Leveraging AI against Capitalism: It's Time for the 15-Hour Workweek [KKF longread]
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Luddite
13 min read
The article references 'the losing path of the Luddites' as a response to automation. Understanding the actual historical Luddite movement—textile workers who destroyed machinery in early 19th century England—provides crucial context for debates about technological unemployment and worker resistance to automation.
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Bullshit Jobs
12 min read
The article directly references 'bullshit jobs' as a category of work that AI could eliminate. David Graeber's anthropological concept and book examining meaningless employment is central to the article's argument about which jobs humans should be freed from.
Guest essay from Egor Kotkin. Support Egor’s work on Substack and Patreon. Follow him on Twitter and YouTube
In contemporary progressive/left politics, there is a fundamental misconception of the relationship between the left political project and the working class, which has entered the 21st century with the baggage of the 20th century and, like everything else in it, has remained unexamined. To put it simply, the anti-capitalist struggle has come to be understood as a struggle to empower working people as a class, whereas in reality it has always been about the liberation of people from the working class.
This distinction is anything but technical or academic—especially now, when technological progress has reached or is approaching the point where automation can replace a significant portion of human labor.
In the paradigm of the struggle for the working class, this is an existential threat, since with the loss of the need for the worker’s labor, the worker loses the power that the ability to withhold their labor gave them.
But if we take a step back, this makes no sense in the bigger picture: being a worker has never been a human dream, and permanent employment has never been what the idea of freedom meant. Throughout history, people have dreamed of an artificial servant who would do their work—these themes have existed in myths since as far back as preserved records of myths goes; it’s quite possible that they were created with the transition to agriculture and the emergence of the peasant—the first worker.
Right now the undisguised threats of a massive permanent reduction in the labor force required by capital, regularly issued by the AI kingpins, taken at face value, as a danger for working people, causing even genuinely anti-capitalist voices to take either
the losing path of the Luddites,
or the self-defeating path of defending capitalist employment at any cost—which only means a willingness to re-negotiate conditions already incompatible with normal life into even worse ones.
Both choices follow from:
the underlying assumption that AI capitalists are in a position of strength,
and from an understanding of the struggle for the interests of the working person as a struggle for their jobs (ideally, for better jobs, but in such dire circumstances, at least to keep them)
—where the former follows from the latter, in other words, the AI capitalists appear to be in a position of strength, ...
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