Marsham Street, last month. Socialist Worker placards stacked three deep: SHUT DOWN A.I. DATA CENTRES. Underneath, in smaller type, the subhead did more work than the headline: water, energy and land for public need, not corporate greed. A street sign behind the crowd confirmed, unnecessarily, where everyone already knew they were.
Four words are carrying the whole argument here. It’s worth asking what kind of argument four words can carry.
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Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? lacks a chapter on placards, but the categories he and the Bolsheviks left behind are more exacting than anything in the current AI debate.
A slogan spreads one idea to many people at once.
A demand is extracted from somebody (an employer, a landlord, a government) and names who is meant to concede it.
A measure belongs to a government programme, something a workers’ administration would actually implement.
A plank sits inside a platform: a union caucus, a students’ union candidacy.
“Shut Down A.I. Data Centres” borrows the grammar of a demand without doing a demand’s job. It doesn’t say who is meant to do the shutting, on what timescale, under what pressure, won by whom.
In an article on ecosocialist.scot last month, I outlined how republican socialists in Scotland could put the four categories to work on this dispute directly.
The demand already has a name and a paper trail: a moratorium on new grid connections for speculative AI infrastructure, which the Scottish Greens tried to force at First Minister’s Questions before summer recess and which the SNP’s own National Council has since backed, addressed to Ofgem, the network operators and the Scottish government, with a decision date attached.
Behind it sits a harder measure: a national compute utility, publicly owned campuses sited on the curtailed wind capacity further north that Scotland already pays generators to switch off, putting stranded power to public use instead of handing a stranded grid connection to whichever hyperscaler or landowner gets there first.
Move the data, not the energy is a slogan that follows from both, short enough for a placard but only honest once the demand and the measure behind it exist.
And the plank: the moratorium and the public compute utility, written into a Green, left or independent candidacy in any council currently sitting on a live data-centre planning application. The fifteen-odd local campaigns already have a map of every proposal in the country; the platform is still to be built.
The obvious reply is that placards aren’t policy papers, that four words are supposed to be blunt. That’s not quite right either. The blunter the slogan, the more precision it needs standing behind it, because a slogan is supposed to be deduced from the concrete situation in front of you, not substituted for the work of analysing it.
What the SWP’s subhead attempts is the job the headline dodges. Water, energy and land for public need, not corporate greed is not a demand but a measure wearing a demand’s clothes. There’s no campaign named that would win it, no borough, mayor or government specified that should be committed to implementing it, nobody it’s addressed to. It states a value. It doesn’t yet organise anyone around extracting anything from anybody.
This is where the united front question bites. A united front is built on demands precise enough that people who agree on almost nothing else can act on them together: a council worker worried about her pension fund’s data-centre exposure, an angler watching a chalk stream drop, a nurse who has just discovered her trust’s new imaging contract runs on a cloud she’s never heard of. None of them needs to share a theory of capitalism to sign a petition against a specific water abstraction licence. All of them would need considerably more persuading to sign up for shutting the whole sector down, sight unseen, water bill and radiology queue included. The distinction between the issue you’re raising and the social group you’re raising it among, worked out first by Bensaïd and Scalabrino for a very different movement, still holds: a demand has to be deduced from who you’re actually talking to as much as from what you believe.
And that’s worth sitting with for a moment, because “shut down” doesn’t distinguish. The Larbert site earmarked for a data centre sits within 400 metres of Forth Valley Royal, an 860-bed hospital, and within 50 metres of a hospice, ringed by the 200 diesel backup generators the local campaign is right to object to. Does the working class gain nothing, though, from whatever compute keeps that hospital’s own diagnostic queue moving? The placard doesn’t ask. It can’t; there’s no room in four words for the distinction between data centres speculating on hype-cycle valuations and the compute an NHS trust actually depends on, and collapsing the two into one enemy is exactly the kind of ultra-left moralism this framework was built to catch. Or would be, if anyone on that demo had stopped long enough to draw the line.
The moratorium is winnable because it only has to say no, and no is where fifteen local campaigns and the 22,000 signatories against the Duke of Roxburghe’s own £2 billion scheme already agree. The compute utility is harder: it has to say what compute is for, who owns it, and where the money currently heading toward a hyperscaler or a duke’s fifty-thousand-acre estate would go instead. Public ownership of the hardware solves nothing by itself. Whoever still licenses the model, the training data and the chip design keeps the real leverage, which is more or less what happened to Harold Wilson’s National Computing Centre once computing stopped being scarce and the state, having built it, sold the commercial end into what is now a cybersecurity firm on the FTSE 250.
None of this is an argument for fewer slogans, or vaguer ones. It’s the opposite. A slogan that does its job, diffusing one precise idea, deduced from where the relationship of forces actually sits, to people who haven’t yet worked through the argument themselves, is harder to write than a chant, not easier. It has to survive the nurse’s question. Soundbites don’t advance anyone’s consciousness; they just travel. A slogan that’s done the analytical work first can do both. Slogans have to be written after demands, for two reasons.
First, slogans communicate one idea to many people because they want to agitate: to stimulate action. Agitation has to be for actions and demands around which we can build unity. If something doesn’t do that, it’s either raising a demand around which we can’t build unity (e.g. it may be arcane, sectarian or ultra-left) or it’s not raising a demand (e.g. it’s a soundbite, not a slogan).
Second, what matters in politics is what you are for, not what you are against. Of course you can be for stopping something, but either concretely (you raise demands that counter it) or shapelessly, by deploring something. Sadly, opposition alone is easily co-opted. We saw this when Steve Bannon and a crowd of the US far right signed the Eko statement against data centres.
We should be putting more effort into slogans, not less. The alternative is a placard that says everything and asks nothing.
Next week: the same test on a harder case. Seven dockworkers’ federations have called an international day of action for 30 October, and one of their six points is a flat NO to automation. Is that a slogan with nothing behind it, or something the test has missed?
Join the discussion on 12 November
Message register at bit.ly/NoMoreDataCentres to watch the public meeting online, or join us in person.
