Falling into the Abyss of Fascism, Climate Disaster & “Superintelligence”
[Below is a revised version of a talk given by Frieda Afary to the Los Angeles Left Coast panel on October 3]
It is not an exaggeration to say that the world is falling into the abyss of fascism, climate disaster and a Brave New World type of scenario with Artificial Intelligence. Deeply rooted and active struggles for self-determination of Ukrainians and Palestinians are being crushed by genocidal wars from Russia on Ukraine and from Israel and the U.S. on the Palestinians. A multipolar capitalist imperialism is promoting wars and at the same time carving up the world into spheres of influence. Women and LGBT from Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan. India and Sudan, to Xinjiang, China, Myanmar, Cuba, Venezuela and elsewhere are under assault by their state militaries and/or warlords while women throughout the world are losing their hard-earned rights. New struggles for education, labor, environmental protection and against gender-based oppression are continuing to arise, most recently in India and France. All of these struggles face great challenges.
Given these developments, international socialist feminist anti-war solidarity demands rethinking, redefinition and reorganization:
We need to take a clear stand against all imperialist powers as well as domestic authoritarian and religious fundamentalist regimes and powers.
We need solidarity with progressive forces inside each country that oppose these powers. In the case of Iran, these are labor activists, feminists, students, intellectuals-writers, Kurdish, Baluch, Arab, Afghan activists. They are the forces that most of Iran’s political prisoners represent.
International socialist feminist anti-war solidarity also demands developing and offering an affirmative alternative to imperialism, capitalism, racism and sexism.
In my book, Socialist Feminism: A New Approach, I argue that developing such an alternative means going further than simply opposing capitalism as neoliberalism or wealth inequality or calling for an equitable distribution of wealth as well as communal arrangements with mutual aid. It means addressing the alienation at the heart of the capitalist mode of production which also builds on racism and sexism and affects all spheres of life including family, relationships, sexuality.
This issue of alienated labor and capitalist alienation, has a lot to do with why millions of people around the world are turning to authoritarianism and fascism today. It has been complicated by the fact that capitalist automation in its effort to extract more and more monetary value from less and less living labor, has moved in the direction of “Artificial Intelligence.” It is attempting to replace humans while still relying on highly exploited low-skilled human labor to conduct its operations.
Now “Super Intelligence” which is a Brave New World scenario aims to go beyond scanning all internet and book content toward scanning all human brains and uploading their content into a centralized computer that would control all humans. In the words of Nick Bostrom, author of Superintelligence (2014), human “recalcitrance” will be overcome.
On a global level, we are dealing with a level of confusion, lack of attention and disinformation that is truly unprecedented in modern history. In the face of this capitalist assault on the human mind, I argue that we need to return to a socialist humanist reclamation of critical thinking and dialectical rationality in order to stand for well-rounded human development in harmony with nature.
Without a return to a socialist humanist alternative rooted in overcoming alienated capitalist labor, and without a transformation both at the structural level and the level of human relations and human to nature relations, we will not be able to confront the current apocalyptic trend.
Socialist feminism has so much to offer to address these challenges. Yet, when it comes to practical international solidarity, many socialist feminists are either imprisoned by the confines of academia or so focused only on U.S. imperialism that they refuse to or hesitate to take a stand against Russian and Chinese imperialism and their ally states.
In 2022, the Ukrainian feminists’ demand for arms to defend themselves against Russia’s imperialist invasion was rejected by many prominent socialist feminists who dismissed Ukraine’s war of liberation as a proxy war. https://spectrejournal.com/feminist-resistance-against-war/
Most recently when a group of 24 U.S. Black feminists and other U.S and international intellectuals published a letter in the Guardian to express solidarity with Iranian political prisoners, their letter was attacked for supposedly creating “a false equivalency” between the Iranian government and the U.S. and Israeli governments. Subsequently signatories, Hossam el-Hamalawy, Nadia Abu El-Haj, Nisrin Elamin, Rashid Khalidi, Robin DG Kelley, and Sinan Antoon, withdrew their signatures. https://newpol.org/symposium/the-iranian-prisoner-solidarity-letter-some-replies-to-critics/
As various Iranian leftist supporters of this letter of solidarity have responded, those who have caved into the attacks are violating the demands and struggles of Iranian political prisoners and Iranian feminist, labor, youth and national minority activists who oppose both the regime and the brutal war launched on them by the U.S. and Israel.
In this symposium, you will read the contributions of Ukrainian, Cuban and Iranian feminists who have a clear stand against all imperialist and authoritarian powers, and want to offer ways of engaging in solidarity with progressive struggles and forces in their respective countries and around the world.