Dear Rezgar Akrawi, Regarding Your Remarkable Book on Artificial Intelligence

Communist leader, Marxist writer and researcher from Lebanon


Dear Rezgar, greetings…
I was pleased with the publication of your remarkable book on artificial intelligence, even though my reading has remained limited to the explanatory summary that you wrote in your call to open the discussion. Illness and “age” unfortunately hinder the work. This has imposed that my contribution be brief and modest.

It is true what you have pointed out, my friend, regarding the formation of a “digital gap between the left and capitalism,” and your consideration of this as a “major challenge”! Yet this proposition does not touch upon, nor point to, as I see it, the different reasons— in nature and history— for the emergence of this situation. The two phenomena are not identical models; each has its own qualitative characteristics: the first between human and nature, the second between human and human!

Therefore, your effort to follow artificial intelligence and to assess its role and dimensions requires, for its understanding— according to our logical reasoning— the necessity of addressing it, as objective dialectics prescribes, within the methodological equation of the Marxist base and superstructure, in their necessary logical integration and their contradiction at the same time. Only then, and in this light, does the phenomenon of artificial intelligence appear as an advanced, contemporary expression of the development of human thought in its higher and more advanced aims of searching and discovering the requirements of development in thought, nature, and society, even under the dominance of capital, which you yourself also rightly point out.

And we see as well, moreover, that the attempt to explain and understand the digital illiteracy which we too have observed, according to the image you initiated in describing and raising it, imposes on us the necessity of vigilance and caution against the danger of the birth and revival of renewed idealist intellectual “biases,” entirely opposed to the scientific interpretation of history, obstructing the process of social progress in the name of “renewal” and “specificity,” heralded by “neo-liberalism” in its latest “refined” editions!

Thus we believe that— by excluding “contemplative” and non-scientific interpretations of digital illiteracy— we open before thought possibilities that help discover the real causes that led to “differentiated,” uneven developments in the trajectories of different societies, despite all of them being subject to the influence of the same factors and general laws of social development. This is because they have continued to carry within themselves additional local formative conditions, with tangible effects in determining the courses of “special development” in each of them, diverging and differentiating. And this must necessarily be taken into account in the fields of intellectual research and political action.

It was not “pure coincidence” alone, in my estimation, that led Rezgar Akrawi to present his intellectual study on artificial intelligence at the same time that Mr. Trump was clouding the global political and intellectual scene with his propositions, which provoked increasingly deeper reactions from states and research centers, and stirred growing anxiety among millions of people in various countries and continents. There is almost unanimous agreement among research centers and experts in economics and international relations that our world faces, during the current and coming two years, an economic crisis more severe than the deposits crisis (1987–2008) that exploded in the United States and spread across all areas under capitalist control.

Under the influence of this course, the capitalist mode of production in its development inaugurated entry into a qualitative stage— globalization— with its crisis acquiring the characteristic of a permanent crisis, as a new formula, alternative (or rather: added) to the “periodic” formula that has accompanied it since its beginnings, as Marx revealed and demonstrated since the mid-nineteenth century.

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