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Karl Marx on AI (europe.pub)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/quotes@lemmygrad.ml
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/50835222

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#S5

Photo from https://mystorypie.com/learn/en/biography/karl-marx/

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[–] 24 points 2 months ago (12 children)

Western leftists continuously struggle with the need to distance themselves from the barbaric society they grew up in and too often get tripped up in "distance as abstention" rather than "distance as revolution". The "master's tools" are, by this mindset, evil because the master uses them, rather than because of how the master uses them. So we get a sort of symbolic, rather than material, resistance. Waging resistance largely in symbolism, in "discourse" removed from praxis; praxis is dirty, flawed, with warts and all. And every time the warts show, it is only used as further evidence that the barbarism can only be resisted in the realm of symbolism, that anything too close to the dirt will have a corrupting influence and replace one barbarian with another. A paradigm that hinges, in part, on the imperialist-pedaled lies that AES states were and are an abject failure, that they are corrupted rather than flawed, lost rather than transitioning, and that better is only possible through a sort of ideological purification in the "marketplace of ideas".

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  • [–] 15 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    A+ post. There are hundreds of examples of this, but I'm reminded of the anarchist blanket rejection of cops, intelligence services, armies, borders, structured organization... no, proletarian states absolutely need all of these things to survive, but the way they function in a communist society is completely different, because they serve workers, and not capital.

    People who grew up in capitalist countries have never seen how these things can manifest themselves in positive and healthy ways, so they ignorantly denounce their communist equivalents.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago

    Well said. I remember getting caught up some in the ACAB type stuff myself in my initial transition to lefty politics. And although I'd probably still agree with it in the context of the US and the way its system operates / has operated, it's not universally applicable and a system that was going to try to replace the US in the region would need something like cops still (but actually serving the workers, like you say).

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago (7 children)

    They also have no solution to the supposed problems, just "don't use it" and crybullying people who disagree with you into agreeing. I guess I should just ignore what China is doing with it and pretend like Hollywood sci-fi movies were documentaries.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    There definitely appears to be a kind of tunnel-visioning that can go into it. Like there are valid criticisms of the way the west approaches AI and how that approach embodies, or even accelerates, capitalist tendencies. But ecological destruction didn't start with AI, that has been going on for decades at least. Replacing workers via automation didn't start with AI, that has been going on for... what, centuries?

    If AI can be a wakeup call for some people, that helps them reach class consciousness, then great. But if they stop at "AI bad, boycott it, shame, shame, shame" and don't go beyond that, it's not really helping the working class.

    In the storied history of the exploiting classes and their abuses and barbarism, AI's abuses are tame, honestly. If people had the same energy for anti-imperialism as they do for anti-AI, maybe liberation would be moving faster in the imperial core. But AI comes more directly for them in a way that imperialism doesn't. For the people living under the shadow of empire, I don't see the same kind of kneejerk response. Like Explosive Media that I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the Iranian group doing those anti-imperialist AI Lego videos. They are in an existential war for survival and they are taking advantage of the tools available to them. They know there's no self-actualization for them within the imperial framework, no chance of "getting theirs" and living a quiet, safe white picket fence life. AI coming for jobs is nothing next to the terror of imperial bombs and the prospect of one's homeland being turned into a graveyard just cause the empire is mad that a people won't kneel.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago (3 children)

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (2 children)

    tbf, probably shouldn't train in certain methods of warfare the yankee reich possesses
    unless we're going to declare a protracted people's war on ten year old girls of course

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    The method is sound though: missiles and drones. It's the target that matters, the same method used by Iran to bomb US bases and troops hiding in hotels is cool. In context: we should use AI to produce propaganda aimed against imperialist, not their victims.

    Also the quote comes from "Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder" so it's aimed exactly correctly even after over a century :D

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago*

    i was referring to the method of warfare being terrorism, which the am*rican empire is good at, with the means being missiles and drones
    it was mostly a joke about the quote, but i guess it didn't land

    my opinion on LLMs is that they're a tool like any other

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Well said. It's difficult to even have a neutral opinion on AI without feeling like a pariah these days. I guess that's just a microcosm of the political situation in Amerika where everything feels like tribalism.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago

    Yeah, the fracturing is a screwy thing. To an extent, it's something the exploiting classes manufactured and benefited from (along racial lines, gendered lines, and more). But by this point, it seems like it's something of a runaway monster that has taken on a life of its own, probably in large part due to the empire being in decline, along with the vilification of an alternative (though I have some hope in the numbers sympathetic to socialism and communism, whether or not they all fully understand what it is).

    It's like there's something of a "whose podcast do you listen to" thing now (figuratively speaking and sometimes, literally) where things can be fractured to the point of differing views based on which niche piece of media somebody ingests on a regular basis. Like the antithesis of people having a holistic worldview. It makes me think we really need more work done on dialectical materialism and making it easier for people to grasp it and apply it to organizing and worldview because that stuff really helps with a more holistic view. Even with my (I feel) elementary grasp of it, it is still a night and day difference vs. trying to understand the world through a lens of individualism and idealism.

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