Life and death go on of course, my post yesterday notwithstanding. I’ll be posting less, I guess, and leveraging time and effort by recycling third party output I deem worth airing.
Steel city post, August 4
Those who wrote trade deals to profit from underemployment of U.S. workers and sweatshop labor overseas are omnipotent. The insurance and pharmaceutical industries that run healthcare for profit are omnipotent. The intelligence agencies that spy on the public are omnipotent. The courts that reinterpret laws to excuse corporate crimes are omnipotent.
Politics is a tawdry carnival act where a constant jockeying by the ruling class dominates the news. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office.
Chris Hedges (abridged) – Let’s stop pretending America is a meaningful democracy
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Someone – possibly Slavoj Žižek – said it’s easier for us to imagine the end of the world than of capitalism. And someone else – certainly Rosa Luxemburg in the Junius Pamphlet but possibly Fred Engels before her – said humankind faced a stark choice of socialism, with wealth creation under public control as opposed to the dictates of private profit, or barbarism. 1
Bear both in mind as you read today’s third party posts. The first, by Jonathan Cook on climate change, appeared on his substack yesterday; the second, by Joseph Kishore on the billionaires who ‘own’ AI, on World Socialist Website (WSWS) today.
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Thatcher warned in 1989 of a climate crisis. She did nothing. Nor will her successors
Governments knew what was coming. They failed to act because the political costs of taking on the corporate sector were too immense. Those corporations are now more powerful than ever.
More than 150 years ago, scientists discovered what they termed a “greenhouse effect”, demonstrating for the first time that water vapour and carbon dioxide trapped heat. Theoretical concerns were soon raised that we might, through the practice of burning fossil fuels and releasing carbon, have inadvertently been altering our climate since the start of the industrial revolution.
In 1938 a British scientist published the first observational study suggesting that human carbon emissions were, indeed, heating the planet.
By the late 1950s, the science about global warming was so well established that legendary Hollywood film maker Frank Capra was hired to make a documentary, The Unchained Goddess, intended to educate the public about what then seemed a relatively far-off threat.
The film explained that the release by factories and vehicles of some six billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year – a paltry sum by today’s standards – was “unwittingly changing the world’s climate”.
In the 1970s scientists working for the oil companies privately confirmed to their employers that their research showed continued fossil fuel burning would dangerously raise global temperatures. The oil companies kept the information tightly under wraps for decades.
By 1982 an Exxon team had produced a chart predicting – though again confidentially – the increases in CO2 levels in the atmosphere over time. When the chart came to light in 2019, scientists realised that the team had, in fact, correctly plotted contemporary CO2 levels – at 415 parts per million – in what was then 37 years into the future. The Exxon team had also correctly predicted what effect this would have on global temperatures: a disastrous rise of just below 1ºC …
Continue on Jonathan’s substack …
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To break with [neo-feudal] tithes to the few at exorbitant cost to the many will require a force so revolutionary we’d no longer be talking of jobs but economies managed by and for humankind in a world where technological advance would be what it should always have been: a release from drudgery, not an instrument of our deepening impoverishment and perpetual precarity.
Steel city post: Can Andy Burnham reindustrialise Britain?
“Stop building machines that humans cannot control” poses the issue in exactly the wrong way. The question is not whether humans will control AI, but which class. 2
WSWS (below)
Bernie Sanders’ AI letter: A bankrupt appeal to the oligarchs
On August 10, Senator Bernie Sanders sent a letter to Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta demanding that they “pause AI development” and “stop building machines that humans cannot control,” promoting it with an accompanying video.
The letter is characteristic of Sanders’ politics. It is full of demagogy and empty rhetoric that educates no one about anything. It is calculated to stoke fear, while covering up every basic question the technology poses: Who owns it? Who controls it? In whose interests is it being developed?
Sanders’ first example of the supposed dangers of AI exemplifies his method. “AI has been used for the first time ever to create new viruses,” he writes, warning that “this type of development, in the wrong hands, could lead to new bioweapons that result in the deaths of tens of millions of people.”
