Amazon says AI forced them to cut 30,000 jobs. Amazon revenue for the quarter ending June 30, 2025 was $167.702B, a 13.33% increase year over year. The math doesn’t math.

CEO Andy Jassy told employees that AI automation is making roles obsolete. But when we look at the actual numbers, we see something different. We see a story about class power and who gets to claim the rewards of productivity gains.

The Numbers Tell a Different Story

Let’s be clear about what the financial data actually shows. Amazon’s gross profit margin jumped from 39.57% in 2020 to 48.85% in 2024. The operating profit margin rose from 5.93% in 2020 to 10.75% in 2024. These are not the numbers of a company in crisis. These are not the numbers of a company forced to make painful cuts to survive.

CEO Andy Jassy’s total compensation reached $40.1 million in 2024, a 37% increase from his 2023 earnings of $29.2 million. Meanwhile, the median global Amazon employee made $37,181 in 2024. Amazon reported that Jassy’s pay ratio compared to the median employee was 43:1.

And the company is not pulling back. Amazon plans to spend well over $100 billion on capital expenditures in 2025, with the vast majority going toward AI infrastructure for AWS. This represents a significant increase from the $83 billion spent in 2024.

These numbers paint a clear picture. This is not cost cutting. This is profit maximization.

Understanding Surplus Value Extraction

To understand what is happening at Amazon, we need to talk about surplus value. This is the cornerstone of Marxist economic analysis.

Workers create value through their labor. They produce more value in a day than what they receive in wages. The difference between what workers produce and what they are paid is surplus value. Under capitalism, this surplus value is claimed by capital owners as profit.

The 30,000 workers Amazon is laying off were producing value. Now that value will either be absorbed by remaining workers who must do more work, or it will be replaced by AI systems. Either way, the surplus value extraction intensifies. The workers who remain will be squeezed harder. The technology will concentrate wealth among those who own it.

Look at the profit margin increases again. Amazon’s gross profit margin rose nearly 10 percentage points in just four years. This means more value is being extracted per dollar of labor cost. This is not efficiency. This is intensified exploitation. The company is extracting more surplus value from each worker, and now they are using AI to extract even more by eliminating workers entirely.

The CEO makes over a thousand times what the median worker earns. This is not because he works a thousand times harder. It is because he represents the interests of capital. His job is to maximize surplus value extraction. And by that measure, he is succeeding brilliantly.

The AI Narrative as Ideological Cover

Amazon frames these layoffs as technological inevitability. AI makes certain jobs obsolete, they say. This is progress, they say. Workers must adapt.

But this narrative obscures a fundamental truth. These are not natural events. These are class decisions.

Capital chose to develop AI in a specific way. Capital chose who would own the AI systems. Capital chose how to deploy these systems. Capital chose who would bear the costs of displacement. And capital chose who would reap the rewards.

The “AI made us do it” story naturalizes what are actually choices made by the capitalist class. It makes automation seem like a force of nature rather than a tool of class power. It positions job cuts as responding to technology rather than wielding technology against workers.

This ideological work is crucial. It prevents us from asking the most important questions. Who owns the AI? Who created the data that trained these models? Who decides that productivity gains mean fewer jobs rather than shorter hours for all? Who benefits?

The answer to all these questions is the same: capital.

The Reserve Army of Labor

Marx described how capitalism creates what he called the “reserve army of labor.” This is a pool of unemployed workers who serve a specific function in the capitalist system. They discipline the employed workforce.

The 30,000 workers Amazon is laying off join this reserve army. Their unemployment sends a message to every remaining Amazon worker: you are replaceable. AI will take your job if you demand too much. Accept your wages. Accept your conditions. Or join the unemployed.

This is not an accident. This is a feature of the system. The threat of unemployment, the fear of being replaced by machines, becomes a tool for suppressing wage demands and preventing worker organizing. Workers compete against each other and against machines instead of organizing collectively against capital.

Amazon is one of the most heavily surveilled workplaces in America. Workers are monitored constantly. Productivity targets are relentless. Union organizing has faced fierce resistance. Now add to this the fear of AI replacement. The disciplining function of the reserve army is intensified by the spectacle of mass layoffs blamed on automation.

Capital and Technology: An Old Story

The Luddites have been misunderstood for two centuries. History remembers them as people who hated technology. But the Luddites were not anti-machinery. Many of them were machine experts and welcomed new equipment that made their work easier.

What they opposed was a choice made by factory owners in the early 19th century. Instead of using machines to support expert workers, owners introduced industrial machinery that could make textiles faster and more cheaply using lower-skilled and lower-waged workers, often children. The cloth produced was lower quality, but it was so cheap to churn out that factory owners still turned a profit.

The Luddites were fighting about who would benefit from technological progress. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. They understood that technology itself was not the problem. The problem was who controlled it and who profited from it.

The British government deployed 12,000 troops to suppress the Luddite movement. Machine breaking became a capital offense. The state chose sides in the class conflict. It chose capital.

The parallels to today are striking. We face the same questions the Luddites faced. Who will control AI? Who will benefit from the productivity gains? Will automation mean shared prosperity or concentrated wealth?

Amazon’s layoffs give us the answer that capital has chosen.

The Contradiction at the Heart of Automation

Here is something capital does not want us to understand. There is a fundamental contradiction in replacing workers with AI.

Only living labor creates new value. Machines do not create value. They only transfer their own value to the products they help produce. This is basic Marxist economics. An AI system is like any other machine. It embodies past labor (the workers who built it, the workers who created the training data, the workers who maintain it). But it does not create new surplus value.

Capital invests heavily in AI to reduce dependence on labor. Amazon plans to spend over $100 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025. Microsoft, Google, and Meta are making similar massive investments. They are shifting from variable capital (wages paid to workers) to constant capital (investment in technology).

