What Marx's Grundrisse Can Teach Us About the Rise of AI and China - Foreign Policy

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What Marx's Grundrisse Can Teach Us About the Rise of AI and China - Foreign Policy

Among the rites of passage of the millennial generation was the rediscovery, for some, of Karl Marx. Many left-populist movements that emerged across the Western world after the Great Recession of 2008, such as Occupy Wall Street, channeled their intellectual energy into engaging with the 19th-century German thinker’s work—specifically, Marx’s canonical text Das Kapital (1867) and its explorations of how recessions recur throughout business cycles. Among the rites of passage of the millennial generation was the rediscovery, for some, of Karl Marx. Many left-populist movements that emerged across the Western world after the Great Recession of 2008, such as Occupy Wall Street, channeled their intellectual energy into engaging with the 19th-century German thinker’s work—specifically, Marx’s canonical text Das Kapital (1867) and its explorations of how recessions recur throughout business cycles.
The relative economic scarcity that the millennial generation confronted after 2008, and the insights provided by Marx, helped shift much of the contemporary left away from the once-fashionable postmodernist linguistic theory that had dominated U.S. academia in the 1990s. The need to explain falling standards of living and unemployment took precedence over parsing complex French theory. This materialist attitude found its way into political movements including the Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders campaigns in Britain and the United States, respectively, and the new parties of continental Europe such as Syriza in Greece, PODEMOS in Spain, and La France Insoumise in France. 2019 and 2020 brought electoral defeat for most of these projects and the hopes of a set of millennial left activists trained on Das Kapital. But that defeat has come just in time for the next generation to embrace a Marx of its own. For many analysts, the millennials’ left-populism was unable to grasp the growing social atomization driven by technology, fully conceptualize the move toward a new multipolar axis revolving around U.S.-China relations, or speak convincingly about threats from robotic automation and ecological collapse.
It’s not that Marx can’t help the new post-COVID-19 generation understand its own forms of accelerating social, economic, and natural dislocation. But Generation Z would be wise to trade Marx’s Das Kapital for his long-neglected Grundrisse. And it now has a useful new guide at its disposal, A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse by David Harvey.
Harvey, a soft-spoken 87-year-old British professor working in the City University of New York system, happens to have also heavily influenced the post-2008 cohort’s engagement with Marx. His guide to Das Kapital , published in 2010, was incredibly popular, overcoming the fact that its content matter was an obtuse, abstract, and frustratingly complex economic treatise. Notably, the first episode of Harvey’s YouTube series “Reading Marx’s Capital Vol I,” released the same year, has nearly 1 million views.
Just as Das Kapital provided orientation amid the Great Recession, the Grundrisse—and Harvey’s interpretation of it—could be an indispensable guide to navigating our political situation today, specifically when it comes to the question of how to deal with a rapidly developing artificial intelligence and the continued, seemingly inexorable rise of China. Men wearing work uniforms and hats assemble rows of semi-automatic textile machines on a large factory floor in Leningrad in 1924. Soviet-made semi-automatic textile machines are assembled at the Karl Marx factory in Leningrad in 1924. Sovfoto/Universal Images Group via Getty Images The Grundrisse is a collection of Marx’s unpublished notebooks that cover his entire critique of classical political economy. It is looser and more chaotic in form than Das Kapital and covers more ground, taking in art, ancient history, geography, and technology as well as expected economic themes, such as the relations between production, distribution, exchange, and consumption in 19th-century industrial capitalism. Harvey presents the Grundrisse as the exposition of a vast array of overlapping and ever-evolving mechanical systems that explain an encyclopedic range of modern phenomena, including money, capitalist forms of slavery, the transformation of tools into machinery, and...