Artificial Intelligence and the Surplus Class: A Critical Analysis of Labour and Automation

This article develops a theoretical framework for understanding Artificial Intelligence (AI) through the lens of Marxian political economy. It argues that AI represents a qualitative transformation of the means of production into a novel, intangible, and algorithmic form. This shift, concentrated in the hands of a nascent class of algorithmic capitalists, dramatically increases productivity while exacerbating capitalism’s fundamental contradictions, producing what can be described as a crisis of realization. By displacing labour from value creation and suppressing wages, the algorithmic mode of production undermines the aggregate demand required to consume its outputs. The social consequence is the emergence of a “Surplus Precariat”—a population structurally excluded from capital’s valorization process, living in economic precarity and political marginalization rather than conventional unemployment. The article critically assesses proposed solutions and argues that the crisis provoked by AI poses a fundamental political choice: either a future of intensified inequality and automated precarity, or a post-capitalist reorganization of the algorithmic means of production toward a fully automated common.