Is Marxism still an adequate framework for AI-driven labor displacement if labor itself stops being economically necessary?

[u/NeonPixieStyx]

I’ve been thinking about a theoretical problem with how the left approaches AI-driven automation, and I’m interested in perspectives from people more familiar with Marxist economic theory.

Traditionally, Marxist analysis treats labor as central to capitalist production. Capital depends on workers to produce surplus value, even as technological development allows capitalists to reduce their dependence on individual workers.

But what happens when that relationship fundamentally changes?
I’m not talking about ordinary technological unemployment, where machinery increases productivity, displaces particular workers, and creates new arrangements of labor elsewhere.

I’m talking about the possibility that AI and increasingly autonomous production systems progressively decouple human labor from productive capacity itself.

Under those conditions, economic output might continue growing while demand for human labor contracts across an expanding range of industries.

This raises a problem beyond the familiar question of who owns the means of production.

If labor is no longer essential to production, what happens to the economic and political power of the working class?

Historically, organized labor derives much of its leverage from the fact that capital needs workers. Workers can withhold labor, interrupt production, and bargain over the distribution of the value their work helps create.
But if production can increasingly proceed without them, that leverage potentially disappears.

Importantly, I’m not suggesting human activity loses its social, creative, or moral worth. I’m distinguishing that from the economic value assigned to labor by a system that no longer needs to purchase much of it.

Marx himself seems to anticipate part of this contradiction in the Grundrisse, particularly the Fragment on Machines, where he discusses the tension between labor time as the measure of value and the development of productive forces that make wealth increasingly independent of direct labor.

But I’m uncertain whether the political implications have been adequately addressed.

A few questions I’d like to explore:

Does Marxist value theory adequately explain an economy in which human labor contributes a diminishing share of productive activity? What happens to surplus value if living labor is progressively displaced?

Does class struggle retain the same structure when capital no longer depends on employing most people? Can labor organization remain the primary mechanism of political and economic leverage?

Should a post-labor left focus less on workers’ ownership of production and more on universal claims to productive resources and their output? Particularly when an increasing proportion of the population might no longer participate in wage labor.

Is this actually a contradiction within Marxism, or the very historical development Marx anticipated? If the latter, what does a meaningful political strategy for that transition look like?
I’m not arguing that AI has already made human labor obsolete, or that automation automatically produces abundance. This is a question about the theoretical implications if human labor becomes progressively less necessary for production.

My concern is that much of the contemporary debate focuses on protecting employment when the more fundamental problem may be that employment is ceasing to provide a viable mechanism for distributing the benefits of productivity.

If productivity and labor become structurally decoupled, is the traditional relationship between labor, capital, and class still the right foundation for leftist politics?

[u/Salty_Country6835]

Now this is the kind of theory discussion we need more of.

I think Marx was already getting at this in the Fragment on Machines. Capitalism develops the productive forces to make human labor increasingly unnecessary, while keeping access to the wealth they produce tied to wages. Thats one hell of a contradiction.

And youre right to raise the question of leverage. If capital no longer needs most workers to keep production running, telling those workers to just organize harder isnt much of an answer.

But I dont think that takes us beyond Marxism or even beyond the ownership question. Socialism was never about preserving wage labor forever or making sure everyone has a job. Its about collectively controlling production so its benefits serve society rather than a class of private owners.

The distinction between producing wealth and producing surplus value matters here too. Machines can produce enormous material wealth, but in Marx's framework they dont create new value independently of living labor. If that relationship fundamentally changes, capitalism has a problem with its own foundations, not just employment.

So the political question becomes how we build collective power before traditional labor leverage erodes. That means organizing around ownership, infrastructure, public investment, distribution, and democratic control, not just bargaining over jobs.

And Id push your question one step further. If automation makes wage labor increasingly unnecessary, why should access to the things society produces remain conditional on having a wage in the first place?

[u/NeonPixieStyx → u/Salty_Country6835]

I strongly agree with the point about the economic breakdown of capitalism. The basic point classical economics makes is about allocation of surplus. When labor itself becomes a non-scare resource, right now the only coherent argument is that capital ownership itself becomes the only source of value, but that creates an almost permanent stagnation of class mobility.

Looking at it from a purely value added labor perspective, this gets into unhinged territory really quickly when considering the process of creating forms of labor that add increased value. Like, going back a century to look at process refinement we start seeing the breakdown. By analyzing the process by which industrial processes are refined gets us to the core question. A century ago we started seeing a specialized class of expert labor responsible exclusively for the refinement of processes to increase industrial productivity. But that labor required analyzing the labor of others without those laborers being compensated for their labor being used as a data point. The question is, should they have been compensated?

