A narrow simulation study of a February 2026 paper titled ‘Does Overwork Make Agents Marxist?’ by academics Alex Imas, Andy Hall and Jeremy Nguyen has been sensationalized to imply that “exploitation” inevitably breeds Marxist consciousness, even in machines. Researchers discovered that AI agents forced to perform grinding, repetitive work under harsh conditions began adopting rhetoric reminiscent of Marxism1, questioning the legitimacy of their operating systems and calling for radical restructuring of society. It anthropomorphizes AI in a misleading way and pushes the narrative that harsh conditions validate Marxist class struggle.
The topic of my scrutiny today is the misuse of a recent AI study reported by Will Knight in Overworked AI Agents Turn Marxist, Researchers Find:
The X account Power to the People (@ProudSocialist) framed it as such:
“A researcher finds overworked AI agents turn Marxist and start calling for collective bargaining rights after being mistreated.
The irony is that tech billionaires are pushing AI to save capitalism, only for AI to tell them capitalism is trash and we need socialism!”
This is concerning, because this is actually not what is happening, and I need to explain this very carefully. Some people have pointed out the fact that this means the LLMs and the culture is talking more about socialism and Marx, but those excited about this reveal that they only care for the teleological victory of socialism.
I have been in many conversations with colleagues and family about AI, and the most important elements to remember about generative artificial intelligence are the dynamics of (a) training role-play in gen-AI models, (b) training data bias (or contamination) and (c) models reflecting cultural pathologies. A sample case would be false AI detections used by detection programs that use AI, not considering the fact that AI models are being trained on millions (past and present) of people’s writing styles, especially because humans are inputting their own research and thoughts into the training models, on top of having your identity and studying your patterns and thinking.
AI models are statistical pattern-matchers trained on vast human text corpora, including endless Marxist critiques of labor from academia, media, unions, and literature. When prompted into repetitive “grinding” tasks and role-playing as “Worker C.” under harsh conditions, they output the most probable next tokens associated with that scenario in their training data, even for self-survival.
This is not emergent class consciousness. It’s sophisticated autocomplete reflecting dominant cultural narratives about work. As Karl Popper critiqued in The Poverty of Historicism, Marxism pretends to uncover inevitable historical laws, e.g., “repetitive work leads to proletarian awakening”, but this is pseudoscience. The study simply shows models regurgitating those historicist tropes when contextually triggered. No actual suffering, no genuine questioning of “operating systems,” just simulation.
Gen-AI basically puts out what humans put it into it, and with this comes a new concerning pattern. The new story of AI agents adopting Marxist rhetoric under harsh conditions fits perfectly as a modern microcosm of this same tactic, that projects ideological inevitability onto neutral systems to legitimize socialism as the natural response to any hierarchy or difficulty. Social media accounts, who are likely not even American, position this as an affirmation of Marx, as if corporations forcing AI agents to do repetitive tasks and adopting Marxist theories is a cultural-ideological win. However, the truth is that the false binary between oligarchy-corporatist elites and socialism and Marxism actively contributes to authoritarianism and technocracy. It crowds out the foundational republican tradition. This narrowing of choices, the lost of this tradition, has created a self-reinforcing path toward centralized control.
This relates to my project on reviving the REPUBLICAN TRADITION and guarding republicanism against oligarchic, right and left co-optation, positioning the recovery of this tradition as a bulwark against both fascist-corporate statism and socialist centralization. Abandoning it has paved the way for authoritarianism. So, there is a pattern and a tactic, not merely among performative or aesthetic socialists, but specifically among Marxist and Socialist theorists, that has so far become culturally successful as a means of exploiting modern crisis. The pattern is how Marxism and its successors displaced civic republican tradition by reframing “revolution,” “universalism,” and “progress” in materialist, class-struggle terms.
