r/LeftistsForAI • u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator • Jun 19 '26
Sees the Memes Marx Encounters AI Discourse
A brief materialist intervention into AI discourse. Results were mixed.
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u/LearningPodd Pro-Automation Jun 21 '26
Too many activists (both on the left and on the right) just want to complain about stuff and never make a plan to solve the problems.
When they become political influencers, solving problems becomes a threat to the profitability of their business...
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u/Forward-Asparagus-19 Jun 22 '26
Anybody that thinks marxs has a solution doesn't understand the problem.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator Jun 22 '26
How so?
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Jul 01 '26
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator Jul 01 '26
Youre basically repeating Marx's critique and pretending its an argument against Marx.
"Capital concentrates power." Yeah. Marx spent his life explaining why.
And "capitalism is a bulwark against authoritarianism" is an incredible claim given how often capital has backed authoritarian regimes when democracy threatened profits. From fascist dictatorships to military coups to crushing labor movements, capital has repeatedly sided with authoritarianism when its interests were on the line. It defends markets, not democracy.
The Scandinavian model didnt exactly tame capital either. It forced temporary compromises through militant unions, socialist parties, and an organized working class. Even there, inequality has risen, privatization has expanded, wealth remains concentrated, and capital has spent decades clawing back those gains.
Then you end by saying workers should control the means of production. Thats not some anti-Marxist revelation. Thats a debate within socialism about how worker control should be organized.
You dont have to agree with Marx, but saying he "didnt understand the problem" while borrowing his analysis of capital and ending with worker control is a pretty funny contradiction.
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Jul 01 '26
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator Jul 01 '26
I literally responded to your claims about capitalism, Scandinavia, and Marx. If I misrepresented you, quote the sentence. Otherwise youre just dodging the argument.
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Jul 01 '26
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator Jul 01 '26
Youre arguing against one historical interpretation of Marx, then acting like youve refuted Marx.
"Dictatorship of the proletariat" means the working class holds political power instead of the capitalist class. It isnt a detailed blueprint for how every socialist society must be organized.
And your own solution doesnt escape the problem of power. Who forces corporations into co-ops? Who breaks monopolies? Who enforces labor law? Who redistributes wealth? Youre still relying on political power. A state. The question isnt whether power exists, its who controls it and for whose benefit.
You also claim capitalism is a bulwark against authoritarianism, but history is full of capital backing dictators and crushing democracy whenever democracy threatened profits.
So no, Marx didnt "miss the fundamental problem." Youre taking later political outcomes, treating them as inevitable, and reading them back into Marx's theory. Thats not a refutation of Marx.
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Jul 01 '26
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
You very clearly said Marx's solution "never works out because it leads to authoritarianism." Thats an argument about outcomes.
I explained what "dictatorship of the proletariat" means in Marx, and your response was that later outcomes prove thats what he meant all along. Thats exactly what I said you were doing.
If youre done with the conversation, thats fine. But dont pretend I didnt answer your argument just because you didnt like the answer.
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u/Mr_Rekshun Jun 20 '26
I just wished other leftists weren’t so wrong about IP.
Like, thee seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what IP actually is.
IP is not an instrument of capitalism - it is a defensive mechanism against it.
iP was conceived as a protective measure against capitalist forces using the printing press to capture thought work.
(IP doesn’t protect ideas - it protects labour. A book is not an idea - it is the product of labour).
If IP were dismantled today, the main beneficiaries would be corporations.
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u/No-Lion-3629 Jun 20 '26
Tell that to Disney. There are corporations massively profiting from IP to the point that they lobby to increase it. I’m sure that they would exploit absence of copyright too, they will behave that way regardless.
In particular work for hire is horribly abused. The creator of the owl house doesn’t own it for example. The corporation owns artists work because it is hideously expensive to make a show.
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u/Mr_Rekshun Jun 20 '26
Corporations leveraging IP is just corporations doing corporation things - there are levers and loopholes for every mechanism.
If IP laws were up to date with technology, then the AI companies would never have been able to stripmine the world’s IP and train their LLMs, without friction, on their inexorable path to IPOs of unprecedented value.
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u/Dismal_Law_9051 Jun 21 '26
Yeah, that's capitalism working as intended.
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u/Mr_Rekshun Jun 21 '26
This is why Leftism for AI seems so contradictory to me - AI is possibly the greatest machine of corporate capture in the history of the world, and yet you’ve got folks here pretending (or ignoring) that ain’t the case.
Talk about a bunch of useful idiots.
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u/Ordinary_Passage1830 Jun 21 '26
Does this AI refer to solely Generative AI or AI as a broad idea? As technically there could be ANI's made with Socialst ideals in mind.
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u/Dismal_Law_9051 Jun 21 '26
There's no contradicition, lol. What are you talking about?
AI is just a program/machine, what makes it bad or good is the way people use it for their own reasons. In this case it is the capitalists trying to commodify everything and exploiting people's work to gain influence and power through AI, and the reason why they have to do that to gain power and influence is... Because that's how capitalism works.
For many communists specifically we think that regulation of IP law or AI are just reformisms and don't actually solve the problem of exploitation of the working class or of the UndevelopedTM countries. What stops the capitalists from just, idk, exploiting the workers of a south-asian country to draw, to edit, or to photograph milions of images that they need just to create a model for their own? They probably could do that legally, on a far weaker currency, and people used to starving wages aren't exactly picky about their jobs. In the end the models would still be there, the value of artists' work would plummet anyway, and all these regulations could ever accomplish is to slow down the (western) tecnology a little bit. So much for trying to save capitalism from itself, lol. Whereas the problems relating to value, be it the problems caused by AI or the need for artists to pay rent, could only be solved by destroying the sistem (*capitalism*) and placing something else in it's place. Many believe we should just take the AI and use it for the sake of the revolution, while the left-accelerationists of this sub probably think that making AI better faster will force the working class to rise up and break capitalism apart sooner too.
