The Workers Replaced by Algorithms: A Neo-Communist Response
A take on what communism might look like in 21st Century
Generative AI has been a boon for many industries, especially those where large parts of the work could be automated. Completely replaced? Not yet. But let us be honest for a minute here~ it is getting close.
And the response to this automation? Often anger, even vileness and justifiably so. Just recently, I came across a post on X by a screenwriter who poured her heart out. She had just been fired after spending 8 years in the company. Why? Because Gemini could now do her entire job.
Now pause and hear me out. If an AI tool with a decent prompt and some training can do your job in 10 seconds... was your work ever truly ‘valuable’? Or was the system simply waiting for the first excuse to discard you not because you failed but because it could cut costs and move on?
But let us go a little deeper. Is this really just a tech problem ~a glitch in the algorithm of progress as most pundits and think-fluencers claim? Or is it something older, something deeper (or maybe colder issue at play)? A structural defect that has been baked into our economic systems for centuries?
What if the mass displacement caused by AI is not an accident but a continuation just tools are different this time? A continuation of a 2,000-year-old pattern where the powerful adopt new tools not to free the many, but to control them more efficiently.
Capitalism didn’t invent exploitation but it industrialized it -scaled it, sanitized it and branded it nicely as innovation. And now, in the age of gen AI, it is doing what it has always done~ squeezing value from human labour and discarding the labourers the moment they become inconvenient.
We talk about AI ethics, guardrails, and regulation but none of that answers the root question: who owns the machine? Because the real divide isn’t between humans and AI. It iss between those who profit from AI and those who get replaced by it (sounds familiar?)
That is why we can’t afford to see this crisis only through a technological lens. It is like everything political. It always was and will be. And maybe, just maybe, a neo-communist lens is the only way to see it clearly.
The Great Displacement
AI is already hollowing out conventional work as we have known it for decades and it is only getting started. In 2023, McKinsey released a study predicting that AI could automate tasks affecting over 300 million full-time jobs globally.
You might say, “Sure, the impact is real but aren’t these numbers a bit rhetorical?” Fair. But when you start seeing it unfold in real time it stops sounding like a hypothetical and starts feeling like a threat. BuzzFeed laid off 15% of its staff and turned to AI for content. Robo-lawyers like DoNotPay are threatening entry-level legal jobs. Canva, infused with AI tools, is replacing beginner graphic designers. (we all must have felt the last one atleast)
Tech first came for the call centres. Now it is coming for the coders
Just a few years ago, tech bros confidently predicted that blue-collar jobs would be the first to fall. They were not wrong. But what they didn’t expect or maybe didn’t care about was that the white-collar class would be next or simultaneous~ which is dangerous.
This is the plot twist I am seeing: The salaried, middle and upper-middle class, the so-called ‘formal sector’ that pays the most taxes and preaches free-market economics is now facing the same structural precarity it once ignored.
What we are seeing is not just job loss. It is a sort of disillusionment which existed always. The system isn’t glitching. It is showing us its core logic and for the first time in a long time, those who benefited from it are also feeling the heat.
The tools of exploitation have changed. The target? Just increased. The illusion of immunity for the white-collar worker is starting to crack.
Capitalism Weaponized AI
Capitalism as a system is rooted in the exploitation of both people and resources.
Its rot runs so deep that it doesn’t even pretend anymore, it openly classifies humans as ‘resources’ to be optimized, extracted or replaced.
Proponents of the free-market system ~ Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, F. A. Hayek, Thomas Friedman and their tribe have long sold us the myth that 'markets will take care of all inefficiencies. That if left alone, capital will find the highest good for the highest number. We don’t see an effecient market, do we?
But what do we do when that same market now uses AI not to empower, but to concentrate power, hoard wealth, and discard human labor?
Take OpenAI. It began as a non-profit. A mission-driven initiative to democratize artificial intelligence. But soon came the funding crunch and then the pivot. The system did what it always does: It incentivized a research-led public good to morph into a profit-driven and a privately held corporate fortress- keeping most away.
And what fuels this so-called intelligence revolution? Your data. Our data. Public data. Sourced from Reddit (a privately controlled platform), Stack Overflow, public blogs, GitHub repositories (owned by Microsoft). All of it, scraped and ingested, with zero consent, zero credit and zero compensation. ZERO. NIL.
The profit? Or rather, the power flows straight to shareholders, VCs and corporate boards- who are already multi-millionaires or billionaires.
Not to the programmers, writers, artists, or forum posters whose labor trained these models.
And here’s the question no one in power wants to answer: How is this even remotely a fair system?
AI should be a public common. Why? Because it’s built on the collective labor of billions. Every time we use it, prompt it or correct it we are literally improving the model. We are unpaid workers, polishing the future but owned by someone else.
The algorithm is the landlord of the mind
And behind the scenes? The sweatshops of the digital era. Underpaid clickworkers in Kenya, the Philippines, and beyond labelling images, moderating toxic content and classifying hate speech.
Their stories are documented powerfully by Mary Gray in her book Ghost Work exposing how the AI system that seem magical is kept alive by a shadow labor force.
