Readers of The Communist – we want to hear from you!
Over the course of our summer recruitment drive, we want to know what kinds of questions are coming up on your paper sales, in your discussions with prospective RCP recruits, and in your party branch meetings.
Your questions can be about anything from current events, to Marxist theory, to party building and tactics.
Head to communist.red/write to get in touch. We will use your responses to curate the contents of the paper, and provide a Marxist response to a selection of them, alongside recommendations for further study…
A reader from Birmingham asks: “Do communists oppose AI?”
The prevailing attitude on the left towards the AI boom is one of hostility, fear, and repulsion. Quite rightly, the general view is that this technology is being imposed onto society by gigantic capitalist monopolies without any regard for what people actually want and need.
As a technology developed by and for capitalists, it is understood that it will be used to sack workers or pay them less, advertise even more invasively, and to tell lies on an industrial scale.
Nevertheless, Marxism is about understanding society in an all-sided way, and not about blanket rejections of ‘bad’ things, which is the method of anarchism.
No technology is inherently bad. Rather, it is the class which uses it that determines how and why it is used. For AI to be the global phenomenon that it is, you can be sure that it has enormous potential to be useful and a benefit to humanity.
Indeed, of all the technologies mankind has invented, it is surely the most universal of all. It can be used to spot any pattern in society or nature.
And so, it can be used to identify diseases and their cures, to plan a workplace (or entire economy) more efficiently, to discover new, more sustainable materials, to translate so quickly and accurately that people from around the world can communicate. Potentially, it can be used to remove drudgery to liberate people from such work for good.
There is a layer of people on the left that opposes AI in a moralistic and absolute sense, who think it must never be touched – as if, by inventing it, humanity has conjured an all-powerful demon. That line of thinking is wrong and is going nowhere.
In the hands of the market, however, AI has produced a colossal bubble which will burst and cause a lot of damage. The strange thing about AI is that no one knows how useful it will really become.
No one knows if it will stop ‘hallucinating’, and to what extent it will raise productivity. If it is realised that it will not make the improvements expected of it in the next few years, the bubble would burst in an especially damaging way, leading to a global slump
What AI does seem to be good at – in the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism, and in the hands of greedy and short-sighted people – is producing scams and churning out ‘slop’, as seen with the explosion of surreal Farage-related investment scams on X this week.
This leads to a bizarre situation in which no one can trust any text, image, or video that they see online. This is a graphic illustration of the alienated society we live in.
But in the hands of the working class after a socialist revolution, AI would enable us to plan the economy and eliminate waste extremely quickly, allowing the working week to be reduced, living standards to rise, and people to be freed up to lead the lives they want to lead. Under capitalism, it is used largely to cheat everyone else.
Daniel Morley
A reader from Cardiff asks: “What would a communist party do with the monarchy?”
The British monarchy is facing a big crisis. Fewer than half of British young people today think Britain should remain as a monarchy.
This is no surprise given the long list of scandals that the royals have been mired in over the past years, most recently the affair surrounding ‘Prince’ Andrew’s abuse. Increasingly, people are wondering ‘why should I pay for these parasitic freeloaders?’
Marxists want to see the monarchy, and every pillar of capitalist society torn down. This isn’t solely because the monarchy is expensive or gaudy, as some on the left base their position on. As Rosa Luxemburg once wrote, we would prefer the most expensive republic to the cheapest monarchy!
Fundamentally, we oppose the British monarchy because it is a central part of the British state apparatus, and the bedrock of the uncodified British constitution. It is, therefore, a weapon in the hands of our class enemies.
One job of the monarchy is to create a sense of patriotism and unity across Britain, to anoint the British state with a sense of divine mystique, removed from the sordid world of parliamentary politics. In the past, this played a powerful role. Today, less so.
Another function of the Crown can be seen through Charles’ latest trip to the White House, where he played the role of a curmudgeonly but ultimately wise old Brit, in an attempt to save the dying special relationship.
