Is China a capitalist and imperialist country or is it "socialist [not even communist] with Chinese characteristics" as some leftists say? Is it to be considered an ally of those who oppose U.S. capitalism simply because it is a U.S. rival or because it truly represents an alternative system? We in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) say the answer to both questions is that China is an imperialist rival of the U.S. and is no friend of the working class.. Both its external political and economic policies and the conditions of its own working class attest that China is capitalist. The unfortunate truth is that there are no communist countries in the world today. Our energy must go into understanding the nature of contemporary Chinese society and why socialist revolutions in the USSR and China devolved back to capitalism, not into pretending that it didn't happen.
External relations
There is no doubt that China is the main economic and military rival of the U.S. today. In 2024, China's outward foreign direct investment was 12 percent of the global total, including about 52,000 foreign enterprises controlled or created by Chinese investors in 190 countries. Much of the over $3 trillion in foreign capital that China controls passes through tax havens like offshore holding companies that have indirect ownership or corporate opacity, just like other imperialist nations.1
Chinese domestic manufactured goods production in 2024 was 26 percent of world industrial output, nearly double that of the U.S., while their export of manufactured goods was almost triple that of the U.S.2
Moreover, China dominates the world’s supply chains of minerals needed to produce “clean” energy – electric car batteries, solar panels, cell phones, and other electronics – accounting for 60 percent of world-wide production and 85 percent of processing capacity.
In addition to mining its own resources, China is well entrenched in Africa and is dominant in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Guinea, Zambia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. In DRC, over 40,000 children dig cobalt, lithium and other rare earth elements out of the earth with their hands and shovels and many die every year from accidents and the effects of pollution and poverty. DRC supplies 70 percent of the world’s cobalt, and China either owns or has a stake in nearly all the mines. In the Central African Republic (CAR) many people die from mercury poisoning related to Chinese gold mining.3 China also owns 50 factories in Indonesia, and invests in mining and manufacturing in Peru, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and (until recently) Venezuela.
China has established a new financial bloc, BRICS, originally involving Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa, but now also including the authoritarian nations Egypt, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE. Many other Asian, African and Latin American countries have lesser "partner" status. BRICS' major aim is to reduce dependency on the dollar as the world's reserve currency and engine of trade and replace it with the Chinese renminbi, although the dollar still finances 80 percent of international transactions.4
China has doubled its military budget since Xi came to power and is accelerating its development of hypersonic missiles, AI, biotechnology and increasing its supply of nuclear and maritime weapons. They expect to be able to win a war over Taiwan by 2027.5
Internal conditions
The domestic Chinese economy involves state-owned and private companies, with 60 percent of output coming from the private sector, although the state does play a major role in regulating private capital and in industrial planning. This system has encouraged huge levels of corruption, in which capitalists offer high-stakes rewards to powerful officials in exchange not just for speed but also for access to exclusive, lucrative privileges, including cheap credit, land grants, monopoly rights, procurement contracts, tax breaks, and the like.6 U.S. intelligence says Xi Jinping and his family have $1 billion in assets, and that 65 percent of all government officials receive income through bribery or graft.7 Production is based on what can be sold, commodity production, not what people need, as would be the case under communism.
Perhaps most telling is how China treats its own 725 million workers. Each worker must have an officially registered household location, and anyone living outside this area forsakes many social services. Nonetheless, about 300 million rural workers have migrated to the cities seeking work and face discrimination in housing, employment, health care and education. Even for urban workers who do have health insurance it has very limited coverage for out-patient care or medications. Schooling is free for only nine years and unavailable to migrants. For the past 30 years there have been many labor strikes, in which the police always intervene to suppress the workers. The legal right to strike was removed in 1982, and the only legal union today is one run by the (fake left) Communist Party.8 Wages are on average about one fourth of those in the U.S., and, although it is illegal, many workers are required to work 12 hour days, six days a week.9
Thus we see that China has become a wholly capitalist nation, albeit one that runs more efficiently than the U.S. because of state oversight and control and is outpacing the U.S. in production and international investment. For the Chinese working class, a new communist consciousness and organization is necessary to defeat capitalism, just as in all nations of the world. It may be that the inevitable future conflict between the U.S. and China will lead workers in both nations, indeed all nations, to refuse to fight their bosses' wars and organize themselves to build an enduring communist society. We fight for the Progressive Labor Party to be the international party that unites workers in this life and death struggle.
