Capitalism’s book-burning machines
The media ask whether robots will steal your job, because ‘AI apocalypse’ shifts copy. While socialists ask what the machine was for in the first place, who owns it, who tells it what to do, and where the wealth goes.
Marx cared about machinery because he could see what it could do. A machine that handles the grinding, repetitive labour frees human beings from that labour. In a society run for human need, that means shorter hours, less exhaustion, more time to actually live. The technology isn’t the problem but how capitalism applies it.
Capitalism doesn’t use increased productivity to give us more free time. It uses it to produce more cheaply, undercut the competition, and pile up more capital. The contradiction isn’t accidental.
When Marx writes about machinery in Capital, he deals with something far more interesting than its impact on employment. He’s analysing the social relationship around the machine. A lathe or a loom has no innate capitalist purpose. It could serve entirely different social arrangements. What matters is who owns it and why it’s running.
Under the current economic system, machinery becomes a tool for extracting relative surplus value. Technological development gets dragged into the fight over unpaid labour. But the machine isn’t the enemy. The property relation is.
This logic is playing out right now in the second-hand book trade. AI firm Anthropic is one that we know has been buying up millions of physical volumes. Antiquarian books. Foreign-language texts. Out-of-print editions. They feed them into hydraulic guillotines, slice off the spines, scan the pages, and pulp what remains. The operation was called ‘Project Panama’, and they kept it quiet for a reason.
Why? Because the internet is now clogged with ‘AI slop’ – soulless machine generated text that poisons the models if you train on it. So capital has turned to pre-2022 printed books as a ‘clean’ source of human prose. Brokers like ISBNdb now handle bulk orders from a thousand volumes to a million. The books aren’t read. They aren’t preserved. They aren’t shelved. They’re strip-mined.
This isn’t a glitch. It’s exactly how capitalism handles knowledge. The first-sale doctrine and fair use rulings provide the legal scaffolding. Physical carriers of human thought are fed into the inferno. The accumulated intellectual labour of centuries is treated as raw material to be extracted, enclosed, and monetised. Same impulse that cleared forests for timber. Same impulse that pumped the oil dry. The book isn’t valued as culture or understanding. It’s valued as a vector of data that can be fed into a model to generate return on investment.
Marx and the machine
When Marx examined machinery in Capital and in the Grundrisse ‘Fragment on Machines,’ he was describing precisely this. He wrote:
‘The development of the means of labour into machinery is not an accidental moment of the development of capital.’
It isn’t an innocent invention that society happens to pick up. It becomes part of capital’s logic.
In the Grundrisse, Marx sketches a future where human labour increasingly consists of supervising and regulating an immense productive apparatus:
‘Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process.’
That’s a tendency. But under capitalism, the tendency is subordinated to the expansion of value. The machine doesn’t shorten the working day; it intensifies labour and throws people out of work. It doesn’t liberate. It subjects human beings to the pace of the mechanism and the demands of accumulation.
The AI models trained on shredded books are no different. They aren’t being built to reduce drudgery in any rational sense. They’re being built to cut labour costs, automate creative and intellectual work, and secure competitive advantage. Whether they serve human wellbeing is secondary. Whether they serve profit is what counts.
Ownership and control
Socialists are not Luddites. We don’t oppose technology. We oppose the class ownership of technology. Socialism means common ownership of the means of production and distribution. Production for use, not for profit. Under that arrangement, machinery and automation would be directed democratically by the whole community.
The same scanning kit now destroying books could digitise the world’s literature and make it freely available to everyone, without pulping a single volume. The same AI research could genuinely reduce unpleasant labour. But that requires changing the social relationship, not just tinkering with the machine.
Capitalism is structurally compelled to treat every resource, human labour, natural wealth, accumulated knowledge, as fuel for capital expansion. Book becomes data. Data becomes property. Property generates profit. The physical book is just an obstacle to speed.
What is to be done?
Reforms won’t fix this. Tighter copyright law, stricter AI regulation, bigger fines will not alter the underlying compulsion.
The company behind Claude, Anthropic, agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a copyright class action brought by authors and publishers. The settlement was finally approved by a US federal judge on 20 July 2026. Reuters describes it as the largest known U.S. copyright settlement of its kind.
So long as the means of production belong to a minority and operate for profit, capital will extract value from whatever is lying around, be it oil, cobalt or the printed word.
The only answer is the one Marx gave: replace capitalist production with socialist production. Common ownership means the machinery, the data, and the knowledge they process belong to society as a whole. Decisions about what to automate, what to preserve, and how to share the fruits of higher productivity would be made democratically, by the people actually affected.
Until then, expect more extraction. More enclosure of creative commons. More destruction of the cultural and material basis of life, all in the name of profit. The machine is not the enemy. The class that owns the machine is.
The task of the working class is to understand this, and to organise for the socialist transformation of society.
A .T.