/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

On Friday, December 12, 2025, the World Socialist Web Site, the online publication of the International Committee of the Fourth International, will launch Socialism AI, a chatbot that will use the power of amplified human cognition to advance the development of socialist consciousness in the international working class.

Socialism AI will expand and accelerate the education of workers, student youth, progressive intellectuals and artists on the basis of the world scientific outlook of Marxism. It will prepare them for the irrepressible escalation of the international class conflict.

For the ruling class, AI’s role creates new means of intensifying exploitation, displacing labor and increasing profits.

But, paradoxically, AI technology also makes possible an unprecedented expansion of knowledge and social consciousness.

Technology does not lead automatically to the improvement of the human condition. Without politically conscious mass action, guided by scientific Marxist theory, technological advances under capitalism intensify the exploitation of the working class and threaten the destruction of the planet.

Therefore, the problem of bringing into proper alignment the development of technology and the interests of the working class must be solved. The socialist movement must make use of the most advanced tools available for the education and unification of the working class.

That is the significance of Socialism AI, which will gather, clarify and make accessible the theoretical, historical and political experience of more than 150 years of the Marxist movement, above all, the heritage defended by the Fourth International.

Its aim is not to substitute technology for politics, or algorithms for revolutionary leadership. On the contrary, it is to assist the development of consciousness by overcoming the barriers of distance, language, specialization and time. A worker in Detroit, a student in São Paulo, a nurse in Johannesburg, a young intellectual in Mumbai will pose questions about theory, history, economics, philosophy and politics—and receive answers grounded not in the lies of the ruling class but in the scientific method of historical materialism and in the accumulated strategic experience of the international working class.

The experiences of exploitation, war and crisis can radicalize millions, but without a conscious, historically informed perspective, they can also produce confusion, disorientation and despair. The working class requires a memory of its own struggle, a theory that explains its position in society and a program that links immediate demands to the conquest of power.

Only a Marxist party can provide this. Socialism AI will be a powerful weapon in the struggle against capitalism, a 21st century interactive encyclopedia of socialism, continuously enriched and corrected through the practice of the revolutionary movement itself and the participation of its readers.

At this point, objections may be raised: “But is not AI itself dangerous? Can it not be used for surveillance, for manipulation, for censorship, for the perfection of dictatorship?”

Of course, it can. That is already happening. But this is neither new nor unique to AI. Every great technological advance in history has been double-edged. The printing press was used to publish both revolutionary tracts during the Reformation and reactionary sermons and papal bulls. The telegraph and railway networks served the needs of capital and empire, but they also knit together the national working classes and made possible coordinated action on a scale that had never previously existed. Radio and cinema became instruments of fascist propaganda—but at the same time powerful means of artistic and political education.

It is necessary to address a widespread source of ideological confusion: the designation of AI as “artificial intelligence.” The term has been repeated so incessantly—and with so little precision—that it obscures more than it clarifies. It creates the impression of something mystical, autonomous, somehow divorced from human thought, and therefore either wondrously omnipotent or terrifyingly alien.

The phrase “artificial intelligence” suggests that we stand in the presence of a kind of counterfeit or ersatz intelligence. Yet we do not speak this way about any other technological extension of human capacity.

We do not call a forklift or a hydraulic press an “artificial muscle,” though it multiplies human physical power many thousands of times. We do not describe riding a bicycle, driving a car or boarding a jetliner as “artificial running” or “artificial flight.”

Modern telescopes no longer rely solely on visible light but detect invisible electromagnetic radiation—radio, infrared, X-ray and gamma—thereby vastly extending the sensory powers of humanity.

These technologies amplify human capability; they do not replace its essence.

Why, then, this insistence on labeling computational systems as “artificial intelligence”? The term is not scientifically neutral. It mystifies technology by implying that intelligence can be somehow fabricated in isolation from human intellectual labor, as if it were an autonomous substance that can be synthesized like a chemical compound.

This is not merely inaccurate; it is ideologically useful to the ruling class. It encourages passivity. It encourages awe. And it encourages the belief that the technology exists above and beyond social control.

In reality, what is called “AI” is better understood as augmented intelligence—an extension and amplification of human intellectual labor. Its foundations lie in centuries of accumulated human practice and knowledge: logic, mathematics, linguistics, engineering, computer science, and the collective experience of billions of people using and generating language, images and data. The algorithms do not invent meaning; they learn from vast human-generated corpora. Their architecture is designed by human engineers; their parameters are shaped and refined by human intervention; their failures reveal the limits of human training, not the existence of some alien mind.

The intelligence is not artificial; the automation is. What AI systems automate are operations—classification, search, retrieval, pattern recognition, language prediction—that previously required specific forms of human labor.

The term “augmented intelligence” emphasizes not a break with humanity but a deep continuity. It recognizes that these systems are built on human labor and knowledge, shaped by human purpose and deployed to amplify human capabilities. And most importantly, it clarifies the essential social and political issues at stake.

If AI is an augmentation of human intelligence, then the question is not what “it” will do, but who controls it, in whose interests it is developed and for what social ends it is used.

In the hands of the capitalist oligarchy, AI is being deployed to intensify exploitation, expand surveillance, manipulate populations and wage war. But this does not arise from any inherent malevolence in the technology itself. It arises from the imperatives of profit, competition, militarism and private capitalist ownership.

To fear “AI” as an autonomous threat is to misidentify the problem. The danger does not lie in the machine but in the class that wields that machine.

The intellectuals and artists who fear that AI will smother individual creativity, and who oppose this technology as a threat to “intellectual property,” not only accept uncritically the bourgeois commodification of science and art but also fail to recognize that their work, so essential for human progress, can be defended only through the social struggle against all forms of capitalist property.

AI does not depersonalize “intellectual” labor in some narrow sense. It is the outcome of the entire historical evolution of human labor and culture—of the process, described by Marx, in which humanity opposes itself to nature as one of nature’s own forces. This historical activity is the basis of the development of human consciousness. As Marx explained: “The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.”

AI is a product of the human mind as it has been formed by millennia of physical and intellectual labor. It embodies the human capacity to analyze, abstract, symbolize and model the world. Controlled democratically—subordinated to social need rather than private accumulation—it will become one of the most powerful instruments for human emancipation ever created. It will reduce the burden of labor, shorten the working day, expand access to education and allow billions to participate in cultural and scientific life at levels previously unimaginable.

And, as it is increasingly integrated into the work of artists, it will provide a powerful new impulse for the cognition of the world and the vast range of human experience and emotion.