Let’s get one thing straight: AI decimating middle-class desk jobs is not a win for the working class. It’s a crisis for everyone, just not equally. The commentariat suddenly discovers that the “future of work” might not include them, and the takeaway is finally some good news for the grafters? Spare us the sentimentalism. What’s being packaged here as a “boom” for the working class is in fact the continuation of the same system. Just with a different class in the firing line. And, as ever, the spoils will not be evenly shared.
This argument. AI is coming for the marketers and solicitors but not the brickies and sparkies, has a smug, self-congratulatory smell to it. It flatters the myth of post-pandemic revaluation, the idea that Covid “reshaped our notions of essential work.” It didn’t. It clapped for carers, then slashed their wages. The working class didn’t suddenly become valued. They were just harder to replace at that moment.
What we’re seeing now is not a renaissance of labour but a reorganisation of class domination. And if you think the trades are safe, you haven’t been paying attention. Yes, you can’t get ChatGPT to fix a boiler—yet. But capital does not rest. Robotic bricklaying machines already exist. AI-powered predictive maintenance diagnostics are on the way. Amazon’s warehouse “picking” bots aren’t there to assist workers. They’re there to replace them. It’s only a matter of profitability, not possibility.
The romantic turn to manual labour as a secure future is, ironically, a middle-class fantasy. It’s the same delusion that told kids they should all go to university, and now tells them to pick up a wrench instead. But the truth is, AI will create more jobs only under conditions where those jobs are profitable for capital. And we already know what kind of jobs those are: precarious, surveilled, unorganised, and deskilled.
Take the line from economist Guy Standing about “the precariat.”1 It’s useful, but only if we stop pretending this is something new. The working class has always been precarious. The so-called precariat is just a way of saying that middle-class security was a historical blip. Welcome to the rest of the economy.
What we are facing is not the great working-class revival. It’s a race to the bottom with fewer protections and less collective power. When Beaty’s piece marvels at the electrician who drives an Audi, it confuses relative scarcity with structural uplift. A shortage of skilled labour in the trades means higher wages, for now. But that’s not empowerment. It’s supply-and-demand dressed up as social mobility. And it can turn.
If AI continues to intensify capital’s grip, automate decision-making, devalue expertise, and render labour increasingly disposable, it won’t matter if you work with words or wires. You are a commodity to be rationalised. That’s why the question isn’t which jobs will be safe. The question is: who controls the technology, and in whose interest is it deployed?
The so-called “AI revolution” is being led by monopolists and venture capitalists, not communities or unions. And their interest lies in accumulation, not liberation. The goal isn’t to free us from toil, it’s to make toil more efficient, more monitored, and more profitable. Unless we organise around democratic control of tech and public ownership of AI infrastructure, this won’t be a revolution, it’ll be another enclosure.
So no, this isn’t the dawn of a golden age for the working class. It’s another turn of the screw.
Footnotes
- Guy Standing’s term “precariat” is useful for describing the erosion of stable, protected employment in the Global North. But from a Marxist perspective, this so-called new class is better understood as the working class under neoliberalism. What Standing identifies as precarity is the historical norm for most workers globally, especially women, racialised people, and migrants. The “golden age” of secure employment was limited to a narrow stratum of mostly white, male, Western workers during the postwar boom, and was sustained by imperial plunder, domestic labour, and trade union strength. The shock isn’t that precarity exists. It’s that the professional classes are now beginning to experience it too. ↩︎
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