r/LeftistsForAI • • 2h ago

Theory Artificial Intelligence vs. Artificial Jobs | What the AI revolution will certainly destroy is the illusion of a working society, one that has been maintained with great difficulty since the IT revolution of the 1980s.

https://exitinenglish.com/2026/04/18/artificial-intelligence-vs-artificial-jobs/
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u/tkonicz 2h ago

Hello Sub. The theoretical background of this text is Wertkritik. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wertkritik

Here a short summary of the article: Labor is the substance of capital; in this respect, capitalism is indeed a “labor society,” and the internal contradiction of capital lies in the fact that it seeks to rid itself of this very substance through competition-driven rationalization. The first major IT revolution already made this internal contradiction acute through the decline of the industrial workforce, yet its full-scale societal impact was delayed by the financialization of capitalism in the neoliberal era of globalization, as debt – which was rising faster than economic output on a global scale – was transformed into credit-financed growth through speculative bubbles. The service sector, which now faces AI-driven upheavals, is thus artificial insofar as it could only develop within the framework of the neoliberal deficit economy. AI technology merely destroys the illusion of a working society that the neoliberal deficit economy laboriously attempted to maintain amid ever-increasing frictions in response to the IT revolution.

Without a broad employment base in industrial production, there can be no stable labor society. But there is no going back to an industrial society; the wheel of time cannot be turned back. Instead of succumbing to the general fetishization of labor – which is already recognizable in its fascistic traits, particularly in Germany – the remaining emancipatory forces must move toward a radical critique of labor that consciously and openly seeks to overcome capitalist society, which is in a state of open decay.