From the Editors: Rally-Agrupemonos! aims to help its readers “dig deeper” into the issues of the day by laying out some of the fundamental economic causes of today’s political turmoil. By understanding fundamental economic causes, we can organize and unify more effectively, since the working class, indeed society as a whole, is being impacted by these deep and relentless economic changes.
This article is about how capitalism as a system has been changing – revolutionizing – since the 1960s and 1970s due to the technological revolution that brought us automation, robotics, and now AI. It was adapted from an article originally printed in 2018.
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The defining characteristic of capitalism is that, first, the owners of capital exploit human labor to produce commodities, keeping labor cheap and paying the lowest wages possible. Then, the workers must purchase these commodities with their wages in order to live.
Labor-replacing technologies, as they develop, completely shatter this relationship. Neither robots nor permanently unemployed workers do any shopping. Through the ongoing process of technological change, which has been continuing for decades, society is being polarized into two great camps. One camp possesses the vast wealth of society and the abundance being produced. The other camp lives permanently in abject poverty and want, without adequate work or means of survival. As this polarization becomes more extreme, even deeply hostile and opposed, that is, antagonistic, our society moves away from reforming the existing system and moves toward revolution.
In other words, the conflict in the economy – and between the classes – intensifies as a natural and inevitable process. Step by step, it reaches the point where it cannot and will not be resolved or settled by partial reforms. Indeed, as the capitalist class moves toward fascism, we can see this process at work. The capitalist class today is stripping away programs like food stamps (SNAP) and Medicaid which help workers who have lost jobs and income at the very time such programs are needed most. The recent so-called Big [Ugly] Budget Bill is an example of how far the capitalist class will go in attacking the working class’s basic needs and demand for justice, rolling back reforms won in the 1960s and 1970s.
It was just a matter of time before this economic antagonism found political expression. One example of this is evidenced by the polarizing effect of the two Trump presidencies. The size, the scope, and the sustainability of the demonstrations against the policies of the Trump administration have caused many in the movement to compare this period with the civil rights and antiwar upheavals of the 1960s. The demands of the movement today are around many of the same issues as they were back then. Healthcare, education, housing, jobs, racism, police brutality, women’s rights and war are just some of those issues.
Automation is incompatible with capitalism
In the past period, these demands could be partially met and some reforms in the interests of the workers could be obtained because the capitalist system was still expanding. For example, the struggle for civil rights for African Americans led to significant reforms against the background of mechanical cotton harvesting in the South, which came to replace sharecroppers in picking cotton. Massive migration from the rural South brought workers into expanding industry in the North and eventually in the South. This example shows how demands for greater economic opportunity, equality and justice could win civil rights reforms without disrupting the capitalist system.
In the 1960s, there was still plenty of room for technological developments that were compatible with the capitalist system. “Compatible” as used here means that technological change at this earlier time took away some jobs but gave rise to others and people kept working and surviving within the system.
Automation – labor-replacing, electronic technology – has grown rapidly since it was applied to production the 1970s but automation is not compatible with capitalism. Society has become more polarized economically and politically. The upsurge of a movement for the basic necessities of life and social justice is proof of this. While many participants in the movement perceive themselves as resisting Trump, they are actually rebelling against capitalism and its private property relationships which are threatening their very survival. Historic changes in the production process and the economy have brought about what we are going through now.
We know from our study of history that social orders do not disappear until there is no longer any room for their economic system to expand. Today the capitalist economic system has penetrated every corner of the globe. It has nowhere to expand. Unprecedented production and unprecedented want describe our time. Millions of workers in the United States – and indeed, across the world – are struggling to survive, demanding the basic necessities of life. Today, any reform efforts to gain free universal healthcare and equal education or for an end to homelessness challenge the private property of the capitalist class.
In a time when expansion is no longer possible, the capitalist class will not yield or share the social wealth they claim as their own. It is aggressive, cruel, murderous and determined to undermine all means of democratic participation. It is sacrificing the value of human and planetary life on the altar of increased profit. The Trump regime is only the most recent brutal example of this.
The struggles against the current regime may appear to be efforts to reform the system. However, because reforms are no longer possible, they are becoming struggles to transform our society from one based on a system of private property to a new cooperative system in which the society owns the means of production and the social product is distributed according to need. Automation – and now artificial intelligence – is producing such abundance that it makes distribution according to need both practical and necessary. This is the meaning of revolution today.
Published on August 4, 2025
This article originated in Rally!
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