My father, over lunch, said it plainly: “AI is coming after you. The robots came for my generation, the factory workers, toolmakers, people on the line. Now they’re coming for yours.”
He’s right. In the post-war decades, automation meant the mechanisation of hands. The assembly line was streamlined, the worker replaced by the robot arm, the punch card, the programmable logic controller. But the jobs that remained (or emerged) were considered safe: the white-collar roles, the professions of speech, judgement, creation, care. These were human things.
Now the machine has learned to listen. To mimic. To write. To recognise tone. To track emotion. To generate. The aim is no longer to displace brawn. But to simulate cognition, affect, culture. The machine doesn’t just do (it represents. It doesn’t just perform) it predicts.
The production line was the battlefield of your father’s time.
Your father was told to retrain or retire. Today, you’re told to “collaborate with AI,” to use productivity tools, to become faster, leaner, more data-driven. But the subtext is the same: you’re not the future. The machine is.
There’s a brutal symmetry here. One generation lost its grip on the tools of production. Another is now watching its mind, speech, and sociality become the raw material of the next extraction regime. First they automated muscle. Now they automate thought.
Behind it all, capital smiles, because the logic is unchanged.
Automation, under capitalism, is never about freedom. It is about control. The same machine, different face. The same displacement, now dressed as innovation.
In his essay for Anti*Capitalist Resistance, Dylan Naughten writes that the Artisan campaign slogan Stop Hiring Humans isn’t simply tasteless advertising. It’s something more serious, more revealing. It is the articulation, in marketing-speak, of capital’s deepest wish: a world of production without producers. A world without unions, demands, wages, sick days, or sabotage. A world where labour no longer matters because it no longer exists. In short: the machine without us.
The Artisan campaign is just one symptom of this shift. It joins the chorus of Silicon Valley utopianism that insists AI will liberate us from toil, automate away our drudgery, and allow us to live lives of leisure, creativity, and rest. The dream of a four-day week, universal basic income, post-scarcity abundance. But in a system where wealth is privately owned, work is coerced, and the productive forces are steered by profit, this vision becomes a lie with revolutionary origins and reactionary consequences. As Naughten points out, the left has long flirted with the idea of work abolition, but “this can never be true if work abolitionism is driven by tech-billionaires and software moguls.” What Artisan offers is not liberation. It is displacement.
Marx saw this coming. The factory system, he wrote in the Grundrisse, already contained the seeds of capital’s dream to expel labour from the labour process altogether. Machines were not neutral: they were expressions of class power. “It is not the worker who employs the means of production,” he wrote, “but the means of production which employ the worker.” In 2025, this formulation demands inversion. The worker no longer operates the machine, nor does the machine merely operate the worker. The worker is becoming training data. The worker is the machine, fodder for the algorithm, substrate for the model, source code for a simulated intelligence that learns by devouring us.
“Labour produces not only commodities,” Marx observed. “It produces itself and the capitalist as a commodity.”
But what happens when labour no longer produces the capitalist. When the capitalist is produced instead by the machine?
Naughten’s article makes the crucial point: this is not just about technology. It’s about capitalist social relations. AI development is driven not by a neutral technological imperative but by the needs of capital. The need to reduce costs, discipline labour, and expand accumulation. Under these conditions, automation is not a route to leisure. It is a route to obsolescence. A way to devalue the human while extracting every residual trace of value from what humans leave behind: their words, gestures, habits, preferences, memories. What is being built is not a post-work utopia, but a class project of dispossession, cloaked in the aesthetics of innovation.
Here is the dialectic: the same productive force that could, in another social order, free us from necessity, is instead rendering us unnecessary within the existing one. The contradiction sharpens. The more powerful the machines become, the less power the workers have. As long as capital commands the process, automation will not abolish work, it will abolish the worker.
This is where Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation returns with force. Once, it was the enclosure of land, the theft of the commons, the transformation of peasants into propertyless proletarians. Today, it is the enclosure of attention, affect, and self. Every scroll, click, keystroke, voice memo, or facial scan becomes a moment of unfree labour. A new kind of expropriation. Surveillance capitalism was the first step. Generative AI is the next. The commons of human expression are not simply being monitored; they are being mined.
The Artisan campaign makes this explicit. “Humans Are So 2023.” The slogan sounds like satire. It’s not. It is ideology. It announces the obsolescence of the very subject who makes value in the first place. The worker becomes disposable not because work is done, but because capital has found a way to simulate work without workers. The fantasy is complete: surplus value with no surplus population. No working class, no class struggle. Just data.
But this is a fantasy with limits. Because AI doesn’t abolish value production. It merely mystifies it. The data doesn’t appear from nowhere. The models are trained on stolen labour: the books we wrote, the art we made, the conversations we had, the gestures we expressed. Even now, AI models rely on underpaid human annotators and ghost labour, cleaning, curating, correcting. Behind every chatbot lies a shadow proletariat.
Marx would have seen this as the latest iteration of alienation. The worker no longer recognises themselves in the product of their labour, because their labour has been absorbed, atomised, and reanimated by the machine. Their language speaks back to them in another voice. Their thoughts return, stripped of politics, sold back as productivity tools. Alienation becomes hallucination.
“Capital is dead labour,” Marx warned, “which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour.”
Now, it sucks memory, voice, and imagination. And in doing so, it dreams of a system in which the class relation is replaced by a training relation, where the worker’s role is not to produce, but to be extracted from. The future of work becomes the future of surveillance.
This is the terrain on which the left must fight. We cannot oppose AI with nostalgia for the dignity of toil. Nor can we accept Artisan’s narrative that work will simply dissolve into leisure. We must insist: automation can only be liberatory under different relations of production. A planned, democratic economy, run through workers’ councils and accountable institutions could harness automation to shorten the working week, redistribute wealth, and expand collective joy. But this will not happen by default. It will never happen under capitalism.
The Labour government, for its part, sees value only in work. Not in life, not in care, not in solidarity, just productivity. No one embodies this vision more clearly than Liz Kendall, now Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. You couldn’t get further right within the party. Kendall has revived the worst Blairite language of “strivers and skivers” but dressed it in the bureaucratic blandness of “economic inactivity” and “getting Britain back to work.” Under her watch, the government has announced sweeping reforms to disability benefits, targeting Personal Independence Payments and tightening the already punitive Work Capability Assessment. People are to be judged not by what they need, but by what they can perform.
Kendall’s approach is not technocratic. It is ideological. A return to moral capitalism, where the sick and disabled are suspect by default and only those who can perform wage labour are deemed socially legitimate. Labour’s welfare policy doesn’t challenge the cruelty of the Tory years, it perfects it. Those who cannot work are coerced to prove their worth. Those who do work are reminded that they are only as secure as their output. In this context, the rise of AI doesn’t promise liberation, it serves as threat. If the machine can do it faster, cheaper, or without protest, then what are you for? A system already designed to discard the unprofitable is now armed with tools to make that discarding look efficient.
Naughten is right to remind us that socialism must be the quest for a liberatory machinery. But it also requires a confrontation with the machinery as it exists now: built on exploitation, coded in hierarchy, deployed for dispossession. AI is not outside the class struggle. It is its latest battlefield.
The Artisan campaign invites us to laugh at our own disappearance. To welcome our redundancy with irony and resignation. But the task is not to stop the machine. It is to seize it. To repurpose it for collective life, not private profit. To reject the fantasy that intelligence can be programmed without politics, that labour can be eliminated without consequence, that humans are optional.
Marx, if he lived to see the Artisan billboard, would not be surprised. He would not panic. He would name the contradiction. Then he would organise.
The machine cannot liberate us until we liberate the machine.
