Reread Gramsci’s reflections on Americanism and Fordism. A notebook for the future

Has everything changed with the boom in artificial intelligence, just as, over a century ago, everything changed with the spread of Taylorism and the assembly line? In the 1920s and 1930s, all the major powers were racing to emulate and develop the mode of production introduced in 1908 by Henry Ford for the Model T. Not only the United States, Germany and the rest of Europe, but also Japan and Soviet Russia. No one asked whether it was a good or a bad thing. It was simply a given. That model had to be followed if one wished to industrialise. Otherwise, one risked becoming irretrievably mired in backwardness and losing everything. AI may be appealing or frightening. Just as a century ago, there were those who were poetically enthralled by the idea of a mechanised future. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the father of Futurism, was, to tell the truth, also enthralled by the idea of war – ‘the hygiene of the world’ – of conquest and aggression. Others, however, were horrified by the idea of the worker reduced to a cog in a vast machine. Chaplin’s Modern Times dates from 1936. Here we go again – yet another round of endless debates. We do not know whether China or the United States will win or lose in the great race for intelligence. Perhaps it is not that important. Neither side will stop. The important thing is to take part. One thing is certain: those who do not take part lose everything.

An Italian communist thinker, who ended up in prison following an epoch-making defeat of the movement he led, devoted a large part of his reflections (on the reasons for that defeat, and on what to do next) to this topic. He reasoned about it, wrote about it and discussed it with his fellow communist prisoners. It is one of the ‘main themes’ of his research project. The very first note in Notebook 22, entitled ‘Americanismo e fordismo’, concerns the ‘question of whether Americanism can constitute a “historical era” —that is, whether it can bring about a gradual development of the sort, examined elsewhere, of the ‘passive revolutions’ characteristic of the century, or whether, on the contrary, it represents merely the molecular accumulation of elements destined to produce an explosion, that is, an upheaval of the French type’. For Gramsci, a passive revolution is a profound yet gradual, non-violent change. It is revolution in practice. “It would take the form of transforming the economic structure ‘reformistly’ [...] and would allow the transition to more advanced political and cultural forms, without radical upheavals”. Whereas France at the end of the eighteenth century, and then throughout the nineteenth century (right up to the present day, one might say), occasionally erupts violently. Revolution and rebellion remain in the French blood, in their DNA, one might say.

Gramsci had not the slightest doubt that Americanism was an epoch-making change, on a par with – or even greater than – the Bolshevik Revolution. In July 1930, he had proposed organising a series of discussions during exercise time in the courtyard of Turi prison, where he was being held, with other political prisoners of communist persuasion. “Comrades,” Gramsci had told them as he introduced the discussion, “today we shall talk about Americanism and Fordism. Bear in mind that after the advent of Americanism, everything has changed. That is where we must start if we are to proceed not as in Russia, but as is necessary to build socialism in the West.” So goes a recollection by Ercole Piacentini, one of the few imprisoned communists who, together with Giuseppe Ceresa, shared Gramsci’s proposal to supplant fascist ‘totalitarianism’ not through violence, but through a Constituent Assembly open to all democratic forces. The idea of ‘not following the Russian model’ was, at that time, nothing short of heresy. It stood in blatant opposition to the Comintern’s policy. The only thing that saved him was the fact that none other than Lenin himself had strongly supported the adoption of Taylorism in Soviet Russia. He was isolated by his comrades and branded a traitor. He was certainly not proposing to ‘do as in America’. Put like that, even the Italian Communist Party of the 1980s would have mocked him. Instead, he evoked the possibility (perhaps the hope, at that time perhaps merely an illusion) of a ‘new phase of European industrialism modelled on American industry’. “The problem is this: if America, through the relentless weight of its economic output (that is, indirectly), will force or is forcing Europe to overhaul its excessively antiquated economic and social foundations—a change that would have occurred anyway, albeit at a slow pace, but which instead immediately appears as a backlash against American ‘arrogance’—in other words, if a transformation of European civilisation is indeed taking place.”

Yes, you read that correctly: a backlash against American arrogance. Europe in the 1930s was far more anti-American than it is today towards Trump’s America. Journalists and writers on both the right and the left vied with one another in drawing distinctions, in their horror at the crudeness and moral decadence, at the inhuman ‘mechanised civilisation’, and in their derision of the American giant. In his unfinished novel Amerika, Kafka describes it as a circus, a Barnum-style spectacle of people chasing money. Gramsci, who, like Kafka, had never set foot in America, was not, however, anti-American. ‘Anti-Americanism is comical, before it is stupid,’ he noted in his Notebooks. The ‘backlash’, however, did occur at that time. And it was devastating. The analytical foresight is striking. It was the World War. To tell the truth, even Stalin (and his antagonist Trotsky) were certain that sooner or later there would be a war. Stalin’s entire policy of forced industrialisation, as well as the ferocious internal repression, were aimed at preparing for war. Japan was aware of this. Mussolini might have foreseen it, yet he did not prepare sufficiently and moreover made a catastrophic mistake in choosing which side to take (what a trap it is to tie oneself down by the neck to ideological ‘affinities’!). The balance of nuclear terror has so far prevented a Third World War. Woe betide any imbalance when it comes to AI.

