Guy Standing explores the potential for humanity to strike back against careless leadership as tech leaders of artificial intelligence (AI) drive humanity to destruction
The widely-discussed report by investment researcher’ Citrini, “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” recently imagined one of these potential futures being prepared for humanity: intelligence becomes cheap, friction collapses, white-collar employment is shredded, and the economy carries on in the national accounts while social life disintegrates beneath it and inequality sky rockets even further. As AI is used to control Netanyahu and Trump’s Iran war, New Scientist reported on how AI recommended nuclear strikes in 95% of wargame simulations in a recent experiment run by King’s College London.
Previously, of course, some AI leaders themselves had suggested that AI could lead to the demise of the human race, but concluded they had to develop AI in the ‘right way’ to avoid such an outcome. What no-one with power is suggesting is that humanity should “take a beat” before rushing headlong into these potential dystopias.
That is why the idea of a social strike, or uprising, to force such reflection deserves serious attention. But it also needs clarification. Strikes can be against something, or for something, or both. They may take the form of non-compliance, raising the costs of operating an unjust system. They may take the form of retributive justice, imposing costs on those who benefit from that system. Or they may be transformative, aimed at overturning an economic structure that is generating systemic injustice in the first place. It is the latter that is most needed, urgently.
For such a strike to have any real chance of success, it must combine what might be called a politics of grievance with a politics of paradise.
For such a strike to have any real chance of success, it must combine what might be called a politics of grievance with a politics of paradise. There must be justified anger, but there must also be the collective articulation of a credible, attractive alternative. In this sense, social uprisings resemble scientific revolutions. A paradigm does not collapse simply because it is failing. It collapses when it can no longer answer the central questions being posed and when another paradigm is ready to replace it. Protest without vision exhausts itself. Vision without grievance remains a seminar.
History makes this plain. In Britain, the great social rebellions were not random spasms of anger. They were class-based struggles centred, again and again, on the defence of the commons. The Charter of the Forest, sealed alongside Magna Carta in 1217, was not a historical footnote. It was a constitutional statement that ordinary people had rights against enclosure and arbitrary power. Later came the Peasants’ Revolt, Kett’s Rebellion, the Levellers, the Diggers, the blacking protests, the Chartists. In different ways, all fused grievance with a vision of a more just social order.
Most achieved only partial victories in their own time. They identified injustice, forced it into public consciousness, and legitimised demands that elites had sought to suppress. Yet they often failed in the short term to realise the world they wanted instead. Still, the uprisings mattered because they shifted the terrain of politics. They opened the road for later advances. The significance of an uprising is not always visible in the moment.
That is relevant now because our own moment is too often misread. We are told to see atomised frustrations, disconnected protests, isolated bursts of rage. In reality, a new global class structure has been taking shape beneath the surface for years. While a plutocracy emerged to take advantage of AI, a mass precariat crystallised. It is no longer merely a sociological description. It is rapidly becoming a political subject.
When I wrote The Precariat in 2011, that class was still in formation. The Occupy movement that followed expressed a powerful moral truth: obscene inequality had corroded democratic life. But it lacked an agreed programme, leadership and institutional strategy. There was grievance in abundance, but very little politics of paradise. It was, for all its energy and decency, doomed to dissipate. Much the same can be said of other eruptions over the following decade. They revealed anger, but they could not build unified agency.
The gains flow upward; the risks flow downward.
Meanwhile, the plutarchy consolidated itself. By plutarchy, I mean rule by the super-rich in the interests of the super-rich. Today’s order is not simply capitalism in some generic sense. It is rentier capitalism, in which wealth is accumulated increasingly through ownership of assets, intellectual property, land, finance and platforms, while insecurity is shifted onto everybody else. The gains flow upward; the risks flow downward.
What makes this system politically durable is not only the power of the plutocrats themselves. It is their ability to mobilise support among fragments of the precariat. One part, which I have called the Atavists, looks backwards and feels that the insecure present they inhabit is worse than the social world their parents knew. That fear can be weaponised by the authoritarian right. Another part, the Nostalgics, consists largely of migrants and denizens with few rights and much to lose. A third, the Progressives, is made up disproportionately of the educated young, promised a future by the education system and delivered instead into chronic uncertainty.
Grievances were real, but solidarity remained weak.
For a long time, these groups did not cohere. That was the strategic opening through which Trumpism, Brexitism and assorted far-right projects advanced. Progressives often failed to speak to Atavists in language to which they could relate, while Nostalgics remained too precarious (feeling like supplicants) to participate fully in collective action. The result was that while grievances were common and real, class solidarity remained weak.
That picture is changing. The Atavist bloc is ageing and shrinking. The Progressives are growing and increasingly conscious of themselves not as failed members of another class, but as members of the precariat. Many Nostalgics, subjected to relentless pressure, now know that silence offers no security. This does not guarantee a democratic breakthrough. But it does create the possibility of one.
Still, possibility is not enough. A transformative social strike requires strategic focus. It must identify both the class enemy and the alliance capable of defeating it. Here the crucial terrain today is not only the workplace but education.
The education commons has been captured. Schools, colleges and universities are increasingly organised as a human capital industry, dedicated to producing compliant labour, indebted consumers and measurable outputs. Humanities, arts, history and moral reasoning are downgraded because they are said to have insufficient economic value. Teachers and academics themselves are pushed into the precariat. Students are processed as units of investment. This is not an accidental distortion. It is a structural project.
And it is politically lethal. A system that hollows out critical thought while rewarding conformity is a system that prepares the ground for authoritarianism. When Donald Trump says he loves the poorly educated, he is not making an offhand remark. He is identifying a political strategy. When the right wages war on universities, it is because education remains one of the few spaces where democratic imagination can still survive.
It would not be a protest merely against cuts, fees, managerialism or private equity ownership, though it would be against all of those. It would be for a different civilisation.
So this is where a social strike could become transformative. Imagine an alliance of precarious students, school workers, teachers, lecturers, cultural workers, parents, and the ethical strata of the salariat who have not sold themselves to rentier privilege. Imagine a movement that resists the commodification of learning and demands the restoration of education as a commons: a place for truth-seeking, empathy, historical memory, moral development and democratic agency.
That would unite grievance with paradise. It would name the enemy clearly while offering a credible alternative. It would not be a protest merely against cuts, fees, managerialism or private equity ownership, though it would be against all of those. It would be for a different civilisation.
The deeper issue raised by Citrini’s scenario is not whether one forecast proves right or wrong. It is whether a society organised around extraction, insecurity and disposability can survive the next wave of technological upheaval without collapsing into barbarism. My answer is no. Unless the precariat acts as a class for itself, and unless it acts for the commons, the future will be written by those who profit from social ruin.
What is needed, then, is not just resistance. It is a social strike with memory, strategy and hope. That is the only kind worth winning.
