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.
