A Class Analysis of the World of Artificial Intelligence in Light of the Anthropic Survey

Young comrades,

Today humanity has been drawn into a colossal circle of "digital illusion" by the propaganda machines of the ruling class and the Silicon Valley monopolies. The narrative offered to us is extremely glittering: artificial intelligence is a neutral technological miracle that will free humanity from drudgery, democratize productivity, and make everyone the "creative manager" of their own work.

Yet dialectical materialism teaches us that no technology can carry a quality above classes, independent of the relations of production in which it is born and in which it unfolds. The colossal study titled What 81,000 People Want from AI, carried out by the artificial-intelligence giant Anthropic with more than 81,000 people from 159 countries and presented to the public, is not an innocent "public-opinion survey" of the kind the bourgeois media launches. This data set is a digital class reconnaissance report in which the technology monopoly measures labor’s reactions, points of resistance, anxieties, and capacity to adapt.

Even the way the survey was conducted lays this contradiction bare: the research was carried out through the dialogues the artificial intelligence itself (Claude) entered into with users. Every input the participants offered was, in the end, processed on these monopolies’ server farms and appropriated in order to perfect capital’s model of accumulation. Even while expressing their own anxiety, the laborer supplied free data (dead labor) to capital’s artificial intelligence.

Now let us peel back the materialist reality behind these data and decode, step by step, the order of exploitation capital has established with artificial intelligence.

The "Treadmill" Paradox: Surplus Value and Intensifying Exploitation

The first concrete reality the survey data set before us is how, under capitalism, the link between technological speed and human emancipation is turned into a lie. A large share of participants report that, thanks to artificial-intelligence tools, they finish their tasks 32 percent or more faster and have captured an increase in "productivity." Yet the same data document that workers have not been emancipated; on the contrary, they are left breathless on a treadmill (treadmill effect) whose speed keeps rising.

As Karl Marx showed in Capital, the capitalist regime of accumulation brings a new technology into play not to lighten the worker’s load, but to produce relative surplus value:

• Stopping Up the Pores of the Working Day: When an eight-hour coding or analysis job falls to two hours with artificial intelligence, the remaining six hours do not return to the worker as "free time." The capitalist adds three more new tasks into that stretch of time.

• The Intensification of Labor: Artificial intelligence completely stops up the pores of time spent thinking, breathing, or living human pauses. It multiplies the quantity of surplus labor extracted per unit of time.

Bourgeois / Idealist Discourse	Dialectical-Materialist Reality
"AI is eliminating drudge work."	In place of drudgery comes a denser and uninterrupted tempo of production that strains mental limits.
"Employees are saving time."	The time saved remains not with the worker but with capital; the quantity of surplus value produced per unit of time increases.
"The chance to be the boss of your own work."	A cognitive assembly line: digital discipline governed by the instantaneous turnaround times the algorithm sets.

The Cognitive Reserve Army of Labor and the Anxiety of Youth

One of the most burning contradictions documented in the survey is that the groups most exposed to artificial intelligence and using these tools at the highest efficiency—programmers, data analysts, designers—carry the highest anxiety about losing their jobs. Young workers at the beginning of their careers, in particular, are living through a deep existential crisis compared with their senior colleagues.

Bourgeois psychology individualizes this situation by calling it "resistance to change" or "impostor syndrome." Yet the picture before us is a concrete process of class dispossession. Capital is creating a colossal cognitive reserve army of labor:

• Deskilling: A programmer’s experience or an artist’s style is seized by capital through vast corpora of data and turned into an algorithmic model. The laborer whose skill has been transferred to the model becomes a replaceable "prompt-giver" and loses bargaining power.

• The Seizure of Apprenticeship: The "entry-level" tasks through which young workers enter the sector and gain experience are being automated. Because the stages of apprenticeship have been erased, the young generation is pushed outside the system while still at the start of the road and condemned to flexible, precarious piecework.

Capital’s call to youth to "keep updating yourself" serves no purpose other than to deepen competition, set young laborers against one another, and cover systemic destruction with the illusion of individual success.

