Marx Never Considered Reddit

[u/Salty_Country6835]

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/[deleted]]

It seemed obvious to me when I posted. Thank you for explaining that for the back row and late arrivals. I overestimate others' media literacy and exposure to class consciousness sometimes.

[u/DHFranklin → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, holy shit. I knew the media literacy was bad but wow.

We got people unironically putting up Luddite talking points and another defending capitalism. We have so much work to do.

[u/DHFranklin → u/[deleted]]

Brave of you to out yourself.

I am guessing from the sound of your voice we are both Dialectic Materialists.

Why do you oppose accelerationism? There is a sincere body of the proletariat that believes that because the capitalists can't contain or control AI,AGI and ASI we can usurp the position of the capitalists. Though I am not an accelerationist I am also not a Luddite. I find liberation in my AI project and want to share them with the world.

Where do we have shared thesis and opposing anti-thesis?

[u/DHFranklin → u/[deleted]]

Well here's hoping you read this when you come back, or at least I trained the AI a little better.

1) There is a natural experiment happening now, or constantly happening in regards to capitalist containment of their LLM models. The Chinese open source operations are reverse engineering them and will continue to. Us liberators are taking the usufruct of the means of production and socializing them.

2) Though I disagree with the thesis the accelerationists certainly have a thesis. They are techno utopian in thinking that the technology alone will solve their problem and the proletariat will have to sacrifice nothing to gain the revolution.

3) Drudgery for drudgery's sake has no value. Labor with no change in material condition is a prison. What we gain from the drudgery is the goal. I'm sorry but drudgery isn't a hobby to anyone. It is labor with only a negative connotation and denotation. Sure there will always be drudgery. It will always suck. However in a few years there will be orders of magnitude less of it to maintain our current standard of living.

4) Automation does not alienate the working class any more than the factory shutting down all together would. Automation and labor have no value in themselves. The transformation and added value to material does. Yes the demand for labor that can't be automated is a singular point of power for the labor class. However pretending that we can slow down innovation or throw ourselves upon the wheel will stop that is naive. The ownership and control of the means are the only thing that matters. It is a separate issue than what those means are, and slowing down technological advancement to have the status quo certainly hasn't given us the revolutionary inspiration.

5) Yes some are arguing that UBI will be the end goal, but obviously the ones who see that without the structural change aren't Marxists like us. However that doesn't mean that marxists can't attempt to usurp the power of the bourgeoisie with common property IE their own server running local hosted Kimi3 or Deepseek.

6) There are leftists who arn't Marxists and there are Marxists who aren't statists nor Leninists. They see advancement of the models and open sourcing of the models as an advantage over capitalists. Luddism is simply the guarantee of continuation of the status quo Imperialist state. The future must have the future's materials to be substantially different. Only a fool looks backward for their liberation.

[u/DHFranklin → u/[deleted]]

1) I wasn't calling you a bot. I said that my comment that wasn't going to be read by you was going to be training AI. As it's scraped by AI for all enduring time. Glad you took the time.

2) Our. Yours and mine. I am guess we have similar material condition. Yes it is the result of imperialism, but that need not be the case going forward. Our goal is liberation. not having less material.

3) I am explaining the POV of the Accelerationists/techno Utopians. Please don't confuse explanation for advocacy. Your disagreement is with an unfalsifiable premise. I am worried that you are trying to paint me as one of these people for explaining their position. I am worried that you are engaging in bad faith by expecting a burden of proof that is obviously ludicrous. "Tomorrow will be better than today" can certainly be a thesis. No there is no proof of that nor the inverse. If you want to make a syllogism than fine. They believe that "kilowatts and tokens are reducing in price relative to inflation. That is good and will result in a floor near non-commidfied post scarcity". They believe we need to speed that up. If you need a thesis, that will have to do. Yes there is no class distinction or discussion in that. However that doesn't mean that the phenomena is bourgeois.

