Workers Strike Back, including co-founder and revolutionary socialist leader Kshama Sawant, stand in solidarity with the working-class movement against the quantum computing center being built on the South Side of Chicago. Nationally, seven out of ten people are opposed to the Artificial Intelligence data centers. There is mass anger against the billionaire class and the reasons for the massive expansion of AI and quantum projects: imperialist wars, genocide, ICE terror, and mass surveillance. We need a coordinated nationwide militant fightback. However, our movements will succeed only if we defeat the Democratic Party as well as the Republicans, both of which represent the billionaires and multimillionaires.
AI and Quantum Computing for War and Mass Surveillance
Known as Quantum Shore, Chicago’s project would be a sprawling 440-acre campus. It would include a hyperscale data center needing a whole gigawatt of energy, which could power 800,000 homes. Many prominent Democratic Party politicians such as Illinois Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, billionaire Illinois State Governor JB Pritzker, and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson have lauded Quantum Shore as an innovation center. Mayor Johnson has claimed it would bring “new jobs and educational pathways while also paving the way for expanded health care and community amenities.” In reality, the Quantum Shore project is a war-profiteering joint venture between billionaires and multimillionaires, the Pentagon, American corporations like IBM and Blackrock, Israeli corporation Quantum Machines, and the Democratic and Republican parties in Chicago, Cook County, and Illinois. Under pressure from Chicago’s working people, and organizations such as Southside Together and Code Pink that have mobilized to protest actions, Mayor Johnson was recently forced to publicly declare that the hyperscale data center will not be included. Working people should not trust what is very likely an empty promise. But even if the data center itself will not be built, the quantum computing project, as a whole, is deeply ominous and must be shut down.
AI and quantum computing are separate technologies. AI is a software-generated capability to use large amounts of data to infuence decision-making. A landmark investigation in November 2023 found that the Israeli military’s systematic use of AI was part of the backbone of the genocide in Gaza from the very beginning, cold-bloodedly targeting civilians, including babies and children. As admitted by a former IDF official, AI-assisted data processing had taken the pace of target generation from 50 targets per year to 100 per day and created a “mass assassination factory” in Gaza. AI has been key to the ICE terror being inflicted in cities across the nation.
Quantum computing is technology that could, both by itself, and in combination with AI software, take the horrors to another level. Quantum computing deploys hardware in order to process data and calculations that would take traditional computers millennia to solve, in other words, processing that would otherwise be impossible.
Under capitalism, all of this so-called “innovation” is being used for wars, genocide, and mass surveillance against billions of ordinary people. Both AI and quantum technology are ongoing new frontiers for research and development of modern war technologies and for super-profits for the capitalist class.
Among those who would profit from the Quantum project are also the wealthy owners of Related Midwest, part of the massive $70-billion Related Companies. The principal owner of Related is Stephen Ross, who has a net worth estimated close to $17 billion. Related’s owners are also about to profit from the imminent demolition and privatization of the last remaining half-a-million public affordable residential housing units in New York City.
The Democratic Party is Responsible for Chicago’s Quantum Project
For the project to begin construction, the old defunct steel mill located on the site had to be rezoned. The Chicago City Council had the opportunity to block the project by voting NO on the rezoning legislation in December of 2024. The rezoning was approved unanimously by the Chicago City Council, which has 48 Democrats and 2 independents. There is no Republican stronghold in Chicago.
Chicago’s “progressive” Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson has similarly not made any attempt to stop this project. In fact, Johnson was at the ground-breaking ceremony, taking photo-ops to celebrate the beginning of construction. Johnson was forced to appear at a Town Hall earlier this month, attended by hundreds of working people. When Johnson attempted to placate the audience with a new executive order he signed creating regulations on data centers, he was booed and shouted down off the stage and confronted with loud chants of “Mayor Johnson, shut it down. Revoke the permits. Do it now.”
Workers Strike Back and Kshama join Chicago’s working people in demanding a stop to the entire Quantum computing campus and for the City Council to enact a permanent moratorium on its development.
