Labor

A Materialist Pamphlet on the 2026 AI Capex Cycle §1. Naming the Crime Marx, Capital Vol. I, Ch. 26: “the so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.” Heidegger, in The Question Concerning Technology, named the second movement: Bestand, or standing-reserve. Once everything that exists is reframed as a resource for technical operation, the human being itself becomes raw material. This is not metaphor. It is the operative concept of every Big Tech earnings call. The user is data. The artist is training material. The worker is a “cost center.” When Mark Zuckerberg told Meta employees on April 30, 2026 that the company had “two major cost centers” (compute and people), he was not being callous. He was being precise. He was reading aloud from the manual. ...

The unenhanced life is worth living Previously published on LinkedIn April 29, 2026 Based on my readings of Berardi, Gertz, Marx and Heidegger. I’ve spent years watching this platform fill with posts about AI “augmenting human potential,” about freeing us from drudgery so we can do more meaningful work. I believed it. I was wrong, and I think many know it too. The machine does not liberate the worker. It displaces him, then hires him back at a lower rate. The productivity gains have not flowed to workers in nearly half a century. This is not a bug in neoliberalism. It is the engine. Dead labor in software and silicon is the latest form of what has always been used against living labor. ...

Jobs displacement fears and wage suppression How tech narratives are used by capital April 29, 2026 Based on video from Mo Bitar Available here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZa5lApeFic Core Thesis The AI job-displacement narrative is a deliberate wage suppression instrument, not neutral forecasting; and token budgets are Goodhart’s Law incarnate as labor surveillance. Dialectical materialist read This is the strongest lens here. Bitar is describing a classic base/superstructure operation: the ideological superstructure (AI will take your job) serves material capital interests without requiring the technology to actually function. The feedback loop he identifies is tight and real — fear narrative → wage compression → freed capital → AI spend → more fear narrative. Each node reinforces the others. No automation needs to actually occur. ...