By Cedar Monroe and Nijmie Zakkiyyah Dzurinko
In MLK’s final sermon, on March 31, 1968 – he spoke about automation:
“There can be no gainsaying of the fact that the great revolution is taking place in the world today. In the sense it is a triple revolution: that is, a technological revolution with the impact of automation and cybernation; then there is a revolution in weaponry with the emergence of atomic and nuclear weapons of warfare; then there is the human rights revolution with the freedom explosion that is taking place all over the world.”
MLK named the technological revolution of the microchip and computerization nearly 60 years ago, connecting it to warfare and societal change. The University of the Poor, too, has been consistent in sounding the call to study and understand the implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the 4th technological revolution even before Peter Thiel, Alex Karp and Sam Altman became household names.
AI is not simply one “issue” among many competing for our limited time and attention. AI is disrupting the fundamental basis of capitalist relations of production. We still live in a society that is based on earning a wage. But we are just at the beginning of a technological revolution that is already disrupting work as we know it, and there is much more to come.
We are calling for a materialist understanding of AI that goes beyond and beneath the doomsday headlines and is instead grounded in dialectical and historical materialism. We believe such an understanding will help us chart the way forward – and we need such a way now more than ever as the pace of technological change is speeding up the possibilities for a re-organization of society. We have so much to lose, and so much to gain. We have to understand both the existential dangers and historic possibilities.
To quote MLK again: “Automation and cybernation will make it possible for working people to have undreamed-of amounts of leisure time.” AI does have the potential to make this possible but only under certain conditions. Right now, the ownership and control of these technologies is in the hands of a tiny group of billionaires – which prevents their application to improve human life and wellbeing and accelerates instead of mitigates their impact on our shared environment, the earth which is the source of all life as we know it.
That’s why the technology is being applied against us, not for us. The US economy shed more than half a million jobs in the first 8 months of 2026, with AI cited as a reason in almost a quarter of cases. [Challenger, Gray and Christmas Job Cut Announcement Report]. What we are experiencing is not merely a cyclical crisis of capitalism but a structural crisis. The entire relationship between capital and wage labor is being disrupted. This is a problem for the capitalist class as well as us – and they are willing to sacrifice billions of people and the living world for their own survival in a system that is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.
The AI build out is exemplified in the physical form of data centers – with 680 “hyperscale” data centers already completed, in development, or proposed across the United States. The resistance movement against them that crosses the urban/rural and party divide is truly a sign of hope – if these forces can be organized into the base for a mass independent working class party.
While the ruling class is spinning false and pernicious narratives that data centers are our fault for posting on Instagram and using GPS, we have to be crystal clear on what data centers actually represent: “compute” for the sake of
- Surveillance and repression – applied to workplace systems of monitoring and control, predictive policing, immigration enforcement and military applications.
- Capturing public resources like land, water, energy and tax breaks with public money that subsidize private capital.
- Administering austerity – our public benefits systems are on track to be turned over to AI and algorithmic tools for eligibility determination, benefit level calculation, and targeting mass numbers of people for removal.
During the Great Medicaid Purge with the ending of pandemic protections under President Biden, 27 million people in the U.S. were cut from Medicaid, at least half wrongfully due to AI-based decision-making across many states. Eight hundred people die every day in this country due to poverty and AI applications in public welfare are accelerating this policy murder.
The ruling class are applying this repressive use of AI both within the U.S. and outside it. Palestinians in Gaza are subject to the world’s first AI-powered genocide, with a system called “Lavender” analyzing information from mass surveillance of 2.3 million Gazans. Tens of thousands of human “targets” identified by an AI system called “Where’s Daddy?” then alerted the Israeli military when these fathers returned home to their families, and then Israeli soldiers carried out orders to bomb their houses containing dozens of additional family members, women, children and babies.
AI is significantly shaping U.S. ruling class foreign policy as well, across both party systems. We see the rise of a new cold war, this time with China, in a “race for AI.” The race for AI is seen as a key economic and political crisis by think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), as well as the Trump Administration. A recent CFR report states; “The greatest challenge to U.S. technological leadership comes from the Chinese government.” AI and wider technological changes are framed as national security issues, effectively ending the neoliberal, laissez faire economic policies of the previous generation, and replacing them with direct state intervention on behalf of the capitalist class.
This can be understood as a representation of two different poles in the world today: the U.S., which has seen one of the largest increases in poverty over the past five decades and China, a country that has seen the largest reduction of poverty in the same period.
The messages coming from these two countries– one the center of global capital accumulation for nearly a century and the other the representation of global socialist struggle– could not be more different.
The U.S. ruling class is clear that it is in a race to maintain US state power on the world stage. The CFR report America Revived makes this clear; “The United States faces the most dangerous international circumstances since the end of World War II, and perhaps in its history. An ever more powerful authoritarian China plows ahead in its determined effort to replace the United States as the dominant power in the Indo-Pacific, and eventually the world.” This rhetoric is repeated by both Republican and Democratic politicians, beating the drums of a new war for supremacy, essential for continued capitalist accumulation.
In the meantime, China is calling for increased cooperation between nations and a multipolar world order. This represents a vision of interdependence and cooperation and respect very different from the role the U.S. has played as the enforcer for global capital.
Additionally, while China’s technological capabilities are likely exceeding those of the U.S., the Chinese Communist Party is clear that AI must be used as a tool for human benefit, with strict controls on its use. Xi Jinping, in a July address to 2026 World AI Conference, said; “In China’s view, all countries should take a people-centered approach and develop AI for the positive and for good.” He framed AI as a human tool that must remain under human control and be used for human benefit.
Technology in all its forms are tools built by the labor of the working class. AI and other advanced technology, like biotech and quantum computing, could make human lives better, if used carefully and within the limits of our shared planetary home. Or, in the hands of the capitalist ruling class, it is being used to destroy our common home and the lives of its people. Today, U.S. political rhetoric does not even mention using AI to benefit people or the environment. Instead, the entire focus is on winning a technological (and arms) race. This might explain why 50% of Americans polled by Pew Research Center said they were concerned about AI and only 10% were excited about it.
We are in a historic moment, where the choice between a habitable, abundant world or one without fresh water and constantly wracked by climate disaster; between a world organized around meeting the needs of people and for the benefit of all life or one ruled by an increasingly tiny and murderous capitalist class; between socialism or capitalism – is becoming increasingly stark.
In MLK’s sermon on the war in Vietnam, he quoted James Russell Lowell’s abolition poem turned hymn:
“Once to every man and nation
comes the moment to decide…”
—
[…] Read this article in English […]