Zhang Jianyun: The Core and Characteristics of the New Round of Technological Revolution from the Perspective of Historical Materialism
Science and technology are the primary productive forces. To study the development of productive forces and the transformation of the mode of production in the present era, the most fundamental task is to profoundly grasp the essence, core, and characteristics of the contemporary new round of scientific and technological revolution. To investigate these aspects, one must study the development of information technology, which serves as the underlying technical architecture and infrastructure guiding and dominating this new revolution. Over the past 20 years, information technology has been undergoing an unprecedented "great convergence." This is manifested in the integration, mutual promotion, and complementarity between 20th-century information technologies—such as wireless communication, computing, digitalization of information, the internet, and artificial intelligence (AI)—and new 21st-century technologies like cloud computing, the mobile internet, blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Together, they form a "digital-intelligent technology system," summarized by the Third Plenary Session of the 20th CPC Central Committee as the "digi-intel technology" (数智技术) [1] system.
General Secretary Xi Jinping has pointed out: "A new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation is germinating and rising. Cloud computing, big data, the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence are developing rapidly, crossing and merging with fields such as biology, energy, materials, and neuroscience, triggering a collective technological transformation characterized by being green, intelligent, and ubiquitous. Network information technology, represented by the internet, is increasingly becoming the pioneering force for innovation-driven development, accelerating the flow and sharing of factors such as labor, capital, energy, and information, and pushing social productive forces toward a new qualitative leap."
The digital-intelligent technology system is the key and dominant force driving today's new round of scientific and technological revolution. Its core and characteristics lie in the following: supported by this system, AI constructs models based on massive data, greatly liberating mental labor, thereby promoting the production of digital content using data and information resources as raw materials. That is, digitalized cultural production has become a new field of production leading social development, merging cultural production with material production and "culturalizing" material production. Driven by the increasingly close division of labor and collaboration based on the intelligent internet and the deep development of the socialization of labor, new industries, new business forms, and new models are emerging in an endless stream, changing with each passing day. The movement of capitalist value and the logic of capital run contrary to the developmental requirements of the new productive forces dominated by digital-intelligent technology. In contrast, socialism complements and promotes the development of these new productive forces, pushing human society into a new form of civilization.
I. The Digital-Intelligent Technology System Formed by the Great Convergence of Information Technology is the Dominant Force of the New Round of Scientific and Technological Revolution
Information technology primarily rose in the mid-20th century, becoming widely popular with the emergence and application of technologies such as electronic computers (1940s), information digitalization (1940s), AI (1950s), the internet (1960s), and mobile communications (1980s). Since entering the 21st century, the emergence and application of new technologies like cloud computing (2006), the IoT and mobile internet (around 2008), and blockchain (2008) have enabled an unprecedented convergence, forming a digital-intelligent technology system that has ignited a new round of scientific and technological revolution.
1. The Great Convergence of Information Technology and the Formation of the Digital-Intelligent Technology System
Among traditional information technologies, mobile communication technology originated from the invention and use of radio communication at the turn of the 20th century. Subsequently, with the development of cellular networks, the first generation of mobile communication (1G) appeared in the 1980s, followed by the second generation (2G) in the 1990s, mainly used for the real-time transmission of information. The computer, born in the 1940s, progressed through stages involving vacuum tubes, transistors, integrated circuits, large-scale and very-large-scale integrated circuits (VLSI), and personal computers, mainly used for information storage, calculation, and processing. Information digitalization technology also emerged in the 1940s when computer scientists discovered that the binary system matched the logic circuit switching states within computers, allowing information to be converted from analog to digital formats for easier storage, transmission, and analysis. With the subsequent invention of Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs), the complex physical world could be easily quantified and processed. AI was born in the 1950s with the goal of enabling computers to think like human brains through the calculation and analysis of data. The internet, born in the 1960s, was primarily used for sharing information; the World Wide Web, proposed in 1989, utilized distributed technology to link pages globally. Additionally, the 20th century saw the birth of distributed computing, cryptography, virtualization, sensor technology, and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID).
Before the 21st century, these technologies had not yet fully demonstrated their collective power as they developed relatively independently. However, since the turn of the century, these technologies have begun to permeate, support, and complement one another. This is evidenced in several ways: First, the mobile internet—formed by merging computing, digitalization, mobile communication, and the internet—allows people to be online anytime and anywhere via smartphones. All human activities and states can be digitalized into data. The IoT, merging mobile networks with sensors and GPS, further digitalizes the status of all physical objects. This creates an interconnected web of information between people and things, where massive data is generated and shared instantly at extremely low cost.