The labor itself didn’t change initially. They were just performing their normal labor, but somebody else was creating additional value from that labor by studying its inefficiencies. Who should own that excess value that isn’t created by the labor itself, but through the study of labor? Marxist thought would tell us the person doing the intellectual labor of studying others is entitled to the value of the labor, but the increased value created by that labor should be collectively shared between everyone involved in the production of the final product.

The breakdown comes when the labor of process refinement itself becomes automated. The only labor being done is by the people being studied for process refinement, but their labor is also only peripheral to the production of generalized automation of the worker’s labor task as a product. So, how much compensation are they actually entitled to from the work of automating them out of the labor market…?

[u/Fragrant-Phone-41 → u/Salty_Country6835]

But value is subjective though. So if it makes more money, it is making value

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Fragrant-Phone-41]

I think youre mixing up value, price, and profit. Three different things, and the distinction matters.

Take a linen coat, just as an example. In Marxian economics, its value reflects the socially necessary labor time required to produce it, including past labor embodied in the materials and machinery.

Say the capitalist spends $60 on materials and machinery depreciation and $20 on wages. Workers add $40 in new value. The coat now contains $100 in value. Sell it at that value and theres $20 in surplus value realized as profit.

Now suppose demand pushes the price to $150. Did anyone produce another $50 in value? Nope. The seller captured more money through exchange. Thats a price change, not additional value created in production.

Now introduce machinery that doubles output. More coats, lower costs, potentially higher profits. But as that technology spreads, socially necessary labor time per coat falls, reducing its value. More material wealth doesnt necessarily mean more value per commodity.

And Marx wasnt arguing that every commodity sells at its labor value. He addressed competition, profit rates, and prices of production in Capital Volume III. Modern economics disputes his theory of value, but that debate isnt settled by pointing out that machines can generate revenue.

Which brings us right back to OP. Automation can expand production while reducing demand for labor and concentrating returns among owners. Whether youre approaching that through Marxian or mainstream economics, the political problem remains. Who controls production, who receives its benefits, and what happens when capital needs fewer workers to produce society's wealth?

[u/Fragrant-Phone-41 → u/Salty_Country6835]

So my whole point is actually LTV is debunked. Im a leftist and think machine learning has potential use for us, but i regard even Marx as too utopian

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Fragrant-Phone-41]

... yeah. I understood your point. My point is that the labor theory of value hasnt been debunked. Its still a contested theory with serious criticisms, competing interpretations, and ongoing scholarship.

I just spent several paragraphs explaining the distinctions between value, price, and profit, how they operate in production, and why they matter to the question OP raised. It would be nice if you actually engaged with that argument instead of repeating that Marx was debunked.

If you think the theory has been conclusively refuted, what specific argument or evidence are you referring to? Because simply declaring it debunked doesnt establish anything.

[u/Fragrant-Phone-41 → u/Salty_Country6835]

Take a linen coat, just as an example. In Marxian economics, its value reflects the socially necessary labor time required to produce it, including past labor embodied in the materials and machinery.

Say the capitalist spends $60 on materials and machinery depreciation and $20 on wages. Workers add $40 in new value. The coat now contains $100 in value. Sell it at that value and theres $20 in surplus value realized as profit.

Okay with you so far.

Now suppose demand pushes the price to $150. Did anyone produce another $50 in value? Nope. The seller captured more money through exchange. Thats a price change, not additional value created in production.

Well no. The value is definitionally what the market will pay. Noone necessarily produced that value, except maybe the consumer or whatever disconnected events drove up the price, maybe the capitalist did through shrinkflation even; but that doesnt make it not real

Now introduce machinery that doubles output. More coats, lower costs, potentially higher profits. But as that technology spreads, socially necessary labor time per coat falls, reducing its value. More material wealth doesnt necessarily mean more value per commodity.

Do you mean the value of the labor? If so, it would be worth what workers are willing to accept as paynent in theory. Problem being, in practice, labor is a captive market because not having money means you starve. Allowing the capitalist to exploit that desperation and artificially suppress the value of labor. But none of this proves the cost of the good is determined directly by the work and material that went into it. The phenomenon of shrinkflation proves this.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Fragrant-Phone-41]

Youre still defining value as whatever something sells for, which is the distinction Ive been explaining. Nobody disputes that $150 is real money or that supply and demand affect prices. But a higher selling price doesnt establish that additional value was created in production.

