The world is beset with questions, and technology presumes to have answers. The potential for new kinds of automation using language models and other techniques in machine learning dominates the public discourse regarding the future of work. Some, optimistic in the transformative effects of these technologies, believe that work might not have a future at all. Categories of white-collar knowledge work such as management consulting, software development, law, and medicine that it has been all but unthinkable to imagine as automatable are now arguably just as much on the chopping block as blue-collar manual labor such as mining, bricklaying, and truck-driving. Will artificial intelligence really transform our world of work as some claim it will? If it does, will it be for the better or the worse?
The aim of this course is twofold:
It is designed with those who are actively engaged in the operational edifice of ‘big tech’ in mind, as a structured and socially involved way to reflect on the ethics and politics of working in the world of software. A tried and tested way to create space for this kind of difficult conceptual labor is to read and re-read Capital, a fact to which a century and a half of political struggle attests. The following questions spur and are indicative of the tone of our enquiry:
Reading Capital is not a simple undertaking. The first volume alone is over 800 pages, and the commentary and criticism that has accumulated on it over the years stretches (we are sure, though we have not strictly done the math) into the hundreds of thousands if not millions of pages. When we read, we do not consume a text’s information in a vacuum. Reading is a social and political act, and it is affected by our context.
In this course, we will read Capital in 2026, from the vantage of currently working or having worked in software (broadly defined), in an electoral political climate that is hostile to reason as it is usually understood and more openly racist and xenophobic than its preceding versions. We welcome anyone who wants to learn, and invite you to bring personal reflections regarding your role in the tech sector with you.
This course follows on from a previous iteration of the course that we ran from June-September 2025. In that course, we read chapters 1-9 of Capital Volume I. In the upcoming 2026 iteration, we will therefore start from chapter 10 of Volume I, and read through until the end.
A week before the course starts, we will make a draft of a textbook (also titled ‘Capital for Tech Workers’) available to students, which covers key concepts from the first 9 chapters. This textbook is designed to only take a few hours to work through from start to finish, so that students who did not take the first iteration will nevertheless have a way to catch up. Additionally, we will recap the first 9 chapters by way of introduction in the first session. We will then move into discussing chapters 10 onwards for the remainder of the course.
We will work from the new translation of Capital, Volume I. A PDF will be made available to students on request, meaning that there are no costs involved in taking the course beyond having an Internet connection and a video conferencing device. All other supplementary materials will also be made available as PDFs.