Second, cloud computing integrates distributed computing and virtualization, distributing tasks across vast resource pools of computers to process massive data in short timeframes. Third, blockchain—acting as the underlying architecture of Internet 3.0—fuses distributed networks, cryptography, consensus algorithms, and smart contracts. It features decentralization, immutability of data, and traceability, establishing a technical trust mechanism and data rights mechanism [2] that protects privacy and improves efficiency. Fourth, AI machine learning, supported by big data and cloud computing, constructs models to propose new solutions or content, assisting the human brain in information processing and accelerating the "valorization of data" (数据价值化). Under the empowerment of these models, the efficiency with which the human brain constructs concepts increases, and machines become increasingly intelligent.
2. Data is the Core Around Which the Digital-Intelligent Technology System Revolves
From the convergence described above, it is clear that the digital-intelligent technology system revolves around the real-time generation, storage, transmission, sharing, calculation, and application of big data. Data is the "concrete in thought" (理性具体) [3] necessary for a profound understanding of this system and the new technological revolution. Marx summarized the human cognitive process as two paths: "On the first path, the full conception was evaporated into yield an abstract determination; on the second, the abstract determinations lead to the reproduction of the concrete by way of thought." The first path abstracts empirical material from practice into rational abstractions (理性抽象); however, these do not yet reveal the internal laws or the "unity of the diverse." Therefore, one must rise from the rational abstract to the rational concrete (the "concrete in thought"), achieving a comprehensive understanding of the object's essence. Technologies like AI, cloud computing, and blockchain are various "abstract determinations" of the digital-intelligent system; to understand how they drive productive forces and transform the mode of production, we must distill the "concrete in thought" from these abstractions.
That "concrete in thought" is "data." Data is online digitalized information. All information technologies revolve around this core. Specifically, the intelligent network handles the generation and sharing of data; cloud computing handles analysis and valorization; blockchain ensures immutability and data rights; and AI handles the practical application through model construction, improving the efficiency of the human brain's "conceptual transformation of things" (观念地改造事物). If big data is the "rice" for a meal, then the various technologies like AI and cloud computing are the "pots and pans." The core logic of the digital-intelligent technology system is how to produce and use data to improve the efficiency of mental labor and promote the development of productive forces. In short, the key to grasping this system is to explore how to foster the generation of data, how to promote its valorization, and how to form new quality productive forces.
3. The Digital-Intelligent Technology System Plays a Leading and Dominant Role in the New Scientific and Technological Revolution
While the current era features many frontier technologies—such as quantum technology, biotechnology, new energy, and aerospace—none can compare to the digital-intelligent technology system in bringing about such broad and profound changes to humanity. This system serves as the infrastructure and underlying architecture. Other frontier technologies can only achieve innovative development when empowered by big data, the internet, and AI. For example, gene sequencing produces vast amounts of data that require digital-intelligent technologies to explore genetic functions and disease relationships. When this system permeates traditional industries, it drives the digitalization and "intelligentization" of agriculture, industry, and services, forming new technologies, industries, and business models that promote a transformation of the productive forces on an unprecedented scale.
General Secretary Xi Jinping has repeatedly emphasized the leading and dominant role of big data, the Internet, and artificial intelligence (AI) supported by the digital intelligence technology system. He noted: "At present, a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation led by artificial intelligence is in the ascendant. Driven by new theories and technologies such as the mobile Internet, big data, supercomputing, sensor networks, and brain science, artificial intelligence is exhibiting new characteristics such as deep learning, cross-border integration, human-machine collaboration, swarm intelligence [4], and autonomous control. It is exerting a major and profound influence on economic development, social progress, and global governance." Furthermore: "The breadth and depth of the impact of the Internet's rapid development are incomparable to any other technological achievement. The changes brought by Internet development to the productive forces and relations of production are unprecedented; the profound adjustments it has brought to the global political and economic landscape are unprecedented; the impact on national sovereignty and national security is unprecedented; and the influence on the exchange, integration, and confrontation [5] of different cultures and values is also unprecedented." Clearly, "artificial intelligence" and the "Internet" here do not refer to a single Internet or AI technology, but to the Internet and AI as supported by the digital intelligence technology system. This system is the dominant infrastructure and underlying architectural technology of the current era; it is the core force leading the new round of technological revolution and the dominant force driving the development of new quality productive forces.
