A Machine That Makes Socialists

The Argument for AI Populism

“106251“ by Biblioteca Rector Machado y Nuñez is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

The bulk of the Western left, including myself, believed in the proposition that climate change could operate as a populist instrument, welding disparate struggles together in a structuring emergency necessitating the transformation of social life.

While rapid decarbonization is an absolute ecological necessity, the political strategy implied here has unfortunately proven incorrect. Despite protestations that a small group of firms are responsible for emissions, the short-term benefits of the fossil fuel economy are felt by a vast majority of the population, and thus the costs of transition are widely distributed, falling most heavily on the working classes. Across the world, there have been revolts against the imposition of carbon taxes, and across the world parties of the left have been electorally punished for their ecological orientation.

Tying a wide set of issues to climate change proved to be a strategic failure. In the past decade, struggles as diverse as employment guarantees and demilitarization, have been drawn into the logic of climate politics. This green frame, anathema to the working poor, was still able to mobilize millions of people into the streets for demonstrations and mandate that the Biden administration focus on decarbonization even at significant political cost.

But what if there was an issue that could actually mobilize a supermajority behind the socialist programme? A frame under which disparate struggles could be oriented together in a chain of equivalence with the masses on our side?

Much opposition to AI currently manifests in localist fights against data centers, over concerns with water use and utility rate hikes. However, people do tend to care about what’s inside. Polling suggests that Americans are fine with data centers utilized for other purposes, and are specifically concerned with those being used to train and deploy AI.

Americans are concerned that this technology will replace their jobs, propagate falsehoods, and potentially, should a sufficiently advanced system escape human control, in the manner that OpenAI’s internal models did when they hacked Huggingface, cause catastrophic harm.

It helps that all of the CEOs of the leading artificial intelligence companies have said that this is exactly what may happen. A common canard amongst the AI-denialists is that Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are presenting risks from their technology as a kind of marketing ploy, pointing at a burning building to sell you petrol. This is an absurdity. Surely, the AI companies would be other ways of hawking their book than committing felonies and presenting an existential risk to human life or democracy.

Let us return to the analogy with climate change. Do the CEOs of Exxon and BP express that their product is so systemic to the world economy that it may cause extinction? We may also recall that these CEOs have long publicly expressed their concern about AI, before the technologies became publicly salient. As Sam Altman said in 2015, before OpenAI was officially even launched, “AI will probably lead to the end of the world… but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.”

The obvious threat that undemocratic AI poses to the working class is why it has steadily increased in salience, now surpassing reproductive freedom, and why appending the clause “because of AI,” before elements of the socialist minimum program increases the popularity of those policies. This crisis generates the permission structure for a transformation of our political economy, but only if mobilized to do so. While only 40% agreed with banning AI in the workforce entirely, 49% said a 4-day workweek would be a proper response to AI-driven automation, with 84% of Harris voters agreeing with granting Americans equal shares in the AI companies. Astoundingly, that polling is from 2025. More recent surveys have found 69% support for expropriating 50% of ownership of the AI companies.

Social control of Artificial Intelligence has several useful features as the locus of a populist strategy.

All populist articulation requires an identified enemy capable of minimizing conflicts within the popular coalition. The AI CEOs, the right-wing technologists, and their political enablers are a quite useful enemy to polarize around. Unlike the barons of most other sectors, they are public figures, who constantly go out in public and pontificate about how they are planning to displace human labor with their technology. This rather small group of individuals is working every day to undemocratically transform life and advance a technology in their hands deprives us of autonomy and dignity.

The capitalists of this sector are uniquely risible, with personality types alien to persuading the working class to trust them with unbound authorities. Rewarded by their social circles for signaling reactionary elitism, they are prone to making public statements that trigger populist backlash, such as Elon Musk saying that the poor ought to be barred from voting, or Marc Andreesen’s mocking of the Pope for suggesting that new technologies be deployed ethically.

Data for Progress’s polling concludes that a Democrat who received donations from the Oil & Gas Industry incurred a -3.1pp penalty in a head-to-head matchup against the GOP. For the Artificial Intelligence Industry, the penalty is -5.3pp, second only to AIPAC in how much voters are willing to punish politicians supported by the lobby (-6.3pp).

Note, this doesn’t imply a generalized opposition to technology, or to the tech sector, or to technologists - but specifically to the undemocratic capitalist project of deploying unsafe artificial general intelligence.

Unique among the crises facing our polity, the question of Artificial Intelligence is centrally a question of the social ownership of capital. While the capitalist class can co-opt climate politics or even solidarity for Palestine, the expropriation of the largest growth sector in the economy, the outright seizure of trillions of dollars in capital, cannot be integrated into the programme of any other political fraction. This is a technology trained on the collective corpus of human text, posed to transform the fundamental relations of human life. It should be owned by all of us. The case for nationalization is clear and credible, defending civilization from existential risk from loss of control, defending the working class from rapid immiseration, and ensuring collective steering of the future rather than atavistic social disintegration.

