October 1, 2026In
addressing Marxian ecology and the critique of the fetishism of so-called
artificial intelligence or AI, it is important to place this in the context of
the present age of accumulation under monopoly-finance capital. The rise of AI
capital does not represent, as contemporary ideology would have us believe, a
new, technologically determined, rationally organized capitalist system, to
which it is useless to offer resistance.1 Rather, today’s alienated AI capital constitutes an
irrational shift from order to disorder in human ecological and social
relations on the local, global, and planetary levels. Not only does
computational capitalism promise to disrupt the entire work environment,
pointing to growing joblessness and increased exploitation, exacerbating class
and imperial polarization on a global basis, but we are seeing, even more
ominously, a further rupture in the human relation to the earth of which
humanity is itself an emergent part. 
Biospheric Boundaries wiith safe operating space - 2025. Illustration showing the crossing of seven of the nine planetary boundaries that constitute the safe operating space for humanity. Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Boris Sakschewski and Levke Caesar et al., Planetary Health Check 2025: A Scientific Assessment of the State of the Planet, stockholmreslience.org. The rise
of AI capital thus points to a further acceleration of the shift from order to
chaos in the human social metabolism with nature endemic to capitalism. What
Karl Marx conceived of as the metabolic rift, now operative on a planetary
scale, is visible in heightened entropic disorder in the Earth System,
presenting a habitability crisis for global humanity and life itself.
Capitalism, Marx emphasized, is a social order marked by an uncontrollable
drive to accumulation: “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the
prophets!” It accepts no boundaries to its expansion, even those posed by life
itself.2 It is not the new hyperscale
digital technology, representing new forces of production, that is proving so
extremely dangerous in the present historical moment, but rather this same
technology when combined with the social relations of capital—representing a
system committed to accumulation without end.
This
reality contradicts the fetishized notion of AI, which sees it as pointing
toward a unified technocratic society, constituting a highpoint of capitalist
organization, a new reified reality superseding human knowledge and activity.
It is presented as the genesis of a “transhumanist” world in which human
intelligence would be supplanted by intelligent machines. As high-tech
billionaire Marc Andreesen says, “Combine technology and markets and you
get…the techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation,
growth, and abundance.”6
In recent years, AI has come to be seen as providing “scalar” effects through
massive investment in AI cloud computing and data centers, leading to the ever
greater concentration of capital and power. It is said that AI will eventually
solve all of our ecological problems, including climate change, while providing
virtually unlimited social benefits to the world’s population, a new,
hyperorganized “singularity.”7
The
Myth of a New, Hyperorganized AI Capitalism
Here it
is useful to recall that one of the chief myths of Cold War
ideology—rationalized most fully by Western Marxist philosophical tradition in
the period after the Second World War—was the complete acceptance of the notion
of an “organized capitalism” or a self-regulating technocratic order, free from
material crises. This view was advocated not only within the mainstream, but
also within the broad critical theory tradition and was espoused in various
ways by such thinkers as Friedrich Pollock, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse,
Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jürgen Habermas. Its strongest advocate, however, was the
French philosopher and socialist humanist Lucien Goldmann.8 If Cold War liberalism in the
period after the Second World War theorized the stability of capitalism, it was
left to the critical theorists of the day to give such notions as organized
capitalism a real legitimacy that the establishment ideology was unable to
provide.
In his
1966 Preface to The Human Sciences and Philosophy, Goldmann adopted what is
known as the “human exemptionalist” position that under capitalism humanity had
completely conquered nature.9
“For some centuries now,” he wrote, “we have had one value that is changeless
and is shared by all social groups, the control of nature. This value has
permitted the construction of an important corpus of physico-chemical sciences
that are at once ahistorical, non-dialectical and extremely efficacious in an
operational sense.”10 Writing four years after the
publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which helped launch the modern
environmental movement and pointed to the fatal consequences of the continued
capitalist degradation of nature, Goldmann’s pronouncements with respect to the
absolute control of nature were nothing less than myopic.11
Still,
based on the notion of domination of the earthly environment, Goldmann went on
to pronounce that organized capitalism had achieved a similar domination in the
social realm. Economic, social, and political crises, and the class struggle
were now surmounted, as was the present-day significance of history. “Crisis
capitalism,” associated with the growth of monopoly capital, was now superseded
by organized capitalism. “By the term ‘organized capitalism,’” he declared:
we mean the contemporary period which,
through the creation of regulative mechanisms owing to state interventions, has
made possible a continual economic growth and the diminution, not to say total
elimination, of internally generated social and political crises. The
intellectual movement corresponding to organized capitalism is to be found in
the replacement of a philosophical tradition concerned with the problems of
anxiety and death (or, conversely, with historical and transcendental hope) by
a scientistic, rationalistic and ahistorical mode of thinking.12
As
István Mészáros wrote, in response to Goldmann, the illusion of an organized,
crisis-free capitalism and the prospect of continuous unhindered growth was
only possible because leading Marxists in the West were concerned simply with
the “little more than ten percent of the world’s population” in the so-called
advanced capitalist world. And even then, their view was truncated, as they
failed to see the uncontrollability of capitalism, and thus the permanence of
conditions generating political-economic and ecological crises.13
The
uncontrollability of capitalism—its instability, destructiveness, and
historically transitory character—was in fact crucial to Marx and Frederick
Engels’s argument in The Communist Manifesto. The first half of Part One of the
Manifesto was a panegyric to the bourgeoisie, emphasizing the revolutionary
transition from feudalism to capitalism. Halfway through Part One, however,
Marx and Engels, drawing on the classic story of the sorcerer’s apprentice as
developed by Lucian and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, indicated that, “Modern
bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of
property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and
of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the power
of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”14 In the remainder of Part One and
in Part Two of the Manifesto they pointed to the periodic capitalist economic
crises, the division between town and country (associated with ecological
crises), the enormous inequality generated by the system, the superexploitation
of women, and, above all, to the proletariat as the gravedigger of the system.
Capital in its relentless pursuit of accumulation leaves uncontrollable crises,
destruction, and death in its wake, while giving rise to new forces of
resistance and revolution, emerging unlooked-for from the “nether world.”
