How AI Changes Class Dynamics

Discussion

Benjammin Life:

"For most of the industrial era, working people held a card they could play. It was not a strong hand. But it was a hand. Capital needed labor. You could not run the mill, the line, the mine, or the warehouse without human beings showing up to do the work. That necessity, the simple fact that the owners could not produce profit without workers, gave workers a bargaining position. And from that bargaining position, through more than a century of struggle, they extracted nearly everything we now think of as the markers of a decent society.

It is worth saying plainly what was won, because we have come to treat these things as if they were simply properties of the natural order. The two-day weekend. The eight-hour day. Public education. The end of child labor. Workplace safety laws. The right to organize, to bargain collectively, to strike. The very idea that a person who works should be able to live.

None of it was given. All of it was taken, won by people who organized at enormous personal risk. The textile workers and the miners who struck and were beaten and sometimes killed for it by corporate mercenaries and national militaries. The Catholic Workers and the radicals and the ordinary people who, during the brutal early decades of the industrial revolution, refuted the notion that human beings were simply inputs to be consumed. They built protections out of nothing but solidarity and the leverage that came from being necessary.

That’s the crucial word. Necessary. The whole architecture of workers’ rights rests on a single load-bearing fact: that capital could not do without labor, and so labor could make demands.

That load-bearing fact is now being removed.

The bargaining position has been eroding for decades, through offshoring, through automation, through the systematic dismantling of the unions that once gave it institutional form. But AI represents something categorically different from the previous waves. It’s not relocating the work to cheaper hands. It’s making the hands unnecessary. And once you no longer need workers to generate profit, the entire basis on which working people could demand anything simply dissolves.

We are watching the final erosion of a bargaining position that took a century of blood and sweat and sacrifice to build. And the people doing the eroding understand exactly what they are doing."

(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/the-solarpunk-revolution-is-inevitable?)