IN AN interview with The Economist, Elon Musk said he believes that artificial intelligence (AI) will make work by humans “optional,” that robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of “amazing abundance” and that money will become meaningless.

In doing so, Musk is sounding the death knell of capitalism. “Abundance” is the antithesis of commodity production and commodity production lies at the heart of the system of capitalist production and exchange. An item that’s available in abundance — air for instance — cannot be treated as a commodity; it cannot be traded; it has no exchange value.

It was Friedrich Engels who in a piece in 1847 entitled The Principles of Communism predicted that improvements in science and technology would ultimately result in “an abundance of goods” in such a way as to “be able to satisfy the needs of all [society’s] members.” So, what is not to like?

Artificial intelligence exposes the inherent contradiction that capitalists face: in an effort to increase profits, capitalists have, since the Industrial Revolution, strived to replace workers with machines. This was taken further with automation and now reached its zenith with AI.

The purpose is to lower the wage bill by cutting down the number of employees, who constitute the very component of the production process that delivers surplus value and hence the profit capitalists crave.

But if profits are to increase with such labour-saving techniques, the average surplus value produced by the now diminished number of employees must increase.

These new labour-saving machines, like all machines, do not create surplus value. They merely pass on their value, based on the amount of labour-time involved in their production, to the products that the particular capitalist is engaged in making.

The employees for their part also add to the value of the product. They do so directly through the amount of time they spend on its production.

If, for instance, a group of 10 employees spends 20 hours on a product, 20 hours of labour-time is added directly to the value of the product.

However, and here is the rub, these employees are only paid the value of their reproduction — that is, the cost of keeping them in a state in which they may continue to offer their services day in, day out; an amount which is smaller than the value they add to the product.

The difference between the two is the surplus value which the capitalist pockets as profit. If by using AI that group of 10 employees was cut by half as a result of automation/AI, then each of the remaining employees must now produce twice as much surplus value as before just to maintain the profit level, otherwise profits will drop.

In the short term, high profits are made by the capitalists who are first to introduce labour-saving technologies and techniques, but when these become common practice and are employed by other capitalists, that advantage disappears.

The net result over time is an increase in the production of these goods, bringing their prices down.

Artificial intelligence has taken this tendency to its logical conclusion in replacing human labour with AI-based technology on a mass scale. Production of goods can take place with little intervention from human labour, when work by humans becomes “optional.”

In such a scenario, the surplus value that the remaining workforce has to create becomes prohibitively high, and as fewer and fewer workers are employed, it begins to approach infinity. At this point, the system collapses under the weight of its own demands. In this respect, AI acts as a catalyst for the demise of capitalism.

God works in mysterious ways, and so does the evolutionary transformation of capitalism — in a more subtle process than the traditional “storming of the palace” scenario, which is a version of events that has held the left back for decades.

Through any evolutionary process, there are short, sharp and painful moments that are essential to move the process forward and they happen when the old system is at its peak, and seemingly invincible.

Artificial intelligence is such a moment, when capital feels so omnificent it doesn’t even need workers to extract huge profits. Yet it is precisely at this moment that it is at its most vulnerable, regardless of the eye-watering, record-breaking trillion-dollar valuations of tech companies, of the likes of chipmaker Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI.

With AI, capitalism is experiencing a metamorphosis moment. “Workers are the grave diggers of capitalism,” says the Communist Manifesto — but who actually administers the fatal blow; who puts the dagger in and kills the beast? Grave diggers do not — they prepare the final resting place for the deceased.

It is capitalism itself that administers the fatal blow, the final act, in the same way that a caterpillar does when it metamorphoses into a butterfly.

Is the metamorphosis of a caterpillar its saviour or its slayer? It is both. Its demise is also its salvation — its death is also its rebirth. It sacrifices itself to save itself by evolving into a beautiful butterfly.

So it is with capitalism; it kills itself to save itself by evolving away from the dominance of commodity production into a system of production and exchange whose aim is to meet the needs of the people through such measures as nationalising public utilities and transforming profit-making businesses into social enterprises– what is commonly known as socialism. 

Fawzi Ibrahim is author of Capitalism versus Planet Earth — an irreconcilable conflict.