The Leftist Alternative to Artificial Intelligence

The Leftist Alternative to Artificial Intelligence
Rezgar Akrawi

The recent developments in artificial intelligence have opened up vast possibilities for its applications across various fields. However, they have also sparked concerns about how this technology is being directed. From the perspective of digital leftism, AI can be a revolutionary tool that contributes to restructuring society toward greater justice and equality.
This vision aims to liberate AI from the constraints of the capitalist market and redirect it toward serving all humanity, transforming it into a means to improve quality of life, free people from burdensome routine labor, and enhance human creativity in all areas.
For the first time in history, it has become realistically possible to meet the needs of the majority of the population with minimal human effort, and to provide goods, services, and knowledge abundantly, sometimes even for free, without relying on intensive wage labor or traditional bureaucratic structures. However, these possibilities are being constrained and used to maximize profits, reduce wages, and deepen class and ideological domination, rather than to free people from exploitation.
Today, AI is not merely a new tool in the hands of capital, it is fundamentally a reflection of a qualitative transformation in the nature of production and an exposure of capitalism’s structural limits. Many digital applications and platforms, from 3D printing to cooperative systems, home-based production, mass automation, and the removal of capitalist intermediaries in some sectors, demonstrate that society now effectively possesses the tools that could allow for a socialist reorganization of the economy in a horizontal, participatory, and community-based manner.
Yet this transformation remains constrained and stifled by the monopolistic structures that dominate technology and redirect it toward profit rather than social benefit.
In the following sections, we will explore how a socialist, leftist vision, particularly that of electronic leftism, can redefine artificial intelligence as a liberating force serving human and progressive values. These ideas, however, are merely an outline for collective dialogue within the left. Proposing such an alternative requires broad discussion among leftist, progressive, and activist movements and individuals around the world. By presenting these ideas, the goal is not to offer ready-made solutions, but to open up debate about urgent priorities. These priorities should serve as an open invitation to contribute to developing a digital leftist vision based on the collective ownership of artificial intelligence specifically, and technology in general, through an organized global leftist effort.

1. Developing Leftist, Neutral, and Open-Source AI Systems
As a feasible solution, developing neutral, democratic, and open-source AI systems is one of the core strategies to confront the dominance of major states and corporations over AI. These systems must be managed with transparency and independence, and kept as far as possible from monopolistic capitalist interests, to ensure their use in service of the people.
Achieving this requires collective effort and coordination among leftist, progressive, and human rights organizations around the world, to advocate and work toward making technology a tool that enhances democracy, freedom, and equality to the fullest extent possible under current class power dynamics.
Open-source systems offer an opportunity for the public and leftist/progressive organizations to participate in technological development in ways that reflect their values. Individuals or groups can access source code, understand how the systems work, and freely modify and improve them. This approach can enhance collective ownership and innovation, support transparency, and partially dismantle the control of monopolistic states and corporations. The public accessibility of these systems for review also reduces the risk of ideological manipulation or hidden agendas, making them more reliable and independent from narrow capitalist interests.
It also provides safeguards for data protection and privacy. By enabling the auditing of source code, hidden biases and manipulations that serve ruling class interests can be identified and minimized.
Building transparency and trust in AI is a critical first step toward transforming technology into a liberatory tool.
The ultimate solution that we must struggle for in the long term lies in global coordination among leftist, progressive, and human rights organizations to develop and promote leftist and progressive, transparent alternatives to AI, ensuring the technology becomes collective property, under full public oversight and direction, aligned with respect for human rights, equality, democratic values, and intellectual pluralism.
Instead of AI remaining the exclusive domain of wealthy states and monopolistic corporations, it should become a progressive, popular tool that helps solve global and local problems such as poverty and exploitation, achieving equality and justice, enhancing democracy, addressing climate change, and developing more inclusive and equitable health and education systems, alongside other major human challenges. In this way, artificial intelligence becomes a global liberatory project, redefining the relationship between humans and technology according to socialist values and opening the door to a new model where technology is in service of humanity.
Until a progressive leftist model of AI is fully realized, current technologies must be subject to independent international legal and human rights oversight to ensure transparency and fairness. This oversight can help curb, or at least frame, capitalist manipulation of technology as an initial step toward redirecting it in service of the wider public under suitable safeguards.