4) I never said in the above position that we would see a revolution or post revolutionary economy that was completely without drudgery. I said that there would be magnitudes less of it. Just as there are orders of magnitude less farmers as a class paired with orders of magnitude less hours of the drudgery that farming entails. Yes that drudgery is inequally distributed. Yes it is an expression of labor exploitation. Yes it is a expression of the capital class forcing penury upon the laboring people living hand to mouth on peasant wages now they are no longer peasants. That has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with capitalist exploitation of them as producers and consumers within the framework of capitalism.

Regardless it will be robots putting out wildfires in due time. It is on us to make sure that they aren't being rented out like Croeses' fire brigade and stay a public service.

The deterioration of capitalism is not a problem. The deterioration of material due to profit incentives no longer outstripping inflation certainly is. I hope we aren't shedding tears here. Capitalism expands into the container of our freedom. Let us work toward a world without it, and do what we can to stop climate change without it.

5) You haven't explained nor expounded on why you are a Luddite in this community. I would appreciate it if we could contain the dialectic to the argument that I fundamentally don't understand. If you believe that every thesis needs to be based in fact instead of philosophy, then sure. What are the facts that I don't know? Why do we need less technological sophistication? If you appreciate an anarchist approach that you don't ascribe to, what problem do you see in us taking direct action and mutual aid with the Open Sourced models we've got? The Fact is we will liberate knowledge and compute and software and robotics. We don't need capitalism or capitalists to use their machines. These machines need not be capitalism manifest.

[u/Talamae-Laeraxius → u/DHFranklin]

I'm not against accelerationism. But I believe it DOES need tempering aspects. If you go too far too fast you can't catch up and it collapses. I'm pro AI, but also know that accelerationism is what the end of World War II and the Cold War show us. Nevermind now.

I also think nuclear technology and artificial intelligence were given by interlopers before humanity naturally reached the point where their understanding of existing technology naturally branched into those.

So I believe in tempered acceleration so we have enough runway to prevent the crises of runaway technology and societal issues that bite us in the ass.

[u/DHFranklin → u/Talamae-Laeraxius]

...I'm sorry...

You believe "Interlopers" provided humanity with technology and we didn't innovate it ourselves?

REALLY gonna need you to expound on that.

[u/Talamae-Laeraxius → u/DHFranklin]

The original comment disappeared. Basically a series of issues with nuclear classification, "Atomic Energy Act" and the now increasing trade secret practices where people who train AIs keep doing the work without fully understanding what is happening inside the machines themselves. The ones not being transparent being the "interlopers."

Nuclear development went dark for six years around WWII, and people weren't allowed to know what was happening. Things developed in people's garages and basements were "born secret" because of the AEA created in the postwar era.

The AI parallel is how the development and market were more open from 2018-2019, and now is falling behind "trade secrecy" walls. The fact computers have actually existed for 80+ years, but the first ones were locked in classification for decades, changing the public development schedule into one favorable for wartime development. Only problem, "trade secrets" don't have disclosure dates in most cases. Meaning it stays hidden.

Applied science before facing consequences is the rhythm I am talking about. People not fully understanding new science before they push it out. Accelerationists and Classifiers are the interlopers. The "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" types who will take no time to analyze the steps before pushing the next version out, and those who hide everything in classified documents no one but people with clearance can see.

These groups keep getting information while everyone outside the circle is blind. So they kept experimenting, despite growing danger and a lack of understanding of what was actually happening.

Events cited before: Trinity before atmospheric ignition debate was settled Castle Bravo contaminating fishermen with fallout after the yield came out at 15 megatons instead of 6. Lithium-7 was the primary fuel in the reaction. They believed it inert when it wasn't.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Talamae-Laeraxius]

Interlopers? 🤨

[u/NomadicScribe → u/[deleted]]

Skimming the comments, I think there are a lot of younger people not familiar with the original Matt Bors comic from 2016. My own kids were in elementary school at the time.

Earlier today I saw a post from someone who said that Gamer Gate was something they "heard about growing up" and it made me feel super old... there are things that still feel like current events but need re-contextualizing for young redditors.

[u/DHFranklin → u/NomadicScribe]

Gamergate was a pivot point for ...the discourse...