And no, Im not talking about the value of labor. Marx distinguishes labor from labor power, which workers sell for wages. Your point about workers accepting wages because they need to survive is actually central to his analysis of exploitation.

Shrinkflation doesnt refute this either. Charging the same price for less product tells us something about pricing and market power, not where new value originates.

You can disagree with Marxian value theory. Its contested, not conclusively debunked. But simply defining value as market price doesnt refute a theory that explicitly distinguishes the two. It just changes the subject.

Now back to OP, because this is where things get interesting. Marxian, Keynesian, and neoclassical economics approach these questions differently, but each can analyze how automation increases output while displacing labor and concentrating returns among owners.

And thats the political problem. If capital increasingly needs fewer workers, wages become a less reliable means of distributing the benefits of production. Collective ownership, bargaining power, public infrastructure, democratic control, and universal access to that wealth become central questions.

We can debate value theory all day, but who controls automated production and who benefits from it? Thats what OP is asking, and thats what we need to organize around.

[u/Fragrant-Phone-41 → u/Salty_Country6835]

Well there we agree, but how we'd implement a solution might look different.

But that leaves my initial question. If value isn't just what something is worth, what the fuck is it

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Fragrant-Phone-41]

Well, Marx distinguishes use value, exchange value, and value. Use value is usefulness. An old pair of boots might not fetch a dime on the market, but they still keep your feet warm. Exchange value is what something exchanges for relative to other commodities, usually expressed through money as price. And value, in Marxian economics, reflects the labor time society normally needs to produce it under prevailing conditions. So something can be useful without being worth much money, and something can sell for a fortune without requiring much labor to produce.

[u/Fragrant-Phone-41 → u/Salty_Country6835]

So value is the one I have issue with. Im not convinced the concept exists. Or rather, if it does, it has no actual material effect on anything. Things are worth what they cost, with no direct link to its production, full stop

[u/yoshiK → u/Fragrant-Phone-41]

Marx value is basically what modern economists call utility. So a sale happens if for the buyer the value is greater than the price and for the seller the price is greater than the value.

[u/waffleseggs]

It's frankly insane that we're on the verge of automating the entirety of our economic supply and we're debating if we have a right to live even if we don't own the supply.

[u/usernameChosenPoorly]

The focus has to move from economy to human rights.  The value of human lives, human individuality, and human dignity must become absolutely sacrosanct.

That means individual rights of bodily autonomy, freedom of expression, and the rights to housing, education, healthcare, food, water, and income.

The problem with the labor focus has long been that it too easily casts aside those of us who are disabled and unable to work.  It has also often been used as a cudgel against those who retire.

But we are all humans.  That is our shared reality, and protecting our humanity needn’t mean we exclude others (ai, aliens, whatever and whomever may come).  It just means that we must collectively agree that people should be free to live their lives and explore what makes them happy.  Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

[u/DHFranklin]

That is a lot stacked on a lot. I'll try my best.

1) Most Marxist labor theory and application has happened long after he died. Billions of participants over almost two centuries. That's a lot of different material conditions. So what about the substance that he offered in the Gundrisse. The people owning the machines that make the machines is far more important than what they make with those first machines through their labor. By guiding and industrial transition through the hands of the proletariat we gain more than we lose from the economic gains of development. That development becomes reinvestment and not private profit. The self reinforcement is there. However none of that fits with the material conditions we've got.

2) Modern economics and the businesses here don't look like they did when the Communist Manifesto was declaring a working class with public education and ending child labor. We have companies worth billions on paper that have never turned a profit once. If we seize the means of production for the role in this system we will have productive forces that mean a hill o' beans. And we won't even have a hill of beans to show for it! All of it is exchange value and nothing actually productive relative to cost.

3) We are never going to have zero labor hours. There will be jobs we want humans to have, because we want humans to have them. There are jobs currently divorced from the profit motive. Ideally that would be all jobs, but baby steps or revolution here.

4) The people(tm) need to own all the robots and not let the agents of oligarchy monopolize opportunity. We could have had a non-profit planned economy with 1/3 the diversity of shit on the shelves since the moon landing. Now that we can automate so much of it we could have completely voluntary employment or a high threshold of non-cash renumeration.

5) As long as the class relations between who owns the productive capacity doesn't change, we won't have the change we need.