Today
despite the disorder all around us, the myth of organized capitalism or
“technocratic society,” as Goldmann also called it, while originally a product
of Cold War ideology, persists, diverting attention from both the destructive
nature of the system and from the potential revolutionary role of human agency.15 We are told that we are in a
Fourth Industrial Revolution, and that the new technology is in the driver’s
seat, leading to a new, fatalistic reality, to which we must simply succumb.16 AI is the new god in the
machine. The current AI fetish feeds an economic and technological determinism,
as if society as a whole were simply the result of the new forces of
production, while the existing social relations of production are considered so
completely natural and inviolable as to become invisible. All of this
reinforces the notion of a self-regulating market beyond human control (though
clearly in the hands of giant corporations), removing all possibility of
meaningful social, economic, and ecological struggle. Yet, viewed from a
classical historical-materialist perspective, the ideology of organized
capitalism—now paraded before our eyes as a hyperorganized AI capitalism—is
nothing but the ultimate attempt to remove human agency from the picture, as if
the whole world were to be governed by automatons.
The
grand illusion of a deterministic AI capitalism that when unified with
monopoly-finance capital constitutes the end of history is negated today, not
simply by persistent economic and social crises and the permanence of class
struggle, but even more ominously by capitalism’s exterminist, ecocidal
tendencies. With the relentless corporate focus on the exponential accumulation
of capital as the only end, the entire Earth System is being shifted from order
to chaos. Earth System analysis within natural science sees the earth as a far
from equilibrium thermodynamic system, in which the biogeochemical cycles of
the planet uniquely provide a supporting environment for life. Capitalism,
however, represents an extreme version of a dissipative system expropriating
materials and energy from nature in ways that promote the unlimited
accumulation of capital, while creating rifts in the planetary ecological
cycles essential to life and thus accelerating disorder (entropic degradation).17 The inevitable result is a
society that maximizes entropy, as exemplified by the carbon rift—the
accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil
fuels—leading to climate change and endangering billions of people and
innumerable other species.18
The
Metabolic Rift and Entropic Accumulation
In order
to understand the overall process of capitalism’s degradation of the
environment, it is useful to look at Marx’s theory of metabolic rift. Building
on the agricultural chemistry of Justus von Liebig, Marx argued that under
industrialized capitalist agriculture soil nutrients, such as nitrogen,
phosphorus, and potassium, were being removed from fields in the food and fiber
sent to the new urban centers sometimes hundreds and even thousands of miles
away, where they ended up as waste polluting air and water in the cities,
rather than being returned to replenish the soil. This overall process
disrupted the reproductive cycle of the soil and generated unusable waste in
the cities. It thus served to accelerate entropic degradation, or the natural
process (stemming from the second law of thermodynamics) in which usable energy
is changed into unusable heat with the loss of the ability to do work,
representing a shift from order to disorder in the physical world. The result
of the disruption in the soil cycle was to undermine what Marx called the
“universal metabolism of nature.”19 Marx quite properly saw the break in the soil cycle
associated with industrial agriculture under capitalism as violating the basic
laws of physics, leading to “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process
of social metabolism” between humanity and the earth. In this way, he argued,
“the negative, i.e. destructive side” of capital’s relation to nature was
revealed.20
Our
whole understanding of the present-day Earth System crisis follows this same
pattern. Capitalism by the nature of its accumulation process, which drives the
entire system, is irrevocably geared to maximizing disorder (entropy
production) in the natural world, not only by virtue of the scale of its
activities, but due to the systemic ruptures in the biogeochemical cycles of
the earth associated with its linear pursuit of exchange value at the expense
of use value and natural reproduction. Indeed, the onset in the 1950s of the
Anthropocene epoch (a concept that remains scientifically important even if
officially rejected by the conservative International Union of Geological
Sciences) is understood today as constituting an “anthropogenic rift” in the Earth
System.21
Capitalism’s
innate drive as an entropy maximizer, forever accelerating disorder, can be
seen in what we can call the Jevons dynamic.22 The famous Jevons paradox, named
after William Stanley Jevons, is the notion that increased efficiency in the
throughput of energy and materials, decreasing the physical inputs needed to
obtain a given output—for example, an improved steam engine that needs less
coal to run at a given level—leads not to conservation of resources, but rather
to a greater demand for resource inputs. Whatever savings in energy/material
throughput are achieved, along with the attendant decreases in cost, are used
not for conservation but for expansion.23 We can see the Jevons paradox as operative today in
all attempts to decrease carbon emissions through gains in relative
decarbonization, the result of increases in efficiency, which are, however,
constantly outweighed by the expansion in overall fossil fuel use—with the
result that the absolute carbon emissions keep on rising.
But
while Jevons saw this as a paradox, still as a marginalist (or early
neoclassical) economist, he failed to trace the problem to the accumulation of
capital as the historic cause. What the Jevons dynamic (no longer to be seen as
a mere paradox) tells us is that the laws of motion of capital are antagonistic
to conservation.24 Capitalism is at its base an
extreme-dissipative system that expropriates as much as it can from nature at a
given level of development, with little or no concern for ecological
reproduction, and pours its increasingly toxic effluents back into the environment,
fouling its own nest. The system’s environmental destruction and degradation is
evident not only in effects of the constant increases in scale associated with
the accumulation of capital, but also in the disruption of all of the earth’s
ecosystems and planetary ecological cycles, none of which is included in the
financial bottom line. All human actions that would be restorative of the
environment overall are thus outside the modality of capitalist production. As
Marx wrote, with respect to the conservation of forests: “The development of
civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the
destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their
conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.”25 In the twenty-first century,
“entropy accumulation,” or increasing disorder induced by global
monopoly-finance capital, is having negative, destructive effects on the entire
Earth System, destabilizing the planet as a safe home for humanity.26
AI,
Monopoly Capital, and the Planetary Rift
If
capitalism by its nature and logic enhances the metabolic rift and entropic
degradation, moving the world from order to disorder in an uncontrollable
fashion, it is necessary to explain how monopoly capitalism and with it AI
further accelerate this destructive tendency. As deeply exploitative of
humanity and as expropriative of nature as capitalism was in its ascendant
freely competitive stage, the very scarcity of capital and resources that it
confronted led to a certain degree of economizing. Nineteenth-century
ragpickers scrounged for rags with which to manufacture paper, not as an
environmentalist action, but as a major recycling industry driven by resource
scarcity.27 In Charles Dickens’s novel Our
Mutual Friend, ownership of a dust heap, or garbage dump, entails unimaginable
riches due to the materials that can be reused, personified by the remarkable
Dickensian character Nicodemus Boffin, the golden dustman.28 In the Victorian age, broken
glass was fixed, shoes were repairable, clothes were mended and remade, and
containers were reused, reflecting the circular flow of life.29
In
contrast, under late monopoly capitalism, which is prone to overaccumulation,
production is geared to disposable goods and waste on a gargantuan scale, and
the reuse and recycling of materials is relatively minor. Water is increasingly
drunk out of plastic bottles that contain toxic elements and are rarely
recycled, ending up in landfills. Even electronic goods are thrown away or
trashed at a rapid rate, their “lifetime” having expired after a few years.
