Artificial Intelligence: Labor, Machinery, and Capital

Is artificial intelligence a radical break with the past, or the latest expression of tendencies embedded in the structure of capitalism itself? It is often described as an unprecedented technological leap, a threshold beyond which human labor becomes increasingly unnecessary. But what does this development reveal when examined through the critique of political economy? Rather than asking whether machines think, whether AI produces “real” art, or whether individual use is moral, we will consider how artificial intelligence can be understood within the Marxian categories of capital, labor, value, and property. The question before us is not consciousness, but production: how AI reorganizes work, knowledge, and power.

We begin with Marx’s analysis of machinery in Capital and his reflections on the “general intellect” in the Grundrisse. There, technology appears not as neutral progress, but as accumulated social knowledge taking material form. We ask whether contemporary AI represents a new stage in this process: large-scale computational infrastructures that embody historically accumulated knowledge while reorganizing labor in the present. What impact, novel or existing, does the “AI revolution” have on deskilling and managerial control under capitalism? If writing, design, analysis, and judgment are increasingly mediated by algorithmic systems, what becomes of professional autonomy and skilled work?

Global and ecological contexts also complicate the neat picture of technological prometheanism. The promise of automation often obscures the labor that sustains it: data annotation, content moderation, mineral extraction, cloud maintenance. Rather than fulfilling its claim of abolishing labor, does the AI industry redistribute it unequally across international and environmental hierarchies?

Finally, we consider AI within the framework of platform capitalism. If value is realized less through simple commodity exchange than through infrastructural control, data extraction, and strategic positioning within global markets, how should we understand the political and geopolitical stakes of our increasing delegation of tasks to AI? What appears as technological innovation may unfold within broader patterns of concentrated corporate power and state competition.

Across four sessions, we will read Marx, Braverman, and selected contemporary theorists of platform capitalism and digital labor such as Srnicek. Our aim is not to arrive at definitive answers, but to clarify the categories with which we analyze these transformations. By situating artificial intelligence within the critique of political economy, we seek to question assumptions of technological neutrality and to examine how socially produced knowledge becomes capital in our time.