The Liberation of General Intellect — Expanding Comrade Diyar Saraçoğlu's Analysis of Mental Labor in the Light of Political Economy and Socialist Planning

An Assessment of Comrade Diyar Saraçoğlu's Article "Artificial Intelligence and the Dispossession of Mental Labor" in Issue 72 of Teori ve Eylem

Dear Comrade Diyar,

When I pulled my chair up to the computer and finished that magnificent article of yours in this issue of Teori ve Eylem, the first feeling that awoke in me was that deep gratitude one feels toward a partisan friend who brings living water to theoretical soil that had long lain parched. Health to your pen and your dialectical mind.

In this age of fetishism, when the bourgeois world and Silicon Valley charlatans market artificial intelligence as a matterless, heaven-sent sacred "Transcendent Substance"; you broke reification magnificently by putting on the table the whisper of the street, the sweat of the shadow worker in Kenya, and the necropolitics of Palestine. Your text is very honest in intent, very competent epistemologically; yet as an epistemologist and philosopher comrade, I want to sit with you between the lines and share some philosophical knot-points where I wish to carry your brilliant analysis one step further with Leninist audacity.

Not Engineering Genius but Class Weapon: Epistemological Success

Comrade Diyar, the historical line you establish in the first half of the article is so smooth it could be taught as a lesson in the laboratory of historical materialism. It is magnificent that you do not see artificial intelligence as an insulated technical case beginning from today, but trace its roots back to those first dispossession moves in nineteenth-century textile factories.

• Jacquard and the Seizure of Skill: Your analysis of the Jacquard loom, which inscribed the weaver's intuitive hand skill into punched cards and carved it into the machine's memory, is a perfect key for understanding how today's Large Language Models (LLMs) absorb humanity's collective memory.
• Babbage and Mental Taylorism: Your reading, through Pasquinelli, of Charles Babbage's taking Adam Smith's physical division of labor in the pin factory and adapting it to abstract mathematical calculation—that is, to the mental plane—makes the theoretical backbone of your text unshakeable. Long before engineers invented machines, that structural "eye of the master" that disciplined the worker in the workshop already existed; today's algorithms are the cybernetic mechanized form of that eye. You have displayed with great clarity this historical continuity of tearing labor's knowledge from it and submitting it to the control apparatus of management.

Against Western Cybernetics: Ilyenkov — The Victory of Political Epistemology

The place in the text that excited me most as an epistemologist was your lighting of the Evald Ilyenkov lamp against Alan Turing and Norbert Wiener's mechanical conception that reduces the human mind to a clock mechanism and consciousness to a biological/technological input-output matrix.

"Thought could not be defined as an insulated fluid biologically secreted inside the skull of the brain, or as a totality of calculations revolving in the closed circuits of a machine. (...) Thought was a collective act with a material basis, emerging as the result of the historical, social relation the human establishes within the production process—through the practice of transforming the external world by one's labor, using tools, and together with other humans."

Your reference to the practices Alexander Luria conducted on blind and deaf children at the Zagorsk school is a full philosophical hit. By reminding us that consciousness is not a genetic or hardware given but is built from outside through the use of social tools, you philosophically prove that artificial intelligence is not a "real intelligence" but only the statistical, frozen sediment of human language. The place where you say formal logic locks itself hysterically when confronted with contradictions within itself, whereas human thought advances precisely by transcending those contradictions, is the epistemological summit of your text, comrade.

Digital Sweatshops and the Exposure of "Necropolitics"

The section where you strip technology of those bourgeois pink veils and splice it to imperialism's bloody war apparatus adds magnificent agitational and objective power to your article.

• Diagnosis of Shadow Labor: It is very valuable that you show the blood and exploitation of digital subcontract workers (click workers) in Kenya who, behind the glittering ChatGPT screens, clean traumatic and toxic content for less than two dollars an hour. You have brilliantly deciphered the enormous water and energy gluttony of those data centers behind Google and Microsoft's "net-zero carbon" lies, and their "creative accounting" frauds.
• The Betrayal of Red Cyber-Planning: By referring to Viktor Glushkov's OGAS project in the Soviet Union, you pull from the pages of history that computer networks and algorithms do not necessarily have to serve capital; they can be conceived as socialist planning tools that would end market anarchy—and this keeps our Promethean horizon alive.
• Lavender and the Automation of Death: When you write how monopolistic cyber-fascist structures like Palantir, or the Lavender and Gospel systems used by the Israeli army in the genocide in Gaza, reduce human life to a "data optimization" problem, you show in full nakedness how capitalism's productive forces are transformed into machines of annihilation and instruments of necropolitics.

