"When the wicked rule, the people groan. Where there is no vision, the people perish." — Proverbs 29:2, 18
Historical materialism teaches that the productive forces developed under capitalism do not belong, by nature, to the capitalist class that owns and directs them. They are the accumulated product of collective human labor, and their revolutionary potential is realized only when the working class wrests them from private control and turns them to conscious, planned use. Artificial intelligence is no exception to this law. The question is not whether AI will be used, but for whom and against whom.
It is in this light that Socialist World Media's recent republication of "The Man Trotsky" deserves attention — not merely as a historical curiosity, but as a prompt for thinking through how revolutionaries relate to new technology. The piece, first drafted in 1940 by the 22-year-old Rae Spiegel (who would later become known as Raya Dunayevskaya) while she served as Trotsky's secretary in Mexico, offers an intimate portrait of a revolutionary at work — disciplined, exacting, and always oriented toward the education of cadre. It was submitted to Max Shachtman's Workers Party press but never printed. One need not share the author's later political trajectory, or her uncritical treatment of Joseph Hansen, to find value in her account of Trotsky's method: the insistence that theory be tested constantly against a changing world, and that the education of the working class is inseparable from the fight to overturn capitalist rule.
That same method — historical materialism applied without flinching to a new technical development — is the correct way to approach the World Socialist Web Site's launch of Socialism AI, a chatbot trained on roughly 175 years of Marxist theoretical production and nearly three decades of WSWS analysis of the class struggle. Rather than a novelty or a gimmick, it should be understood as an attempt to place the accumulated theoretical memory of the international working-class movement within easier reach of workers, students, and activists confronting concrete questions — from the lessons of past struggles to how to organize against a specific layoff.
David North has situated the platform's significance within the objective crisis of world capitalism: at a moment when the bourgeoisie has spent decades dismantling the institutions of independent working-class education and discussion, a tool that draws connections between Marxist theory and the unfolding crisis is not a curiosity but a weapon of intellectual counter-offensive — a means of recovering historical memory for a movement that capital has worked systematically to sever from its own past. That argument holds. The retrieval and transmission of working-class historical memory has always been central to the Marxist project — from the Communist Manifesto onward, from the newspaper to the internet — and Socialism AI represents a further, qualitative step in that same continuous effort, a complement to the World Socialist Web Site rather than any substitute for it.
Unsurprisingly, sections of the middle-class left have moved quickly to denounce the initiative. A recent thread on the Socialist Party of Great Britain's forum, "WSWS group to launch a 'Socialism AI,'" gathered a series of unopposed comments hostile both to Trotskyist politics and to the very use of AI by a socialist movement. The WSWS's reply to one such critic, posting as "Dmitri," made the essential point: technical jargon aside, this hostility reflects a broader failure among layers of middle-class radicalism to grasp either how AI functions or how Marxists have historically approached new technology — not with technophobic suspicion, but by asking concretely which class interest a given tool serves and how it can be turned to the benefit of the exploited.
That is the standard by which Socialism AI should be judged, and by that standard it passes. A tool that makes 175 years of revolutionary theory more accessible to a worker asking how to fight a layoff, or a student trying to place today's crisis in historical context, does not distract from the tasks of socialist politics — it equips people to take them up. Workers and students have every reason to make use of it in the struggle for socialism in the twenty-first century.