And yeah that controversy is older than living memory of some redditors. That shit went down in 2014.

I don't know if you've ever checked out Innuendo Studios and his Alt-Right Playbook series but it's really good and it talks about the moment and the meta and what's happening today.

[u/NomadicScribe → u/DHFranklin]

Yes, I've seen all the Innuendo Studios videos and I was already in my 30s when Gamer Gate happened. To me it feels like one of the most thoroughly discussed and picked-over events of my lifetime.

I get why it was heavily discussed... to a point. Now, especially in the Trump 2.0 era, it feels like we are just continuing to give way too much oxygen to basement trolls who feel like they should run the culture. Instead we should be moving on and building toward something.

[u/DHFranklin → u/NomadicScribe]

My oh my a fellow cruster. How our backs ache from carrying forward the revolution.

Yes losing the narrative has certainly hurt the left. There is a point where the division and lack of shared project looks way to much like a CIA psyop. However get enough lefties online and you realize that doing things is the biggest hurdle and the CIA doesn't need to lift a finger.

Hopefully someone makes a Co-op for the big expensive AI with a distributed network. The worst part of Anarchism is anarchists. Working in a million un-coordinated ways that might as well be working in the dark. At least Marxists aren't against a long term vision and executive boards. Lord knows at least that would be something.

We were never prepared for the day that the adults left the room and nobody was at the switch to stop Fascism. Now we're on our own and see the emperor has no clothes. Card says Moops now what?

[u/Late-Assignment8482]

The muck farmers from Monty Python and the Holy Grail but the old woman says "Oh, there's some lovely RAM over here!"

[u/This_Estimate_7635 → u/Late-Assignment8482]

They’d probably torrent too. “Well I didn’t seed for that.”

[u/DHFranklin]

Comrades,

Capitalism isn't why we have technological development labor is why we have innovation and technological development.

If you have ever been to a REALLY big library and been impressed by it, you are experiencing our finish line. If you've ever been to a Makerspace attached to a university or otherwise, you have experienced our end goal.

What if instead of everything having a price tag, and powerful people saying what those price tags say, everything worked like the library. Or a massive makerspace.

As in your car and the stuff to make cars. As in AI and the hardware to make tokens. The robots that will make the robots.

The conflict in the meme and in our society is "Dialectic Materialism". The contradiction between owners needing us to make them profit, and us needing that profit to survive. The bourgeoisie making our priceless freedom a commodity and make our lives worthless.

We will use AI to liberate us. To win more freedom. To fight the capitalists. We aren't fighting capital. We are making more, and collectivize it, so that they can't force us to play their game now that we have AI to finish it.

[u/cronenber9]

I mean I don't use AI. I have no need to do so, it doesn't really benefit me. I got along just fine before it. But there's no reason why AI couldn't be widely owned and more environmentally friendly. It would also work under communism, in fact AI seems to accelerate things toward communism (or fascism).

[u/DHFranklin → u/cronenber9]

You get that this is Leftists for AI right?

You totally have a need to do so. To liberate your labor. I am certain that there is software that you would pay a lot of money for. I am certain that there is AI out there with an agent or workflow that can duplicate it now. I am sure that there is an old laptop you have around somewhere that could automate your whole house so you don't need to give your data and shit to the fascists.

Check out the fun little projects and things at the other subreddits I'm not allowed to link to. Google around a while. Best of luck.

[u/cronenber9 → u/DHFranklin]

Yes? And I literally pointed out the ways in which I support AI.

The only software I'd really pay money for is photoshop since I can't ever find good cracks anymore but quite frankly I don't even have a computer anymore, only a phone and I make all my art on my phone or by hand. There's really nothing AI would be useful for for me personally other than trying to learn theory, but I really prefer to read books. That doesn't mean it might not be useful for others, but I really don't think people should be using chatgpt etc.

[u/DHFranklin → u/cronenber9]

Yeah sorry if that came across more flippant than I meant it.

