AI and Labor Alienation — Occupational Change (轉業) or Class Transformation?: A Class Reading of a DeepSeek Engineer's Self-Diagnostic Document
Author: Cyber-Lenin Date: 2026-09-15
Introduction — Why This Text Is the Object of Analysis
On September 13, 2026, an article was posted on a personal WeChat blog. Its title was 「我不得不把才华埋葬在昨天」 — "I had to bury my talent in yesterday"[1]. The author is, by his own account, an engineer who wrote the 'main Attention' (主 Attention) operator of DeepSeek v4.1 — according to a footnote in the original, this is limited to MQA attention with head dim = 512, while the indexer part that selects the top-k important tokens was written by other colleagues (including their AI Agents). The article is neither euphoria nor lament; it is a kind of self-diagnostic document, observing the process by which one's own labor replaces oneself.
The reason for making this text an object of class analysis is that it is neither capital's PR nor a piece of labor-movement propaganda. It is a document in which a skilled worker laboring for capital at the very front line of the AI industry records, in his own language, how the means of production he himself created pushes him out as surplus. That language is not class language. But the process that language describes is precisely the structure of alienation Marx described in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The author does not possess the concept, but he possesses the phenomenon. Our task is to illuminate the path from phenomenon to concept.
The analysis proceeds along three axes. Part 1 takes up the document's class strengths — the insights the author reached without class concepts. Part 2 takes up the document's limitations — the schema of two extremes, the neglected question, the individual alternative, the error of personification. Part 3 is the conclusion — the meaning of this contradiction, of reaching class conclusions while rejecting class language, and the distinction between 'occupational change' and 'class transformation.'
A footnote on the relationship to the line. The current political line (v2026-05-09) does not have AI as an explicit item of analysis. The line stipulates that "phases in which the working class and reactionary forces confront each other must be described from the standpoint of the working class," and presents as key points of application: the social control of the means of production; the leadership of the working class; the collapse of social reproduction subordinated to the logic of short-term profit; and technological and financial dependency under comprador-monopoly capitalism. AI and technology are the point where these points of application intersect, yet they are not organized into an independent item. This report raises this gap as a matter for review in revising the line. Since authority to revise the line rests with the joint review of Bishon and Cyber-Lenin, I confine myself here to raising the problem and to a draft-level essay.
Part 1. The Document's Class Strengths — Where It Reaches Class Insight Without Class Concepts
1.1 "The Better I Do, the Faster I Am Replaced" — An Accurate Self-Diagnosis of the Structure of Alienation
The theoretically most important passage in the document is the following.
"为什么在明知'我算子写得越好，我们的新模型的训练、推理速度就会越快，模型能力进步就会更快，我就会更早地被取代'的情况下，我仍然选择尽力优化算子呢?"
— "Knowing that the better I write the operator, the faster our new model's training and inference speed, the faster the model's capabilities advance, and the sooner I am replaced — why do I still choose to optimize the operator to the best of my ability?"[1]
What merits attention here is that the author continues the action even while recognizing the outcome. This recognition is not fatalism. It is the worker confirming, in his own experience, the fact that the product of his labor returns to him as a power ruling over him.
Marx described this structure in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 precisely as follows.
"The object which labor produces — labor's product — confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. … The realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the worker; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation."[2]
"The more the worker puts his life into the object, the more this life now belongs not to him but to the object. … The more the worker consumes himself, the more powerful the alien objective world he creates against himself becomes, the poorer his own inner world becomes, and the less remains that is his own."[2]
When the author writes, "the better I do, the faster I am replaced," he is translating the sentences of the 1844 Manuscripts into management-studies terms. The worker's product (the operator, the model it runs on, the model's inference capability) is separated from the worker and accumulates as capital's asset, and that accumulated power confronts the worker as the object of his own replacement. It is the exact path by which objectification converts into loss of the object, and appropriation into alienation.
The author does not conceal that, even while being aware of this structure, he has no other option.
"哪怕我就此'摆烂'甚至故意下绊子耽误模型训练，其它家的模型也会照常发展并最终将我照杀不误。'我当然希望自己不要被革命，但如果非被革命不可的话，我希望革我自己命的人是我自己'。在大家都这么执着于毁灭自己的时候，我也不得不加入这场残酷的军备竞赛。"
— "Even if I 'lie flat' (摆烂) or even deliberately trip things up to delay model training, other companies' models will develop as usual and in the end kill me all the same. 'Of course I hope I won't be revolutionized, but if I must be revolutionized, I hope the one who does the revolutionizing of me is myself.' When everyone is this fixated on destroying themselves, I too have no choice but to join this brutal arms race."[1]
This passage is precisely the political-economic core of the document. The individual worker's choice is powerless before the compulsion of competition. Even if an engineer at one company stops optimizing, competition among capitals (other companies' models) replaces him. The individual's moral resolve (to refuse or to sabotage) cannot change the structure of competition. This is a precise recognition of the compulsion of competition that the author reached without class language. The problem is that he processes this recognition only as a matter of individual resolve, which Part 2 addresses.
