AI and the World

AI and the World 

Mark Wain June 1, 2025

It is a common knowledge that humans are not machines, contrary to the assertions of René Descartes (1596–1650) and Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751). Machines are merely our servants, or at the very best, our labor-assistants. Ever since our ancestors evolved from amoeba hundreds of millions of years ago, no other one in the animal kingdom, let alone machines, had ever challenged our non-machinery and supreme existence.

“In the First Industrial Revolution, in the late 18th and 19th centuries, steam engines transformed various industries and driving economic growth that transformed societies from agrarian, rural economies to industrialized, urban ones. This period saw the introduction of power-driven machinery, mass production in factories, and significant shifts in social and economic structures. 

The Second Industrial Revolution saw mass production enabled by electricity and assembly lines, with advancements in steel, chemicals, and transportation. The Third Industrial Revolution, also known as the Digital Revolution, brought about the rise of digital technologies, automation, and the internet. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Industry 4.0, is characterized by the integration of cyber-physical systems, the internet of things, and advanced technologies like AI and cloud computing. (https://www.google.com/ ) ”

Humans had never been challenged by machines for their existence before the AI storm. Machines, in either analog or digitized eras, were compatible to humans’ needs as capital owners could not tolerate slow responses, strikes, and bargaining and workers could not accept heavy, dull, dirty, monotonic, and dangerous tasks which were mandatory on their physical and mental labor. The contradictions between humans and machines were resolved and translated into co-existence and mutual benefits, although bosses continuously used oppressed human beings as either manual or mental laborers for money making purposes.

The AI industry at present in the era of private wealth has taken up seriously the 18thcentury insidious and deadly wrong idea that humans are machines in toto and the myth of the Golem, from Jewish folklore, that told of a clay creature brought to life by magic, often by rabbis, whom the AI industrialists seem have happily substituted.

The wily capitalist AI leadership has declared that all machines can be manipulated at will and factory workers can be entirely superseded by machines as well, merely by means of AI's omniscient and omnipotent power. Thus, AI has been elevated from its “smart encyclopedia based on machine evolution” or s.e.b.o.m.e. position to a so-called AGI framework or a pseudo-conscious and hybrid machinery-human position.

Over 40% of Microsoft 2,000 Washington state employees, mainly programmers, have been laid off.  McKinsey Company estimates that between 400 million and 800 million individuals could be displaced globally. Additionally, a McKinsey report suggests 2.4 million US jobs could be replaced by AI by 2030, with an additional 12 million occupational shifts. 

If the AI entrepreneurs - other “masters of the universe” based on “fabricated and fictitious production” (Marx’s criticism against the German late coming capitalists of his time) than the Wall-street casino oligarchs – are winning, will the old contradictions between humans and machines and, above all, those between the working class and their bosses be resolved as their forefathers during the previous three Industrial Revolutions did, after their fierce struggles with capitalists over a period of more than three hundred years?

As there will be less workers in the infotainment-evolved AI industry hired to give away their unpaid surplus values to bosses, less profits will be made on AI. Even though productivities of the hired increase dramatically, their wages will decrease because too many workers during this storm will join in what Engels called the reserve army of the unemployed, and therefore enormously exacerbate wealth and income inequality.

Not only the blue-collar workers will lose their jobs, but also the seemingly well-positioned white-collar upper echelons of surplus-value-contributing office working force will be severely affected as well. This is, in part, because the inference power of AI exceeds that of humans; its cost has dopped enough hence AI has become a DO-IT-YOURSELF tool that everyone takes up with ease, causing many jobs and tasks to disappear.

According to Mr. Aneesh Raman, the chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn:

 “The unemployment rate for college grads has risen 30 percent since September 2022, compared with about 18 percent for all workers.

“Virtually all jobs will experience some impacts, but office jobs are expected to feel the biggest crunch: Our research suggests that professionals with more advanced degrees are more likely to see their jobs disrupted than those without. While the technology sector is feeling the first waves of change, reflecting A.I.’s mass adoption in this field, the erosion of traditional entry-level tasks is expected to play out in fields like finance, travel, food and professional services, too.

“When manufacturing jobs vanished across America’s heartland, the result was not just lost income but also social and political upheaval.”

