This essay examines artificial intelligence through Marx and Engels’ accounts of machinery, ownership, and wage labor. Its focus is the relationship between technical capacity and the organization of work.

Machinery, professional work, and ownership

In chapter I of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels describe professions including medicine and law becoming forms of paid wage labor. They also describe continual changes in the instruments of production as a characteristic of bourgeois society.[3]

The author’s interpretation extends their account to a question about AI and capitalism: how does the ownership of a productive system affect the position of the people whose work it reorganizes?

Engels on machinery and labor

In chapter III of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels argues that competition compels industrial capitalists to improve machinery and that mechanization can displace workers. He presents the use of workers’ products against their own livelihoods as a contradiction of capitalist production. Read chapter III.

Engels connects changes in machinery to changes in employment and workers’ bargaining position. Those relationships provide the points of comparison with AI in this reading.

Productivity and working time

In Capital, chapter XV, section 3(b), Marx discusses a tension between machinery’s capacity to reduce necessary working time and its use to prolong the working day. His analysis concerns the relationship between technical capacity and the conditions under which machinery is employed.[1]

Marx’s discussion distinguishes what machinery makes technically possible from the conditions of its use. Applied to AI, that distinction organizes the inquiry around ownership, working time, and control over production. Establishing the effects of a particular system would still require evidence about its workplace use and the tasks and people involved.

For a related application to platform-mediated work, read The Gig Economy: A Marxist Analysis of Wages and Work. The Technology, Automation, and Artificial Intelligence pathway provides a longer reading sequence, including sources on skill, management, ownership, and automation.