Part I – From Seed to Steam (Agricultural → Industrial)

Preface:

What follows is the first in a series of opinion piece essays that seek to apply dialectic materialism as a methodology to the modern goal and eventual implementation of AGI. It should be heavily noted that this is not a direct claim of truth, but simply the opinionated application of a historical philosophical methodology to modern trends and claims. This first piece is not linked heavily to studies, statistics, or other sources - it is, at present, simply a foundational introduction to the methodology. Even in this, the true scale of its mechanisms and applications are far more than what I could write here - and thus, this first essay is what I believe to be a bare minimum in what exactly the methodology spoken of is about, and how we can apply it in today’s coming world. It also does not rely on the time-scales of AGI being discovered, only that it is predicated on the idea that AGI becomes prolific and is capable of replacing human cognition and presence in the labor cycle.

If you have concerns, edits, or comments about this piece and the following essays - I welcome you to email me from my Contact page and tell me what you think.

Introduction:

“The instrument of labour, when it takes the form of a machine, immediately becomes a competitor of the workman himself.” — Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 15 (1867) (Marx, 557)

When labor’s value is reduced below subsistence levels, what becomes of the worker? Automation has continually increased the productivity of labor; raising labor income, expanding economic horizons, and creating a modern economic framework that allows highly efficient production (Autor and Salomons 2). However, this is not without controversy. We currently observe a sustained downward shift in total labor share - the portion of wealth owned by labor as opposed to capital. These are considered to be quantitative changes in a Marxian framework: piecemeal steps that increase scale, efficiency, or output, but do not otherwise change the dynamics and relationship both owners and workers have to production.

Today, however, automation marks a qualitative shift. While we do not currently see massive productive gains from automated cognition, we must still confront the looming threat of total productive relational collapse through an economic revolution that renders labor, as we understand it, obsolete (Korinek) given that the promised returns on AI do come to fruition. This new revolution, predicated on cognition-at-scale—intelligence infrastructure in the form of Big Data and algorithms—threatens to destabilize a world unprepared for its arrival.

Our current economy is built on the premise of a business owner paying workers to operate machinery, transport goods, or provide some material service related to the businesses production. These workers then spend their money in the economy, creating fiscal momentum and a recirculating goods production that allows for further production through transaction. If AGI is made, we must begin to understand the economic ramifications where the laborer as we have it is no longer needed. One must consider alternatives to our current mode of production: the productive forces themselves and our relationship to them. Many solutions have been proposed that we will cover in this multi-part essay - each given their strengths and weaknesses, each considered on their own merit and capacity to provide a sustainable economic future for not only the nation, but the globe.

Through the use of Marxist theory, case studies on leading AI companies, and economic statistics, I will define a clear trend in our economic trajectory, examine the threat of systemic rupture, and offer theoretical responses to this unfolding transformation.

Hegelian Methodology for Historical Dissection

In dialectic materialism, history is defined by ruptures in material conditions, predicated on the accumulation of changes that eventually lead to full shifts in our economic thought and paradigms. While our first ancestors spent tens of thousands of years utilizing primitive tools in subsistence hunter-gatherer communities, their incremental developments - pottery, husbandry, tool use - led to a full transition from nomadic life to more settled, agriculture-based societies built on land as a medium of production.

Consequently, we saw the rise of states, class stratification, and wealth surplus for perhaps the first time in history. These same kinds of economic ruptures reappeared in the Industrial Revolution and the Information Revolution of the 19th and 20th centuries, fundamentally altering how we perceive labor, class dynamics, and society itself. These are examples of true qualitative shifts in the productive forces, distinct from mere quantitative change.

What, then, is the distinction? In a Hegelian framework, a quantitative shift (Quantität) refers to microcosmic changes within the existing medium - policy changes, efficiency-enhancing technologies, or market shifts driven by capital, interest rates, climate conditions, and so on. Most economic analysis remains confined to these parameters, relying on statistical modeling and paradigms that presuppose continuity with existing structures. But a qualitative shift (Qualität) refers to a transformation in the very nature of the system. More directly, it is the culmination of countless quantitative changes, eventually rupturing into a new mode of production—what Hegel called the Übergang. Quantitative changes, however, do not alone constitute a qualitative shift. What can more directly cause these shifts in the natural inclination of any system to contain within it contradictions - things that the system fails to address because it can not on a superstructure level. Think first of simple water being heated - the quantitative contradiction is the difference in temperature. This temperature must change, shifting towards a rupture. As we see in water, once it hits a certain temperature it will become gaseous, which could be seen as a qualitative rupture in the system that was water heating on a stove. In more direct terms, as contradictions accumulate, a thing undergoes a shift not just in degree, but in kind.