As capitalist AI makes every endeavor to serve capital and not at all humans, none can escape the domesticated regions that capital holds sway and humans must comprehensively rely on AI, if they want to survive the disaster waiting to happen. Their work styles must be drastically changed to suit capital’s book. Workers not only have to be skilled in making close contact with AI, but also versatile in doing different works with no complaint. Workerless corporations and factories will emerge from the logical necessity of capital.

The elephantine investments in the AI data centers, including  the electromagnetic power and cooling water supplies all over the world are what Marx called the constant capital or nonwage capital which do not produce profit by living labor, because their labor-produced surplus values as profits for the center-manufacturing capital have been used up or materialized and its associated living labor has been dead. Materialized labor is dead labor.

The decreased profitability will not be acceptable to the capitalists, as their only motivity for scientific and technologic progresses, such as AI, is to concentrate on the perpetually increased profits. Among many approaches, one powerful and tried-and-true tactic of and for the society is to achieve success through nationalization of AI. After all, automation has long been discussed and confirmed to be most suitable to public-ownership societies in which labor-produced gains in wealth are enjoyed by all, rather than to private-ownership societies of today, enjoyed by a few.

Before changing the social system from private to societal ownership of wealth, the capital never ceases from investment in the data centers all over the world. The electromagnetic power supply that these centers estimated to be 1,000 in number each of which consumes about 1 GW and total consumption will be as large as 1 Tera watts. The World Coal Association estimates that some 900GW of coal generation were operating in 1992, and that this had increased to around 1.9TW by 2015. It had further increased to around 2,155 GW = 2.155TW in 2024, of which at least about ½, possibly more, will be converted to heat via data centers.  [1 GW = 1 Giga Watt = 10^9 Watts; 1 TW = 1 Tera Watt = 10^12 Watts = 10^3 GW.]

There is an insurmountable barrier for capital to switch its investment from fossil fuel power plants to renewables no matter how inexpensive or well-suited for generation of electricity the latter may be. The barrier to progress is capital itself.

Climate change is but one of the many problems that require radical changes of a dying system if it is to be saved for a time. Other problems include economic structural crises; gold worker’s productivity-based depreciations, in price and value, of commodity, means of subsistence, and means of production as labor power rather devotes its major portion of working hours to produce surplus value than create new value for the society; decline of socio-average rate of profit; automation-driven over-production, excess production capacity, over accumulation of capital which necessarily and deliberately creates a surplus population and a long-term reserve army of unemployed labor and transforms economic crises into financial crises; temporal decline of capital value in commodity, real estate, debt, stock and other financial assets such as currency etc.

Since mainstream economists as an apologist opinion-leader class have been at a loss to save the system from the danger of demise, now it is the people’s duty as well as their privilege to take the solution of these problems into their own hands.

In these days opportunity is being driven by the digital or AI economy and a production-based economy is superseded by numbers, just like manual labor has been superseded by using machinery which never asks for a raise.

There are many reasons why it happens, but one of them is the fact that automation has not only reduced the manual labor usage but also reduced labor power value or money wage and the average rate of profit. To regain the latter, capital tends to take advantage of the social nature of the internet and AI where it can acquire surplus labor power value without paying any wage hence boost the rate of profit extraordinarily high, if it can realize fully the unpaid surplus value.

In the infotainment or the digital or AI economy, web visitors or computer and AI users contribute their (working) time either online or offline viewing advertisements or AI contents from which infotainment “industries” exchange viewers’ and users’ viewing time as value for cash, when capital pays nothing for wages or the labor power spent during their working time.

For an example, Microsoft Corporation has gained 71,283% in stock value from 1986 to 2016 over 30 years, i.e., at an annual rate of increase of 2376%. Microsoft has $245 billion in sales and $88 billion in net income during the year until August, 2023 and Apple has $385 billion in sales and $101 billion in net income. There are on the average about 0.5 billion people using its Windows Operating System; each contributes, say, 2 hours a day working on their Windows machines to create surplus labor value at about $10 a day as profit for Microsoft and other companies gratis in addition to the cost on users acquiring the operating system and paying internet providers; the total working day contribution is about $1 billion, from which Microsoft and other online corporations such as Facebook, X, YouTube, Google etc., acquired and shared as profits.