1.https://www.facebook.com/groups/457920714226660/posts/27202332456025456/
2. https://x.com/econovisuals/status/1947272850890797345
4. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/what-brics-group-and-why-it-expanding
6. https://www.chinadebate.com/chinamacroreporter/how-corruption-powers-chinas-economy
What makes the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 a milestone in world history is the achievements of the Soviet Union and the Communist International during the 25 years after Leon Trotsky’s exile in 1929. These achievements are the reason that the revolution of 1917 remains a world-historical event. Like his hero Trotsky and the whole tribe of anticommunists, Miéville slanders these triumphs.
During the 1930s Leon Trotsky himself was widely published in, and handsomely paid by, the capitalist press. Miéville’s October is a partisan Trotskyist screed that is similarly celebrated by that capitalist press and for the same reason: it is an anti-communist attack on the heroic period of the Soviet Union, the historical legacy of the revolution of 1917.
October is a one-sided interpretation of the insurrection of October 25 / November 7, 1917 in Petrograd and the events leading up to it. At the end Miéville outlines an explicitly Trotskyist, and completely inaccurate, interpretation of the subsequent development of the history of the Soviet Union. The flagrant dishonesty of this false thumbnail sketch of Soviet history naturally raises the question: How historically accurate is the main part of the book?
The primary requisites for any historical work are evidence and objectivity in studying that evidence. Miéville’s book has neither.
A few examples of Mieville’s Trotskyist falsifications:
“…the embrace of ‘Socialism in One Country’ is a dramatic reversal of a foundational thesis of the Bolsheviks …”
This is a Trotskyist lie. In fact, Lenin had repeatedly said Russia had “all that is necessary and sufficient” for building a socialist society. (On Cooperation, 1922).
Miéville also claims that building socialism in the USSR was a “bad hope” (sic). Better that the Soviet Union fail than that it attempts to build socialism! Hitler, Winston Churchill, and all the capitalists and imperialists of the world, would certainly have agreed.
Miéville:
“[Lenin] grows suspicious of Stalin’s personality and his place within the machine. In his last writings, he insists Stalin be removed from his post as general secretary. His advice is not followed.”
Moscow University professor Valentin Sakharov’s detailed and well-known study of Lenin’s supposed “Testament” was published in 2003. Sakharov concludes these documents are forgeries. Sakharov’s evidence is summarized and studied in Grover Furr’s book, The Fraud of the ‘Testament of Lenin’ (2022). Miéville ignores Sakharov’s study entirely.
Following his hero Trotsky Miéville can say nothing but lies about Stalin. A few examples:
“There is a rare hint at something more troubling about the man in the assessment of the party’s Russian Bureau in Petrograd, which allowed him to join, but only as advisor, without the right to a vote – because, it said, of ‘certain personal features that are inherent in him.’”
Viacheslav Molotov, one of the three members of the Russian Bureau already in Petrograd in March, said this never happened! Another member, Aleksandr Shliapnikov, mentions nothing about this in his three-volume memoir of 1917. Even Trotsky, who misses no opportunity to attack and belittle Stalin, doesn’t mention it.
In fact, it can’t be true because Stalin was already a member of the Russian Bureau! He had been appointed to it and to the Central Committee in 1912 by the All-Russian Conference of the Bolshevik party.
Miéville claims that “Stalin went so far in the direction of moderation as to support a merger of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks …” This is a lie.
Miéville copied it straight from Trotsky, who cites no evidence.
Miéville calls collectivization “brutal”. In reality collectivization was “a real reform.” (Mark Tauger) that modernized Soviet agriculture and stopped the thousand-year cycle of killer famines, four of which had struck Russia and Ukraine in the 1920s alone. See Professor Mark Tauger’s article at https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/review-of-anne-applebaums-red-famine-stalins-war-o Tauger’s research on Russian and Soviet agriculture is the best in the world.
Miéville on the Moscow Trials:
“Party activists are … forced to betray others, to confess to preposterous crimes with stentorian declarations.”
False again. We have had strong evidence of the guilt of the Moscow Trials defendants for decades. Beginning in 1980 the discoveries of Trotskyist historian Pierre Broué proved that Trotsky had consistently lied about the Moscow Trials and his own conspiracies in all his writings. Trotskyist writers do not mention it.
Stalin, however, did not lie about Trotsky! He acknowledged Trotsky’s leading role in winning over the Petrograd garrison (Pravda November 6, 1918). Stalin reprinted this passage in his book The October Revolution, published in 1934, even though the exiled Trotsky had been slandering Stalin for years.