This process is not always immediately visible. There is rarely a moment where one can definitively declare a qualitative change. Often, it is retrospective - recognized only after the transformation has become irreversible. This is the nature of dialectical movement, marked by the concept of sublation (Aufhebung)—the act of superseding while preserving elements of what came before.

To illustrate: an apple ripens and rots, yet remains an apple throughout. Only when it becomes fertilizer does it cease to be one—yet even then, it still carries forward its prior essence. So too in economics: past models linger in new forms. The Industrial Revolution, for instance, retained feudal structures in peripheral regions, and even today, monarchies and nobility persist in a globally capitalist world.

Case Study 1: The Agricultural Revolution

Perhaps the first - and arguably most important - qualitative shift in human history was the invention and subsequent adoption of agriculture. This was not merely a new way to produce food, but a total transformation of our social relations and productive forces, allowing for production of food to take place without direct human intervention at all processes. Whereas we were previously hunter-gatherers searching for subsistence, agriculture allowed for a semi-automated transformation of labor that used the temporal agent of “time” as a component of the food-gathering process. Time was used to deliberately place certain food products into cultivated locales, while also improving storage through granaries - marking the transition from gathering to cultivation, and enabling permanent settlement. These improvements marked the first echoes of automation, but more importantly, laid the foundation for class stratification, wealth extraction, and surplus labor value, but it should be minded that these things were not solely caused by agriculture, but a consequence amplified by it.

Over thousands of years, innumerable quantitative improvements built the necessary productivity that eventually allowed for rupture - not through individual achievement alone, but through the collective material accumulation of labor over time.

It should be noted that the Agricultural Revolution took place over roughly 5,000 years in multiple regions across the world - but this only emphasizes that its emergence resulted from the proliferation of these quantitative changes through the shared material experience of humanity, not from singular intention. While millstones improved grain processing and sickles reduced the labor required to cut produce, these tools merely refined existing processes. Agriculture itself was the rupture - shift from gathering into cultivation. The difference may seem subtle, but its historical significance is profound.

The earliest evidence of this shift appears in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia and the Levant, where native species such as wheat, barley, and lentils became the foundation of Western civilization. Later examples emerged in China, New Guinea, Mesoamerica, the Andes, and Sub-Saharan Africa. These proto-agricultural societies represent qualitative transitions in the Hegelian sense, though they did not yet constitute radically different civilizations, due to sublation and transitional continuity. Many cultures likely cultivated grains, migrated during winter to hunt, and returned to harvest what had been sown.

Only centuries later do we begin to see clear evidence of class stratification. Around 5,000 to 4,000 BCE, archaeological data reveals the first signs of wealth accumulation through differentiated burials, unequal housing, and centralized food storage and redistribution. These are unmistakable indicators of wealth disparity and material shifts in ownership and labor extraction. Where earlier societies appeared materially equal, these transitions reflected the emergence of dominance, surplus control, and early state formation.

Wealth extraction in these early societies was often carried out through produce taxation, with a portion of each harvest claimed by those who owned, but did not necessarily operate, the land. This allowed landowners to pursue other roles - military, religious, bureaucratic, or administrative - setting the stage for the first non-producing classes in human history. It should be again noted, however, that there are examples of these non-producing classes prior to obvious agriculture such as Gobekli Tepe.

Case Study 2: The Industrial Revolution

Agriculture augmented human labor to such a degree that it allowed hunter-gatherers to transition from searching for food to cultivating it. Under our hegelian framework, this augmentation laid the foundation for class dynamics, organized society, and many innovations not worth elaborating here. While agriculture redefined our relationship to food and its labor processes, it was industrialization that revolutionized our relationship to everything else - from guild work to agriculture at scale. It was industrialization that fundamentally created the extreme surplus of labor we take for granted today.

How, then, did it do this? Mechanization was first introduced through the automation of basic human input - such as hand cranks and water wheels - and quickly expanded into larger-scale animal or river-powered mills that could perform mechanical labor with no human input at all. These systems were eventually refined into steam engines, coal and diesel machines, and later, electric engines that generated load through arcs and magnetism. These non-human inputs enabled a scaling economy in which humans were no longer required for every aspect of labor. Tasks like spinning thread or sorting agricultural produce by size became mechanized, compressing what once took hours into mere minutes.