2. A Tool for Achieving Social Justice and Promoting Equality in the Labor Market
Artificial intelligence, if directed through a progressive, socialist-leftist lens, can become a powerful tool for liberating humanity and achieving social justice by analyzing complex social problems and providing effective solutions to reduce economic inequality and class oppression. But achieving this goal is not automatic; it requires directing its mechanisms and capabilities toward addressing the root causes of poverty, unemployment, lack of basic services, and social discrimination, so that it can truly serve the people.
AI can also help monitor these disparities through advanced data analysis systems, allowing for the identification of the most deprived groups and directing fair policies to correct structural imbalances in wealth and service distribution.
In this context, progressive governments and left-leaning institutions can employ these technologies to design more just and systematic economic and social programs, using precise data models to determine the actual needs of marginalized communities, thus promoting equal opportunities, reducing class inequality, and achieving the highest possible level of social justice.
The leftist alternative to AI focuses on making it a tool to free people from exhausting, repetitive labor, while ensuring the provision of dignified and stable employment at equal wages. Fair use of automation can reduce overall working hours, giving individuals more time for personal growth, community participation, and enjoyment of life, instead of trapping them in the cycle of intensive capitalist exploitation. In this model, the labor market becomes a space that is more just and free, eliminating gender, racial, religious, and age-based discrimination through evaluation systems based on competence and skills, independent of social or ideological biases that reproduce existing class structures. It becomes a mechanism for ensuring equal opportunities for all, with a work environment that enhances the well-being of manual and intellectual workers alike.
Furthermore, AI can be a powerful tool to support labor organizing and union activism, through the development of apps that help workers build digital unions, create solidarity networks, strengthen their ability to negotiate with employers, demand their rights, and improve working conditions.
Finally, AI can be used to develop software capable of infiltrating production centers and imposing digital strikes, by disrupting production systems within corporations or government institutions that violate workers’ rights or ban union activity. In authoritarian regimes that deny workers the right to organize and strike, this becomes a last-resort option to force these entities to grant more rights to their workforce.

3. Artificial Intelligence as a Practical Tool for Scientific Liberation and Creative Empowerment
Rather than allowing artificial intelligence to weaken human abilities and produce generations overly dependent on technology, it can be redirected to become a tool for scientific liberation and enhanced creativity. AI should not replace human thinking entirely, but should instead assist in expanding human capacities, enabling access to advanced knowledge tools, and freeing up time from routine tasks, thus allowing people to focus on innovation and creative work.
Instead of reinforcing dependence and overreliance, including the trap of digital addiction, AI can be designed to assist rather than replace human agency. Progressive, open-source AI systems can be developed to stimulate critical and creative thinking, encouraging users to explore knowledge independently by prompting analytical questions rather than simply offering ready-made answers. These systems can suggest research ideas, analyze data to support inferential reasoning, and inspire users to generate original thought, rather than passively consume information.
The leftist alternative promotes using AI to strengthen collaborative scientific research by making big data analysis tools freely accessible to independent scientists and researchers. This can accelerate scientific innovation in fields like medicine, chronic and rare disease treatment, sociology, renewable energy, environmental protection, and more.
Collaborative AI projects can be established involving workers, women, engineers, researchers, and social activists, ensuring that technology is used in service of the public interest. It is crucial to provide AI technologies as fully free public services, granting individuals access to all features, both basic and advanced, that support creativity across fields, without the burden of high costs.

4. Community Oversight of Artificial Intelligence
The leftist alternative to AI seeks to impose transparent, democratic, community oversight over technology, especially artificial intelligence, to ensure its use is fair and equitable. Effective oversight requires redistributing digital power so that technology is socially owned and used to serve the public, rather than being monopolized by major corporations.
This calls for the creation of participatory institutions and platforms that allow the public to examine how algorithms are designed and implemented, enhancing transparency and enabling users to understand how these technologies affect their daily lives. Popular oversight bodies should be established at both local and international levels, including broad representation of workers, academics, human rights advocates, and technical experts, to ensure neutrality and justice in the development and deployment of AI systems.
Furthermore, binding legislation and guidelines must be introduced requiring developers to embed values of justice and equality at the design stage, with mandatory community review before any system is marketed. Developers must be obligated to modify or halt any biased system that causes social harm, and no technology should be marketed without undergoing a thorough review to ensure it does not negatively impact marginalized groups or reinforce class inequality.
Additionally, oversight bodies must be given real authority to continuously audit algorithms and monitor for embedded biases that may lead to discrimination or exploitation. These bodies should also have the power to impose regulatory standards to prevent AI from being used, as it is today, as a tool for perpetuating inequality or class domination.