According to Molotov Stalin even complained that Trotsky’s contribution to the revolution was being suppressed.
“In 1939 Stalin looked through the second volume of the “History of the Civil War” and asked me:
But where is Trotsky’s picture?
But he is an enemy of the people!
He was the People’s Commissar of the Army and Navy! — said Stalin.”
At the second and third Moscow Trials Trotsky was charged with conspiring with Nazi Germany and fascist Japan against the USSR and with plotting assassination and sabotage in the USSR. There is a great deal of evidence to support these charges (see the book by Grover Furr, Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan). Like all Trotskyists and anticommunists, Miéville ignores this evidence.
The accomplishments of the socialist Soviet Union: collectivization, industrialization, broad social welfare benefits for workers, the defeat of the Nazi hordes, the feats of the Communist International under Soviet leadership – these were the pivot on which the history of the world in the 20th century turned.
If we are to learn the lessons of 1917 we must discard biased, subjective, and anticommunist accounts like Miéville’s and face the evidence squarely. The new and better world the communists of the last century fought for can only be built on a foundation of historical truth.
The PLP-led ‘78 wildcat strike
At the D.C. transit rally, I discussed the 1978 Progressive Labor Party (PLP)-led wildcat strike with several operators. They wanted to know what the strike had been about. Operators in PLP struggled with their fellow workers over two years to prepare for battle. The primary issue was whether they would actually get the cost of living raise that was guaranteed in the contract, but the contract had expired. The law required that the provisions of the contract stay in place–the cost of living raise had to be given. But WMATA refused to provide the raise. This flagrant violation of labor law outraged all of WMATA’s workers. At the union meeting, the president refused to allow a discussion of a strike, “adjourned” the meeting, and left the building. A PLP transit worker jumped up on stage and declared that the meeting was back in session. The workers voted unanimously to strike – illegally!! The 5-6 day strike paralyzed the city until the bosses surrendered, and provided the cost of living raise. The power of the workers can’t be beat!
*****
Campaign workers encounter communism
From June 11th to 18th, two of our club members joined an array of Democratic and Republican campaign workers at several preliminary election sites in Baltimore City. As revolutionary communists, we stood firmly in our place against the capitalist ruling class and fighting for workers’ power. We held our signs, and we talked to campaign workers and the workers coming in to cast their votes. Workers encountered vague slogans like “Leadership You Can Trust,” “Focus On The Progress,” and “Values Matter.” Political signs with dolled up faces and campaign workers with flyers were trying to entice voters on their way to the election shrine. Each jurisdiction enforces a strict boundary line known as a “No Electioneering Zone,” meant to protect voters’ privacy and restrict the campaign workers from doing all the legwork of their bosses. Thousands of dollars are spent by the ruling class to please their gangster bosses and swindle the working class. Democrats occupy most offices in Baltimore City Hall, the Maryland State Assembly, and local districts, who—once in office—make their political careers out of them. With hardly any opposition from Small Fascist Republicans, the liberal Big Fascists control the cityscape.
Walking into a place where patriotism and nationalism are the norm and disturbing it with communist internationalism sparks interesting discussions. The campaign workers we talked with wondered how communism, the “evil” ideology claimed by the ruling class, would work and if it ever functioned anywhere in the world. We responded that we will not achieve communism until we get rid of the capitalist system and rebuild from the bottom up with the power of the working class. We referenced the Paris commune, the Bolshevik revolution, and the workers’/peasants’ revolution in China. Explaining our nuanced opposition to the bosses’ electoral system soon turned out to be such an enormous task that some of the campaign workers turned down anything we said. Some made references to our “ancestors” that fought hard for what we have but failed to explain what those specific gains were. A candidate running for a state district approached one of our comrades, claiming that our refusal to participate in this capitalist system was the main reason that Trump was elected to office. She also talked about how Black workers are finally liberated and doing well, but that white workers are not happy and are trying to take that freedom from them. This is typical rhetoric of a puppet politician, telling the working class that white and Black workers are each other’s enemy. Progressive Labor Party’s slogan “Asian, Latin, Black and white, workers of the world unite!” boldly disputes that. And so does the history of workers’ struggle against the ruling class (read “Juneteenth: Smash racism with multiracial unity” CHALLENGE 6/17 issue). Another example of the ruling class and their puppet politicians fighting to keep their power away from the workers is religion. Some of the campaign workers were convinced that God Almighty is in charge for all the good and evil of this world and that he is the one who chooses the leaders. This idea ignores the various factions on the left, both parties and individuals, who continue to betray the working class by helping to elect the next capitalist crony.
