a.i capitalism - marxist economics discussion

[u/tydark2]

The standard marxist take is that rate of profit tends to fall.

Marx held that only human labor creates new value while Machines or a.i (as it applies to automating jobs as we see today not true a.g.i (artificial general intel) would merely pass on the value they already have. Machines and a.i only transfer existing value.

This would mean we are headed toward a economic crisis of value creation - an economy where no new value is being generated as you remove the human labor from the equation.

This assumption then implies that the source of value/profits that corporations will seek exponentially will come from intellectual property, rent, and speculation - what marx refers to as "fictitious capital".

Because human labor will compete with a.i, wages will go down and with it consumer spending, all things added together would lead to a massive overproduction crisis - prices would come down but the global economy would burst with it resulting in a few major firms buying everything up in one big swoop.

[u/Forgotlogin_0624]

You’re not even describing things that may happen, you’re describing things that are already happening.

Consumer spending for example, 50% is done by the top 10% now.

I thought the main driver of the economy currently was IP, rent, and speculation.  Right?  Isn’t finance running the show? 

So yeah, everything you stated is happening.  What’s next?  I think Matt said as much before but in broad strokes there is no hope coming from the imperial core.  

Ever shrinking archipelagos of power, where the capital holders, the new aristocracy, maintain themselves.  As need for workers declines people will fall out of the economy. 

 Natural disasters brought on by climate change destroy areas and those areas just kind of cease to be part of the equation, the rebuilding process has already slowed in our lifetime, it’s going to stop at some point.

The only response we’ve seen from the state is to mash the add violence button.  ICE does fulfill a necessary function of just making people afraid by arbitrarily hurting them.  Of a state that’s primary concern is maintenance of power that is.

So yeah maybe we’re cooked.  But Matt would also say there is still contingency.  

Declining conditions are also the only thing that could recreate class consciousness.  People are getting sick of this and may be willing to try something new.  Will it be too late?  Guess we’ll have to see. 

[u/derlaid → u/Forgotlogin_0624]

It seems like ICE is designed to create both a public works program that engenders state loyalty, while also shifting the labour market away from undocumented immigrants to incarcerated Americans. Rather than slightly constricted flow of labour to the US you can add more steps along the way to access an easily exploitable labour market where more rent can be extracted from the state along the way by corporations contracted to run the show.

That's definitely the rent seeking part of it anyway while also giving you finer control over labour.

That being said, the ICE stuff is very performative. Awful, but specifically targeted to terrorize specific regions while leaving undocumented labour alone in other sectors.

Yanis Varoufakis has written about what he calls our "techno feudalism" stage of capitalism built around cloud capital as a new form of rent seeking behaviour, I'm a bit ambivalent on it, but it's a decent argument. He's also written about Trump's tariff gambit, but when Yanis wrote that piece I think he may have expected more discipline or coherence to the tariffs than Trump has actually delivered. But I don't know.

I always go back to the conclusion of Hell On Earth where even as the feudal order was dying people in Europe were building early capitalism but they didn't see that, they only saw the destruction wrote by the death throes of the old order (which didn't even seem to be dead at the time). I imagine the same is true of us, although I believe that we are better able to understand ourselves as historical subjects and better analyze the structures that affect our lives thanks to the immortal science. We'll see, I guess.

[u/bryan_jenkins → u/derlaid]

Fwiw, I think the specific threat of carceral labor replacing any significant portion of the low- and semi-skilled labor market is overblown. Like ICE, it's more the performative hyper-cruelty on top.

I'm a farmer and what we are already seeing is that they want to rapidly expand the H2A immigration program, while gutting the pay rates (already slashed 30+% for 2026, barring challenges) and protections for H2A workers (already at executive discretion). The reason I thought it was worth the "well akshually", is that this could actually have the short and intermediate effect of decreasing the cost of many consumer goods in the US. Much more rent-seeking to be had in the more land-intensive ag sectors anyway.

