Evgeny Morozov knows how to theorize (and, a fortiori, how to intellectually provoke) like few other mortals. The elegance of his argumentation and the sophistication of his critiques are legendary. Several issues back, Morozov launched a grenade by suggesting that socialist attempts to harness AI have treated it like other basic tools of capitalist production—as a neutral instrument that can simply be redirected—rather than as a transformative force that actively shapes social values and human capacities.
We now have two responses to Morozov’s original essay, one from the Cornell historian Aaron Benanav, a target of Morozov’s earlier salvo, and another from the NYU scholar Leif Weatherby. For Benanav, humanity stands between two technological revolutions—generative AI and the green energy transition—and how we choose between them will determine the shape of the future. His essay develops a broader project of designing a post-capitalist “multidimensional economy” (for more see his coruscating essays in New Left Review this past year ) while rebutting Morozov’s claim that such a framework would stifle technological “worldmaking.”
Weatherby, who looks at both Morozov and Benanav, argues that contemporary Marxist and socialist analyses of technology fail to engage adequately with the entanglement between technological rationality and capitalist ideology. To understand AI and the digital economy, Weatherby suggests, one must see them as the logical outcomes of a longstanding merger between mathematics, computation, and neoliberal governance—a fusion that has turned “optimization” into both the logic and the theology of capitalism itself.
Morozov responds in analytically stentorian tones asserting misrepresentation. His rebuttal is a blistering defense of his original essay on socialism and AI. Morozov accuses Benanav of no less than misreading his arguments, erecting straw men, and evading core challenges. His piece blends close textual analysis and cultural critique to argue that Benanav’s institutional blueprint remains trapped in capitalist categories and fails to inspire a desirable post-capitalist life.
Our curated section puts forward two stellar pieces from a recent issue of the London Review of Books, both of which we deem to be required reading. The first, from the acclaimed writer and critic Adam Shatz, is a magisterial tour d’horizon of the parlous state of the United States, where imperial monstrosity is coupled with racial violence, yet where an underlying promise of sublime innovation and cosmopolitan possibility somehow remain.
The second is an essay by Iza Ding in which she examines meritocracy’s enduring failures in both China and the US. Ding interweaves historical context and philosophical reflections to argue that high-stakes exams like the gaokao perpetuate inequality under the guise of fairness while fueling global disillusionment with elite selection systems. The lessons for today are myriad.
Our musical selection for Issue 57 comes from Maurice Ravel, that great master of orchestral precision and vivid color. Our focus is on the adagio from his second piano concerto. The music is hypnotic—both intimate and timeless. Nobody owns this piece like Martha Argerich, who performs it live here.
—Leonard Benardo, senior vice president at the Open Society Foundations
Automate the C-Suite
A Response to Morozov and Benanav
Leif Weatherby
The Ideas Letter
Essay
Weatherby argues that Benanav’s and Morozov’s essays on AI and the left miss a deeper reality: Today’s AI is not a neutral tool operating within capitalism but the materialization of capitalism’s own decision-making rationality, forged through a century of optimization theory, economics, and computing. AI’s natural target, and the class whose work will be replaced, is not primarily hands-on labor but executive authority itself, since CEOs and corporate boards perform the same data-driven, decision-aggregating functions that AI systems execute more and more efficiently.
“Should we do this? Probably not. But I am not making a policy proposal. What we do need to do is see that this is the logical outcome that our built world is militating for. The whole system groans under the weight of a reactionary class of remainder humans still trying to be capitalists as Marx knew them, continuing to arrogate value on the basis of dubious achievements carried out by the market and now logically achievable by machines. We have reached the point where the heroes of our economy are empty vessels of risk—rewarded to the tune of annual national GDPs for having been in the right place at the right time as the wave of market actions, data, and algorithms peaked. It is this position, which confuses wealth and capital, concentrating them into godlike personae that seek to control government and culture alike, that is logically null in the present. Everyone feels the utter lack of justification for the imbalance.”
A Real Political Economy of Technology
A Rebuttal to Morozov
Aaron Benanav
The Ideas Letter
Essay
Two technological futures are competing for political and material priority: generative AI and the green transition. Benanav argues that while AI is marketed as a world-reordering breakthrough, its productivity gains remain elusive even as its energy demands place it in direct tension with decarbonization. But the deeper issue, Benanav contends, is not which technology is superior—it is who decides what gets built and how. Against Morozov’s argument that AI’s indeterminacy requires unconstrained experimentation, Benanav argues that no experimentation is ever free of political choice: Investment decisions inevitably privilege some futures over others. His alternative politicizes investment itself, insisting that experimentation, conflict, and democratic selection must be institutionally entangled if technology is to be wrested from capitalist direction.
