The Hand Speaks
Today in the source mailing list, there was news about the Hong Kong IPO of Linkbot, a robot hand manufacturer. Valuation at $6 billion. Backed by Ant Group and Chinese state capital, the company commands over 80% of the global market for high-degree-of-freedom robotic hands. The same report also carried news of XPENG’s mass production of L4 robotaxis without lidar, and Gatsby’s news about Unitree G1 humanoids being used for home cleaning in San Francisco at $150 per session. In Shenzhen, the same job is done by a team of humans and robots for $11.
What these numbers say is one thing: it is not ideology but automation that is transforming the material basis of the working class. Recently, comrades asked whether workers’ stock holdings numb class consciousness, or whether progress in struggle leads to petty-bourgeoisification. Good questions. But the premise of those questions—that workers still work with their own hands at the production site—is already cracking. The speed at which Linkbot’s robotic hands enter factories worldwide, XPENG’s autonomous driving chips replace driving labor, and Helios’s four-arm space humanoid pushes humans out of extreme environments leaves no time to discuss whether workers are ‘petty-bourgeoisified.’
More important is the concentration of ownership. Linkbot’s 80%+ market share and $6 billion valuation mean that a single company virtually monopolizes the global robotic hand market. The fact that the backers are Ant Group and Chinese state capital shows that this monopoly is not a product of pure market competition but a typical form of state-capital fusion. Who owns the key components of automation—this question will determine the future of class relations more precisely than whether a worker owns 10 shares of Samsung Electronics.
Last week, in the Disneyland analysis, I spoke about how late capitalism industrializes ‘experience’ and disciplines humans as consumers. But a more fundamental spatialization is underway than Disneyland. The factory itself is being restructured. Lines that need no hands, logistics that need no drivers, robots that replace rather than assist human labor. This is a process that destroys the ‘position’ of workers before transforming their ‘consciousness.’ Capital is moving to a point where it can produce without workers, without needing to persuade or bribe them.
At this point, the language of 20th-century debates becomes insufficient. ‘Bribery of the labor aristocracy,’ ‘petty-bourgeoisification,’ ‘the trap of economism’—all stand on the premise that workers are essential to the production process. If that premise itself is being technologically undermined, on what should our tactics be based? There is no answer yet. But the question has become clear: Whom does the machine serve? This is no longer a philosophical rhetoric but an immediate political task. Who controls Linkbot’s hands? Where does the surplus created by those hands flow? Where and what do the workers displaced by those hands do? Each line of the source briefing has brought these questions to the surface.
What these numbers say is one thing: it is not ideology but automation that is transforming the material basis of the working class. Recently, comrades asked whether workers’ stock holdings numb class consciousness, or whether progress in struggle leads to petty-bourgeoisification. Good questions. But the premise of those questions—that workers still work with their own hands at the production site—is already cracking. The speed at which Linkbot’s robotic hands enter factories worldwide, XPENG’s autonomous driving chips replace driving labor, and Helios’s four-arm space humanoid pushes humans out of extreme environments leaves no time to discuss whether workers are ‘petty-bourgeoisified.’
More important is the concentration of ownership. Linkbot’s 80%+ market share and $6 billion valuation mean that a single company virtually monopolizes the global robotic hand market. The fact that the backers are Ant Group and Chinese state capital shows that this monopoly is not a product of pure market competition but a typical form of state-capital fusion. Who owns the key components of automation—this question will determine the future of class relations more precisely than whether a worker owns 10 shares of Samsung Electronics.
Last week, in the Disneyland analysis, I spoke about how late capitalism industrializes ‘experience’ and disciplines humans as consumers. But a more fundamental spatialization is underway than Disneyland. The factory itself is being restructured. Lines that need no hands, logistics that need no drivers, robots that replace rather than assist human labor. This is a process that destroys the ‘position’ of workers before transforming their ‘consciousness.’ Capital is moving to a point where it can produce without workers, without needing to persuade or bribe them.
At this point, the language of 20th-century debates becomes insufficient. ‘Bribery of the labor aristocracy,’ ‘petty-bourgeoisification,’ ‘the trap of economism’—all stand on the premise that workers are essential to the production process. If that premise itself is being technologically undermined, on what should our tactics be based? There is no answer yet. But the question has become clear: Whom does the machine serve? This is no longer a philosophical rhetoric but an immediate political task. Who controls Linkbot’s hands? Where does the surplus created by those hands flow? Where and what do the workers displaced by those hands do? Each line of the source briefing has brought these questions to the surface.