Social transformations in the age of the artificial intelligence revolution are becoming increasingly complex and ever more difficult to understand. The pace at which social structures are changing exceeds our capacity to fully and intuitively comprehend them, particularly because these changes are simultaneously radical, far-reaching, and enduring. These transformations are not confined to a single sphere. They encompass the economy, social relations, education, art, and culture, while driving a parallel revolution in traditional social systems and posing major challenges to legal frameworks as they struggle to keep pace with technological development and regulate a sector that has assumed an increasingly transformative role.
Artificial Intelligence and Social Structure
In a research paper published in Capital & Class, political economy researcher Elliott Goodell Ugalde examines the nature of the contemporary revolution represented by artificial intelligence. He argues that AI functions as a mechanism for absorbing surplus value within capitalism itself, rather than signaling a “post-capitalist” revolution marked by the emergence of technological or digital feudalism, known as “technofeudalism,” from the ruins of capitalist production.
Under this interpretation, this new form of feudalism is embodied by companies such as Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Tesla, and others. Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis previously advanced this argument in his book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism? Varoufakis heralds the end of an era in which profits were generated through capitalist competition and the traditional market production cycle, and the beginning of an age of digital feudalism.
In this new order, people are transformed into producers of “free” content who feed and reproduce “cloud capital,” meaning digital platforms and algorithms, without compensation, much as peasants once labored for the benefit of feudal lords.
Ugalde argues that capitalism is not defined solely by competitive markets, but by commodity production, wage labor, and the logic of accumulation. Digital platforms do not abolish this logic, but rather reorganize and intensify it. Digital rent is not an alternative to the accumulation of surplus value at the point of production, but rather a derivative, secondary distribution of that value. More importantly, he addresses the fact that data does not generate value in and of itself. Its value depends on the living labor involved in collecting and processing it, as well as on capital-intensive infrastructure that requires enormous amounts of financing and long-term investment, and, of course, considerable human effort devoted to its construction, development, and maintenance.
Despite the precise clarification of several concepts in Ugalde’s paper, which also includes an extensive discussion of social structure, it overlooks the impact of the artificial intelligence revolution on the transformation of the social structure as a whole, including the capitalist class itself. Instead, it reduces this class to its function. In the traditional leftist imagination, which remains largely Hegelian, the capitalist class appears as a cohesive bloc with a single essence performing a single function. Yet although mechanisms of domination have intensified under monopoly capitalism, they are not simply tools through which the ruling class reorganizes itself and reinforces its dominance, as Ugalde suggests. The capitalist class was never homogeneous to begin with. It is marked by overlapping internal conflicts, both old and new, operating across several levels, including productive, rent-based, speculative financial, and technological interests. The newer of these conflicts are intensifying rapidly as a result of the artificial intelligence revolution.
Internal conflict within a social class itself has both quantitative and qualitative transformative effects on that class, just as conflict between social classes transforms society more broadly. Such conflict can translate into quantitative or qualitative changes in laws and in economic, financial, and monetary policies, among others, or into a comprehensive transformation of the social contract. Consequently, as the conditions of capitalist accumulation change under the impact of the artificial intelligence revolution, the transformation cannot be reduced to a mere “repositioning” of the same class within the same social structure. Rather, it extends to the transformation of the social structure in its entirety, across its various classes, beginning with the internal transformations occurring within those classes themselves.
Nor is it sufficient to describe artificial intelligence companies simply as manifestations of “monopoly capitalism,” as though they were a direct extension of traditional monopoly capitalism, and to regard digital capitalism as an automatic and direct continuation of industrial and financial capitalism along a linear and sequential path of development. Such an interpretation leaves no room for the new differences and contradictions that emerge and destabilize the imagined organic unity within the social class, nor for the conflicts that produce enormous and complex processes of mergers, acquisitions, displacement, and elimination. No social class assumes an eternal form. Even the capitalist class, within the capitalist system itself, undergoes structural transformations driven by changes in the very form of value.
Another problem with this argument lies in its reduction of the working class itself to a helpless victim and passive recipient, as though it neither influences nor is influenced by the artificial intelligence revolution or by transformations and developments in production relations. Its historical role is reduced to exclusion from the labor market and the erosion of its purchasing power. There is no consideration of the role artificial intelligence may play in shaping workers’ awareness of their rights or strengthening their capacity to organize. The working class, too, is reduced to an organically homogeneous class occupying the same fixed position within the structure of exploitation.
