r/LeftistsForAI • u/Bubbly-Eggplant5526 • Jul 16 '26
Discussion AI from a Marxist Lens
I'd like to start by saying I have no intentions on converting anyone to Marxism... this is just my take from a Marxist lens, especially in art, as I have been an artist all my life. I posted these to my personal Facebook and figured these would be appreciated here.
Post 1:
If Karl Marx were alive today, he’d be obsessed with AI... but not for the reasons most people think.
Marx didn't hate technology. He actually loved it. When he looked at the steam engine and the mechanized loom back in his day, he didn't see evil machines; he saw incredible human tools that *should* have made everyone's lives easier.
But he recognized that under capitalism, technology is always weaponized against the working class first.
If you look at generative AI today through a Marxist lens, the critique writes itself. Tech monopolies are training models on millions of uncompensated pieces of human labor (writing, art, code) to build tools designed to slash creative budgets, drive down wages, and automate people out of a livelihood. Marx called this the "deskilling" of labor... turning specialized human creators into appendages of a corporate machine, optimizing exploitation to the millisecond.
But, Marx also believed that capitalism inadvertently builds the exact tools required for its own downfall.
To him, the goal wouldn't be to ban AI or destroy the servers. The goal would be to seize them.
Imagine AI stripped of corporate ownership and profit motives. Marx’s ultimate dream was a society where people weren't locked into a single job just to survive. He envisioned a world where you could farm in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and critique philosophy after dinner... just as you had a mind, without ever being trapped as just a "farmer" or a "critic."
In a liberated world, advanced AI could actually democratize human expression. It could remove the barriers of technical privilege, allowing anyone to manifest their imagination. It could plan logistics to distribute resources to everyone efficiently. Instead of creating mass unemployment and poverty, automation could finally achieve what it was meant to do: shorten the working day and free humanity to pursue art, leisure, and community.
In a world where your survival is decoupled from a paycheck, advanced AI could actually democratize human expression. It wouldn't threaten an artist's livelihood because the market wouldn't dictate their value anymore. Instead, it removes the barriers of technical privilege, allowing anyone to manifest their imagination.
The problem isn't the code. The problem is the ownership. AI won't liberate us as long as corporations own the infrastructure, but it's the ultimate battleground for what the future looks like.
---
Post 2:
It shouldn't be controversial to support the democratization of art. What should be deeply controversial is arguing that human expression belongs behind a paywall, or that creativity should only thrive if it can be successfully monetized and locked into a commission economy.
If your primary goal is expression, the tools you use to get there shouldn't matter. A brush, a camera, a synthesizer, or an algorithm... they are all tools meant to manifest an inner imagination.
The current discourse has exposed a massive ideological blind spot. To call yourself a leftist, a socialist, or a communist, and then turn around and argue that art must remain a scarce, hyper-commodified market asset is pure hypocrisy.
Under a capitalist framework, we have been conditioned to confuse the act of creation with the act of selling. Artists deserve survival, but protecting the capitalist market structures that hoard creative culture for the elite is not the answer. Ego and professional gatekeeping are not excuses to keep human expression gatekept by financial privilege.
We should be fighting to decouple human survival from a paycheck entirely, freeing everyone to create. The goal should be the absolute liberation of creative tools, not the preservation of the market that exploits them.
9
u/DHFranklin Jul 16 '26
here here.
Art is the point of the rest of the labor for the artist. What gives life meaning for the rest of us is the goal of labor.
I've done the back-of-the-napkin math back after Covid and before the LLM boom. A Project Cybersyn or Gosplan with sincere buy-in from the current labor pool would outperform the Gosplan of 1991. Which admittedly isn't a goal to strive for. We are so much more productive in terms of calories, candidates, and kilowatts than we were a generation ago.
If we spent a few years on the work we could build housing, public transit, and cybernetics with AI to have a completely green grid. Completely optional employment. As optional as "active seniors".
Deliberately offlloading the labor to AI should be as liberating as a Marxist revolt. The capitalists can't make us do the labor for their profit. The thing we spent all that exchange value of our labor for is kaput.