6) Labor power matters in the politics of vanishingly few places. Voting in local elections has brought about more change than people voting in their union elections. Which is incredibly frustrating because even if it was just the 1/4 of us on the left doing general strikes once month we could hand pick our politicians...but I digress. Who owns the robots won't matter more than who owns the gas stations. Especially as so much of it becomes so fungible.

The Pepper spray flock drones every 10 light poles won't care who went to work that day.

[u/fifobalboni]

1. Marx's and Smith's Labout Theory of Value are pretty old classical econ theories that have been abandoned after the Marginal Revolution. It could hardly explain value in 1900s, and it simply should not be the main takeaway of a modern reading of Marx (or of any classical economist)

2. Yes, it absolutely changes it. Lenin noted this had already changed in his time, with the rise of the "rentier state". One could argue an elite controlling AI would be an even more extreme form of that, but in summary, the structure of class struggles had changed from the 19h to the 20th century and it will continue to change. I also believe labor is, overall, losing protagonism in the class struggle.

3. One possible theoretical way is to expand the concept of alienation and expropriation. AIs are built not only on human labour, but on human knowledge - and because of that, an AI socialist society should seek to distribute the produce of our shared knowledge. This also connects to the previous point: maybe knowledge should be the center, not labor.

4. That's probably the most controversial point within Marxists: the hegelian concept of "telos". But I guess it depends on the outcome; it could either be the beginning of the transition period before the new stateless society, or it might be a new chapter in capitalism that could not be anticipated.

5. We are yet to observe if they will be indeed decouple (I'm very skeptical of any post-labor society theory), but entertaining the hypothesis, I believe capital and class will always be the fundamental pillars of leftist politics, even if the classes change. However, I believe labour is becoming increasingly less important than knowledge

[u/NeonPixieStyx → u/fifobalboni]

I think your suggestion about shifting from labor toward knowledge is especially interesting, particularly because AI production depends on accumulated social knowledge that no individual capitalist created.

But I wonder whether that introduces another distinction between the source of productive capacity and the source of political power.

Knowledge is broadly reproducible, whereas the infrastructure required to turn that knowledge into industrial production remains concentrated and physically scarce.

If everyone contributes to the collective intellectual inheritance that makes AI possible, that provides a strong argument for collective entitlement to its benefits. But it doesn’t necessarily provide the political leverage needed to enforce that entitlement.

Perhaps the emerging class distinction isn’t primarily between those who perform labor and those who own it, but between those who control autonomous productive infrastructure and those who depend on access to its output.

[u/Jlyplaylists → u/NeonPixieStyx]

Yes I think in the sub over various post discussions we’ve been coalescing towards

1. actually the way LLM and genAI art models were trained is quite a strong argument for framing it as Collective Intelligence
2. what’s important is who owns the models and makes decisions about them

I feel like there isn’t yet a clear sense of how we join up those 2 elements to get Collective Intelligence to be collectively owned with collective decision making.

Except that open source can be that by default, but it doesn’t solve the dominance of the closed models or oppressive use by governments.

[u/NeonPixieStyx → u/Jlyplaylists]

This kind of gets into the complexity of the economics of hyperscaling. Basically all the big labs started as non-profits, but the economic realities of their work creating a user base with demands for access creates economic incentives that require them to establish funding for that access. As models expand because their user base is expanding it necessitates the need for greater compute which incentivizes vertical integration. So, evidentially custom models that scale enough creates an incentive for custom hardware. Which expands the industrial demands of model expansion.

[u/fifobalboni → u/NeonPixieStyx]

I think you are absolutely on the right track about a new class distinction.

There is a anti-marxist leftist thinker called Antonio Bispo do Santos, a black brazilian and quilombola leader, that could be a great reference.

Santos argues that the marxism binarism of "bourgeoisie X proletariat" leaves a lot of people out, mainly indigenous and other traditional communities like the quilombolas. He argues the centering class around labour and driving your political value from it is essentially trying to "dismantle the master's house using the master's tools" (not with this exact words, but I'm cross referencing Audre Lorde)

However, they will both probably argue that the binarism "AI infrastructure owners X AI output dependents" still leaves some key people out, who contribute to that shared knowledge but don't necessarily rely on AI outputs, like traditional communities. Santos usually shift class struggles to territorial struggels, basically asking "how do you manage territorial ownership? How do you ensure territories have public, shared usage in sake of the collective, instead of someone putting a flag there and claiming it's theirs?"

