With the rise of transhumanism, would bionic beings be considered political subjects with rights and decision-making power on par with 100% human workers? Could everyone have access to technological “enhancements,” the quality of which would vary according to social class? 

What will be the role of unions in 20 years? Will they disappear with mass automation and AI? If not, what would be the impact of their disappearance in this context?

Transhumanism, androids and class struggle

Guillaume SUING

I am always tempted to see, in questions about our distant future, the symptoms of a crisis that is actually very real right now. The massive reduction of the working class, strictly speaking, in imperialist countries, as they outsource their industrial production on the one hand, and as technological development leaps forward on the other, gives the impression that they will one day disappear completely, refuting the core of Marxist theory.

The evolution or broadening of the concept of the worker in capitalist countries is, in parallel, a subject in itself, requiring considerable work, which I will deliberately leave aside. It is, however, within the framework of this necessary work that I recognise the relevance of the question posed here. In terms of form, I can attempt at least two unfortunate anachronisms that I find illuminating, as a continuation of my last book (Fleeing Progress? Marxism Facing the Scientific Challenges of Our Century: Climate, Biodiversity, Gender, AI, Transhumanism. Delga Publishers, 2025).

The massive destruction of competition at the dawn of the imperialist era, more than a century ago, similarly gave rise to speculation about the imminent disappearance of the bourgeois class around a single, final, super-powerful monopoly (Kautsky's theory of ultra-imperialism, for example). Lenin was right at the time to counter this kind of speculation, which, as we know today, has been invalidated by experience.

The violent mechanisation of industry, which began a century earlier, had also led some workers to believe that machines would replace them sooner or later (the Luddite movement against machines). Here again, nothing of the sort happened. Marx was right to insist that this mechanisation would primarily lead to an acceleration of the exploitation and alienation of workers, as the reductions in working hours (assumed to be inevitable with mechanisation) were only achieved at the cost of extremely hard struggles. It is worth noting that theories of the “great replacement” (by machines, immigrants, or perhaps soon by android robots) always proliferate in times of widespread crisis—economic, but also political and moral: at the time of the first industrial revolution as well as in the current technological revolution.

A new development: the mass alienation of intellectual workers by AI resembles that of manual labourers in the early days of factories by machine tools, thus further broadening the scope of this type of anxiety and the objective convergence of interest among all workers against employers.

From a union perspective, the question is therefore very well posed. Whenever the bourgeoisie seeks to increase its profit margin by relying on a cheaper or more vulnerable workforce (workers in the colonies, undocumented immigrant workers, women, etc.), fascists transform supposed “rivals” into enemies or “competitors,” while communists work to integrate the struggle of these workers into all the others, which are necessarily convergent (liberation of colonised peoples, regularisation of undocumented workers, women's rights, etc.). Could we not, in the same vein, prophesy that worker robots will become integrated into the class struggle, if they resemble humans to such an extent?

I am tempted to answer categorically: No.

Here, my “biological” approach will prevail, because it is a matter of examining what constitutes life (or what remains of life in industrial production), in light of the new, seemingly limitless technological revolutions surrounding “artificial intelligence” and nanotechnologies.

When Marx and Engels distinguished between living and dead labor, it was to limit the development of the dead labor of machines to mere wear and tear, regardless of the complexity of the task performed. It is clearly the bourgeoisie's dream to make this dead labor "alive," or better yet, to "kill" living labor, in order to resolve the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (linked to the obligation to hire worker-consumers, the only generators of surplus value). But it is an unattainable dream; here's why.

First, for a biologist, the human being is no longer, as was thought in Descartes' time, a wonderful “machine." It is above all a story interwoven with nature and nurture. Biological parents, family history, childhood, a complex experience (far more complex than a simple accumulation of memories), a limited but very real assimilation of traits acquired in previous generations, a filtering, a transformation of traits acquired throughout life, interpersonal cooperation, collective intelligence—all these further complicate this evolution for each individual. Humans are a mass of interconnected individual histories, of personal and collective movements, of interactions between short- and long-term acquired traits and the innate (of even longer duration). In short, a human being is not manufactured. They are not a thing, a “finished product” that wears out (use value), but a self-movement that unfolds, sustains itself, and evolves. Of course, it wears out, but certainly not in the same way as machines: homeostasis preserves the body up to a certain point, and reproduction renews the dead. Humans are their own history; they cannot be the ahistorical and definitive product of an external will. It is contemporary postmodernism that turns them into a Golem, contrary to everything that cutting-edge biology is discovering.