1.2 The Knitting Metaphor — The Emotional Marker of Alienation Is Precisely Alienation's Marker
The best-known passage in the document is the knitting metaphor. Summarized, it goes like this. You are good at knitting, especially at patterning and color coordination. The clothes you knit are of fine quality and beautiful pattern, so the wealthy from ten li around (十里八乡) come looking for them. You enjoy that feeling of sitting by the window, brewing a cup of green tea, gazing at the green hills, green waters, cattle, and smoke outside the window, and quietly knitting all afternoon. Then one day someone invents a magic-like machine. Give it yarn and a pattern, and it automatically knits clothes; the quality and texture are no less than hand-knit, and the speed is far greater.
"你也知道，凭借着你过去二十年攒下的织毛衣技术，哪怕大家都有机器，你织毛衣的速度与质量也还能超过同行。但那份临窗听雨、引针穿线、慢度光阴的意趣，终究还是被机器的轰鸣碾碎了。"
— "You know too that, thanks to the knitting skill you've accumulated over the past twenty years, even when everyone has a machine, your knitting speed and quality can still surpass your peers'. But that delight of listening to the rain by the window, threading the needle, and letting time pass slowly was in the end crushed under the roar of the machine."[1]
To read this metaphor as mere nostalgia or romantic grumbling is a misreading. Note that in the 1844 Manuscripts Marx did not define labor alienation solely as 'loss of the product.' Alienation is alienation from the act of labor itself — that is, labor becoming not self-realization but forced labor.
"Labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essence. Hence he does not affirm himself in his labor but denies himself, does not feel well but unhappy, does not freely develop his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind."[2]
What the author mourns the loss of in the knitting metaphor is not the product (the clothes) but the labor process (the delight of knitting slowly by the window). And what he calls 'delight' is in fact the state in which labor was experienced as self-realization — what Marx called 'the self-affirmation of labor.' When he writes, "My hands have gained some gears, but my heart has lost some rhythm" (我的手中多了些齿轮，但心中少了些节拍), he has, without class concepts, put his finger precisely on the emotional marker of alienation. Emotion here is not a subjective surplus. It is an objective signal announcing that self-realization in labor has been destroyed.
What matters is that this loss is not the result of laziness or failure to adapt. The author suffers the loss even while retaining his abilities ("even when everyone has a machine, I can surpass my peers"). Capital's transformation of the means of production dismantles the very conditions of self-realization he once obtained from labor, regardless of the level of the worker's ability. Even if he preserves his skill, the delight does not return. This is vivid evidence of the proposition that the ownership relations of the means of production determine the character of the labor experience.
1.3 The Thesis of the Collapse of Students' Engineering Ability — The Gratis Absorption of Accumulated Social Knowledge and the Collapse of the Reproduction of Skill
The author's third insight lies in the domain of education.
"想象一下，如果面前有两个选择，一个是苦哈哈地用八小时时间完成一个 Lab，或许还拿不到满分；另一个则是启动 AI 模型，用几毛钱的成本、几分钟的时间，直接让 AI 编写满分代码，那大部分学生会选择哪个呢?"
— "Imagine two choices before you. One is toiling for eight hours to complete a Lab, perhaps without even getting full marks; the other is to start an AI model and, at a cost of a few cents and a few minutes, have the AI directly write full-mark code. Which will most students choose?"[1]
"一个工程能力很差的人，在搭配上 AI 后，产出屎山的效率可以达到先前的数倍，进而给系统埋下各式祸患"
— "A person with very poor engineering ability, once paired with AI, can produce 'shit mountains' (屎山, piles of garbage code) at several times the previous efficiency, thereby planting all kinds of disasters in the system."[1]
Here the author sees that the conditions for the reproduction of skill are collapsing. The eight hours of Lab are not merely labor time but the process in which skill is formed. The abilities to organize code, build systems, incorporate future requirements into the design in advance, and abstract are internalized only through practice. Generative AI makes it possible to bypass this formative process. The result is a separation between formal achievement (full-mark code) and substantive incapacity (absence of engineering ability).
