Read The Fragment on Machines, Marx's Capital (especially the sections on machinery and relative surplus value), Nick Dyer-Witheford's Cyber-Marx, and Aaron Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Also look into Paul Mason's Postcapitalism, Srnicek's Platform Capitalism, and the autonomist Marxist tradition, especially the work of Antonio Negri and the concept of the general intellect. Matteo Pasquinelli's The Eye of the Master is particularly relevant for understanding how AI emerges from the historical organization and abstraction of human labor rather than simply appearing as some autonomous technological miracle. BUT the crucial thing is that AI exposes a contradiction that a lot of contemporary leftists seem almost pathologically incapable of confronting - the abolition of necessary human labor should be the POINT. We need to become more than our placement in the marketplace and reconnect with our own authentic identities and selves outside of a job. Not the preservation of wage labor as some sacred institution that must survive technological development indefinitely. The objective should be thinking bigger. The genuinely radical horizon is POST-LABOR. Not necessarily the literal disappearance of all human work, but the abolition of compulsory wage labor as the organizing principle of social existence. AI potentially makes that more materially conceivable, while simultaneously making the concentration of economic power catastrophically worse if existing property relations remain intact. The dialectic will inevitably respond. The fundamental antagonism is increasingly between the social character of intelligence production and the private ownership of the infrastructure through which that intelligence is deployed. AI models are trained on collective human cultural production and maintained through enormous networks of material and intellectual labor. Meanwhile the infrastructure and profit is concentrated in a handful of corporations. The technology is not inherently capitalist. Its ownership and deployment are political-economic questions. Open-source models, public ownership of the infrastructure, and universal access to increasingly automated productive capacity are vastly more interesting emancipatory projects than either corporate accelerationism or reflexive anti-technology Luddism.

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