- by Graham Holton
- The Guardian
- Issue #2130
Image: Wesley Fryer – flickr.com (CC BY 2.0)
The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the face of the world. Like all transformations and ‘revolutions’ in society that capitalism has wrought, AI has enormous possibility for good, but the problem is that it remains firmly in the grip of private capital and the capitalist state. It serves the interests of profit.
Inequality has never been greater as capitalism devours all before it in a quest to maintain and expand profit, even as the rate of profit shrinks. We hear that AI technology has been used to restore sight to the blind. This is astonishing and offers hope for the future. At the same time, here in Australia, we can’t find a bulk-billing doctor. Basic health-care is out of reach for millions. Just another contradiction of capitalism.
What does the rise, resistible or irresistible, of AI mean for the future? Does it mean a bright, profitable new golden age for capital, without the irritation of workers? Or does it mean a further irreconcilable contradiction for capitalism and another nail that it is driving into its own coffin? What does it mean for the working class?
Huge amounts of capital are being pumped into AI technology by capitalism. Rival capitalist states and corporations wage war with each other to ‘get there first.’ It is, for capital, the latest and possibly last throw of the dice. Ever since capitalism arrived on the world stage, it has been engaged in a life and death struggle for survival and for growth.
CAPITALISM
Capitalism derives its wealth from an ever-intensifying extraction of surplus value from labour. It has also been constantly hunted and haunted by a tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Capital has sought to forestall this by speeding up production, incorporating more and more technological innovations to increase production using fewer workers, globalisation of production, the physical movement of capital and production to low wage regimes, and now the last bright and best hope appears in the form of AI.
Much of the innovation of capitalist production over the past two centuries has had a progressive capacity. Revolutions in transport, in technology that make work less strenuous, in scientific advances, have all had the potential to liberate and yet all have, ultimately, tied the working class more closely to the bourgeoisie. Fundamentally, AI has an enormous potential for good and yet, it is already a fearful thing as hundreds of millions of jobs are forecast to be destroyed in the very near future.
Capitalism, as Marx and Engels described in the Manifesto, “with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” The spectre that capitalism has conjured, the all-devouring monster of its creation is now set to destroy itself and the working class along with it.
SHORT-SIGHTEDNESS
The ideologists of capitalism accept the madness and short-sightedness of their masters. There seems to be a sincere belief that the new technology will bring a solution to the crisis of capitalism. They seem to seriously believe there will be total profit to be derived from the machines. There seems to be a belief that a fully-automated capitalism, disencumbered by labour will seize the heights. In denying the role of labour in the acquisition of profit, the system turns its back on economic theory and the historical development of capitalism. They ignore and deny their own history.
Surplus value is the basis of capitalist growth and profit. The worker who provides that surplus is also a consumer. An entire class of workers both produce and consume products that require a new and eternal round of production, creating surplus and profit and importantly, reproducing capital.
Slavery came to an end because slaves had no capacity to increase capital by consumption, or by purchasing the fruits of their labour. The reproduction of capital was, at best, minimal. Somehow, in the fevered imagination of capitalists AI, which in a raw economic sense is the modern-day equivalence of slavery, offers answers to perennial economic problems and crises. At best it will produce dividends for sections of capital and for a relatively short period of time, before the same contradictions that drove capital to the wall recur.
Individual capitalists and economies, seek a comparative advantage over their rivals. Where one capitalist concern introduces an innovation to lift profit rates, then others must follow. This is happening before our eyes with the introduction of AI across so many sections of industry. The bourgeois economists use the term ‘restructuring’ of the labour market to describe the wholesale job-shedding that the new technology ensures.
The US multinational investment bank, Goldman Sachs, released a major report in 2024. It described a “disruption” to the labour market in the coming period. This “disruption,” according to the report, will mean 300 million workers being ‘exposed’ to the effects of AI and that 60 per cent of all jobs would be affected to some degree by the automation that is coming. The report indicates that up to a quarter of all current work carried out in the USA and in the EU could be automated.
It has also been reported that global employment in the developed capitalist economies is likely to shrink by 5 per cent this year as a direct result of AI technologies.
The ‘transformation’ of work and society that AI is bringing is hardly a uniform thing. Human labour, as the source of surplus value and profit will not disappear. The division of labour between skilled and unskilled will sharpen. The exploitation of labour will intensify. The ‘army of unemployed’ will grow, thereby allowing employers to further push down wages.
The concept of a privileged workforce will assume a greater reality. There will be a section of the skilled workforce who, by dint of human intelligence, will control production and there will be those whose tasks will be beyond the scope of the ‘intelligence’ of the machine. Their value, the surplus they produce, will ensure their place in a hierarchy of labour.
AI, as a tool of capital, will support capitalism and immediate profitability. The working class will be increasingly compelled to exist in ever more poorly paid jobs. Our bourgeois economists and statisticians show that employment remained high in Australia after the collapse of the manufacturing industry. They are right. A look at the casualised workforce, the struggling families working two and three part-time jobs, the gig economy, all attest to the fact that ‘employment’ remains high. Wages, however, shrink.
AI will remain and increase. Capitalism demands it to be so. It is foolish to assume otherwise. Marxism does not advocate a return to the ‘levellers,’ to Luddism, to the machine breakers. Marxism does advocate and demands that the machinery of capitalism be taken and used for the good of the working class.