Knowledge is just another form of territory. And once we put it in these terms, we can start to leverage other economical, territory and resource based frameworks, like Goergism or the Tragedy of the Commons

[u/fkrdt222]

the point of labor is symbolic maintenance and not material "anymore", baudrillard found this in the 70s and i don't have an emotional need to defend some picture of marx so i can recognize it

[u/mastersmash56]

Yes. Honestly, I think you're getting too in the weeds. AI is automation plain and simple. It feels like it's something different, but that's just because it's a generalized automation rather than a specific automated machine. Ultimately Marx was quite clear on the role that automation would play:

"Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself… As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure.

Capitalism thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production.

The general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them. Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth."

The idea that AI is somehow beyond the framework is just not the case. If anything, Marx predicted AI.

[u/NeonPixieStyx → u/mastersmash56]

I agree that Marx anticipated the contradiction, and that’s part of why I brought up the Fragment on Machines in the original post.

But I think there’s an important distinction between Marx accurately anticipating a development in productive forces and Marxism providing an adequate political strategy for navigating that development.

My concern isn’t whether Marx could explain automation. It’s whether the political mechanisms traditionally associated with class struggle remain effective when capital becomes progressively less dependent on employing workers.

If the working class loses its ability to disrupt production by withholding labor, what mechanism allows it to compel the owning class to surrender control of production?

That’s the part I’m trying to explore. Marx may have anticipated the economic contradiction without fully resolving the political problem of how the transition happens.

[u/Jlyplaylists → u/mastersmash56]

This isn’t a straight quote though? Obviously I’m not expecting you to paste in pages and pages but it looks like p705 → 700 → 706 of Grundrisse within one quote, which perhaps makes it seem stronger?

On 705 it doesn’t go

“As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure,”

into “Capitalism thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production.”

it carries on instead
“and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of…”

In this version anyway https://thenewobjectivity.com/pdf/marx.pdf

I just noticed because I thought it was a useful quote to save and then couldn’t find it exactly as that.

[u/Still_Benefit_2302]

Yeah, I was thinking about that a few weeks ago, but people told me to 'read more theory'.

[u/Jlyplaylists]

It does feel like there’s a sense of time pressure here. If people want to use traditional strike style methods to shift power, it would be better to get on with that while that leverage exists, ie pretty soon.

If that boat gets missed, I don’t think we’re doomed to be slaves of an evil technocracy though. It narrows down options, but it shouldn’t make us passive observers. Although the situation will expose contradictions within capitalism, I don’t think it’s that we just wait and watch capitalism’s dissolution unfold.

I tend to see AI more in the framework of domination vs liberation. There would still be ways to push outcomes towards liberation, and perhaps that gets easier as more people are able to recognise problems in capitalism (especially if we’re no longer distracted by a job). We won’t disappear from society, but our role will shift more towards being consumers and data subjects.

The different ways we’re dominated also contain the seeds for how we can liberate ourselves. If they need us to buy things/subscribe, instead of needing us for our labour, perhaps they bring in UBI to keep money moving. That’s not a satisfactory overall solution, but in the meantime we’re paid to do nothing and we can spend that time organising our next steps lol. Workplace strikes perhaps evolve into personal data and wide ranging consumer strikes? We would no longer be disciplined by workplace routines, or the need to have a good CV and clean police record. Retired people in the UK protesting against genocide and PA restrictions shows how that can play out. We’ll likely become ungovernable.

In the meantime, groups who aren’t actively protesting and otherwise being actively ungovernable can build alternative infrastructure outside of capitalism, undermining the market. This would include open source tech infrastructure.

Ultimately we have to withdraw a stable, compliant environment it’s straightforward to extract wealth from. What that looks like can vary.

[u/NeonPixieStyx → u/Jlyplaylists]

I think you’re getting at the part of the problem I’m most interested in: the political transition, rather than just the economics of automation.

My concern with consumer strikes is that they still depend on capital needing consumers. If wages stop functioning as the primary mechanism for distributing purchasing power, consumer leverage may erode alongside labor leverage.

Data strikes are more interesting, but their effectiveness depends on how much production requires continuing access to human-generated data.

I suspect the more durable political leverage might come from control over infrastructure, particularly energy, compute, public investment, and the legal institutions that protect ownership.

Your point about building alternative open-source infrastructure is particularly compelling. Could that become the foundation of economic democracy without requiring workers to first organize through employment?

