“Technology can be used to subjugate peoples, or it can be used to help liberate them.” Technologies made in Scotland prove Che Guevara’s first claim. The Leonardo factory in Edinburgh equips Israel’s F-35 fighter jets with laser sensors. In May, simpler technology – a wire-cutter – was used to interrupt production at the plant, and then in July an early morning picket resulted in the factory’s closure for a day. Sustained sabotage and protest prove the possibility, at least, of halting the production of weapons used to subjugate people in Palestine. It shows the courage of the pro-Palestine resistance. It also demonstrates the difference between the arsenals of oppressors and oppressed, in a world where technology is used for profit and nothing is more profitable than war.

In the 1980s and 90s, Scotland’s peace movement paid close attention to the nuclear weapons held in Faslane, which Britain continues using to bear down on peoples beyond its borders. Nuke-watch monitored police discussions and the movement of the warheads. The Trident Ploughshares campaign broke into military facilities to smash up equipment. The supply of weapons from Scotland to Israel is a more secretive business than the Trident programme. It paves the path along which, as Chris Sutherland warns in this issue, Britain seems to be sleepwalking into a wider regional war. Alongside ongoing efforts to assess the scale of Scottish arms for Israel, public interventions are exposing the complicity of organisations up the research stream. Chilling ‘innovations’ are often conceived in universities, and two democratically elected rectors, Stella Maris at St Andrews and Ghassan Abu Sittah at Glasgow, have demanded divestment from projects linked with Israel. In Maris’s case, the university responded by dismissing her from the roles she was elected to perform. Principal Sally Mapstone’s decision is linked to threats by an Israel-linked foundation to withdraw some major funding for a technological research project.

The role of manufacturers and research institutions is one clear case where technology is used to suppress liberation struggle. Che said “technology is a weapon” and he did not just mean arms, but also all the tools and machines used to change the way we produce and transform nature. Technology alters what people can create, changes how things can be produced, serviced, and distributed, and affects the productivity of labour. Those who control and deploy it hold dominion over labour and society. Technology will not bring social benefits without changing who controls it. It might be fun to imagine a terrifying techno-future akin to the world of Yannis Varoufakis’s Technofeudalism that Xabier Villares explores in this issue, but the Left needs to avoid the tendency for technological determinism, either of the optimistic or the pessimistic kind. The question of whether tech will create or destroy jobs is a false dichotomy; technologies will change who and what is needed to do work, as it always has done. As Stephen Boyd explains, the economic impacts of technology transitions depend on how they are managed, including by government intervention. Meanwhile, the tech establishment drones on about the ‘ethics of AI’, the benefits of ‘digital innovation’, and the promises of ‘data justice’; but everybody knows how ridiculous it is to talk about the ethical responsibilities of an ethernet cable. The material issue, Dan McQuillan reminds us, is that technologies are run unaccountably, consuming unimaginable gigawatt-hours of energy. The regulation of the industry and the reduction of computer processing must therefore be priorities of any truly Just Transition. Kate McCurdy explains why technologies like Large Language Models will degrade the quality of work for millions of people, and why workers’ resistance will develop just as it did in the age of the steam engine.

In the meantime governments are scrambling to put technology to work in the public services with a view to increasing productivity or reducing staff numbers. The Sunak government’s promise to use AI to cut the civil service has been echoed by Keir Starmer. And as Drew Gilchrist points out of the NHS, while service managers – and sometimes trade union representatives – are enticed by the promises of private tech, workers know that pay, conditions and budget sizes matter more than technological innovations for most service delivery. In the heart of this issue, a range of union voices from a variety of sectors – the civil service, colleges, schools, and social care – all highlight that the rate of increase in workloads and the ratio of staff to service users, are the vital data for understanding what is going wrong.

Our third section looks at how to make things right. Organising is the basis upon which people at the wrong end of exploitation are able to turn political, economic and technological transitions to their advantage. When technology makes it easier for the civil service to outsource and cut pay, Fran Heathcote explains how workplace-wide organising keeps workers united. When union officials struggle to keep up with changing conditions in a construction sector short of labour, writes Davy Brockett, rank-and-file campaigns can bring workers’ experiences and demands to the fore. Unity between outsourced and insourced workers, rank and file campaigns that connect disparate workers in sectors like construction, and workers’ committees to monitor and respond to the unwatched impact of tech, are all models of organising from below. Ronan Scott reviews The Workers’ Committee, part of a series of reprints by Strike Map on rank and file organising, and asks what is missing from the theories of industrial unionism we have inherited.

This issue also casts a critical eye on other types of Left organisation. These questions have greater urgency in the face of recent far-right mobilisations including the racist mobbing that erupted in England following a triple murder in Southport. Fraser McQueen’s review of the French elections considers the lessons we can learn from the recent victory of the New Popular Front and the anti-racist politics of the French Left. Jennifer Clapham interviews the co-chair of the Democratic Union Party in Rojava about how the organisation was built to involve all of society’s communities in a social revolution. And Coll McCail reviews Vincent Bevins’ If We Burn which asks why, despite a decade of hot protest, this generation has failed to forge the organisational unity of past generations. All these interventions are a reminder that when it comes to building the Left, we must not put the cart before the horse, or the app before the rider. The use of technology by capital relies on a tightly ordered system of control. Inverting it depends on a struggle in which technology can be an aid but never an agent. “In order to use the weapon of technology for society’s benefit, one has to control society.” To do that, said Che, “the weapon of technology must be placed at the disposal of all technicians, at the disposal of the people.”