Annihilation of the workers

Work, the planned modification of the physical world and the world of ideas, without which civilization would not exist. A biblical curse that punishes the original sin of aspiring to be like gods through knowledge; it could elevate us to omnipotence or annihilate us.

Paradoxically, part of human work is precisely aimed at preventing this. Tools and machines amplify and, ultimately, supplant our strength; the same is true for most of our faculties: the ability to think is no exception.

Much is said about the capabilities of artificial intelligence; very little about its social effects. In his brilliant 1891 article, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," Oscar Wilde argued that all heavy, monotonous, unhealthy, and degrading labor should be performed by machines, freeing humans for creation or the supreme enjoyment of life. Our aesthete asserted that this would only be possible in a socialist society, where machines and nature belonged to everyone.

Logically, the utopia envisioned by the Irish aesthete would seem inevitable. But illogicality dictates that increasingly, two factors in the equation—capital and commodities—are monopolized by a tiny minority, while the vast majority are left only with labor to contribute. And two centuries later, increasingly sophisticated machines appear ever more capable of replacing workers who own nothing.

How do the world's elite envision this future where a few will own everything and everyone will own almost nothing? The first part of the answer is the same as that of Marx, Engels, and Wilde: specifically human labor will be replaced by automated work. Regarding the second question, there are only evasions and omissions. In a 2025 interview with The Economist, billionaire Elon Musk (then head of the Department of Government Efficiency) stated that automation would facilitate such abundance that money would become "irrelevant," artificial intelligence would surpass human intelligence within five years, and human labor would become "optional" in ten. Let's ask ourselves what the effects of this will be.

(https://www.economist.com/insider/the-insider/an-interview-with-elon-musk).

Let's recap some data on the global concentration of wealth. In Capital (1867), Marx argued that wealth tends to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands. Countless authors, including Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), confirm this assertion. The World Inequality Report states that “the top 10% of income earners make more than the remaining 90%, while the poorest half of the global population appropriates less than 10% of total global income. Wealth is even more concentrated in the top 10% of the owners, who possess three-quarters of global wealth, while the poorest half of the population owns just 2%.” (https://wir2026.wid.world/insight/executive-summary/).

This extreme inequality stems from two constant strategies employed by capital to maximize profit: raising the prices of the goods it offers and lowering the wages of the workers who produce them. With few exceptions, both precepts have governed capitalism from its inception to the present day: they are its existential principles, since the profit or surplus value of capital derives from the worker adding value to raw materials for which they are not compensated. Capital has spared no resource, trick, or crime to maintain high profits and minimal labor costs: police, armies, corrupt politicians, religious figures, corrupt media, anti-labor legislation, strikebreakers, relocating industrial parks to countries with nearly free labor, and wars.

On what grounds, then, would capital make available to everyone an "abundance" not paid for with money that would "lose its meaning" nor with labor that would become "optional"? I'll give you one: socialism, or its higher stage, communism. Only with the social ownership of automated productive forces would their product be freely available to all.

Without it, the fully automated future world would function solely and exclusively, first for the 10% and eventually for the 1% who own 90% and then 99% of the wealth. Do you doubt it? Elon Musk himself, the prophet of “optional” work, laid off 121.000 workers during his brief tenure at the Department of Government Efficiency between January and May 2025. No “abundance,” no “optional work,” and no “irrelevant” money. The brutal fate of the expendable worker is nothing other than unemployment and destitution. Or, ultimately, mass elimination.

Other proposals for addressing the problem display the same pathetic disorientation. The universal basic income proposal suggests providing everyone with periodic sums of money to cover their needs, regardless of whether they work or not. While viable in a socialist system, it runs counter to the logic and very practice of capitalism for 10% of the owners of nearly 90% of the world's wealth to dedicate it to providing free pensions for the rest of humanity.

Sam Altman of OpenAI acknowledges that computing reduces the demand for human labor and merely recommends redistribution mechanisms. Sundar Pichai of Google advises resignation because every technological revolution eliminates jobs and creates new ones (although computing could abolish them entirely).

It's astonishing that the astute managers of such a definitive transformation in the means of production are so obtuse when it comes to foreseeing its consequences. It's no wonder all the billionaires on the planet are building impregnable bunkers in which to take refuge. "Socialism or barbarism!" Rosa Luxemburg declared in 1916. Socialism or extinction is the new slogan of the working class, with no alternative destiny other than to be supplanted and destroyed by the very computer systems it has created.