A New Dimension of Alienation: Cognitive Atrophy and Atomization

In the Anthropic study, 21.9 percent of participants say they have lost their autonomy, and 17 percent say they fear the dulling of their faculties of critical thought and analysis (cognitive atrophy). These data are the concrete manifestation, in the digital age, of Marx’s theory of alienation:

"The object which the worker produces stands over against him as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer. The more the worker transfers his life into the object, the more that life belongs not to himself but to the object." — Karl Marx

• Alienation from Mental Activity: When the human being hands the act of thinking over to the algorithm, they enter their own mental production as an "outside eye." The creative process is reduced to a passive mechanism of approval.

• Dead Labor’s Dominion over Living Labor: Artificial-intelligence models are the form, gathered in capital’s hands, of the knowledge millions of people produced in the past (that is, of dead labor). The young worker who owns living labor watches the mental accumulation they themselves produced come and stand over against them as a company’s property and replace their own mind.

• Atomization and Digital Loneliness: Workplace solidarity and collective culture are being replaced by artificial-intelligence "assistants" the individual can access 24/7. These algorithmic shelters, which take the place of human-to-human relation, isolate youth from the will to social and class struggle and leave them alone.

Digital Imperialism and the Global Rift

One of the survey’s most striking findings is also a geographic rift in perception. Participants in Global South countries such as Nigeria, Mexico, and Vietnam look at artificial intelligence with a 67 percent net positive perception and see it as an instrument of "social mobility and technological leap," while workers in the Global North (North America, Western Europe) focus on the fear of mass unemployment and surveillance.

This is the manifestation, in the digital dimension, of the law of imperialism and uneven development set out by V. I. Lenin:

• The Dream of Technological Determinism: In a Global South whose infrastructure has been left incomplete by the imperialist center, youth is steered toward perceiving artificial intelligence as a "technological miracle" rather than as systemic transformation.

• Data Colonialism: In reality the Global South has been turned into Silicon Valley’s cheap data-labeling depot. Young people in Kenya or the Philippines are being made into the invisible digital slaves who label the West’s artificial-intelligence models for one or two dollars an hour.

The Global South does not own the server farms, the chip technology, or the foundation models. It is merely these monopolies’ data supplier and market territory.

Line of Action: Target Property, Not the Machines!

Two shallow lines are drawn before us in the face of artificial intelligence: capital’s cyber-utopian surrender, which says "Whoever adapts to the technology wins," and the technophobia of petty-bourgeois romanticism, which says "Let’s ban the machines" (neo-Luddism).

As Marx emphasized, the working class must grasp the difference between the machine itself and the capitalist use of the machine. Artificial intelligence alone is not the enemy. Our enemy is the regime of private property that holds this productive force, the capitalist relations of production, and the lust for profit.

Process / Dimension	Artificial Intelligence under Capitalist Property	Artificial Intelligence under Collective / Public Planning
Working Hours	Rising work quotas with increased productivity, intensification of the working day, and burnout.	The immediate reduction of working hours (a 3–4 hour working day).
Cognitive Labor	A deskilled, precarized, and replaceable reserve army.	The individual freed from drudging mental load, realizing themselves through science and art.
Purpose of Production	The market’s irrational lust for profit, deepening crises, and the exploitation of nature.	Crisis-free, ecological central planning shaped according to society’s concrete needs.
Technology and Data	An instrument of digital slavery in the property of Silicon Valley monopolies.	Public and collective property open to the common use of all humanity.

Young comrades, the cognitive proletariat’s line of action must rise on the basis of these principles:

• Organization of the Cognitive Proletariat: Programmers, data labelers, designers, and students must abandon their "middle class" dreams. Digital labor unions and workplace committees must be built in companies, on campuses, and on platforms.

• Expropriation of Infrastructure and Data: Colossal server farms, chip-production facilities, and the data that is the collective accumulation of humanity must be taken from the monopolies’ hands, expropriated, and subjected to social control.

• The Struggle for a Radical Shortening of the Working Day: For every increase in productivity artificial intelligence provides, the immediate reduction of working hours without a cut in wages (for example a 20-hour working week) must be made a fundamental class demand.

• Internationalist Solidarity: The cognitive worker of the Global North and the data-labeling worker of the Global South must unite on a common line of action, and digital imperialism’s divide-and-rule moves must be rendered void.

Let us organize in the ranks of the class to make algorithms instruments not of exploitation, but of humanity’s real emancipation!