This denial of the historical agency of social classes, or of their ability to use the tools and technologies developed by capitalism, on the one hand, and the reduction of transformations in social structure to fixed class binaries or linear, sequential developments, on the other, marks precisely the dividing line between Marxist philosophy, which recognises the dynamics of social conflict and treats them as a force that directs and drives human history, and a Hegelian philosophy dressed in Marxist clothing, which views human history as an inevitable trajectory towards a predetermined end.
In addition, overlooking the role of the middle classes, alongside the capitalist and working classes, is no less significant. These groups play a fundamental role in driving the technological revolution, particularly in artificial intelligence, with engineers and programmers being key. Yet just as the middle classes contribute to technological development, they also bear a substantial share of the harm caused by job losses resulting from the automation of intellectual and creative tasks that were once largely their domain, and from the transformation of their specialized skills into algorithms owned and managed by major capitalist corporations.
The artificial intelligence revolution cannot be examined in isolation from the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between AI and social structure. Each produces the other, and each also reproduces the other. Both possess a degree of independent capacity for self-reproduction, through which a knowledge gap emerges and widens. Despite the transformative role of artificial intelligence, and the impossibility of reducing it to the category of a mere “tool,” it must, in one way or another, reflect at least partially the class structure of the prevailing political and social system within which it was produced. In this sense, AI is neither a neutral tool nor independent of prevailing relations of production. At the same time, it is not merely a “one-way” instrument in the hands of the dominant classes, and therefore does not automatically or fully reproduce this class structure.
Artificial Intelligence and Wealth Distribution
Moving from theoretical abstraction to economic reality, we have seen that artificial intelligence is not merely a neutral tool. Rather, it plays a powerful role in restructuring social organization, both at the level of its infrastructure, meaning its material economic base, and its superstructure, meaning its institutions and ideological and political systems. This transformation is accompanied by an unprecedented concentration of wealth, which, amid the artificial intelligence revolution, is accumulating at record levels in the hands of a narrow elite of technology and AI company owners (see table below). Against this backdrop comes US Senator Bernie Sanders’ proposal to establish an artificial intelligence sovereign wealth fund to redistribute this digital wealth by enabling American society to acquire stakes in major technology companies, offering an alternative to the emerging model of monopoly capitalism.
Bernie Sanders’ proposal to establish a sovereign wealth fund is not merely a theoretical idea. It partially aligns with concrete measures adopted by several countries to protect their economic interests. Gulf states, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have used sovereign wealth funds to channel tens of billions of dollars into national artificial intelligence infrastructure. In contrast, countries such as the United Kingdom and South Korea have established sovereign funds dedicated to AI and direct investment in emerging companies.
What distinguishes Sanders’ proposal, however, is its emphasis on wealth redistribution through the transfer of part of the technology sector’s ownership to the American public. His proposal would require major artificial intelligence companies, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, to transfer 50% of their shares to the fund. The proposal rests on the argument that AI models have been trained on the “intellectual commons of humanity,” that these companies have exploited content created by millions of people without permission or compensation, and that public resources and the fruits of human knowledge should benefit society as a whole.
Yet the dilemma, or rather the fundamental problem, arising from Sanders’ proposal lies in the gap between the universal nature of the “intellectual commons of humanity,” understood as a space produced and reproduced through the participation and interaction of hundreds of millions of people around the world, and the particular nature of the proposed outcome, or right to compensation, which would transfer ownership of a portion of these shares exclusively to the American public. Wealth redistribution is fundamentally rooted in the principle of social justice. How, then, can it be considered just if it reproduces class inequality in new forms, appropriating the “global commons” to strengthen the social safety net of a single country?
In addition, the widespread waves of layoffs affecting numerous sectors worldwide must be taken into account. It is not only the American labor market that is experiencing profound disruption, but the global labor market as a whole. Nor are American social safety nets the only ones facing deterioration. Social protection systems around the world are confronting similar pressures. Consideration must also be given to the scale of the imbalance likely to emerge in the future, which will become far more visible in no less than ten years, between wealthy countries that have been able to build infrastructure connected to artificial intelligence and developing or poorer countries that have remained primarily consumers of the technology. The deepening of this contradiction is likely to widen the inequality gap between these countries, a gap that is already vast.
A Global Artificial Intelligence Fund?