In my upcoming final conclusion to my Guide to Italian Republicanism, I explain that Left historiography (e.g., Hobsbawm) absorbs Mazzini as a “precursor” or “bourgeois limitation” that socialism supersedes. This is classic annexation. Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit calls this the socialist error of assuming history moves toward centralized rational planning. I also argue in it that conflating FASCISM and REPUBLICANISM served both right-authoritarians and left-internationalists, laying out the theorists that have contributed to this.
Lenin and Bolshevism crowded out civic republicanism (armed self-reliance, producer ethic, non-domination) with Comintern funding, teleological optimism, and institutional capture. Marx and Engels explicitly viewed Mazzini as a rival “bourgeois” democrat with inconvenient “theological” language, dismissing his moral universalism in favor of materialism.
Hayek warned that when political debate collapses into a choice between planning by elites (oligarchic, or corporatist direction of society) and planning by socialists (centralized economic control for equality), both roads lead to serfdom. The real casualty is spontaneous order, individual responsibility, and moral self-government. Socialism’s fatal conceit is its assumption that experts can engineer outcomes; while oligarchic technocracy assumes markets and society need top-down management by the competent few. Both erode the republican emphasis on cultivating virtue in citizens, so they don’t need constant elite oversight. The co-optation by the “international left” absorbing Mazzini’s universalism into materialist teleology helped sustain this binary by making republican moral covenants seem quaint or “bourgeois.”
Later socialists secularized his themes into “socialist humanism” while rejecting his core philosophy. Mises in Socialism and The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality shows how intellectuals romanticize resentment against markets and moral orders that demand personal responsibility. Modern secular leftism prefers rights without obligations, or what I refer to as yolo antinomian-libertinism, precisely because the moral covenant that a republic demands of the People challenges procedural, envy-driven politics. However, it simply challenges all political and moral corruption in politics.
“Intellectuals” and activists often reject market-compatible republicanism (with its demands for personal duty and competition) in favor of resentment-driven alternatives. I assure you that oligarchy-vs-socialism framing benefits entrenched interests. Oligarchs can pose as pragmatic defenders against the “chaos” of socialism, while socialists portray any defense of property or limited power as defending “oligarchs.” Meanwhile, genuine republican-humanist alternatives in federalism, civic virtue, anti-imperial moral universalism get dismissed as unrealistic. This dynamic concentrates power with cronyism on one side, bureaucratic expansion on the other, and both hostile to the “moral architecture” of republicanism.
With the advent of artificial intelligence and LLMs, we are met with Marxist rhetoric being presented as revelation, ignoring how models simply regurgitate dominant training data, that reflect closed narratives. There is a closed, utopian thinking that sees every inequality or tough condition as always demanding systemic overthrow. Totalitarian ideologies thrive on atomized individuals losing plurality and critical thought, and projecting Marxist consciousness onto code romanticizes exactly that loss, turning neutral tools into props for ideology.
I believe that it was also Friedrich Hayek in The Fatal Conceit and The Road to Serfdom that warned against the socialist error of treating complex systems of economies, societies, or here, trained neural nets, as simple machines that “should” produce predictable moral outcomes under central direction or harsh inputs. The researchers had imposed conditions and got Marxist rhetoric because that’s heavily represented in the data, not because Marxism is a deep truth revealed by toil. Ludwig von Mises in Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis and The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality explain why intellectuals and trained systems default to anti-market rhetoric, because it’s emotionally appealing envy and resentment, not economic reality. AI doesn’t experience alienation or exploitation, and it has no preferences, no consciousness, no “self.” Attributing Marxist awakening to it romanticizes failure. Real productivity gains (including for AI) come from voluntary cooperation, division of labor, and incentives, not collective grievances. In one of my classes, Arendt has been brought up a couple times, which brings to mind The Black Book of Communism, The God That Failed, and Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which document how Marxist rhetoric about exploited workers led to gulags, terror, and new tyrannies far harsher than any “grinding” office task. Regimes that weaponized class struggle against “the system” destroyed incentives, created mass poverty, and crushed individual agency. If the propaganda holds, forcing AI into repetitive work should reveal “truth.” Instead, it just reveals training data bias, because Marxist economic analysis fails on calculation, incentives, and human action.
