Reading Marx remains useful. Following Marxism, much less so. Around his work, orthodoxies built empires—often dull, often coercive, always convinced that wage labour is humanity’s permanent horizon.

But between Marx and Marxism there is a fault line. On one side: a living critique of labour and capital as historical forms. On the other: a dogma that treats wage labour as destiny.

Let’s be clear. Non‑voluntary wage labour is a softened form of slavery. It binds life to schedules imposed from outside, and to an income dictated by an abstract “market.” Legal freedom changes little when survival still depends on selling one’s time in pre-cut blocks. What is sold is not labour—it is life, formatted.

Machines have been quietly undoing this system for two centuries. First they took the strain of bodies. Then the monotony of repetition. Now, with artificial intelligence, they enter the terrain once reserved for thought: writing, coding, deciding, answering what we cannot. When we turn to AI for solutions we cannot produce ourselves, we admit something decisive: the tool has become an organ.

So why do we persist in organising society around the sale of labour?

The real question is simpler, and more dangerous: why not pay people to live? To play, to learn, to create, to care. Income need not be compensation for submission. It could be the condition of freedom.

What we call “free time” is, today, a residue—the leftover of employment. It should be the centre. Not an exception, but the rule.

This would not be a regression into childhood, but its transformation. A return, yes—but armed with infrastructure. A technically sustained abundance, no longer dependent on mass submission to meaningless work. Childhood, extended and made conscious.

A different society becomes imaginable. Not perfectly just, but more lucid. Artificial intelligence, no longer hidden inside platforms, could become a public instrument: mapping inequalities, modelling consequences, exposing concentrations of power. What I call “democracy maps” would allow societies to see themselves—continuously, reflexively—and to adjust.

Politics, then, would no longer operate in semi-blindness. It would navigate.

And the circle could widen further. If representation is the core of democracy, why stop at humans? A “Parliament of Others” is conceivable: rivers, forests, animals, climates—given voice through computational mediation. Not metaphorically, but operationally. Not as poetry, but as input.

In such a world, empathy would no longer be moral decoration. It would be structural.

The scandal is not that machines are replacing human labour. The scandal is that we resist it.

The real post‑Marxist heresy is this: to accelerate the end of necessary labour, and to detach income from work entirely. To accept that what deserves our time was never work, but something we have always known, obscurely, since childhood: learning, feeling, creating, caring, imagining—together.