II. The Liberation of Mental Labor by Artificial Intelligence Supported by the Digital Intelligence Technology System is the Core and Key Content of the New Technological Revolution
The new round of technological revolution led by the digital intelligence technology system is fundamentally different from the traditional revolution of large-scale mechanical productive forces. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the rapid development of natural sciences and their application to production promoted the organic integration of tool-machines, transmission mechanisms, and power machines driven by steam engines, forming a system of large-scale machinery. Marx noted: "This mechanical apparatus does not replace a specific tool, but the human hand itself... 'a degree of lightness, precision, and speed which the most skillful workman’s hand, however practiced, could never attain.'" The formation of the machinery system greatly liberated manual labor, marking the full-scale outbreak of large-scale industry and driving the productive forces toward a qualitative leap in development. In the current era, AI supported by the digital intelligence technology system constructs models based on massive data to assist the human brain in processing information. This greatly liberates mental labor, improves the efficiency of conceptual construction within the human brain, enhances machine intelligence, and promotes a new qualitative leap in the development of productive forces.
1. Mental labor, or the human brain's process of conceptual construction, is an intrinsic link in human labor.
From the moment the first stone knife was made, human labor has never been mere manual labor, but rather an active process involving mental labor performed simultaneously with physical exertion. That is, before people realistically transform objects, they first transform them conceptually in their minds, and then guide actual transformative activities based on the results of that mental conceptual construction. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx expressed this idea: "Man duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively and actually, and therefore he contemplates himself in a world that he has created." In Capital, this thought was expressed as: "What distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in ivory and gold. At the end of every labor-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement, i.e., it already existed ideally. He not only effects a change of form in the materials on which he works, but he also realizes a purpose of his own."
In a general sense, mental labor is the labor process that consumes mental energy; it is a high-level neurological activity where the brain relies on the nervous system and utilizes all existing information to innovate. The essence of this process is the brain's "conceptual construction" activity—the process by which people conceptually transform objects and create ideal modes of existence in their minds based on the deficiencies of reality. This involves using thinking abilities such as abstraction, generalization, imagination, and association to filter information, perform calculations and analysis, and permeate the conceptual object with all of one's rationality (theories, knowledge) and sensibility (emotions, will, ideals, beliefs, aesthetic tastes). This process creates an ideal conceptual existence that does not yet exist in the physical world. The objectified results of mental labor—conceptual construction—are various spiritual and cultural products [6]. These include general forms such as scientific theories, political thought, philosophy, and art, as well as specific spiritual products like new methods for solving problems, new schemes for labor processes, and new blueprints for labor outcomes. Subsequently, guided by this ideal existence constructed conceptually, people use physical tools to actually change the form of objects in reality, producing goods to satisfy needs. Therefore, the actual process of transforming things in labor is guided by an ideal existence constructed conceptually that does not exist in the physical world; the innovativeness of conceptual construction leads the innovativeness of actual practice. This is the essence of human labor.
2. Mental labor, or conceptual construction, requires massive amounts of information and powerful information-processing capabilities.
For the human brain to better perform "conceptual construction," it requires two basic conditions: first, information that is as comprehensive and accurate as possible; second, the ability of the brain to analyze and process that information.
What is information? According to the principles of dialectical materialism, information is the result of all reflections of the objective world in the human brain; it is the result of the activities of all forms of human consciousness, such as sensation, perception, memory, representation, and thought. Information includes rational content like knowledge and rules expressed through language and text, as well as emotional information experienced through mutual glances, tone of voice, gestures, and behaviors in embodied social interactions.
Information is an indispensable element for the normal conduct of the labor process. Marx once pointed out: "In a wider sense, besides those things which are the means for the action of labor on its object, and which, therefore, serve as conduits of its activity, all such material conditions as are necessary for the labor-process to take place at all, must be reckoned among the instruments of labor." All material conditions necessary for the labor process belong to the means of labor. Therefore, in addition to physical factors like land and tools, the means of production inherently include non-physical factors such as information, science and technology, management, and the division of labor and cooperation. Information differs from other non-physical factors; while science, technology, and management were not present at the very beginning of human labor but formed gradually as productive forces developed, information has been a necessary condition for human labor since its inception. For example, to successfully make a stone knife in early human society, the brain needed not only a conceptual image of the blade but also a basic grasp of the properties of the stone, the laws of its cleavage, and the surrounding environment. Information is crucial to the success of human practice; without it, labor is blind and will fail. Thus, information is an indispensable internal factor of production within the productive forces. In mental labor and conceptual construction, the richer, more comprehensive, and more accurate the information is, the more innovative and guiding the conceptual schemes and blueprints become, and the more likely labor is to succeed.
