How to Build a World Socialist Party in the Age of AI
by Eric Sommer

Chapter 1: How Karl Marx Foresaw the Self-Destruction of the Capitalist Mode of Production by AI and Robotics

In 1857-1858 while working in his personal notebook Karl Marx identified a central contradiction in the capitalist mode of production – a contradiction which he believed would inevitably lead, if capitalism continued long enough, to it’s self destruction by the technologies we call artificial intelligence and robotics.

Marx drew this conclusion by extrapolation from the inherent competitive drive of capitalism to replace human labour with technology. “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.”

On the one hand capitalism makes labour the sole source of value. But the competitive struggle between individual capitalists, and between capitalist nation states, compels them to continually seek to eliminate labour, leading ultimately to technology replacing all forms of physical and mental labour and therefor of capitalism.

In vivid prose Marx used the language of his day to describe AI and robotics and the process which would lead to them. Until recently his words might have seemed like fantasy or Utopian dreaming But the real-world appearance of LLM AI and increasingly advanced robotics lets us see concretely what he was writing about 170 years ago.

“Once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the automatic system of machinery set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.”.

The training, abilities, and human labour required by capital would no longer be needed. “Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal or oil just as the worker consumes food to keep up its perpetual motion….

The human role would no longer be producers but checkers and regulators. “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

Chapter 2. The Social Impact of AI and Advanced Robotics

Most of us grew up living in the social world and social categories created by the results of the second or industrial revolution. This is ?the capitalist mode of production which includes jobs, businesses, corporations, entrepreneurs, mass education schools, and separate capitalist nation states governed separately by individual governments.

It’s hard to realize that these currently dominant socioeconomiccategories began their ascent only about 200 years ago with the industrial revolution which began?in England about 1800 AD.
Before the Industrial Revolution most human beings lived in a different?world dominated by kings, nobles, religions, and large and small ?landlords? and the ?serfs? who lived on the land and worked the landlords land.

But in just 180 years, the second or industrial revolution had radically?transformed people?s lives. Jobs and specialized skill sets had become the center of almost all people?s lives in the so-called developed countries and an increasing number in the rest of the world as well.
But these social categories of the capitalist epoch are destined to be ultimately swept away by the artificial intelligence epoch, just as the categories of the previous agricultural societies were swept away by the capitalist epoch. ?

The Immediate Impact

The immediate social impact of this process of reducing socially necessary labour time towards zero can be reduced to this: Under capitalist private ownership of the means of production, generalized labour substitution by artificial intelligence and other automation technologies is a curse. For as one job-type and sector after another disappears, workers become unable to survive under the obsolete capitalist system. The only conceivable solution to this problem is workers struggles for conversion from nation-state capitalism to global social ownership of the digital/AI-based economy.

Conseequently, the demand for a satisfactory universal guaranteed income should be conjoined with every workers strike and struggle over jobs and workplace conditions