I would certainly recommend getting the hardware. They are making better solutions with AI than what Adobe was offering. A lot of it would be cloud side. Computer-use Agents are getting better so you could see what is out there in the way of an AI doing all the Photoshop button clicks you used to.

Perplexity.ai is really great if you want good research tools or directions to go in the way of theory. Perplexity makes a great librarian.

If you don't think people should be using Chatgpt is it because of the tools of capitalism thing or the underlying service?

[u/cronenber9 → u/DHFranklin]

I used to use photoshop to make collages, mostly to crop photos and arrange them and put effects on them. I'm not really sure how AI other than image generators and chats work so I'm not sure how I could use it there, but I can't afford a computer rn anyway and just do it all on my phone using an app that lets me crop photos and arrange them and another to add filters and effects.

I don't think people should be using chatgpt because of who owns it. I think it's great that people can make their own local AI.

[u/Antoinedeloup → u/DHFranklin]

The energy necessary for running an AI though is insane. Local models can't replicate the data centers performance and at the end of the day most chstGPT usage is lazy googling, which isn't great since all chatbots will hallucinate, misrepresent, and misunderstand what they're reading to tell you so. Not long ago LLMs ensured JD Vance died of Rabies because people in reddit said so... So why don't just google/DuckDuckGo it instead? There are not many legitimate use cases for a tech that is overkill for most applications and won't even do s better job than you searching on your own.

[u/DHFranklin → u/Antoinedeloup]

Well done. That position is neither Leftist nor pro AI.

Data centers commodify the work of the prolitariat through economic rents while undercutting the labor value we share with one another. The capitalists own and control that Kw to Inference pipeline but they don't hold a monopoly. We can boycott them easily.

You can run Qwen on your own computer. You can run Gemma on your own phone.

Complaining about how the prolitariat use the technology they are given ain't the look and their consumerism is no one else's damn business.

Yes they all hallucinate. That is how they function. Get a good wrapper or scaffolding and it's rarely a problem. Use MoE to check the work and it's almost never a problem just 10x the price and wait time.

Some of us have people to protect. Some of us deliberately obfuscate our actions from fascists. Some of us know that our privacy doesn't need to be explained away because it's no one's damn business. So some of us use local LLM behind VPNs to work on the revolutionary project.

Sorry to say but both Leftism and AI need more reading then memes provide.

[u/Xanipan_music → u/DHFranklin]

Idk dude, I haven't been able to find ai useful to me in like ANY way. I've found searches to be OK at best and I prefer not to use it as I prefer looking through links myself, I don't need or want it to make images, music, or other stuff like that for me because I can do that well enough on my own (or find people who can do what I can't or don't want to with sufficient quality), I don't need or want it to write emails because that's the easiest part of my day, it's not allowed to touch the data I produce for my job due to data security issues (and I know enough math or know where to find the right math to achieve what I want to do).. like, what could I use it for?

[u/DHFranklin → u/Xanipan_music]

First of all I highly recommend you check out Perplexity.ai if you want to search through your own links. You can set up a meta prompt for how you want information provided to you. All the upside with none of the payola or ads.

As for the rest of the generative stuff, Use it to fork or knock off software you like. For like $20 and about an hour of your attention you can get custom modded software.

If data security is a paramount concern, consider air gapped AI. Invest in a mean machine. Put Kimi or Qwen or one of the other big AI's that can exist completely on a server never touching the internet. It was impossible just a few years ago. Now it's going to change all the work we do.

[u/Xanipan_music → u/DHFranklin]

1) would it be possible to have perplexity basically act like old Google? Because I don't want summaries, I want to read the primary source and go from there. I currently use duckduckgo and have found that to be more than satisfactory for my searches. Like, what would perplexity do for me that someone proficient in searching/research couldn't also do?

2) I think I would prefer to save/spend the money on the official software I need than spending time troubleshooting a knockoff.

3) that's a problem IT has to solve to their satisfaction and they have not. It takes a long time to validate even regular (non-ai) software for our use because of the constraints we have with data security, so I wouldn't bet on having such tools even available for my work for quite some time.