This heightened efficiency wasn’t confined to industry- it also enabled farming to be done at commercial scale, where it had previously been a function of subsistence and serfdom. This commercialized agriculture was, arguably, the most revolutionary land reform to date. It allowed the emerging capitalist class to produce food at levels of efficiency never before possible. As agricultural efficiency grew, farmers increasingly became capitalists in their own right, as once-communal efforts were bought up and converted into family-owned ranches, privatized farms, or corporate land holdings.

This was carried out through what is known as the Enclosure Movement, whereby previously feudal or publicly owned land was privatized and fenced off for the exclusive use of commercial agriculture. Displaced by more efficient modes of production, many former serfs had no choice but to migrate to urban centers in search of wage labor.

Once in the cities, these former subsistence farmers became newly formed proletarians - those who sell their labor and time for wages. This transformation was made possible by mechanization, which allowed otherwise unskilled laborers to contribute to large, socialized enterprises that multiplied their collective input into more profitable outcomes. Here emerged the first instance of the modern proletariat, who no longer worked the land but instead operated the machines of a new age to earn their subsistence.

These improvements in efficiency were marked by the creation of various innovations. Impactful inventions like the Spinning Jenny allowed for the winding of up to eight spools of thread at once, and later significantly more. Where as it once took one skilled spinner to create thread, the creation of this early spinning apparatus only required one unskilled laborer to produce significantly more work per unit of input labor than the skilled laborer - this was one of the first foundational steps in the proletarianization of the workforce, and the decoupling of ‘skilled’ labor from the creation of commodities.

This decoupling is significant because it allowed capital to essentially replace the otherwise universal understanding that labor required skilled hands to accomplish it. With this new realization that mechanization allowed capital to replace skilled labor, further innovations were normalized - meanwhile, the prior subsistence industries predicated on that skilled labor collapsed, being unable to compete with this new found efficiency.

Further obsolescence was introduced via inventions like the steam engine, which displaced muscle labor and decoupled factories from water run wheels. This allowed urban environments to explode with factories across the entire city, as opposed to only the waterways. Muscle labor as well was made obsolescent to a degree by the introduction of mechanized muscle, making things like animal labor or swathes of workers no longer necessary to accomplish the same amount of work - made more cost efficient by an optimization of wage to output, commodities needed to accomplish the work such as food to coal or wood, and more.

Later infrastructural innovations allowed for optimized trade inland through the use of locomotives, enabling not only the mass transit of freight, but the quick transportation of people - making migration to urban environments across a nation suddenly viable for millions of people. This further decentralized mechanization, while centralizing population centers as the ‘new paradigm’ of the then-modern worker. Again and again, the transition from guild and skilled labor to mechanized labor was magnified by seemingly minute quantitative changes to the overall qualitative change we see today in the Industrial Revolution. It is only post-hoc that we are able to rationalize these growths in efficiency, but the change was seen even then for what it was - even if it took decades.

This efficiency led to valorization, or otherwise known as Verwertung in Marx’s own works. Valorization is the process in which capital creates more capital by funding laborers to use the machines of their trade to produce new commodities. These new commodities inherit a few values: from their use value, to their inherent value, and the additional added value of both the machines used in their creation and the imparted value of the laborer into their transition. That is to say, a piece of linen is worth only a single piece of linen until it is crafted by machine and sewn into a shirt, at which point it contains the value of the linen, the value of the sewing machine imparted into it, and the value of the labor transitioning the material into a new commodity. Valorization is then the extraction of that excess labor value so that capital’s engine is self-serving and self-fueling. It is often misunderstood as perpetual, in so far as it creates value from its own efforts and causes further value to return. We will expand later in the essay as to why I believe this is not perpetual, but rather a definite process that must come to an end due to the natural contradictions and antagonisms therein.

For now, however, we should focus on the changes in ownership and pinpoint the economic rupture. The birth of the wage-labor class can not be tied to any single event, but the general transition of labor from guild dominated to capital dominated as a whole. Each piece of its transition plays a major part in the overall qualitative transition we see today, but in their isolation can only be seen as quantitative changes. This is a fact of the dialectic methodology, in that a thing can never be its total transition, and only a piece of it - both in of itself, and not of itself in a slow and methodical magnetism to what it is not.

