A Marxist View on AI: A Six-Part Series
- AI and the Marxist Theory of Machines
- Automation and Labour-Power
- Surveillance, Digital Taylorism and Knowledge Capture
- Algorithmic Management
- The Militarisation of AI
- Real Subsumption and Communist AI
Part 1: AI and the Marxist Theory of Machines
Capitalists say some wild things about what AI is all about. Elon Musk has described it in terms of a project of extending the “light of consciousness” to the stars. A Marxist perspective on AI starts from the more modest perspective of pointing out that AI is, first of all, a commodity. While scientific AI projects not driven by the goal of generating surplus value do exist, these are relatively rare. AI is a technology developed primarily by a handful of large companies from the US and China and a large crowd of smaller companies around the world. A commodity is a product made in order to be profitably sold. For a commodity to be sold, it must have some utility (which Marxists call use-value), whether perceived or actual. So what is the use-value of AI?
While AI company CEOs sometimes make dramatic statements about a coming “jobs apocalypse” in order to generate clickbait headlines, their company websites tend to present a calmer vision of AI’s function as augmenting human capacities, rather than replacing workers. For example, a Microsoft webpage describes the value of AI as coming from its ability to automate repetitive, low-skill tasks: “Repetitive tasks can be handled through secure background processes … helping streamline workflows and free teams to focus on higher-value work”. This is the single use-value which is motivating companies, governments and institutions like universities around the world to invest millions on AI. This might sound implausible or at least underwhelming. Is getting rid of repetitive and mundane tasks all there is to AI? Marxism explains the situation quite well.
Marx devoted the whole of Chapter 15 of Capital, Volume I, to developing a theory of machines under capitalism. Marx showed that alleviating the burden of work is “by no means the aim of the application of machinery under capitalism”. On the contrary, the machine is a “means for producing surplus-value” by “cheapen[ing] commodities and, by shortening the part of the working day in which the worker works for himself, to lengthen the … part he gives to the capitalist for nothing” (Marx 1990, 492). The global enthusiasm of capital for AI is driven by the promise, made by the companies that make it, that it will make the labour of workers more productive. But within capitalism, productivity does not entail better work quality or even better quality output; it entails the maximal production of value which can be appropriated by capital after paying out the wages of labour. The appropriation of surplus value is what Marxists call exploitation.
While Marxists desire the advancement of technology in order to increase the power of the productive forces such that they come into conflict with the relations of production, capital seeks to advance the productive forces in order to increase surplus value production and exploitation, regardless of whatever consequences this might have for the well-being of people, the degradation of the environment and the proliferation of war, to take only a few examples. While capitalists can always try to make workers work harder through discipline, incentives or by forcing longer working days, these options have hard limits. There are only 24 hours in a day, and human bodies can only work so hard before they break down.
Machines present almost infinite options for increasing the productivity of labour, and with it, exploitation by expanding human capacities. This is why capital is obsessed with technical innovation and why today it is particularly obsessed with AI. In Chapter 15, Marx makes a startling statement when he claims that machinery is the “material foundation of the capitalist mode of production” (Marx 1990, 554). One might expect him to say that labour is this foundation, as it is what generates value. But as this article has hopefully made clear, capital cannot achieve its goal of ever-greater exploitation of labour without machines. Capital pursues new technologies not because capitalists are tech-savvy individuals or visionaries, but because, as an economic system, it is based on the appropriation of surplus value: it must continually create new commodities and it must minimise the labour required to produce them. By serving both of these needs, AI appears as a dream come true for capital.
References
Marx, Karl (1990) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Classics.
Microsoft, “Maximize productivity with AI automation”, Microsoft Windows Business Knowledge Center, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/business/knowledge-center/maximize-productivity-with-ai-automation.