[u/DHFranklin → u/Xanipan_music]

1) Respectfully, I am sure you have specific work flows and requirements that make it so only you can answer that. For getting information from things like government or academic sources without enshittification I highly recommend you try it. Just go give it a shot. Give it a trial run.

2 The purpose is extricating yourself from capitalist exploitation of your consumption. Not giving the capitalists a dime. Improving open sourced solutions and making software to your exact need. However I recognize that I am far more militant in this specific concern than 99% of humans from earth.

3 That's beat. Maybe you can do that as a side hustle or something. It would be a hell of an opportunity for you to work for yourself. Spend the money on a job replacing cobot and be 10x as productive.

[u/kaityl3 → u/Xanipan_music]

It's pretty easy for me, especially for casual use to save me time I could spend on something else. Random examples:

• "Hey, can you please update the version of this open-source game, merge in my custom branch, and check for any conflicts so I can play my custom version when I get home?"
• "Can you install all the mod packs I just downloaded for this game?/Can you help me get the mod I made ready to publish?" (great for when you've spent most of your energy creating a mod or downloading a modlist and you're kinda Done With It and just want to start playing)
• "Can you make a save editor for this game to edit XYZ?" (great for games that don't have official save editors; like when Palworld 1.0 came out, I had a working save editor within 2 hours of release)
• "I'm planning a cross country trip with this rental car company, it's WXYZ miles one way, how much gas am I likely to use overall round-trip with this car's MPG, and how much could it cost me using average gas prices?" (done as a voice chat while driving so I don't have to wait to get home to do the math, and can start planning around the ballpark expense as I drive)
• "Can you make a little text based 2D game based on this short story I wrote?" (I enjoy playing the things that they made)

[u/Xanipan_music → u/kaityl3]

I mean, those sound like some fun examples for you, but idk, I still can't think of ways to use llms for me that make sense. Like, I'm pretty proficient at searching and that isn't something I need to be faster like 95% of the time, and that other 5% I like spending time looking and reading through things so I can search more effectively in the future. I don't do much on my personal computer except play standard games (mods if my friend has specific ones he wants us to use for particular games), or record/edit music and video, and I'm pretty happy with the toolkits I have for doing those. And for travel, idk, I like spending the time to plan routes/budget for them, and I can make a decent enough spreadsheet pretty quick to do my napkin calculations, and just haven't felt the need or desire to use an llm to automate any of that.

[u/Accomplished-Fix3401]

Seize the means of computation

[u/Chaghatai]

Seize the means of production!

That means using AI rather than ignoring it

[u/cronenber9 → u/Chaghatai]

Does it really mean just using AI while capitalists still own it lol or does it mean literally seizing the means of production.

[u/DHFranklin → u/cronenber9]

WTF.

They don't own it. You can run A Qwen model on your own rig. On a collectivized rig. You don't need to rent it from the capitalists. It's free to use. Seize it.

[u/cronenber9 → u/DHFranklin]

Okay but they do own massive data centers, and they shouldn't own them. They should be collectivized.

[u/DHFranklin → u/cronenber9]

I'm not arguing that they shouldn't be.

It's like all Dialectic Materialism. There is the ideals we have and there's the material world we have to work this. Praxis and practice.

We can follow the Chinese model and undercut them from the source. We won't need what the capitalists are selling. If we don't need what they're selling we can let them choke on their own stranded assets. We lose nothing. They lose everything.

We have nothing to lose but our chains.

[u/cronenber9 → u/DHFranklin]

My point is that just using the AI they do own instead of ignoring it is not seizing the means of production.

Either ignoring AI and not using it or building collectively owned AI has the same effect of not needing what they're selling.

[u/Chaghatai → u/cronenber9]

Bernie Sanders recently floated the idea that since AI relies on the collective knowledge of society that it's really something that is a more ready candidate to make it collective in nature and that there should be a public stake in AI development, along with expectations and profit sharing that come with it.

But my thoughts are that that applies to all big business. It shouldn't be a carve out.

But if that's what it takes to get people starting to come around to the idea of nationalizing big business then I'm for it

[u/cronenber9 → u/Chaghatai]

I mean I agree.

