Happy Halloween! I wish I had a more fun, spooky-scary topic for you today, but unfortunately I do not. This thing that scares me the most, and has for at least a couple years, has to do with the arc of human history. I worry that technological development, in the society we have, will build more subtle and effective ways of guaranteeing our unfreedom—rather than the traditional Marxist analysis that posits that as technology develops, social relations change toward liberation.

The Orthodox Marxist Case (dominant pre-1960s)

Marxist Historical Materialism posits that social relationships develop in step with technological developments that make societal reproduction more efficient.

Humans exist with a metabolic relationship with the rest of the world. Our metabolism is how we use our time and energy with each other and the world to produce the material things that keep us going and sustain our lifestyles. Looking at things in the context of our human metabolism inevitably puts analytical focus on our capacity to labor to affect the world, which Marxists call our ‘labor power’.

We expend our labor power to replenish our labor power, and, if we have any left over, we can put our labor power toward achieving other goals beyond mere sustenance. If one has the option to aim a significant portion of their labor power at goals beyond sustenance, one can develop their hobbies and skills, play games and music, study philosophy, develop our scientific knowledge, and enjoy our social connections to a community of others who choose to develop their own lives in different and interesting ways. (Among other things.)

Marxists look at technology as the material things in the world which help us achieve our goals, particularly within this human metabolism. Technological advancements allow us to produce more / better food, housing, connections, entertainment, and opportunities to develop our lives in the ways we want to. Technological developments in production mean that less labor power is required to sustain society and produce more life opportunities for people and groups living in it. This naturally requires a change in social relations within production.

Primarily, these technological developments require more coordination among people in production. Global networks of production, mathematical models, overseers enacting violence on enslaved populations, command hierarchies, assembly lines, the threat of starvation and loss of shelter, an emphasis on market signals—all of these are examples of how social relations in production are shaped in light of technological developments.

Ultimately, the Marxist idea is that democratically-guided social relations of production are inevitably the most effective way to structure our human society’s metabolism. In such a society, people freely realize that they would want to contribute according to their ability toward democratically-decided goals, and receive the rewards of production according to their needs. People would freely choose to produce such a society because those principles produce the highest levels of life opportunities, shared equally and fairly among all.

Additionally, these more-democratic relations in production are also more inclusive democratic relations—the more-democratic coordination includes a larger portion of the population. To motivate a shift away from the more densely centralized power of the previous class society, people are motivated to shift production to meet the capacity of technology because they see the potential benefit of more self-directed labor power. With the shift to capitalism, this means more capitalists, with more power than they had before under feudal society. With the shift to socialism, democratically-guided social relations are achieved because of technological developments and people’s realization of how that technology can be effectively used to improve the level of just opportunities for all.

As technology develops, the tendency of requiring less labor power seems, in the Marxist analysis, that it should also be a tendency to restructure our production relations to be more inclusively democratic. Indeed, this has largely been the case since the inception of the dominance of hierarchical class societies: from slavery to feudalism to capitalism, this has been the arc of technological development and social relations. To be clear, this ‘arc of history toward inclusive democratic responsiveness’ is only internal to these class societies. In expansionary moments for class societies, we see the invention of global processes of enslavement and imperialism which destabilize non-capitalist modes of life, and bring new regions and populations under the rule of capitalist production. Capitalism is not a democratic mode of production, but in moments of peak capitalist efficiency, production shifts according to demand on the market—and this is significantly more responsive to the desires of the masses than what we had under feudalism.

As technology has developed further under the global capitalist empire, the emergent effects of the incentive toward capital accumulation have, in part, included devious warpings of the “responsiveness” of capitalist market economies. Market forces matter much less as monopolies are established, as the Global North maintains neo-colonial relations, and as the capacity of the masses to demand more and better is increasingly restricted by the threat of social disconnection and material deprivation. Capitalism is not the most efficient structure for producing more, better opportunities in more people’s lives. This should mean, if Marxists are correct, that it will become increasingly obvious and inevitable that more democratic, communistic relations are required if we want to most effectively advance society to create the highest standard of life opportunities for all.

I find hope that this is the case by looking at the increased strategy and militancy of trade unions in the United States, from the seeming growing interest in cooperatives, and even the procedurally more democratic forms of internal coordination in many big tech companies.

But I promised scary doomerism, so it’s time to deliver on that.

The Doomer Case

There is a different, doomer analysis of history which I am concerned might be the case. In this analysis, the historical increases in inclusive democracy and benefits of new social relations of production are only granted after other technologies are invented that can reasonably guarantee the social power of the ruling class. The class that effectively controls the means of production stays in power, and the production benefits of more-democratic technological production continue to be funneled primarily to the ruling class.

Technology is used to solve problems—but whose problems? To members of the ruling class, losing their relative unjustly distributed benefits to the democratically self-organized majority can appear to be a major problem. New technologies of social control are developed, in lockstep with other technologies more focused on simple, generalized benefits. Furthermore, new technologies that have general benefits are co-opted by those who already have social power.

Technologies of explicit social control range from overt violence, to government capture, threats of deprivation, surveillance and punishment, and ideological propaganda. These technologies keep raising the bar for what the working class would have to do to successfully democratically self-organize and take power over the means of production.

Co-opted general technologies include the internet, which, for all its promises of democratization and worldwide community, has largely been captured by massive companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon.

One of my worries is that AI will greatly increase the capacity for the ruling class’s social control. It enables the mass iteration and testing of the most effective ideological messaging to scuttle democratic self-organization of people. It also enables effective pattern recognition of when people are organizing to create a union or other forms of democratic worker power, so that workplaces can effectively target those workers. Democracy takes time to build—it relies on meaningful connections, and there’s no shortcut to create those. This arduous process can be destroyed quickly before it has chance to take root.

I also worry that AI will increase the production “efficiency” of material stuff, to the point that it can be run entirely by profit-seeking bastards. This “efficiency” is not of the production of just lives and opportunities, but of profit for the wealthy. It has the potential to de-skill the masses to the point of near-total dependency on AI that serves the interests and whims of the wealthy, not the majority.

My ultimate fear—the scariest thing I can imagine—is that the democratizing promise of technological advancement will always be scuttled by the lockstep developments in technologies that strengthen and obscure the social domination of the ruling class. We have to take the chances we get to build power, and to build our analysis to find the chinks in the armor of capital’s domination. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.