We should not have to fear automation. The dream of every human being, and especially every Marxist should be the total automation of labor, where the autonomous machine replaces that of the human worker. This would mean that the work that’s done by the proletariat would be limited to making sure that the autonomous system of machines functioned correctly. Such a change would upend the entire relationship between production and goods as we understand it today. However, under the current capitalist mode of production, automation’s upending of the connection between labor and value would be (and has been) catastrophic, leaving the proletariat at great risk of starvation, suffering, and displacement. A socialist mode of economic organization can and should be one in which automation is welcomed in order to allow society to advance.
To understand why this autonomous path should be welcomed, we must first understand the relationship between the worker and their tools historically. The artisan, or independent craftsman of the pre-industrial era, had control over their tools, and owned them. The artisan, as Bordiga explains in his essay Who’s Afraid of Automation, and, by extension, Marx’s Grundrisse, has the ability to, if he can buy or otherwise collect his raw resources, produce and sell his commodities at his own leisure. This was because they had control over both their labor and their instruments of creation. The artisan was an independent actor, who had full control over both their labor and the product of said labor. Guilds arose as the primary form of both collectivized labor and enterprise. They would control the price of goods coming and going from the artisans to ensure a competitive market. In doing so, the guilds encouraged capitalist growth.
This control was lost during the social upheavals of the immediate pre-industrial and early industrial age as the relationship between production and producer became more alienated. As time moved on, the artisan was pushed out, slowly at first, then rapidly, by the machine, who was owned not by the artisan and the guild, but by the Bourgeoisie, who had accumulated enough capital to obtain these machines and pay wages to the less-skilled (and less independent) laborers to operate them. This new relationship, one between the laborer and the bourgeoisie’s machines, can be best described as the devaluation of the worker’s labor, relegating it to secondary to the machine. This, in theory, should leave the worker without nearly as much necessary work to do. Under Capitalism, this then creates an issue, the workers are left with almost no labor, no value-generation, left to sustain themselves, which leads to massive unemployment, and with it mass misery and social upheaval. The Bourgeoisie has no requirement to help the worker whose job was just automated out of existence-indeed, such disregard for workers (and even accelerating this process) is encouraged as a way to increase profits.
We can see this happening again today with the endless attempts to push so-called “artificial intelligence” in all kinds of industries. Capitalists, particularly the very wealthiest among them, endlessly proselytize about the ways in which AI, algorithms, and Large Language Models will automate industries driven by intellectual or creative labor that previously would have been seen as impossible to automate. From highly technical fields such as computer science and geographic analysis to intellectual fields like teaching and law, even creative fields such as animation, there is a constant stream of news proclaiming that the human workers within each of these industries will be made obsolete by automated systems, which replace these workers and their very thoughts. Some of the cynical ways these developments are being used are fairly obvious: Nvidia keeping their stock prices high by supplying the endless demand of data centers; fascists in the tech industry like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel seeking to develop AI in furtherance of their perfectly rationalized and controlled society; major Hollywood studio companies looking to produce an endless stream of mediocre content as a way to avoid dealing with pesky humans who might take the risk of having original ideas.
These predictions, much like many answers given by AI search engines with great confidence, may well be wrong, but the manner in which the bourgeoisie look at the development of AI is something worth discussing. The reduction of artisan labor to a non-valued hobby does create economic hardship, but people may still find personal fulfillment in doing these things. The threat of AI superseding our ways of knowing, of reasoning, of creating new things, and converting the fundamentals of our existence into paid-for products is perhaps the epitome of the way in which capitalism reduces the whole of human life into mere transactions. Famous animator Hayao Miyazaki once called AI-generated animation “an insult to life itself”; this is true of all the ways in which capitalists encourage automation.
What is the point of automation in a capitalist society? By replacing the need for a human laborer to do a task, we as a society should require less labor to keep humanity functioning, however, this is not the case. In a capitalist system, workers are not “freed up” from the need to labor in order to continue living; they are only “freed up” to find a new industry to sell their labor in. Any efficiency, any easing of the requirements needed to uphold society, are taken by the bourgeoisie in the same way all other surplus value is.
And when that requirement drops enough, when the amount of labor generating value for the capitalists falls low enough, the workers themselves become a source of value. We are seeing an extractive system developing, where data itself is being collected from the population and sold, as opposed to their labor. Instead of the body and mind of the worker being exploited, the very identity of the worker is being captured and marketed, then sold back to them in an endless stream of subscription services and highly-targeted materials. This commodification of the individual marks a new form of colonization, where the singular person is now being turned into an extractive resource for the market, as opposed to the individual’s labor.
This shouldn’t be the case. Automation would, under a socialist system, do away with value all together. There would be no need for human labor to be the primary form of work, or for people to constantly perform value-generating labor or else starve. Instead, the machines and sciences should be used to do the work for us. Under the socialist form of production, where we no longer are producing commodities for sale on the market, but instead are producing use-values, automation would simply decrease the amount of necessary work required to maintain society, leaving humans the ability to focus on other pursuits, such as learning, creation, or innovation. We could live in a society where people are fully able to develop and realize their potential.
The fundamental paradigm shift that must occur, as Bordiga breaks down in writing on the subject, is that science and technology should be de-monopolized from the bourgeoisie. The proletariat would be able to drastically change their own material conditions with the introduction of machinery and technology, but since it lies in the hands of the few, it is instead used to generate more and more profit. We must remember that, according to Marx in Grundrisse and Bordiga in Who’s Afraid of Automation, society itself can be viewed as a single living creature, with a singular life that encompasses the entirety of the human experience. This includes the totality of technology, science, and all other human advancements. The bourgeoisie monopolizes this totality, and attempts to use it solely to grow their own capital as a small economic minority.
To fully realize the accumulation of collective human experience, the proletariat must take back not only technology and science, but the entire societal organism. This creature must be taken from the bourgeoisie and put to work by the proletariat. Only then will automation no longer harm the worker. The Laborer’s work would be in maintaining the system of automation instead of the grueling work of the past, which includes resource collection and production. This would empower the proletariat to become secondary in their work, meaning less overall labor required from them and more free time. Once the proletariat has asserted its dominance over the culmination of human excellence, the concept of value would be eradicated. Of course there would be resource cost, but there would no longer be an interlocking connection between the laborer’s work and production.