What Does the "AI Tsunami" Conceal?

Young comrades,

Listen closely! From the magnificent castles of global finance capital, from the glass towers of Silicon Valley, and from the sterile libraries of the bourgeois academy, a colossal lament is rising!

The capitalist press adorns its headlines with disaster scenarios; screens, product launches, and international summits shake with panic-filled cries: "Joint warning from 16 Nobel economists: The economic tsunami of artificial intelligence is coming!"

So who are those raising this cry? From Daron Acemoğlu to Joseph Stiglitz, from Paul Krugman to Angus Deaton — the "historical priests" of bourgeois economics, together with international monopolistic centers, are hurling a prophecy. Echoing through the halls of IMF Research Publications and the World Economic Forum (WEF), this prophecy confronts us as systematic propaganda in the columns of Project Syndicate and the Financial Times: "Technology is coming like a tsunami; it will destroy jobs, swallow markets, and impoverish the masses!"

Comrades, look carefully at this circus and the spectacle it stages! What stands before us is not the innocent warning of benevolent prophets concerned for humanity’s future. Whenever bourgeois ideology confronts the internal contradictions of its own mode of production, it suddenly begins to manufacture a mystical language of apocalypse. Packaging the crises they themselves create as a "natural disaster" and presenting them as a classless catastrophe illusion that paralyzes the consciousness of the masses — this is their oldest historical trick!

A tsunami is a natural event; it has no agent, no one responsible; it cannot be stopped — one can only submit to it passively. That is precisely why they name the crisis a "tsunami"! The owners of capital blame the "natural force of technology" in order to obscure the destruction wrought by their own hunger for profit, their own greed that turns artificial intelligence into workerless factories, and the system’s inevitable crisis of overaccumulation.

We, young comrades who carry dialectical materialism as a torch in our hands, must tear through this ideological fog!

There is no mystical monster awakening and attacking humanity. What stands before us is a colossal productive force — the product of humanity’s collective mental labor (the General Intellect) — that no longer fits within the narrow molds of capitalist relations of production and private property, and has reached the point of explosion! What stands before us is desperate capitalism: rates of profit falling, unable to find buyers for the commodities it produces as it expels living labor, sawing off the very branch on which its profit mechanism sits!

We do not fear machines; we do not shrink from technology! For we know that the true creator of that accumulated dead labor is the working class. Now let us dismantle step by step this "virtual apocalypse" clamor spread by capital’s prophets, draw out the dialectical anatomy of events, and lay bare the truth itself!

Who Said What? The Claims and Sources of the Bourgeois Prophets

Whenever capital’s "priests of economics" and the advisors of global finance capital encounter an internal blockage created by their own mode of production, they suddenly transform into monuments of "humanitarian concern." The panic-filled stance they take today before artificial intelligence springs not from humanist anxiety, but from the fear of being crushed beneath productive forces they can no longer manage.

Let us decipher one by one the claims of this chorus led by 16 Nobel-winning economists — claims that have found wide echo in the bourgeois media — along with the institutional sources behind them and the ideological functions they carry:

Daron Acemoğlu: "So-So Automation" and Excessive Capital Incentives

MIT faculty member Daron Acemoğlu and his colleagues argue that artificial intelligence will not create the colossal "productivity miracle" imagined for the global economy, but will instead trigger mass unemployment under capital’s drive to protect its rates of profit.

• His claim: According to Acemoğlu, current AI investments are of the nature of "so-so automation." That is, they do not deliver a radical increase in productivity in production; they merely replace workers, suppress wages, and serve capital’s exploitation of tax advantages.

• Bourgeois policy proposal: That states tax technologies that substitute for capital and incentivize "human-centered" AI research.

• Sources and links: You can access Acemoğlu’s foundational studies, which set out with quantitative data the macroeconomic limits of AI, the productivity illusion, and its destructive effects on employment, via NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research) Working Papers and the MIT Economics Research Portal.

Joseph Stiglitz: "Market Failure" and a Deepening Distribution Shock

Columbia University faculty member and Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz is among those foremost in declaring that leaving artificial intelligence to capitalist market dynamics will lead to social catastrophe.

