From Consumers to Control: Rethinking Economic Power in the Age of AI
As the AI revolution accelerates, it’s becoming increasingly clear that traditional economic models—those that prioritize currency, trade, and the maintenance of a large consumer base—may be missing something fundamental. Under classical capitalism, the engine of growth is the paid laborer: companies need consumers, and consumers need wages. This cycle has underpinned the expansion of markets and the accumulation of wealth for centuries.
However, the rapid adoption of AI threatens to disrupt this balance. If automation and artificial intelligence lead to mass unemployment, the consumer base shrinks, undermining the very foundation of capitalist growth. On the surface, this looks like companies are “shooting themselves in the foot” for short-term gains, creating what some might call an “AI bubble.” But perhaps this is not a miscalculation, but a sign that the underlying logic of economic power is shifting.
The Persistence of Feudal Logics: Rent Seeking and State Privilege
Historically, feudalism was characterized by power derived from land ownership, rent extraction, and proximity to the state or sovereign. While capitalism ostensibly replaced feudalism with a system based on free trade and competitive markets, many critics argue that feudal logics never fully disappeared. Instead, they were transformed. Today, rent seeking—the extraction of income not from productive activity, but from control over resources, intellectual property, or regulatory privileges—remains central to the accumulation of wealth.
Mutualist anarchists like Kevin Carson have long argued that modern capitalism is riddled with state-granted privileges: patents, subsidies, regulatory barriers, and other forms of legal protection that allow certain actors to extract rents from the rest of society. This critique is shared by Marxists, who see the state as an instrument for maintaining class power and facilitating the extraction of surplus value, not just through wage labor but through control over the means of production and access to markets.
Capital as Power (CASP): A New Paradigm
The “Capital as Power” (CASP) framework, developed by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, offers a radical rethinking of economic power. CASP argues that capital is not just a stock of money or physical assets, but a quantifiable measure of power—specifically, the power to shape and control social processes, including production, consumption, and even state policy. In this view, the main mode of economic power is not trade or productive activity per se, but the ability to create and maintain differential advantages—through rent seeking, regulatory capture, and strategic control over key resources.
Under CASP, the transition to an AI-driven economy is not a threat to capital, but an opportunity to consolidate power. Even if the consumer base shrinks, those who control the AI infrastructure, data, and intellectual property can extract rents from the rest of society, including from states themselves. The messy transition expected—marked by unemployment, social unrest, and political upheaval—is not a bug, but a feature of this new mode of accumulation.
The Bet: Power Over Consumption
The best-kept secret of the AI revolution may be that having more consumers is not the main basis of economic power, but merely one of its historical forms. As we move into a new era, the real basis of power is the ability to control the levers of production, information, and state policy—regardless of the size of the consumer base. This is not a return to feudalism, but a mutation of its core logic: power through differential advantage, rent seeking, and state privilege.
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