Nicolas D. Villarreal’s "Marxism in the Age of AI" rightly brings our attention back to Marx’s 1857–1858 Grundrisse ("Fragment on Machines"), where fixed capital absorbs the "general intellect" (General Intellect) and manifests as "organs of the human brain, created by the human hand." 

Living through the AI explosion of 2026—where models like Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra autonomously execute multi-day workflows—we can observe Marx’s prophecy materializing with uncanny literalism. When Marx wrote in 1858 that "the worker no longer stands as the principal agent of the production process, but stands beside it... as its watchman and regulator," he practically wrote the job description for what programmers in 2025–2026 call "Vibe Coding" and human-in-the-loop agent supervision. Furthermore, by stripping away the scarcity of mental labor, AI is finally completing the Communist Manifesto’s prediction of stripping the halo from "the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science," uniting white-collar cognitive workers and traditional blue-collar workers into a single, universal proletariat.

However, there is a deeper theoretical puzzle that Villarreal’s piece—and much of contemporary Marxist commentary on AGI—has yet to connect. For over a century, critics and even many Marxists believed that Marx and Engels made a historical miscalculation in The German Ideology (1845) and Principles of Communism (1847), where they insisted that communism could not succeed as a purely local event, but "is only empirically possible as the act of the dominant peoples 'all at once' (auf einmal) and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism."

Because 20th-century socialist revolutions broke out first in economically backward, agrarian countries (such as Russia and China) rather than simultaneously in the advanced capitalist core, conventional wisdom held that Marx’s "simultaneous victory" thesis was flawed and required correction by "socialism in one country."

Yet viewed through the lens of approaching Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), it becomes clear that Marx’s 1845 thesis needed no correction—history had simply not yet forged the productive force capable of triggering it. Twentieth-century revolutions in peripheral nations were a historical inversion and a defensive prelude in an era when industrial productive forces diffused slowly and unevenly across borders, and where, as Marx warned, "any expansion of intercourse would abolish local communism."

ASI changes the physical constant of history. Unlike the steam engine or the assembly line, which took decades to cross oceans, algorithmic breakthroughs, open-source weights, and cloud-based superintelligence propagate across the planetary network at the speed of light. The moment AGI/ASI crosses the threshold where the marginal cost of both mental and physical labor drops to zero, the foundation of production based on exchange-value (wage-labor time) will not collapse in one country alone—it will suffer a mathematical divide-by-zero error across all dominant economies simultaneously. 

In short, Marx’s 1858 "organs of the human brain" (AGI/ASI) is the exact material switch required to trigger his 1845 "act of the dominant peoples all at once and simultaneously." What appeared for a hundred years to be a flaw in classical Marxism was, in fact, a prophecy waiting for the technological singularity to catch up.

Comradely regards,

Chang Nuo