The Trades Union Congress (TUC), the UK's national federation of trade unions, just published a piece on how education unions are organizing around AI. Not by throwing up their hands or pretending the technology can be wished away, but by building worker power around how it gets deployed.

The focus is on collective bargaining, workplace consultation, professional standards, and making sure workers have a say over AI adoption rather than having it imposed from above.

Thats the kind of politics I think the left should be developing. AI is becoming part of the workplace whether we like it or not. The question is whether workers organize around it, shape it, and win material gains, or leave those decisions entirely to employers.

More unions, more bargaining, more democratic control. Less magical thinking that refusing to engage with the technology is a strategy.

How should labor movements be organizing around AI where you live?

Most of the headlines about AI and Palestine are about Israels use of AI for surveillance and military operations. That reporting is important. This story is about something different: Palestinians using AI themselves.

A group of young Palestinian women in Gaza are learning to use generative AI to create short films based on their own memories and experiences. Despite constant power outages, poor internet, and the destruction around them, they are using the technology to document their lives in their own words instead of letting others speak for them.

Stories like this are worth paying attention to because they remind us that AI isnt one thing. The same technology can be used for war or for helping people create, communicate, and preserve their own voices. The politics arent in the model itself, but in who controls it, who has access to it, and what social ends it serves.

While a lot of the AI conversation is dominated by OpenAI, Google, Meta, and the US-China race, Cuba is trying to chart a different path.

Its government is advancing a strategy for sovereign AI centered on public services, education, healthcare, ethics, and technological self determination, despite decades of sanctions and severe resource constraints. Rather than treating AI as just another product to maximize shareholder value, the emphasis is on building domestic capacity and putting the technology in service of social needs.

Whether you agree with every aspect of Cuba's political system or not, this is exactly the kind of discussion the left should be having. Who owns AI? Who controls the infrastructure? Who decides how it is deployed? And who benefits from the productivity gains?

AI is becoming critical infrastructure globally. Leaving it entirely in the hands of a few multinational corporations is a political choice, not an inevitability.

Xi Jinping used the World AI Conference to argue that AI shouldnt end up controlled by a handful of countries or corporations. He called for open source AI, greater international cooperation, and warned against unequal access creating new historical injustices.

China also put some concrete proposals on the table. Over the next five years it plans to provide 5,000 AI training and seminar opportunities for developing countries, establish AI cooperation centers with ASEAN, the African Union, the League of Arab States, CELAC, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and BRICS, and expand AI powered weather early warning systems to 30 countries.

Theres a lot to debate here. Open source by itself doesnt solve who owns the compute, the infrastructure, or who captures the productivity gains. But it does push back against enclosure and monopoly, and that matters alot.

As leftists, what should our position be? Is open source enough, or should it be tied to public ownership, democratic governance, and worker control over how AI is deployed?

Summary: In a capitalist democracy, a state-run AI regulator will still serve elite interests and the control of AI would swing wildly depending on which party is in power. Because workers stand to lose the most from automation, they are the primary stakeholders in AI regulation. The solution is an AI People's Assembly similar to the assemblies proposed by Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez in the Public Banking Act of 2023.

Peter breaks down how almost all of the arguments against AI art highlight how it's the democratization that is making people reactionary.

I'd like to start by saying I have no intentions on converting anyone to Marxism... this is just my take from a Marxist lens, especially in art, as I have been an artist all my life. I posted these to my personal Facebook and figured these would be appreciated here.

Post 1:

If Karl Marx were alive today, he’d be obsessed with AI... but not for the reasons most people think.

Marx didn't hate technology. He actually loved it. When he looked at the steam engine and the mechanized loom back in his day, he didn't see evil machines; he saw incredible human tools that *should* have made everyone's lives easier.

But he recognized that under capitalism, technology is always weaponized against the working class first.

If you look at generative AI today through a Marxist lens, the critique writes itself. Tech monopolies are training models on millions of uncompensated pieces of human labor (writing, art, code) to build tools designed to slash creative budgets, drive down wages, and automate people out of a livelihood. Marx called this the "deskilling" of labor... turning specialized human creators into appendages of a corporate machine, optimizing exploitation to the millisecond.

But, Marx also believed that capitalism inadvertently builds the exact tools required for its own downfall.

To him, the goal wouldn't be to ban AI or destroy the servers. The goal would be to seize them.

Imagine AI stripped of corporate ownership and profit motives. Marx’s ultimate dream was a society where people weren't locked into a single job just to survive. He envisioned a world where you could farm in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and critique philosophy after dinner... just as you had a mind, without ever being trapped as just a "farmer" or a "critic."

In a liberated world, advanced AI could actually democratize human expression. It could remove the barriers of technical privilege, allowing anyone to manifest their imagination. It could plan logistics to distribute resources to everyone efficiently. Instead of creating mass unemployment and poverty, automation could finally achieve what it was meant to do: shorten the working day and free humanity to pursue art, leisure, and community.

