The past decade must be understood not only through the rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods, but also through the intensifying concerns over how these technologies reshape employment, labour processes, and everyday life. As was noted at our previous HM Istanbul Conference:
“There is a hype i.e technology fetishism in AI applications and “immense accumulation” of data extracted by capitalist Hi-Tech corporations. Foundation models, Such as Large Language Models (LLM), especially generative AI models are believed to mimic Human brain. On the one side, computational technologies like AI and machine learning models are important as productive forces of collective labour, and for planning and shortening human labour. On the other side, while plundered and commodified data increase the wealth of hi-tec capitalism, ecological cost is huge and socialized.”
In recent years, the expansion of tech monopolies, the debate over whether the AI boom constitutes a hype or a bubble, and the revival of concepts such as “techno-feudalism” have become central to contemporary political economy. At the same time, the potential for productive forces to turn into destructive forces has become starkly evident. As “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear,” the deployment of AI in surveillance, warfare, and drone operations—most visibly through Israel’s use of AI-driven cloud and targeting systems in Gaza—reveals the immediate dangers of capitalist technological development.
This stream invites papers that develop a critical, Marxian understanding of today’s technological hype and the transformation of relations of production through the lens of class struggle. We welcome analyses that interrogate how digital technologies reshape social reproduction, deepen capitalist crises, and transform labour into new compositions of affective and immaterial work—often expressed through the proliferation of “bullshit jobs.” We are also interested in reflections on how technological mediation reshapes our understanding of everyday life, pleasure, and social relations under digital capitalism. Finally, we encourage contributions that engage with the question of digital commons as a terrain of struggle and possibility for Marxists today.
Possible Themes Include (but are not limited to):
- Critical approaches to algorithmic management
- Historical and philosophical perspectives on technology under capitalism
- Hype or Bubble? AI and capitalist ideology and the ways AI reproduces and naturalizes capitalist notions of progress, labour, and value.
- Political economy of high-tech
- Political economy of AI governance (such as the EU AI Act) and its implications for labour and class power
- Ethical and ecological dimensions of AI and automation
- Organising strategies and theoretical frameworks for collective resistance in the age of AI
- Critical perspectives on data extractivism and the commodification of knowledge
- Global inequalities and technology, North–South dynamics in digital production and data extractivism
- Gender and technology
- Digital commons and collective ownership in the age of platform capitalism
Historical Materialism Istanbul 2026 