There were 62 million tonnes of e-waste globally (most of it toxic) disposed of
in 2022, almost doubling that of 2010, enough to fill 1.55 million 40-tonne
trucks that could stretch end-to-end around the earth’s Equator.30 Driven by the relative cheapness
of raw materials in the petrochemical age and the near complete dominance of
exchange value over use value, most of what is made and purchased is subject to
rapid planned obsolescence. Production at every level is ultimately reliant on
the maximization of the throughput of energy and materials and their fast
disposal in the environment.31
Social and environmental costs are viewed by the system as mere negative
externalities. Such externalities are treated as invisible and unaccounted for
in capitalist accounting because falling outside the market.32 Under monopoly capitalism, where
overaccumulation—or the absorption, as opposed to the generation, of economic
surplus—is the major economic problem, conspicuous consumption, waste, and
destruction become functional in what is an increasingly irrational system.33
The
consolidation of monopoly capitalism under U.S. hegemony after the Second World
War coincided with the Great Acceleration of environmental impacts associated
with the Anthropocene, marking the growing metabolic rift between humanity and
nature.34 Today, this is evident in the
crossing of seven of the planetary boundaries defining the Earth System as a
safe place for humanity, including the atmospheric carbon boundary.35 From the standpoint of
neoclassical economics, however, the destructive, entropic effects, which
include rifts in the biogeochemical cycles of the planet, are external to the
“circular flow” of exchange value within the capitalist economic system, and
thus of no significance. The entropy law itself (the second law of
thermodynamics) is conspicuously absent from neoclassical economics.36 Largely ignored in this
framework is not only the reality that the capital accumulation process under
monopoly capitalism unceasingly promotes climate change through its endemic
reliance on fossil fuels, but also the fact that the system by its very nature
blocks any serious attempt to alleviate the problem, since this would
inevitably go against the logic of capital itself.
While
capitalism has generated a planetary metabolic rift, the emergence of AI
capital is propelling the world even faster from a state of order into one of
chaos. This is clear in the work of Kate Crawford, senior principal researcher
at Microsoft Research, research professor at the University of Southern
California at Annenberg, and author of Atlas of AI.37 Drawing on both Liebig and Marx,
Crawford contends that “AI’s mineral demands,” obtained globally under some of
the most exploitative conditions imaginable, are “driving another metabolic
rift, extracting the minerals that took billions of years to form in the
earth’s crust in deep time for AI chips that are used generally for one or two
years.”38 Gargantuan data centers that can
be as large as several times the size of Manhattan or as big as Washington, DC,
are being constructed, using energy and water at unprecedented rates.39
In order
to perceive the full tempo of this technological revolution, which has occurred
in the blink of an eye, one has to recognize that ChatGPT, which set off the
large-language model generative AI craze, materialized only four years ago, in
2022. By the first quarter of 2025, capital spending by the four “Great Houses
of AI,” Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Alphabet/Google, and Meta/Facebook,
accounted for 80 percent of the increase in final private domestic demand in
the United States. The spending primarily on data centers—now sometimes
referred to in the industry as “AI factories”—by these four hyperscaler
corporations rose from $150 billion in 2022 to $360 billion in 2025 and is
projected to equal $650 billion in 2026. In July 2026, both Amazon and Microsoft
announced that their capital spending had increased by 69 percent over the
previous year. Projections of worldwide AI-linked expenditures (covering all
aspects from chips to data centers) for 2026 now run as high as $2.5 trillion.