In addition to Microsoft Windows machines, there are at least 2 billion smartphone users worldwide in 2016; each of them can access as many social networks as one wants. The theoretical profits that corporations accumulate from them are indeed phenomenal. In 2015, Facebook has 1.59 billion active users of which 1.44 billion are smartphone users. Its potential daily income obtained as profits from those smartphone users at say 0.25 hour a day per user at $0.25/hour adds up to about $0.1 billion a day. (Facebook announces that the average visiting time on Facebook is 50 minutes per user which is exceedingly high. It is possible that its user-time measure is exaggerated by counting time from user’s logon through logoff. Most users would not stay on Facebook all the time before logoff.)

To realize it, Facebook would have to sell 100% of its surplus value of the “guest” workers to advertisers to realize the daily $0.1 billion or annually $36.5 billion profits. Obviously, that would be a tall order. Facebook these days can realize only about a small portion, say 1% (called the realization coefficient g of the surplus value) of the surplus value created by the guestworkers every day as profit, i.e., $0.001 billion or its annual surplus value created by these guestworker is only $0.365 billion, which is insignificant compared with the total annual profit (or net income) of $3.69 billion for 2015.

Other than the guest workers, its own internal host employees will create additional surplus value.

In the service sector of which the infotainment industry is only a part, users of social networks, viewers of TV, listeners of radios, readers of online newspapers/webs and customers of different sorts participate in productive labor as well. They serve a dual role in the economy as both producers and buyers of products they produce. They contribute surplus labor powers as guestworkers and purchase the infotainment products as consumers by spending money on accessing fees to the internet and AI and subscription fees, if any. In general, in the production sector, workers and buyers of products are distinct from one another.

Other types of capital to make money the soft way include the unproductive and fictitious capital of banks, hedge funds and other financial services firms such as Charles Schwab, TIAA, and Fidelity Investments. It is questionable how this type of “virtual-reality” capital can help the economy for and of the working class that loses political power and social standing for the past several decades.

The sunny side of the American economy, as always, is for and of the rich, powerful, and influential brought into being by workers faithfully toiling for race-to-the-bottom wages.

The remedy for the problems remains the same - nationalization of these industries by breaking away with old forms, rules, laws, and politico-economic scope of capitalist system through a new democratic revolution process. The new revolution can neither be considered as another huge revolving door where fortunes of a few change hands among themselves nor be so awkwardly situated that “the pragmatic pursuit of incremental liberal policy change” as Hillary Clinton and her cohort have done carries the day. Democratic revolution means seizing major portion of the political power from, and sharing the economic power with, capital, the king, by the people. Without the political power, people’s new democratic revolution is empty; with it, people can subjugate capital to serve the whole society and never again only the 1%.

There are many problems that require radical changes of a dying system if it is to be saved for a time, including automation-driven or AI-driven over-production, excess production capacity, over accumulation of capital which necessarily and deliberately creates a surplus population and a long-term reserve army of unemployed labor.

To solve the long-term unemployment problem, the state should take over the private enterprises either by transformation of capitalist industry and commerce through the policy of redemption or expropriation, or both. Any other policies are merely futile fidgets.

Labor productivity of service sector should be similarly defined to that of the production sector. If service sector workers spend their working time on producing service products of use value for the society, the output per hour per worker or labor productivity is calculable.  A more meaningful measurement for labor productivity is not based on the output produced but on the surplus value that labor creates per hour for capital, called labor valuability (new value owned only by capital but not by the whole society).

The surplus value is an unpaid and unearned labor power measured in terms of working hour by capital which reaps that as its only income. Its income supplies capital as the sum of profit, interest, rent, and tax payment, if any. Capital’s main interest is not of production per se but profit maximization hence valuability is more useful than productivity, unless one is interested in only the total output created by labor power. It might be added that labor power creates not only surplus value for capital but also paid wage or advanced money compensation by capital as exchange value for the whole society.

Users of AI’s, social networks, viewers of TV, listeners of radios, readers of online newspapers, news webs and others participate in productive labor as well. They serve a dual role in the economy as both producers and buyers of products they produce. They contribute surplus labor powers as guest workers and purchase the infotainment products as viewing consumers by spending money on accessing fees to the internet and AI and subscription fees, if any.

