Artificial Intelligence: A Battleground for the Future
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a battleground for the future.
Under capitalism, AI functions as a productive force used to intensify exploitation, increase profits, and expand control over systems of administration, surveillance, and power. It serves as a weapon of war for the ruling classes. At the vanguard of this dystopian project stands Palantir—a CIA spin-off named after the all-seeing stones from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings . Just as Sauron wielded the Palantíri to manipulate and terrorise, today’s capitalist elites deploy AI to monitor, suppress, and annihilate resistance. Palantir’s public celebration of Israel’s genocide in Gaza lays bare the moral rot at the core of capitalist power. Governments in dozens of countries have signed vast contracts with Palantir to help them monitor, control, and kill people.
Nevertheless, despite the hundreds of billions invested by privately owned tech giants, the future of AI remains a living battleground.
AI assimilates the sum of human knowledge and accelerates its exploitation, propelling technological and social change at breakneck speed. Yet this very development as a productive force collides violently with the social relations of capitalism.
Consider private property—the hallowed god of bourgeois society. Artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers watch as their life’s work—crafted with passion—is scraped, dismembered, and fed into AI systems. Their creativity is reduced to raw data, stripped of context, compensation, or consent. Centuries of human achievement are melted into an anonymous sludge, repurposed to serve profit. In this way, capitalist AI devours the very principle of private ownership it claims to uphold.
Capitalist AI: Profit and Domination
The capitalist AI project serves two tyrannical aims:
- Maximising Profit : AI intensifies the exploitation of labour. It automates jobs, deskills workers, reinforces managerial tyranny, drives wages down, and increases surplus extraction. Workers are reduced to appendages of algorithms, their bargaining power crushed by machine-driven “efficiency.”
- Expanding Control : States and corporations deploy AI as a weapon of mass surveillance. Facial recognition, predictive policing, and algorithmic censorship are deployed to stifle dissent and suffocate the truth. AI does not merely serve capitalism—it becomes the architecture of capitalist hegemony.
In the hands of capital, AI is not a neutral tool but a mechanism of domination. It is designed to ensure that automation enriches the few while tightening control over the majority.
AI as a Revolutionary Weapon
Yet AI is not fated to serve oppression. It is a contradictory force—a weapon that can be seized and repurposed. AI can:
- Shatter information monopolies, bypassing state and corporate censorship to expose their crimes and coordinate resistance.
- Power counter-surveillance, shielding activists from repression and anonymising dissent where necessary.
- Transform theory into action, turning Marxist analysis into tactical tools for organising strikes, building solidarity networks, and modelling socialist alternatives.
- Democratise knowledge, assisting the production of revolutionary education and agitation.
The struggle over AI is a class war—a fight to determine whether it remains a tool of exploitation or becomes an instrument of liberation.
AI and Revolution
AI is not simply an instrument of control over the masses. It is a weapon that can be used to defend people’s rights, challenge dominant narratives, and ultimately establish a new socialist society. AI can:
- Undermine state and corporate information control, engage in counter-surveillance, and expose state repression.
- Transform research into a weapon that serves the masses.
- Create decentralised projects free from corporate control, undermining the dominance of proprietary models.
Proprietary vs. Open-Source AI: A Struggle Over the Means of Production
Capitalist AI is owned and controlled by corporations and the state, whereas open-source AI remains in the public domain.
Proprietary AI , like ChatGPT, is closed, restricted, and designed to serve capital. It is developed behind corporate paywalls, integrated into state surveillance, and used to concentrate wealth and power in ever-fewer hands.
Open-Source AI , like Qwen, is free, adaptable, and available to the masses. It allows anyone to modify and repurpose AI systems, making it an ideal instrument for organising, developing revolutionary strategy and tactics, and facilitating the socialist reorganisation of society.
The battle between these models mirrors the conflict between capital and labour. The capitalist elite seeks to enclose AI under private control, while the majority would benefit from its expansion as open, continuously improvable, and collectively governed common property.
Marxist.ai: Forging Revolutionary Tools
Marxist.ai is a publishing and research platform focused on the relationship between Marxism and artificial intelligence. It develops, collects, and refines AI-generated and AI-assisted analyses to advance the following:
- Curating AI-Informed Marxist Perspectives : Utilising the power of AI to integrate and synthesise accurate analyses of the world to assist revolutionary struggle.
- Editing and Refining Marxist Theory for the AI Era : Updating historical materialist analysis to account for the rapid expansion of AI and its implications for class struggle.