Karl Marx and Artificial Intelligence: Liberation or New Alienation?

The Historical Context: Marx and the Industrial Machine

When Karl Marx analyzed English industry in the latter half of the nineteenth century, he witnessed—through data, reports, and observations—an epochal transformation. Steam engines were replacing artisanal labor, mechanical looms were supplanting weavers, and entire categories of workers saw their skills rendered obsolete by automation. His analysis of this phenomenon, contained primarily in Das Kapital (1867), was not a Luddite reaction to technology, but a profound reflection on the relationship between the means of production, ownership, and alienation.

For Marx, the problem was not the machine itself, but who owned it. In the capitalist system, he observed, the machine becomes a tool to extend and intensify the working day beyond natural limits, turning the worker into an appendage of the productive apparatus. Technology, in capitalist hands, does not free the worker from toil, but tends to subordinate the human rhythm to the mechanical one.

The concept of Marxist alienation precisely describes this condition: the worker is estranged from the product of their labor (which belongs to the capitalist), from the labor process itself (which they do not control), from their own human essence (reduced to labor-commodity), and from other human beings (placed in competition rather than cooperation). The machine, inserted into a context of capital dominance, accentuates this alienation rather than alleviating it.

The Anachronistic Hypothesis: Marx Confronting AI

If we could transport Marx to the twenty-first century and show him ChatGPT, machine learning systems, robots capable of assembling cars, or algorithms that write code, what would his reaction be? The exercise is inevitably speculative, but we can trace two scenarios consistent with his philosophy.

The Scenario of Possible Liberation

Marx would immediately recognize the extraordinary potential in AI. In the Grundrisse (preparatory notes for Das Kapital in which Marx outlines the fundamentals of the critique of political economy, 1857-1858), in the famous “Fragment on Machines,” he had already hypothesized that technological development could drastically reduce necessary labor time and free humanity from economic dependence: “The appropriation of alien labor time, upon which present-day wealth is based, appears as a miserable basis in relation to this new one that has developed in the meantime”—as he wrote in a passage anticipating the idea of increasingly automated production.

AI would represent, in this perspective, the apex of that process: machines capable not only of replacing manual labor but also intellectual labor. The production of goods and services could theoretically occur with minimal human intervention. In a post-capitalist society—the communism Marx imagined—this would mean the end of the necessity of wage labor as a means of subsistence.

In this utopian scenario, AI would manage production, distribute resources according to need, and human beings would finally be free to dedicate themselves to what Marx called “creative labor”: art, philosophy, social relations, self-realization. Work, shifting from necessity, would become an expression of human nature, no longer alienated but fully gratifying. We discussed this extensively when commenting on a fine video by the philosopher Massimo Cacciari.

The Scenario of New Alienation

But Marx, as a historical materialist, would not stop at this ideal vision. He would immediately notice who owns the means of production of AI: large technology corporations, investment funds, economic elites. And here he would recognize the same dynamic as in industrial capitalism, only amplified.

AI in capitalist hands, Marx would say, does not free workers but renders them superfluous. Technological unemployment fuels what he termed the “industrial reserve army”—masses of unemployed people exerting downward pressure on the wages of those still working. Laid-off workers are not transformed into artists and philosophers, but often fall into poverty, precarity, irrelevance in the economy.

Furthermore, Marx would see new forms of digital alienation: gig economy workers reduced to cogs in algorithmic platforms, content moderators traumatized by continuous exposure to violence, data labelers in developing countries paid cents to train systems that enrich Californian billionaires. AI does not eliminate exploitation; it delocalizes it and makes it less visible.

He would also observe the concentration of power: a few companies control the most advanced models, the data, the computational infrastructure. This concentration of “intellectual means of production” creates a new technological aristocracy, a class that not only owns capital but controls the very production of knowledge and meaning.

The Dialectical Synthesis

Marx was a dialectical thinker: he saw history as a movement of contradictions. He would probably conclude that AI represents both possibilities simultaneously—it is both a potential for liberation and an instrument of oppression. Which of the two will be realized depends on the capacity of citizens to organize and claim collective control over these technologies.

He might then suggest that the task is not to destroy the machine, but to return it to the common good: certainly, he would argue, to remove it from private ownership, recognizing that its power stems from collective knowledge, to reduce necessary labor time, and to allow everyone to participate in the benefits of automation. The goal would no longer be growth, but the human measure of freed time.

Perhaps, he would say, the question is not whether AI is good or bad, but who governs it, and for whom it works. Technology is never neutral: it takes on the form of the powers that direct it. An intelligence built for profit will reproduce the logic of domination; a shared technology could, on the contrary, become an instrument of emancipation.

Our time is played out in this ambiguity. It is not the machine that decides man's destiny, but the consciousness with which he employs it. And so the ghost of Marx continues to wander—among the digital factories and the servers of Silicon Valley—reminding us that progress, without justice, is only a new form of alienation (certainly a dazzling one, there is no doubt about that).