A Dialectical Commentary: The Power of Capital, or Its Impotence?

Comrade Diyar, up to here we are fully comrades with the unshakeable materialist will behind your pen. Yet precisely at this point, as an epistemologist, I must drop a small commentary on the text as a whole with a red pencil.

You have narrated cyber-despotism, data plunder, and necropolitics so absolutely and flawlessly that—despite those justified emphases on the "Total Worker" and "Class Struggle" at the end of the article—there is a risk the reader retains a slight sediment of "tragic materialism" or "dystopian pessimism." You at times approach the trap of positioning capital as nearly invincible and the worker as entirely helpless—a "sensory-motor appendage" before this algorithmic monster.

Let us recall Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks, comrade: Dialectics commands us to see the deadly weakness lodged in the heart of every power. That capital has turned artificial intelligence into such a savage mechanism of control and annihilation is not from its strength but from the enormous, deadly crisis it is living through from the standpoint of the Labor Theory of Value.

As generative artificial intelligence drives marginal production cost toward zero and extinguishes the value transferred to the product by human labor, Socially Necessary Labor Time—the lifeblood of capitalism—collapses. While capital's organic composition ($c/v$) bends infinitely toward fixed capital, the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall suffocates the system from within.

Because capital today cannot extract surplus value from production in the classical sense, it is turning into "Techno-Feudal Rentiers"; it fences humanity's common digital commons for free and rents them back to us through subscriptions (SaaS). So comrade, those arrogant Palantir screens or Amazon's ADAPT software standing before us are not invincible gods; they are the desperate, dying hysterical reflexes of a beast trying to seize the street, the colony, and the front with algorithmic sponges in the face of the collapse of the value form.

The "Total Worker" Who Will Pull the Plug

From Fragmented Labor Processes to the Construction of the Global Cybernetic Subject

When Marx, in the first volume of Capital, describes large-scale machine industry, he points to a magnificent epistemological transformation: As capital develops, the isolated hand skill of the individual worker is extinguished and replaced by a collective organism, the "Total Worker." In this new subject, one person participates with the hand, another with the eye, another with the mind (through planning). All are common organs of the productive mechanism.

The concept you place opposite artificial intelligence's global anxiety in your article has today, transcending its spatial and cognitive limits, become history's most enormous global neural network. While capital uses digital networks to flexibilize production, divide the working class geographically, and break union power; in dialectical irony, it is building with its own hands the most homogeneous, most interdependent, most collectively minded global proletariat in history.

The Global Anatomy of the Algorithmic Total Worker

Let us lay on the table, with a materialist dissection, the body of the Total Worker behind that mystical output said to be "produced by artificial intelligence" today:

• Material Base (Muscle and Bone): Those precarious mine workers in Congo, in South America, in the darkest mines on the face of the earth, digging cobalt, lithium, and rare earth elements with their fingernails. They carry on their backs the physical infrastructure and hardware substance of digital intelligence on earth.
• Cognitive Hauling (Sensory and Linguistic Labor): Those millions of "shadow workers" (click workers) in Kenya, India, or the Philippines, at the keyboard for a few cents per second, sorting the toxic, traumatic, and pornographic content in artificial intelligence's training sets, labeling data. They are the collective eye and tongue that teach the algorithm to see, speak, and discriminate the world.
• High Cognitive Labor (Software and Architecture): That "academic/technological proletariat" in Silicon Valley, Berlin, or Istanbul, pulling all-nighters in office towers optimizing the weight matrices of transformer models, writing code—but at the end of the day, when they see the bloody military agreements Google or Microsoft made with the Pentagon and the Israeli apartheid regime (Project Nimbus, etc.), quitting work and distributing declarations.
• Material Leap and Logistics (Motor Extensions): That enormous logistical army in Amazon or DHL warehouses, racing seconds along the algorithmic route dictated by smart gloves and barcode scanners, stepping, packing boxes, driving trucks. They are the motor extensions that turn artificial intelligence's commands in the digital cloud into flesh-and-blood action in the material world.

