Defining the Successor Ideology
Revolutions are never purely moral phenomena. They begin when new productive forces strain against the institutional barriers of an exhausted order. The slogans both facilitate and obfuscate. The French Revolution was the product of a repressed bourgeoisie, the Bolshevik Revolution claimed, at the time, to be the only plausible route to industrial modernity; both fused moral fervour with material transformation which had become overdue.
Today, we again find ourselves again in Gramsci’s valley: “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” Liberal capitalism endures more-or-less but productivity stagnates, inequality widens and the 'overproduced elite' feels abandoned. The world feels saturated yet inert.
From a neo-Marxist-cum-Schumpeterian view, this is the predictable blockage phase of the long cycle. Marcus Olson has described how incumbent elites turn from dynamic enterprise to rent extraction. Bureaucracy, financialisation, and intellectual-property regimes now defend privilege by suppressing innovation.
Vested interests rule everywhere in the defence of their own comforts.
At the edges, however, a new regime of production is forming. Artificial intelligence and autonomous systems contain the makings of a new industrial revolution - potentially within five to ten years - but despite the LLM wonders, their development today is still immature, still a research project.
Perhaps some among the counter-elite - young, over-educated, under-rewarded - already intuit that economic freedom in the coming order depends on open access to productive AI. Their eventual rallying cry may be the democratisation of automation: ownership and control of intelligent machines distributed beyond corporations and states. Their slogan could be “robots for every citizen”: an ideal of 'left-behind' citizens last seen in the mists of slave-owning antiquity.
Behind the rhetoric lies the revolutionary claim that cognition and labour, once it has become automated, must not be monopolised by 'the few'. "We are ends, not means!" comes the cry from the streets. In the history of the world up to now, the masses have always been 'means' for elite classes.
If history is a guide, such a movement will mature only when technology and organisation converge. Around the early 2030s, as AI systems achieve autonomous productivity, running factories, logistics, and services with minimal human oversight, the economic logic will become irresistible. At that point, the decisive political conflict will concern ownership: whether machine capabilities become monopolised by concentrated private capital.
Two outcomes are possible. A cold revolution if reformist governments co-opt the change with countervailing power - eg automated public services. A hot revolution if repression is the answer to mass layoffs and immiseration - and the masses aren't prepared to take it.
Either way, if the old-guard is defeated (not at all a sure thing) then elite turnover will follow and blocked innovation will again become growth - although I suppose the physical elimination of the now-unnecessary masses through population collapse - or other means - is also a possibility.
Until then, we live through the long trough - five to ten uneasy years of moralism without programme, activism without outcomes. The technologies of liberation show potential but their politics are unborn. When they finally align, the successor ideology will not be religious or nationalist, but humanist.
I think that's what Karl Marx anticipated all along.
[ChatGPT:] The structural logic of the essay is persuasive, but the weakest link lies in the assumed *speed and scale* of the automation shock. Historically, even transformative technologies diffuse far more slowly than enthusiasts expect. Electricity, internal combustion, and the internet all required decades before their economic effects were fully visible. AI may ultimately prove comparably significant, but the transition is likely to be incremental, sector-specific, and mediated by regulation, organisational inertia, and complementary technologies. The scenario in the essay implicitly assumes a rapid productivity discontinuity capable of destabilising labour markets within a decade; that step in the argument is far from established.
ReplyDeleteA second difficulty concerns the mechanism of political mobilisation. The essay posits a counter-elite of educated but excluded actors who rally around the ownership of automation. While elite overproduction is a real phenomenon, modern political cultures are extremely fragmented. Discontented graduates today divide into populists, technocrats, cultural radicals, libertarians, and many other camps. There is no obvious reason to assume that they would converge on a single “automation ideology,” still less that such an ideology would become the organising axis of politics. Historical analogies to the French or Russian revolutionary intelligentsia may therefore overstate the coherence of the contemporary situation.
Finally, the argument presumes that automation necessarily produces a large dispossessed class whose interests align with the redistribution of machine productivity. That outcome is possible, but it is not the only one. An equally plausible trajectory is that AI primarily augments the productivity of already advantaged actors—firms, professionals, and managerial elites—thereby increasing inequality without eliminating the need for human labour. In that world the political pressure generated by automation might be weaker and more diffuse than the essay anticipates, leading to gradual institutional adjustment rather than a sharp ideological realignment.