5. Restructuring Production and Distribution Using Artificial Intelligence
Restructuring production and distribution is a central pillar of the leftist vision for AI. This technology can be employed to build democratically centralized planning systems based on accurate data and socialist principles, allowing resources to be efficiently allocated to meet society’s real needs with the goal of achieving maximum social justice. These systems would rely on precise analysis of demand and consumption, enabling the production of necessary goods and services based on actual needs, and avoiding the overproduction that characterizes the capitalist system. A democratic socialist system powered by AI could achieve a balance between production and consumption and redistribute resources equitably to maximize the benefits of available capacities.
AI can play a critical role in restructuring supply chains by reducing waste, directing production toward the most underserved areas, and promoting environmental sustainability by minimizing energy and raw material consumption. Smart logistics systems can help distribute goods and services more efficiently and determine optimal routes to reduce carbon emissions, ensuring fair access without market manipulation or monopoly control.
Moreover, AI can enhance transparency in production and distribution by tracking how resources are allocated and ensuring they align with community priorities.
AI also has the potential to revolutionize cooperative, socially oriented production. It can empower cooperatives and community-based projects to utilize intelligent technologies that improve operational efficiency, lower costs, and ensure fair distribution of resources among members. In this context, technology becomes a tool for building a solidarity economy, helping poor communities achieve economic and political independence through joint production and equitable distribution of available resources, free from the grip of monopolistic capital.

6. Artificial Intelligence for Gender Justice
Leftist, feminist, and human rights forces must actively work to design and develop AI systems that promote gender justice and support full equality. To achieve this, there must be balanced representation of women in technology development teams, helping to reduce gender biases embedded in algorithms. There must also be pressure to enforce policies that mandate gender diversity at all stages and levels of AI design and development, aiming to dismantle the prevailing male dominance in the field.
Additionally, algorithms must be trained on comprehensive, diverse datasets that reflect women’s experiences and roles in full and non-stereotypical ways. This would help break traditional gender molds reinforced by patriarchal structures. Governments must be pushed to adopt legislation requiring companies to publish transparent reports on gender diversity in their tech teams and programs, with significant penalties for non-compliance.
Evaluation metrics must shift to focus on “gender equity” in system performance rather than just technical efficiency.
AI can also be used to support women’s issues and promote gender equality by developing advanced analytical systems that detect workplace discrimination. It can also support policies that strengthen women’s rights in education, healthcare, and economic and political inclusion. Additionally, AI technologies can be used to analyze gender pay gaps through intelligent systems trained on labor market data, helping to develop fairer policies that achieve wage justice and gender parity.
Leftist, feminist, and human rights organizations must adopt a discourse that redefines technology as a liberatory tool for gender equality, rather than one that reproduces discrimination. This includes challenging stereotypes tied to voice-based and service systems, and developing smart assistants that reflect progressive values like justice and equality, acknowledging women as full, equal partners in building society.
Moreover, male-dominated language must be removed from AI systems, and gender-neutral language must be developed to help dismantle sexist bias. This can be achieved by designing algorithms based on comprehensive, diverse linguistic data that do not reflect traditional gender stereotypes.
AI tools can also be developed to review texts and analyze discourse to eliminate linguistic or gender-based discrimination, helping reshape the language of intelligent systems to be more inclusive and equitable, and to promote respect and equality in expression and communication.
Such measures will contribute to building an alternative vision that redefines the relationship between AI and gender justice, where technology becomes an effective tool for empowerment and liberation and supports full gender equality and justice.

7. Artificial Intelligence as a Tool for Advancing Human Rights
Artificial intelligence must be redirected to become a tool for the protection and promotion of human rights, not for their restriction or violation. To achieve this, progressive leftist initiatives must be adopted to ensure transparency, oversight, and the use of AI in ways that promote justice and equality, instead of being used by authoritarian regimes and major corporations to monitor individuals and suppress freedoms.
Strict local and international legal frameworks must be established to criminalize the use of AI in violating human rights, whether through surveillance, targeting dissidents and activists, or digital censorship that leads to digital arrests, digital assassinations, and restrictions on freedom of expression.
All AI applications must respect the principles of justice and fundamental human rights as enshrined in international charters. Security-based applications of AI must be subject to independent judicial review, with civil society organizations participating in evaluating the risks these systems pose to freedoms. Global solidarity networks should be formed to monitor AI-related human rights violations and boycott companies that sell surveillance technologies to authoritarian regimes, placing them on international blacklists.
To ensure accountability, open-source AI systems and programs must be developed and managed by independent bodies composed of civil society and human rights representatives, with democratic oversight to prevent misuse by governments, monopolistic corporations, or authoritarian regimes. These systems could be used to protect human rights by exposing violations, monitoring government performance, and analyzing data to reveal repressive practices.
Strengthening the role of leftist, progressive, and human rights organizations in monitoring the use of AI is essential. International coalitions can be formed to pressure against the exploitation of this technology for domination and digital repression.
AI can also be an effective tool in resisting digital surveillance by supporting the development of encryption technologies and secure communications to protect activists and dissidents, while also monitoring dictatorial governments and exposing their human rights violations.
Raising public awareness about the dangers of digital surveillance and control is also crucial, along with enacting local and international laws to prevent privacy violations and providing tools to help individuals protect their data and ensure freedom of expression in digital spaces.