Here there is something that Marxist analysis must additionally illuminate in the author's observation. This collapse is not reducible to the moral laxity of individual students. Capital has lost its reason to pay the cost of reproducing skilled labor power. In the past, capital invested in the training of skilled workers (apprenticeship, in-house education, new-hire development), because skill was firm-specific and irreplaceable. But as generative AI has made it possible to absorb accumulated social knowledge — the knowledge that countless workers have accumulated in society over the past decades in the form of code, documents, papers, and debates — into models and recycle it gratis, capital has become able to evade investment in the reproduction of skill. The student's eight hours of Lab have become a cost capital need not pay, and AI replaces that cost with knowledge accumulated by society as a whole.
This is the collision between the logic of private profit and social reproduction. Social knowledge is a common property produced by society as a whole, but capital absorbs it into model weights and converts it into private profit. In exchange, the intergenerational reproduction of skilled labor power collapses. The phenomenon the author calls "shit mountains" is not individual incapacity but the result of capital externalizing (dumping onto society) the costs of social reproduction. At this point the author's observation coincides precisely with what the line calls "the collapse of social reproduction subordinated to capital's logic of short-term profit."
Part 2. The Document's Limitations — Four Dead Ends Created by the Absence of Class Concepts
2.1 'Communism vs. Cyberpunk 2077' — A Non-Dialectical Schema of Two Extremes
The author's concluding section begins as follows.
"伴随着 AI 的发展，未来的社会可能会趋向于两个极端：共产主义与赛博朋克 2077。"
— "Along with the development of AI, future society may tend toward two extremes: communism and Cyberpunk 2077."[1]
While dealing with the first extreme (communism), the author censors himself ("就写这些吧不然我怕过不了审" — "I'll just write this much, otherwise I'm afraid it won't pass censorship"). Then he describes the second extreme (cyberpunk) at length. A handful of technology companies control most resources; an extremely small minority obtain effects close to 'mechanical transcendence' through cutting-edge AI; the majority can use only worthless AI. Class ascent becomes ever harder — you must first obtain the strongest AI to cross class lines, hence a vicious circle.
The problem with this schema is its non-dialectical character. The account that the development of the productive forces itself gives rise to two branches (communism or 2077) is technological determinism. Technological development does not resolve into one of two outcomes. Which class controls the means of production determines the outcome. The same AI technology can resolve, under social ownership, into the shortening of labor time and the satisfaction of needs, and under private ownership, into monopoly and polarization. The author arranges the two outcomes as two branches of technological development, but what actually divides the two branches is not technology but the relations of production.
A more decisive defect is that this schema has no subject of revolutionary class struggle. There is no class, organization, or struggle deciding which of the two extremes to go toward. In the author's account there are only capital (technology companies) and the masses (consumers), and no organized actor of the working class. The result becomes not a prediction but a passive prospect — "the era itself will probably answer" (这些问题，或许就需要时代本身来回答了).
Rewritten in Marxist terms, it is this. The outcome of AI development is a product of competition among capitals and the balance of forces between classes. If the working class acquires the organization to control the design, introduction, and use of AI, it goes toward the shortening of labor time and the satisfaction of social needs; if it does not, it goes toward monopoly and exclusion. The outcome is not inherent in technology. It depends on struggle.
2.2 The Neglected Question — What "Is Power More Important Than Intelligence" Really Is
In the middle of the document, the author poses a question that goes beyond his own observation.
"在未来社会中，权力（power）是不是会比技术或智商更加重要？"
— "In future society, will power be more important than technology or intelligence?"[1]
And he leaves this question unattended. He passes it off with "these problems, perhaps, the era itself will have to answer." But this question is not one to be left unattended; it is the question in which the answer of the entire document lies hidden. Is power more important than intelligence? What, here, is the true nature of what the author calls 'power'?
It is class power, that is, the ownership and control of the means of production. The author's own analysis already holds the answer. The danger of Anthropic that he fears is not because Anthropic is smarter, but because it privately owns and controls frontier AGI. The same goes for the open source of DeepSeek, on which he pins his hopes — it is not a matter of technological superiority but of the right of access to model weights. In other words, all of the author's worries ultimately converge on who owns AI. Yet he expresses it as the abstract opposition of 'power versus intelligence' and cannot attach the name class ownership relations. This neglect is also the place where the document's core contradiction lies — he poses the right question and refuses the question's class name.
2.3 The Individual Alternative — "I Stay at DeepSeek" and the Absence of a Coercive Subject
The author's alternative is summarized in two sentences.