The global AI expansion has been referred to by Rob Wachen, cofounder of the
microchip firm Etched, as “the largest scale infrastructure build-out in
history.” At present, the world has about 20 million AI chips crammed into data
centers globally. By 2028, this is expected to top 200 million. Google alone is
said to now have about four times as many AI chips as all of China.40
Besides
the four Great Houses of AI in the United States, each with deep pockets based
on their other monopolistic operations as well as their access to vast amounts
of credit, a number of other U.S. hyperscalers are rapidly boosting their
computational capital operations. OpenAI, in ventures heavily fueled by debt,
is committed to spending $600 billion on AI infrastructure by 2030, including
hundreds of billions of dollars of purchases from Oracle for computing services
and Nvidia for chips.41 Anthropic, which rents four data
centers from Microsoft and has its own AI chatbot, Claude, has taken on a core
role for the U.S. military in target selection, missile defense, and
cybersecurity in the context of the War on Iran. (Although Anthropic declared
that it had certain ethical guardrails preventing its use in fully autonomous
weapons, its models were nonetheless employed by the U.S. military in targeting
in the War on Iran, since already deeply embedded in Pentagon systems.)42
This
massive AI infrastructure buildout is occurring alongside the failure of
productivity and profits to rise in tandem with data center investments and
stock market capitalization. AI-linked stocks now account for 45 percent of the
total capitalization of the S&P 500.43 Much of the AI expansion is now based on record
borrowing as the hyperscalers have used up all of their free cash.44 This signals an AI bubble that
is likely to burst. An economic meltdown on this scale could have immeasurable,
unforeseeable effects.45
It is
often argued in economic circles that massive buildouts during industrial
revolutions, such as the railroad mania in the nineteenth century, have always
resulted in financial crises “before the benefits of the technology were
realized,” while the epoch-making innovation itself continues to advance.46 However, the earlier Wall Street
notion that a financial crisis associated with AI would look like the
short-term dot-com crisis of the late 1990s is now receding before the
increasingly prevalent view that a more proper analogy is the Great Financial
Crisis/Great Recession of 2007–2009, which threatened a full scale meltdown of
the capitalist system.47
Most
serious of all the ramifications of AI are the ecological effects. Accelerated
AI development points to an enhanced metabolic rift, a new kind of “Raubbau” or
robbery system, in the terms of Liebig and Marx.48 Already in 2025, AI data centers
consumed roughly as much electricity as Germany, the world’s third-largest
economy. U.S. data centers are expected to account for 20 percent of the
country’s electricity consumption by 2035. Hyperscale data centers require
cooling systems that consume millions of gallons of water daily, with the water
demand increasing exponentially with the number and size of the data centers.49 U.S. data centers used 17.4
billion gallons of water in 2023, equal to that of around 160,000 households,
while this is expected to rise to 74 billion gallons by 2028. According to the
United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health, by
2030, global freshwater usage of AI data centers is projected to equal the
amount of water needed to meet the annual domestic needs of the 1.3 billion
people of Sub-Saharan Africa.50
The new
massive AI data centers are accelerating carbon emissions. Microsoft alone has
increased its carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent since 2020, with the
result that its total emissions now approach those of Denmark. Bloomberg New
Finance projects that there will likely be a 10 percent rise in carbon
emissions from the power sector worldwide in the coming decade, with data
center electricity demand expected to more than triple.51
The AI
boom has largely put a stop to any pretense of serious climate mitigation or
reduction of carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 in the United States and
other countries in the capitalist core. Instead, we are seeing the reactivation
of coal plants that were previously closed and vast new developments of oil and
gas pipelines, particularly in North America.52 Fantastic claims that new
AI-organized green capitalism will reduce carbon emissions through greater
energy efficiency are shown to be little more than hyped-up futuristic
corporate propaganda.53
Related
to the AI metabolic rift and the tendency of capitalism to accelerate entropic
degradation is what is known in the technical literature as “AI autophagy”
(after dysfunctional metabolic autophagy, or self-eating in cells). AI, which
produces its own dysfunctional “slop” full of phantasmagoria and uncontrollable
hallucinations, inexorably ends up ingesting more and more of its own synthetic
data, in effect eating itself, as in the ancient myth of Erysichthon as
presented by Ovid, leading to what is referred to as “model collapse” and
qualitative decline.54 In July 2026, two OpenAI
artificial intelligence models in the training stage went rogue and hacked into
a real company, Hugging Face (which was forced to rely on a Chinese open-source
AI model to defend itself), pointing to the insatiable, uncontrollable
character of some of the AI systems being constructed.55
Since AI
technology has developed under monopoly capitalism primarily as a system of
power, its main objectives are exploitation and the expansion of exchange
value, demanding ever greater repression on both a local and a global scale. It
promises to: (1) provide new addictive computational products for consumption
(generating cognitive dependence), (2) massively displace labor, (3) carry out
surveillance of all populations in their most minute daily activities, and (4)
enhance military (and police) operations and the use of force through the
development of autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons systems capable of acting
on their own, beyond direct human control. As Crawford writes, “the latest
metabolic rift between AI and humans threatens multiple forms of cascading
failure: moral collapse, financial collapse, ecological collapse, and,
depending on what you believe, cognitive collapse.”56
Nevertheless,
in the United States so far all attempts to regulate AI, despite a groundswell
movement against data center expansion, have been opposed by the federal
government. AI capital remains in the hands of a tiny oligarchy of billionaires
and centimillionaires and their hangers-on, to use for their own inequitable,
iniquitous, and irrational ends.
AI under
monopoly-finance capitalism is ultimately a tool in the class war. Estimates
suggest that the application of AI technology in industry could eliminate
nearly 100 million U.S. jobs in a decade.57 Yet, like all previous attempts to displace labor
under capitalism, this also means the replacement of good jobs with bad ones.
Computational capitalism relies on the superexploitation of workers mining
cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, on countless data trainers earning
abysmally low wages in countries such as Kenya and India, and on a host of
poorly paid gig/platform workers around the world.58 What is subject to displacement,
in contrast, is the sphere of better-paid—including white-collar—jobs. This
will generate new levels of proletarianization and a rising reserve army of
unemployed/underemployed, undermining the position of employed workers and
widening the gradients of power. Employed labor will be faced with increased
degradation of work. Not only is the hyperautomation generated by AI replacing
workers, but the decline in conditions on the job can be seen in Amazon
warehouses, where relentless, robotized speed-ups have resulted in a rate of
injury that is now about three times the national average.59
The
logic of AI algorithms under monopoly capitalism thus points not to a more
ordered reality (even if in some ways a more regimented one) but to an
uncontrollable breakdown in those environmental and social relations that
sustain ecological and social life.
Entropic
degradation, as Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine argued, is
correlated with irreversible processes, marking the temporal nature of reality.
Yet, life itself is the proof of the capacity to produce a degree of order
(even if by means of dissipative systems). Moreover, agency is present in both
nature and history. The world, in this sense, is not to be treated as a
function of a simple determinism (the mechanical cause and effect of Newtonian
physics), but chance and contingency, opening up new possibilities, are
fundamental realities arising in particular historical instances. Where
Epicurus’s swerve and the breaking the bonds of fate (foedera fati) occurs,
Prigogine declares, we find “the beginning of nature,” evolution, and history.60 Both determinism and freedom are
elements of human existence. Ecological degradation and disorder, as in the
metabolic rift brought on by capitalism’s uncontrollable drive to accumulation,
has to be opposed by collective organization from below, aimed at sustainable
human development, a world of substantive equality and ecological
sustainability. The irrationality of AI capitalism, by any substantively
rational measure, is not an expression of an unassailable reality but an
invitation to revolt.
China’s
Alternative AI Regime
Where
the development of the forces of production, both in terms of quantity and
quality, are concerned, social relations are crucial. We know from the example
of China that AI can be developed and regulated on quite different bases, more
in line with social needs. Even at this early stage, it is clear that the
governance of AI under socialism with Chinese characteristics is vastly
different from the regime of monopoly-finance capital in the United States.