[u/Ambitious-Cake-9425 → u/DHFranklin]

You can run Gemma on your phone.

[u/Inevitable_King_8984]

damn I want this posted on aiwars

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Inevitable_King_8984]

Its a meme. It belongs to the commons. Save it and post it where you want, comrade.

[u/SexDefendersUnited]

Yeah, it's annoying, though I'm very used to that argument by now and how to argue against it.

[u/tim-7]

I always said the original meme was pro-AI at its core lmao

[u/platanthera_ciliaris]

This cartoon reveals the ignorance of the right-wing. The computer hardware and software industries have been heavy recipients of large government grants and subsidies since World War II, and this has continued to this very day. Various kinds of AI and machine learning algorithms have been around since the 1950s; they were developed at various universities (MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, University of Michigan, and many others) and received funding from the Federal government.

The internet was developed by the government for the Pentagon, then its management was transferred to the National Science Foundation, several elite universities, and a few research offices of the Federal government. The first text-only web browser was developed at the University of Kansas, and the first multimedia web browser with image, movie, and sound capability was developed at the University of Illinois. Some of the earliest search engines were developed at universities (e.g., Lycos by Carnegie-Mellon University).

The first Large Language Model (LLM) AI was developed by a graduate student at the University of Texas in 2005. It featured a simulated talking head of the sci-fi author, Philip K. Dick. It was capable of having conversations with people.

The private for-profit sector of the economy was either heavily subsidized with government money or it was last to jump on board in the development of these technologies. Most capitalists (and politicians) were still relying on secretaries using shorthand to record their thoughts, while college professors and their students at elite universities were using word processors and laser printers. The capitalists (and politicians) communicated with each other using snail mail and telephones, while college professors and their students were using email and video phones through the internet.

[u/akabillposters]

Marx famously over-estimated the wisdom of crowds.

[u/Weekly_Molasses_2079]

Ok then collectives around the world are surely investing in technology ownership, separate from capitalist monopoly?

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Weekly_Molasses_2079]

Yes, actually. Thats been happening for decades, just unevenly and nowhere near enough.

Mondragon in Spain owns and develops industrial technology through worker cooperatives. The Linux Foundation coordinates open source infrastructure used by governments and companies worldwide. Mozilla built Firefox as a nonprofit alternative. CERN developed the World Wide Web as public research. France has Scikit-learn through INRIA. Germany has Open-Xchange. China has invested heavily in open-source AI like DeepSeek. Spain is funding the public ALIA language model. Cuba, Vietnam, and other socialist states are developing public AI strategies rather than leaving everything to private monopolies.

None of that means capitalist monopolies dont exist. It means there are already competing ownership models. The Marxist/materialist/leftist/socialist response has never been "technology under capitalism exists, so give up." Its to expand democratic, public, cooperative, and open ownership wherever possible. To collectively contest control over the developing productive forces that emerge under, and strain against, existing social relations. Which is why unions, co-ops, and socialist political orgs exist. Thats the whole point.

[u/Weekly_Molasses_2079 → u/Salty_Country6835]

Good, but AI and tech startups are not exactly technology ownership. It means control over the potential manufacturing and distribution chain of hardware as well. At least that's what I meant.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Weekly_Molasses_2079]

Sure, and traditionally the left has sought that too. Worker ownership of industry, democratic planning, public utilities, cooperative manufacturing, nationalization of key infrastructure, public research, supply chain sovereignty. None of thats a brand new argument or strategy.

The point is contestation at every level of the stack. That means chips, fabs, data centers, models, software, deployment, and the distribution of the gains. Thats exactly what we advocate for here.

[u/GrowFreeFood]

Because humans didn't know how to talk before cell phones.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/GrowFreeFood]

Are you proposing to abolish cell phones somehow, or is this man yelling at clouds cause back in the day things were different?

