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Monthly Review | Braverman, Monopoly Capital, and AI: The Collective Worker and the Reunification of Labor

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Automation associated with algorithms designed for computers, raising the possibility of intelligent machines displacing human labor, is an issue that has been around for more than a century and a half, going as far back as Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine and Karl Marx’s famous treatment of the “general intellect” in the Grundrisse and his subsequent concept of the “collective worker” in Capital.1 Yet, it was only with the rise of monopoly capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that large-scale industry and the application of science to industry were able to introduce the “real” as opposed to “formal” subsumption of labor within production.2 Here knowledge of the labor process was removed systematically from the workers and concentrated within management in such a way that the labor process could be progressively broken down and subsumed within a logic dominated by machine technology. With the consolidation of monopoly capitalism after the Second World War

Braverman, Monopoly Capital, and AI: The Collective Worker and the Reunification of Labor - Monthly Review Skip to content NOTE TO OUR READERS: The July-August 2026 issue has been delayed. Domestic subscribers will receive paper copies in the mail by the end of July; Int’l by mid- to late-August. Close Menu Books Authors On The Site Also in this issue December 2024 (Volume 76, Number 7) The Classic Transcending Borders and Ages: Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of ‘Labor and Monopoly Capital’ Monopoly Capital and the Rise of the Synthetic Age Every week, another Preface

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