Under the conditions governing its use within the current monopolistic trajectory, artificial intelligence is not merely radically reshaping the relationship between capital and labor, nor is it simply redistributing value in ways that further concentrate wealth in the hands of technology giants amid increasingly severe social stratification. This is particularly evident as employment opportunities shrink and global unemployment rates rise, especially among young people. A report issued by the International Labor Organization in August 2026 noted that 6.1% of jobs held by young people aged 15 to 29 are in occupations highly exposed to changes associated with artificial intelligence. Rather, the impact of AI extends to reproducing the traditional capitalist class in an extreme form unprecedented in the history of capitalism. It strips the bourgeoisie of its historical character as the class that led the Industrial Revolution on the one hand, and the revolution in political and individual freedoms on the other. In its place, it puts an effective weapon for undermining the liberal democracy that the revolutionary bourgeoisie built on the ruins of feudalism into the hands of an algorithmic class monstrosity emerging from within that very bourgeoisie.
To alter the direction of this historical trajectory, the conditions governing the use of artificial intelligence must change. This could perhaps involve redistributing ownership of digital platforms, as Bernie Sanders has proposed, but on a global scale. Here, however, another problem emerges. Redistributing ownership at the national level is practically feasible, despite its difficulty, but it can also generate new crises. Redistributing ownership globally, by contrast, raises an entirely new set of dilemmas given the absence of enforcement mechanisms, the lack of international organizations either dedicated to such a task or equipped with the appropriate powers, and the incompatibility of existing national legal frameworks.
Addressing these challenges requires new proposals and new solutions. A first step could perhaps be the creation of a global artificial intelligence fund to support developing countries and ensure that the benefits of AI are distributed fairly among different peoples. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres announced his intention to present recommendations on such a fund during the opening session of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on July 17, 2026.
The Need for Philosophy
Philosophy, despite possessing the analytical tools necessary to unpack the phenomenon of artificial intelligence, finds itself almost incapable of keeping pace in real time with the accelerating pace of technological development. This applies whether it seeks to explain the current state of human consciousness, which is being profoundly affected in both negative and positive ways; human free will and the new forms of alienation that are emerging and multiplying across different levels; or human creativity, which is threatened in some areas while finding new spaces for experimentation in others. The same difficulty arises when philosophy attempts to address the ethical, class-based, and social questions associated with this digital revolution. The gap between philosophy and this revolution is widening over time rather than narrowing, and this is itself a philosophical problem that warrants a separate discussion.
Artificial intelligence, then, is not merely a “tool,” like a mechanical machine, a computer, or a smartphone. This is the dilemma confronting traditional understandings of a historical phenomenon whose emergence rests, on the one hand, on the cumulative historical development of the means of production as a necessary condition for its existence, and, on the other, on the human will that directs, feeds, establishes, and defines the tasks that artificial intelligence systems were designed and developed to perform.
The epistemological dilemma begins precisely with the assumption that artificial intelligence is analogous to the technological developments that preceded it, and with the tendency to overlook the qualitative leap through which AI transcends the logic of linear continuity with earlier technological developments. Artificial intelligence constitutes an immense transformative force, not only in economic, social, cultural, and political structures but also in its capacity to transform itself without requiring continuous direct human intervention. Once the logic of technological neutrality no longer applies to artificial intelligence, the claim that it is “merely a tool” can no longer hold.
A tool is neutral, despite the role it too plays in transforming nature and human beings. Artificial intelligence, by contrast, is not neutral. It is a social actor in multiple ways. Its role encompasses knowledge production and decision-making, and it simulates human consciousness and even surpasses it. It is precisely here that the distinction becomes clear between traditional Marxist analysis, which proceeds from strained ideological attempts to reconcile classical theory with a rapidly changing reality, and a Marxist analysis that begins by acknowledging its inability to fully comprehend an ever-changing reality. Such an analysis starts by accepting that artificial intelligence represents a foundational moment of ontological rupture in the very concept of the “productive forces,” and proceeds towards recognizing the fractures emerging in the prevailing understanding of the historical relationship between the human and the machine.
Yet the inability to achieve a complete understanding is no justification for theoretical surrender. On the contrary, it is precisely what should drive the reconstruction of theoretical tools, even if that reconstruction must begin from below zero rather than merely from zero. The human inability to comprehend everything is the spirit of philosophy; philosophy is the spirit of science, and science is the spirit of artificial intelligence. Philosophy cannot live in a world where human consciousness and will are no longer propelled into theoretical exploration by wonder, the acknowledgment of ignorance, and the rejection of absolute certainty. Perhaps the trap of certainty, embodied in treating artificial intelligence merely as a “tool” that possesses the truth, is the first wall humanity must tear down to declare war on alienation, understood as an objective relationship in which human beings surrender their critical consciousness to a digital system that simultaneously simulates and appropriates that consciousness.