8. Toward an Eco-Socialist Alternative for Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence must be redirected toward environmental protection, an objective that can only be fully achieved within a socialist framework that redefines the relationship between technology and nature, away from the capitalist market logic that currently drives its development.
A leftist alternative to AI must seek to liberate technology from capitalist control and turn it into a tool for democratically and socially managing resources. Its applications should serve to combat climate change, reduce the environmental impact of production, and ensure equitable resource distribution, instead of reinforcing the capitalist model of unlimited consumer-driven production that undermines ecological balance.
In a leftist model, AI would serve as a mechanism for environmentally conscious economic planning. Its analytical capabilities would be employed to align production with actual societal needs, not market demand and competition, which constantly drive expansion. Through progressive AI governance, resources could be used more efficiently, waste could be minimized, and technological development could be directed toward deep environmental solutions, such as improving renewable energy systems, ensuring sustainable water management, and reducing emissions in industrial sectors.
AI should be banned in projects that harm the environment, and any AI technology must be subject to environmental impact assessments before being approved. Smart monitoring systems should be created to ensure corporate compliance with environmental standards, with popular oversight of technological development policies to prevent destructive resource exploitation.
Ending the dominance of powerful states and monopolistic corporations over technology is not only about redistributing its benefits, it’s about redefining its priorities. Technology should be redirected toward strategic environmental initiatives that serve society and the planet, rather than corporate interests.
Capitalist technology in its current form does not solve the environmental crisis, it exacerbates it. Within a socialist framework, however, technology can be redirected to become a powerful tool for protecting natural resources and building an economy based on environmental justice, not human and ecological exploitation.
While some reforms may be possible within capitalism, such as environmental regulations and green legislation, experience shows their limitations and inability to bring about fundamental change.
The root solution requires a radical transformation in the relationship between technology and society, where all technologies and AI systems are subject to strict democratic and ecological standards that prioritize environmental protection.
This also involves developing intelligent systems that reduce energy overconsumption and promote full reliance on renewable energy, ensuring that technology serves both society and the environment.

9. Artificial Intelligence for Peace and Disarmament
AI must be reoriented as a tool for promoting global peace rather than as a weapon of war and destruction. To achieve this, international policies must be adopted that prohibit the development and use of AI in weapons, especially autonomous systems that operate without direct human intervention, as these pose an unprecedented threat to global peace and reinforce the dominance of military superpowers.
Leftist and progressive movements can lead global initiatives to pressure governments and international institutions into enacting clear and strict legislation banning the military development of AI. This technology could instead be used to analyze current conflicts, study the root causes of wars, and propose solutions that address those causes.
AI can also enhance international cooperation through platforms that foster dialogue between peoples and promote diplomacy and peaceful solutions.
Additionally, AI should be used to document war crimes and human rights violations, holding authoritarian regimes, states, and large corporations accountable for militarizing technology and using it to wage war.
Leftist movements, peace advocacy groups, and antiwar organizations have a key role in raising public awareness about the risks of AI militarization, through educational campaigns, progressive media, and on-the-ground activism, to expose the links between capitalism and war and the commodification of destruction.
Empowering the masses to resist the militarization of technology means building a global resistance movement capable of pressuring governments and institutions to end this inhumane and criminal use of technology in general, and artificial intelligence in particular.

10. Artificial Intelligence for Supporting Democracy and Popular Participation
AI must be transformed from a tool that contributes to the erosion of democracy into one that strengthens and advances it. Technology should empower the public, enhance political participation on the basis of equality, and ensure transparency and integrity in democratic processes.
AI can be used to develop secure and transparent digital platforms for dialogue and voting, allowing citizens to express their views and participate directly and effectively in decision-making at all levels. This would promote participatory democracy and restore power and agency to the people.
AI tools can also be developed to automatically detect and expose fake news and misinformation, protecting the public from disinformation campaigns aimed at undermining their ability to make informed decisions. These tools can be made widely and freely available as part of a public initiative to promote media transparency and combat monopolistic media dominance.
This requires fighting for local and international laws that clearly prohibit the use of AI to manipulate public opinion and ensure that information provided to the public is accurate, objective, and reflective of reality, free from class or ideological bias.

About Author
Rezgar Akrawi is an independent leftist, interested in the left and the technological revolution, and works as an expert in system development and e-governance. He is coordinator of the Center for Marxist and Leftist Studies and Research (in Arabic).

*[Based on ideas from Capitalist Artificial Intelligence: Challenges for the Left and Possible Alternatives – Technology in the Service of Capital or a Tool for Liberation? by Rezgar Akrawi – available in multiple languages]
Download the book for free:
https://leanpub.com/ai-en-socialism
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