This speech was delivered by Evan Blake, a Socialist Equality Party (US) National Committee member, at the 2026 May Day Online Rally, organized by the WSWS and the International Committee of the Fourth International.

Revolutionary greetings to all those attending today’s May Day rally.

At the center of the imperialist war now raging against Iran and of the world economy as a whole is the struggle over AI, which has become the locus of the greatest financial bubble in the history of capitalism.

Trillions of dollars in capital investment and debt have been poured into a narrow cluster of tech firms that now dominate the US stock market. The American ruling class has placed all its bets on this AI bubble—believing that it will somehow restore the hegemony of a declining imperialist power and resolve the crisis of US capitalism that has built up for over half a century.

The revolutionary character of AI as a technology is self-evident to anyone who has used it. In a matter of seconds, an LLM can summarize a thousand-page document. It can translate across any pair of languages. It can write the code for a working piece of software in minutes. It can engage a user in sustained dialogue on any subject in the history of human culture.

But the destructive uses to which this technology is being put under capitalism are no less self-evident, and they are growing by the day.

AI has been turned into an instrument of war. Firms like Palantir are building the autonomous targeting software now deployed by the US and Israeli militaries in Gaza, Iran and across the Middle East, while AI has been integrated into every layer of the American military-intelligence apparatus. The same technology is being used to hunt migrants in US cities and to automate the labor of hundreds of millions of workers throughout the world. The wave of mass layoffs now sweeping industry after industry is being justified in the name of what the ruling class calls “AI efficiency”—the financial oligarchy’s dream of a production process purged of the class whose labor creates all of society’s wealth.

Confronted with growing opposition to these reactionary uses, sections of the political establishment counterpose a single answer: regulation. They cultivate the illusion that the most powerful advance of the productive forces can be moderated within a social order driven by the pursuit of profit and the ruthless competition between rival nation-states.

It must be stated categorically: such reforms are impossible and will never be accepted by a ruling class tobogganing towards fascism and world war.

The socially regressive use of technological advances under capitalism is not new. Every great technological breakthrough in the history of capitalism has been subordinated to exploitation and war. More than 150 years ago Marx demonstrated in his great work Capital that technologies that could have liberated workers from drudgery were turned instead into instruments for intensifying their exploitation. The fault lay not in the machine. It lay in the social relations within which the machine operated.

Leon Trotsky wrote in his 1926 essay Culture and Socialism:

Technology is a basic conquest of mankind; although it has indeed served until now as an instrument of exploitation, it is at the same time the basic requirement for the liberation of the exploited. The machine strangles the wage-slave. But the wage-slave can only be freed through the machine.

This is the materialist approach of the Marxist movement to every technology. The decisive question is that of ownership—in whose hands, in whose interests, and for what social purpose is technology utilized.

Last December, the ICFI launched Socialism AI, which was a historic achievement for the international working class. The aim of Socialism AI is to harness the revolutionary power of AI—to turn it from an instrument of exploitation and war into an instrument of working-class education and organization, and of the building of the international socialist movement.

In launching Socialism AI, for the first time in the history of the socialist movement we placed in the hands of workers and youth a tool capable of making the entire heritage of Marxism—the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and Plekhanov, and nearly three decades of daily analysis on the World Socialist Web Site—accessible in real time, in dialogue, in any language, at any hour.

The response over the past four and a half months has been remarkable. Thousands of workers and young people in over 100 countries have turned to Socialism AI for answers they can find nowhere else. Your questions and feedback have fed directly back into its development—a continuous, dialectical interaction between the tool and the working class whose political education it serves.

Starting today, Socialism AI is vastly more powerful than what was launched in December, producing answers qualitatively better to all political, theoretical and historical questions. Based on the feedback of users internationally, we have made substantial improvements to the architecture underlying this revolutionary tool.

When a worker asks: What is capital? — when a young person asks: How did the Russian Revolution happen? — when a rank-and-file worker asks: How do I organize against the betrayals of the trade union bureaucracy? — the reply will draw upon the theoretical and historical arsenal of the Trotskyist movement—the labor theory of value, the theory of permanent revolution, the great lessons of the 20th century and more.

Every revolutionary epoch in history has been prepared by an explosion of knowledge. The Enlightenment cleared the intellectual ground for the French Revolution by placing knowledge in the hands of the rising revolutionary class of the day. The October Revolution was made possible by a generation of Russian workers, led by the Bolshevik Party, who studied Marx in factory circles and prepared themselves theoretically and politically for the seizure of power. No class can make a revolution if it cannot first grasp, in thought, the nature of the society it intends to transform.

This is why the capitalist system thrives on and promotes ignorance—the destruction of public education, the degeneration of serious journalism into corporate propaganda, the cultivation of postmodernism and irrationalism in the universities, the operations of the pseudo-left whose aim is to disorient every generation turning toward socialism. All of this is the attempt of a doomed social order to prevent the working class from understanding its own historical role as the gravedigger of capitalism.

Against this the ICFI counterposes Socialism AI: a universe of knowledge placed in the hands of the international working class, in the service of its political education on a world scale.

We urge every worker and young person watching this rally to go to SocialismAI.com today and to incorporate this tool into your daily political life. Inform your coworkers, classmates, and friends, and collaborate with them in using it to build the socialist movement internationally.

The old world is ending. The new world must be built. Socialism AI is a central weapon the international working class must take into its hands for that revolutionary work.