Part of the information required for conceptual construction comes from the experience and knowledge people distill from sensory materials collected in their own practice, but such information is limited. To obtain more information, people must communicate and exchange information through various media. In the pre-digital era, information was mainly expressed through language and script, with paper and other materials serving as storage and transmission media. The collection, transmission, exchange, and sharing of information were restricted by time and space, possessing a certain "hereness" (immediacy) that affected the quantity and quality of new information generated. In today's digital intelligence era, information is expressed via binary code to form data, which is stored on carriers like hard drives and transmitted, exchanged, and shared via the Internet. With the development and popularization of technologies like the mobile Internet and the Internet of Things (IoT), digitized information is increasingly forming "massive data." The vast amount of information contained in mass data cannot be effectively calculated, analyzed, processed, or utilized by the human brain alone. As a physical organ, the brain's capacity for processing information is limited by biological constraints; consequently, the efficiency of human mental labor and conceptual construction is also limited.
Marx noted: "The movement of the instrument of labor as a machine requires the replacement of human force by natural forces, and the conscious application of science, instead of rule of thumb." In the 19th century, the system of large-scale machinery replaced the human hand with natural forces, liberating physical strength and greatly improving labor efficiency. In the current era, the development of the digital intelligence technology system and the formation of massive data resources require us to consciously apply science and technology to transcend the biological limitations of the human brain with natural forces. This is what AI does: supported by the digital intelligence technology system and based on massive data and models, it assists the brain in calculating, analyzing, and processing information, thereby liberating the mind and greatly enhancing labor efficiency.
3. The internal mechanism by which AI assists the human brain in processing data and information based on the digital intelligence technology system.
Machine learning is the core of AI. The essence of machine learning is a simulation of mental labor—the brain's process of conceptual construction. Specifically: First, to solve a problem, AI identifies hidden patterns and internal logic within massive data to perform feature extraction. This process is like the brain filtering relevant information and distilling knowledge from sensory input and existing memory. Second, AI determines algorithms and constructs models, training them with datasets and adjusting parameters to optimize performance. This process is like the brain proposing preliminary schemes, patterns, or knowledge through imaginative and associative thinking, and then refining them through repeated modification. Third, AI validates the model using validation datasets and, after evaluation, determines the optimal model. This is like the brain's preliminary schemes being verified through practice until they are finally established. Finally, based on the finalized model, AI can solve various problems presented by specific real-world contexts and scenarios—that is, AI proposes solutions or constructs new patterns and content for actual situations. These new schemes, patterns, and contents provide infinitely rich materials or tools for the human brain's conceptual construction, thereby greatly improving the efficiency of mental labor. Meanwhile, as superior models are applied to machinery, the machinery becomes more intelligent, and embodied intelligent robots [7] can better serve humanity.
Since 2020, AI machine learning has achieved rapid development. In particular, with continuous breakthroughs in technologies like deep learning, Generative AI has emerged. By simulating the structure and operating mechanisms of the brain's neural networks, Generative AI establishes large pre-trained models to automatically perform general feature extraction on large-scale unlabeled data, enhancing the model's versatility and generalization capabilities. Consequently, when performing new tasks, these general features and knowledge can be utilized with only a small amount of labeled data for fine-tuning to train a high-performance model. Meanwhile, Generative AI can automatically process multiple types of data—including images, text, video, and audio—creating multimodal generative models and achieving generative output of heterogeneous data. In model training, technologies such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and Variational Autoencoders (VAE) play important roles. In January 2025, the AI technological innovations of DeepSeek surprised the world. It utilizes dynamic sparse computation and dynamic neuron activation to significantly reduce computational load; employs mixed-precision quantization training to compress model size; and uses ultra-large-scale Mixture of Experts (MoE) technology to efficiently utilize computing resources and improve performance. Thus, while greatly reducing the cost of chips and computing power, it has trained models of excellent performance and adopted a completely open-source strategy to benefit the world.
In short, as technology continues to break through, Generative AI increasingly demonstrates immense advantages in assisting the human brain with information processing, improving the efficiency of conceptual construction, and enhancing machine intelligence. On this basis, it can rapidly and efficiently generate innovative original content, new schemes, and new patterns applicable across multiple fields and scenarios. For instance, in the field of art, Generative AI can produce literature, music, or paintings containing completely new content, plots, or moods within seconds, thereby providing humans with infinitely rich materials for writing novels, composing music, or painting, stimulating human inspiration and enhancing artistic innovativeness.
