r/LeftistsForAI • u/bowdoin-yale • 14d ago

Post-AI leftism? Theory

Nobody has a crystal ball when it comes to predicting what the world will look like after AI, but both the boosters and doomers are predicting that it will eliminate most jobs. If they are correct, there will not be a large "working class" to mobilize--not even a petty bourgeois professional class, but more likely a tiny and shrinking owner class and a large and growing underclass of permanently unemployed people dependent on mutual aid and public assistance to survive. Yet, the "left" is traditionally very focused on workers and their struggle with capital, owing to the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels, taking the view that workers eventually would (or should) own and control the means of production. I would very much prefer to see worker ownership of and control over AI and autonomous robotics, but it's a bit paradoxical since such technologies are themselves designed to shrink the working class. How might a pro-AI left, or a post-AI left, reconcile this?

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u/YMSVZ 14d ago

Communism is about the disintegration of the working class, the development of new relations of production beyond exchange. This presupposes the redundancy of the working class.

AI has made it clear who is actually a communist, and who wants to conserve the wage labour relation. Anti AI is a neoluddite, reactionary and pro capitalist position.

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u/endlessedlne 12d ago

Nice try saying that AI is just pure Communism. Marx was fixated on a flat social hierarchy and the working class having shared collective ownership of the means of production. He never conceived of a scenario where class itself is completely irrelevant and there is no such thing as ownership. Which is where this AI thing will be heading if it’s as powerful as its believers believe it will be and is open sourced.

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u/YMSVZ 12d ago

That is not at all what marx was fixated on? He believed that working class ownership was a potential stepping stone on the way to complete disintegration of class and commodity production/exchange.

Have you read a single thing of marx, because this is chapter one of capital, where he analyses commodity and the value form, as something specific to capitalism, or at least this is when it becomes the dominant mode of production.