AI Technoimperialism — and Sanders’ endorsement of it

Prof Michael Hudson : https://michael-hudson.com/

This is from Michael’s Patreon site.

There is a very good article by Evgeny Morozov in today’s FT, emphasizing how the U.S. progressive movemeent endorsing Trump’s U.S. attempt to maintain its postindustrial prosperity by establishing monopoly choke points is reminiscent of how Britain’s Labour Party sught to benefit its membership from the predatory takings of British imperialism in the late 19th century.

Here’s the column, to which I’ve added some comments by Lenin in his own 1916 critique of this — to which Morozov helpfully refers.

Evgeny Moro­zov, “An AI fund is just a form of techno-imper­i­al­ism,” Financial Times, October 2, 2026. He is the author of ‘The Net Delu­sion’ and ‘To Save Everything,”

A grow­ing num­ber of Amer­ic­ans dis­like AI so Wash­ing­ton is try­ing to change their minds the old-fash­ioned way, with a stick and a car­rot. The stick was on full dis­play on Tues­day. Pres­id­ent Don­ald Trump, with tech exec­ut­ives at his back, told voters that if they refuse data centres, com­pan­ies will “be forced to go over­seas” — and, as he put it, “who­ever wins super­in­tel­li­gence wins . . . you’re prob­ably not gonna have a second place” imply­ing that detract­ors would be hand­ing China vic­tory in the AI race.

The car­rot comes in the form of a dividend. In July, Sam Alt­man pro­posed that lead­ing US AI labs each hand 5 per cent of their equity to a pub­lic fund. And Sen­ator Bernie Sanders has intro­duced a bill for a national fund with 50 per cent own­er­ship of the AI giants, with cit­izens entitled to a stake in their profits.

The stick, on inspec­tion, is flimsy. The two are per­fectly com­pat­ible: US-aligned data centres can go over­seas while AI profits still accrue to Amer­ic­ans. Most of AI’s power goes into train­ing mod­els. This can hap­pen wherever elec­tri­city is cheap; only the sys­tems answer­ing users in real time must stay near them. That means data centres can leave US soil and US com­pan­ies still gain, while cit­izens with a stake in them are paid wherever the machines run. For share­hold­ers, it’s the best of both worlds: no data centre next door and a cheque in the mail.

But the machines still stand on someone’s land, guzz­ling someone’s water, strain­ing someone’s grid. Income at home from land and power abroad has an old name: empire. What’s new is the idea, shared by Alt­man and Sanders, of enrolling every US cit­izen. The res­ult? A new form of social and tech­no­lo­gical imper­i­al­ism.

Pax Silica, the state depart­ment’s AI sup­ply-chain club, has barely con­cealed its aim: to lock mem­bers into Amer­ica’s com­pute and out of China’s. The Pentagon’s new Eco­nomic Defense Unit has even invoked the East India Com­pany as its model. Pax Silica’s first out­post is a 4,000-acre “eco­nomic secur­ity zone” in the Phil­ip­pines. Wash­ing­ton reportedly sought US jur­is­dic­tion and immunity for its per­son­nel there; Manila said no twice and insists the zone will stay under Phil­ip­pine law (the project is pro­ceed­ing). Just as Detroit in its hey­day ran on Liberian rub­ber and Chilean cop­per, San Fran­cisco’s AI glory could run on Phil­ip­pine land and other people’s mega­watts.

The imper­ial ambi­tion behind such ini­ti­at­ives has pro­voked dis­con­tent in host nations. In Kenya, a $1bn data centre stalled after Microsoft and its Emir­ati part­ner asked the gov­ern­ment to guar­an­tee pur­chases of its com­put­ing capa­city. Mex­ico’s pres­id­ent said her coun­try need not become the data centre of the world. What other coun­tries can­not stop is Amer­ica’s use of sanc­tions to lock out China by ration­ing advanced chips. With the US’s chips and open mar­kets, China would crush Sil­icon Val­ley’s valu­ations. Shut­ting Beijing out allows US AI com­pan­ies to cap­ture enough profits that a pub­lic fund would be able to redis­trib­ute them. Such a fund would be no cus­todian of col­lect­ive intel­li­gence but a col­lector of geo­pol­it­ical rent: the yield on keep­ing China’s AI down and the world’s AI bills up.

The US left seems not to have noticed. Gavin New­som waxes lyr­ical about “uni­ver­sal basic cap­ital”, Sanders about a Nor­we­gian-style sov­er­eign wealth fund. Yet, there’s a dif­fer­ence. Nor­way’s wealth comes from its own seabed, while Amer­ica’s would come from a choke­hold on chips and bul­ly­ing weaker coun­tries. Sanders’s bill lets this slip: it traces AI’s value to human­ity’s “col­lect­ive intel­li­gence”, then pays out only to Amer­ic­ans.

For Maga, local trib­ute flow­ing to the centre is a cause for cel­eb­ra­tion. Not so for the left. When Edwar­d­ian social imper­i­al­ists prom­ised to fund wel­fare out of Pax Brit­an­nica, old social­ists, from Engels to Lenin, derided work­ers who took the money as the labour aris­to­cracy. Their point stands: a pub­lic that lives off the rent acquires a stake in whatever pro­tects it.

For now, AI’s expan­sion abroad is a freel­ance affair, as indi­vidual com­pan­ies cut deals that host nations can still refuse. However, once the US state clears the ground and the Amer­ican pub­lic draws a dividend from it, a refus­ing gov­ern­ment will find itself up against not only Wash­ing­ton but every Amer­ican with a pay­out to lose.

Crit­ics from Sanders to Steve Ban­non are right about the dis­ease: AI breeds olig­archy. But a dividend fun­ded by flex­ing Amer­ican muscle while under­devel­op­ing the rest of the globe would not cure it. It would solve one injustice by hid­ing another, and give olig­archs what they’ve never had: a pub­lic with a stake in look­ing away.

This excellent article points out that the more bourgeois layer of the labor movement supports the economic benefits that it receives from foreign imperialism. Moro­zov’s critique of Bernie Sanders in seeking simply to make sure that America’s attempt to use an AI monopoly as a checkpoint to provide high returns be “socialized” instead of being left solely in private hands.

His reference to Lenin’s 1916 article on “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism” is quite apt. Among Lenin’s observartions are:

“Marx specially stressed this profound observation of Sismondi.[7] Imperialism somewhat changes the situation. A privileged upper stratum of the proletariat in the imperialist countries lives partly at the expense of hundreds of millions in the uncivilised nations.

“What distinguishes imperialism is the rule not of industrial capital, but of finance capital, the striving to annex not agrarian countries, particularly, but every kind of country.

The prospect of partitioning China elicited from Hobson the following economic appraisal: “The greater part of Western Europe might then assume the appearance and character already exhibited by tracts of country in the South of England, in the Riviera, and in the tourist-ridden or residential parts of Italy and Switzerland, little clusters of wealthy aristocrats drawing dividends and pensions from the Far East, with a somewhat larger group of professional retainers and tradesmen and a larger body of personal servants and workers in the transport trade and in the final stages of production of the more perishable goods: all the main arterial industries would have disappeared, the staple foods and semi-manufactures flowing in as tribute from Asia and Africa…. We have foreshadowed the possibility of even a larger alliance of Western states, a European federation of Great Powers which, so far from forwarding the cause of world civilisation, might introduce the gigantic peril of a Western parasitism, a group of advanced industrial nations, whose upper classes drew vast tribute from Asia and Africa, with which they supported great tame masses of retainers, no longer engaged in the staple industries of agriculture and manufacture, but kept in the performance of personal or minor industrial services under the control of a new financial aristocracy.”