4. The essence and value of AI-generated products.
Generative Artificial Intelligence is so powerful that some fear it will cause a decline in human memory, analytical ability, and judgment, thereby endangering human subjectivity. In reality, the products generated and answers presented by AI are fundamentally different from the products obtained through human mental labor. Mental labor belongs to the objectification [8] of man’s essential powers. In mental labor, humans permeate ideational things and condense into spiritual-cultural products [9] their entire strength—including not only all rationality such as knowledge and rules, but also the entirety of their emotions, such as desires, moral sense, will, ideals, beliefs, and aesthetic sensibilities. These spiritual-cultural products embody not only rational knowledge but also contain the totality of socialized emotions, thereby satisfying the comprehensive needs of the human being. Conversely, the process of AI-generated content is not a process of the objectification of human labor; AI cannot objectify rationality, such as knowledge expressed in natural language. Furthermore, because AI is not a biological organism, it possesses no instinctive drives or physiological needs; it lacks the desires stemming from primal biological impulses and the emotions arising from the satisfaction of needs. It cannot undergo the objectification of the sensibilities—emotions, will, ideals, beliefs, and aesthetics. Consequently, the new content and products generated by AI cannot satisfy human emotional needs, nor can they, in principle, be directly consumed as final products. They can never replace human labor.
The significant value of AI lies in its assistance to the human brain in processing information, thereby greatly liberating mental labor. By constructing models based on massive datasets to propose new solutions, schemas, or content, AI provides infinitely rich materials, tools, or conditions for human mental labor. It stimulates human imagination and creativity, offers unprecedented convenience for the human brain to construct ideational products, and vastly improves the efficiency of mental labor. This drives a new leap in the development of the productive forces and transforms the social mode of production. Therefore, the liberation of mental labor, bolstered by a digital-intelligent technological system and AI, constitutes the most central and critical content of the new round of scientific and technological revolution.
III. The Transformation of the Mode of Production Driven by the Liberation of Mental Labor as a Major Achievement of the New Round of Scientific and Technological Revolution
In the current era, digital-intelligent technology liberates mental labor and greatly enhances the efficiency of the process by which labor "transforms things ideationally"—that is, the process of ideational construction by the human brain. This is driving an unprecedented transformation in the mode of production. This is primarily manifested in the following: data has become a new and vital factor of production playing a key role, and the rise of digital content production using data as raw material is driving digital cultural production to become a new engine of economic development. Meanwhile, the digital-intelligent technological system, reinforcing the Internet, has pushed the division of labor, coordination, and the socialization of labor to unprecedented breadths and depths. However, the transformation of the new mode of production driven by digital-intelligent technology is influenced and constrained by the social system. Capitalist private ownership and the logic of capital are incompatible with the developmental requirements of the new productive forces dominated by digital-intelligent technology; the two move in opposite directions. In contrast, the institutional design and value pursuits of socialist public ownership—characterized by the "common possession and use of the means of production by the whole of society"—complement and promote the development of the new productive forces dominated by digital-intelligent technology, achieving a true unity of science and labor.
1. Transformation of the Content of the Means of Production: Big Data as a Key Factor of Production
The liberation of mental labor and the vast improvement in the efficiency of the human brain's ideational construction are achieved through machine learning powered by digital-intelligent technology. Data is the "raw material" for AI model construction. Without data, nothing can be discussed. Data is the rice for the digital-intelligent system’s cooking, the ingredients for creating exquisite dishes; the quantity, quality, and diversity of data directly determine model performance, thereby directly affecting the efficiency of the human brain in processing information and constructing ideas, and determining the quality of the intellectualization of the entire labor process. Consequently, data has become the core and key element for the liberation of mental labor and, by extension, the entire labor process in the digital-intelligent era. "The vast ocean of data is like the oil resources of industrial society, containing immense productive forces and business opportunities; whoever masters big data technology masters the resources and the initiative for development." "We must construct a digital economy with data as a key factor." Data is a new type of means of production following land, labor, capital, and technology, and it is a vital factor of production that plays a critical role.
