Karl Marx never wrote a single line of JavaScript. Yet open any copy of Das Kapital and you will find a mirror held up to the modern tech industry with startling clarity.
The Means of Production, Revisited
In 1867, Marx described how capitalism works: a ruling class owns the means of production — the land, the machines, the factories — and everyone else sells their labor to survive. The workers create value, and the owners capture most of it.
Fast-forward to 2024. The means of production are now:
- Cloud computing platforms (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure)
- App stores that take 30% of every transaction
- Social media algorithms that monetize attention
- Proprietary platforms where millions of creators work for free
The factory floor is a GitHub repository. The foreman is a sprint board. The factory whistle is a Slack notification at 11pm.
Alienated Labor in the Age of SaaS
Marx introduced the concept of alienated labor — the idea that when workers have no stake in what they produce, their work becomes foreign to them. They are cogs, not craftsmen.
Sound familiar? How many developers have built features they knew were harmful — dark patterns, addictive feeds, surveillance tools — because the ticket was assigned and the sprint was closing? The code ships. The developer feels nothing. The platform profits.
This is alienation written in TypeScript.
The General Intellect
Here is where Marx gets interesting for software developers. In the Grundrisse, he wrote about the General Intellect — the idea that as society advances, collective knowledge and science become the primary productive force, more important than individual labor.
He was describing open source software in 1857.
Linux powers most of the world’s servers. React, Node.js, PostgreSQL, Python — the entire foundation of the modern internet is built on collective, freely shared knowledge. The General Intellect is GitHub. And yet the companies that profit most from it give the least back.
What Would Marx Say About Big Tech?
He would say that a handful of monopolies — Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft — have captured the means of digital production and extracted enormous surplus value from:
- Developers who build the platforms for salaries that represent a fraction of the value they create
- Users whose attention and data are the raw material, harvested and sold without meaningful compensation
- Content creators who generate all the value on platforms they do not own
He would call this the digital enclosure of the commons — the privatization of a public good (the internet, open knowledge) for private profit.
The Communist Answer
Marx’s answer was collective ownership. Applied to software, this already exists — it’s called free and open source software. The question is whether the infrastructure of society (communications, data, computation) should be owned by a few corporations or held as a commons.
Cooperatives like the Mondragon Corporation point toward one model. Platform cooperatives — where the users own the platform — point toward another. The fediverse (Mastodon, Matrix, ActivityPub) is the internet refusing enclosure.
Code as a Political Act
Every commit is a choice. You can build tools that extract and exploit, or tools that liberate and connect. You can work for a platform that surveils, or contribute to one that respects privacy.
Marx did not believe in individual moral purity — he believed in collective action. But he would recognize that in the 21st century, the struggle over the means of production is partly fought in pull requests, in license choices, in the decision to build on open standards instead of proprietary ones.
The workers of the world have a new rallying cry:
Merge the PR. Own the platform. Fork the state.