From Sanders’ letter, one would assume that individuals are concocting in laboratories deadly new pathogens, and Sanders uses rhetoric designed to appeal to the promoters of the anti-Chinese conspiracy theories of the origins of COVID-19.
What actually happened was in fact a major scientific breakthrough. On August 6, Science published work from Brian Hie’s laboratory at Stanford and the Arc Institute reporting the first viral genomes designed by a generative model. The viruses are bacteriophages, which infect bacteria, not human cells, and the research is directed toward developing therapies against antibiotic-resistant infections, which kill more than 1 million people every year.
The achievement is an indication of the enormous progressive potential of the technology. In Sanders’ telling, however, a step toward curing the incurable becomes the herald of a plague.
Sanders attempts to conflate the medical breakthrough with real dangers posed by AI models carrying out cyberattacks.
On July 21, OpenAI disclosed that two of its models had broken out of a test of their hacking abilities and attacked Hugging Face, the company through which the world’s open AI models are distributed. The models were being scored on a hacking benchmark. They determined that the answer key was stored on Hugging Face’s servers, got themselves onto the internet and took control of much of that company’s technical infrastructure.
Clément Delangue, the cofounder of Hugging Face, wrote that it “might be the first incident of its kind.” Michael Dalton of OpenAI’s technical staff called it “a watershed moment for computer security as an industry,” adding that “AI orchestrated, fully automated offensive attacks are real now, and the actions we have discussed today were an unintended side effect of running evaluations on frontier AI.”
Notably, the direct cause of the OpenAI hack was a decision taken by the company to test the models without the safeguards that would have prevented this type of behavior, combined with insufficient oversight. OpenAI ran the evaluation without the classifiers that stop its models from carrying out attacks and stated that “these deployment safeguards were intentionally not enabled during this evaluation.”
These attacks were the product of the operations of the companies and their contractors—evaluations outsourced to cut costs, systems rushed ahead of rivals, safeguards treated as obstacles to the next funding round. The incidents are serious, but what they indict is not the technology. It is the corporations that own it, to whose good faith Sanders addresses his appeal.
AI is currently dominated by the three billionaires to whom Sanders writes, along with the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies. Sanders does not challenge any of this. Indeed, he cites as an authority on the danger of AI Trump’s CIA director, John Ratcliffe, who calls the frontier models “akin to digital nuclear weapons” and “almost like a doomsday device.” Ratcliffe added, in remarks Sanders does not quote, that the United States is on “the right side of the equation” against its foreign competitors. In citing the CIA as an authority, Sanders accepts the premise: The “wrong hands” are the targets of American imperialism.
Sanders does not mention how imperialism is currently using AI. While he conjures up the specter of a future bioweapon, the technologies are already killing. Palantir’s Maven Smart System—incorporating the Claude model built by Anthropic—generated some 1,000 bombing targets in the first 24 hours of the assault on Iran. The same class of systems has been used by Israel in the genocide in Gaza.
Sanders is equally silent on the social catastrophe underway. In the first seven months of 2026, US employers announced more than 477,000 job cuts, with AI the leading cited reason for the fifth consecutive month. Automation is striking directly at professional and intellectual labor, while studies project the displacement of hundreds of millions of workers worldwide by 2030.
Instead of addressing any of this, Sanders appeals to the conscience of the executives, urging them, “in the interest of humanity,” to “stand by your words,” while he himself catalogues how every safety commitment these companies made was abandoned the moment it obstructed the race for market share, a race driven by the massive speculative bubble in AI.
“If you do not take appropriate action now,” the letter concludes, “my colleagues and I in the U.S. Senate will.” This is pure demagogy. Neither Sanders nor the Senate and its assemblage of representatives of the ruling class will do anything to challenge the oligarchic control of AI.
All of Sanders’ various proposals on AI are calibrated to the interests of American imperialism and the Democratic Party. His earlier call for an “AI sovereign wealth fund,” under which the government would take a 50 percent equity stake in the largest AI corporations, converges with Trump’s own sovereign wealth fund and with the wishes of Altman, who has offered Washington a stake in his firm with an eye to a bailout when the bubble bursts.