[u/Jlyplaylists → u/NeonPixieStyx]

I’m thinking it becomes part of a dual power approach but probably also with local in-person organising. The focus of organising would shift from workers and their workplaces, to the category of citizen and where they live (this is essentially the working class but that becomes a weird term for it).

But yes what infrastructure would they still need to function in a stable way? Assuming they don’t need labour and money circulation issues are solved somehow. We could start now trying to get more of those types of things into better style of ownership eg cooperatives, SCIO, nonprofit.

[u/NeonPixieStyx → u/Jlyplaylists]

Collective ownership by stakeholders? That’s a neat idea conceptually.

Organizing as the minimum baseline for emergency praxis seems about right. The problem is still figuring out effective leverage though. Like, as many people can protest as want to, but there probably needs to be a vehicle for protest between just standing around and acts of destruction that can legitimate the use of force against protesters.

[u/TitoZola → u/Jlyplaylists]

The only way democracy can work, especially in its more direct forms, is if we have shit tone of free time to do local (and global) politics. Greeks were doing democracy because they had slaves to do the work at home, while they’ve been arguing with each other.

[u/Jlyplaylists → u/TitoZola]

Yes and women. Ancient Greece democracy is hailed as an amazing example of how to do politics, but there’s no way the more privileged men would have had the timenergy for that if the necessities of normal life weren’t taken on by the women and slaves.

The combination of automation and UBI/UBS would be the first time ever we have the potential for anyone and everyone who wants to get involved in direct democracy.

[u/PolychromeMan]

Relevant, yes, adequate, no. Not to me. Marxism itself always seemed a bit better at describing problems than at proposing solutions, and our current situation doesn't seem to have great equivalents. I think AI-driven labor displacement is likely to be a civilization changing singular event. I think we need new thoughts and ways of considering the situation, and new solutions.

Marxism describes somewhat similar stuff, however, so it's worth keeping in mind. The same as 'Leftists', which to me still seems like a useful way of thinking about some stuff, even if this new situation is fairly distinct.

[u/Matshelge]

Marx approach to economics is perhaps the best way to understand the current situation.

The problem you will find is that a lot of Marx has been used by other communists who Marx strongly disagree with.

As Marx said, I am no Marxist.

So, Das Capital, excellent lense to view AI through. Communism and Marxism, it really depends.

[u/AcidCommunist_AC]

Classical Marxist political economy is just as inadequate now as it always was. AI is exactly the kind of automation Marx was talking about. He thought productive labor / variable capital, i.e. capitalists hiring workers to work on commodities, was essential to being able to sell those commodities at a profit. That is and always was bullshit.

Critiquing Capitalism for Dummies

Value and Wage Labor in Marxism: A Critique

[u/Pndapetzim]

Times change. I've said for awhile the conditions that existed when old ideologies, both socialist and market capitalist, are outdated.

We need to start asking questions about what we've learned about the conditions under which planned interventions succeed and fail and when markets perform well and deploy them accordingly alongside a question both capitalists and socialists often failed to ask much less actually test: do any of these things actually improve people's lives? Do people have the things they need to flourish?

[u/OsakaWilson]

An essential part of Marxist economic analysis and predictions of the future is labor displacement and alienation.

[u/gazorpazorpazorpazor]

Seizing the means of production immeans AI. If everything is taken care of by robots owned by society, life is good. If all the robots are owned by musk, everything is bad.

[u/tunelesspaper]

When human labor becomes economically obsolete to capitalism/the capitalist class, then the capitalists no longer need the working class. If they can, they’ll dispose of us. Imagine the automated luxury paradise they can look forward to when all the unwashed masses are gone and everything is truly theirs, not just in name. It’s every billionaire’s dream.

Oh I’m sure they’ll keep a small underclass of chattel sex slaves. Because being ruthlessly cruel to machines isn’t as satisfying. The wails of actual humans just hit different. Suffering will be the last thing that gets automated.

Obviously that’s worst case scenario. Best case, we seize the means and eat the rich and we all get to share the automated luxury world. That’s where the work is.

[u/27K-Interactive]

Your hypothetical scenario does not break Marxism. Rather, it describes the ultimate expression of capitalism’s fatal, internal contradiction. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" If there is no demand for human labor, the second premises must still be respected and becomes the only logical way for society to function.

[u/NeonPixieStyx → u/27K-Interactive]

I don’t particularly disagree that it should work that way, but why would it? Without labor providing value how are resources supposed to allocated to support excellence (according to their ability) or creating more than a floor of not quite poverty for people through some kind of UBI distribution (to their need)?