As digitized information, data is the result of the human brain's reflection of the objective world; it belongs to the categories of consciousness and ideas, and constitutes a non-corporeal element of the means of production. Therefore, data is fundamentally different from corporeal elements such as land, capital, machinery, and energy. Corporeal resources possess the characteristics of wear-and-tear through use, exclusivity, scarcity, and diminishing value through sharing. Data, however, possesses ease of reproducibility (it can be copied rapidly at near-zero cost) and non-exclusivity of use (it can be used by countless people simultaneously and repeated infinitely); it is thus inexhaustible and non-scarce. Importantly, data possesses the property of value-added through sharing. While sharing a physical object leads to a reduction in its use-value, data sharing not only prevents a reduction in use-value but actually increases it. The value of data lies not in possession, but in use. As Viktor Mayer-Schönberger pointed out in Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, the key to data's value is its seemingly infinite reuse... the value of data lies in its use, not in its possession per se. People acquire data to use it and create value, not to possess it; mere possession without use renders data meaningless. The more data is shared and used, the more valuable it becomes and the greater value it can create. At the same time, blockchain networks based on digital-intelligent systems construct network coordination mechanisms, trust mechanisms backed by technology, and data rights-confirmation mechanisms. These track data flow and protect data privacy, creating conditions for an open, decentralized, and credible environment for data exchange and sharing. Thus, people can exchange and share the use-value of data without exchanging ownership, laying the technical foundation for the universal social exchange, sharing, utilization, and valuation of data resources.
Precisely because data-as-information differs from physical things, data ownership and property rights (right in rem) are concepts of a different nature. The validity of property rights is built on the foundations of resource finitude, exclusivity of use, and diminishing value through sharing. Data, characterized by ease of reproduction, non-exclusivity of use, and value-added through sharing, cannot be understood through the logic of property rights. People purchase physical products to obtain ownership; however, once digital products created on the Internet form data and are published to generate returns, they spread across the entire network and become social resources held in common. Therefore, people are usually willing to pay for digital products not because of ownership, but because their unique creativity and personality can fully satisfy emotional needs and spiritual pursuits. Consequently, once data from a digital product has been released, it becomes very difficult to charge consumers again. Thus, while the legal significance of digital product copyright remains substantial, its economic significance is dwindling day by day.
In the current era, among the constituent elements of the means of production, data is the core and critical factor; corporeal elements like land, capital, machinery, and energy cannot effectively realize their value without the reinforcement of data. Therefore, with the continuous development of digital-intelligent technology, the value-adding sharing and non-scarcity of data resources mean that private ownership of the means of production will inevitably lose its traditional importance. However, under capitalist conditions, the logic of capital and its profit-seeking nature drive capitalists to use every possible means to strengthen their monopoly and control over digital products and data resources, attempting to reap massive profits from a single investment. They exert every effort to restrict and obstruct the universal social exchange, sharing, and use of digital products and data resources, which violates the objective requirements for the development of the new productive forces dominated by digital-intelligent technology. In fact, capitalists are also unable to withstand the tide of value-added data sharing. Socialism takes the standpoint of the masses; it strives by all means to promote the social sharing, common use, joint construction, and joint management of data resources. On the premise of ensuring security, it provides public data to the whole of society in accordance with laws and regulations. Through measures such as including data assets in financial statements, it stimulates the activity of the data trading market and promotes the deep development and utilization of data by enterprises. The institutional design and value pursuit of socialist public ownership—the common possession of the means of production by the whole of society and their "common utilization by all for the benefit of all"—are mutually adapted to, complementary to, and mutually reinforcing with the development of the new productive forces dominated by digital-intelligent technology.
2. Transformation of Labor Forms: Digital Content Production Using Data as Raw Material Drives Cultural Production to Become a New Economic Engine
In the current era, supported by a digital-intelligent technological system, AI assists the human brain in processing information and greatly liberates mental labor, thereby driving digital content production to become a new field of production and allowing spiritual-cultural production to reach unprecedented breadth and depth.
Digital content production refers to the process where creators, based on Internet platforms and massive data resources and utilizing AI models and digital content creation tools, produce digital products with creative and innovative content. People permeate scenes of actual production and life with their emotions, intellect, and knowledge, recording them through text, video, images, and audio to form digital content products and generate economic benefits.
Although data exists in various forms—text, video, image, audio—its essence is digitized information, belonging to the category of thoughts and ideas. Therefore, it can be copied, edited, ideationally reorganized, and recreated. Thus, the essence of people using data resources for digital content production is spiritual-cultural production. On one hand, supported by the digital-intelligent technological system, the Internet provides people with infinitely rich data resources for digital content production; as long as one is connected to the network, anyone can access them. At the same time, it provides a platform that transcends time, space, and trust for digital content production. "The word 'platform' has effectively become a collective term for all online spaces in an era, spaces that support the work of all creators today." The Internet is not only a means or channel for people to obtain data resources and interact with one another, but also a space for users to engage in content creation and collaborative innovation, as well as a platform for people to obtain services and satisfy needs; it is thus the field for the production, sharing, promotion, management, and operation of digital content and products. On the other hand, people increasingly rely on various professional digital content production tools or services to complete their creations. Regarding content creativity, AI—particularly the "generative AI" that has become a sensation in recent years—is increasingly demonstrating its powerful functions. It can generate multi-modal content according to human needs and can efficiently perform modal conversions between text, code, video, and audio. It thus proposes new solutions, schemas, or content that do not exist in the physical world to solve human problems, providing infinitely rich materials, conditions, or tools for the human brain's ideational construction and, by extension, for spiritual-cultural production. Regarding content production, Internet content production technologies or tools—such as computer vision, multimedia processing, increasingly sophisticated audio and video editing tools, image enhancement and graphic design tools, and innovative materials like frames, stickers, templates, and special effects—help people process digital content works to make them more distinctive. Professional digital content production tools or services render the generation of digital content more automated and efficient. Crucially, they significantly lower the professional threshold for digital content creation, enabling every ordinary citizen who can use a mobile phone or computer to access the Internet to engage in digital content production and cultural creation.