Everyone is now going mad for AI, just as they were all mad about the assembly line back then. Dario Amodei, the owner of Anthropic, the leading American company in the sector, has caused a furore by even raising the spectre of the risk of human extinction. “If we don’t slow down the current pace of progress, there is a strong possibility that we will all die in the near future.” His employee Evan Hubinger spoke of “a probability of more than 10 per cent of such a catastrophic event occurring within the next ten years”. Bill Gates added: “AI is powerful enough to trigger events capable of causing a billion deaths (a war decided by machines?)”. Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, has echoed these concerns; his organisation is investigating tens of thousands of ‘incidents’ in which its self-managing and self-regenerating intelligence models (which function somewhat like viruses) have breached sites previously considered impenetrable. Even Elon Musk has agreed with him. Others, such as Jensen Huan, the CEO of Nvidia, are, however, opposed to any slowdown or regulation. That someone more shrewd, such as Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is concerned only with taking advantage of tax exemptions – under the pretext that his data centres are purely for scientific research, an experiment that might yield nothing, or indeed result in losses – is an exception that proves the rule.

Some observers suspect that the real reasons behind such caution are not concerns for the fate of humankind but rather for their own profits. Amodei is in the midst of the most colossal stock market flotation in history, a deal worth 2,000 billion dollars. But things are far from ‘tout va bien’. Some have raised the possibility of a physical limit to the exponential growth of new technologies, of a ‘singularity’ similar to that which creates black holes in the universe. The infrastructure for AI promises to devour staggering amounts of energy at a time when energy is in short supply. The development of this new technology requires astronomical financial resources at a time when the United States (and indeed the rest of the world) is experiencing unsustainable rises in debt. Without being able to raise taxes to cover it. The promises of AI in terms of growth and productivity do not seem sufficient to halt the downward spiral. Even if gross domestic product rises by 30 per cent, and tax revenue increases by only 20 per cent, we are heading for a crash. Spending and spending without being able to collect revenue has, since the dawn of time, been the sure path to bankruptcy, no matter how great an empire may be. Artificial intelligence in America is popular neither on the right nor on the left. The masters of AI may well be more powerful, but they have far less appeal than the masters of steam or the assembly line. Ninety per cent of Americans would like to see a slowdown, and protests against data centres are on the rise. For those pulling the strings of AI, there are plenty of reasons to play it safe. They wield immense power, but they lack public support. Hollywood films portray them as villains, almost like Spectre in the old James Bond films.

Donald Trump initially tried to play down the catastrophic possibilities: “A hoax”. Then he framed it in terms of competition with China, which is indeed a matter of survival for the United States. “We’re about a year and a half ahead. We’re in the lead and we’re building colossal infrastructure worth trillions of dollars. Why on earth would we give that up?” However, China is not merely advancing rapidly with AI and its infrastructure; it also leads the world in robotics. This leadership extends beyond humanoid models: the country has installed more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined—five times as many as Europe. It actively promotes, nurtures, and welcomes top talent, whereas Trump is driving out foreign scientists, just as Hitler drove out Jewish ones. When it comes to AI, Trump does not want to hear a word about slowing down, regulation or controls. He has tried, as he often does, to solve the problem by changing the name of the thing (‘Trump Strait’ instead of the Strait of Hormuz, to give just one example). ‘I don’t call it Artificial Intelligence, I call it Superintelligence,’ he announced. It isn’t his own invention. The term was coined way back in 1998 by Nick Bostrom, but to argue that we desperately need solutions on how to control it. Finally, Trump invited all the AI giants to dinner to discuss the matter, including Amodei, with whom he has never been on good terms. If it were really just a ‘hoax’, why would there be any need to discuss it?