Capital owning the means of production could be as close to a pinpoint as we could rightfully declare, yet even this is dangerously bereft of the context needed to validate such a declaration. As stated, know that this isn’t the total transition - but its steps are piecemeal and partitioned. As capital owned the means of production, labor became commodified for its time, or single input of labor in an hour per person. This single input of labor was raised in efficiency until it led to the priorly explained valorization, leading to Capital becoming its own engine of perpetuation. As the means of production were now directly tied to capital instead of land, it became more directly understood that labor was strictly tied to capital instead of agricultural output as seen previously.

Once capital owns the means of production, and labor becomes commodified, alienation becomes rampant. Alienation, or Entfremdung, is where a laborer is no longer connected to the input, the output, or the commodities therein of their labor and its production, instead tied to the capital that relates all manner of that production. This alienation is spoken about in depth in other places, and thus only a minor focus shall be given to it. In so far that alienation exists in this framework, it drives a worker to disengage with their labor, leading to estrangement from the very aspects of a person from their human nature. Alienation is a result of the inherent contradictions that come from Capital as the mode of production, playing a key part in both modern and historic developments of policy, quantitative changes of necessity to the system, and further strife built in those antagonisms.

These antagonisms are inherent to the system, most succinctly in the form of wages as the subsistence of the laborer necessary to create the work, and wages being the largest cost of a capitalist. This contradiction sees itself manifest in that a Capitalist may want to lower wages as far as they can manage them, while also magnifying the profitability of their commodity production - selling it for more, as an example, but more aptly in the raising of efficiency in production; creating more value per hour of labor input. This contradiction, in that one wants to pay less while selling for more, is a significant driver of class antagonisms seen throughout a modern capitalist economy, or any post-industrial economy.

This is a departure from prior class antagonisms as it is no longer a give and take of production and taxes, but instead a direct antagonism between the producer and the owner. Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat became the new direct competitors in the Capitalist mode of production, forging forward with their own best interests in mind, leading to further efficiency as policy progressively moved in favor of the proletariat, until much later where in stagnation occurs in their total labor share, followed by their slow fall in labor share in more recent years.

Dialectically, these contradictions were interpreted in their time by thinkers such as Marx, Keynes, and Owen - each offering a partial glimpse into the unfolding historical process. Marx developed dialectical materialism as a method for understanding history through the lens of class conflict and economic structure. Keynes sought to mediate those conflicts through state intervention and welfare policy, aiming to stabilize capitalism without dismantling it. Owen, through his moral critique of industrial conditions, imagined a cooperative order built on education, dignity, and shared labor. Each offered a vision of resolution - rooted in their context, shaped by their ideology - but none alone could capture the totality of the system’s movement. They remain fragments of a larger whole: expressions of a world struggling to transcend itself.

These expressions are not bereft of the contexts they came from, however. All thinkers, all systems, of the Industrial Revolution continued to embody the nature of the Agricultural Revolution in new forms. As land reform transitioned serfs into laborers, land became its own form of capital dominated productive measure, while taxes were altered from land tax to more graduated models fitting of new found wealth of the worker and capitalist. In spite of these transitions, however, even monarchies continued throughout the modern era.

Monarchies, despite their continuation however, were gutted of their strength. They were removed from power as capital continued to transcend beyond the bounds that feudal restrictions and absolutist policies had placed upon productive measures. In this obsolescence of production, an obsolescence of form manifested in that monarchies could no longer hold the power they once did.

Many liberalized in the face of capitalist production, direct consequences of their material conditions. These liberalization efforts were only able to be done as a direct result of their mode of production transitioning from one form of agriculturally dominated imperialism, to capital defined production. This is the core of all transitions in history, as direct responses to the material conditions of their time - making such changes possible.

Part I Conclusion:

It should then be understood that today is another profound rupture environment where in our material conditions will define our future, both in government, policy, but also in our very lives and productive means. Artificial Intelligence has been posited by numerous agencies across the world as the key to obsolescence of labor. To know if this is true, we must ask the question; If land gave us civilization, machines gave us capital, then what shall AI give us?

With AI, cognition is no longer human. Thought itself becomes externalized, and labor becomes a qualitative piece of the past. The future will be defined by a race towards AI for research, production, military, civic, and more uses than we can enumerate - but its implications are total in their impact. There will not be an industry that will not be affected by the creation of AI, and for this reason - it may become the next qualitative step in our human dialectical process, given that the methodology can truly be applied.