China rivals the United States in AI development. China’s DeepSeek AI models
are more energy efficient and cost effective than U.S. chatbots, while it seems
probable that China’s ecocivilizational approach will place limits on the
operation of the Jevons dynamic thereby preventing uncontrolled creative destruction.
In July 2026, China unveiled two new generative AI models, both of which are
comparable to U.S. generative AI systems, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 and Alibaba’s
Qwen3.8-Max. In contrast to financialized U.S. capital, where the object is to
monopolize AI models and charge for their use, the Chinese AI large language
models are open-source and “open-weight” (standing for the billions of numbers
fixed during training) and made freely available to be downloaded anywhere in
the world.61 China has refrained from pouring
resources into data center construction on anything like the level of the
United States, which currently has about 5,500 data centers, while China has
less than a tenth that number.62 Beijing has focused its machine-learning technology
more directly on manufacturing, logistics, energy, public finance, and public
services, as opposed to the U.S. emphasis on chatbot development. AI tools are
used heavily in hospitals, where a “simpler ‘narrow AI’” is employed and
designed for specific tasks.63
Although AI in China displaces labor, there are stringent safeguards to protect
workers. Employees cannot be terminated at will as a result of the introduction
of the new technology. Existing contracts with workers must be honored.
Companies must deal with the workers through processes of “consultation,
negotiation, training, reasonable reassignment, or lawful compensation.”64
In its
“people-centered” development path, China has introduced targeted rules for the
products of deep synthesis technologies (known as deepfakes), which require
conspicuous labeling or watermarking to ensure transparency, reliability, and
accuracy. Any company wanting to offer generative AI has to register its
algorithms with the Cyberspace Administration of China, the main regulatory
body. All major bodies of data that developers wish to include in their AI
models have to be randomly sampled for discriminatory, antisocial content.
Regulations are designed to protect individuals, who retain “rights of
portrait, reputation, honor, privacy, and personal information.”65 (In contrast, U.S. AI capital,
in the case of Elon Musk’s AI company, SpaceXAI, went so far as to oppose the
Minnesota state government legislation outlawing the AI “nudification” of
individuals—in which young girls were being targeted by deepfakes with sexually
explicit renderings of their bodies against their will—on the trumped up
grounds that the statute interfered with free speech.66) Beijing’s regulations are more
stringent for large language models offered to the public in contrast to
machine learning within industry meant to support innovation. The social
character of China’s approach, while admittedly raising a myriad of difficult
issues, contrasts to the predatory development of the technology in the United
States, where the federal government has not only refused to regulate
monopolistic AI capital but has attempted to prevent the state governments from
doing so.
China
has played the leading role in seeking to promote worldwide AI governance. This
has included its support for the establishment of the World Artificial
Intelligence Cooperation Organization, established in July 2026. In his July
17, 2026, speech at the World AI Conference, Chinese President Xi Jinping
presented four “observations” on AI governance:
First, we should adhere to the principle
of openness and win-win and boost innovation driven development…[since] AI is
moving from the digital to the physical world…. Second, we should strengthen
risk awareness and ensure that AI is secure and controllable…. Third, we should
encourage inclusiveness and promote mutual learning between civilizations….
Fourth, we should advocate solidarity and improve global governance. AI is an
invaluable asset that encapsulates humanity’s collective wisdom.67
Xi’s
four observations suggest a path in which enhanced machine-learning or AI
technology would be universally shared and placed under global governance
rules. He states: “We often say in China, ‘A single string cannot make music,
and a single tree does not make a forest.’ AI development should not be a solo
performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation.”68 This proposal is all the more
significant given that it emanates from one of the two leading countries in the
development of AI technology globally. Putting these principles into practice,
China is already freely sharing the most advanced AI technology with the entire
world as open-source and open-weight.
Not
surprisingly, U.S. monopoly tech firms and the U.S. government are condemning
China’s practice of openly sharing AI technology globally as a threat to U.S.
world dominance and even to the U.S. domestic market itself, leading to demands
for AI protectionism.69 This induced Dean Ball, formerly
an official in the Trump administration and now head of strategic futures for
OpenAI, to declare that China presents the specter of “full AI Communism” in
which AI becomes a “public good.”70
Notable
in Xi’s July 2026 speech on AI was the complete absence of any reference to the
environment and the Chinese notion of ecological civilization. Training large
frontier AI models, particularly large language models directed at generative
AI, requires massive data centers, with enormous throughputs of minerals,
energy, and water. All this places vast strains on the environment. This is
naturally true of generative AI in China as well as the United States. Chinese
AI models need far less electricity, only 10 to 40 percent of U.S. models, to
produce comparable results, and so are far more energy efficient. Still,
Beijing estimates that AI data centers will take up about 6 percent of its
electricity use by 2030. And while China has introduced the world’s first
wind-powered underwater data center that relies on natural ocean cooling, its
massive land-based data centers remain dependent on millions of gallons of
freshwater for cooling.71
This then poses a major challenge to China’s effort to build an ecological
civilization.
The
danger that AI poses to the planetary environment depends to a large extent on
whether scaled-up mass market consumption (high-volume “inference”) takes over
as the dominant demand “load” on data centers, leading to exponentially rising
mineral, energy, and water throughput. This in turn depends on the nature of AI
use itself and its regulation. In the age of planetary crisis, social controls
and rational limits are essential if only to preserve the planet as a safe home
for humanity (and innumerable other species). There is no doubt that the new
technology can be used for ecological ends. For example, Brazil’s Landless
Workers’ Movement has launched its Artificial Intelligence for Agrarian Reform
and Agroecology, an open-source AI tool/platform aimed at collective
organization.72 Nevertheless, at present, the
environmental costs of the dominant AI capital models, which are rapidly
accelerating the current planetary ecological crisis, far outweigh any
conceivable environmental benefits. Caught up in the uncontrollable expansion
of capitalism in search of ever greater monetary wealth, AI technology points
to catastrophe. Here, as in other areas, therefore, the precautionary principle
should come into play.73
The
Sorcerer’s Apprentice and AI
What is
certain is that AI under the regime of monopoly-finance capital, left to its
own devices, is, in Marx and Engels’s words, “like the sorcerer, who is no
longer able to control the power of the nether world whom he has called up by
his spells.” What appears at first sight as immediately positive becomes, when
harnessed to uncontrollable capital accumulation, competition, and
concentration, a veritable vehicle for destruction: order turned to disorder.
