Left Transhumanism
A conversation with Luis Arroyo
Our guest on Technoprogressive Hub is Luis Arroyo, moderator of the Left Transhumanism group on Facebook, member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and vice chairman of the New York Transhumanist Party. We discuss his political evolution from the Right to the radical Left, and his analysis of the politics of transhumanism today.
Links
Left Transhumanism group on Facebook
Proletarian Outlook on Substack
“The Origins of Transhumanism” by Luis Arroyo
“Left Transhumanism and Luxury Communism” RU Sirius interviews Luis Arroyo
“The Issue of Food” by Luis Arroyo
“The Red Past of Transhumanism” by Luis Arroyo
Transcript
I. The God Problem
JJH: How did you come to be interested in transhumanism?
LA: It all started with religion. I was a Jehovah’s Witness when I was younger. A man came to the house giving Bible studies and said: we’ll never have to face death. We’ll live healthy and perfect. He thought Armageddon was coming relatively soon. Ever since then I couldn’t get the notion of not dying out of my mind. That led me into a rabbit hole, longevity advocates, people like Bryan Johnson, the broader longevity community. And from there I found the transhumanist world, and was very surprised to discover there was a political organization around these ideas. I thought: I have to be involved in that.
JJH: So longevity was the gateway. Did that push you in a political direction—thinking about who gets access to these technologies?
LA: Essentially, yes. Once this stuff becomes available, who’s going to get it? That question is inescapable. And it led me to worry about what happens when technological advancement outruns the state’s capacity to distribute its benefits.
JJH: When did you get political, in the formal sense?
LA: My first politics were right-wing. This was 2016, American exceptionalism, a bit of manosphere. I’m Puerto Rican, born in New York, and there was something like an assimilationist logic to it: “we’re all American, right?” I didn’t see myself as the target. A lot of Hispanic people who drift right do that, they put rose colored glasses on. After Trump got elected I moved further right for a while, then I remember the far right kept saying ‘cultural Marxism, Marxism controls the universities.’ Eventually, I thought: I should actually read this. And it won me over.
JJH: You went so far right that the right’s own propaganda led you back to Marx. That’s almost elegant.
LA: It happened in pieces. First it was economics. A lot of far-right people keep the capitalist framework but want an authoritarian state. What finally shifted me was automation. What happens if all the jobs disappear? The far right had no answer, only ‘hold the place of the human worker for the sake of tradition.’ I stumbled across Huey P. Newton writing about technological unemployment, and it went deeper from there. The left had been asking these questions for a long time.
II. Socialism, Vanguards, and the Gen Z Exception
JJH: You’re now a member of DSA. I’ve been a DSA member since the founding convention in 1982. One of the things that’s happened inside DSA is the growth of explicitly Marxist-Leninist caucuses. Does that tradition appeal to you?
LA: In a sense, yes, particularly vanguardism. In an American context, most people live their lives without much sustained political engagement. Reading levels are low, media literacy is low. The idea that a committed layer of better-educated political activists can lead the broader movement makes a certain kind of sense here. It’s not my whole worldview, but I understand its appeal.
JJH: I’ve made a version of that argument myself. Democratic socialism often founders on the fact that most people want to delegate political decisions rather than participate directly. The problem is that the people doing the delegating, union bureaucrats, party officials, haven’t gone through any political education to make them accountable. Leninism at least tries to formalize that.
LA: Exactly. You can’t pretend that’s not happening. The question is whether you’re honest about it and whether there’s accountability. What gives me some optimism is Gen Z. DSA in New York has been filling weeks with events, local meetings, educational programs, social housing campaigns, organizing against the Big Beautiful Bill. Young people are showing up in ways that go well beyond showing up every election cycle. That’s different.
JJH: The Mamdani win in New York, DSA has grown 20,000 members since then, does seem to be proof that electoral success energizes a movement.
LA: It’s been a huge boon. And Mamdani has captured headlines and done real local work. DSA is probably the biggest socialist organization in the U.S. right now. That matters.
III. The Transhumanist Party
JJH: How did you end up in the Transhumanist Party? That’s not the usual next stop after DSA.
LA: I got into the economics of it first, the automation question, and started attending meetings run by some of the party leadership in 2019, 2020. I became vice chairman of the New York chapter around 2022 or 2023. Originally I thought I was just carving out a small leftist space in a mostly libertarian party. But there were already some techno-progressives and social liberals there. When we started showing that a different kind of transhumanist politics was possible, more people to us.
JJH: When I was secretary general of the World Transhumanist Association, I ran membership surveys. The libertarians were only about 20 percent globally. The far right was one or two percent. About 40 percent were left-wing in various senses, from European social democrats to Marxist-Leninists. Things have changed significantly since then, partly because of the entrance of billionaire money into the movement.
LA: The billionaires have shaped the perception enormously. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Bryan Johnson, etc. Its so normalized the Transhumanist Party has even hosted the chief marketing officer of Prospera on their YouTube lives. There are connections even to Javier Milei. When leftists look at the surface of the transhumanist scene and party, they see tech billionaires and right-wing presidents and libertarian connections in addition to things like seasteading, and they walk away. That’s the problem I’m trying to address from the inside.
JJH: I remember when Peter Thiel’s money started flowing into the WTA, people began talking about seasteading. And I thought: wait, we want longevity innovations to be things everyone can access, not just people who fly to an offshore island with unregulated medicine.
