By Larry Holmes
September 21, 2026
This comment, excerpted here, was made at a Sept. 17, 2026, Workers World Party meeting in New York City.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a disastrous, catastrophic monster under the capitalist system. Under a socialist system, it can be a great development towards human liberation to a large extent. China’s still involved in the global capitalist market, but they are demonstrating — now they’re working with other countries — how this new technology can be used for society if it is not completely based on making billionaires richer, which is what it is in the U.S. and elsewhere.
San Francisco, March 2026. Photo websource: Stop AI/Instagram
AI is not only this enormous, biggest bubble connected to everything else. They call it the “everything bubble,” because so many greedy people have invested in it, hoping that they’ll become rich. It looks like that will never happen. It’s not just for rich people.
Look at your pension funds. Before that, I think a lot of money was going into real estate. But now so many trillions of dollars are going into AI.
AI has been considered the savior of U.S. capitalism and imperialism. This is one of the reasons why the big tech companies — Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, SpaceX, or Nvidia and all their little subsidiaries — are so powerful. They run the stuff. They run Wall Street now.
Wall Street is dependent on these companies. I can’t speak to the question of the extent to which AI poses a threat to humanity, at least in the context that they’re talking about it taking over like in “The Terminator.”
AI is a reflection of this phase of capitalism. Capitalism has gone through a series of phases over the past couple of centuries.
Its technological developments objectively were beneficial to society moving forward, even when they came under the contradiction of the control of capital in the struggle against labor.
What Donald Trump represents
We are now in end-stage, degenerated, maniac capitalism. When you look at Trump’s behavior, you just write it off that he’s some kind of narcissist, an ugly American, an erratic with fascist tendencies. All that’s probably true. But his mania, his extremism, his fascism is tied to this phase of capitalism. And the reason why he’s had so much power is because he has tied himself to technology, to the big tech companies, to Elon Musk, to Jeff Bezos, to Mark Zuckerberg. Trump has tied himself to these billionaires. Trump is with them. He’s with the moguls and tycoons who basically run U.S. capitalism and imperialism right now.
That’s why he’s so powerful. That’s one of the reasons why when he says, “Jump,” people ask, “How high?” This is why so many people are afraid of him; why he has been able to turn the state, in a clearer, more vicious and violent way, against the masses, from migrant workers to oppressed people to labor unions. And not only here, but outside the U.S. So there’s a material basis.
What a lot of people are still trying to get their head around is how the hell could someone like Trump become president? But it’s not just him!
He’s a walking, talking sign of the system and where it’s at. You want to see the degeneration of capitalism? Just look at him! He’s the mirror, he’s the face of it.
And it’s not going to change when he leaves. It’s not going to change in November. We’ll have a meeting and talk about that.
Artificial intelligence, if that’s really the correct way to characterize this, is the latest part of the technological revolution, the digital revolution that’s almost a half century old.
The other side of it is that capitalism is no longer in a period where its technological advances to the productive forces are in any way, even in a contradictory way, helpful and progressive. It’s just the opposite.
Under capitalism, technology is now the enemy of the working class, the enemy of the oppressed. It’s antisocial. It’s the enemy of society. It’s worse than antisocial. It’s a danger to the survival of society.
You can extrapolate that to the environment, extrapolate that to war, extrapolate that everywhere. It is now a big reason to make a revolution.
It’s a distinct and unique phenomenon in the various technological revolutions to the means of production under the history of capitalism.
It will be the last phase of the technological revolution under capitalism. I don’t mean that this phase itself is going to wipe out humanity. It is one of the phases that will help manifest the social revolution that will put an end to the capitalist system and allow technology to liberate humanity.