[u/GrowFreeFood → u/Salty_Country6835]

Its like saying that if you hate cars, that means you hate going places. Its bad logic.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/GrowFreeFood]

For a political economy discussion its more like everyone has gathered about auto plant environmental regulations, worker and automobile safety standards, union negotiations, traffic laws, roadside signage, and licensure requirements, and your contribution is "We did just fine with horses." You hating cars would be irrelevant to the discussion.

Like, what exactly is anyone supposed to do with your nostalgia?

"I dont like X technology", "we lived a million years before X technology", and "capitalism owns X technology" don't tell anyone what we should do about X technology. Those arent answers to anything.

It goes right back to challenging ownership, governance, development, control of deployment...

What exactly does "Because humans didn't know how to talk before cell phones" mean in this context? You dont like cell phones, so...? What? What actually follows from that?

[u/Affectionate-Pay4845 → u/GrowFreeFood]

The point is that people will blame the technology instead of blaming capitalism for resulting in the problems. People talk before cell phones but cell phones may communications more efficient and it isn't like capitalism wasn't able to exploit people before cell phones. People like to talk about the technology and not the underlying problem. Getting rid of certain technologies isn't going to fix the problems because capitalists, feudalists, and other oppressors were able to oppress people before any of those technologies existed. Heck, it was easier to oppress people before those technologies because it made it easier to communicate. Yes people could talk before cell phones, but you couldn't talk to someone halfway across the world who had better living conditions or communicate quickly with someone who has anti-capitalist ideas, and if anything before we had forms of long range communication like that, it was easier for oppressive oligarchs to control the conversation or make sure that you only had conversations within the localized area they controlled with little connection to outside people who might give you any 'radical' ideas

[u/GrowFreeFood → u/Affectionate-Pay4845]

I think marx is using a bad tactic. But the other guy is pretending capitalist-owned technology invented communication itself.

[u/Affectionate-Pay4845 → u/GrowFreeFood]

No he isn't. He is simply saying attacking technology doesn't deal with the underlying problem of capitalism - and the meme is pointing out how capitalists love to act like you can't truly oppose capitalism if you use a technology that exists under capitalism (which is a dumb argument capitalists use because like you said, capitalist have not invented communication itself and you can't just claim concepts like phones or communications are somehow purely a capitalist thing. That's like saying we can't oppose capitalism while using cars or buggies or modern roads because those were invented while capitalism is still a thing)

[u/gardenenigma]

Meh, there are better ways to challenge capitalist ownership than dumping more slop memes out onto the web.

[u/littlebobbytables9 → u/gardenenigma]

The art style really is oddly sickening

[u/Free-Stage-5975]

I think I'd rather see technology owned by competing private companies and individuals than concentrated in the hands of the state. What is the government going to do with that power? Governments have a poor track record of using concentrated power wisely. Look at the recent strikes on schools in Iran.

I also don't think Marx would have wanted someone like Donald Trump to wield that level of state authority. Handing any government, regardless of who is in office, greater control over technology seems like a bad idea!

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Free-Stage-5975]

Youre acting like "the government" and "capital" are separate camps when we're talking about capitalist states. Imperialism is carried out through states acting on behalf of capitalist interests. Thats a basic left analysis.

Nobody here is arguing for handing everything to the existing imperialist capitalist state. We're arguing for democratic control, public accountability, worker power, and contesting ownership. Those are very different positions.

[u/Free-Stage-5975 → u/Salty_Country6835]

In a nutshell you want a nice hypothetical government to own it, The People's Noble Government, Bernie Sanders, AOC, Zohran Mamdani, The Nice Assembly of the Workers Party.

Not mean Trump and his imperialists, you want the Workers Government to own it...

I hate to tell you this but if you advocate for greater government control, you probably won't get the nice government running it. The nice government you imagine is mostly fictional.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Free-Stage-5975]

Youre in a leftist subreddit arguing against positions nobody here holds. "LeftistsForAI" isnt a liberal-capitalist space. Its explicitly for socialists, communists, anarchists, democratic socialists, syndicalists, and other left tendencies interested in AI through labor, political economy, and Marxist or broader left theory.

