of combined arms warfare illustrates, often it is the non-technical components of change that are especially salient in military innovation.37 For Adamsky, technology, or “hardware,” often serves as an important initial condition, but innovation depends on the “confluence of weaponry, concept of operations, organization, and the vision of future war.”38 This relationship is one between the object (the technology) and its context (the broader military organization).

For those concerned with the future character of war, the findings suggest that innovation does not necessarily improve combat performance. A bias in favor of military innovation may be helpful because of countervailing bureaucratic and cultural pressures against disruptive changes, but professional instincts to preserve existing ways of war can also be prudent, especially if warfare evolves toward essential continuity rather than discontinuous revolutions.164 Making big bets on technologies such as unmanned systems comes with significant risks because the novel capabilities are unfamiliar and what is lost in an innovation process can be as important as what is created—capital substitution involves tradeoffs.165

Fervor for military innovation is especially high in the United States because there is a particularly foreboding sense that the U.S. military is overstretched, and that its resources and commitments are misaligned. Ever since World War II, the United States has accumulated expansive interests abroad, but it has been reluctant to invest the necessary resources to sustain these commitments.166 Today, while the United States remains concerned about Russia in Europe and Iran in the Middle East, Chinese military modernization and foreign policy has eroded confidence in the U.S. military's ability to operate effectively in the western Pacific and credibly deter Chinese aggression. Meanwhile, resources are relatively stagnant as the rising cost of military equipment exceeds inflation and growth in the defense budget.167

Wishful thinking can overemphasize the promises of innovation. For example, in the late 1940s, the U.S. Air Force innovated an air-atomic blitz capability in which an unescorted fleet of intercontinental bombers could rapidly drop most of if not the entire U.S. nuclear stockpile and destroy the Soviets' capacity and will to fight. But the air force dismissed several plausible criticisms of the new capability. First, it assumed that political and moral constraints would not preclude nuclear use in the next war. Second, it overlooked shortcomings in several key elements needed to ensure the success of the new capability: the intelligence to identify, the bombing accuracy to destroy, and the fighter escorts to reach critical targets deep within the Soviet Union. Consequently, the air force disproportionately invested in Strategic Air Command and cannibalized important capabilities in air superiority and close air support.40

Equating peacetime innovation with greater military effectiveness is puzzling, however, because scholars recognize that the two are not synonyms. Barry Posen categorizes military doctrine as either innovative or stagnant, but he recognizes that “neither … should be valued a priori.” He suggests that instead of stagnation, “stability might be a better choice of terms, as it is less loaded [italics in the original].”7 Historians Allan Millett and Williamson Murray caution that during peacetime innovation “wrong choices and irrelevant investments will occur and will be hard to correct.”8 Others warn that “it is entirely possible that a military innovation may make a military less effective,” and that “not all innovations should be welcomed.”9

Nonetheless, virtually all theories of military innovation are built and tested on cases of performance-enhancing innovations. Posen's influential study of the Battle of France and the Battle of Britain finds that it was the military services that innovated before the war that achieved political-military integration.10 In Winning the Next War, another agenda-setting work, Stephen Rosen ignores “innovations that were put into practice but were clearly mistaken” because “despite an extensive and intensive search,” he finds that mistakes made by the U.S. military “all appear to have been the result of failures to innovate, rather than inappropriate innovations.”11

I expect that harmful innovation is more likely in a wicked mismatch, when a service's commitments are increasing and its resources are decreasing. In a wicked mismatch, a service's traditional capabilities not only are threatened by severe resource scarcity for the foreseeable future but also are rendered ineffective by the ambition of future missions. Expectations about the future are bleak. The service is therefore, I argue, in a professional and bureaucratic crisis. Officers doubt the service can perform assigned missions successfully, fear that the security of the state is at risk, and worry about the service's status and continuing relevance to national security. The service also wants to rectify this situation because it is overstretching its operational capacity by offering a semblance of meeting commitments, and business as usual offers little prospect of enhancing its political standing, contribution to national defense, and associated budget justifications.

Military innovation becomes a desperate, high-payoff, low-probability gamble to resolve the wicked mismatch by placing large bets on a new capability and cannibalizing traditional ones to do so. This strategy expands the range of possible outcomes: the new capability may significantly increase mission effectiveness and resource efficiency, but the service could perform even worse by neglecting traditional capabilities.32 Such innovative gambles are surprising because the standard intuition in military innovation studies is that bureaucratic organizations in general, and military hierarchies in particular, are prone to stasis and resist dramatic changes that disrupt their standard operating procedures.33 But a wicked mismatch generates pressures to adopt risk-seeking preferences.34

Prevailing wisdom suggests that innovation dramatically enhances the effectiveness of a state's armed forces. But self-defeating innovation is more likely to occur when a military service's growing security commitments outstrip shrinking resources. This wide commitment-resource gap pressures the service to make desperate gambles on new capabilities to meet overly ambitious goals while cannibalizing traditional capabilities before beliefs about the effectiveness of new ones are justified. Doing so increases the chances that when wartime comes, the service will discover that the new capability cannot alone accomplish assigned missions, and that neglecting traditional capabilities produces vulnerabilities that the enemy can exploit. To probe this argument's causal logic, a case study examines British armor innovation in the interwar period and its impact on the British Army's poor performance in the North African campaign during World War II. The findings suggest that placing big bets on new capabilities comes with significant risks because what is lost in an innovation process may be as important as what is created. The perils of innovation deserve attention, not just its promises.

Conventional wisdom suggests that innovation consistently improves military power. Militaries that oppose it invite defeat, but those that innovate secure victory. Innovation is considered a sign of organizational health because the ever-changing character of war constantly threatens to render existing capabilities obsolete. Conversely, misfortune comes to those who allow the march of historical change to overtake them. The notion that innovation and better military performance go hand in hand is thus intuitive. It is also wrong.