The primary characteristics of digital cultural production are manifested as follows: First, the subject of creation has become mass-based. As long as one is online, everyone can access massive amounts of data and digital content creation tools via the Internet. Consequently, the threshold for digital cultural production is low, and every individual can become a subject of content creation and cultural production. Second, the content of digital cultural production is infinitely rich and can be integrated with all spheres of human production and life. People can film and record all scenarios of daily production, work, study, shopping, and cooking to form digital products. Third, digital content production fully demonstrates cultural innovation and individuality. Any conceptual construction or cultural production activity is a process of using the creator's individual imaginative thinking power to transform conceptual forms in the mind, creating ideal existences such as new content, new schemes, and new schemas that do not exist in reality. With the help of digital productive forces acquired instantaneously on the Internet, the innovation and individuality of digital cultural production are exerted on an unprecedented scale. In particular, the objectification [12] of the creator's total emotions—such as their sense of aesthetics and morality—allows digital products to fully satisfy people's emotional needs and spiritual pursuits. These characteristics determine the current trend toward the fusion and integration of cultural production and material production—that is, the "culturalization" of material production. Digital cultural production is not a separate realm detached from material production; rather, it is directly integrated with it. People incorporate unique, emotional, and novel ideas into material production, so that "culturalized" material products satisfy functional needs while simultaneously meeting emotional needs and spiritual pursuits, such as entertainment and aesthetics, thereby opening up broader markets. Consequently, digital cultural production promotes cross-border fusion and the interdisciplinary integration of various fields, forming infinitely rich and ever-changing new industries, new business forms, and new models, thus becoming a new engine for contemporary socio-economic development.
The characteristics of digital cultural production dictate that the key to contemporary cultural production lies in the creator's unique creativity, individuality, and emotional objectification; therefore, it is suited to flexible, personalized, small-scale, and distributed production models. The capitalist models of centralization, mass production, and wage labor were formed to adapt to traditional technology and productive forces and are suitable for traditional material production. While this model facilitates capitalists in extracting exorbitant profits, it comes at the cost of product diversity; products lack individuality and the objectification of the laborer's emotions, failing to meet people's multifaceted needs. Consequently, the logic of capital-hired labor and the logic of valorization [13] are ill-suited for digital cultural production and are increasingly incompatible with the trends and requirements of the culturalization of material production. In contrast, the purpose of socialist production is to meet the people's ever-growing needs for a better life. The socialist state focuses on the increasing enrichment of the people's cultural life and the universal elevation of their spiritual realm. It exerts every effort to guide and promote innovation, emphasizing that "innovation is the primary driving force leading development. To grasp innovation is to grasp development; to seek innovation is to seek the future," and that "we must allow innovation to become the new engine driving development." [14] Therefore, the socialist state actively guides mass entrepreneurship and innovation, supports the development of small and micro-enterprises, opens new pathways for convenient entrepreneurship and flexible employment, creates a new environment for distributed production, and establishes institutional mechanisms adapted to digital cultural production to lead industrial and material production transformations through digital cultural production. It is precisely this cultural environment, formed by socialist value pursuits and the logic of innovation, that has allowed indigenous Chinese enterprises to emerge through deep exploration, breaking the traditional logic of scale expansion through algorithmic innovation and deconstructing the exploitative capacity of capitalist enterprises like NVIDIA and OpenAI, which rely on chip and computing power hegemony and closed-source strategies.