How do we classify them? Please answer me….
These people operate through platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk, Appen and Scale AI working 12-hour shifts for pennies to clean up the mess machines can’t handle.
Now humans are placed below these machines. Human rights proponenets, where are you?
This isn’t progress. It’s outsourced exploitation with a silicon coating.
Ghost work is capitalism’s sleight of hand.
It tells us labor has disappeared when in reality, it has just become invisible.
So while upper-middle-class professionals panic about being replaced, millions are already being used without ever being seen. They don’t show up in org charts. Their names are never on patents.
But without them, **surprise surprise** AI doesn’t work
Here’s the punchline: Even in a so-called post-work future, the system still finds someone to exploit.
AI is not replacing humans it is redistributing the labor to those we don’t see or value~ contract work or outsourced- good business sense, right?
The Neo-Communist Response
‘You may ask me- what is the alternative? Fair. If capitalism has given us this mess, what comes next? Hasn’t this system proven resilient adapting, surviving and even thriving?
Sure but not because it works. Capitalism has survived largely because of the geopolitical scaffolding:
The dominance of the US dollar as the global reserve currency
The military-industrial supremacy of the West
And a propaganda machine that for decades painted communism and socialism as inherently evil
Much of that fear was rooted not in evidence but in Cold War hysteria, Hollywood narratives and surface-level understanding of leftist theory.
So when people scoff at alternatives, ask them this: Have you actually read beyond Orwell and memes? Or are you just recycling the fears you were trained to have?
Now let’s get specific-
Examples of Neo-Communist Models Already Working
These aren’t utopian fantasies. They are real- operational systems already at the fringes, often underfunded or suppressed by powerful incumbents. But powerful in real sense.
Commons-Driven AI
HuggingFace: Open-source AI hub, community-contributed models. Transparent. Collaborative.
France’s Mistral AI: State-funded, open-weight LLMs. AI as public infrastructure.
India’s Bhashini: Government-led NLP stack in Indian languages. Prioritizing access over profit.
Democratic and Decentralized Tech Governance
Mozilla: Pioneering “trustworthy AI”, with public good at its core.
Data Unions (e.g., Swash): Let users earn when their data is used. A redistribution of digital value.
🤝 Worker-Owned Digital Platforms
Stocksy United: A co-op for photographers. No shareholders. Profits go back to creators.
Loomio: Decision-making software built by a worker collective. Governance by and for users.
What do all these have in common? Decentralized control. Shared ownership. Fair compensation. Democratic governance.
This is Neo-Communism not a revival of Stalin’s five-year plans but a 21st-century upgrade:
No vanguard party. No absolute state control
Instead: distributed networks, research trusts, data dividends and algorithmic transparency
A model where contributors and not just shareholders are rewarded
Where the ghost workers behind AI are given visibility, dignity and fair compensation
Where the tech is owned by a multi-stakeholder trust not just venture capitalists and boardrooms
“But Communism Doesn’t Work…”
Let’s address that head-on. People love to throw around the ‘Communism always fails’ argument but very few can back it with depth.
You say: “Communism doesn’t work.” I respond: ‘Neither does capitalism unless you are already rich.’
And let’s talk about Lenin’s Soviet Union. Before it fell into Stalinist excesses, it:
Created universal literacy in a formerly feudal empire
Achieved the fastest industrialization in human history (1920–1940)
Built public housing, healthcare and transportation at a mass scale
Outpaced most of Europe in STEM education and space tech by the 1950s
(Source: UNESCO, Paul Cockshott, and World Bank archival reports from mid-century)
Sure, it failed later (because of distortion by Stalin). So has global capitalism ask the people in collapsing gig economies, climate-disrupted communities or student debt traps.
Neo-Communism, as I’m proposing it, is not a step backward. It’s a synthesis: Marx’s clarity, Lenin’s ambition, and the decentralization of the blockchain generation.
It’s not about creating a perfect system. It is about creating a more just, transparent, and shared one.
The question now isn’t whether capitalism is dying. The question is: What will replace it and who will own the future?
Let’s Reimagine AI from the Ground Up
We are not trying to perfect the system. We are trying to make it just enough to be worth believing in. Another world is possible not through slogans, but through code, policy, labor and courage.
We just have to stop thinking it's naive to ask for what should have been ours all along.
The future is not automated. It is organized. And it is ours to claim or lose.
Let me be clear, I am not against AI. I am against an AI that is unaccountable, unregulated and owned by the few. I am against an AI that deepens exploitation, accelerates inequality and concentrates power in the hands of those already on top.
What I stand for is an AI that is decentralized, safe, democratic and bound by constitutional values.
An AI that is antithetical to exploitation, hostile to monopolies and governed by the very people who build it, train it and are impacted by it.
This might sound like repetition but that’s intentional. This is because if there's one idea I want to leave you with, it’s this:
Technology can liberate but only if it is owned by the many, not the few
P.S. This article was conceptualized and written entirely by me. I took help from generative AI for editing and refinement and yes, I realise the irony in that. 😄