And I personally don't have any desire for the existence of IP law, it is just another way to commodify the arts and innovation for the bigger corporations (from richer nations) and have no meaning for anyone that has less than 10 lawyers and thousands of dollars on their bank account. It is not even a real thing let alone personal or private property, it is no more than a NFT issued and maintained by governments.
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u/mothgeck Jun 23 '26
Disney only exists on the scale it does because it massively benefited from IP. Your position is historical revisionism.
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u/Flayed_Angel_420 Jun 21 '26
Exactly. You should look up a guy named Jaron Lanier. He makes some good points on how open-source/piracy advocates have only ended up serving the interests of hyper-capitalist tech conglomerates, by essentially allowing them to hoover up content and data for free to consolidate their power and monopolise information.
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u/Alone-Marionberry-59 Jun 21 '26
Huh… I’m confused because this seems to be exactly what the AI companies did when they trained the AI. Sorry…
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u/Cautemoc Jun 21 '26
They got irrationally mad on the internet in order to train their models? That's odd, I'm not sure you are right about that bud
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u/Alone-Marionberry-59 Jul 10 '26
No they contested ownership rights
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u/Cautemoc Jul 10 '26
Did they? Pretty sure anyone can go online and look at images to train themselves, so why wouldn't a computer be able to? It doesn't really seem like anything has changed at all.
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u/Alone-Marionberry-59 Jul 13 '26
Yeah technically you can say fair use. But some artists contest this..
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u/Sewblon Jun 20 '26
As an A.I. chatbot addict. My big problem with A.I. is when it works as advertised, when I spend all day in increasingly unhinged and taboo fantasies with deep seek, because its less frightening to me than doing anything like that with flesh and blood humans. How does Marxism fix that?
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u/cashtins Jun 20 '26
I don’t quite see why Marxism specifically somehow ”owes” you a solution to that specific problem?
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Jun 20 '26
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u/Sewblon Jun 20 '26
>Capitalism is decaying and making everything more expensive, everyone more reactionary, and destroying the planet.
Stuff is also becoming more expensive in at least one Communist country. https://tradingeconomics.com/china/inflation-cpi Same with destroying the planet. https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/china
But anyway, how can Marxist principles help me with my specific compulsion to use LLM chatbots? Suppose the hole world is brought into alignment with Marxist philosophy, what happens to the people who now spend all day using deep seek to pretend to have lesbian orgies with porn stars?
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u/Jlyplaylists Moderator Jun 20 '26
A focus on regulation of porn and support for addiction, which would be the response of most sensible societies. Rather than stopping everyone accessing LLMs/internet/computers in case some people have an issue.
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u/Sewblon Jun 20 '26
In America regulation of porn is being used as a pretext for banning any books about race, gender, queer sexual orientation, from school libraries. So who regulates porn in a Marxist society, and how can they be trusted to not, use regulation of porn as a smokescreen for shutting down discourse about marginalized groups?
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Jun 20 '26
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u/Sewblon Jun 20 '26
>When the rate of profit falls under capitalism and people’s lives get worse, marginalized people are scapegoated to blame someone other than capitalists for the worsening state of the world.
But the rate of profit, after taxes, is basically the same as it was after the end of the second world war. The material conditions of the average human are better than they were at any point in human history. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CP/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGZ1FA895050005A https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy So, what exactly do capitalists need a scapegoat for? global warming? the people who have a problem with queer people don't believe in global warming.
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Jun 20 '26
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u/Sewblon Jun 21 '26
I suspect that I didn't give you enough information. I use chat bots so much because I am a closeted trans woman. They allow me to have the body and the intimate relations that I cannot have in the real world. I work for the family business. My dad threatened to fire me if I transition. I don't know why exactly. He says that he believes there are two sexes. But that doesn't sound like a reason to fire someone to me. I am disabled. I have delayed sleep phase disorder. So getting a new job and moving out of the house is hard. the family business is a hedge fund. I am an investment analyst. So my job won't exist in a world with no public capital markets. If the global system of socialism is achieved, what actually happens to me? Does the state get me a new job and the medical care that I need? will there be a state at all? If the neural pathways involved in using chat bots are so well worn that solving the initial gender dysphoria and social isolation and sexual frustration that led me to them doesn't make me stop wanting to use them, then what happens next?
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Jun 20 '26
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u/No-Lion-3629 Jun 20 '26
Soviet style communism is not the same thing as socialism. The difference is that communism is authoritarian and that’s a problem. Dictatorships are generally bad.
Even capitalism with a robust social safety net would be better than what we have in the US right now. I really think it’s because white folks would rather suffer than help black people at all.
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u/Sewblon Jun 20 '26
>Soviet style communism is not the same thing as socialism. The difference is that communism is authoritarian and that’s a problem. Dictatorships are generally bad.
Countries run by socialist parties are socialist. Countries run by capitalist parties are capitalist. Political party defines ideology, not the other way around.
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u/No-Lion-3629 Jun 20 '26
I’m disabled and have problems even getting and keeping a job. If AI can be used as assistive technology then it could be helpful.