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this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2026
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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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There is one way how capitalism can work, and it did work for a while:
Worker action, from voting to unionisation, strikes up to revolution are all things that happen under the umbrella of capitalism, and as much as capitalists want to ban that, it's all just part of the same coin.
If capitalists play nice and fair, pay good wages and make sure the workers have a decent live, then the system is stable and as a reward they get stability to make business.
If they get too greedy and squeeze the workers too hard, workers push back. They form unions, vote left, start striking, and in the worst case they destroy equipment and start a revolution. This is the kind of power that the people have.
In theory.
Due to clever manipulaton, the capitalists managed to divide the working class and pit them against each other. This worked fine for a few decades, but it's wearing thin. It will take maybe 5-15 years until it all comes to a head and explodes.
And OP is right. Back in the day you had to get the military to shoot their own people. With automated weapon systems and AI/robots performing more and more of the productivity, this balance shifts rapidly, and it will likely lead to a total system breakdown with unforeseeable results.
Trump was successful in lying to industrial sector unionized that he'd bring back manufacturing to the US. His direct harm to that, and agricultural, sector shouldn't take that long to break the disillusionment. ie midterms. Q4 GDP, despite massive AI/datacenter investment cycle, grew at under 1%, with real economy contracting. The 45 year GOP plan of trickle down oligarchist/corporatist supremacism should be attacked more strongly for the lie that it is.
The Soviet Union as a counterweight was good for worker benefits as well. Keep the workers happy, keep the machine running.
Western Euro-Communism was seen as a real threat during the 1960s and 70s.
Totally this. The capitalists feared that yet another country could spiral into revolution and then communism, so they had to keep the workers happy.
The collapse of the Soviet Union combined with neoliberalism and globalism shifted the balance. Now they could always threaten their workers "If you are unhappy, we'll move production to Singapore or Vietnam. So behave if you want to have a job."
With AI and robots this shifts further. Let's see where this goes.
It’s not just moving industry to countries with cheap labor, there’s also importing cheap labor.
These two things have positive effects for workers elsewhere because they get skilled and comparatively well paid jobs.
A fully globalized economy should eventually balance itself out regarding wages for similarly skilled jobs.
It will be fascinating to see a post scarcity economy. Will all people work as artists, personal trainers, motivational speakers, artisanal bakers, and such?
In theory. In practice, the planet is too big for unified union action or unified political action. You can unionize on a country level and call general strikes on a country level. You can't do that on planet scale. Globalized economy sidesteps the power of unions and the power of the people in general.
Technically, we have been living in a post-scarcity economy for the last 50-70 years already. We have a massive global food overproduction. We have more than enough resources to give everyone a pretty nice standard of living. But on the one hand we have a massively inefficient economical system, where huge parts of the population do redundant work and bullshit jobs, while another huge part of the population do tasks that just exist to prop up the system (e.g. the whole financial and marketing sectors only exists because of the capitalist system, they aren't doing anything worthwhile at all).
We live in an artificial scarcity society, because capitalism needs artificial scarcity to work.
People sell their labour for money, which they then use to buy stuff from the capitalists, and the capitalists use (part of) the money to buy labour from people.
With AI and robots, this will soon not be necessary any more. The labour of the people will be even less relevant than it is today. So the question then becomes whether (a) the system will collapse and what will happen afterwards or (b) if we will just pump even more bullshit into our bullshit jobs to prop up the old system.
No, they will all starve, because they can't make their own food, and are no longer valuable.