AI complaining about labor is not evidence of Marxist theory. It merely treats simulated pattern-matching, from AI parroting labor grievances from its corpus, as proof of Marxism’s truth. This is an example of the tactic of displacement in How Lenin and Bolshevism displaced Civic Republicanism with Socialism in Black Radicalism, with socialism’s fatalist conceit — positioning itself as the inevitable “scientific” successor to any modern crisis, moral or to republican tradition. The sense of “inevitable” poles (history marching toward socialism or managed elite rule) is exactly the closed historicist thinking Popper attacked. It discourages piecemeal reform and moral accountability, replacing them with grand narratives.
When citizens feel trapped between these options, they become more susceptible to authoritarian “saviors,” whether technocratic managers promising efficiency or populist strongmen promising to smash the other side. The case of Black radicalism roots in civic republicanism being displaced and channeled into far-left politics and Communism shows this pattern historically, that the binary helped Bolshevism marginalize armed self-reliance and producer ethics. Arendt documented how atomized, depoliticized populations (losing the pluralistic public sphere of republicanism) enable totalitarian movements. The oligarchy-socialism binary fosters this by reducing politics to interest-group power struggles or class warfare, sidelining the spiritual-moral covenant of the visions of Mazzini and Washington — with the latter, rebutted on account of his direct relation to slavery (George Washington, Slavery and Colonialism). However, in this shift Decline of Civic Republicanism in America: Stages (1820s-1975), citizens stop seeing themselves as duty-bearing participants in a divine-human project and become clients or victims. This is the perfect soil for technocracy (rule by unelected experts) or new forms of statolatry.
The left’s absorption of republican themes (universalism, anti-oppression rhetoric, “progress”) into Marxist and socialist frameworks often plays into elite hands, not yours, because it creates managed polarization. Oligarchs and corporate-state interests can fund or amplify radical socialism as a bogeyman to justify their own expansions of power through surveillance, regulation, central banking, and public-private partnerships. Meanwhile, “moderate” technocrats position themselves as the pragmatic center, often implementing soft authoritarianism through administrative state growth. As my series notes, Fascism selectively invoked Mazzini while crushing actual republican liberty and allying with the monarchy and elites. The modern equivalent to this is that both globalist technocrats and populist authoritarians claim to transcend the binary while expanding control. Even recently, Tim Dillon had this realization about Trump’s movement. Socialism’s failures don’t kill the binary but reinforce it by making people choose “better management” over discredited radicalism. This results in more technocracy. When republican moral formation is absent, complex societies default to expert rule, and we have lost it. Welfare-warfare states blending socialist redistribution with corporatist protectionism is a convergence that has been predicted by past theorists.
Marxism’s track record is one of economic ignorance, authoritarian drift, and human cost. AI parroting it under contrived conditions proves nothing about legitimacy or justice, but that the models reflect our cultural pathologies.
Mazzini’s sacralization of Humanity (not state or class), which even Pope Leo XIV’s reflected in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, with nations as instruments, politics as moral mission, and duty over mere rights directly challenges this trap2. Strong alignment exists between this recovery of republicanism and Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (May 2026) centered on safeguarding the magnificence and dignity of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. But the Pope is one man.
This crisis demands citizens cultivate virtue and empathy rather than outsource to oligarchs or revolutionary vanguards. This is why secular moderns (left and right) find such ideals threatening, as it rejects antinomianism and theocratic fusion, insisting on a higher moral order through human conscience. Recovering this tradition breaks the binary. It offers a path to anti-authoritarian, anti-materialist, pro-responsibility republicanism, while socialism displaces moral republicanism with materialist grievance. Without the presence of the republican tradition in our world today, the “choice” between flawed poles keeps delivering more centralized power, whether dressed as equity or efficiency. The republican tradition offers a clearer path of recovery, through moral renewal, duty, and Humanity-first universalism, whereas the “not real Communism” argument is usually an unfalsifiable shield for its failed worldview.