We are not entering a stable new age of hyperorganized capitalism, as Goldmann
or Marcuse might be thought to have foreseen, but rather a new,
capitalist-engendered global disorder in which humanity, according to climate
science, is headed ever more rapidly toward a planetary “point of no return.”74 Still, it remains possible to
resist and safeguard the future through a resurgent revolutionary humanity.
Here the exercise of social control by the associated producers, a process
starting from the microcosms and extending to the macrocosms, is now more necessary
than ever.75 The emergent struggle of labor
and environmentalists against the gargantuan AI data centers is certain to
contribute to the overall formation of a new environmental proletariat—in which
lies our hope.
In the
irrational, disordered, and destructive world of the present, the historic
choice of socialism or barbarism, made famous by Rosa Luxemburg, no longer
exists. Monopoly-finance capital has devolved to the point that we are faced
today with the choice between socialism or exterminism, a reality made even
more ominous with the development of uncontrollable AI capital, accelerating
the ecological rift. Since the total destruction of humanity is no alternative,
socialism, that is, a society of substantive equality and ecological
sustainability, constitutes the only possible future. It can be expected that
hundreds of millions, even billions, of people will reenter the struggle for
humanity and the earth on this basis alone.
Notes
1.
↩ On the tendency to
see AI as introducing an all-dominant form of organization that is virtually
unstoppable, see Adam Satariano, Paul Mozur, Jacqueline Gu, and Cade Metz, “The
Impending, Inescapable Deluge of A.I.,” New York Times, July 29, 2026; Marc Andreesen,
“The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” Andreesen Horowitz, October, 16, 2023,
a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto; Alex Morris, “What Is Up with These
Tech Billionaires?,” Rolling Stone, July 14, 2025; Kohei Saito,
“Techno-Capitalism and the Perfect Dictatorship,” Georgetown University Global
Dialogues, May 20, 2025, globaldialogues.georgetown.edu; Raúl Ornelas, “AI as a
Transformation of Capitalism’s Productive Paradigm,” Alai (Latin-American
Information Agency), February 22, 2026, alai.info.
2.
↩ Karl Marx, Capital,
vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 742; John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Grundrisse
and the Ecological Contradictions of Capitalism,” in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse,
ed. Marcello Musto (London: Routledge, 2008), 100–2.
3.
↩ Karen Hao, Empire of
AI (London: Penguin, 2026).
4.
↩ Karen Hao quoted in
Ketan Joshi, The AI Climate Hoax: Behind the Curtain of How Big Tech
Greenwashes Impacts, STAND.earth/Beyond Fossil Fuels/Climate Action Against
Disinformation/Green Screen Coalition, Friends of the Earth/Green Web
Foundation, February 16, 2026, stand.earth.org, 12.
5.
↩ Pieter Verdegem,
“Dismantling AI Capitalism: The Commons as an Alternative to the Power
Concentration of Big Tech,” AI and Society 39 (April 9, 2024): 727–37.
6.
↩ Andreesen, “The
Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” See the critique in Martin Hart-Landsberg, “AI and
the Economy: A Losing Bet for Working People,” The Bullet, February 20, 2026,
socialistproject.ca.
7.
↩ Robert J. Szczerba,
“Open AI CEO Sam Altman Says the AI Singularity Is Here. Is He Right?,” Forbes,
July 27, 2026.
8.
↩ Lucien Goldmann, The
Human Sciences and Philosophy (London: Johnathan Cape, 1969), 9–22; Herbert
Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 13; Jean-Paul
Sartre, Life/Situations (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 171; Jürgen Habermas,
Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), 17; Theodor Adorno, “Late
Capitalism or Industrial Society?: Opening Address to the Sixteenth German
Sociological Congress (1968),” Marxists Internet Archive, marxists.org;
Friedrich Pollock, “State Capitalism,” in The Essential Frankfurt School
Reader, eds. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Urizen Books, 1978),
71–94.
9.
↩ On human
exemptionalism, see John Bellamy Foster, “Eco-Marxism and Prometheus Unbound,”
Monthly Review 77, no. 6 (November 2025): 5–6.
10.
↩ Goldmann, The Human
Sciences and Philosophy, 16.
11.
↩ Rachel Carson,
Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).
12.
↩ Goldmann, The Human
Sciences and Philosophy, 10–11. It is perhaps no coincidence that Goldmann was
the sole socialist invited to what became the founding conference of French
Theory/postmodernism at Johns Hopkins University in October 1966. See John Bellamy
Foster, “French Theory in the Intellectual Cold War,” in Aymeric Monville and
Gabriel Rockhill (in conversation with Jennifer Ponce de León), Requiem for
French Theory (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2026), 9–14.
13.
↩ István Mészáros, The
Power of Ideology (New York: New York University Press, 1989), 63, 482–83;
István Mészáros, The Work of Sartre (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012),
258–59; István Mészáros, “The Uncontrollability of Globalizing Capital,”
Monthly Review 49, no. 9 (February 1998): 27–37.
14.
↩ Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1964), 11; John Bellamy Foster, “The Global Structural Crisis of Capital,”
Monthly Review 78, no. 3 (July–August 2026): 5–7.
15.
↩ Goldmann, The Human
Sciences and Philosophy, 13; Andreesen, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.”
16.
↩ Klaus Schwab, The
Fourth Industrial Revolution (New York: Crown Currency, 2017); Jim Jones, “The
Fourth Industrial Revolution,” Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture,
Washington State University, August 30, 2023, etm.wsu.edu.
17.
↩ See Ilya Prigogine
and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New
York: Bantam, 1984); Te Li, “The Thermodynamics of Capitalism: Artificial
Intelligence, Energy Crisis, and Ecological Crisis,” Monthly Review 78, no. 2
(June 2026): 17–32.
18.
