It is a bit of surprise to some that Marx already had a name for what most programmers describe when they describe the worst part of the job. He called it alienation, and in the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (Marx 1975) he sketched it in four senses that map almost directly onto contemporary software work. You are alienated from the product because it is not yours: the codebase belongs to the firm, the data belongs to the platform, the patents belong to the legal entity. You are alienated from the activity, because you do not decide what to build or how. You are alienated from your fellow workers, who are reframed as collaborators during planning and performance during reviews, and against whom you are stack-ranked at year end. You are alienated from your species-being, your capacity for free creative work, because that capacity has been rented to the firm for forty hours a week and asked to express itself in OKRs. The 1844 Manuscripts are sometimes accused of being too humanist for the older Marx of Capital, but if you have ever watched a senior engineer move tickets across a board for ten years and then admit, on a quiet afternoon, that he no longer remembers what he wanted to build, you will recognize the description. The second useful surprise is Marx's account of surplus value in Capital, Volume I (Marx 1990) is the one most wave away, on the grounds that it does not apply to people earning two, three, or four hundred thousand dollars a year. Surplus is a claim about the relation between what the worker is paid and what the worker's labor produces for the owner. A programmer at Google is paid handsomely because his marginal output is enormous, and the firm captures the rest. The fact that the slice you keep is large enough to buy a house in some neighborhoods does not change the structure of the relation. It only means that, for now, the ruling class has decided it makes sense to pay you well. The same firms that paid generously in 2021 laid off hundreds of thousands of these well-paid employees in the years that followed, while reporting record profits.

There is also Marx's chapter on machinery and large-scale industry, which contains the most directly relevant passage in the entire corpus. Marx noticed that machinery, under capitalism, does not simply substitute for human muscle. It is also a way of disciplining workers, deskilling them, and shifting the bargaining power of the firm. Replace machinery with the contemporary stack, CI/CD, autoscaling, observability platforms, the whole SaaS layer, and now the layer of LLM tooling being inserted into every IDE, and the analysis is uncomfortably current. Each of these tools is sold to you as freeing your time for higher-value work, and each, at scale, also has the function of standardizing your output and monitoring your performance, and lowering the cost of replacing you. Harry Braverman picked this thread up in Labor and Monopoly Capital in 1974 and pushed it into the white-collar professions long before software was a profession in our sense. Read Braverman alongside Marx and the typical post-2020 software workplace, with its dashboards, sprint metrics, engineering excellence rituals, and aggressively monitored Git histories, looks less like a craft community and more like the late phase of a process Marx described in the textile mills of the 1850s. #Politics #Programming