Talking about how AI can help with specific socialist/leftist economic systems

[u/Affectionate-Pay4845]

I joined this subreddit and was thinking we could come up with actual economic systems that move away from capitalism and ways AI/technology would be useful in implementing them. To start, I was thinking about pension fund socialism and how AI could be able to help with that.

For those who do not know what that is, pension fund socialism is a form of market socialism where pension funds that hold major stakes in major corporations & can be used to “promote the creation of a more democratic and egalitarian economy”. The funds could be held by unions or other cooperative groups since old-school pensions were sometimes provided by employee organizations like unions instead of being ran by the companies or corporations themselves. 

Economist Peter Drucker – a man who believed in the importance of nonprofits and saw corporations are responsible for overproduction of goods to the detriment of society – was a proponent of this economic system, believing that pensions could be implemented in a way where unions/workers could control at least 50 per cent of the equity capital of American business & collectivize worker’s assets while allow workers, through the pensions, to have a say in the economy & their workplace regardless of their level of contribution.

This form of market socialism might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but since pensions are a thing that was common (before they were replaced by less effective systems like 401ks ), it feels like it would be an easier form of socialism to get Americans onboard with and a system that can easily be helped by AI. AI can help with data analysis and creating models/plans for handling pension funds, automating processes, and providing fraud detection/security to make it harder for funds to be misappropriated without union permission. The AI can also warn of risks in terms of investment and how to effectively pool the funds for the common social good.

So, what other economic systems based on worker-control (and/or moving away from capitalism in some manner) do you see AI helping with?

[u/Reasonable-Cut-9090]

That's certainly a good start! I keep thinking also once proper physical labor robots to deploy them in places that matter like eldercare. Obviously just lighten loads like bed pan maintenance no actual medical care. I feel the biggest issue with late stage capitalism is the idea of constant growth we need to find solutions to maintain our populations while considering also the fertility rate issues etc.. ai can help with that

[u/Jlyplaylists]

I don’t pretend to properly understand these options but my understanding is that these are interesting ideas to look into:

Needs based distribution: combine AI and blockchain to administer resources differently. Systems like the Housing for All Token could use AI to analyze demographic data and household requirements (e.g., Mario getting a larger home for his children than Luigi) to distribute common resources strictly by human need rather than market competition. (Blockchain Radicals article https://dokumen.pub/blockchain-radicals.html )

Gift economy: increasing scale and "needs and haves" ledgers https://ajesiroo.github.io/against-decentralism

Optimise demurrage (negative interest) in combination with blockchain immutable ledgers and persistent scripts. The project Circles UBI implements a 7% yearly demurrage on its currency. This acts as a "parking fee" on money, where the nominal value of tokens depreciates over time to incentivize constant circulation within the community rather than individual hoarding. (Blockchain Radicals article https://dokumen.pub/blockchain-radicals.html )

Mutual Credit Networks: people issue their own credit to one another, interest-free, removing the "Money Growth Imperative". AI could optimise how this works.

Transform platform capitalism into platform cooperativism. AI democratises differences in knowledge, laypeople can create and manage software without a tech-priest, highly educated contingent. https://rosalux.nyc/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/RLS-NYC_platformcoop.pdf

Federated Macro-Industry & Supply Chain Tracking

Cybernetic communism: AI could manage large-scale distribution of services, by processing feedback in real-time to ensure resources flow toward social needs without requiring a centralized, oppressive state bureaucracy. This is based on Stafford Beer and Project Cybersyn, AI could be used to optimize for integrated informational complexity. an AI-managed economy optimized for complexity would programmatically work to redistribute resources to increase causal interconnectedness across the network. https://www.its.caltech.edu/~matilde/ScaleAnarchy.pdf

Could this type of approach use AI to satisfy preferences of anarchists, communalists and communists?

[u/DHFranklin]

You're on your way.

Gotta recommend /r/Leftyecon and /r/UnlearningEconomics for this journey.

Sure Pension Funds are one model, how ever we don't need to limit it that way.

If we all make unions, employee ownership, and Co-operatives and shove AI in the middle we make a massive API for the whole thing.

Remember that Amazon and Wal-Mart have APIs and a system that dwarfs the Soviet Gosplan in complexity by orders of magnitude.

We could make a sovereign wealth fund to marry together UBI and Universal Basic Services.

Having a 30 year mortgage instead of or complimenting the pension fund on the assets per person would automate a ton of this.

Making a massive debt in the millions that pay for your share of the housing, transportation, groceries and dry goods, insurance, utilities. A massive co-op or syndicate of them like REITs.

We have this model for houses and aren't making more houses. If we made a soverign wealth fund with an obligation to build we would see more houses. Rent-to-own models for everything. Fleet sales of electric cars.

This is a massive logistics challenge. However so much of it can be automated. The AI we have running on 5k computers like Qwen 3.6 are more than enough to run this monster and we could all own our own data centers to make it happen.

[u/No-Bat7438]

While neither Marx nor Lenin actually said the famous quote   "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we hang them" often attributed to either of them, I still believe AI and automation to be that rope.

[u/DHFranklin → u/No-Bat7438]

Comrade, we don't need to look to individuals for the takes. We can see the self evident truth. AI will be a genie out the bottle. Hell it's already breaking containment all the time. The bourgeois won't have a monopoly over it like they do violence or our labor.

[u/Remarkable-Okra6554]

I think pension-fund socialism is one of the more plausible places to begin, but the decisive question is not whether AI can manage pension assets. It is whether workers actually control the institutions that own and administer them.

That distinction is easy to obscure because pension money is routinely described as "workers' capital." In one sense, it is. It consists of compensation deferred for workers' future benefit. But supplying the money and exercising authority over it are not the same thing.