In general, in the production sector, workers and buyers of products are distinct from one another. Other than those guest workers, internal employees of the service sector will create additional surplus value.

Let us take Facebook as an example. In 2009, Facebook’s revenue was $777 million, its net income was $229 million and its employee number was 1,218. In 2013, its revenue was $7.87 billion; hired 6,337 full time employees and wrung a net income of $1.49 billion. In 2015 Facebook's revenue grew to $17.93 billion, squeezed a net income of $3.67 billion, and hired 12,691 full time employees.

Assume every year each worker spends 40 hours/week for 52 weeks or 2,080 working hours. The labor valuability (= net income/employee number/working hour) in 2009, 2013 and 2015 are, respectively, $90/hr., $114/hr., and $140/hr., neglecting inflation. From 2009 to 2015, the linear increase rate of labor valuability is 8.3% per year. In the two years from 2013 to 2015 it is 13% per year.

The run-of-mill labor productivity (= labor valuability times the revenue-to-income ratio) in 2009, 2013 and 2015 are, respectively, $305/hr., $598/hr., and $680/hr. Either of the two measures regarding host workers’ output is unbelievably high.

Facebook is not a public owned company serving the well-being of the society. It is a private company for private profit whose raison d'être is to maximize people’s viewing times on it only and nowhere else. To achieve its profit-making purpose, it must be an infotainment outlet serving the interests of all kinds of people. As interests and ideas of people differ, so must its info-contents to suit their tastes most of the time. Consequently, its news will have to be fickle and increasingly hard-to-impress. Logic, facts, reasons, truths, and justices are the casualties of manipulations under the mantle of its algorithms, just like those under advertisements.

The best way to avoid the enormous waste of the public time and resources in the infotainment industry is to enforce the requirement that internet and AI outlets must be government-owned to serve the interests and well-being of the 99% and not the money-making interests of the 1%. The accumulated wealth by Facebook measured with its gross income: $2.85B (2011) 3.73B (2012) 6.11B (2013) 10.28B (2014) and 15.06B (2015) from unpaid viewing times of billions of viewers or guest workers must return to, and enrich, the public and, as an example, to fund universal health-care and free public higher-education programs because viewers create as large as 73% (i.e., $11 billion) of its net income, yet they get no compensation for their working times.

Excessively unequal distributions of guest workers’ surplus value have borne witness to the fact that the infotainment industry has invariably super-exploited users of social networks, and AI, viewers of TV, listeners of radios, readers of online newspapers, news webs and others participating in productive labor for the industry.

To save the dying system, the internet, AI, and the infotainment industries should be nationalized. It is not difficult to do so as the U.S. capital has heavily concentrated in a small number of corporations for more than one hundred years; for an example, “just six corporations own 90 percent of all media in the United States: most of news and information is produced in an echo chamber.” In the AI industry, the same is also true. To alleviate sufferings of the system in the throes, a fresh incremental improvement is to pay the guest workers like you and me according to the amount of time that they spend each day before they go on strike for compensations in the short run and abolition of the wages system in the long run!

The striking guest workers should adopt what capital does the best – using machinery in production to reap profits – to bargain for compensations. As the media are inexorably digitized as well as AI ’ed, to tune advertising out is easy not only on social media but also on commercial TV – an industry worthy of $70 billion per annum. (Television advertising revenues in the United States, according to PwC or PricewaterhouseCoopers, a multinational accounting and auditing firm headquartered in London, England, will grow from $71.1 billion in 2015 to $81 billion in 2019.) If we use 73% of Facebook as the gg of the TV industry in 2015, then TV viewers should claim $52 billion as their rightful compensations. The AI users should likewise claim their rightful compensations. Note: the realization coefficient g of the surplus value, which is a measure of actual surplus value realized for a given kind of workers; wherein, the second letter denotes the subscript - g refers to the guest workers and h the host employees.

If “guest workers” want to get their view-time-worth compensation back, they can use ad-blocking software to block the advertisements they do not want to view or watch. The penalty, however, is that the media outlets will take away viewing or reading or registration rights from you. Capital as a social relation has, as always until now, the upper hand of absolute control power.