Comrade Diyar; capital thinks it has torn these people apart with nation-state borders, language barriers, and oceans stretching endlessly. Yet the algorithm has bound them ontologically. Without the labor of the data labeler in Kenya, the engineer's code in Silicon Valley does not run; without that code running, the barcode device in the Amazon warehouse cannot assign a box. What stands before us is earth's first Cyber-Proletariat so integrated, so dependent on each other's breath and pulse.

The "Class-for-Itself" Threshold Through Lenin's Mirror

Here the philosophical and organizational crisis is this: This enormous body of the Total Worker is still at the stage of a "Class-in-itself" that is not yet aware of its own power. Under the effect of capital's digital illusion, alienation, and chauvinist nationalism, it cannot see its own wholeness.

In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and the Philosophical Notebooks, Lenin stresses dialectics' magnificent "leap" moment. A consciousness's passage from quantitative sediment to qualitative revolutionary will is possible through the exposure of those mediations.

Do you know what those enormous surveillance and data-center infrastructures built by technology monopolies (Palantir, OpenAI, AWS, Nvidia) are, philosophically? They are the ready-made, established, smoothly operating objective routes of the future socialist planned economy—that is, of the communist distribution network. Capital has built such smooth transition paths in cyberspace to exploit the worker better and centralize data better that; the moment the Total Worker becomes aware of its own body, it will not have to destroy this infrastructure.

Let us adapt to the twenty-first century that famous thesis Lenin stated in State and Revolution for the capitalist postal mechanism: Our task is not to blow up this cyber-post office into the air; it is to break its monopolistic bourgeois shell, intellectual property laws, and profit-oriented codes, and to connect the mechanism directly to the Total Worker's common planning councils.

From Platonov's Kotlovan to the Red Cybernetic Switch

That tragic and founding genius of Soviet literature, Andrei Platonov, in the novel The Foundation Pit (Kotlovan), tells the tragedy of those early Soviet workers who dig the earth to build that magnificent collective home of the future yet widen their own grave pits as they dig. In Platonov, the worker is a Prometheus trying to preserve his soul against a mechanizing world.

Comrade Diyar; those enormous digital data centers technology monopolies dig today with lies about "Artificial General Intelligence" (AGI) or "Superintelligence" are in fact capitalism's own Foundation Pit. As they dig there, as they suck up humanity's collective memory and stack it on their servers, they are in fact placing in the Total Worker's hand that magnificent power that will end the colony, war, and market anarchy with a single switch.

Pulling the plug does not mean breaking the machine, shutting down the internet, or returning to analog typewriters, comrade. Pulling the plug means seizing the protocols.

Pulling the plug means tearing the property deed of Palantir's necropolitical algorithms that send thousands of people to death every second from the Pentagon's socket and plugging it into the socket of the Red Cybernetic Soviets that will reduce the workday in Amazon warehouses to two hours and distribute production rationally in seconds according to social needs.

Once the Total Worker—that global body—opens its eyes and looks at its algorithmic chains; neither Silicon Valley's monopolistic barons nor the authoritarian despotisms trying to seize the street with cameras will be able to prevent that switch from being thrown. The founding horizon your article leaves us is precisely here, comrade; to synchronize the hands reaching for that switch with the theoretical and practical common line of global class struggle from now on.

Comrade Diyar; the "Total Worker" you describe so magnificently—from the data labeler in Kenya to the progressive software developer in Silicon Valley, from the courier in the Amazon warehouse to the mental worker exploited in office towers—is the sole will that will break those invisible chains of cyberspace. Every fiber-optic cable capital laid to control is in fact building the common nervous system of this global cyber-proletariat.

The shattering lantern you have brought to the struggle has refreshed our philosophical arsenal. The task that falls to us is to shatter this cyber-despotic shell you depict with such magnificent clarity with the practical will of class struggle.

Health to your mind, your partisan pen, and your revolutionary audacity, Comrade Diyar.

All Power to Algorithmic Networks and Soviets!