Our capacity to articulate a political cleavage capable of uniting the largest possible cut of society around the socialist pole necessitates an issue that centers Americans’ identities as wage-laborers, or even broader - as human beings. The undemocratic character of the rollout of transformative artificial intelligence generates an organic demand towards subjecting the entire sector to popular stewardship, a demand that generates a working-class much broader than the current support base for the politics of the left.

The groundswell of opposition, organized in Facebook groups and community meetings, should not be tailed into the cul de sac of localism, but used as a platform, a springboard, towards a conflict between labor and capital.

On a similar note, It is crucial that socialists adopt a political issue that cannot be co-opted by the Democratic Establishment. The Democratic Party’s decaying political machines and their champions possess a high degree of ideological flexibility that permit them to constantly tail-end us and move to the left on a host of issues, making it imperative to mark Establishment candidates with a policy cleavage that is impossible for them to run away from.

Palestine has been effective in this regard, from Michigan to New York City, but has the potential to fall flat in cases where the candidate opposed to the left’s electoral insurgency follows the Searchlight Institute’s advice to liberals - and ejects AIPAC from their camarilla. The majority of the Democratic House Caucus voted for the Massie amendment, even Rahm Emanuel has called for the end of military aid.

One can easily imagine Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg promising to Block the Bombs, even if we would not view their commitments as credible. But can we imagine them calling for the expropriation of trillions of dollars in assets? For the slow-down of the United States’s primary growth industry? For collaboration and negotiation with China? Newsom, who was prodded by Nancy Pelosi and OpenAI, vetoed a relatively moderate piece of AI safety legislation in 2024, will have much explaining to do on the debate stage. As will the likes of Ritchie Torres, who has received a million dollars spent in his favor from the AI industry’s anti-regulatory Super PAC. He joins a host of other Democratic incumbents in receiving cash from OpenAI and Marc Andreesen, many of whom should be high-priority targets for socialist primary challenges.

Once the primary challenges are won, we will have to win general elections. Exploiting the wide divisions in the Republican Party on AI could permit socialists to cut deep into the GOP and turn back the threat of fascism. Overwhelming portions of the Republican electorate support regulations on AI, and non-trivial sections even support social-democratic policy in the context of AI’s impact on the working class. 37% of Trump voters expressed support for “every citizen should own an equal share” as the best treatment of AI systems and robotics to a world of mass automation.

Vance’s faux-populist shtick is immediately exposed once he allows his venture capitalist persona to speak about “excessive regulation”. The administration is permeated with the industry, and much of its decisions are designed to drive up the value of AI Czar David Sachs’s portfolio. There are populist anti-AI currents within the GOP, but they are a minority, crowded out by the funding of the tech oligarchs who were front and center at Trump’ s inauguration. In the contest for national power, the security logic of great power competition with China, and the general capture of the party by capital, will prevent any insurgent candidate’s victory or wavering on the part of Vance and Rubio. However, this situation may only be temporary.

In Tucker Carlson’s recent manifesto, a central part of the reactionary screed was opposition to AI. His rhetoric was predicated on protecting the organic character of national life, his opposition to AI coming from the same conservative ideological thrust used against transgender people and migrants rather than from an egalitarian-democratic will for popular control. Should we surrender AI to the right, or lose to a Democrat who will, perhaps we will find ourselves on the wrong end of a defining political cleavage. Never mind the idea that Carlson would actually put a pause on AI development, as like all fascists before him, would he find an arrangement with capital and deploy it in the service of domination.

We have the potential to own this issue. As the crisis of accelerating AI capabilities diffuses throughout society, displaced workers and fearful parents will look to those capable of mastering the situation and defending their material well-being and freedoms. Articulated in the right manner, AI could become a machine that makes socialists, generating the most favorable strategic terrain for the conquest of egalitarian hegemony.

The Democratic Socialists of America, especially with an Alexandria Ocasio Cortez presidential campaign as its spearhead, is in a unique position to mobilize the people towards a future in which AI is collectively owned, safely deployed, and socially steered. Other organizations would collapse into parochial defenses of the status quo or ad nauseum tail-ending of Luddism. Only the Democratic Socialists of America, committed to mass politics and to the construction of a new progressive pole, can take up the call of public control with rigor.

Imagine scenes like those at the height of the climate movement, with millions in the streets, but on an issue where the supermajority of the country agrees with our position, and imagine, rather than being led by the non-profit complex of single-issue groups, those mobilizations led by us, and defined by the struggle for the socialization of capital.

It would be a world historical failure to not bring such an event into being.