All that said, our discussions were very productive with a majority of the campaign workers. Decades of systematic anti-communist attacks by capitalist bosses demands that our Party educate workers internationally about the history of the workers’ labor movement against slavery, racism, and the oppression of women. Communists are not for reforming capitalism or just trying to help one particular group. Communists understand that the whole capitalist system must be destroyed, and that a classless society based on “from each according to commitment, to each according to need” must be put in its place. That’s what we fight for: communism!
*****
It was my first time
There was a first time CHALLENGE distribution near a Food Lion Supermarket located next door to a Latino Community Outreach Center in Durham, North Carolina. This action was in response to the recent ICE raid at Burton Elementary School, which was three miles away from Food Lion. Two Honduran students, a brother and sister, respectively 1st grade (age six), and 5th grade (age 11) were detained and subsequently deported by ICE Nazis along with their parents back to Honduras. Personally, this was very upsetting as I’m a retired educator who had a former undocumented 5th grade student whose family fled Honduras after his father was murdered there.
The event was for thirty minutes. I explained to workers passing by that the PLP is against all forms of racism including fascist ICE. Self critically, more time must be spent outside near Food Lion to talk to workers. The area is very multiracial as Black and white workers took CHALLENGE newspapers. As the bosses fascism attacks more workers, no one will be safe. White workers will be caught up too--just look at the fascist ICE murders of two workers, Alex Pretti and Renee Good. In the short term, we in the PLP must lead protests and resistance. In the long term, we must win the international working class to communist revolution to end this capitalist hell.
*****
Mermaids make waves for water aerobics
Our senior water aerobics class has been in existence for over ten years. Every summer like clockwork, we exercise on the south side in Washington Park’s beautiful outdoor pool to get our bodies moving, lose weight, fight isolation, lower blood pressure, depression and build relationships that extend until the next time we meet again.
However, for the last two years (and what would have been this year had we not moved into action), the Chicago Park District (CPD) did not budget for our aerobics class. Meanwhile, they had no shame in announcing a pilot program to install 100 Parisian-style chairs around Buckingham Fountain located downtown near the lakefront for $500 a chair! The parks district bosses have no problem spending money when it’s in a wealthy area, but rarely if it’s contributing to Black and Latin workers’ wellbeing.
Despite the failure of the park district, we were able to get a certified water aerobics instructor to step in and instruct us for FREE until the Park District stopped him from helping us because of insurance and liability reasons. Well, the fighting “Washington Park Mermaids” were having none of this. We appeared at the CPD board meeting and demanded that they reinstate our classes this summer with a budgeted instructor. However, they only provided us with a three-day week instead of five.
Many of us have stepped forward in this fight starting with organizing ourselves, then taking our fight to the Alderwoman, then to the Park District. We will not stop. Chicago has the largest life disparity in the country from city zip codes on the south and west sides to downtown Chicago, as much as 30 years difference. The lack of funding for healthy recreation, like in our neighborhood, helps explain why.
My friends in the class recognize me as a fighter and have looked to me for leadership in this struggle. My goal now is to share CHALLENGE with my friends, keep fighting, and spread communist politics and PLP as the way to win a healthy existence for ALL workers.
*****
The crisis and potential in Cuba
I was born in Cuba, a member of the Progressive Labor Party, and I watch with great concern the situation my country is going through. Cuba is currently enduring the worst crisis in its history, caused by the oil blockade imposed by the fascist and terrorist government of the United States.
More than four months ago, it prohibited Venezuela from selling oil to Cuba following the kidnapping of Maduro, bringing everything to a standstill once again: massive blackouts, severe shortages of food and medicine, hospitals forced to cancel hundreds of surgeries, and many people cooking whatever little they can find over charcoal or firewood. There have been protests in several cities across the country, including Havana, driven by popular discontent. There have also been large marches and mass gatherings at the anti-imperialist plaza in front of the U.S. Embassy.
To this is added the threat of an imminent attack and invasion to kidnap the oldest leader of the Revolution, Raúl Castro, recently indicted in Miami for the shooting down of two small planes that violated Cuban airspace 30 years ago. Miami is where the center of the terrorist Cuban mafia operates, extremist and racist, whose members are largely from the Republican Party and the MAGA movement. Now the fascist Trump government revives this action to win the votes of that community ahead of the November midterm elections and to distract from the unpopularity of the most corrupt, racist, and fascist government in the entire history of a decaying empire.