Have you noticed more and more news websites putting in paywalls and begging readers not to use "adblocking" software?

That is because advertising revenue represents a large percent of the budget for most media outlets. If you do not want to pay to subscribe, or do not want to watch a bunch of autoplaying video ads pop up when you just came to read the news, then they do not want you reading their stories.

No one has figured out how to make internet journalism profitable. And in 2016, it showed. Digital advertising is robust. In 2017, 33 percent of the world’s projected $547 billion in advertising will go to digital enterprises, according to Group M, a global media investment management group. That is 77 cents on every dollar. Television, by way of comparison, will get just 17 cents. So, there is plenty of money going online, just not to media websites. In the first quarter of 2016, Facebook and Google snagged 85 percent of all new online advertising spending. If a pattern can be discerned from the gory remains of this year’s bloodbath of online reorganization, reinvention, acquisition, layoffs, and fiscal “misses,” which claimed the jobs and (often worthless) stock options of so many reporters and editors, it is this: Clicks do not pay the bills.  (https://newrepublic.com/article/139288/year-everyone-realized-digital-media-doomed)

In addition to these unpaid surplus values, the AI and the internet capitals have been flushed with cash from another source - selling guest and host workers’ personal information to both the government and corporations.

For a detailed discussion on the unpaid surplus values contributed by guest workers, see: “The Coming of a New Democratic Revolution, Part 3,” by Mark Wain on March 28， 2016                                                                           

Capitalism as a social system has been greatly weakened not only by its own makings, but also by great awakenings of the working class, to wit, the Jan 6, 2021 uprising and the second civil war in the making. See: “The Coming of a New Democratic Revolution (Part 4).docx” By Mark Wain on May 19, 2022.

The AI storm will make the efforts “to prioritize U.S. dominance and unleash the full potential of American A.I. innovation” and “to gain power in large swaths of the globe” a wishfulness, because the old contradictions, first between humans and machines and secondly the one between the working class and their bosses, can no longer be resolved as their forefathers did after fierce struggles with capitalists over a period of more than three hundred years during the first and the rest Industrial Revolutions. They have both reached a new stage of the essence of social/political conflicts.

In the past, machines were merely humans’ work assistants, nowadays, the AI capitalists in America and China have tried exceedingly hard to usurp humans’ leading position and consciously to take their place as new masters, by using human’s natural languages via LLM (Large Language Model) to mimic humans’ consciousness.

As early as in The German Ideology 1845, Marx already indicated that “Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men,[A] and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men.”

Since consciousness is social hence historical as well as political, so must be language. There is no such thing called universal consciousness, language, and value. The LLM of AI should not be separated from its essential constraints by means of the three historic-social conditions: forces of production, the state of society, and consciousness of humans, as machines are not possessed of consciousness.

“These three historical forces can and must come into contradiction with one another, because of the division of labor. “In other words, AI, its pseudo-consciousness, as well as its industrial enterprise must be social, historical hence political.

A. Marx struck out: “Mein Verhältnis zu meiner Umgebung ist mein Bewußtsein,” My relation to my environment is my consciousness. – See MEGA1 I.5 S. 571, Textvarianten 20.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution has drastically different implications from the previous three. It has determined, for the first time in humans’ history, to reorganize the human society. Except for its ruling class or the 1% and its cohort - the 5% who serve as guest and/or internal host workers providing surplus values as profits for the capitalist bosses, the working class and its higher working ranks such as the labor aristocrats will be déclassé. As AI and its robotic products can work more efficiently and economically than the “expensive and expendable” human workers and they obey work discipline as instructed without any complaint, 24/7, humans are in the process of being pushed to the brink of survival by capitalist AI force in the name of promoting productivity and demoting wages, because the role that humans played as value-producers over the past millions of years is no longer valid and their social existence facing the capital-controlled machines will become superfluous.

No one in the ordinary 94% of the eight billion people in the world would eventually endure the shame of being of secondary importance to those capitalist- AI value usurpers. They will rebel against the 6% - their tyrant-masters' - rule sooner or later. As the awakenings against bosses have become deeper and wide-spread, bosses’ worst victims - the international proletarians or the wage slaves - will rise for class struggle or new democratic revolution against their tyrant-masters yet again.

