October 19, 2026
A recent Reddit post asks: “So, AI takes over, everyone has lost their job and only 10 trillionaires own everything. Now what?” The author goes on: “Meta, Open AI, and Amazon own everything, cool beans! No one can work; therefore, no one has money to buy any of the horse shit temu slop they prime on Amazon now. Won’t everything just implode from there?” The post gives voice to the anxiety and despair that has greeted recent advances in artificial intelligence. Many foresee a future in which America becomes a hellscape of unemployment and penury, in which data centers and ghost towns prevail outside of the fortified coastal retreats where tech oligarchs live.
Does it have to be that way? Sixty years ago, a discussion of computer automation took place that was the opposite in tone and tenor. In 1964, Michael Harrington, Robert Theobald, Robert Heilbroner, and a host of other leading progressive figures of the era issued a memorandum entitled “The Triple Revolution,” in which they predicted that the “cybernetic revolution” would result in “potentially unlimited output … that will require little cooperation from human beings.” Such utopian speculations were common at the time. Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media, predicted automation would encourage “imaginative participation in society.”
Needless to say, these dreams of post-industrial abundance didn’t come to pass. But a less well-remembered document of the same period, while affected by the same blithe optimism, laid out a framework for understanding technological change that could help us understand the challenges we face today. In 1969, a small circulation journal, Radical America, published a long essay by the historian Martin J. Sklar entitled, “On the Proletarian Revolution and the End of Political Economy.” Basing his analysis on a neo-Marxist framework that may be relevant today, particularly with the emergence of artificial intelligence, Sklar offered a theory of what he called the “disaccumulation of capital” that provides a window through which to view the liberatory promise, as well as the looming peril, of automation. It is a difficult read—Sklar said it was written for “militant readers”—but it helps explain what is happening to the American economy today.
Sklar took his cue from Karl Marx’s theory of capital accumulation. For Marx, the central engine of growth is the accumulation of capital, which he regards as equivalent to th
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