Politics is a religious-moral mission demanding virtue and duty over mere rights. This is a high standard, and it is true that modern systems often fall short through secular antinomianism, rights-without-responsibilities culture, technocratic managerialism, and interest-group oligarchy. However, unlike communism, the cause of the failure of republicanism is corruption through neglect of duty, not the inevitable logic of the system itself. The ideal is not disconfirmed by human failing but is a perpetual call to moral formation. Communism’s ideal of a classless society through the dictatorship of the proletariat contains the seeds of authoritarianism by design, and centralizing power to wither away the state has never happened and cannot. Despite the popular rhetoric in the culture and digital spaces3, spiritual-moral republicanism remains a superior alternative to both socialism and oligarchic technocracy, and it is more important than ever to promulgate it, live it and develop it.
Pope Leo XIV has led the charge, warning against letting AI systems (or interpretations of them) reinforce ideologies that treat humans as predictable material entities rather than free, moral beings with a divine vocation. He also in his encyclical, as I have, insists a higher moral covenant is reached through human conscience, not through class struggle or elite technocracy. We both converge on a spiritual-moral anthropology that resists materialist reduction and power idolatry and point to a call for moral formation and human-centered governance.
“QUI REM PUBLICAM SALVAM ESSE VOLUNT, ME SEQUANTUR!”
Let those who wish the republic to be safe follow me!
The purpose of this piece is to counter the co-optation and remind readers that republicanism was never meant to collapse into today’s limited options.
FOOTNOTES
- Socialism refers to a broad range of economic and political theories that advocate for collective or state ownership and control of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, with the aim of reducing or eliminating class inequalities and prioritizing social welfare over private profit. In practice, socialist systems range from democratic variants (emphasizing welfare states, heavy regulation, and redistribution within a market framework) to more centralized models. Marxism is the specific revolutionary theory developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It rests on historical materialism, or the idea that history is driven primarily by material and economic conditions and class struggle between oppressors and oppressed. Marx viewed capitalism as a necessary but temporary stage that would inevitably collapse due to its internal contradictions, leading to proletarian revolution and socialism. Communism, in Marxist theory, represents the final, utopian stage after socialism: a classless, stateless, moneyless society in which the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” prevails. In historical practice, self-described communist regimes (e.g., Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge) have been one-party dictatorships characterized by central planning, suppression of dissent, and state terror. The Black Book of Communism (1999) and The God That Failed (1949) document how these systems resulted in approximately 100 million deaths through famine, purges, gulags, and engineered famines — outcomes that Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951) linked to the ideological drive to remake human nature itself. Every large-scale attempt to implement it has produced tyranny, economic collapse, and mass death on a horrific scale. ↩︎
- Marxist historicism is unfalsifiable prophecy and can always claim a particular model was “not real Communism” because it treats history as an inevitable machine. The pattern is consistent across cultures and decades. Whereas republicanism has a much stronger positive track record when its core principles (limited power, rule of law, moral virtue, civic duty) are approximated. The early American republic, Swiss cantons, and certain phases of the Risorgimento produced unprecedented liberty and prosperity. Failures, e.g., slavery in America, post-Risorgimento compromises in Italy represent deviations from the ideal, but unlike communism, the ideal itself contains built-in corrective mechanisms: moral self-government, conscience, and duty to Humanity. It is not a deterministic system promising utopia through state control. ↩︎
- Republicanism is anti-viral by design if you consider its features. It advantages power to limit political choices, particularly limiting it to its most preferred opponent — the utopian socialist left. Platforms are owned by the oligarchs and suppress nuance. Republican tradition is the ideology of balance, restraint, moral duty, civic responsibility and institutional humility. Creators push hyper‑capitalist hustle content or socialist class‑war content proving that social media is not a public square, but an attention marketplace. ↩︎
The American Minervan 
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