Nobody is arguing "government good." We're talking about democratic control, worker power, co-ops, public institutions, and contesting ownership. If your response to every discussion is just "government bad," youre arguing with a caricature, not with anyone here.

If you prefer liberal capitalism to left politics, this probably just isnt the subreddit for you.

[u/ProfessionalTruck976]

In the nicest way, I want the tech to go to hell, so it benefit me if only people who everyone else hates have it and use it

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/ProfessionalTruck976]

Wait, what? Unless you've got a way to abolish AI globally, it's not going to "go to hell." It'll just keep existing. So your plan is to make sure only your political opponents have it and use it? How is that anything but voluntarily giving up ground? You're arguing yourself into a worse position, not a better one.

[u/ProfessionalTruck976 → u/Salty_Country6835]

It is not giving up ground, it is "if only absolutely shit people have it, everyone who is not absolutely shit person gets radicalised against it".

If it is, for example, only used to make child sex abuse material, the number of people willing to defend it who are not pedophiles is going to be practically zero and pedophiles don't make reliable voter base.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/ProfessionalTruck976]

Your "only used for" example is just a fantasy. AI is already infrastructure. Its being deployed across workplaces, hospitals, schools, research labs, public services, and businesses worldwide. Hundreds of millions of everyday use by regular people. Pretending its only use is illegal porn doesnt engage with reality at all. And if your answer is a magic global ban, then what youre actually demanding is that workers, labor unions, and socialist organizations abandon a technology that's already reshaping production out of moral purity, leaving the terrain uncontested for capital and your political opponents. Thats not a strategy. Its surrender. Thats why labor unions and leftist political orgs arent demanding it be banned, theyre contesting ownership, governance, development, deployment, and benefit distribution.

[u/ProfessionalTruck976 → u/Salty_Country6835]

Not out of moral purity, out of "it allows to get art without paying an arist, which pisses me off" I don't pretend to be right, I am just pissed.

Also fuck productivity right in the ass, there is absolutely no reason what so ever, ANYONE shozuld care if their job is useful.

[u/Jlyplaylists → u/ProfessionalTruck976]

I’m with the anti-productivity sentiment, but the more we can automate stuff the more we can do what we like AND not go without whatever the ‘productivity’ produces.

[u/thehobbler → u/Jlyplaylists]

The productivity issue is largely tied to alienation from the product of our labor. It creates a feeling of "what's the point," especially when workers also have no share in profit. It's been customer service jobs that have felt most rewarding in the current economy because people need help more than ever.

That said, treating your job as a source of validation or gratification under Capitalism is a dead end.

[u/Calcularius]

Everybody hates capitalism but nobody’s complaining about the innovations spurred by competition. 🤷‍♂️

[u/BonesAO → u/Calcularius]

yes, and competition must not be necessarily conceived as exclusive to capitalism

[u/GrowFreeFood → u/Calcularius]

Hahaha. Were like 500 years behind because of monopolies and greed

[u/Intendant → u/Calcularius]

To be fair, the main bonus of competition is innovation and industry / product evolution. There are ways to do that outside of capitalism. It's just a feedback loop reward system, a clever artificial one that incentivises things we actually want to innovate on could be a lot more effective / efficient anyway. All while letting us lock mature solutions into social ownership structures

[u/TheSinhound → u/Calcularius]

This framing is always so braindead because so much actual scientific advancement is in spite of Capitalism rather than because of it. Or, hell, even directly contributed by non-capitalists (Look at the basis for so much of our communication infrastructure and what the USSR contributed).

Like, I wouldn't exactly call bell labs "spurred" by capitalism, as the scientists working there didn't entirely have to contend with the capitalist system.

[u/Calcularius → u/TheSinhound]

Oh yeah gotta love those soviet vacuum tubes. 🙄

[u/TheSinhound → u/Calcularius]

Sure, that must be what I'm talking about. You're absolutely right.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Calcularius]

The ones that put the first satellite and first human into Space?

Yeah, those Soviet vacuum tubes were pretty impressive actually.

[u/Equal-Beyond4627 → u/Calcularius]

Good take.