The Democratic Party has a supermajority in the Illinois State General Assembly, comprising the State Senate and House of Representatives. Except for one Republican politician, the Cook County Board of Commissioners is entirely filled with Democratic Party politicians. These two Democratic Party-led bodies have not only joined the Democrat-dominated Chicago City Council in politically backing the project, but they are also its biggest funders thus far! Most of the billion dollars allocated for the project is through public funds, with the Illinois State Legislature providing a whopping $700 million (70 percent) and the Cook County Board of Commissioners adding $20 million. Johnson has pledged an additional $5 million from the City of Chicago’s affordable housing and economic development fund. Illinois has the nation’s fifth most regressive tax system, with working and poor people paying the largest proportions of their incomes in taxes, which means they are being directly penalized by the Democratic Party to turn over obscene profits for the richest people.
Pritzker and Illinois State Democrats have, along with the Republicans, provided tax incentives for data centers with bipartisan legislation in 2019. According to the state’s 2024 report, at least 27 data centers had received incentives totaling $983 million in estimated lifetime tax breaks and benefits. So instead of taxing the rich to fund working people’s needs like improvements in healthcare, housing, and education, both Democrats and Republicans are trying to help the billionaires save money.
The city and state Democratic Party have also presided over crushing intergenerational poverty in the region. Chicago’s South Side, where the project would be located, has a shocking 40 to 60 percent of residents living below the federal poverty level, which is itself grossly inadequate as a poverty measure. Not surprisingly, some of the highest concentrations of poverty are faced by communities of color.
Democratic Senators Duckworth and Durbin have voted to fund Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which is especially horrendous as Illinois is home to the nation’s largest Palestinian-American community. Both Duckworth and Durbin have also voted to fund ICE, and Durbin voted to create ICE through his vote in favor of Republican President George W, Bush’s 2002 Homeland Security Act.
DSA’s Participation in Selling Out
The most scandalous aspect of the Democratic Party’s promotion of this dystopian project is the role of the elected leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
There are six DSA electeds on the Chicago City Council. Two of them abstained on the vote in the Chicago Plan Commission. But this is simply not enough! It is not enough for a socialist to simply abstain on such a vote. Socialist elected representatives first of all should vote NO. They should also use their elected positions to launch and build mass movements to oppose the pro-war and pro-billionaire agenda of the Democratic Party instead of allowing them to go on with their rapid expansion of AI, war and genocide, and surveillance tech.
Even more shamefully, all the DSA electeds voted in favor of the rezoning in the full City Council vote.
Two DSA members, Robert Peters and Rachel Ventura, have been elected to the Illinois State Senate, and like their City Council counterparts, did absolutely nothing to oppose the Quantum project.
The approach of DSA electeds of not challenging the political establishment and the billionaire class can also clearly be seen in New York. The DSA has had eight to nine electeds in the State Legislature for years. Currently, DSA has nine in the State Legislature and four on the New York City Council, and has control of NYC Mayorship through Zohran Mamdani. Yet, they have failed to launch any movements for substantive demands like a $30/hour minimum wage, statewide rent control, or universal public healthcare. The plan to demolish and privatize the NYC public housing, with corporations like Related standing to make untold profits, predates Mamdani’s mayorship, but he is allowing the plans to continue.
In stark contrast to DSA leaders, revolutionary socialist Kshama Sawant used her decade-long lone elected office on the Seattle City Council to build mass movements of working people to win historic victories. These include the nation’s highest minimum wage (now at $21.30/hour), the Amazon Tax that raises hundreds of millions of dollars every year for affordable housing, and historic renters’ rights like a 10-dollar cap on late rent fees. The minimum wage victory spread nationwide from Seattle, and tens of millions of workers have since won substantial wage increases. Kshama also used her office to organize the working-class and immigrant tenants of Seattle’s public housing to successfully defeat an Obama mandate of 400 percent rent increases, which would have become a precursor for demolition and privatization.