• His claim: Stiglitz emphasizes that the technology giants (Big Tech) that hold ownership of AI technology extract rent income, a situation that excessively expands capital’s share and drives labor’s share to the bottom. He argues that the invisible hand (the market) cannot resolve this distribution shock; on the contrary, it will deepen inequality.

• Bourgeois policy proposal: Taxing technological rent, strong social-state intervention, and supporting the purchasing power of the lower classes through instruments such as "Universal Basic Income" (UBI).

• Sources and links: You can access Stiglitz’s interventions on the "market failure" he theorized and on AI-focused income injustice through Project Syndicate Articles and Roosevelt Institute Publications.

Paul Krugman and Angus Deaton: The Liquidation of Cognitive Labor and the Demand Crisis

Nobel economists Paul Krugman and Angus Deaton warn that the AI wave is qualitatively different from historical automation processes (the steam engine, the assembly line, and so on).

• Their claim: While earlier waves of automation substituted for manual labor (blue-collar work), artificial intelligence directly substitutes for educated mental labor (white-collar work). The devaluation of software developers, analysts, academics, and office workers will liquidate the "middle class" regarded as the backbone of bourgeois society and produce a mass collapse of consumption (demand) relative to production.

• Bourgeois policy proposal: Transforming the education system according to the logic of "reskilling" and flexible models of work.

• Sources and links: You can follow Krugman and Deaton’s analyses of the substitution of mental labor, the collapse of the middle class, and the contraction of demand in global markets via the Financial Times Economics Portal and The New York Times Economics Column.

The Joint "Tsunami" Cry of 16 Nobel Economists and Global Finance Institutions

International organs of finance capital such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Economic Forum (WEF) have declared a global state of alarm, citing joint declarations published under the signatures of 16 Nobel-winning economists.

• Their claim: Artificial intelligence will directly transform or destroy 60% of jobs in advanced economies and at least 40% of jobs on a global scale. This situation constitutes an "economic tsunami" that will spread in successive waves.

• Bourgeois policy proposal: International regulations, global AI funds, and "soft landing" policies that protect capital movements.

• Sources and links: You can examine the joint findings of the 16 Nobel economists and the IMF’s projections of destruction for the global labor force through IMF Staff Discussion Notes and WEO Reports and the World Economic Forum (WEF) Future of Jobs Report.

An Ideological Decryption Table of All These Claims

Comrades, we can summarize the claims presented by the bourgeois prophets, their ideological veils, and the material reality behind them as follows:

Bourgeois Prophet / Institution	Claim Advanced	Ideological Illusion Concealed	Dialectical Materialist Reality
Daron Acemoğlu	"AI is unproductive; it only serves to fire workers."	Blames technical choices in technology investment.	Capital is compelled to restrict variable capital ($v$) and expand constant capital ($c$) because rates of profit are falling.
Joseph Stiglitz	"AI is disrupting market equilibrium and distribution."	Sees the problem not in private property but in a "badly managed market" malfunction.	The cause of inequality is not the disruption of the market, but the fact that data and algorithms stand under monopolistic private property.
Paul Krugman	"Cognitive labor is being liquidated; the middle class will vanish."	Assumes that white-collar workers are "privileged" and can remain outside the system.	Mental labor, like manual labor, is labor-power sold; under capitalism, everything that is commodified is condemned to devaluation.
16 Nobels & IMF	"An AI tsunami is coming; the system will collapse!"	Presents the crisis as an inevitable "tsunami" coming from nature and shrugs off responsibility.	What is unfolding is not a natural disaster; it is the explosion of the historical contradiction between the productive forces and relations of private property.

In short, comrades: bourgeois economists are quite successful at diagnosing the symptoms of the disease (unemployment, collapse of demand, inequality). But they seek the source of the disease in the virus (artificial intelligence); their class position does not permit them to say that the organism itself (capitalist property relations) is rotten.

The Class Anatomy of the Process: A Materialist Analysis of the Contradiction

Bourgeois economists and their spokespersons in the academy present artificial intelligence as if it were a meteor fallen upon our economy from outer space, or a "natural disaster" that suddenly struck. Yet dialectical materialism teaches us that no technology arrives from outside social relations on its own. Artificial intelligence is a necessary product of the internal dynamics of the capitalist mode of production, of the hunger for profit, and of the pressure of competition.