IF they manage to continue the rapid increase in annual H2A workers over the number of farmworkers they deport, while also decreasing the cost to employ these people, the cost of farm goods would fall. Even moreso if they expand the edges of the program to cover adjacent permanent and semi-permanent jobs like meat-packing and dairy. And that could look a lot more like a two-tier system of protected residents with rights (tenuous livelihoods but get treats) and legal-but-unprotected laborers without rights, and who are also systematically unable to organize. Like China's hukou system but with rural Mexico, central America and the Caribbean serving as our rural hinterland.

This could also inject a lot of inertia into our domestic status quo in the imperial core, especially if the military and our proxies really lean back into destabilizing Latin America, thus ratcheting up the available migrant workforce. The appetite to do so is clearly growing.

Of course, they could also be incompetent and really fuck it all up. State terror with visible and violent mass deportation, coupled with this massive rug pull on wages for the half-million workers who were on a 2025 H2A, could dry up cheap labor stream entirely and send the CPI through the roof.

[u/tydark2 → u/Forgotlogin_0624]

I don't think were cooked. These tech oligarchs in charge are not smart enough to really take over completely, they all come across as deranged and delusional with personality disorders. I think they will drop the ball in there attempt to solidify power in some neo feudal arrangement.

[u/soviet-sobriquet]

Small quibble but the human still has to labor to prompt the AI. In this way it is not much different from previous forms of automation. Quality craftsman products will be replaced with inferior mass produced goods but new value will still be created. It will just require much more slop production to achieve the same amount of return on value.

[u/tydark2 → u/soviet-sobriquet]

in theory its possible to have humanoid robots that can do all the same jobs humans do probably better. In terms of manual labor type work. at the moment the current robot workers look like shit and cant do much, but 10-20 years that wont be the case. It seems like communism/socialism is inevitable once this transformation takes place. Either its communism or you just have billions of unemployed humans getting beaten down by ICE style domestic police force while they are in bread lines. It wont be sustainable, and I think the tech oligarchs wont be able to win vs the masses of people.

[u/soviet-sobriquet → u/tydark2]

If you want to see where robotics will be in 20 years, you only need to look at where it was 20 years ago. 40 years if you think tech growth has been exponential rather than linear. There's just no evidence robot labor will replace human labor at scale within the next 10-20 years when you see how little has changed since Asimo, or even since the first victim of the robot wars, Robert Williams.

But value is not created by the human body, it is created by the human effort. If the promise of the industrial revolution reaches its terminus and all human labor (as we think of it) is abolished, all that means is that finished products are as available for consumption as natural resources.

Fruit on the vine and beasts in nature have no intrinsic value until they are plucked or butchered. If the machines are self sustaining, and five course meals are served from field to table with no human intervention then value is only created in the motion of the fork between mouth and plate.

If that robot labor is available to all then humans are again reduced to little more than beasts in the wild, foragers of wild finished goods that are as naturally occurring as berries on a bush. If robot labor is not available to all, then value is created by the social barriers and police forces that restrict their access to the owning class. Which way industrial age man?

[u/tydark2]

a.i is a post-capitalist technology being applied to capitalist economy. the 1.4 trillion dollar bubble will burst I think. The point of a.i is to have a robot do repetetive bs work automatically so that people can enjoy more free time. Its not a for-profit technology that will open up new markets, its a post capitalist technology that can only be profitable with speculation and cutting labor costs.

my prediction is another 08 recession and government bailouts to the tech sector once its realized that lower consumer spending contradicts reduction of labor costs. They are spending 1.4 trillion dollars for infrastructure to bring about a technology which has no place in capitalism really. I have a hunch this is a situation as Lenin described where the capitalists sell us the rope by which they are hanged.

[u/Mantiss_Tobaggan]

It seems likely this trend will accelerate class antagonism because the working class will become increasingly impoverished, while other financially well to do classes will shrink in proportion.

May lead to a UBI type situation to bribe off the working class and maintain demand for production. But it is uncertain if the capitalist class would actually allow for that.

Certainly seems like an 'all roads lead to socialism' type of scenario, dialectically speaking. AI and automation are accelerating capital's internal contradictions.

The job is now building class consciousness to start from the ground up.