Marxism, Islam, and Artificial Intelligence
Abstract
This article develops a speculative synthesis of Marxism, Islamic philosophy, and artificial intelligence in order to theorize the transformation of labor, subjectivity, morality, and class struggle under conditions of accelerating automation. Haz Al-Din begins from the Black Panther Party’s analysis of automation, unemployment, and lumpenization, arguing that the post-industrial masses produced by deproletarianization are better understood as “neo-nomads” than through the classical Marxist category of the lumpenproletariat; these social formations, he suggests, increasingly exist outside the stabilizing structures of bourgeois civil society and therefore resemble historically nomadic communities organized through portable codes, solidarities, and forms of law. From this basis, the article interprets Islam’s renewed contemporary significance through its historical relationship to nomadic social forms and develops a broader account of automation as a return, at a higher technological level, to forms of intelligence and production that exceed the conscious will of the isolated individual. Artificial intelligence is thus presented as destabilizing the modern Promethean conception of labor by revealing intelligence as collective, externalized, and embedded in systems larger than individual human agency. Drawing on al-Ghazali, Avicenna, the Islamic concept of hikma, and Alexandre Kojève’s conception of Sophia, Haz distinguishes procedural rationality from a deeper form of embodied, moral, and spiritual attunement, arguing that AI may increasingly monopolize rational calculation while remaining incapable of hikma. This distinction becomes the basis for rethinking AI alignment as a new dimension of class struggle: in a highly automated society, political conflict would increasingly concern who determines the purposes, values, and beneficiaries toward which artificial intelligence is aligned. The article concludes by proposing a moral cosmology centered on the interpretation of signs, or ayat, in which good consists in truthful and complete attunement to reality while evil reproduces itself through false, partial, and distorted interpretations; in an age increasingly saturated by machine-generated signs, the human task therefore becomes not merely to produce or reason, but to interpret, align, and morally orient the technological systems through which collective life is being reorganized.
Keywords
Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Hikma, Islam, Marxism