American historical, cultural, and social characteristics often hinder American proletarian class struggle and revolution, as their class consciousness has been obscured for a very long time. These characteristics seem to be rendered allergic enough to them that revolutions, either violent or non-violent, are unacceptable, viz., about a little less than half of the voters in the U.S. are hostile to President Trump’s Cultural Revolution. What seem to be acceptable to them are those eccentric and reformist baby kissers, such as the old timers, no matter how corrupt and incompetent they are. 

“In the United States, thanks to peculiarities of its history, the division of opinion on the French Revolution, while very heated, followed somewhat different lines. The United States was a new country, only a few generations removed from the original settlement. It had no real problem of feudal survivals or of ecclesiastical power. Its people had never been brought, like those of various European countries, to accept subordination to a central or national government. It already had more ‘equality,’ and more ‘liberty,’ than any part of Europe… There were no lords, manors, or seigneurial encumbrances on the plain farmer’s land except to a certain degree in New York… In Europe a democratic movement required a strong central government to overcome adversaries. In America a democratic movement could be content to leave well enough alone…” [R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, Princeton University Press, 1964, pp. 26-27.] 

A democratic anti-capitalist-AI movement, therefore, cannot rely on American exploited and oppressed masses as its main force. The advanced force must be organized, trained, and transformed in Europe and Asia. 

In 1846 Marx wrote: “The revolution is essential not merely because the dominant class cannot be overthrown by any other means, but also because only in the course of the revolution can the class which overthrows cleanse itself of mire of the old society and become fit to create a new society.”

To catch up with their international comrades, the American proletarian needs a soul-searching on their more than two hundred years long passive-citizenship ideas, habitual tendency to accept eclecticism, sophism, reformism, and revisionism, or way of behaving, and illusory “general” interest in the form of the State and the nation. Those wrong ideas such as theoretical justifications for the denial of class contradictions and wars must be rebutted, together with theoretical nihilism including “everything goes.” For reformist views opposing the capitalist AI or technology in general but shying from Marxism see “GOP Push to Ban State AI Laws Will Only Help Big Tech ” and “Democracy and Technology.”

The capitalist AI storm will be transformed from an opposite position to the interest and future of people through arduous revolutionary and liberational processes into a non-private-profit and common-interest-orientated public endeavor.

Finally let me quote Engels’ “Anti-Dűhring” as follows:

“It is the compelling force of anarchy in the production of society at large that more and more completely turns the great majority of men into proletarians; and it is the masses of the proletariat again who will finally put an end to anarchy in production. It is the compelling force of anarchy in social production that turns the limitless perfectibility of machinery under modern industry into a compulsory law by which every individual industrial capitalist must perfect his machinery more and more, under penalty of ruin. But the perfecting of machinery is making human labor superfluous. If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions of manuals by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available wage-workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation of a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845, *9 available at the times when industry is working at high pressure, to be cast out upon the street when the inevitable crash comes, a constant dead-weight upon the limbs of the working class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator for the keeping of wages down to the low level that suits the interests of capital. Thus, it comes about, to quote Marx, that machinery becomes the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working class; that the instruments of labor constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the hands of the laborer; that the very product of the worker is turned into an instrument for his subjugation. Thus it comes about that the economizing of the instruments of labor becomes at the same time, from the outset, the most reckless waste of labor-power, and robbery based upon the normal conditions under which labor functions; that machinery, the most powerful instrument for shortening labor-time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the laborer’s time and that of his family at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital.” *9 The Condition of the Working-Class in England, p. 109.

…

“If the crises demonstrate the incapacity of the bourgeoisie for managing any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the great establishments for production and distribution into joint-stock companies and state property shows how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for that purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist are now performed by salaried employees. The capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one another of their capital. At first the capitalist mode of production forces out the workers. Now it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus population, although not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army.

But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on to support the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.” (All bold face words for emphasis are mine – M.W.)

*

Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)

To Virgil

6.

Thou that seest Universal

Nature moved by Universal mind;

Thou majestic in thy sadness

At the doubtful doom of human kind;