Automation is Good!!!!🤖🦍☀️

From the standpoint of Marxist-Leninist theory, automation—the replacement of human labor with machines and artificial intelligence—must be understood not as an unqualified threat to workers, but as a powerful historical force that both deepens the contradictions of capitalism and opens the door to the liberation of labor under socialism. While in capitalist societies automation brings unemployment, intensified exploitation, and alienation, these outcomes are not intrinsic to automation itself, but to the capitalist relations of production in which it is embedded. In contrast, under socialism—particularly in a state guided by a proletarian party such as the Communist Party of China—automation can be harnessed in the service of human need, collective prosperity, and the gradual transition toward a classless society.

Automation Under Capitalism: Contradictions Are Intensified

Capitalists prefer human labour over dead labor (machines) because only human labour can create surplus value - the source of profit. While machines transfer their own value to products they do not generate value beyond their cost. Human workers, on the other hand, produce more value during their working day than they are paid in wages, and this unpaid labour becomes profit for the capitalist. As result, even in highly automated economies capitalists maintain a strong interest in exploiting human labor to maximize surplus value.

Marx recognized in Capital that the development of productive forces under capitalism was both a necessity for capital and a source of its eventual demise. Capitalists are compelled by competition to adopt labor-saving technologies, reducing the value of labor-power by increasing the productivity of each worker. However, this very process leads to a falling rate of profit, chronic overproduction, and the “redundancy” of millions of workers who become surplus to capital’s needs.

In today’s advanced capitalist economies, automation is driving a new wave of structural unemployment, making once-secure jobs obsolete while concentrating wealth in the hands of a shrinking class of owners and tech monopolists. Yet paradoxically, automation does not lead to a reduction in working hours or a rise in living standards for the majority. Instead, workers face precarious gig economies, longer hours, and greater surveillance, even as society produces an unprecedented abundance of goods and services. The contradiction between productive capacity and social relations sharpens: the working class produces more while receiving less.

This contradiction is not a bug but a feature of capitalism. Automation exposes the irrationality of a system that prioritizes private profit over human need. The more capital automates, the more it reveals its own obsolescence. The conditions for socialism—massive productive capacity, global interconnectivity, and a working class increasingly conscious of its exploitation—are thereby ripened.

Socialist China and the Rational Use of Automation

Where capitalism automates to accumulate profit, socialism automates to liberate labor. The People’s Republic of China, guided by Marxist-Leninist principles adapted through socialism with Chinese characteristics, has demonstrated that automation need not lead to mass unemployment or destitution. Instead, through centralized planning, state-owned enterprises, and the strategic guidance of the Communist Party, China has begun to turn automation into a tool for social development.

Chinese planners have integrated automation into long-term strategies such as “Made in China 2025” and “Common Prosperity,” recognizing that new technologies must be deployed not merely for industrial upgrading but also for equitable development. Automation in agriculture, manufacturing, and logistics has not eliminated the rural population or created mass homelessness, as seen in Western countries, but has been paired with investment in education, retraining, and digital infrastructure to uplift entire communities.

Crucially, the Chinese state retains control over key sectors, allowing it to redirect the surplus created by automation into social programs, green development, and public services. This stands in stark contrast to capitalist economies, where the surplus is funneled into shareholder dividends and speculative finance. While contradictions still exist in China—inevitable in the primary stage of socialism—the state has the means and the political will to confront these contradictions in a way capitalist states cannot.

Toward the Abolition of Alienated Labor

Marxism-Leninism teaches us that socialism is not the end point, but a transitional stage toward communism: a society in which classes and the state itself wither away. Automation, when stripped of its capitalist fetters, brings us closer to this horizon. By increasingly freeing humans from repetitive, dangerous, and alienating labor, automation can allow for the flowering of human creativity, the shortening of the working day, and the collective management of social reproduction.

Thus, all automation is good—not because it is painless under capitalism, but because it hastens the end of capitalism. It lays bare the historical anachronism of a mode of production that no longer serves humanity. The task of Marxist-Leninists is to organize and educate the working class, to build the revolutionary consciousness necessary to seize the means of production—including the algorithms, factories, and networks—and put them to use for all. Communist China shows, in embryonic form, what is possible when the proletariat holds power.

In the age of AI, robotics, and machine learning, the choice is clearer than ever: automation under capitalism means despair; automation under socialism means liberation. The future is not to be feared—it is to be won.