Cuba is living through a very dangerous situation: on one hand, the economic crisis, and on the other, the threat of an imminent invasion with the arrival of an aircraft carrier in the Caribbean. I don’t know what will actually happen, but if there is an attack, some workers and the armed forces are prepared to fight and apply the doctrine of the War of All the People, implemented in 1985 and reinforced after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. If that attack on the island takes place, despite the bloodbath that will follow and the possible occupation of the territory, there will be no surrender, because from the mountains the fighting would continue as guerrilla warfare, as in Vietnam, and the war could last many years.
Cuba has the solidarity of the working class in many countries around the world, including the United States, which is already taking to the streets in protest marches against an attack on Cuba, considered a bastion of resistance and struggle.
As a communist and internationalist, I wish to go to Cuba to fight alongside the workers in any capacity, including as a nurse, to care for the wounded and save lives. For now the most important thing I can do is continue growing and building PLP to make a communist world a reality.
*****
German bosses prepare to cut Cold War-era benefits to workers
RT, 6/22–The German government is preparing to back sweeping pension reforms that would gradually raise the retirement age to 70, end popular early-retirement schemes, and introduce additional contributions to a state-run investment fund…The popular option of retiring without deductions after 45 years of contributions – known as the ‘pension at 63’ – would also be abolished. The commission said these early retirees burden pension funds and deprive the labor market of urgently needed skilled workers…The new scheme would also require workers and their employers to contribute another 2 percent of gross wages to a new state-run investment fund, on top of the current 18.6% rate.
Small Fascist judge goes after protestors, even surprising prosecutor
The Guardian, 6/23–A group of Texas protesters convicted of terrorism charges received unusually harsh sentences of at least 50 years in prison on Tuesday in a closely watched case that was widely seen as a test case of the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on dissent…The sentences handed down on Tuesday were unusually long, said Barbara McQuade, a former federal prosecutor who served as the US attorney for the eastern district of Michigan during the Obama administration. “Most often, judges will sentence defendants for separate counts concurrently. Here, it appears that the judge stacked the sentences for each count consecutively. I would have expected lengthy sentences here, more in the ballpark at 15 to 25 years, but nothing like 50 to 100 years”...
Trump demands communism!
Semafor, 6/26–President Donald Trump urged religious conservatives to prevent a “communist” victory in the midterms, telling members of the Faith and Freedom Coalition that his pro-Christian policies would be reversed if Democrats returned to power. “Communism is very easy to sell,” he said, condemning New York City’s rent stabilization board for freezing what landlords could demand from renters: “They’re basically confiscating their property… these buildings will turn into ghettos and slums.” House Speaker Mike Johnson and other GOP legislators echoed the president, describing the victories of Democratic Socialist candidates in New York’s primaries as a threat to families, businesses, and the state of Israel.
Pakistan and Afghanistan bosses fight for control of Central Asia
Al Jazeera, 6/29–Pakistan struck targets of what it claimed were hideouts of an armed group in three Afghan provinces overnight and summoned Kabul’s envoy on Monday morning, after an assault on a Sindh Rangers base in Karachi over the weekend killed three paramilitary personnel and wounded four others…A separate ground operation in Bajaur in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Sunday night killed several members of Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (JuA), including a senior commander, Tarar said, adding that large quantities of weapons and ammunition were also destroyed…
Europe begins process of re-arming for the fights ahead
Foreign Affairs, 6/29–Europeans have been humiliated, disparaged, and sidelined since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to office in 2025…Europe has come to recognize that its old paradigm—wealth without military strength, influence without sacrifice, and protection without obligation—is no longer sustainable. To dismiss Europe as permanently irrelevant is to ignore the scale and depth of the changes that are now underway. For decades, European countries reflexively aligned themselves with Washington’s priorities. They were even willing to send their soldiers to fight in U.S.-led wars…Given the Russian threat and U.S. unreliability, many Europeans now support military buildups…majorities in France, Germany, and Poland now support reinstating mandatory military service, which is already in place in countries such as Denmark, Estonia, and Switzerland.
South Africa bosses prepare to kick out migrant workers
France24, 6/29–Anti-immigrant groups in South Africa have set a June 30 “deadline” for undocumented immigrants to leave the country, planning widespread demonstrations on that date and threatening a “national shutdown” if the government does not take significant action on immigration. Anti-foreigner sentiment has been on the rise in recent months, with protests in several major cities across the country…Three people, including a Malawian man and two Mozambican nationals, were killed during recent anti-immigration protests in KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape provinces...