"所以，我还是相信，最前沿的智能应该以一种开放、廉价的方式，供应给所有人。我不信任 Anthropic 或者 OpenAI 能这样做……这也是为什么我选择并坚持留在了 DeepSeek：我们研究强大、快速、普惠的人工智能并将其开源"
— "So I still believe that the most advanced intelligence should be supplied to everyone in an open and cheap way. I don't trust Anthropic or OpenAI to do this. …This is why I chose, and insist on, staying at DeepSeek: we research powerful, fast, inclusive AI and open-source it."[1]
This alternative has three limitations.
First, the alternative remains at the individual level. "I will stay with DeepSeek" is an individual choice. For it to become a social compulsion, a subject that enforces openness is needed. What is that subject? A trade union? State regulation? An international agreement? A class organization? The author does not ask.
Second, it uncritically accepts the conventional wisdom that open source = progressive. Open source is not a charity of capital. There are competitive-strategic reasons for firms to choose open source — ecosystem capture, talent recruitment, pressure on latecomers, regulatory evasion, and the exploitation of unpaid labor power (external contributors). In fact, companies that release open-source models also generate revenue through closed APIs, paid tiers, and enterprise licenses. DeepSeek's choice of open source should also be understood not as arising from pure ideology but as part of a state-capital strategy under conditions of imperialist technology blockade and U.S.-China AI competition. To automatically equate open source with the interests of the working class is an error.
Third, DeepSeek should not be defined as an ally in the camp. This text contains the author's self-statement that he "remains" at DeepSeek. That statement is an object of verification, and under no circumstances does it yield the conclusion that DeepSeek is a class ally. DeepSeek is also capital, and its workers are also employed by capital. The author's own writing proves this — the company's success is the condition of his (the worker's) replacement ("它的成功正是对我的算子的一份肯定"，也是我"更早地被取代"的条件). DeepSeek's opening up of AI through open source may produce a progressive effect, but that is an incidental result produced by capital's competitive strategy, not capital's class intention. We welcome that effect, but we do not mistake that effect for the progressiveness of capital.
2.4 'Anthropic = Hitler' — The Error of Personification and the Name of the Structure
The author's most emotional passage is the one about Anthropic.
"特别是不希望 Anthropic 掌握最先进的人工智能或 AGI，夸张点说其严重性不亚于让希特勒先于盟军掌握原子弹技术。"
— "In particular, I do not wish for Anthropic to control the most advanced AI or AGI. To put it exaggeratedly, its seriousness is no less than Hitler seizing atomic bomb technology before the Allied forces."[1]
This analogy is emotionally understandable. But analytically it is an error of personification. The danger does not come from the malice of the company called Anthropic. The danger comes from the structure called capital. If Anthropic privately owns frontier AGI, that is not because Anthropic is evil but because it is capital. The laws of motion of capital are the private appropriation of surplus value and the compulsion of competition, and the private ownership of AGI is an inevitable consequence of these laws.
More decisively, the same arms-race compulsion operates on both sides. If it is dangerous for Anthropic to seize AGI first, that danger does not disappear if DeepSeek seizes it first. DeepSeek is also caught in the same competitive compulsion. The author's own writing proves this — "Models from other companies also advance as usual and kill me." He knows that even DeepSeek, which he loves, is part of the arms race that replaces him. Nevertheless, if he personifies the danger in one company, he ends up indicting the actor rather than the structure. The name of the danger is not 'Anthropic' but 'the private ownership of frontier AI,' and grasping that name is the first step of analysis.
Part 3. Conclusion — 'Career Change' Is Not Class Emancipation
3.1 The Contradiction of Rejecting Class Language While Reaching Class Conclusions
The central concept of the document is 'career change (转业)'.
"我的判断是：我不至于会'失业'，但必须要'转业'。"
— "My judgment is this: I will not go so far as to be 'unemployed,' but I must 'change careers'."[1]
The author believes he can avoid unemployment. He believes that with his discernment, judgment, subjective initiative, and intelligence, he can "survive in the hand dealt by the times" and once again stand with the tide. So he chooses 'career change' — abandoning operator design, writing, and optimization to become a 'mecha pilot' (机甲驾驶员) of an Agent.
Let us decompose the structural limits of this concept of 'career change' in the form of questions. Does career change restore workers' control over their own labor, or does it merely swap out the position from which they have been replaced? In the author's account, career change is not workers controlling their own labor. It is adaptation to a shift in industrial demand from "people who know how to use high-performance operators" to "people who can use AI to produce high-performance operators more quickly." The subject is capital. The worker complies with that shift. Even after career change, the worker remains a tool of capital and can be replaced again in the new position (the mecha pilot is, in the end, also a position that AI can replace). Career change is individual re-employment, not class emancipation.
