Karl Marx Would Buy GPUs

Maybe he was half right about owning the means of production

Aug 04, 2025

AI-generated image of a Art Deco-style poster with a worker holding a GPU card

Setting aside the obviously disastrous history of Soviet-era planned economies, sometimes useful messages get lost with the passage of time and past poor implementations. Marx’s observations on the long-term trend of private profit and concentration of asset control have largely turned out to be true. Unfortunately he didn’t allow for how collectivist control ends up no better than control driven by short-term-focused capitalism.

Prev: Economic Currents

For backstory articles on wealth concentration:

Why skilled workers need a plan to navigate through wealth-driven change was introduced in AGI is Irrelevant.
Personal wealth concentration was covered in GenAI Reimagined.
Corporate asset concentration in the U.S. was explored in Economic Currents.

This article is a start on “so what are we going to do about it?”

I’m going to try and scare the hell out of you. I don’t do that to market fear (un-paywalled articles make a terrible economic model for that), but to emphasize how now is THE time to discover whatever your personal sense of purpose might be. You need to find it, and then align that with a strategy that properly accounts for what is happening around you. More than anything, I want you to bloody well pay attention and get out of life’s autopilot mode.

Feudal Production

The part of Marx’s analysis that mattered was how, over time, small cottage-scale industry would get supplanted by larger industrial efforts that needed more coordination. The part that he got wrong was his belief that feeding such a process could result in a different outcome depending on how you fed it. Tech broligarchy and communist oligarchy end up no different when you aren’t one of those “select few” making the big decisions. Wealth concentrates intensely, and anybody not at the very center of that concentration becomes, economically speaking, a food source. You’re the value to harvest, whether as worker or customer or tax payer.

The stronger — if more challenging — solution would have been to advocate for ways in which the smaller cottage industries could grow to reasonable size and scale of output without transitioning into a size disproportionate to the health of everything around them. Some system where workers and owners are either the same, or closer in their working relationship and thus have more ways to be aligned both economically and for the mission of the company.

For the Victorian time period of Marx this notion would have sounded like gibberish in anything except perhaps high-end arts and crafts businesses like William Morris’ own “Morris & Co.” In the modern economic era, things are different.

Modern Production

The personal computer arguably jump-started the idea that people could have a device in their hands that gave them options. If they were a programmer, they could use one to hone their skills. If they were also entrepreneurial then they might add to their income with consulting work, or start a software-based company. Rapidly a host of keyboard-adjacent career paths like bookkeeping or professional writing followed suit, until ultimately virtually all of white-collar employment had potential to at least leverage a PC to assist with the capacity to work and earn a living.

With the advent of GenAI the mere value in possessing a personal computer has dropped substantially, at least in the short term. The fact that you can use a laptop and generate material from it has competition from online services that can also generate material. There was a potential moat each free person possessed by mere virtue of engaging their brain to see if they could produce via a keyboard something another person hadn’t thought of. That entire concept is under systemic threat across roles and across industries.

Future Production

The GenAI vendors are trying to seize the means of production. They’re doing it by making a thing they have and you usually don’t — expensive GPU-based processing for LLMs — and using massive PR and marketing budgets to push all other industry around them to opt for the new means (GPU-based production) and discount the criticality of the previous means (PC-based production). That leaves them in possession of the equivalent of a shop floor filled with robotic assemblers, and you holding a pocket calculator.

In the short term the disparity has been made less obvious. LLM access is metered out remotely, and you get to use it via that old calculator you are used to: your PC. Nothing to see here, right?

Unfortunately we’ve seen this game before. Introduce something on the cheap. Get people to yield to the sound of the Pied Piper. Change their personal and business workflow to the new thing, but at a price that doesn’t quite let them realize that tokens are being positioned as the new form of taxation: a tax on every thought, every act of creation, every communication.

What do you think happens next? Enshittification. The quality drops. The token costs go up. Only the select few with the deeper pockets get the best benefits. This isn’t just a time-tested formula. It is the very formula that some of the biggest players in GenAI have themselves used to grow their pre-AI companies. It is already the way they think about business. As the process proceeds, more wealth leaves from those who can pay, and goes to those who charge. Wealth concentrates even further.

Understand the thesis here. This is not about whether you personally think GenAI is the be-all-end-all technology solution. This isn’t purely about technological effectiveness. This is about the perception of technological effectiveness in the minds of those at the center of concentrations of wealth.

If the GenAI enthusiasts are right about the utility of the technology, it would make its PC predecessor into little more than a calculator. If the GenAI enthusiasts are wrong, but the GenAI companies convince enough of industry otherwise… the situation is almost the same because of the decision-making power of a few. Perception doesn’t just become reality, perception by the select wealthy few dictates reality.

That’s the message to take away here. The parameters for deciding your life strategy are now the same either way, at least until a different future reveals itself than what we are seeing at this moment. You can take either view, and the path forward is the same because the alternative is that you’re one person sitting on a couch reading this article while a handful of TRILLION-dollar companies are sizing you and me and a few billion other people up like we’re all krill destined for the gullet of a whale. That would be bad enough, but they are using their influence to align all the BILLION-dollar companies in the exact same direction.

Go back and read Economic Currents if you haven’t done so previously. It only takes the 5000 largest companies to control about 86% of U.S. corporate wealth. How many games of C-suite weekend golf do you really think it takes to align a large portion of 5000 companies? Not many.

Seizing the Means Back

Personally I’ve been in the GenAI-cautious middle for awhile. I use it often enough for high targeted outcomes, but I’m not the gung-ho-all-in-vibe-till-you-die crowd. Doesn’t quite sound like a Nickelback verse, but close enough. I’ve used the time more for learning the plumbing and research around the edges so instead of being caught up in the new shiny I could develop my own sense of the lay of the land while minimizing the impact of hypesters trying to tell me what to think. But now I know what I think.

We either have to be better at GenAI than the big vendors themselves, or we have to have an option that completely decouples us from their influence on the economy.

Pause. Let it sink in. I’ll say it again.

We have two broad options for strategy:

We can decide we have no choice but to be better at GenAI (likely in a narrow domain), and who we have to be better than is the big vendors. Not better than anybody and everybody that has ever been involved in the AI field. Not better than PhD’s that specialized in LLM-adjacent research. Better than big companies that on the one hand have massive assets, but on the other hand have all the failings of very big companies. Big companies are not nimble. They do not grow like smaller companies if those smaller companies make it past the failure rate statistics. The goal would be to feed off the economic bloat in bigger companies, but have the discipline to remain small enough to retain mobility while large enough to compensate exceptionally-skilled employees, and use that sweet spot to continually dodge around the bigger players.
We can decide that we have some entirely different course of action for which the machinations of big tech will have no relevance at all. That means either computer technology is not particularly relevant, or that somehow the unique provenance of you doing the work is what matters to your customers or employers. This is effectively “living off the grid” in terms of GenAI. What establishes the perception of your value to the marketplace can’t relate to GenAI, or in some way must be an act of rebellion against GenAI that people are willing to pay for. This would push for things like true novelty of a good or service, or something about human connection, or production of a physical good where there is cachet in it not being something imagined by an LLM and instead crafted by a person.

I see no other broad paths out of this than those two. Each has elbow room for individual interpretation and style. What neither of them contain, at least for most of us in the skilled white-collar work force, is “the thing I used to do.” That path was shaped by larger organizations with an already-shrinking relationship to the workforce, and they are in the final stages of doing what they can to reduce it further while concentrating wealth even more.

Yesterday is gone. Let it go. Heartbreaking as the message may be for some, the choice was taken out of our hands.