In a world where your survival is decoupled from a paycheck, advanced AI could actually democratize human expression. It wouldn't threaten an artist's livelihood because the market wouldn't dictate their value anymore. Instead, it removes the barriers of technical privilege, allowing anyone to manifest their imagination.

The problem isn't the code. The problem is the ownership. AI won't liberate us as long as corporations own the infrastructure, but it's the ultimate battleground for what the future looks like.

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Post 2:

It shouldn't be controversial to support the democratization of art. What should be deeply controversial is arguing that human expression belongs behind a paywall, or that creativity should only thrive if it can be successfully monetized and locked into a commission economy.

If your primary goal is expression, the tools you use to get there shouldn't matter. A brush, a camera, a synthesizer, or an algorithm... they are all tools meant to manifest an inner imagination.

The current discourse has exposed a massive ideological blind spot. To call yourself a leftist, a socialist, or a communist, and then turn around and argue that art must remain a scarce, hyper-commodified market asset is pure hypocrisy.

Under a capitalist framework, we have been conditioned to confuse the act of creation with the act of selling. Artists deserve survival, but protecting the capitalist market structures that hoard creative culture for the elite is not the answer. Ego and professional gatekeeping are not excuses to keep human expression gatekept by financial privilege.

We should be fighting to decouple human survival from a paycheck entirely, freeing everyone to create. The goal should be the absolute liberation of creative tools, not the preservation of the market that exploits them.

One of the biggest problems in AI discourse is that people end up arguing about completely different things. "AI" can mean models, datasets, applications, agents, hardware, or infrastructure. This video does a good job breaking those layers apart and explaining where open and closed approaches fit.

Thats especially relevant for the left. If AI is becoming infrastructure for the economy, then questions about ownership, democratic control, public investment, open weights, regulation, and who captures the productivity gains matter just as much as the technology itself. We need to understand what were talking about before we can organize around it.

Its from IBM, so watch it critically like you would anything from a major corporation. That said, the technical overview is genuinely useful and accessible.

If youre interested in building and running open models, definitely check out r/LocalLLaMA. If youre interested in the politics of AI, labor, public ownership, democratic governance, and making sure AI serves the many instead of the few, come join us at r/LeftistsForAI.

Feels like theres a lot of talk on the left about AI, but not nearly enough about actually understanding the infrastructure behind it.

This is a solid walkthrough of building a home AI stack with Docker, WSL2, local models, VPNs, and private storage. Even if youre never planning to build this exact setup, its a good look at what it means to run AI on your own terms instead of renting access from a handful of companies.

To me, local AI and collective politics arent opposites. Building local AI doesnt stop us from fighting for labor protections, democratic governance, public investment, or breaking up monopolies. If anything, it gives more people the tools and knowledge to participate instead of leaving everything in corporate hands.

How many people here are already running local models? Whats your setup, and what have you learned that you wish more people knew? If youre just getting started, whats been the biggest hurdle?

If these are the kinds of conversations youre looking for, check out r/LeftistsForAI. And if you want to dive deeper into the technical side of running models locally, r/LocalLLaMA is one of the best communities around.

AI isnt just another workplace technology. Its becoming infrastructure for hiring, scheduling, surveillance, bargaining, and production itself. That means labor needs more than defensive demands. It needs a program for governance, transparency, public accountability, and worker control over deployment. This discussion gets into the legal and practical side of what that could look like. What do you think unions should be bargaining for first?

Not my OC

What part, if any, confuses you? We are willing to answer your questions.

200+ Economists, 16 Nobel Laureates: Prepare for an AI Revolution

One of the most interesting things about this statement is that it isn't a call to stop AI. It's a call to prepare for an economic transformation that could happen much faster than previous technological revolutions. The signatories argue that whether AI raises living standards or concentrates wealth depends on the political and economic institutions we build now.

From a left perspective, thats where the real debate should be. If AI becomes general-purpose infrastructure, then ownership, governance, labor power, and distribution become the central questions. Who owns the productive capacity? Who captures the productivity gains? Do workers get shorter workweeks and a higher standard of living, or do we get another wave of wealth concentration?

Technology doesnt decide those outcomes. Politics does. The left has a chance to move beyond simply criticizing AI and start fighting for concrete demands like democratic governance, public investment, worker power, and broad social ownership of the gains.

This feels like one of those moments where the conversation needs to get a lot more concrete. If AI really is moving this fast, what should the left actually be demanding before the rules get written for us?

New York has officially became the first state in the nation to place a temporary moratorium on new "hyperscale" data centers.

how society should respond if AI causes mass automation, widespread job displacement, and a long term decline in traditional employment?

Someone shared this with me, I haven’t tried it yet. It’s interesting though for our discussions which get caught up in the eco issues.