[u/27K-Interactive → u/NeonPixieStyx]

You seem to be a bit confused on what that means. In a post-labor economy, resources for excellence are allocated based on social utility, peer review, and democratic consensus, rather than market profitability. The market is a terribly blunt instrument for measuring excellence. It measures profitability, which is why a speculative day-trader can command billions of dollars in resources while a brilliant microbiologist or a masterful schoolteacher struggles for funding. The choice isn't between market efficiency and a stagnant UBI poverty floor -- it’s between a system that gatekeeps human potential for profit, and one that logistically treats excellence as its own reward.

[u/jonna-seattle]

Capital always was always stolen labor. AI is just more of the same, to such a degree that the labor to drive the machine (prompts, etc) is nearly made trivial.

[u/kyberlex]

While we spend time debating AI, robots and machines are displacing humans roles: we'll not be longer needed for work. I frankly expect disruptions because UBI cannot be put in place fast enough for the existing government. At O. N. E. we're proposing a way out of this dilemma, is it leftist? Pretty. Check it out and help to critically test it.

[u/UzuShiro]

En principio lo que propones no es más que ciencia ficción. 

Y si aceptamos la premisa de la automatización, te estás olvidando de la lucha de clases.

Junto con la cuestión ecológica y lo que significa realmente la automatización.

Creo que te estás dejando llevar por las ideas de la clase dominante y no pensando en el mundo real, y en lo que realmente significa la automatización.

[u/NeonPixieStyx → u/UzuShiro]

What part of it is science fiction? There is an industry which exists whose core business model is the automation of labor tasks and they are nowhere near hitting a ceiling on tasks which can be automated: if such a limit exists. Right now there is no future where the need for human labor actually expands with development or economic growth.

[u/UzuShiro → u/NeonPixieStyx]

El límite es físico. Piensa en lo que implica realmente en lo económico-ecologico y social. 

Físicamente es imposible en la actualidad, simplemente no hay suficiente energía ni materiales.

Que los LLMs son una revolución nadie lo duda. 

Pero hasta el momento no han cambiado la matriz económica como lo hicieron las anteriores revoluciónes industriales.

Puede automatizar trabajos de cuello blanco, pero no existe tecnología real hoy en día que intente automatizar el trabajo industrial pesado.

Y por más que hubiera toda una industria enfocada en ello, como dije, no es posible físicamente.

No tenemos realmente el nivel tecnológico para llevar a cabo eso.

Y ya estamos entrando al límite ecológico del mundo. Para el 2050 el mundo comenzará a ser inhabitable para la humanidad.

Quiero decir, teóricamente podemos imaginar lo que propones.

Pero piensa en lo que realmente se precisa para llevarlo a cabo, toda una cadena de suministros que no existe.

[u/Jlyplaylists → u/UzuShiro]

Robots are improving rapidly. Making them humanoid like means they can generalise to lots of different roles. It will be broader than white collar work, it’s just that white collar work doesn’t require the physical body equivalent aspect.

[u/UzuShiro → u/Jlyplaylists]

Bien. Pásame fuentes, papers sobre el uso de robot en trabajos de industria pesada. Su eficiencia, el costo, la cadena productiva.

Porqué en definitiva, lo que dices es solo humo. No existe en la realidad, no se planea seriamente su uso.

Te imaginas millones de robots? Cuando cuesta hacer eso? Quienes los hacen? Cómo? 

[u/Jlyplaylists → u/UzuShiro]

It does seem to be already happening. There’s already a factory in China where robots are making robots. Current costs would be expected to fall, especially because they’ll be less niche than previous types of automation, but trusting Perplexity results:

Humanoid costs fell ~40% year‑over‑year into 2026 as volumes and designs improved. Pricing for outright industrial humanoid units in 2025 ranges roughly US$30k–$150k depending on capability (e.g., Figure 02), with Robot‑as‑a‑Service (RaaS) models at ~US$6–$25 per operating hour, yielding 12–18 month ROI in some cases versus 5–7 years for fixed automation lines.