But this creates a problem for capital. As fewer workers are employed, less new value is created. Profit comes from surplus value, which comes from exploiting living labor. Replace the workers with machines, and where does the profit come from?

This is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. As the organic composition of capital increases (more machines, fewer workers), the rate of profit faces downward pressure. In the short term, individual capitalists like Amazon can boost profits by cutting labor costs. But in the long term, the system faces a crisis.

Who will buy Amazon’s products if workers are unemployed? Who will create the value that becomes profit if AI replaces human labor? These contradictions are built into the system.

AI and the Intensification of Exploitation

We are already seeing how AI intensifies exploitation in multiple ways.

First, AI enables more thorough surveillance of workers. Amazon already tracks warehouse workers’ every movement. AI will make this monitoring more sophisticated and more oppressive. Every second of downtime, every moment of rest, every inefficiency can be identified and eliminated.

Second, AI enables speedup. Workers can be pushed harder because the system can calculate exactly how much more work they can extract before a worker breaks down. The algorithm does not care about human limits. It only cares about maximizing output.

Third, AI deskills work. Just as the machines of the early industrial revolution allowed factory owners to replace skilled artisans with unskilled workers who could be paid less, AI allows companies to replace specialized knowledge workers with lower-paid workers who simply follow algorithmic instructions.

Fourth, AI undermines collective bargaining. When workers organize to demand better conditions, capital can threaten to automate their jobs. The credibility of this threat depends on making examples like Amazon’s 30,000 layoffs visible.

Each of these intensifies the extraction of surplus value. Each makes workers more precarious and capital more powerful.

The Hidden Labor Behind AI

The AI narrative ignores another form of exploitation. AI systems do not spring fully formed from Silicon Valley. They are built on massive amounts of human labor.

Data labelers in Kenya, the Philippines, Venezuela, and India label training data for pennies per task. Content moderators traumatize themselves screening horrific content to make AI outputs palatable. Workers create the knowledge that AI systems encode, often without any compensation or recognition.

Technology companies use AI as a means of trying to drive down wages and worsen conditions so that the entrepreneurial class can make more money. The workers who build and train AI systems are often the most exploited of all. Their labor makes AI possible, but they receive almost none of the value they create.

This is global surplus value extraction. Companies like Amazon benefit from depressed wages in the Global South. They extract maximum surplus value by outsourcing the dirtiest parts of AI development to the most vulnerable workers.

Who Decides How Technology Is Used?

The fundamental question is not whether AI can do certain jobs. The question is who benefits when it does.

Technology is not neutral. It does not fall from the sky. It is developed by people, funded by capital, deployed in workplaces for specific purposes, and the benefits are distributed according to existing power relationships.

Amazon could use AI to reduce working hours while maintaining pay. The company could share productivity gains with workers. It could retrain displaced workers for new roles. It could give workers a say in how automation is implemented.

Instead, Amazon uses AI to maximize profit by eliminating jobs. The company invests $100 billion in AI infrastructure while paying median workers $37,181 per year. The CEO gets a 37% raise while 30,000 workers lose their jobs.

These are choices. These are expressions of class power.

Under capitalism, workers have no claim to the means of production. They have no ownership stake in the AI systems that replace them. They have no say in how technology is deployed. They can only sell their labor power or starve. And when capital no longer wants to buy their labor power, they join the reserve army of the unemployed.

What Is to Be Done?

Recognizing that AI-driven layoffs are expressions of class power rather than technological inevitability points toward responses.

First, workers must organize collectively. Individual workers cannot negotiate with capital on equal terms. But organized labor can resist the worst excesses of automation and demand a share of productivity gains. The answer to “AI will replace you” must be “Then you must negotiate with all of us.”

Second, we must fight for social programs that break the link between employment and survival. Universal healthcare, robust unemployment insurance, housing as a right, and universal basic income would reduce capital’s ability to use the threat of joblessness as a disciplining mechanism.

Third, we must question who owns AI systems and the data they are trained on. Workers create that data. Workers should have a claim to it. The models should not be private property used to extract maximum profit. They should be social resources used for social benefit.

Fourth, we must demand transparency in how AI systems are deployed. Workers have a right to know when they are being monitored, evaluated, or replaced by algorithms. Secret algorithms that control working conditions must be opened to scrutiny and challenge.

Fifth, we must recognize that the problem is not AI itself. The problem is capitalism. As long as the means of production are privately owned and operated for profit, technology will be used to intensify exploitation. The solution is not to destroy machines. The solution is to change who controls them and who benefits from them.

Conclusion: The Choice Before Us

Amazon’s 30,000 layoffs, blamed on AI, reveal the fundamental dynamics of capitalism in the age of automation. These are not job losses forced by technology. They are job losses chosen by capital to maximize surplus value extraction.

The gross profit margins soar. The CEO compensation jumps 37%. The company plans $100 billion in AI investments. Meanwhile, workers are discarded and the median wage stays at $37,181.

This is class conflict. This is capital using its power to reshape the economy in its own interest. This is capital using technology as a weapon against labor.

The Luddites understood that fights over technology are always fights over power and distribution. We must understand this too. We must ask not whether AI can replace workers, but who benefits when it does. We must ask not how to adapt to automation, but how to ensure that the gains from automation are shared.

The choice is not between progress and stagnation. The choice is between a future where technology serves capital and a future where technology serves humanity. That choice will be determined by class struggle, not by algorithms.

The contradiction remains. Capital claims the productivity gains. Workers bear the costs. And the system that produces this outcome presents it as inevitable, natural, efficient, and even progressive.

It is none of those things. It is exploitation. And it does not have to be this way.

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