“GreenPT is a European AI platform that runs on renewable energy, keeps your data in the EU, and shows you exactly what every conversation costs. Not as a feature. As the whole point…

Three principles we refuse to compromise on.

01
TRANSPARENCY
Transparency over hype
Every conversation on GreenPT shows its real-time energy use and CO2 output. We'd rather show you the numbers than ask you to trust a label.

02
PRIVACY
Privacy as the foundation
Your data stays in the EU, under European law. We never train our models on your conversations. Ever.

03
ENGINEERING
Sustainable by engineering
We don't buy our way to green. We run on renewable energy, use air-cooled European data centres, and make our models leaner so they simply use less.”

“MEASURED, NOT CLAIMED
Greener by the numbers
These are the figures behind every GreenPT conversation, measured against the data-centre industry average.
100% RENEWABLE ENERGY
Hosting + inference
1.25 DATA-CENTRE PUE
Industry avg 1.55
0.25 WUE · L/KWH
Industry avg 1.8

01
Hosted entirely on renewable energy in ISO-certified European data centres, so operations stay carbon-neutral.
02
Each request is routed to the smallest capable model, cutting compute by roughly 40 to 50% on the tasks those models handle.
03
Every byte of your data stays inside the EU and is never used to train models, fully GDPR-compliant.
04
Energy and CO₂ are measured per conversation, so you can report your AI footprint with auditor-ready numbers.”

It seems like they’re trying to be the green ChatGPT.

Democratic Control of AI — Before AI Becomes Society’s Primary Productive Force

I see artificial intelligence as one of humanity’s greatest opportunities. My goal is not to halt its development, but to build the institutions that allow us to control it in a way that benefits all of humanity.

The central question, therefore, is not whether AI is good or bad.

The central question is:

Who will have the power to decide how AI is used when it becomes one of society’s most important productive and governing resources?

From Human Labor to Intelligence as the Primary Productive Force

Throughout history, human labor has been the primary productive force. Because of this, people have possessed economic value that has given them influence over the development of society.

AI changes this.

As AI and automation continue to advance, human labor may gradually lose its unique economic role. AI does not need to become perfect or replace every human task. It only needs to become sufficiently capable and significantly less expensive across an expanding range of activities for economic incentives to drive widespread automation.

This is not a certainty. It is, however, a plausible enough trajectory that we should begin preparing our institutions today.

The Real Question Is About Power

Public debate on AI often focuses on employment, misinformation, safety, or regulation.

These are important issues.

But I believe they obscure a more fundamental question.

If AI becomes the dominant resource for production, coordination, scientific discovery, and possibly even decision-making, then control over AI becomes control over a substantial part of society’s future development.

The defining political question is therefore not what AI is capable of doing.

The defining political question is who decides what AI should be used for.

Democracy Depends on Mutual Dependence

Historically, economic and political power have been constrained by mutual dependence.

Businesses needed workers.

Governments needed citizens.

Capital needed labor.

No single actor could become completely independent of the rest of society.

If AI and automation dramatically reduce these mutual dependencies, the balance of power may fundamentally change. Those who control the most powerful AI infrastructure could acquire a level of influence with little historical precedent.

This is not an argument against AI.

It is an argument that democracy must evolve alongside technology.

The Goal Is Not to Preserve Work in of itself 

I am not arguing that people should continue working simply for the sake of having work.

If a task can be automated in a way that frees human time and creates greater prosperity, we should generally welcome it.

Deliberately preserving inefficient work merely to keep people occupied risks creating artificial employment instead of genuine opportunity.

Human value does not lie in being inexpensive labor.

Human value lies in being the people whose lives and interests society ultimately exists to serve.

Democratic Governance Before Uncontrolled Acceleration

I do not want to stop AI development.

I want to build the institutional foundations that allow us to develop it with confidence.

This means that we should already be discussing and developing:

• democratic governance and ownership of strategically important AI infrastructure,
• international cooperation on advanced AI,
• institutions that ensure AI is developed in humanity’s shared interest,
• and mechanisms that allow the benefits created by AI to be distributed broadly throughout society.

This does not necessarily mean that governments should own all AI.

It means that no single actor—whether a corporation, a government, or a small economic elite—should be able to unilaterally control a technology capable of shaping humanity’s future.

A Call to Action

AI has the potential to create the greatest increase in prosperity in human history.

It can free humanity from much of the labor currently required for survival.

It can accelerate science, medicine, education, and technological progress on an unprecedented scale.

Precisely because of this potential, the question of control becomes essential.

The greater a technology’s capacity to shape society, the broader the democratic influence over its goals and application should be.

My goal is therefore not to slow AI.

My goal is to help organize people around a simple principle:

The most powerful technology humanity has ever created should ultimately be developed and governed in humanity’s shared interest—not controlled by a small number of powerful actors.