Mechanization of Human and Humanization of AI : A Dialectical Materialist perspective

In this era of ultimate mechanisation i.e. automation and artificial intelligence, the bourgeoisie is propagating a falsified dream of a “frictionless” future, where humans will no longer need to work, and machines will supposedly liberate them for endless leisure. Beneath this utopian facade, however, the true essence of automation and its profound risks are deliberately obscured by the capitalist system itself.

The question of AI and the breach/theft of “Intellectual Property”:

Many of the so-called progressive or left-leaning intellectuals, including figures like Noam Chomsky, condemn AI as something inherently evil, a threat to the very essence of humanity. Chomsky recently remarked:

“Let’s stop calling it Artificial Intelligence and call it what it is: Plagiarism Software. It doesn’t create anything, just copies existing works from artists and alters them sufficiently to escape copyright laws. It’s the largest theft of property since Native American lands by European settlers.”

Now, as Marxists, we must take a different position from such liberal linguistic critiques. The problem is not merely with the “theft” of intellectual property. The very term “theft” implies the existence of private ownership as something legitimate and inviolable, something we reject at its root. The concept of “private property” itself under capitalism is historically specific, not eternal. What Chomsky calls “theft,” we understand as a reproduction of capitalist relations; wherein art, creativity, and knowledge were already commodified long before AI arrived. Thus, when AI “copies” or “appropriates,” it is not breaching ownership, but extending the logic of private property into the domain of cognition and creativity itself. This fundamental difference of coinage is not new as it goes back to the early disputes between Proudhon and Marx, where Marx showed that the problem was never theft of property, but property itself. [1]

At the same time, under this material condition, when big tech corporations exploit or expropriate the effort and creativity of struggling artists, we oppose this too but from a dialectical standpoint. Here, our critique is not of “theft” in the moral sense, but of the unequal relations of production that allow such expropriation to occur.

What is strikingly absent from both mainstream and critical academic discourse, then, is a Marxist-dialectical analysis of this phenomenon, an understanding of AI not as an ethical question alone, but as a historically determined expression of the contradictions within capitalism.

The Economics of AI:

Human necessity has always driven the uncovering of nature’s “mysteries.” Through the material progression of history, humans have transformed chaotic occurrences into structured knowledge for survival. The logic we call “science” is itself a subset of dialectical thought. The dialectical system that enables us to grasp reality as a process in constant flux, changing through inner contradictions and self-negation.

From this dialectical standpoint, AI, like any other scientific advancements, is a step forward in the social evolution of humankind, and simultaneously a weapon in the hands of capital. In the epoch of capitalism, the highest form of commodity production, science becomes an instrument of accumulation. It serves not humanity’s liberation, but the reproduction of “dead labour” (capital) through the exploitation of “living labour.” Capital will always push scientific development forward, but only insofar as it accelerates its own accumulation. History proved this once before, during the Industrial Revolution in England and Marx’s critique of political economy revealed that this very tendency is self-destructive: the means of capital’s survival are the very means of its eventual demise.

Today, creativity, once considered the highest expression of human intellectual capability, differentiating them from other animal species, only capable of mindless replication of certain processes and patterns, is increasingly being replaced by machines. The great laboratories of applied science, such as Microsoft, Google, Meta, Alibaba, and OpenAI, continuously produce new language models and frameworks designed to automate artistic and intellectual activity: writing, designing, translating, and even composing music. Meanwhile, in most parts of the world, degrading and dangerous work such as manual scavenging continues to be performed by humans.

This contrast exposes the class character of technological progress under capitalism: AI is deployed not to liberate humanity from drudgery, but to deepen alienation to estrange workers from their own creative essence and reduce them to repetitive instruments of production and replication.

The rise of AI coincides with the present stage of capitalist crisis, revealing that overproduction and the falling rate of profit have reached a critical point from which no mere technological innovation can rescue the system. As Marx demonstrated, the rate of profit tends to fall as the composition of capital becomes more “constant”, as investment in machinery and automation rises relative to investment in living labour. Surplus value, derived solely from human labour, consequently declines. And as a remedy to that falling rate of profit, the Capitalist has to reduce the wages (either through reducing the actual wage of each worker, or laying-off a section of its labour force) example of which is ample in todays time. [Goldman Sachs, Meta, Amazon, TCS, etc]

Consider a simple example:

Previously, a worker might have required five units of socially necessary labour time to produce five units of goods i.e. one unit of labour per good. After mechanization, the same worker produces ten goods in the same five units of labour time; the labour per unit falls from one to one-half. Since the value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labour time required for its production, the labour-value of each good declines, so does the surplus value extracted from it, thereby reducing the rate of profit.

Now to bring these rate of profits to earlier values, or higher than that, what the capitalist does is lay-off half of its workforce, since the other half can produce the same five units of goods, keeping the work-hours per day same as previous. With the introduction of “mechanization” or new technology the exploitation of the worker increases, as their wages remain same, but the surplus value generated by them soar, which is reflected in the stock prices / profit-loss statements of companies which incorporate the “new technology”.

In the AI era, this tendency becomes extreme. A machine, once trained, can reproduce output thousands of times with virtually no additional labour time, further diminishing the socially necessary labour embodied in each product and intensifying the contradiction between the expansion of production and the shrinking of surplus value.

As Marx wrote in Capital, Volume III:

“The development of the productive forces of labour... reduces the variable part of capital in relation to the constant part, thereby reducing the source of surplus-value.”

Alongside this economic contradiction, the bourgeoisie promotes the false narrative that AI will “create new, high-paying jobs.” In reality, this directly contradicts the logic of capital accumulation. The system seeks to reduce variable capital (wages) to the minimum necessary for survival, not to expand it. An increase in constant capital would only accelerate the fall in the rate of profit, precisely what capital seeks to avoid, and it is realised in the form of mass lay-offs across a number of fields.

Thus, under capitalism, AI cannot be a force of human emancipation. It is a manifestation of capital’s internal contradiction, its drive to expand production while simultaneously undermining the very source of surplus value: living human labour. Only when the means of production, including AI, are freed from the grip of private ownership and subordinated to social need rather than profit, can technology and art truly serve as an instrument of human liberation and unrestrained expression rather than alienation.

Down with Intellectual Property Rights!

Long live Marxism-Leninism-Trotskyism!

Long live International Proletarian Revolution!

[1] Poverty of Philosophy By Marx {He critiques that the Proudhonian concept of property as ‘theft’ is self-contradictory and comes back to the question itself. Rather private property is a form of appropriation of external nature by humans as a part of nature itself.}