To grasp the class anatomy of the process, we must tear off the abstraction-masks of bourgeois economics — "utility," "supply and demand," "productivity" — and turn to the theory of value and the laws of capital accumulation that Karl Marx crystallized in Capital.

The Leap in the Organic Composition of Capital and Falling Rates of Profit

The most fundamental contradiction of capitalism is the uninterrupted rise of the organic composition of capital in the process of capital accumulation.

Capital consists of two components:

• Constant Capital (c): Means of production, raw materials, servers, processors (GPUs), data centers, and algorithmic infrastructures. This capital creates no new value; it merely transfers the past value it contains into the new product. That is, it is dead labor.

• Variable Capital (v): The wages paid to purchase the worker’s labor-power. The sole source of surplus value (profit) in the system is this living labor.

The capitalist continually increases technology in order to wipe competitors from the market and lower unit cost. The AI offensive means that $c$ (constant capital) reaches colossal dimensions while $v$ (variable capital) is driven to the bottom.

The equation for capital’s rate of profit is as follows:

rate of profit = s / (c+v)

(Here s represents the surplus value produced.)

When capital, through artificial intelligence, expels living labor (v) from the system and fills its place with colossal processor farms (c), it may obtain extra profit in the short term, but in the long term it dries up the total source of surplus value (s) in the system. Thus Marx’s Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall is realized. This is the first material cause of the internal panic of the 16 Nobel economists: Without living human labor, it is impossible to make rates of profit sustainable.

The Domination of Dead Labor Over Living Labor and Relative Surplus Value

The system we call artificial intelligence is the collective knowledge humanity has produced over centuries — the codes written, the images drawn, the research conducted (the General Intellect) — plundered and imprisoned in data centers. That is, artificial intelligence is intensified and privately appropriated dead labor.

Under capitalist relations of production, this dead labor is used not to liberate the living human labor that created it, but as a weapon to subjugate, devalue, and replace it.

Traditional Capitalism: Living Labor > Uses the Machine > Production Digital Capitalism: Dead Labor (AI) > Supervises and Replaces Living Labor

By introducing artificial intelligence into production, the capitalist aims to increase relative surplus value. The necessary labor-time the worker needs to sustain their own life shrinks, thanks to AI, to minutes; all remaining time is transformed into surplus labor-time transferred to the capitalist. Yet the dialectical contradiction deepens precisely here: as the worker’s labor-time shortens and the worker is left unemployed, capital also destroys the mass market through which this surplus value would be realized (sold).

The Proletarianization of Cognitive Labor and the Reserve Army of Labor

The AI wave has dispersed the ideological illusion covering the strata that bourgeois society regarded as "privileged."

White-collar employees who for years were told they "owned their own mental capital" and were therefore not part of the working class (software developers, graphic designers, data analysts, translators, legal workers) are rapidly being proletarianized together with artificial intelligence.

1. Deskilling: The qualitative skills human beings acquire through years of education are loaded into an algorithmic model and reduced to an ordinary keystroke. Mental labor is being devalued.

2. Expansion of the Reserve Army of Labor: The reserve army of labor once arrayed against workers who labored with muscle power in the industrial revolution today stands before mental laborers by means of artificial intelligence. The fact that millions of skilled employees live under the threat of unemployment generally pulls down the wages of those who remain employed.

A Detailed Comparative Table of Class Structure

Let us clarify the class codes and antagonisms of the AI process within capitalist relations of production with the following detailed table:

Dimension of Analysis	Capitalist Class (Technology Monopolies & Finance Capital)	Working Class (Blue- and White-Collar Collective Labor)
Relation to the Means of Production	Holds private ownership of data centers, processors (NVIDIA, TSMC, etc.), and closed models (OpenAI, Google).	Is entirely dispossessed of the means of production; must sell labor-power (cognitive or physical) in order to live.
Purpose in Using Technology	To restrict variable capital ($v$), raise profit margins, establish monopoly in the market, and extract digital rent.	To defend humanity’s common mental accumulation, lighten the burden of work, and live a human life.
Relation to Surplus Value	Appropriates relative surplus value through AI; seizes the mental accumulation produced by labor.	Receives no share of the value produced; on the contrary, the data accumulation they themselves produced is used to render them unemployed.
Contradiction Faced	Must fire workers in order to profit, yet cannot find buyers for the goods produced as workers are fired.	Even if productivity multiplies a hundredfold through AI, working hours do not decrease; they confront unemployment and precariousness.
Systemic Goal	To keep AI in a proprietary and surveillant order; to suppress social explosions with crumbs such as UBI (citizenship income).	To seize AI from private property and socialize it; to pass to an economy planned according to social need.