“In my framework, by contrast, the object of collective choice is not values as such but rival political and existential projects, each of which embodies a particular understanding of what values matter, how they are to be operationalized, and how they should be prioritized relative to one another. Competing ways of composing across values are articulated and contested through concrete proposals and the justifications offered for choosing among them. The broader social salience and the practical meaning of criteria then emerge retroactively, through decisions about which projects are funded and at what scale. This is how my framework makes space for politics—real politics—within the economy itself. Morozov invokes Gillian Rose’s ‘broken middle’ to suggest that any institutional framework will falsely separate deciding from doing. But the institutions I propose are designed precisely to keep the two entwined.”
The Socialist Charcuterie Board
Morozov Replies
Evgeny Morozov
The Ideas Letter
Essay
Taking issue with Benanav’s institutional vision of a democratic political economy of technology, Morozov argues that generative AI exposes a deeper problem that socialism has yet to solve: how to cultivate freedom, creativity, and collective agency as lived experience rather than as administratively mediated outcomes. Contemporary capitalism, he contends, no longer tries to legitimize itself primarily through efficiency, but through its capacity to turn constraint into experimentation and self-formation—a promise that AI intensifies by collapsing the distance between intention and execution. Against socialist frameworks that privilege ex ante evaluation and coordinated direction-setting, Morozov insists that AI’s purposes cannot be specified in advance and must be discovered through practice. The task, then, is not to govern AI into submission, but to appropriate it as an infrastructure for collective experimentation—one capable of generating new ends, new values, and new forms of life that socialism could plausibly call its own.
“My original essay posed three questions that generative AI has dragged, kicking and screaming, into the socialist spotlight—questions of strategy and desire, not institutional plumbing… If socialism is ever to beat capitalism—at the ballot box or the barricades—it must compete on the terrain where capitalism now harvests its deepest legitimacy: the promise of expanded agency, intensified creativity, worldmaking powers distributed (however unevenly, however cynically) into the texture of everyday life.”
Another Country
Adam Shatz
London Review of Books
Essay
For Shatz, Trump’s return is not a rupture with American history but an attempt to resolve its oldest contradictions by force. The authoritarian turn at home and imperial aggression abroad, he contends, intensify long-standing tensions at the heart of American self-understanding: freedom bound up with domination, innocence sustained through violence, and democracy shadowed by exclusion. Yet alongside this descent exists “another country”: a radical and cosmopolitan America forged in the abolitionist struggle, jazz, and anti-imperial dissent.
“How did we get here? A variety of explanations, some of which overlap, have been advanced: the revolt of the non-college-educated against the college-educated; anger among whites in the heartland at coastal elites and their woke ethos; the politics of fear that emerged in the crucible of 9/11 and the war on terror; populist rage over immigration; an anachronistic constitutional order that gives far too much power to small states. All these accounts have a grain of truth, but none captures the full dimensions of America’s crisis, which is not merely political but spiritual, the latest chapter in an older struggle over what sort of country it wants to be—if, indeed, it still is a single country.”
Studying Is Harmful
Iza Ding
London Review of Books
Essay
Ding uses gaokao—China’s national university entrance exam—to interrogate the enduring fantasy of meritocracy. Reviewing The Highest Exam by Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li, she shows how a system designed to reward talent instead entrenches inequality, disciplines society through exhaustion and competition, and sustains political legitimacy by converting hardship into belief in upward mobility. The gaokao, Ding argues, is not merely an educational tool but a governing technology—and a stark illustration of a global predicament: Education systems elsewhere also reproduce hierarchy and anxiety while masking structural injustice beneath the promise of equal opportunity.
“China’s gaokao factories and America’s college-industrial complex are not accidents. They are the logical outcome of a global system that has mistaken education for investment and human life for capital. Michael Young’s warning about a new educated elite in The Rise of the Meritocracy, the satirical novel that popularised the word, was in fact embraced as an ideal. While astute social commentators understood that achievement can’t be dissociated from varieties of privilege, meritocracy became—over the second half of the 20th century—democracy’s operating principle, furnishing it with a ruling class. Today’s democratic leaders, almost without exception, have degrees from elite institutions…”