The alternative form of communist ‘inhumanism’ is ecological. To struggle for human autonomy from capital is also to struggle for a recognition of the ecological and cosmic human enmeshments and imbrications that capital obscures and obliterates: to recognize that, in actuality, ‘we have never been autonomous’ (Nelson and Braun 2017). It deposes the fixity of the human by attending to the species’ dependence on, and imbrication in, other living systems, rather than re-centring analysis and politics upon the machines some humans have created to dominate other humans and the natural world. In this regard, capital’s AI gambit is perhaps human, all too human: communism must play otherwise. A powerful impetus to this line of thought has come from currents of ‘ecosocialism’ developed by thinkers such as John Bellamy Foster (2002) and Jason Moore (2015), with the latter more strongly representing the inhuman flattening of ontological distinctions between humanity and nature we think is necessary to challenge capital’s tendency to a machinic autonomization. We believe, to varying degrees, that these perspectives can be deepened by linkage to Jane Bennett’s analysis of the ‘vital materiality that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman’ (2010: 178) and Timothy Morton’s provocative project to ‘turn up the volume of the nonhumans within Marxism’ (2017: 61). Such positions are ‘inhuman’ not, as with transhumanism, through embrace of technology, but rather in the sense pioneered by posthuman feminists (Braidotti 2018), in epistemologically and practically overthrowing both gendered and racialized definitions of humanity and the dominative concept of hominid supremacy over ecological networks.<sup>4</sup>
These intellectual and political currents provide resources for an ecologically oriented departure from the trajectory of automatic AI-capital, forming a line of flight and fight that thinks of human relations to nature, the nonhuman and other humans not in terms of domination or competition, but of mutualism and cooperation. It may be out of the combination of climate change, war and the slow erosion of wage-labour that there will appear the lineaments of a mode of production that, while it must initially formally subsume capital’s already-existing AI, goes on to really subsume it into entirely new technological configurations in which AI automation is of far less importance than the cultivation of collective and individual human habits, subjectivities, associations and practices necessary for ecological and social sustainability and species survival. In this respect, one of the most promising directions is that of a possible articulation between Marxism and ‘de-growth’ movements, such as those adumbrated in recent works by the value-theorist Anselm Jappe (2017) and the autonomist Emmanuelle Leonardi (2019). It could be in such intentionally decelerationist movements that the deep reservoirs of a ‘biocommunist’ alternative to AI-capital are established.
conclusion: communist ai
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