The Democrats on the Seattle City Council fought viciously against every single one of these working-class demands. But the strength of the movements built through using Kshama’s Council office, and Kshama using her position to publicly expose the individual Democrats and their betrayals, placed a price tag on the political careers of the Democratic Party politicians, and they were forced to concede.
None of the over 200 DSA elected officials across the nation have posed a threat to the establishment, let alone won comparable gains for the working class. It is crucial that movements do not place so much emphasis on the number of elected positions because what is important is what is done with those elected positions. Kshama’s example shows that even with only one elected position that is used to fight for the working class, you can win unparalleled victories and show the strategy to defeat the Democratic Party.
We Need a New Party for the Working Class
It is all too common that politicians who may look like they are on our side initially will try to make alliances with the Democratic Party establishment and the elite, and make a career for themselves instead of organizing working people to fight the party’s corporate warmongering agenda. This is how working people keep getting sold out.
We need to be organizing independently of both parties of the billionaires and our movements have to be in opposition to these sellouts and maneuvers by the Democrats and other gatekeepers who uphold the status quo. We need a mass working-class party that can organize these movements on a national scale, a party that consistently opposes war and imperialism, and fights unambiguously for working people and the oppressed.
Earlier this year, Kshama ran as a revolutionary socialist for the U.S. Congress, against genocidal incumbent Democrat Adam Smith. Kshama won 17.25 percent of the vote, the strongest ever vote, by far, for an openly Marxist candidate for the U.S. Congress. Our campaign won this despite numerous obstacles and maneuvers by both the Democratic and Republican parties.
Kshama ran on electrifying demands like free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich, ending all military aid to Israel and a permanent arms embargo on Israel, stopping the data centers and AI-related layoffs, and national rent control. All of these are extremely popular among the working class in this district and nationally. Kshama’s campaign laid a historical marker at a time when working people are angry at both parties and yet DSA leaders are in the business of rehabilitating the reputation of the Democratic Party. Workers Strike Back members will be using Kshama’s campaign to continue building movements that confront the Democratic and Republican parties, both of which represent the war-profiteering billionaires and multimillionaires.
Take Big Tech Into Democratic Public Ownership!
Workers Strike Back, a nationwide organization fighting the rich and both their parties, has had members in various cities across the country play important roles in the fight against several hyperscale data centers. In a small town of Pekin, Illinois, we fought alongside hundreds of working people against a hyperscale data center project and shut it down. Workers Strike Back members brought the political clarity to this movement that the Democrats and Republicans on the Pekin City Council cannot be swayed by moral appeals. We put a price tag on their political careers by publicly shaming them for their vote to back the data center. This vote exposed them as doing the bidding of the billionaires and multimillionaires who are invested in this technology and not the working people of their city. In Pine Island, Minnesota, where Google is building a massive data center, our members have made it so uncomfortable for the corporate politicians to show their face in public that the Mayor resigned after just weeks of working people going to public comment to fight back. In Seattle, Workers Strike Back recently supported a successful temporary moratorium on data centers.
Workers Strike Back has won these victories against data centers by taking inspiration from Kshama Sawant’s militant socialist leadership on Seattle City Council and bringing it into our fights around the country. We need to build on these fights and bring this approach in Chicago at Quantum Shore and in other cities around the country. Workers everywhere need to get organized into groups like Workers Strike Back and take up these same fighting methods to bring the profit machinery of the Data Center and AI expansion to a grinding halt.
We need to stop all the weapons and tech being used for genocide and imperialist war. We need to stop the massive expansion of AI data centers and the AI-related mass layoffs. We need to take big tech and energy corporations into democratic public ownership of workers because we can’t control what we don’t own.
Working people do not want war technology and we certainly do not want the increased use of fossil fuels that comes with providing obscene amounts of energy to these data centers or war computing centers. All of this is sending us towards the planet’s annihilation and we do not have much time left. We urgently need to stop all of the monstrous uses of these technologies, and the cynical sourcing of their energy, if we want to sustain life on this planet in the decades to come.