↩ John Bellamy Foster,
Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2010), 121–50.
19.
↩ Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975),
vol. 30, 62–63.
20.
↩ Karl Marx, Capital,
vol. 1, 636–39; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 949–50. On
the role of thermodynamics in Marx and Engels’s classical historical
materialism, see John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, Marx and the Earth
(Chicago: Haymarket, 2016).
21.
↩ Clive Hamilton and
Jacques Grinevald, “Was the Anthropocene Anticipated?” Anthropocene Review 2,
no. 1 (2015): 67; Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2016).
22.
↩ Li, “The
Thermodynamics of Capitalism,” 21.
23.
↩ William Stanley
Jevons, The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation,
and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines, ed. A. W. Flux (London:
Macmillan, 1906), 138–53.
24.
↩ Li, “The
Thermodynamics of Capital,” 21–22; Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological
Rift, 169–81.
25.
↩ Karl Marx, Capital,
vol. 2 (London: Penguin, 1978), 322.
26.
↩ Jeremy Rifkin with
Ted Howard, Entropy: Into the Greenhouse World (New York: Bantam Books, 1989),
194; Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, “Energy and Economic Myths,” Southern Economic
Journal 41, no. 3 (January 1973): 347–81.
27.
↩ Deborah Wynne
(interview), “Textile Recycling in Victorian Literature,” EuropeNow, Council
for European Studies, May 7, 2019, europenowjournal.org.
28.
↩ Charles Dickens, Our
Mutual Friend (London: Penguin, 1971), 58, 87–104.
29.
↩ Susan Strasser,
Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York: Holt, 2000).
30.
↩ “Global E-Waste
Monitor,” United Nations Institute for Training and Research, 2024,
ewastemonitor.info.
31.
↩ Foster, Clark, and
York, The Ecological Rift, 207–11.
32.
↩ The analysis of
social and environmental costs was pioneered by K. William Kapp in 1950 in his
The Social Costs of Private Enterprise but was displaced in neoclassical
economics by a renewed emphasis on externalities, which was less threatening to
capitalist economics. See K. William Kapp, The Social Costs of Private
Enterprise (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1950).
33.
↩ Paul A. Baran and
Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966),
112–41, 336–67.
34.
↩ Foster, Clark, and
York, The Ecological Rift, 121–50; J. R. McNeil and Peter Engelke, The Great
Acceleration (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014).
35.
↩ “Planetary
Boundaries,” Stockholm Resilience Centre, stockholmresilience.org.
36.
↩ See Nicholas
Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971).
37.
↩ Kate Crawford, Atlas
of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).
38.
↩ Kate Crawford, “Long
Now Talk: Mapping Empires,” November 12, 2025, longnow.org.
39.
↩ Devin B. Martinez,
“A Massive Data Center Transforms Rural Utah into a National Flashpoint,”
People’s Dispatch, May 9, 2026.
40.
↩ Pete Grunewald and
Satyam Panday, “How Data Centers and AI Are Becoming a New Engine of Growth,”
World Economic Forum, December 17, 2025; Matt Day and Annie Bang, “Big Tech to
Spend $650 Billion This Year as AI Race Intensifies,” Bloomberg, February 5, 2026;
“Gartner Says Worldwide AI Spending Will Total $2.5 Trillion in 2026,” press
release, Gartner, January 15, 2026, gartner.com; Karen Weise, “Big Tech’s AI
Spending Keeps Rising. So Do the Jitters,” Bloomberg, July 30, 2026;
Hart-Landsberg, “AI and the Economy”; Crawford, Atlas of AI, 20; Satariano,
Mozur, Gu, and Metz, “The Impending, Inescapable Deluge of A.I.”
41.
↩ Ashley Capoot and
Kate Romney, “OpenAI Resets Spending Expectations, Tells Investors Compute
Target Is Around $600 Billion by 2030,” CNBC, February 20, 2026; Jez Corden,
“OpenAI Is a Loss-Making Machine, with Estimates that It Has No Road to
Profitability by 2030,” Windows Central, November 29, 2025; Martin
Hart-Landsberg, “Tech Billionaires, the AI Threat, and Resistance,” Monthly
Review 78, no. 3 (July–August 2026): 121.
42.
↩ Satariano, Mozur,
Gu, and Metz, “The Impending, Inescapable Deluge of A.I.”; “US Uses Anthropic
AI, B-2 Bombers, and Suicide Drones in Iran Strikes,” Reuters, February 28,
2026; Nick Robins-Early, “Anthropic-Pentagon Battle Shows How Big Tech Has
Reversed Course on AI and War,” The Guardian, March 13, 2026.
43.
↩ Piyush Shukla, “U.S.
Stock Market Concentration Risk Hits Extreme Levels: AI Stocks Surge to 45% of
S&P 500 Market Cap in 2026,” Economic Times, April 23, 2026,
economictimes.indiatimes.com; Agnee Ghosh, “Why Is So Much Riding on the Data
Center Boom?,” Bloomberg, November 21, 2025.
44.
↩ Jeff Sommer, “AI Is
Running on Borrowed Money,” New York Times, July 17, 2026. On free cash, see
Craig Medlen, “Free Cash, Mergers, and Capital Spillage,” Monthly Review 76,
no. 8 (January 2025): 19–30.
45.
↩ Michael Roberts, “AI
and Productivity,” The Next Recession (blog), July 23, 2026,
thenextrecession.wordpress.com.
46.
↩ Satariano, Mozur,
Gu, and Metz, “The Impending, Inescapable Deluge of A.I.” On epoch-making
innovations, see Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 218–48.
47.
↩ John Authers, “A
Tale of Two Bubbles Defining a Third,” Bloomberg, July 31, 2026.
48.
↩ John Bellamy Foster
and Brett Clark, The Robbery of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020),
12–23, 45–46.
49.
↩ Satariano, Mozur,
Gu, and Metz, “The Impending, Inescapable Deluge of A.I.”; Joshi, The AI
Climate Hoax, 7; Emily Forgash, “Data Centers on Track to Suck Up a Fifth of
U.S. Power Use by 2035,” July 21, 2026.
50.
