Topic

Labour

Who does the work, who keeps the surplus.

Every wave of automation has been sold as a gift to the worker and delivered as a transfer of bargaining power to the owner. AI is the first general-purpose machine that targets the brain work of the middle class — the writers, the paralegals, the radiologists, the customer support agents. The question is never whether the technology can do the job. The question is who gets the productivity gain when it does. On capitailism.com, labour is the lens through which we read every release, every layoff round, every retraining promise.

Columns (4)

  1. Prompt Engineering Is Piece-Rate

    Every generation of capitalism produces a new layer of 'skilled' labour that is actually piece-rate work with a prestigious job title. A column on how AI freelancing reinvented the putting-out system.

  2. UBI as Hush Money

    Universal basic income, as pitched by Silicon Valley, is not a floor. It is a severance package for the working class. A column on the political economy of the billionaire's favourite welfare program.

  3. The Luddites Were Right

    History remembers the Luddites as fools who feared machines. History is wrong. They feared the owner of the machine, and the owner vindicated them. A column on what the original machine-breakers actually wanted.

  4. Scab in the Machine

    The AI scab does not drink coffee and does not cross a picket line. It scabs by default. A column on how capital learned to break strikes without a body.

Parallels (2)

  1. Then · 1811

    Luddites smash power looms in Nottingham. They are not afraid of machines. They are afraid of what the factory owner will do with them.

    Now · 2024

    Hollywood writers strike over AI-generated scripts. They are not afraid of LLMs. They are afraid of what the studio will do with them.

    The tool is never the enemy. The hand that holds it without sharing the surplus is.

  2. Then · 1914

    Henry Ford raises wages to $5 a day so his workers can afford the cars they build.

    Now · 2025

    OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google race to replace the knowledge workers who are the only people left who can afford a $200/month subscription.

    A consumer economy cannot survive the abolition of the consumer.

Contradictions (3)

Claim
AI is built to free humanity from drudgery.
Reality
It is trained on the unpaid labour of everyone who has ever written a sentence online, and its first deployment is to fire the person who writes the next one.
Claim
AI is just the next industrial revolution.
Reality
The first industrial revolution eventually produced unions, the weekend, public education, and a middle class. It took 150 years and a lot of blood. Nobody has that kind of runway twice.
Claim
AI will create more jobs than it destroys.
Reality
Every hand-waving study saying this assumes the profits of the new jobs will be shared. Nothing in the current ownership structure suggests they will be.

Demands (2)

  1. 01

    A shorter week at the same pay. Every productivity gain from automation belongs first to the people automated out of a job.

  2. 02

    A right to a human. Any decision that denies you a job, a loan, a home, or a diagnosis must be answerable by a named person on the other end.

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