Excerpts from a political report by the League National Council, Part 2
More and more people are beginning to realize that the artificial intelligence (A.I.) revolution is threatening to demolish our society as we know it – more completely and drastically than any earlier economic revolution – more so than the steam engine, electromechanics or even simple digital production.
In February, a Citrini research report on a fictional 2028 A.I.-caused economic collapse triggered a one-day 800-point drop in the stock market despite the best efforts of conventional economists to refute it. History teaches us that the A.I. cataclysm will break continuity in our institutions, including the U.S. two-party political system. Indeed, it is already happening.
The outcome of the A.I. boom is impossible to predict, but no conceivable scenario leads to a thriving or even stable economy. Just four A.I. giants – Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft – are investing $650 billion in capital spending in 2026 alone. That is almost four times larger than the largest automakers, construction equipment manufacturers, railroads, defense contractors, wireless carriers, parcel delivery companies, Exxon Mobil, Intel, General Electric and Walmart combined. As University of Virginia economist Anton Korinek pointed out, they “aren’t making hundred-billion-dollar bets because they expect A.I. to have minor effects on the labor market.”
In the unlikely event that productivity projections by A.I. investors fail to happen, the sheer size of the investments makes major economic disruption inevitable anyway. The outcome of these investments will be either a crash based on mass destruction of jobs, or a crash based on collapse of the financial system when projects fail and debts go unpaid.
Even more clearly than with earlier versions of digital automation, A.I. is absolutely antagonistic to the capitalist system that depends on exploitation of human labor to generate value. As the economist Korinek noted, “When a machine can do a worker’s job, the worker’s wage eventually falls toward the machine’s cost. Yes, new jobs will emerge, as they always do. But the machines will learn them faster and do them more cheaply. The reassuring historical patterns depend on humans being needed to run the economy. Remove that bottleneck, and we are facing something qualitatively different: a permanent shift in who, or what, captures the gains from economic growth.”
IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT
Despite the most fervent proclamations of bourgeois economists, mass expulsion of humans from production will immobilize the economy by decreasing what is called “aggregate demand” for goods and services. Government may compensate for this for a while, with programs to create more markets, but in general the private property system cannot and will not permit substantial subsidies to meet the needs of human beings – that is a violation of its entire business model. As long as the government continues to be controlled by billionaires, it will never happen.
The economic system’s central antagonism is between a ruling class forced to defend private property, and the growing propertyless section of the working class that is separated from the formal capitalist economy altogether. This section of the workers cannot physically survive without material means of support, and cannot obtain them without demanding that government distribute them based on need. They are compelled to politically attack the private property system. Either this displaced section of the working class or the private property system must destroy the other in order to survive.
Despite vastly different economic and political conditions, the major ideological debate today is remarkably similar to that of the pre-Civil War period in the United States. In the 1850s, the issue was slavery – the ownership of human beings as a form of private property. Just as the South argued that the constitutional right to own slaves trumped democracy then, today’s rulers argue that the right to private property supersedes democracy now. In the 2020s, the issue has become ownership of private property altogether.
One of the most important lessons of the 1850s is that major realignment of the two-party system requires a split in both parties. The Republican Party grew out of the splintering of the Whig Party, but its victory in the 1860 presidential election would likely not have been possible without the division of Democrats into northern and southern sections, each with its own convention and presidential candidate.
A.I. AND THE TWO-PARTY SYSTEM
The antagonism in today’s economic system has already unleashed an escalating social revolution. The question is how it will be reflected in the political struggle and what will be its impact on the two-party system.
The economy and a basic sense of human decency are driving Americans to embrace restrictions on A.I., data centers, ICE prisons, the Border Patrol, wars, genocides, and wanton destruction of the Earth. The response of the rulers has been an escalating fascist offensive including Project 2025, DOGE, mass deportation, the attack on birthright citizenship, National Security memos and the SAVE Act. Forced to choose between their hundred-billion-dollar bets on A.I. and tolerating democracy, the rulers have embraced fascism with a passion. The problem for the ruling class is how to impose a fascist regime on a population still steeped in the anti-fascism it learned in the 20th century, especially during the 1960s-’70s civil rights movement.
The A.I. revolution is not just disrupting the economy – it is cracking open the political system, forcing the irrepressible conflict between the billionaire class and the working-class majority. The question is whether an emerging political formation will be shaped by a conscious, organized, working-class movement or imposed by a fascist oligarchy.
Anton Korinek accurately sums up the problem we face:
“The good news is that artificial general intelligence would generate enormous economic gains. The same forces that may diminish the value of labor would also dramatically increase total output. The challenge is ensuring that humans share in that abundance when our labor is no longer required to generate it. Historically, wages have been the primary mechanism for broadly distributing the benefits of economic growth. We may soon need new mechanisms that decouple income from labor: broad-based capital ownership, universal basic income, or approaches we haven’t yet imagined. We need to start building those institutions now.”
But the ruling class is incapable of building those institutions. As Sen. Bernie Sanders said about the billionaires controlling A.I.: “Does anybody in their right mind think that these people are staying up nights worrying about how this transformation is going to benefit ordinary people?” No, it is up to the ordinary people themselves to strategize, get organized, and win the political power necessary to secure the better future that is possible.
Published on May 18, 2026.
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