Automation: How Capitalism Is Leading Us to Socialism

2025-10-30

A Paradox Unfolding Before Our Eyes

Paradoxically, it is the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, along with other leaders of modern capitalism, who will bring about a system that in practice closely resembles the socialist vision of the world. This is because automation is increasingly reducing the need for human effort, both physical and intellectual. Just a decade ago, it seemed that only manual labor could be replaced. Today, algorithms are making rapid progress in writing code, analyzing data, conducting sales conversations, diagnosing diseases, driving cars, and even ironing clothes. Successive waves of layoffs at Amazon, Accenture, and Salesforce, as well as ever-smaller teams generating ever-greater value, show that the demand for both white-collar and blue-collar workers is steadily declining.

Elon Musk has been saying for years that Tesla’s main product will not be cars, but humanoid robots capable of performing any human job. Musk repeats that robots will carry out all human work. In his vision, the entire economy will be automated, and people will receive a maximum guaranteed income, funded by the productivity of machines. Is this possible?

In principle, maintaining machines is incomparably cheaper than maintaining a human, and on top of that, they can work without breaks. When an automation replaces a person at work, not only does the cost of their salary disappear, but so does the entire administrative, infrastructural, and social overhead. Each such case represents a permanent cost reduction in the economy, which at a global scale accumulates into enormous savings and productivity gains. The generated funds can be returned to people in the form of a guaranteed income, financed by the productivity of machines and taxes levied on enterprises that use automation.

In practice, this would likely require introducing a new type of automation tax. Its purpose would not be to punish progress, but to redistribute the benefits that progress brings. Since machines are taking over an ever-larger share of human work and generating growing profits for their owners, it is natural that as much of this value as possible should flow back to society in the form of guaranteed compensation. How to implement such a tax is a detail that experts will work out.

A world without the obligation to work and with a guaranteed income is no longer a utopian vision of the distant future. It is the logical conclusion of the trend that capitalism itself has programmed: maximum efficiency, minimum labor cost, relentless automation. We are now witnessing the beginning of this conclusion.

Many people react to this vision with fear and disbelief. These doubts stem mainly from the fact that from childhood, we are raised to believe that life revolves around work. We study so that we can get a job. We study harder to get a better one. We work more diligently to earn more and advance. Unfortunately, after work, little time remains for personal interests, especially if we are raising children. But it was not always this way. Once, free men explained to their slaves that their lives had meaning only when they worked, while they themselves did not work at all, or very little.

Today, although we live in democratic times, many people still cannot imagine life without an employer. We do not even consider that the world could exist without the obligation to work. If we conducted a global survey asking: “If you could receive an average salary without working, would you continue your employment?” — I am convinced that at least 80 percent of people worldwide would answer: no. Those 80% are, of course, not well-paid specialists or managers, but people who work in production, in agriculture, in warehouses, in low-level positions. Such workers are by far the majority.

It turns out, then, that it is capitalism — in the persons of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other tech giants — that is creating a real possibility of liberating the human masses from the misery in which they find themselves. Misery, because that is how, from my perspective, the fate of those who work hard, often at the risk of their health, for minimum wages that barely allow them to make ends meet, appears.