LA: That instinct is still very popular in the movement. But a good number of us don’t support it. The fantasy of exit—just build your own society, is fundamentally incompatible with a left politics of universality. You can’t opt out of collective responsibility for the future.
JJH: Has your argument been gaining traction inside the party?
LA: More regular members are now making the argument for a left posture; that’s a positive sign. The liberals and progressive wing are sympathetic. The libertarian leadership is a bit difficult but never impossible; there is overlap. But things are nonetheless moving leftward it seems.
V. Gender, Race, and Morphological Freedom
JJH: The far right’s global assault on trans rights, feminism, and LGBT visibility has clarified something for me. I’ve always been a socialist feminist, dual systems theory, where the sex-gender system and patriarchy have equal weight alongside class analysis. Most transhumanists have been cis het men, and most have shown surprisingly little interest in trans politics as a legitimate expression of bodily autonomy. Does that strike you as strange?
LA: Members of the Transhumanist Party itself have noted that the movement used to be more diverse, more trans people, more people of color, etc. There’s been a type of narrowing. It’s mostly “Cishet white men” frankly. And that appears to, at times, bring people who are against the idea of certain morphological freedoms. The idea that people should be able to modify their bodies and identities as they choose is fundamentally connected to ‘trans liberation’. You can’t have one without the other.
JJH: In left transhumanism, are you making that connection explicitly?
LA: We try to incorporate the notion of technology in the broader expansion of morphological freedom. Technology isn’t neutral; it can enforce gender binaries or explode them. Transhumanists should be on the side of explosion. The fact that many aren’t is a political failure. We’re attempting to correct it.
JJH: My version of this: I’ve always been suspicious of socialist frameworks that say class will solve everything and gender and race are secondary contradictions. A Marxist analysis that doesn’t grapple independently with patriarchy and white supremacy is just incomplete.
LA: I differ from a lot of fellow leftists on this maybe. Even if you call yourself a Marxist, Marxist economics alone won’t solve gender-based violence, won’t dissolve racism. There are more hardline ML types who say “these issues will be easier to address under socialism” however, I don’t see that as justification for not prioritizing them now.
VI. Party Politics and the Brick Wall
JJH: The Harringtonite tradition in DSA, which I was part of in the 80s, believed in the realignment of the Democratic Party, liberating the social democracy trapped inside it. That became unpopular after the Bernicrat explosion. But the Transhumanist Party’s limits are real too. Do you see it as a genuine third-party formation or more as a pre-political educational project?
LA: Both. It endorses candidates, runs some ballot operations, has coalition work with the Pirate Party who has won seats in Iceland and a few other places. But the ballot access requirements in the U.S. are enormously high, even in New York. It’s trying to be a real party, but the terrain is brutal. What gives me hope is that hostility to the Democratic Party among left Gen Zers is intense enough that third-party openings exist in a way they haven’t before. AOC, Bernie, Mamdani; those figures are what keeps the Democrats’ head above water with young people.
JJH: Bernie’s recent tilt against AI data centers worries me. He’s been touring with Geoffrey Hinton, who is a genuine AI safety voice and calls himself a socialist, but Bernie is reflecting a Luddite current on the left that I’m not comfortable with. I’m not opposed to AI, I want it regulated, I’m worried about risks—but opposing data centers wholesale is a different thing.
LA: The left and the far right are both anti-data center right now, but for entirely different reasons. For the right, it’s culture war and NIMBY. For the left, it’s environmental harm, water usage, displacement of communities, and the sense that AI is being built by and for the billionaire class. That last part is most legitimate to me. But it leads to throwing out the technology along with the ownership model. If AI data centers were being built in a democratically accountable way with environmental standards, community compensation, public ownership of benefits the reception on the left may be different. We don’t have that model yet. China at least tries something like it, though with obvious authoritarian baggage.
JJH: I’m nervous about the China enthusiasm among some left transhumanists. I understand that young people see a competent state providing universal services, something like fully automated luxury communism in aspiration. But China itself is not a place most American leftists would want to live.
LA: I understand the nervousness. Living in the U.S. under Trump, watching our own authoritarian drift does desensitize you somewhat to authoritarian governance elsewhere.
JJH: But it doesn’t make it right. Xi has used the party’s authoritarian power before like with Jack Ma being the obvious case. That’s different from democratic accountability. If Joe Biden had been able to discipline Peter Thiel and Elon Musk the way Xi disciplined Jack Ma, I think we’d be in a better place. But the answer isn’t to import Xi’s methods. Xi isn’t democratic even within the CCP; he’s taken out all his rivals. The answer is democratic accountability for capital. And ironically, Trump is using Xi-style personalist power against his own enemies now—your merger doesn’t get approved unless you bend the knee.
LA: Exactly. That’s what we’re fighting against in the socialist context. Not the idea that capital should be subordinate to collective will—we’re for that. But that it should be subordinate to one man’s will. The distinction matters enormously.
Luis Arroyo is the founder of the Left Transhumanism group on Facebook and vice chairman of the New York Transhumanist Party. You can find Left Transhumanism on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Discord.
James J. Hughes is executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and host of the Technoprogressive Hub podcast. Find the Hub at Substack: technoprogressives.substack.com
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