This attempt at diplomacy is replicated across the globe, where the royal family are rolled out to remind countries – who are uninterested in economic trade and political allyship with this dying power – that British imperialism once ruled the world.
But the most important role of the British monarchy is to be a weapon of last resort, reserved for periods of intense class struggle.
The British government, the police force, the armed forces, the prisons, and the judicial systems all swear fealty to the King – not to parliament, nor to the country as a whole. The Crown plays an essential role in forming parliaments and passing legislation – though this power is usually kept behind the scenes.
This was revealed in 2019, when Boris Johnson asked the Queen to prorogue (dissolve) parliament, in order to force through his Brexit deal.
It is not too far a stretch to imagine how this power could be used in response to a socialist government; or to create a rallying point for reactionary generals and businessmen during large-scale strikes of protests.
This is the reality of the British Monarchy. Not only are they a family of scroungers, living on the tax money of hard-working Brits and the rent they draw from their property empire – as an aside, they are the biggest owners of land in the world! – but they are kept as a potential reserve for counter-revolutionary struggle against our class.
We are fighting for a world free of monarchy, classes, and states. In power, communists would immediately abolish the monarchy as an institution, along with other medieval remnants like the House of Lords and the Privy Council.
We would expropriate the Crown’s land and wealth, strip all titles and decorations from members of the House of Windsor, and prosecute them for all their crimes against the working class.
Perhaps Buckingham Palace could then be made into a museum, so that future generations can gaze in awe at the bejeweled backwardness of British capitalism in its dying days.
Sarah Vedrovitch
A reader from London asks “How do communists approach the trade union movement?”
The trade union struggle is set to intensify in the coming years, and it is inevitable that they will once again become poles of attraction in the future.
This raises certain questions: How exactly can communists intervene effectively in trade union struggles? How can we recruit workers to the RCP in a non-sectarian way?
Successful communist activity in workplaces does not require an intimate knowledge of the ins-and-outs of how unions work, and ‘practical’ matters of organising. This stuff will be alien to most radicalised young workers in any case, who are likely much more interested in topics like Palestine, international events, and so on.
Nor does it require embedding oneself within trade union structures, hiding or softening our revolutionary politics, and waiting for the coming struggles. Communists can only ever intervene in an open and honest way, putting forward clear Marxist ideas and methods.
Not all workers will like this. But we are not aiming to recruit all workers. We are not even aiming to recruit broad layers of workers at this stage, those who are drawing the most advanced conclusions about the need for revolutionary change.
The main way we can intervene in the movement is to mobilise around struggles as and when they break out.
For example, in 2022 members of the RCP (then known as Socialist Appeal) intervened in a teacher’s strike at Newham Sixth Form College in East London. This strike took place in the context of a broader strike wave that year.
The comrades intervening were mainly myself and two students who attended the college. We simply attended the picket lines and talked to the teachers in a friendly way about their strike, but also about wider political subjects: why austerity exists in the first place, the farmers’ struggle in India, and even the works of the dramatist Bertolt Brecht! At no point was there any suspicion or hostility shown towards us by the staff.
We designed and handed out flyers to students outside the college gates, and we offered ideas on how to take the strike forward, like organising a mass meeting of students and winning over other staff and the parents on a political basis.
When speaking to students, we linked the strike to the fight for high-quality education. In fact, we were the only ones able to do this, since the teachers were prohibited from even talking to the students about the strike!
We were able to gain authority amongst the strikers, to the point that, by the end, that the main union rep was turning to our lead school student for ideas on how to move forward.
We ended up organising a mass student-staff assembly, and concessions were eventually granted by management, partly as a result of our efforts. We even recruited more students from the school shortly afterwards.
None of the comrades who intervened were members of that workplace, and we carried out this intervention with no understanding or knowledge of the NEU rules or procedures. But none of this prevented us from having success, because we broadened the struggle out politically, and patiently, confidently explained: “with these methods, we can win”.
Nelson Wan
