We are witnessing the production and use of “smart” weapons systems, drones that seek out and kill civilians.

We already see translators, technical support workers and call center workers left without work due to the introduction of automatic programs capable of replacing part of their work.

Much tougher struggles are needed on the field of class battle, of manual workers and even intellectuals, who are awakening to this threat.

The Party must also be updated on the role of the most modern technology in the perpetuation of the bourgeois regime.

Let us be Clear With the Words

Marx already taught us that science and intelligence are embodied in machines, the effective custodians of the ingenuity and work of past generations, an impersonal social heritage. Intelligence (which means “seeing inside”) is always artificial. Only the petty bourgeois, the intellectual, believes in and claims his own, indefinable, individual intelligence. Because he tries to make a commodity out of it and make a living from it. So let’s welcome artificial intelligence to take away from the bourgeois even this illusory boast of self-sufficiency.

It is an old story. Since the invention of writing we have done without tales to the young from old men of particularly good and rich memories. Since Pythagoras hung his Table on the wall, it was no longer necessary for anyone to remember that seven times eight equals fifty-six.

In a commercial titillation to individualism they called them Personal Computers: then it was discovered that not connected to the network they were useless. Intelligence is in the network.

There is no intelligence above classes. The intelligence of the working class is the Communist Party. Which is a group, disciplined to a purpose, a doctrine and an action, that goes beyond individuals, and that gathers the Communists of yesterday and today around the same historical program. Revolutionary intelligence arises from the historical need of Communism and is kept in the pages of our texts.

If any automatic sieve can help our hatred and contempt for this dying society and our passion for Communism to find more quickly in our vast library some precious dialectical shot to keep the theoretical bastions of the Party firm, welcome! The old mole, even in the field of data processing, always digs for the revolution.

Even the bourgeois will look for their quotes in their texts. Will a propaganda article soon be needed for the next war or for a chauvinist or racist campaign? They will ask artificial intelligence. But revolutions are not decided by propaganda. Otherwise there would never have been any in history, since the class in power has always had, with the monopoly of its class intelligence, today also artificial, infinite and much more pervasive means of indoctrination and falsification.

The Old Monopolistic Capitalism

The technology sector, where companies like NVIDIA are currently making record profits thanks to the boom in so-called artificial intelligence, has long been dominated by monopolistic companies. But what some today call “techno-feudalism” is neither a new nor pre-bourgeois phenomenon.

For some time now, gigantic monopolies, especially American and Chinese, have been making disproportionate profits by imposing their tools, operating systems and applications, for the execution of intellectual work and calculations in general. Similar monopolies have also formed in the production of microprocessors.

These products are used by companies as fixed capital, or for personal consumption, paying a license for the use of an application or a fee for access to a cloud server and, tomorrow, to “artificial intelligence”.

A high concentration has been achieved in advertising collection and mail order sales, with devastating consequences for the petty mercantile bourgeoisie.

Thanks to their monopolistic control of the markets, large companies such as Google, Amazon, etc. are able to set the prices of their services well above the cost of production. These large conglomerates can buy any competitor thanks to their enormous financial resources. The strength of this monopoly capital even allows them to operate for a certain period without profit, in order to crush their competitors. Before the end of the last century, all hardware and software production in European countries was eliminated.

So it is only rent from a monopoly. Monopolies that have been created, and are maintained against competitors, through the energetic protection of large imperial states. In the price of their software products, the majority is rent, almost no new surplus value.

This income is subtracted from the surplus value produced in all other countries of the world. An enormous flow of wealth that, for example, from Europe arrives in the United States under the heading of "services". Also to "solve" this dispute, the capitalists are preparing for world war.

Moreover, every monopoly is not absolute and unlimited. Around new scientific discoveries and new inventions, an economic war is fought between monopolies, old and new, within nations and between opposing blocs. For example, the announcement of the new Chinese application DeepSeek caused the US stock markets to collapse as soon as investors realized the fragility of the advantage that they thought the US maintained over its imperial competitors in China.

Taiwan has become a strategic semiconductor hub, but China is ramping up its capabilities in the sector, ironically spurred by the embargo imposed during the Biden administration.

In capitalism, not even technological progress brings peace. Instead, the global ramification of technological monopolies serves as an instrument of imperialist domination, and vice versa. Information technology services are an integral part of national and military infrastructures, while artificial intelligence is increasingly used in warfare. These technologies extend the influence of the main imperialist blocs in the contest between the productions of greatest strategic interest: energy sources and generation, semiconductors, as well as the personnel of technicians and scientists trained to build and maintain these systems.

Will AI Save Capitalism?

Capitalists trust in artificial intelligence to stop, if not reverse, the decline of the rate of profit, especially in the old national industrialisms. They dream of a new “computer revolution” and talk about investing colossal sums in the sector, 500 billion dollars in the United States alone.

But the decline, or recovery, of capitalism is not a strictly technical fact nor of a particular sector of production, but rather a general economic and historical one.

The productive euphoria of the decades following the Second World War and up to the crisis of 1975 was not ensured by the spread of the use and sale of cars, for example; on the contrary, the recovery was based on the reconstructions made necessary after the destruction of the war, which allowed, after a difficult decade, also the expansion of internal consumption. Since then the crisis has dragged on and has not precipitated not because of the "computer revolution" but because of the opening of the Asian markets. Today, these too are saturated.

True production is material. The demandability of the price of a good, of an immaterial commodity such as information technology, which does not have its own market value, understood as an average price for its social reproduction, depends only on the force that protects its monopoly. This is subject to the alternating events of relations between States and between groups of States, diplomatic and military weight.

How come Pythagoras, and his heirs, don’t get paid by everyone who looks up at his Table? It is possible then that all this publicity that is being made about artificial intelligence will finally reveal itself to be just a bubble and at a certain point it will end up bursting, as it did with the Dot-coms.

Remember the huge post-war investments in the "space race", which also had military implications: not a single dollar was made. Today billionaires would like to go on a tourist trip to Mars: if only it were true.

Dead Labor

Artificial intelligence, like all forms of automation used by capital since time immemorial, is “dead labor” incarnate. Man has worked to create these machines, subsequently these same machines, with the assistance of new workers or sometimes almost without any assistance, except for maintenance, carry out the jobs that had been done by artisans or more specialized workers.

This technical automation, although initially expensive to produce and develop, has great and revolutionary effects: it increases the productivity of labor; by requiring production on a larger scale it contributes to crises of overproduction; dead labor, exceeding living labor in value, induces a decrease in the rate of profit. It is a dynamic that culminates in the block of accumulation, which capital tries to resolve by increasing the rate of exploitation and, finally, through imperialist wars.

Capitalism does not enter into crisis because it lacks "intelligence"; it is the maximum capitalist intelligence, the one that best informs its development – in productivity, production, trade, etc. – that at the same time most quickly leads to the accumulation of contradictions that condemn it to explode. If artificial intelligence can do better than capitalists for capitalism, this will inevitably come closer to its ruin and, finally, communism.

How it Works

Computer programs have long been used to perform all sorts of functions, including complex ones that were previously exclusive to the human mind, much faster than this one: calculators, programs that process large masses of numbers, and even playing chess!

But by artificial intelligence in particular we mean the large-scale linguistic models (LLMs) currently in use, which are able to process human language in a very similar way to how automatic sentence completion works, finding the most probable series of words that follow a given one. It took decades of study and experimentation to get to the LLM stage.

An important advance was the invention of “transformation” procedures that, instead of guessing the next word to propose one at a time, identify the important parts of the sentence, which are translated as a whole. The mathematical tool is the “neural networks”, which are based on the calculation of the frequency of association between words: for “apple”-“tree” we give 90, for “apple”-“Newton” 5, for example. Obviously the combinations are a huge number, so very powerful computers are needed.

The possibilities for errors are evident: “Newton ate the apple” could put “intelligence” into crisis.

Then there is the much bigger problem of the reliability of the texts from which one copies. What appears statistically in Big Data, in the vast archives – generated by users, influenced by fashions and the dominant ideology – is not necessarily true. As far as we are concerned, the truth, and the Revolution, lies, on the contrary, in doubt, in paradox, in the denial of the obvious.

Furthermore, more and more texts in online archives will not be produced by scholars but by incompetents, if not by artificial intelligence itself, which can “short-circuit” models by making them collapse on themselves, producing truly absurd results.

The Competition of Machines

The future will likely involve the use of language analysis to provide more reliable systems for tasks currently performed by men, who would be laid off. This type of automation will still lead to a reduction in wages, even for those involved in intellectual activities. It is already a reality that the recognition of copyright for one’s work is denied. The Hollywood screenwriters’ union fought to protect itself in 2023 and obtained some protections, but most of the workers affected by these applications are not members of a union. And many unions do not even seek protections in their contracts, having lost any class character.

Historically, workers have resisted the push of automation to de-skill and devalue labor. The Luddites were an embryonic form of this resistance. Today we say: let capital apply its innovations, but workers will still fight to maintain their living conditions.

Turning the World Upside Down

Today, artificial intelligence already replaces the most repetitive jobs and is of assistance for some intellectual activities, but its applications are limited by the capitalist mode of production, which prevents any technique from being used rationally and for the benefit of all humanity.

The growing inability of capitalism to support its slaves will drive the working class to organize against its dehumanizing effects and overthrow it worldwide. This will be possible when workers’ solidarity and coordinated strikes against the bosses and their puppets, the most effective class weapons against the implacable depravity of capitalism, are revived. We can then, having traced the leadership of the Communist Party, go further and lead the fight in this class war for communism.

A future is expected in which capitalism will no longer exist, with the working class victorious throughout the world. We will then be able to employ these techniques, and the new extraordinary ones that brotherly humanity will be able to create, for the good and development of the human species.