On June 12, as the AI and rocketship company SpaceX joined the public stock exchange, founder Elon Musk became a trillionaire–just three weeks after 8,000 layoffs at the AI company Meta, on top of job cuts for more than 100,000 other tech workers this year (Layoffs.fyi, 6/13). Here is the essence of capitalism: Obscene wealth for the very few feeds on theft from the many, while racism and sexism keep the international working class divided. The AI industry is generating mass unemployment, environmental catastrophes, and super-exploitation of Black workers in Africa who mine the minerals that AI chips require. It’s all part of the deepening crisis of capitalism, which the bosses can resolve only with fascism and world war.
A wave of protests against AI data centers shows that workers aren’t fooled by the rhetoric of parasites like Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. This righteous anger is the raw material for mass fightback and resistance against the entire capitalist system. It contains the seeds of a communist world that will put AI, and all technologies, in the hands of the working class.
Rare earths chokepoint suffocates workers
The AI boom has made the competition for rare earth minerals a battlefront in the imperialist rivalry between U.S. and Chinese bosses. Cobalt and other minerals are essential for producing the computer chips that power AI applications. Currently, China refines 90 percent of the world’s rare earths (Foreign Affairs, June) and dominates the market in Democratic Republic of Congo, where miners suffer brutal racist conditions and environmental destruction.
As a counterpunch to Trump’s 2025 tariffs, the Chinese bosses imposed stringent controls on rare earths. Within weeks, U.S. supply chains buckled, with Ford (CBS News, 6/25) and the weapons manufacturer Raytheon (Foreign Affairs, May/June) facing rare earth shortages. Conflicts over the AI future are also intensifying the inter-imperialist fight over Taiwan, where Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) controls 72 percent of global computer chip production and an even higher share of the advanced chips needed for AI applications. Control over Taiwan and the strategically vital Taiwan Strait remains a flashpoint between the liberal finance capital Big Fascist bosses of the U.S. and the Chinese state capitalists. The contest could erupt into world war at any time, with millions of workers’ lives on the line.
Fascism rears its head
The rise of AI is accelerating both the global capitalist crisis and the rise of fascism. Economic booms and busts are fundamental to the profit system. As the bosses’ intensify their exploitation through layoffs and wage cuts, workers can consume less and less of the products we create.
This leads to periodic crises of overproduction–and all workers, especially Black and Latin and women workers, pay the price. The bosses’ feverish investment into AI infrastructure–JPMorganChase projects $5 trillion in AI spending by 2030–is reminiscent of the “dot-com” crash of the late 1990s and the Great Recession in 2008-2009, where rampant speculation led to economic devastation for the global working class.
Meanwhile, the capitalist rulers use AI tools to intimidate and control an increasingly desperate and angry working class. Flock AI makes cameras that track license plates and recognize faces, with data sent directly to police departments around the country. Palantir, an AI company specializing in surveillance, contracts with ICE and with the U.S., Dutch, and Spanish militaries. The openly fascist Israeli military uses AI-powered drones to target and murder workers in Palestine and Lebanon (Haaretz, 6/5).
The bosses also use AI to strip away the most powerful weapon in the world: workers’ class consciousness. AI promotes social isolation and inundates workers with racist and sexist algorithms–it can stifle our critical, materialist understanding of reality itself. In this period of repression and growing fascism, workers and youth are encouraged to turn to a “thinking” machine for support instead of to one another. Tragically, one teenager committed suicide with the “support” of ChatGPT. As the crisis of capitalism continues to worsen, more people will be forced to use AI in place of human education and healthcare. In short, outsourcing thinking leaves workers more vulnerable to fascist ideas.
Communist AI will reflect the collective intelligence of workers
As graduating students greeted tech CEO speakers with boos, as workers trash Flock AI cameras, as communities wage pitched battles against AI data centers, we can see that the working class understands how capitalist technology is being turned against us. This militant class consciousness needs to be organized by Progressive Labor Party, a communist party with a long-term plan for leading the international working class to revolution.
Artificial intelligence is a tool that now pumps out absurd profits for the bosses while impoverishing workers and promoting racism, fascism, and imperialist war. But like any tool, its impact is defined by who controls it–and for what purpose. Under communism, workers will decide which uses of AI can benefit our class, within the limits of available resources, and which should be rejected. The deciding factor will not be profit, which we’ll abolish, but the potential for serving the needs of our class. Once workers embrace our own power and ability, we’ll use our collective working-class intelligence to accumulate knowledge and run society for all time.