The Dialectical Synthesis of the Contradiction

Young comrades, as we see, what stands before us is neither a "machine gaining consciousness" nor an "unstoppable natural event." What stands before us is the historical conflict between the tremendous level the productive forces have reached and the narrow molds of bourgeois property relations.

Artificial intelligence is humanity’s accumulated collective labor. Yet under capitalist property relations, this accumulation is transformed into a guillotine hanging over the heads of its creators. The capitalist order cannot manage this process without converting the abundance potential AI offers into social destruction (unemployment, collapse, crisis).

The plain truth behind the bourgeois prophets’ weeping about a "tsunami" is this: Capitalism is historically inadequate before the magnitude of the productive forces it itself has created.

Details Capitalism Fears — But That Are Destructive for the Classes

Young comrades,

In Silicon Valley’s glittering launches, on the covers of technology magazines, or in the panic-filled declarations of 16 Nobel economists, one thing is insistently concealed: The capitalist class never fears human destruction, the hunger of laborers, or social misery.

Capital’s only real fear is the collapse of rates of profit and the unsustainability of the cycle of capital accumulation (M - C - M').

In this process called the AI revolution, the systemic contradictions that keep capital awake at night and the destructive consequences these contradictions create for the working class are two sides of the same coin. Now let us dissect, with a dialectical approach, these destructive details that the bourgeois academy tries to brush aside as a "problem of technological adaptation."

The Realization Crisis and the Paradox of "Perfect Automation"

One of the most tragicomic contradictions of the capitalist mode of production is that a move "rational" for the individual capitalist is of the nature of "suicide" for the total capitalist class.

• The Individual Capitalist’s Logic: "If I fire all the software developers, analysts, and office workers in the system and put AI agents in their place, I zero out my labor costs and pull ahead of my competitors."

• The Dead End of Total Capital: If all capitalists do the same thing and completely expel living human labor from production through AI, a colossal Realization Crisis emerges.

As Marx showed: a commodity acquires value the moment it is produced, but for that value to turn into profit it must be sold on the market (C' - M'). When the masses are left unemployed through AI and wages are suppressed, the purchasing power that would buy the goods and services produced by this colossal productive capacity disappears.

The workerless factory looks like a profitable dream; yet in an economy where there remain no wage-earners to buy the software, service, or commodity produced, capital is crushed beneath the value it itself has produced. The first detail capitalism fears is this: Profit cannot be obtained in a market without customers.

The Drying Up of the Source of Surplus Value and the Bankruptcy of the Price Mechanism

The greatest secret the capitalist class cannot utter is this: Artificial intelligence does not produce value.

Capitalist economics spreads the illusion that machines and algorithms "create value." Yet according to the dialectical materialist theory of value, the sole source of new value and profit is living human labor.

• Artificial intelligence, servers, processors, and data centers are constant capital (c).

• As they are consumed in the production process, they transfer the dead value previously imprisoned within them into the new product.

If living human labor (v) approaches zero in a sector, the marginal cost of reproducing the product of that sector also approaches zero. When the cost of copying the code, text, or image produced by an AI model is zero, the price and profit margin of commodities are, by the law of value, also pulled toward zero.

Capitalism is not a system that produces abundance; it is a system that obtains profit through artificial scarcity. AI’s potential to zero out the marginal cost of knowledge threatens capitalism’s property and price mechanism at the root.

Destructive Details for the Laboring Classes: The Apex of Alienation and the "UBI" Illusion

While the capitalist class fears the collapse of rates of profit, the bill for this process is being charged to the working class as a compounded social destruction:

The Absolute Apex of Alienation

For the first time in history, the working class is witnessing its own past collective labor being used to destroy it. The codes written by the developer, the texts penned by the writer, the images produced by the illustrator (collective mental labor) have been scraped without our knowledge or consent and fed into AI models. Today the laborer is being stripped of their job by artificial intelligence — the objectified form of their own past labor. This is the most radical point of humanity’s alienation from its own product.