Secondly, we will apply this approach to the brain itself (since all other organs can eventually, to a certain extent, be replaced by machines—with maintenance). Close observation of the brain reveals a complex network of synaptic interconnections. However, only a mechanistic, fixist approach (vulgar materialism, as Marxists call it, because it is non-dialectical) would lead us to believe that we can "reconstruct" this structure with ever-increasing perfection to obtain a functional replica of the brain. Because it is not the network structure itself that constitutes the brain, but rather the even more complex movement of that structure, its evolution over time. A scan, a snapshot, however perfect, of a human... is anything but human.

From this perspective, artificial intelligence is misnamed: it is indeed the processing of (already existing) information, and not a creative, innovative intelligence as such. Human intelligence, at both the individual and collective levels (often overlooked), can be distinguished from its strictly calculative dimension, and stems as much from its empirical successes as from its errors, and even from the deliberate, sometimes useful, persistence of those errors (contradictions destined to be overcome in one way or another). Isn't it a certain "bad faith" on the part of the individual, in the history of science, that paves the way for great discoveries against the community of guardians of the prevailing paradigm? Isn't it to thought experiments bordering on the absurd, to literally counterintuitive ideas, to the interpretation of the unexpected, that we owe the great revolutions in scientific research, the pinnacle of human intelligence? Isn't it this quintessence of human intelligence that should mobilise all humankind, once all practical, computational, and informational activities have become entirely digital?

Following this line of thought, one could almost say that the definition of living labor, on the one hand, and of intelligence, on the other, is, contrary to everything presupposed by any industrial process, "that which cannot be standardised."

It is a thermodynamic difference that distinguishes the way in which living labor and dead labor are consumed. Living labor regenerates itself daily, even modifying itself in the process, and then reproduces itself from generation to generation (always based on the consumption of the goods produced themselves), unlike dead labor, which passively dissipates until it breaks down (entropy). Humans thus self-regenerate by consuming the fruits of their own production (even through machines), and when the machine wears out, it "repairs" itself (up to a certain point and through work external to the system). This is not, moreover, a fixed or cyclical definition of life, since paradoxically, evolution is necessary for self-regeneration to be even minimally effective in a changing world. 

It is understandable that this dimension of self-regeneration presupposes a sufficient degree of self-interest to fuel an awareness of collective interests, and therefore a class, union, and political struggle.

While we don't rule out the possibility of one day producing such self-regenerating entities, these would still be, by definition, and regardless of their appearance, fully alive. However, there is one difficult-to-imagine condition: it could not be a production ex nihilo, but rather a "reproduction," requiring not digital technology but rather biotechnology and... a great deal of time.

At every level of describing life, from self-replicating molecules (DNA, etc.) to the most refined forms of nervous tissue,

By passing through homeostasis and, in this case, the human “collective worker,” we rediscover this negentropy, which acts as a permanent counter-movement to entropy, the wear and tear of the inorganic (whether mineral, mechanical, or digital).

It is in this sense that the regeneration of human labor is not comparable to filling up a car or lubricating the gears of a machine tool. It is based on what it collectively produces, regardless of the thickness of the machinery, the dead labor, that separates it from it. And it is on this sole basis, however increasingly complex, increasingly refined, and less and less easy to uncover, that capital extracts its surplus value.

Once the insurmountable wall that will remain between living work - even simple - and dead work - even infinitely complex - has been scientifically demonstrated through serious and collective work (and not through this modest individual text), it remains to highlight (it's simpler) how much more relevant and evident Das Kapital is today than ever before!

https://germinallejournal.jimdofree.com/2026/07/26/transhumanisme-andro%C3%AFdes-et-lutte-de-classe/

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