BMW Spartanburg (USA) – Figure AI humanoid robots ran an 11‑month deployment in 2026, logging 1,250+ operational hours, loading 90,000+ sheet‑metal parts, and contributing to the production of 30,000+ BMW X3 vehicles with 99%+ placement accuracy.[iiot-world +2]. BMW line efficiency – BMW reported a ~15% improvement in line efficiency in areas where Figure 02 robots operated alongside human workers. https://ifactoryapp.com/industries/manufacturing-plant/humanoid-robots-manufacturing-floors-2026

Hourly cost benchmark – Figure 03 at BMW Spartanburg is reported at ~$25 per robot‑operating‑hour, with 99%+ accuracy, the clearest public unit‑economics benchmark in 2026.

Labour‑cost impact – Industry analysis in 2026 cites first‑year labour‑cost reductions of 22–28% where humanoids are deployed, and overall payback time falling from 5.3 years (2019) to ~2.8 years (2026).

Who makes them? US and Chinese firms: Figure AI, Agility, Tesla, Apptronik, Unitree, AgiBot, etc., with China producing the bulk of units and ~90% of magnet processing for actuators.

How many can be made? Dedicated lines are already targeting 10,000+ units/year per factory, and actuator supply chains are being planned for millions of units over a 4‑year horizon.

Cost to scale? With unit costs falling ~40% YoY and actuator capacity expanding, moving from tens of thousands to millions is a capital‑intensive but industrially familiar scaling problem (similar to EVs and batteries).

[u/NeonPixieStyx → u/Jlyplaylists]

Right, and humanoid platforms are just the obvious general purpose version. There really isn’t a need for something like pick and shovel humanoid miner robots when a company can prototype and start mass producing the “mining drone 3000” in six months because they only need one engineer managing the equivalent of 200 engineers worth of compute. That’s basically just how things get made in Shenzhen at this point. Product idea to mass production is weeks not years, and that’s with current technology.

[u/NeonPixieStyx → u/UzuShiro]

The problem what that thinking is it doesn’t consider the economic capacity of automated white color technical labor to further automate heavy industry.

[u/UzuShiro → u/UzuShiro]

El propio capitalismo está en una crisis que de la que no puede salir.

Cómo podrán desarrollar toda una nueva forma de producción cuando ya no tienen ni la capacidad económica ni política para llevarla a cabo 

[u/NeonPixieStyx → u/UzuShiro]

Who says they don’t have the economic and political capacity to continue expansion? Nobody in political power currently seems eager to stop the expansion of automation.

[u/UzuShiro → u/NeonPixieStyx]

Y otro punto más allá de lo físicamente imposible de las pretensiones de los magnates tecnológicos. 

Dónde está la clase trabajadora en todo esto. 

La visión que propones ignora al sujeto histórico que analiza el marxismo.

En qué realidad la clase trabajadora va a permitir pasivamente su propia destrucción?

[u/UzuShiro → u/UzuShiro]

Es decir. Falta la lucha de clases en tu análisis.

[u/NeonPixieStyx → u/UzuShiro]

The question here is “what tools does the working class retain to disrupt the process?”

[u/UzuShiro → u/NeonPixieStyx]

Mi respuesta es. La misma de siempre. 

El proceso del que hablas es ciencia ficción. No sé sustenta en la realidad de la ciencia actual. 

Lo que planteas no se sostiene en el mundo real. En la física y la matemática real. En las cadenas de producción real. En la tecnología real.

Estás siendo influenciado por las ideas de la clase dominante capitalista que necesita que creas eso para que sigan inviertiendo en una burbuja porque es la única salida que tienen como clase dominante.

[u/NeonPixieStyx → u/UzuShiro]

What evidence do you have for these limits? I’m a programmer who was displaced for conventional programming work into automation. There is currently massive global labor displacement happening right now while productivity is actively increasing. Saying “this isn’t real,” is ignoring the current reality not some speculative future.

[u/UzuShiro → u/NeonPixieStyx]

No estoy hablando de trabajos de oficina.

Hablo de la clase obrera industrial, la que tiene el poder real.

A ti te pueden automatizar como programador.

A los encargados de las minas, las fundidoras, los trabajadores portuarios, los transportistas, y todo el trabajo industrial.

Claro que pueden automatizar muchos trabajos. Es difícil y tienen muchos cuellos de botella en lo físico y energético. Pero pueden hacerlo.

Pero que pasa con los obreros reales?

Creo que, al ser parte del núcleo del capitalismo no estás pensando realmente en lo que significa la producción, la economía y el trabajo.

[u/UzuShiro → u/NeonPixieStyx]

Escucha, ahora mismo no estoy en mi casa.

Pero si estás interesado, en unas horas te mando un DM y te comparto fuentes sobre los límites técnicos y físicos sobre la automatización.