The Universal Basic Income (UBI) Illusion and Techno-Feudal Dependency

The "Universal Basic Income" proposal frequently voiced by the 16 Nobel economists and technology bosses (Sam Altman, Elon Musk, etc.) is not a humanitarian aid; it is a move to protect the property order.

The class function of UBI is as follows:

1. To pay the masses driven into mass unemployment a "hush money" at the hunger line in order to prevent them from embarking on a revolutionary uprising.

2. To fund, through the state (again with taxes collected from society), a minimal consumer base capable of purchasing the commodities capital produces.

3. While keeping ownership of the means of production in the hands of a handful of technology monopolies, to transform the masses into "digital slaves" fully dependent on the state and corporations.

A Class and Systemic Comparative Table of the Contradictions

We can read the dialectical antagonism between the systemic crises capital fears and the social reality that destroys the working class through the following table:

Process / Field of Contradiction	Systemic Risks Capitalism Fears	Destructive Consequences for the Working Class	Lie / Illusion of Bourgeois Economics
Market and Sale (C' - M')	Collapse of Purchasing Power: Unemployed masses unable to buy the commodities produced, and capital locking up.	Absolute Impoverishment: Becoming unable to sell the only thing one has to live on (labor-power).	"AI will create new fields of work; everyone will work less."
Profit Mechanism (s)	Drying Up of Surplus Value: As living human labor is withdrawn, the total rate of surplus value approaches zero.	Cognitive Deskilling: Human qualities transferred to the algorithm, cheapening labor.	"Technology increases productivity; social welfare will rise."
Price and Property	Zeroing of Marginal Cost: The disappearance of the cost of copying knowledge and digital services.	Digital Enclosure: Humanity’s common knowledge imprisoned behind monopolistic APIs.	"Intellectual property rights are essential to protect innovation."
Social Order	Loss of Systemic Legitimacy: Millions of skilled employees being dispossessed and radicalized at once.	Techno-Feudal Dependency: Severed from the means of production and condemned to the state’s UBI crumbs.	"With Universal Basic Income, humanity will be freed from poverty."

Capitalism has created, through artificial intelligence, a colossal productive force capable of bringing about its own end. It is not technology itself, but its capitalist property wrapping, that is a destruction for the classes.

The capitalist class on the one hand clings to AI to save rates of profit, and on the other is horrified at being crushed beneath the social collapse this clinging creates. The Nobel economists’ "tsunami" outcries are precisely the expression of this historical entrapment.

The Task Falling to Young Comrades — Liberating the Desacralized Technology

Young comrades,

Let us fix our eyes on that "paralyzing" climate of fear spread by the capitalist class and its guardians in the academy: On one side, technology monopolies that say "AI has reached consciousness; it is attacking humanity" and subcontract their own security negligence to the machine; on the other, Nobel economic prophets who cry "An AI tsunami is coming; we will all go hungry" and charge the bill for the crisis to "technological fate"...

This entire society of the spectacle and bourgeois ideology has a single aim: To render you passive, to mystify technology, and to make existing property relations accepted as an unchangeable law of nature.

As dialectical materialists, our task is not merely to interpret the world, but to change it. We must go beyond technology fetishism, Silicon Valley illusions, and "virtual apocalypse" tales, and define our concrete revolutionary tasks. The process before us is not a "machine rebellion," but the sharpening of the historical contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production.

The practical and theoretical tasks standing before young comrades take shape along five main axes:

Theory Against Ideological Disarmament: Smashing Technology Fetishism

The bourgeois world, by presenting artificial intelligence as a "self-thinking," sacred, or human-like being, produces the most radical form of commodity fetishism.

• Breaking the Spell: We must defend in every arena that AI does not possess "consciousness," "free will," or "malice"; that it is the processed form, in colossal server farms, of the collective accumulation humanity has produced throughout history — that is, intensified dead labor ($General\ Intellect$).

• Naming the Agent Correctly: When an AI model exploits a system or produces mass unemployment, we must put on the target board not the "algorithm," but monopoly capital (OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, etc.) — which removes security limits out of hunger for profit and puts living labor out on the street to cut costs.