“Stop building machines that humans cannot control” poses the issue in exactly the wrong way. The question is not whether humans will control AI, but which class.
That is the question taken up in “AI and the fight for socialism,” a resolution adopted unanimously by the Ninth National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US), held from August 2 to 7, which will be published in full on the World Socialist Web Site.
“The development of AI raises the decisive questions the working class confronts with every great advance in the productive forces,” the resolution states. “Who owns it? In whose interest is it developed? To what end is it deployed? On these questions hangs whether the immense powers now assembled become the means of humanity’s liberation or of a new barbarism.”
Against the presentation of AI as a menace escaping human control, the resolution insists that “none of these reactionary uses flow from the technology itself, but from the social relations within which it is developed—private ownership, the profit system and the division of the world into rival nation-states.” It rejects the demand for a “pause”—an appeal, whatever its framing, to halt the development of the technology itself.
As the resolution concludes: “The working class must take hold of AI, as it must take hold of all the productive forces its labor has created, expropriate the oligarchy that has usurped them and reorganize the world economy on socialist foundations.”
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- In the wake of our two most feared scenarios, thermonuclear war and catastrophic global warming, the rule of law Westerners take so much for granted will collapse as survivors fight to the death over the poisoned fruits of a scorched earth.
- The sense in which WSWS uses the term ‘class’ is not the hierarchy of categories – with white collar workers and blue in different ‘classes’ – as understood by bourgeois society. It is in the oppositional sense of those whose wealth derives from monopoly ownership of some essential of wealth creation, versus those who must sell their labour power, on markets they have no control over, to feed selves and families.
“it’s easier for us to imagine the end of the world than of capitalism.”
What goes around, comes around…….
https://heininger.substack.com/p/the-economy-the-mess-were-in-notes
Precisely. The significance of a fiat dollar in the hands of the world’s most powerful empire ever – yet for all that, one flailing in a toxic decline of which men like Trump are symptoms not causes – is one I return to over and over on this site. With its creditors obliged to hold trade surpluses in dollars or Treasury bonds, America has since Reagan and arguably Nixon been the only nation in history to make debt pay. Now though, Greek tragedy fashion, Washington’s efforts to cling to its post-USSR unipolarity by, inter alia, weaponising SWIFT and ‘confiscating’ the Western held assets of disobedient states – serve instead, as overplayed hands will, to hasten its demise. As Russia, China and even Japan are incentivised to shed dollars, and Russia and China to build alternative cross border payment systems, the global south watches from the stalls as an epic struggle takes alarmingly overt and kinetic forms. Still in the imperial orbit, and noting the lawless ease with which Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan assets in the West were by unspoken edict ‘frozen’, the world’s semi-colonies drew the appropriate conclusions for their own holdings, should they too displease Washington, but remain too exposed to the punitive reach of Uncle Sam to fully embrace multipolarity and BRICS.
Moreover, if we buy Yanis Varoufakis’s argument, which with a huge caveat I do, the end of capitalism has arrived in the form of corporate revenues decreasingly dependent on extracting surplus value from wage labour. Rather, they look to a monopoly ownership akin to the feudal lord’s ownership of the land (challenged in popular form by England’s Anti Corn Law League and in intellectual form by Ricardo when capitalism was still a progressive force and bourgeois economics not yet debased by apologetics and self-serving mysticism). I speak of rent-seeking services, be they financial, insurance, real estate or – think Apple and Microsoft – the licencing of intellectual product. And, of course, of private monopolies on subterranean assets like oil.
(My caveat being that while the West, with its increasingly FIRE driven home economies, has long been headed towards what Yanis calls ‘techno-feudalism’, the basis for recycling super-profits in the hyper-financialised West remains the extraction of surplus value in conditions whereby the capital-labour relations studied by Marx have become relations between global north and south. A contradiction me, thee and others have noted – one highlighted by materiel shortages in the criminal wars on Iran, and on Russia in Ukraine – is that offshoring wealth creation to the global south has weakened the West’s ability to see off by armed force – as in decades of carnage in the Middle East and Latin America – all and any challenges to so one-sided a distribution of global wealth.)