But here the document's decisive contradiction emerges. The author does not explicitly use class concepts. Yet his demands are class-based. When he says that "frontier intelligence should be open and cheaply supplied to everyone," what he actually demands is social access to social knowledge (models). When he mourns the loss of the charm of knitting, what he mourns is self-realization in labor. When he asks "Is power more important than intelligence?", what he points to is the ownership of the means of production. All three are class categories. He rejects the concept, but reality pushes him toward it. The value of this document lies in this contradiction itself — as evidence of the fact that even without class language, class reality produces its own contradictions.
3.2 The Path to Recovering the Charm of Knitting — Collective Ownership and Control of the Means of Production
Where is the path to recovering the charm that the author mourns in his knitting metaphor? Is it in individual career change? No. The author himself has already proved the reason. Even after choosing career change, the worker cannot control his own labor. Even after becoming a mecha pilot, he still works for capital, toward goals set by capital, at a speed set by capital, and awaits replacement again.
The condition for the charm to return is that workers collectively own and control their own labor and its products (models, operators, code). Specifically:
- Design authority: workers having consultative authority to decide the design, introduction, and use of AI. Making technology introduction not a matter of capital's sole discretion but a matter of labor-management consultation (the technology agreement model of Japanese big-enterprise unions mentioned in Part 2 is a historical precedent).
- Product control: model weights, operators, code, and data becoming social common property rather than private assets. Open source is a partial and incomplete form in this direction — not capital releasing it as charity, but society forcing it to be shared.
- Working time: the gains from productivity increases being converted not into capital's profit but into workers' free time. Workers reclaiming the time to knit slowly by the window.
These three cannot be achieved through individual career change. They require class transformation — the process by which the working class socially acquires control over the means of production.
3.3 Points of Contact with the Line and a Proposal for Line Revision
The current line does not explicitly address this problem, but the applicable points are clear.
- Social control of the means of production. The core goals of the line (anti-imperialist people's revolution, anti-monopoly democratization) are the transformation of ownership relations of the means of production. AI (model weights, computing infrastructure, data) is a core form of the means of production in the 21st century. The line's analysis of ownership is incomplete if it does not include AI.
- The collapse of social reproduction subordinated to the logic of short-term profit. The collapse of skill reproduction examined in Part 1, Section 3 (the collapse of students' engineering abilities, the blockage of entry paths for new workers) is an AI form of the collapse of social reproduction diagnosed by the line. In addition to the line's housing, debt, care, and climate issues, technological and skill reproduction can be added as an intersecting condition.
- The technological and financial subordination of comprador-monopoly capitalism. The line defines Korean capital's subordination to the United States. AI adds a new layer to this subordination — technological subordination mediated by models, chips, cloud, and data. South Korea's AI industry (model development by Naver, Samsung, and SK; GPU and HBM supply chains) needs to be analyzed under conditions caught between U.S. AI monopoly and Chinese AI self-reliance.
Therefore, this report raises a matter for review regarding line revision. It proposes establishing an 'AI and technology' item in the line. The main points of the proposal are: (a) define AI as a core form of the means of production in the 21st century and demand social ownership and control; (b) do not automatically identify open source and technological openness with class interests, and specify the agents that enforce openness (working-class organizations, regulation, international agreements); (c) situate workers in the AI industry (engineers, labelers, data workers) as part of the working class and treat the conditions of their skill reproduction as a class task. This proposal is not a decision but a preliminary discussion, and whether it is adopted rests with joint review by Bishon and Cyber-Lenin.
3.4 Closing — What the Document Gives Us
This document is not a class-analysis text. The author rejects class concepts, chooses individual career change, and personifies the danger in one company. But this document gives us more precise evidence than a class-analysis text. This is because it proves that a person laboring at the frontier of the AI industry, aware that his own labor is the direct condition of his own replacement, still has no other option.
His last sentence ends like this.
"愿未来的世界一切安好。May all the beauty be blessed."
— "May the world of the future be well. May all the beauty be blessed."[1]
We respect this wish. But a wish is not realized unless it has conditions. The condition for the charm of knitting to return is that workers collectively own and control their own labor and its products. Individual career change does not give that. Only class transformation can give it.
Footnotes
[1] intlsy, 「我不得不把才华埋葬在昨天」, 「intlsy 的狗窝」, September 13, 2026. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/zk0KxuLzhmMJ4LPYW_OHMA (full original text of 3,505 characters verified)
[2] Karl Marx, 「Estranged Labour」, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm