Reflections on the Communist Manifesto in the AI epoch
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In the AI epoch the Communist Manifesto is more relevant than ever. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto in a time that was analogous to ours – a time of great economic upheaval, rapid social change, and exploitation of the poor and working class on an industrial scale. Money, power, and influence that had previously been the exclusive reserve of landowners and agriculturalists, became concentrated in a new and more rapacious cohort – factory owners and industrialists. Communities were scattered by the system shocks to the local economies, forcing families into subsistence, and finally, slum-dwelling subservience on the periphery of urban sprawl.
Capitalism seeks new frontiers and greater ease of efficiency in its methods of exploitation. It takes on many guises, and wears many masks. Predating the publication of the Communist Manifesto, colonial forces had been pillaging African resources, enslaving African people for God, King, or Nation, all to fill the coffers of the elite. In contemporary Africa, the exploitation continues as the wealth of Africa is extracted from the continent on purpose-built colonial infrastructure. By rail, by road, from port to port, the resources of Africa are spirited away to further enrich the transnational wealthy.
In the time of Marx and Engels, steam power drove industrialization and the seismic cultural and economic shocks that shaped the 19th and 20th century. Slum formation, the exploitation of children as labour, the intensified exploitation of women, and a range of downstream maladies unleashed on society by the industrialists’ lust for lucre was the way of the world contemporaneous to the writing of the Communist Manifesto. That’s why the Communist Manifesto was much more than a theoretical treatise on history and class struggle. It made demands that would restore the spirit of women, men and children who had been scooped up and dumped into the gnashing teeth of the capitalist machine. It called for the abolition of child labour, and free education for all children in public schools. It called for the centralization of credit in the hands of the state, as the working class, already hyper-exploited, were preyed upon by money lenders. It called for the monopolies held by the industrialists to be broken by having the state expand its own capacity. The cultivation of waste lands, the improvement of the soil. And it called for a fair income tax, so that the wealthy would have to pay their fair share, a good idea even 175 years later.
In their historical analysis from violent and coerced original expropriation (the concept popularly mislabeled as “primitive accumulation”), right up until the formulation of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels offered a blueprint for the attack patterns of capitalism in class struggle. It is these ideas that plot the trajectory of capitalism’s demise.
Artificial Intelligence and Communism in the 21st Century
We have come full circle one hundred and seventy five years after the publication of the Communist Manifesto. For 175 years, humanity has been on a guided tour of history and consequence by Marx and Engels, accompanied by their texts to enlighten this journey. We have seen the aggressive imperialism of the colonial powers, imposing their will on the Global South by force and coercion. We’ve seen leaders deposed in coups and by manipulation of the electorate. Poverty, inequality, and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of fewer entities and individuals are all phenomena that were predicted by the Communist Manifesto.
Now, the tool that gives impetus to the class struggle of the 21st century is increased automation and AI. And, just as the industrial revolution saw fortune and influence move from landowners to the industrialists, so too now is wealth and technology being concentrated in the hands of fewer than ever before. Those who owned the machines that powered the factories of the industrial revolution held the whip hand over the masses, and the ordering of society for their benefit. Power and influence rests with a vanishingly small band of tech and tech adjacent American billionaires, and state actors they are aligned with.
At the edge of this new epoch of struggle, some of the terrain is familiar, such as the forging of a new Cold War by imperial capitalist powers, and the inexhaustible appetite for African resources. Even though it feels like uncharted territory, the advent of AI is just another tool that capitalists will use to exploit the working class. It is a tool of great sophistication, but really no different to any primitive weapon of coercion forged in the throes of original expropriation. Artificial Intelligence in the hands of these oligarchs is only going to develop along one predictable stream – as a means of enrichment for the few with the costs borne by the exploited working class.
Other phenomena are relatively new or developing, such as threat of exhaustion or despoliation of natural resources, and permanent and irreversible damage to our biosphere. We are so imperilled by the consequences of capitalism so as to put our species on the track of extinction well before the ideas contained within the Communist Manifesto would expire.
The only alternative to the barbarism that capitalism continues to inflict on the oppressed is to organize society in opposition to exploitation of the poor and the working class, de-concentrate wealth and power from the few, and close the chasmic wealth gap between the rich and poor.
Roscoe Palm is a Director of the Pan-African Institute for Socialism