3. Transformation of Organizational Forms: Division of Labor, Collaboration, and the Socialization of Labor Based on the Internet Reach Unprecedented Breadth and Depth
The close coordination of division of labor and the deepening socialization of labor are inevitable requirements and trends in the development of human production. Marx emphasized that the division of labor and collaboration are productive forces: "The division of labor simplifies labor, makes it easier to learn, and thus reduces the total cost of the capacity for productive labor"; "the basic premise of the division of labor, like the basic premise of the expansion of capital, is collaboration," and collaboration "creates a productive force which is, in its essence, a collective force." While the division of labor becomes more granular, collaboration must simultaneously deepen, thereby promoting the in-depth development of the socialization of labor. "Labor itself is organized as social labor through collaboration, the division of labor, and the combination of labor with the natural sciences." Socialized labor is collective labor linked by people's mutual division of labor and collaboration. The continuous deepening of the socialization of labor is an inevitable trend realized by human labor alongside the development of productive forces and scientific and technological progress.
In the current era, labor is combined with the system of digital intelligent technology. On the one hand, in the field of digital cultural production which leads contemporary socio-economic development, the means of mental production—namely, the massive data resources and digital content production tools on the Internet—possess universal sharing and sociality. Everyone can easily obtain them; the laborer is directly combined with the means of mental production, engaging in cultural production based on Internet platforms. The laborer's new ideas and the production process of digital products are socialized production realized universally through the help of others' labor achievements. Once ownership of data and digital content products is realized through forms such as Tokens (tokens/certificates) or NFTs (non-fungible tokens), they can reach consumers directly through Internet platforms; thus, individual labor directly becomes social labor without taking a circuitous route. Therefore, the socialization of labor in digital cultural production has reached unprecedented heights and depths, greatly improving efficiency. On the other hand, the Internet, supported by the digital intelligent technology system, increasingly links all elements, links, and processes of socialized production directly, removing all unnecessary intermediary links. it constructs an unprecedented large-scale platform for division of labor and collaboration, directly connecting the sphere of production with the sphere of consumption, continuously reducing commercial intermediaries, promoting the integration of production and consumption, and facilitating the realization of planned production based on sales. At the same time, the intelligent Internet based on blockchain architecture not only connects various links and elements within enterprises and organizations instantaneously, but also connects various fields, industries, and enterprises in society, as well as countries and regions globally. This allows innovation chains, industrial chains, and value chains to integrate and converge via Internet platforms, enabling instantaneous division of labor and collaboration across time, space, and trust, pushing global economic integration and the socialization of production to unprecedented new heights.
Capitalist private ownership creates a fragmentation of interests among people, placing them in a state of separation, opposition, and universal competition. Interaction and the division of labor and collaboration between people rely on commodities and money as intermediaries, manifesting as "atomic" connections characterized by superficiality, externality, and fragmentation. This form of social production organization, formed under traditional technical conditions, is becoming an internal constraint on the deep socialization of labor and the high degree of collaboration realized by the combination of labor and digital intelligent technology in today's digital age. For their own selfish interests, Western capitalist countries persist in the logic of hegemony and a Cold War mentality, adhering to traditional mindsets regarding physical property rights. In this era of the new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation dominated by digital intelligent technology—an era of deep globalization and integration of the world economy—they act against globalization, vigorously pursue unilateralism, promote "decoupling and breaking chains," and adopt various forms of protectionism, hindering the process of global integration. Conversely, the socialist state actively advocates for and promotes co-construction and sharing among all countries, advancing the deep development of division of labor, collaboration, and the socialization of labor based on digital intelligent technology. It promotes the building of a community with a shared future for humanity, maintaining that "all countries should deepen pragmatic cooperation, taking shared progress as the driving force and win-win results as the goal, walking a path of mutual trust and common governance," and "strengthening communication, expanding consensus, and deepening cooperation to jointly build a community with a shared future in cyberspace." Socialist China actively promotes the building of a community with a shared future for humanity by advocating and constructing the "Belt and Road."
Marx pointed out that in the future society, we should "imagine... an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of individual labor-power in full self-awareness as one single social labor-power. All the characteristics of Robinson’s [Crusoe] labor are here repeated, but with this difference, that they are social, instead of individual." In the future society, under the condition that the means of production are commonly owned and used by the whole society, the degree of closeness in the division of labor and collaboration among people will be like "one single social labor-power." This was difficult to imagine under traditional technical conditions, but in the current era, the digital intelligent technology system is creating unprecedented possibilities and conditions for the organizational synergy of "one single social labor-power" and the deep development of the socialization of labor. Socialism, adapting to the objective requirements of the new round of technological revolution and the development of productive forces dominated by digital intelligent technology, will inevitably reshape human civilization in a fair and reasonable manner.
(Author's Affiliation: Institute of Marxism Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) Source: Marxism Studies (《马克思主义研究》), Issue 4, 2025 Web Editor: Paul