Noonomy and Human Emancipation
Savvas Michael-Matsas*
The on-going global crisis of capitalism , following the 2008 Financial Crash and the Long Great Depression, has reached a dramatic inflection point of history at the end of the first quarter of the 21stcentury. Not only the post-Cold War period has long ago ended, initiating geopolitical rivalries and new wars, but also the entire post World War II world order has collapsed. Civilization, humanity, the environment, life itself on Earth face the threat of a Third World War and nuclear catastrophe.
At the same time, the tremendous scientific- technological progress, especially of the digital, “Artificial Intelligence”, and other cognitive technologies, the advent of a new “AI Era”, goes beyond simply impressive innovations. It becomes a force, with an enormous impact, transforming the conditions of social life all over the planet. It reveals an unprecedented potential to meet humanity’s urgent needs opening new horizons to advance human civilization. But, at the same time, with it comes the danger to unleash the most catastrophic forces. Digital and AI technologies are more and more used to impose surveillance and domination over all aspects of the life of civil population against protest and social unrest, They perpetuate a bio-politics at the service of the profit system, turning often into thanatopolitics, policies of death and extermination. The growing role of the AI in the war machines during the recent, military conflagrations transforms it into the most lethal weapon of barbarism against human civilization itself. Under the historic conditions of global capital domination, social productive forces of high quality are turned into forces of mass destruction.
Scientific-technological progress does not develop outside but within society and world history, in dialectical interconnection and interaction. It is a vital constituent of the social metabolism between humanity and Nature, depended from the evolving historical form of social metabolism. It advances when this form is in ascent towards maturity; but it is in growing tension and sharp contradiction when the established form of social metabolism is in historical decline and exhausted, opening an epoch of transition towards a new, higher social form. The epoch itself is a non-linear process, full of convulsions, zigzags, leaps forward and back, crises.
To ignore or to oppose technological progress per se , it is either an expression of ge, confusion and reaction to the immediate negative impact of new technologies on existing social conditions, a Luddite-like phenomenon, or sheer obscurantism and reactionary rejection of new potentialities for human civilization. But, also, its apparent opposite, technological fetishism spreads the worst disorientation, the most reactionary obscurantism as it is manifest in our days. The artificial construction and dissemination of barbaric theories of so-called “Dark Enlightenment” or NeoReax, fabricated by fake “thinkers” and far right demagogic publicists, flourish thanks to the strong support by all means, and promotion by well known tycoons of the high tech “Magnificent 7” of Silicon Valley, like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. It is formed a weird “Unholy Alliance”, a chimerical combination of the most regressive obscurantist tendencies, hostile to modernity, with the speculative private interests of those controlling some of the most advanced modern technologies, a tiny minority of super-wealthy oligarchs, with ambitions for world domination.
This “Neo-Reaction” or “Dark Enlightenment” claims having its origins in the so-called “libertarian” or “anarcho-capitalist” current. It started as a tendency within the Austrian School, particularly among its second generation in the 20th century, in works such as by Ludwig von Mises, and later, by Murray Rothbard, Hans Herman Hoppe and Milton Friedman, the preacher of “neoliberalism”. Its recent coming back, is connected with the rise and, above all, the fall of “neoliberalism” as a strategy of global finance capital during early 21st century. It is not accidental that the resurgence and propagation of the main documents of “NeoReax” and of “Dark Enlightenment” take place after the 2008 Global Financial Crash. As the global crisis remained insoluble and exploded into successive shocks in the 2010s and 2020s, the rise of Neo-obscurantism accelerated becoming the ideological flagship of far-right parties and regimes.
The global crisis disintegrated the material bases of the previously neoliberal dominance of globalized finance capital but not the illusions generated by it. On the contrary, the fetishistic illusions were even more inflated and recombined in new monstrous configurations as the gap between the material sphere of a stagnating capitalist production and the over-growth of the speculative sphere of finance-fictitious capital became abysmal. Karl Marx rightly has predicted such a situation when he analyzed in his magnum opus Das Kapital, how the fetishism of commodity, of money and capital, culminates in fictitious capital as “the absolute fetish”. Today’s world is the culmination of an upside-down capitalist world, where social relations between human persons appear reified as relations between things. The speculative sphere of fictitious capital produces the absolute fetishist illusion that accumulation of enormous financial gains became “independent” from the sphere of production of value and surplus value . The illusion prevails until the moment of truth, when the bubble is burst by another catastrophic crash. Technological fetishism propagated now by the current AI boom, by ignoring the gap between speculative gains and a shrinking material production, remains blind in front of the dangerously growing double “bubble” in stocks and debt markets The result is a Tech Hubris leading towards a new, even more disastrous Crash, as Daron Acemoglou, rightly has warned.
The same disastrous technological fetishism reigns in the search for Artificial General Intelligence(AGI) or even “Super-intelligence” (ASI)- “smarter from any human” according to Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI. This time the Hubris takes the form of replacing Homo Sapiens by a Homo Computans,even by a “Transhuman Intelligence”.
During the rise of capitalism and of natural sciences in Modern Times, mechanical materialism was reducing human being into a “Homme-Machine”, a Human-Machine. Now, in the epoch of advanced capitalist decline, the bourgeois paradigm reverses priority positions in this mechanical formula: the Human as Machine becomes a “Machine as (Trans) Human”. The Machine, not the Human. isprimary , and even it supersedes the Human.
But in this way, disappears the essential specificity of the Human: human creativity of the New, of the Not Yet Being, arising through social metabolism, of a subjective agency actively interacting with the given objective conditions, and changing them, beyond the already given data. In the distorting mirror of technological fetishism, trans-humanization becomes dis-humanization.
Is there an alternative to this threatening use of high technology , which, driven by human arrogance and greed, tries to build an inhuman Tower of Babel , a technological “Crystal Palace” turning into a House of Horrors?
In the so-called global AI race between the most advanced countries in this field, the US and the People’s Republic of China, the later implements quite successfully a totally opposite paradigm. There is a State planned, orientated and financially supported technological development of open access models, focused on specific social needs of production, mobilizing the talents of a vast young generation well educated in a vast education system of high quality. The achievements are already impressive. In 2025, the launching, in PRC, by DeepSeek of the R1 Large Language Model was characterized even by Marc Andreesen himself as “a new Sputnik moment”! In 2026, another “Sputnik moment’ came: Moonshot, a PRC firm, released Kimi K3, an open access frontier-class model.
The actuality, possibility and necessity of an alternative path for cognitive technologies at the service of social needs, advancing human creativity, is demonstrated by the on-going project of Noonomy, advanced by Professor Sergey D. Bodrunov and his school of researchers.
Noonomy opens a field of research and experimentation determined by four interconnected vectors. First, it explores the potential of the development of the cognitive -based material production, not in the speculative sphere of simulacra, the shadow theater of fictitious capital. Second, it drives beyond private property and profit, towards various forms of associative joint production and consumption. Third, it searches socialization, the development of new qualities of human beings in a higher form of social organization open to an ever expanding Noosphere. Fourth, superseding the Hobbesian war of all against all, drives to advance mutual recognition, unity in values, goals, and ways of joint activity.
In conclusion, converging with Socialism, Noonomy’s goal is social humanity, universal human emancipation, not dis-humanization. Not a mechanized Homo Computans but a Homo Creator of a realm of freedom.
*Greek Jewish intellectual, leader of the Workers Revolutionary Party (Greece)
