The Fetishism of AI

John Bellamy Foster

The United States today is witnessing a new era of concentration and centralisation of monopoly-finance capital marked by the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. S&P Global economists estimate that “80% of the increase in final private domestic demand” in the United States in the first half of 2025 was attributable to spending on “data centres and related high-tech capital expenditures. Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Alphabet/Google and Meta plan to spend $650 billion in 2026. By comparison, “the largest US-based automakers, construction equipment manufacturers, railroads, defence contractors, wireless carriers, parcel delivery outfits, along with ExxonMobil Corp., Intel Corp., Walmart Inc., and the spun-off progeny of General Electric—21 companies—are projected to spenda combined $180 billion in 2026.”

But «The Great Houses of AI are divided against themselves and cannot stand. They rely for their very existence on an increasingly centralised, coercive, and corrupt class-based capitalist state (and cultural) apparatus, constituting an overall logic that—if allowed to continue—will be nothing less than catastrophic. If humanity is to flourish, the forces and relations of production must be revolutionised together, along with the development of human capacities, creating a world of sustainable human development. This requires the formation under socialism of a true “whole-process democracy” informed by the general intellect, in which “the associated producers govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way…accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most appropriate for their human nature.»

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