Socialism after Ai
The old socialist calculation debate asked whether markets or planners could allocate resources more rationally. But neoliberalism long ago shifted the terrain from calculation to creativity, experimentation and worldmaking — and AI now radicalises that shift by enclosing the infrastructures of knowledge, culture, judgment and imagination. This lecture, by Evgeny Morozov, argues that AI exposes a deeper blind spot in socialist thought: the absence of a robust theory of technologically-mediated action.
The Left has struggled to grasp how human capacities, state power and technical infrastructures make one another inside the capitalist world-system — and how that same process might become a path from dependency to emancipation. From Europe’s search for AI sovereignty to the Global South’s long experience of technological dependence, the question is no longer only who owns the machines, but who controls the infrastructures through which societies learn, create, remember, govern and make worlds.
Meet our speaker and chair
Evgeny Morozov is a Belarusian and Italian writer, researcher, and intellectual who studies the political and social implications of technology. He was named one of the 28 most influential Europeans by Politico in 2018. He is the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom and To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (both listed among the 100 notable books of the year by The New York Times). His latest podcast, A Sense of Rebellion, came out in June 2024.
Lea Ypi (@lea_ypi) is the Ralph Miliband Professor in Politics and Philosophy at LSE, a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and Honorary Professor at ANU. Author of Free and Indignity (Penguin), her work has won major prizes, including the RSL Ondaatje Prize and Leverhulme Prize, and been translated into 35+ languages. She coedits Political Philosophy and writes for the FT and Guardian.
More about this event
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Alternatives to Capitalism (AC) is a major new multidisciplinary initiative to investigate viable alternatives to capitalism and explore how political, economic, and cultural life might be organised beyond capitalist social relations. Led by Lea Ypi and Vincent Harting, it brings together leading scholars in political philosophy and the social sciences to examine competing post-capitalist visions, institutions, and strategies for social transformation. Through research, public engagement, and interdisciplinary collaboration, the initiative seeks to advance rigorous thinking about what should come after capitalism and how such alternatives might be realised.
LSE Law School is one of the world’s top law schools with an international reputation for the quality of its teaching and legal research.
The Ralph Miliband (@RMilibandLSE) programme is one of the LSE’s most prestigious public lecture series, receiving attention not only at the LSE but across London, the UK, and globally. The programme was set up in 1996 thanks to a generous anonymous benefaction from a former PhD student inspired by ‘Ralph Miliband’s contribution to social thought’. He specified that the funds be used in memory of his friend and mentor ‘to advance his spirit of free social inquiry’ and the diversity of thought that has always been the hallmark of LSE.