By WSWS Reporter.
This article was originally published in the World Socialist Web Site on the 24 November 2025.
At two major public meetings over the past week—in Berlin on November 18 and London on November 22—David North, chairperson of the World Socialist Web SiteInternational Editorial Board, delivered lectures analyzing the deepening crisis of American capitalism and the Trump administration’s drive toward dictatorship. Both meetings drew over 100 attendees, demonstrating the widespread concern over the threat of fascism under Trump and his counterparts internationally.
Most significantly, North used both occasions to announce the imminent launch of Socialism AI, a revolutionary tool that will harness artificial intelligence for the development of socialist consciousness in the international working class.
In his concluding remarks at the Berlin meeting, held at Humboldt University, North explained the transformative potential of Socialism AI, stating:
The vast pedagogical potential of AI, combined with the revolutionary perspectives of scientific socialism, opens unprecedented possibilities. The consciousness of the working class, the understanding of the objective conditions of capitalist crisis, the clarification of the path to working class power—all of this can be spread on a scale that previous generations could scarcely have imagined.
Drawing a profound historical parallel, North continued:
Just as Diderot’s Encyclopedia in the eighteenth century became an instrument of enlightenment that contributed to the French Revolution by making knowledge available to masses of people who had been kept in ignorance, so artificial intelligence—properly developed and democratically controlled, utilized by the revolutionary Marxist-Trotskyist party and placed in the service of the working class rather than capitalist profit—can become an instrument of socialist consciousness and liberation.
North then formally announced Socialism AI, saying:
I am pleased to announce today that the International Committee has taken measures to harness the power of AI for the purposes and interests of the working class movement. Within a few weeks, we will be releasing Socialism AI, a revolutionary application of augmented intelligence to the development of socialist consciousness and the organizational capacity of the international working class. It is a chatbot which will enable users to pose political, historical, social questions, problems of organization and technical initiative, and receive a response which draws on the vast archive of Marxist thought. First and foremost, the archive of the World Socialist Web Site itself, which encompasses well over 100,000 articles.
North stressed that Socialism AI “will not be programmed as the existing chatbots are to provide an answer which has been conditioned by the establishment media.” Rather, “It will provide an accurate, thoroughly researched reply to critical issues which arise in the day to day struggles of the working class. It will answer questions posed by intellectuals, students, youth on a vast range of questions, and will give answers which reflect and express the interests of the working class.”
Drawing parallels between the launching of Socialism AI and the World Socialist Web Site in 1998, North stated:
This is not a minor technical project. Some 28 years ago, when the internet was first coming into existence, we understood the power of this new technology, and we were the first left-wing tendency to actually make the shift from a written newspaper to the internet. We founded the World Socialist Web Site… We understood the implications of this technology and acted upon it, and this was critical for the development of the revolutionary movement. We understand the power of AI, both its reactionary but also its revolutionary potential. We are acting on the latter. I am convinced that in the weeks and months ahead, and certainly in the years ahead, all of you will be using it. And thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions of workers will utilize this powerful instrument as a means of education, social education, political education, cultural education. It will be used not in one language, but in dozens of languages.
North concluded:
This application of the most advanced productive forces to the transformation of consciousness has vast significance. It makes available instantly and globally the theoretical resources, the historical analysis, the programmatic clarity necessary for the working class to understand its historic mission and seize power.
The announcement of Socialism AI came at the conclusion of an extensive lecture addressing the fundamental question: “Where is America going?” North opened by noting that most people would respond, “To hell”—a judgment he acknowledged as largely justified given the accelerating political crisis.
Drawing on Marx’s description of France’s financial aristocracy as the “lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society,” North characterized the contemporary American ruling class as “a super-Mafia at the summit of capitalist society, flaunting crime and perversion while ordinary people pay the cost in misery and blood.”
North presented extensive data documenting the unprecedented concentration of wealth in the United States. Trump’s cabinet and top appointees possess a collective net worth exceeding $60 billion, with sixteen of his twenty-five wealthiest appointees ranking among the 813 billionaires in a nation of 341 million people—placing them in the top 0.0001 percent. “This is not symbolic representation,” North stated. “It is direct rule by the oligarchy.”
The lectures traced the historical roots of the crisis to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and the subsequent financialization of the American economy. North documented how the total value of publicly traded US stocks now exceeds 220 percent of annual economic output—more than double the GDP—compared to just 80 percent in 1971. This represents an economy increasingly detached from real production and built on “fictitious capital.”
North argued that moral outrage alone cannot provide the foundation for revolutionary struggle. What is required is a scientific understanding of capitalism’s contradictions, particularly Marx’s law of the decline in the rate of profit. The current frenzy of investment in artificial intelligence under capitalism, while appearing to promise increased profitability through mass layoffs, will in fact accelerate the systemic decline in the rate of profit by further reducing the source of surplus value—living labor.
North concluded with a powerful metaphor:
The world in which we live is like a sleeping volcano upon whose slopes civilization builds its monuments, establishes its institutions, and organizes its daily life. For periods of time, the volcano appears dormant. But beneath the surface, immense pressures accumulate. The magma rises. The tremors intensify. And finally, the eruption comes with catastrophic force, transforming the landscape entirely.
He continued:
The eruption of class struggle in the United States will destroy the rotting structures of capitalism but will also open the possibility for a new world. From the depths of social oppression will arise a force greater than any army or corporation—the collective power of a class that produces all wealth yet owns nothing. When that force acts consciously, guided by scientific socialism and the analysis of objective reality, it will sweep away the barriers of nationality and ethnicity and unite humanity in a common struggle for liberation.
Following both lectures in Berlin and London, animated discussions took place, with many attendees leaving their contact information and purchasing books at the literature tables.
Both meetings reflected growing interest among workers, students, and youth in a genuine socialist alternative to the escalating crises of capitalism, dictatorship, and imperialist war. The announcement of Socialism AI was received with great enthusiasm as a tool that can democratize access to Marxist theory and historical analysis on an unprecedented scale.
In the coming days, the WSWS will post the full video recording of the London lecture.
