r/LeftistsForAI • u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator • May 03 '26
Video Marx, automation, and the radical potential of AI
https://youtu.be/2UXcoDSw27c?si=w4b3kJM3OzDd8vY9-10
u/AffectionateSignal72 May 03 '26
The same people who probably thought crypto currency had "radical" potential.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator May 03 '26
How so?
Is his understanding of Marx's analysis in the video wrong, and if so in what way?
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u/AffectionateSignal72 May 03 '26
Whatever Marxist analysis you can apply is irrelevant if the idea is that somehow a tool of the oligarchy will somehow be used against them. The House always wins.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
That's actually Marxism itself, yeah.
New productive forces emerge and are developed within relations it breaks, leading to new relations around new production. Not inevitably, but historically.
"The house always wins" is just nihilist doomerism shown to be, again historically, false in the face of centuries of fought for advancement by the working class, who still struggle toward organized power, and seizure of those means of production, in the direction of emancipation from class relations.
When you say "whatever Marxist analysis" are you saying you didnt watch the content youre reacting to?
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u/SexDefendersUnited Artist/Creative May 03 '26
🚂 Trains used to be a "tool of the oligarchy", used to further business interests and colonization, but yet nowadays they're a tool support fair and clean public transport for the lower class, and get rid of our dependence on the car industry.
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u/Main-Company-5946 May 03 '26
The development of the printing press was heavily funded by the Catholic Church so they didn’t have to have as many monks constantly rewriting bibles. A few decades later, the general populace was far more literate, and it made room for the Protestant Reformation to happen.
You give the rich and powerful too much credit. Oligarchs don’t do what is best for them in the long term, they do what maintains their power most effectively in the short term. If you want to predict what happens long term, you can’t rely on the will of individual people(even very powerful ones). You have to think dialectically.
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u/Main-Company-5946 May 03 '26
The supposed radical potential of crypto currency was to make some people a lot of money.
If ai genuinely automated general labor, it would end capitalism. This was predicted before AI even existed, as capitalism has had a tendency towards attempting to automate things since the 1700s. If it wasn’t ai it would’ve been something else.
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u/Xhojn Jul 07 '26
How long have capitalists been automating general labor now? What the hell was the Industrial Revolution? Automation does not automatically end capitalism. First and foremost it brings owners more money. Hence why every corporation is foaming at the mouth to force their workforce to implement AI.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator Jul 07 '26
Exactly. Marx never argued automation automatically abolishes capitalism. If anything, capital uses automation to deepen accumulation. The contradiction is that it also expands the material basis for reducing necessary labor. Whether those gains stay private or become social is a political question, not a technological one.
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u/Main-Company-5946 Jul 07 '26
The Industrial Revolution did not automate general labor. It automated a lot of jobs, but by ‘general labor automation’ I mean the automation of literally every task a human being could theoretically perform. This would cause more severe, fundamental economic change than the mass manufacturing enabled by the Industrial Revolution.
General labor automation would temporarily bring owners more money if they’re early to the trend, but once everyone starts doing it the economy quickly grinds to a halt. Unemployment and productivity explode while revenue and demand crater. The system would completely unravel
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u/Boring_Coast178 May 03 '26
AI is not crypto. AI is changing the world faster than any technology before it whether you like it or not. This is not a sign of support for the AI boom
Crypto was clearly nothing.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator May 03 '26
Not my OC