…but now they don’t. As ideologists for capitalism, they, of course, had to resist the idea that AI would expose how little interest capitalist modes of production have in wage laborers–blue collar workers learned this decades ago, but now white collar workers are being lined up at the firing line. As I said in a debate about “Capitalism, Social Democracy, and Socialism” a few years back at the University of Wisconsin at Madison:

[C]apitalists do not provide jobs for people out of altruistic concern for the welfare of others: they do so only because it is necessary to produce the goods that are their source of profit. A l those whose lives depend upon wages from capitalist producers work and survive only as long as some capitalist needs them to. Because capitalist producers are always locked in life-and-death competition struggles with other capitalists, they must reduce costs where they can, and increase productivity where they can, sometimes doing both at the same time. Global corporations move jobs to India or Mexico for one simple reason: labor costs are lower there. Corporations embrace new technologies, like robots, because over the long term they are much cheaper than even cheap human labor.

Here’s how the New York Times put it in a story about corporate executives meeting at the Davis World Economic Forum:

“They’ ll never admit it in public, but many of your bosses want machines to replace you as soon as possible .[I]n private settings…these executives tel a different story: They are racing to automate their own work forces to stay ahead of the competition, with little regard for the impact on workers. Al over the world, executives are spending bilions of dolars to transform their businesses into lean, digitized, highly automated operations. They crave the fat profit margins automation can deliver, and they see A.I. as a golden ticket to savings, perhaps by letting them whittle departments with thousands of workers down to just a few dozen . In Davos, executives tend to speak about automation as a natural phenomenon over which they have no control, like hurricanes or heat waves. They claim that if they don’t automate jobs as quickly as possible, their competitors will. As to who will buy the products of their operations once al the workers are gone .well, that doesn’t seem to occur to any of them.”

And that, in a journalistic nutshell, is the problem that faces us under capitalism: capitalist producers must reduce their costs, for if they don’t, their competitors wil do so and then drive them out of business. Since the logic of capitalism demands reduction of production costs, and since the wages of most people under capitalism are simply “production costs” to be reduced or eliminated, this cannot end well.

We discuss this in Chapter 4 of our Marx book, with additional evidence that this started happening two decades ago in the advanced capitalist economies, even before AI. The NYT, as the ideological mouthpiece for the prudent wing of the capitalist class, often picks up these signals, but without putting them in the right systemic context. As Rosa Luxembourg said, our ultimate choices are likely to be socialism (using increased productivity to meet human needs and free people from wage slavery) or barbarism. Trumpism represents, of course, the barbarism end of the spectrum, and hardly in its most barbaric form (yet).