The arrival of artificial intelligence does not inaugurate liberation of labor, it consummates its abolition. Yet the abolition of labor does not, as many technocratic prophets declare, signal the arrival of a new epoch of human flourishing. Rather, it completes an already unfolding logic inherent to capitalism’s conception of labor as mere labor-value; an abstract unit of measurement divorced from lived human experience. Under such conditions, human beings, whose value is mediated primarily by their labor-value, risk being reduced to absolute superfluity.

The dialectic thereby reverses itself, as expected: what was promised as liberation becomes abjection; the emancipation from labor turns into the liquidation of the laborer. Labor is at once valorized and relentlessly devalued. The worker, once the bearer of meaning, was already stripped to its bare functionality, defined only by its instrumental capacity within the productive apparatus. AI, as the purest manifestation of instrumental reason, executes this logic with unparalleled efficiency, negating the intellectual labor through intellectual automation. Yet, in performing this negation, it inadvertently negates human purpose itself, for capitalism has left no alternative avenue through which the meaning of a person’s life might be secured. The abolition of labor, therefore, implies the abolition of human significance as capitalism has construed it. Within the administered society, the meaning of individuals is mediated through the system’s implacable logic, which assigns value based upon measurable productivity. This instrumentalization is the foundation upon which capitalism constructs its ideological edifice: everyone is promised a meaningful existence through labor, while simultaneously labor becomes increasingly meaningless, repetitive, and alienating. AI accentuates this alienation by making explicit the latent redundancy embedded within capitalist modes of production. Workers now confront their redundancy not as potential, but as imminent actuality.

The promise of a “golden age of entrepreneurship”, where anyone can start their billion-dollar startup run by AI Agents, emerges as ideological consolation in response to this negation. The capitalist apparatus, in a gesture of cruel optimism, suggests that the displaced laborer is not merely unemployed but rather an entrepreneur-in-waiting. Entrepreneurship serves as a fictitious reconciliation of a systemic contradiction. It posits a fantasy wherein all individuals are capable of creating value autonomously, obscuring the structural impossibility embedded within the capitalist framework itself. Rather than confronting the systemic conditions that render labor meaningless, the invocation of universal entrepreneurship perversely individualizes social failure. Each worker, newly categorized as entrepreneur, is personally accountable for their impotence against the machine; the failure to adapt becomes moral rather than structural. “If you are not using AI to launch a million dollar SaaS, you are stupid.” Such ideological mystification obfuscates the fact that entrepreneurship itself remains confined within capitalism’s prescribed terms. To become entrepreneurial is not to become free, but rather to internalize and reproduce the instrumental logic that previously rendered the worker expendable. Entrepreneurship, conceived under capitalism, is not a genuine escape from instrumental reason but rather its perfected embodiment. The entrepreneur is the ultimate expression of reification, willingly subordinating personal existence to market rationality, thereby completing the subsumption of humanity under capital. No matter how loudly the entrepreneurial gospel is proclaimed, material conditions reveal that most individuals lack the capital, resources, and conditions necessary to compete effectively against automated productivity. Entrepreneurship under such conditions becomes a disciplinary mechanism rather than a liberation; a tool for managing the discontent of those displaced by AI.

The truth-element of the free market is that the market is free, but the individual who is but a parasite attached to it isn’t. It is impossible to envision genuine human flourishing outside the parameters of productivity and instrumentality. As labor is abolished, so too is the last vestige of human autonomy under capitalism. Humanity confronts itself as superfluous, as utterly meaningless, precisely because it cannot imagine itself apart from the value-system capitalism has imposed.

If genuine emancipation is to emerge, it must resist this dialectical trap. Rather than succumbing to the false reconciliation of entrepreneurial optimism, humanity must confront the aspect of existence that escapes commodification and resists instrumental calculation. Only through acknowledging the inadequacy of capitalism’s categories, and through persistent negation of its false promises, can genuine human meaning begin to emerge. The abolition of labor thus demands not the acceptance of entrepreneurial illusions but the radical questioning of labor-value itself. Only through such rigorous negative dialectics can society hope to reclaim a meaning not defined by the very system that seeks its negation.