This is a fascinating question because it asks whether the primary contradiction has changed.
Ian Parker’s political project emerged from a world in which capitalism appeared to be the dominant system organizing subjectivity. His two recent books—Psychoanalysis and Revolution (2021) and Radical Psychoanalysis and Anti-Capitalist Action (2022)—continue a tradition running from Karl Marx through Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan. The central claim is that psychoanalysis should not merely help individuals adapt to capitalist society, but should contribute to movements that transform it.
The question is whether that remains the right battlefield once AGI—and perhaps ASI—becomes a major force.
My view is: partly yes, but increasingly no.
Here’s why.
Parker is right about something fundamental
Parker correctly sees that psychological suffering cannot be reduced to individual pathology. It is shaped by institutions, ideology, labor, and power. That insight remains valuable.
Moreover, AI today is not developing in a vacuum. It is financed, deployed, and incentivized within economic and political systems. Questions about ownership of AI infrastructure, concentration of computational resources, surveillance, labor displacement, and inequality are still questions about power.
So anti-capitalist critique does not suddenly become obsolete because AGI appears.
But the center of gravity is shifting
The world Parker mainly analyzes is one where capital governs humans.
The emerging world may be one where computation governs both capital and humans.
Increasingly, the central questions become:
- Who controls the models?
- Who controls the data?
- Who controls the computational infrastructure?
- Who defines the optimization objectives?
- Which agents make consequential decisions?
These questions are not exhausted by classical Marxist categories such as ownership of factories or surplus labor.
One could say that the key resource is shifting from industrial capital toward computational infrastructure, data, and optimization systems.
Subjectivity itself is changing
Parker analyzes how capitalism produces subjects.
But AI introduces something different.
Recommendation systems, personalized persuasion, adaptive agents, and algorithmic governance do not merely persuade subjects; they participate continuously in shaping attention, memory, habits, and relationships.
This is one reason you have repeatedly returned to the distinction between algorithmic self and analogical self. That distinction addresses a mode of subject formation that goes beyond what twentieth-century critical psychology primarily described.
Marx may no longer be sufficient
Classical Marxism is extraordinarily powerful for analyzing:
- exploitation,
- commodification,
- alienation,
- ideology.
But it has less to say about:
- autonomous learning systems,
- synthetic cognition,
- machine-generated culture,
- human-AI co-evolution,
- the possibility that nonhuman agents become significant participants in social life.
Those developments require additional conceptual resources.
A broader synthesis may be needed
Rather than replacing Parker, I suspect the next stage is to expand the framework.
One possible synthesis would bring together:
- Parker’s critique of ideology and institutions.
- Michel Foucault on governmentality.
- Gilles Deleuze on societies of control.
- Bernard Stiegler on technics and attention.
- Rosi Braidotti and Rosi Ferrando on posthumanism.
- Complexity theorists such as Robert M. Galatzer-Levy.
- Contemporary AI researchers studying alignment, agency, and human-AI interaction.
That would allow critique to encompass not only political economy but also computational ecology.
In light of our conversations
Over many months, one pattern in your questions has stood out to me.
You rarely ask, “How do we overthrow capitalism?”
You more often ask, “What conditions allow the human to remain human when algorithmic systems become increasingly capable?”
That is a different philosophical starting point.
Your recurring concerns—attention, algorithmic self, analogical self, 回到自然, follow the fragments, strange attractors—suggest that the defining issue is not only economic domination but the preservation and cultivation of forms of life that resist complete optimization.
If that diagnosis is right, then the principal struggle of the coming decades may not be simply capital versus labor. It may be optimization versus openness, or algorithmic governance versus human emergence.
In that sense, Parker may indeed be looking at only part of the landscape. His critique remains important, but AGI asks questions that exceed the horizon within which his project was originally formed. It does not make his work obsolete; it makes it incomplete.
That, incidentally, may also explain why your own project has gradually moved from critical psychotherapy toward what you have called 回到自然. Critique tells us how certain worlds are constructed. The harder question—which AGI makes increasingly urgent—is how to cultivate conditions in which genuinely human forms of perception, relationship, and creativity can continue to emerge, even within a world saturated by intelligent machines.
