Own your future

Every great technology in history has redistributed power, and it has rarely done so in favour of working people. The machines of the industrial age enriched factory owners long before unions and socialist movements forced them to share the gains. Artificial intelligence moves faster than anything that came before, and this time there is no guarantee that the many will get a second chance.

A handful of corporations, answerable only to their founders and shareholders, now control the most powerful technology humanity has ever built. The states racing to master it treat it as an instrument of domination long before they treat it as a public good. Decisions about work, credit, information, welfare and war are moving away from institutions people can hold to account and toward systems nobody can see, owned by people nobody elected.

This alliance has a name. Technofascism is what happens when the owners of the most powerful technologies join forces with governments that no longer respect democracy, and surveillance, control of information and automated decisions become tools to keep the few in power. It is not a distant threat, because in more than one country it is already how power is exercised.

There is also a darker possibility that serious people no longer dismiss. Systems more capable than their makers could escape anyone's control, including the control of the few who built them. A world run by oligarchs is bad enough, but a world run by artificial intelligence without regard for human dignity would be worse.

We do not have to imagine this future, because its outline is already visible on every continent. Genocides like the one happening in Gaza. Invasions like Russia's in Ukraine, and wars like the one tearing Sudan apart while the powerful look elsewhere. Each is a sign of a world in which force and wealth have stopped answering to law.

The same logic shapes everyday life, even where no bombs fall. Wages stagnate while profits soar, housing slips out of reach and public services are cut in the name of budgets that somehow always balance for the wealthy. The minerals that power our devices are dug out of the countries of the global majority under brutal conditions, and the people who train artificial intelligence are often paid a few dollars a day to do it. Meanwhile the richest carry on as before, and more and more they own the tools that will decide what comes next.

That is the future that awaits us, unless we reach for power.

We are a movement of the left. We belong to the long tradition of democratic socialism, of the labour movements, anti-colonial struggles and campaigns for equal rights that won the eight-hour day, universal suffrage, public healthcare and the end of formal empires. We carry that tradition into an age its founders could not have imagined.

We believe that democracy cannot stop at the ballot box. It must reach the workplace, the economy and the technologies that now organise human life, because political equality means little while economic power stays in the hands of a few. We reject every form of authoritarianism, including the kind that has tried to speak in the name of socialism, since freedom and equality only survive together.

We are internationalists. Capital crosses borders freely and so do the corporations building artificial intelligence, so the people must organise across borders too. A worker in Lagos, a student in São Paulo, a nurse in Manila and a teacher in Milan face the same concentration of power, and together they can break it.

We stand for a future where humanity stays in control. Technology must remain answerable to people and to the democratic institutions they build, and no system - however capable - may hold final authority over a human life.

We stand for human dignity. Every human being deserves a standard of living that keeps rising, rights that keep expanding and a life free from oppression, whether it comes from their own government or from a foreign power.

We stand for prosperity that is shared. The wealth artificial intelligence will create, and the wealth oligarchs across the planet have already captured, must be redistributed through shared ownership, fair taxation and the tearing down of every barrier that keeps people from freedom and opportunity.

Good intentions have not been enough. For years experts have written reports, citizens have signed open letters and governments have promised frameworks, while the concentration of power only accelerated. Asking politely has become a way of losing slowly.

So we seek power, openly and without apology, because only power can change the course of human history. We mean the power of working people organised across borders, of unions and movements, of votes and of numbers that cannot be ignored.

We will protest and act outside the chambers of power, because there is no time to wait for those inside them to find their courage. Where those chambers are not closed behind a wall of authoritarianism, we will stand for election and take our place within them.