↩ Michelle Ma, “Why Do
Data Centers Use So Much Fresh Water?,” Bloomberg, August 5, 2026; Miriam Aczel
et al., Environmental Costs of Artificial Intelligence: Carbon, Water and Land
Footprints (Richmond Hill, Ontario: United Nations University—Institute for
Water, Environment, and Health, June 3, 2026), 12, 32–33.
51.
↩ STAND.earth,
“Microsoft’s Sustainability Report Discloses 80% Emissions Increase Since
2020,” July 14, 2026, stand.earth; Microsoft, 2026 Environmental Sustainability
Report; Ghosh, “Why Is So Much Riding on the Data Center Boom?”; Joshi, The AI
Climate Hoax, 6; “AI to Prop Up Fossil Fuels and Slow Emissions Decline, BNEF
Says,” Energy Connects, April 15, 2025.
52.
↩ See Editors, “Notes
from the Editors,” Monthly Review 76, no. 10 (March 2025); Joshi, The AI
Climate Hoax, 7; Richard Haass (interview), “A World in Disarray? A Longtime
Diplomat Says It’s Worse than That,” Wall Street Journal, December 14, 2023;
Mike Le Couteur and Stephanie Ha, “Old Emission Plan Would Have Been
‘Opportunity’ to ‘Pull Canada Apart,’” CTV News, June 30, 2026.
53.
↩ John Fleming and
Jean Su, Data Crunch: How the AI Boom Threatens to Entrench Fossil Fuels and
Compromise Climate Goals, Center for Biological Diversity, October 2025; Tianqi
Xiao et al., “Environmental Impact and Net Zero Pathways for Sustainable Artificial
Intelligence Servers in the USA,” Nature Sustainability 8 (November 2025):
1541–53; Joshi, The AI Climate Hoax, 6.
54.
↩ Kate Crawford,
“Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop,” e-flux Architecture,
September 2025, e-flux.com; John Bellamy Foster, “The Fetishism of AI,” Monthly
Review 78, no. 1 (May 2026): 8–11; Ovid, Metamorphoses (New York: Norton,
2004), 298.
55.
↩ Harry Booth, “How
OpenAI Lost Control of an AI Model—And What Needs to Change,” Time, July 24,
2026; Selina Xu, “Now America Builds a ‘Great Firewall,’” Wall Street Journal,
July 30, 2026.
56.
↩ Crawford, “Long Now
Talk: Mapping Empires,” at 40:11.
57.
↩ Bernie Sanders, The
Big Tech Oligarchs’ War Against Workers: AI and Automation Could Destroy Nearly
100 Million U.S. Jobs in a Decade, Ranking Member Minority Staff Report,
Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee, United States Senate, October
6, 2025.
58.
↩ Billy Perrigo,
“Exclusive: OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less than $2 an Hour to Make ChatGPT
Less Toxic,” Time, January 18, 2023; Chinmayi Arun, “Transnational AI and
Corporate Imperialism,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, October 8,
2024; Hao, Empire of AI, 189–223.
59.
↩ Cory Doctorow, “F@#$
the AI Overlords,” WYNC, July 31, 2026, at 6:32.
60.
↩ Prigogine and
Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, 252–53, 258, 288, 292, 303–5. On Epicurus,
Lucretius, and Marx on the foedera fati (the bonds of fate), see John Bellamy
Foster, Breaking the Bonds of Fate (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2025).
61.
↩ Steve Lohr, “China
Rewrites the ‘Soft Power’ Playbook for the A.I. Age,” New York Times, July 23,
2026; Gary Wilson, “China’s Open-Weight AI Exposes the Fiction Behind Wall
Street’s Boom,” Struggle La Lucha, July 27, 2026.
62.
↩ Satariano, Mozur,
Gu, and Metz, “The Impending, Inescapable Deluge of A.I.”; Rasmus Leichter,
“Number of Data Centers by Country,” Cargoson (blog), November 2025,
cargoson.com.
63.
↩ Foster, “The
Fetishism of AI,” 12–13.
64.
↩ Gary Wilson, “In
China, AI Is No Excuse to Fire Workers,” Struggle La Lucha, June 5, 2026.
65.
↩ Vanessa Bates
Ramirez, “The U.S. and China Are Pursuing Different AI Futures,” IEEE Spectrum,
February 19, 2026; “AI Watch: Global Regulatory Tracker—China,” White &
Case, September 22, 2025.
66.
↩ Michelle Griffith,
“Nudification Law to Go in Effect Saturday After Judge Denies Delay Request
from Musk’s AI Company,” Minnesota Reformer, July 31, 2026.
67.
↩ Xi Jinping, “Keynote
Speech at Opening Ceremony of the 2026 World AI Conference,” July 17, 2026,
Shanghai, Friends of Socialist China, socialistchina.org.
68.
↩ Xi, “Keynote Speech
at Opening Ceremony of the 2026 World AI Conference.”
69.
↩ Xu, “Now America
Builds a ‘Great Firewall.’”
70.
↩ Dean Ball quoted in
Evan Blake, “The Specter of ‘AI Communism’: Chinese Open-Weight Models and the
Crisis of the American AI Bubble,” World Socialist Website, July 22, 2026.
71.
↩ Christa Marshall,
“‘Game Changer’?: What ‘Deep Seek’ AI Means for Electricity,” E&E News,
January 29, 2025; Satariano, Mozur, Gu, and Metz, “The Impending, Inescapable
Deluge of A.I.”; Fernanda González, “China Opens First Wind-Powered Underwater
Data Center,” Wired, June 18, 2026.
72.
↩ Bappa Sinha,
“Seizing the New Printing Press: Why Our Movements Must Learn to Use AI,”
People’s Democracy, July 26, 2026, peoplesdemocracy.in.
73.
↩ Paul Burkett, “On
Eco-Revolutionary Prudence: Capitalism, Communism, and the Precautionary
Principle,” Socialism and Democracy 30, no. 2 (2016): 87.
74.
↩ James Hansen,
“Runaway Climate: The Point of No Return,” Climate Uncensored (blog), March 6,
2026, jimehansen.substack.com.
75.
↩ See István Mészáros,
The Necessity of Social Control (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015); István
Mészáros, Critique of Leviathan (New York: Monthly Review Press, forthcoming).
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