Socialism After AI
'Socialism After AI' (New Left Review, December 2025) is Morozov's most sustained recent engagement with the political-economic question the AI transition poses to the democratic left. The essay argues that contemporary capitalism 'no longer tries to legitimize itself primarily through efficiency, but through its capacity to turn constraint into experimentation and self-formation' — a promise AI intensifies, and one that the conventional left critique of technology has struggled to accommodate because it takes seriously the genuine experience of empowerment that AI tools produce.
In the AI Story
The essay's central observation is that AI is not experienced by its users as oppressive. It is experienced as liberating. The engineer celebrating her new productive capability does not feel exploited; she feels empowered. The feeling is genuine — it corresponds to a real expansion of her productive capacity. The political challenge is not to convince empowered users they are actually oppressed, which would be both condescending and inaccurate. It is to demonstrate that empowerment within a structure of concentrated governance is not the same as freedom, and that the difference matters.
Morozov's sharpest move is the diagnosis of the left's own determinism. Critics of capitalism, he argues, have often treated AI 'like earlier tools of capitalist production — as a neutral instrument that can simply be redirected.' The framing inherits the determinism of the technology it claims to critique. If AI is a neutral instrument, the only political question is who controls it. The deeper question — what kind of intelligence the instrument embodies, whose purposes it serves in its very design, what experiences its operation forecloses — disappears from view.
The essay's constructive proposal draws on the ecological reason framework. AI's purposes, Morozov argues, 'cannot be specified in advance and must be discovered through practice.' This formulation challenges the instrumental view of intelligence that Silicon Valley and its critics share. It opens space for institutional experimentation — public data trusts, cooperative ownership structures, regulated infrastructure — that the determinist framing forecloses by treating the current corporate arrangement as the only possible one.
The essay sits in explicit dialogue with the longer tradition of technology-and-socialism debates running through William Morris, Raymond Williams, and André Gorz, while insisting that AI presents challenges these earlier thinkers could not have anticipated. The promise of self-formation through constraint is a new legitimation strategy, and the left's theoretical resources — forged against earlier forms of capitalist legitimation — require substantial updating to meet it.
Origin
The essay extends themes Morozov has developed across his AI-era work, synthesizing his critiques of AGI-ism, Panglossian neoliberalism, and technological determinism into a constructive political argument addressed to the democratic left.
Key Ideas
Empowerment is real. The user's experience of enhanced capability is genuine and must be taken seriously; denying it is both inaccurate and strategically inept.
Capability vs. freedom. Empowerment within concentrated governance is not freedom; the distinction is the political crux.
Left determinism. Critics of capitalism have often inherited the determinism they claim to oppose, treating AI as a neutral tool to be redirected rather than a specific product of specific institutions.
New legitimation. Contemporary capitalism legitimates itself through promises of self-formation rather than efficiency; AI intensifies this promise and requires new theoretical resources to meet.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Evgeny Morozov, 'Socialism After AI,' New Left Review, December 2025.
- André Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason (1989).
- Raymond Williams, 'Culture Is Ordinary' (1958).
- William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890), on work and technology in an imagined socialist future.