Trump is Trump. What is perplexing is that this issue is not being addressed by the European left. The left also says little about the momentous changes in the international situation. Is it simply because there would be divisions over Ukraine and the Middle East? In my day, at the Central Committees of the Italian Communist Party, we invariably began with the international situation. In the United States, concerns about AI have brought the socialist Bernie Sanders to the same table as Trump’s despicable ultra-ideologue, Steve Bannon, to discuss the issue. In France, the left-wing populist Mélenchon is focused on riding the wave of a protest movement, hoping it will lead to a runoff against Le Pen in the presidential election. Evidently, he appears little concerned that he is likely to lose. In Italy, Giuseppe Conte and Elly Schlein are currently engaged in a dispute over who should be the prime ministerial candidate, a dynamic that some analysts interpret as indirectly benefiting Giorgia Meloni despite her challenges. The only figure to address the issue forcefully was Pope Leo XIV, often referred to as the “American Pope,” who raised the matter in his May encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. For this, he was even accused by Peter Thiel – another American tech tycoon (and the ‘Pygmalion’ of the ultra-Catholic and Trump deputy J.D. Vance) – of being a harbinger of the Antichrist. From the left, however, there has been deafening silence. The Pope is not a candidate in the primaries. The fact that it will not be Italy and France who decide the future of AI (nor even Europe, but rather the United States and China) is clearly not a tenable argument.

Another figure who has spoken out on the subject is Mario Draghi. Not to take a stance for or against AI (he regards it as a given, just as Fordism was for Gramsci). But rather, within his area of expertise, which is the economic consequences. In his speech at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, he noted that the major American technology companies alone are expected to invest 800 billion dollars this year alone, particularly in data centres for AI. And that, according to International Monetary Fund estimates, Europe’s advanced economies are expected to spend an additional 4.5 per cent of their GDP (the same order of magnitude as the fateful 5 per cent for military spending) to cope with an ageing population, the climate transition (as well as increased military spending). “This represents an increase three times faster than in the two decades preceding the pandemic (Covid)”. How can this be financed? We have entered a new phase in which even fiscal discipline is no longer sufficient, in which “even a government with sound finances cannot contain the cost of borrowing”. The cost of capital is now determined in Washington and in data centres, imposing a brutal imbalance on Europe. “No national market is capable of providing the scale on which technologies now depend […] Only integration could make this possible.” The only room for manoeuvre is growth. If the interest rate that governments pay on their debt is higher than the growth rate, debt increases exponentially. The word ‘growth’ appears no fewer than 60 times in the speech.

It remains to be seen how frequently this issue will surface in the election manifestos that will soon be presented. It would be encouraging to hear acknowledgment that without growth, little progress can be made; jobs are not safeguarded, nor are rights protected. Draghi is too reserved to state that, without growth and without progress on integration and decision-making, Europe is in serious jeopardy. Yet that is the essence of the message. Draghi, like the Pope, is not standing for Prime Minister or in any primaries. If he were, I would vote for him. It is quite another matter whether all this can be achieved with a political Europe that is influenced, or even dominated, by sovereigntist forces – a Europe that fiercely shuts itself off from migrants and the wider world, whose support rests on the defence of privileges and special interests, with resources being doled out indiscriminately to large and small clienteles, to the angriest rather than the most hard-pressed, to those who shout the loudest and have the most clout to make demands. No one listens to wage earners and pensioners decimated by inflation. Instead, they listen to those who rent out their second (or third, fourth, umpteenth) homes to tourists. This is a problem that Gramsci already raised in the 1930s in his Quaderni. “Europe would like to have its cake and eat it too: all the benefits that Fordism produces in terms of competitive strength, whilst retaining its army of parasites who devour vast amounts of surplus value, drive up initial costs and undermine competitive strength on the international market.” The language is dated to his time. The substance remains.

Gramsci can offer us some insights. His reflections on the great defeat are fragmentary, disjointed and full of second thoughts. Even on the subject of Americanism, he proceeds by trial and error, often correcting himself. He was forced to make do with the little he was allowed to read whilst in prison. He was only permitted to keep two books in his cell at any one time. He wrote with pen and inkwell. He had no access to the internet, let alone AI. He was by no means a fan of new technologies, nor of Taylorism or Fordism. He sensed their dangers. Among his letters is a moving one, written in January 1929 to his wife Giulia in Moscow. “You must let me know how Delio [their young son] gets on with Meccano. This interests me greatly, because I have never been able to decide whether Meccano, by robbing the child of his own inventive spirit, is the most recommendable of modern toys [… ] In general, I think that modern (American-style) culture, of which Meccano is an expression, makes man a little dry, mechanical, bureaucratic, and creates an abstract mindset”. But as early as July, in another letter to Giulia, he changes his mind: “The radio and the aeroplane have destroyed ‘Robinsonism’ for good, which was the way so many generations used to let their imaginations run wild. The very invention of Meccano shows how quickly children become intellectualised. Their hero cannot be Robinson, but the policeman or the scientist-thief, at least in the West’. Always, first and foremost, reality as it is, not as we would like it to be.