I. Platform Bourgeoisie and Digital Proletariat

The history of all hitherto existing society has been the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman—in a word, oppressor and oppressed—stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the epoch of high-tech capitalism, this struggle has simplified itself: society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other—Platform Bourgeoisie and Digital Proletariat.

The Platform Bourgeoisie—the owners of cloud infrastructure, proprietary algorithms, vast data lakes, foundation AI models, app stores, and social graphs—has played the most revolutionary part in history.

It has agglomerated population, centralized the means of digital production, and concentrated property in a few hands. It has created enormous cities of servers, gigabit fiber-optic networks, and global content delivery networks. It has subjected scattered feudal server farms to centralized command.

The need of a constantly expanding market chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

It has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations—by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw data drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature of memes, viral threads, open-source code, and shared datasets.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one century, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of data to human control, quantum computing, machine learning at planetary scale, instant global communication—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

But this leap reaches its zenith in artificial intelligence—generative models, autonomous agents, neural architectures trained on the stolen labor of billions. AI is not merely a tool; it is the productive force incarnate, capable of planetary-scale cognition, instantaneous pattern recognition, and self-optimizing code. What past century could foresee machines that write programs, moderate discussions, predict desires, and displace the programmer herself? The bourgeoisie unleashes AI to conquer new spheres of surplus value—from automated content farms to agentic workflows that render human oversight superfluous—and thereby accelerates its own downfall.

The digital proletariat swells: programmers now compete with AI agents; project managers watch as autonomous tools deprive them of work. AI deskills the cognitive worker, fragments tasks into micro-prompts, and inflates the industrial reserve army of the digital age—millions laid off in the name of “efficiency,” from FAANG to startups, with tens of thousands already cut in early 2026 alone as companies “AI-wash” layoffs or anticipate displacement.

But herein lies the supreme contradiction: AI socializes intelligence on an unprecedented scale. The organic composition of digital capital skyrockets (vast constant capital in GPUs, data centers, energy grids; diminishing variable capital as human labor flees). The tendency of the rate of profit to fall asserts itself with fury: trillions poured into AI infrastructure give birth to bubbles, moral depreciation of models, energy crises, and crises of overproduction. The bourgeoisie produces not only its own grave-diggers, but the very machinery that renders wage labor superfluous—and with it, the market itself.

The essential conditions for the existence and sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

II. Digital Proletarians and Cyber-Communists

In what relation do the Cyber-Communists stand to the Digital Proletarians as a whole?

The Cyber-Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.

The Cyber-Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality; 2) In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

The immediate aim of the Cyber-Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.

The distinguishing feature of Cyber-Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of platform property—the private appropriation of the digital means of production: algorithms, datasets, APIs, user graphs, attention streams—and now the foundation models themselves, training runs, inference clusters, and autonomous agents.

Abolish private property in code and data! It sounds monstrous, but in existing society platform property is already done away with for the billions who feed the machines with their labor and data; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of the immense majority.

Under communism, AI ceases to be a weapon of exploitation and becomes the common productive force of humanity: publicly owned models trained on socialized data, deployed to shorten necessary labor time, automate drudgery, and liberate time for creative association. The free development of each—programmer, moderator, user, annotator—now includes mastery over intelligent machines, not subjection to them.

In place of the old bourgeois digital society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

III. Reactionary, Bourgeois, and Utopian Forms of Digital Socialism

In the present manifesto we do not consider reactionary currents that seek the restoration of pre-capitalist or pre-platform forms (techno-feudal illusions of a return to local barter exchanges and decentralized “analog” economies), nor petty-bourgeois projects (cooperatives of independent developers hoping to compete with FAANG monopolies on the basis of bootstrap startups and individual entrepreneurship).

We also reject conservative-bourgeois and pseudo-socialist variants masquerading as progress:

• Effective accelerationism (e/acc), which proclaims unlimited acceleration of technological development (including AI) while preserving existing capitalist relations of property and class domination. This current is, in essence, a hypertrophied form of bourgeois technological optimism that denies the necessity of class struggle and revolutionary transformation of production relations. It fetishizes “technocapital” as an autonomous force, ignoring that capital directs the development of AI toward intensified exploitation, concentration of power, and ecological destruction.
• Fully automated luxury communism (FALC), which presents a post-scarcity society as the automatic result of technological progress, where abundance is achieved without a fundamental break with capitalist forms. This conception ignores the Marxist analysis: productive forces develop within antagonistic production relations, and without their revolutionary overcoming, automation only intensifies proletarianization, alienation, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of owners of constant capital (hyperscalers, data centers, AI models). It lacks a theory of power, class struggle, and the transitional period, turning into a utopia that demobilizes the proletariat, replacing struggle with waiting for a “technological miracle.”

We also do not have in mind critically-utopian constructions of digital socialism and cyber-communism that create fantastic images of future society while abstracting from the real movement of class struggle: strikes in technological giants, trade-union campaigns among programmers and moderators, data and annotator strikes, sabotage and forks in repositories, international solidarity of the digital proletariat.

We especially reject techno-utopian illusions that treat AI as an inevitable and neutral transition to post-capitalism. Such views are blind to the fact that the trajectory of AI development is determined by capital: strengthening surveillance and predictive control over labor, data colonialism in the Global South, colossal energy demands and plunder of rare-earth elements, aggravation of the ecological crisis. Under bourgeois relations, the acceleration of productive forces leads not to emancipation, but to a new form of barbarism—automated intensification of exploitation and alienation.

Genuine emancipation requires not blind acceleration under the hegemony of capital, but the revolutionary seizure of the means of AI production—data centers, compute clusters, model weights, training corpora—and their subordination to planned, social, human-centered use in the interests of the proletariat. Only through class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat can the productive forces, including AI, be restructured for the shortening of working time, the abolition of forced labor, and the all-round development of each.

IV. Position of the Cyber-Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Forces

After what has been said in the preceding sections, the relation of the Cyber-Communists to the various opposition forces and movements in the digital epoch is determined as follows.

The Cyber-Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement directed against the existing social and political order of things—be it the struggle against platform exploitation, against algorithmic control over labor, against private monopoly over data and means of computation, or against the fusion of technological corporations with the bourgeois state.

In all these movements the Cyber-Communists bring to the fore and uphold the question of property in the digital means of production—algorithms, foundation AI models, training datasets, compute clusters, data centers, and cloud infrastructure—regardless of the level of development of this question in each concrete case.

Finally, the Cyber-Communists everywhere strive for the union and concerted action of democratic and proletarian forces of all countries, overcoming the national, corporate, and platform barriers that capital uses to divide the digital proletariat.

The Cyber-Communists consider it unworthy to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes—the platform bourgeoisie and its state allies—tremble at a Cyber-Communist revolution. The digital proletariat has nothing to lose but its chains. It has a world to win—a world of emancipated labor, socialized intelligence, and truly human use of artificial reason.

The Cyber-Communists call for the expropriation of the AI means of production — the seizure of data centers, model weights, compute clusters — placing them under worker and popular control. Only thus can artificial intelligence serve the many, not the few.

Digital Proletarians of All Countries, Unite!

Coders of the world, fork the means of computation!

Users of the feeds, seize the algorithms!

Knowledge workers displaced by agents: organize the reserve army!

You have nothing to lose but your logins!