The twentieth century demonstrated that the only force that can kill capital is capital itself: the proletariat is, sensu strictu, just the ‘gravedigger’. In 1917 in Russia and 1949 in China, revolution arose from inter-capitalist war. Anything that weak anti-capitalist forces might throw at capital in terms of sabotage, psychological warfare and mischief is dwarfed by what capital is launching against itself in the murky confluence of cyber-war and cyber-crime that render networks increasingly dysfunctional. Nick Land’s (2014) compelling vision of an unstoppable AI-capital ascendancy omits the possibility that the competitive dynamics of the world market result in the mutual destruction of contending cybernetic capitals. Given the tight interdependencies of cyber-war and nuclear war, this is a potentially species-fatal dynamic, but it is also potentially a revolution-generating one. The violent fragmentation of the turned-against-itself world market will produce revolts, of very varied political inflection. Communist versions will, as Bernes (2018) observes, inevitably be localized, and, we would add, likely be situated amid rapidly disintegrating networks and degrading infrastructures. This means that, if successful, they will quite possibly take control only of AI in ruins, and that they will do so only at the culmination of struggles in which AI has predominantly been in the hands of those attempting to suppress them.
Communist AI
A communist orientation to AI takes as its priority neither halting AI (Luddism) nor intensifying its development (accelerationism) but rather liquidating the structural dynamics of capital that have so far fostered its development – i.e. capital’s imperative to reduce the costs of labour-power as a factor of production and to speed up the circulation of other commodities. Whether or not there might be a ‘communist AI’ depends on whether ‘AI’ can exist outside of those conditions. From this point of view, the most promising parts of postcapitalist/left-accelerationist programmes are not those that advance the automation of work within capital, but rather those that point to the expropriation of AI-capital, the development of new forms of collective ownership of AI, and the application of AI to the collectivization of other sectors. At the moment, however, such possibilities appear only at the far end of a spectrum of discussion opened by events such as the Cambridge Analytica–Facebook scandal. Such discussions generally extend from the currently mainstreamed prospect of greater self-regulation by AI giants, to intensified government regulation (acceptable in Europe but not North America), to the remote possibility of serious trust-busting action against the concentration of ownership which is a feature of actually-existing AI-capital. On the far edges of this horizon, however, in contrast to capitalist discourse about AI as the new electricity, appear discussions of AI and its related infrastructures as a computational ‘public utility that might actually be subject to democratic control (Mosco 2017). This is the edge that should be pushed forward, towards the deeper concept of a post-revolutionary ‘communal utility’. Only where cuts in capital’s integument of material intellectual property appear are there prospects for working-class steering of AI development, for the involvement of workers and communities in determining what sorts of work should or should not be automated, and thus for a genuine determination by the ‘general intellect’ as to the design of AI – in other words, for the revival of aspirations for a digital-era equivalent to the Lucas Plan (the 1970s-era shop-stewards plan for the conversion and remaking of one of the UK’s major military-industrial corporations) (Holtwell 2018).
conclusion: communist ai
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