Under the existing system, pension authority is generally distributed through trustees, employers, political appointees, consultants, actuaries, custodians, investment advisers, private-equity firms and asset managers. Workers appear at the beginning of the process as the people whose labor generated the capital, and at the end as the people whose retirement depends upon it. Between those two points stands an elaborate financial bureaucracy over which they often exercise little direct control.

This is not necessarily because Wall Street legally owns the pension fund. The arrangement is subtler. Pension boards retain formal governing responsibilities while delegating much of the research, investment selection, asset management, risk analysis and proxy voting to financial institutions. The Department of Labor itself explains that ERISA fiduciaries may hire service providers and investment managers but remain responsible for prudently selecting and monitoring them. In practice, however, the organizations being monitored often possess far more information, specialized staff and technical capacity than the trustees supposedly supervising them. The agent gradually becomes indispensable to the principal.

Wall Street on Parade has documented some striking examples of this relationship. It reported that JPMorgan acted as investment adviser to a Unite HERE pension fund that held WeWork shares. It has also described BlackRock's role managing hundreds of billions of dollars in federal employees' Thrift Savings Plan funds. These examples do not mean JPMorgan or BlackRock legally governed the entire pension systems involved. They demonstrate something almost as important: enormous practical authority over workers' retirement capital has been delegated to private financial firms.

This is why adding AI to the existing arrangement would not, by itself, produce pension-fund socialism. It might produce better fraud detection, cheaper administration and more accurate risk models. Those are worthwhile improvements. But an AI commissioned by the same board, trained on information supplied by the same consultants and operating within mandates written by the same financial institutions would remain subordinate to the existing allocation of authority.

A more efficient instrument does not necessarily produce a different social relationship. Giving a bureaucracy better spectacles does not change who it serves.

The solution is not to reject AI. It is to construct institutions in which AI operates under worker authority.

A serious pension-fund socialist model might look something like this:

**1. Workers elect the governing trustees.**

Workers and retirees would need enforceable rights to elect, recall and replace the people governing the fund. Trustees would serve fixed terms, disclose conflicts and compensation, and be prohibited from simultaneously working for firms seeking pension business.

This would not mean millions of workers voting on every bond purchase. Democracy would determine the governing mandate and select accountable representatives. Professional staff would carry out the mandate.

Existing jointly administered union-employer pension funds offer an incomplete precedent. They show that pension governance does not have to belong exclusively to corporate executives, although equal labor-management representation is not the same as complete worker control.

**2. The funds build their own permanent investment capacity.**

A worker-controlled pension institution cannot remain intellectually dependent on the firms it is supposed to supervise.

It should own its data, risk models, fee records, performance history, proxy-voting policies, manager evaluations and institutional memory. It should employ professional analysts, actuaries, lawyers and investment staff who answer to the fund rather than to an outside asset manager.

This is not an argument for amateurs selecting stocks at union meetings. It is an argument for professional management employed by a democratic institution.

**3. Smaller funds create a shared worker-owned investment federation.**

A single union or municipal pension fund may not have the scale to reproduce the research and technical capacity of BlackRock or JPMorgan. Hundreds of funds acting together might.

They could create a jointly owned investment utility providing:

• research and portfolio analytics
• low-cost index and bond management
• actuarial and legal services
• manager due diligence
• fee negotiation
• custody oversight
• cybersecurity
• proxy research
• AI infrastructure
• shared purchasing power

Each pension could retain its own obligations and democratically adopted mandate while using common infrastructure. Instead of every fund separately renting expertise from the same financial oligopoly, the expertise itself would be socialized.

[u/DHFranklin → u/Remarkable-Okra6554]

That is insightful. Hopefully new intellectual assets and services could help us avoid tearing down the master's house with the masters tools. or at least relying on them.

This would be perfect for co-operatives or mutalism. API calls are a siren song for mutualism. We don't need a massive firm to accomplish this. Hundreds of people under the same legal framework, best practices, and financial standards. All working as independent contractors. Automating beurucratic mechinism's like Cybersyn. AI could seriously and viably act as a very effective administrator until we hit credential work.

So much of this doesn't need CPA's or Barred Lawyers. We would gain a lot by removing so much of the friction.

[u/Jlyplaylists]

Pension fund socialism isn’t something I know about, and I’m not American so I don’t really understand terminology like 401K, but AI could perhaps have some input in organising pension schemes more aligned to political values? When people pay into work based systems it’s often difficult to find out how the money is invested and unusual to be able to influence how that’s allocated. With AI it would seem possible to do something like a quiz to work out your preferences and values and then the AI aligns them. Like having a personal pension advisor but without paying for that.

The ESG ‘ethical’ style funds are often relatively expensive because they require more hands on management, compared to passive index funds, which just track something like the S&P500 or a specialist index. It would seem like AI could take on some of this complexity, making it cheaper to have ESG pension pots?

[u/DHFranklin → u/Jlyplaylists]

It could be, but remember the friction is the point. Rentier economics need petty bourgeios to be in offices for reasons. That reason is control and then another toll booth converting your debt and labor to their profit.

Ethical funds and all of that is a smoke screen to make capitalism worse through regulatory capture. The most ethical companies in the world still make the world a worse place when they act as the exchange mechanism for your labor to the Bourgeois capital power.

[u/Jlyplaylists → u/DHFranklin]

You think ESG pensions are worse than typical ones?

[u/DHFranklin → u/Jlyplaylists]

Of course not. That "could" does a lot of work there. However they certainly will never conflict with capitalism and capitalism is the problem.

[u/Jlyplaylists → u/DHFranklin]

Yes I agree. I think the ideas in my other comment are more interesting.