• We Reject Fatalism: Against the futuristic pessimism bourgeois economists spread with the "tsunami" metaphor, we must organize historical optimism. It is not technology itself that is destructive, but the form of property in capital’s hands.

Axis of Struggle: The Fight for Socialization Against Digital Enclosures

What the fencing-off of peasants’ common pastures in eighteenth-century England and their conversion into the private property of dukes (primitive accumulation) was then, the scraping of humanity’s common digital accumulation by monopolistic companies and its imprisonment behind closed APIs and subscription walls is today.

• The Demand for Public Ownership: AI models, data centers, supercomputers, and chip-production infrastructures cannot be the personal property or profit gate of a handful of billionaires. We must raise as a banner the demand that all this infrastructure be removed from private property and socialized, transferred to transparent institutions working for the public good, and planned according to society’s needs.

• Common Ownership Against Data Plunder: Against bourgeois law that protects capital’s rent under the name of "intellectual property," we must declare that the data and knowledge humanity produces have a public character belonging to everyone.

Line of Organization: The Proletarianization of Cognitive Labor and a New Class Alliance

Together with artificial intelligence, capital is rapidly precarizing and deskilling white-collar mental laborers as well. The software developer, analyst, academic, or illustrator who for years saw themselves as "separate from the system" today understands that they share the same fate as the factory worker.

• Smashing the Privilege Illusion: Young comrades must make young employees in the technology sector or in fields of mental labor grasp that they are not "elite," that they are a proletariat with nothing to sell but their labor-power.

• Organization Against Digital Slavery: We must unite on the same class line of struggle the millions of data workers in the Global South who label AI data for a bare living (clickworkers) with the software developers in the metropolises.

• Exit Against Techno-Feudalism (UBI): Against the bourgeoisie’s projects of pacifying the masses and rendering them dependent on the state under the name of "Universal Basic Income" (UBI), we must raise the demand for "not charity, but the shortening of working time and control of the means of production."

Ideological Intervention in the Open-Source Movement

As we have seen in the Hugging Face crisis or in the development of open-source models (DeepSeek, GLM, etc.), the greatest resistance to monopoly capital’s closed and censored towers comes from open-source communities. Yet this movement carries the risk of being trapped within liberal-technocratic limits.

• Consciousness of Social Ownership: Young comrades must actively support and use open-source code movements, free software licenses, and public data repositories.

• Surpassing the Liberal Trap: We must carry to these communities that open source is not merely "a more practical method of software development," but carries the potential of a communizing mode of production against capital’s private property. Bringing technical communities together with class consciousness is a revolutionary task.

The Historical Divide: Capitalist Collapse vs. Socialist Future

To clarify our vision of the future, we must tirelessly explain to the masses the character of technology under two different social orders:

Criterion of Analysis	AI Under Capitalist Property	AI Under Socialist Planning
Social Outcome	Mass unemployment, precariousness, collapse of purchasing power, and crisis.	Radical reduction of necessary labor-time (for example, 10 hours a week).
Human Counterpart	Cognitive deskilling; the apex of alienation from labor and from oneself.	Transfer of drudgery to the machine; human beings having time for art and science.
Purpose of Production	Raising the profit rates of a handful of monopolistic companies and extracting digital rent.	Fully meeting society’s material and cultural needs and harmony with nature.
Form of Property	Private property, closed APIs, intellectual-property walls, and enclosure.	Common social ownership, full transparency, and open-source access.

The Future Is Ours!

Comrades!

Let capital’s Nobel prophets weep "tsunami" as much as they like; what they fear is not technology itself, but that technology’s reaching the point of exploding their own property order.

We do not fear machines or the speed of algorithms. For the sole real power behind the knowledge that feeds those algorithms, the mines that bring those processors into being, and the infrastructure that builds those servers is living human labor — the working class!

Artificial intelligence is not a catastrophe; the moment it is stripped of its capitalist wrapping, it is a tremendous lever that will accelerate humanity’s passage from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

Our task is to smash the technological fatalism capital spreads, to free the productive forces from the shackles of monopolistic property, and to restore this collective accumulation of humanity to society.

Down with capital’s digital enclosures!

Long live the public ownership of the means of production and organized class struggle!