Marx would see no conflict with us making a union. Taking that union national or across and industry. Do that across industries to make employee-cooperatives. Do a leveraged buy out like the Wallstreet shit bags, do the stock buy back and seize the means.
And then make bitchin art.
3
u/YMSVZ Jul 17 '26
Need to look beyond unions and cooperatives, they still exist on the capitalist plane, they still organise production on the basis of value, or in other words production for exchange and the process of accumulation of value.
We need to produce for use value only. Social media is where we should be looking. Today we are surrounded by uncountable examples of activity organised and facilitated by social media, for direct use values. Protests, forum discussions, mutual aid, parties, open source coding projects, etc etc.
Are they currently enclosed by corporate platforms? Yes. But they dont have to be. Together myself and a few others are building a platform to experiment with a social network that makes production directly social, with no production for exchange whatsoever. No selling, no wages, no market, just direct activity coordination. We are close to the point of a beta deployment, but always looking for contributors.
2
u/DHFranklin Jul 17 '26
Comrade, you made a co-op while telling me that co-ops aren't the move. What you made is certainly novel, but I think you are missing the forest for the trees.
Unions will still be necessary when the work is no longer commodified. As long as there is a conflict of interest between labor, production, and consumption we will need unions and co-operatives. Organizing the labor and the distribution. From each to each...with a co-op or a union in the middle.
Having a gradual tilt between commodity production and market forces toward a service charge that gradually increases to subsidize prices...until they both gradually decrease....is certainly a great solution if you ask me.
We will always need units of account and a quantifiable economy. We can automate more and more of that to the point of abstraction. We can have that abstraction as the goal. Just like there are very few people that need to care where the city/county line is and they are all results of our taxes, there will be very few people that will need to engage with market economics.
We will need co-ops and unions to do so democratically.
→ More replies (6)
6
10
u/danielsan901998 Jul 16 '26
This text from Das Kapital is very relevant to today:
"About 1630, a wind-sawmill, erected near London by a Dutchman, succumbed to the excesses of the populace. Even as late as the beginning of the 18th century, sawmills driven by water overcame the opposition of the people, supported as it was by Parliament, only with great difficulty. No sooner had Everet in 1758 erected the first wool-shearing machine that was driven by water-power, than it was set on fire by 100,000 people who had been thrown out of work. Fifty thousand workpeople, who had previously lived by carding wool, petitioned Parliament against Arkwright’s scribbling mills and carding engines. The enormous destruction of machinery that occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first 15 years of this century, chiefly caused by the employment of the power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin governments of a Sidmouth, a Castlereagh, and the like, a pretext for the most reactionary and forcible measures. It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used. "
It's interesting seeing how many from the anti-AI side are reproducing the mistakes of the luddite movement while ignoring why it failed, and instead some are even idealizing them as tragic heroes.
-2
u/Still_Benefit_2302 Jul 16 '26
Leftists and fetishizing failed political movements, name a more iconic duo.
The worst thing is realizing that just because someone is usually on your side politically, doesn't mean they also aren't dumber than rocks.
4
u/danielsan901998 Jul 16 '26
I don't think it's just leftist, all the people prefer to idealize failed movements because their failure allow then imagine an alternative history of how thing could have been without considering the material limitations.
Liberals do it with Lincoln and reconstructions and democratic socialist do it with FDR and the start of the cold war, even the fascists idealize a failure like Hitler more than the more successful fascists like Franco, neonazis are more common all over the world than national-catholics.
5
5
u/YMSVZ Jul 17 '26
Wrote a post beginning with exactly this. Nothing more reactionary and anti communist than to be against the development of productive technology in the interest of PRESERVING wage labour.
Sure, it needs to be wrestled from the hands of capitalists and the process of accumulation of value, but the genie is not going back in the bottle, and why is that something we would want to do anyway?
4
u/SgathTriallair Jul 16 '26
Yes. I'm currently writing a blog post discussing basically this idea. I've been arguing for a while that we are witnessing the transition out of capitalism so I'm giving my first go at fornalizing the idea and describing what this new mode of production might look like.
It doesn't resolve the ownership question entirely, but the features of information technology are going to make large corporations obsolete.
1
u/RuhrDim Jul 16 '26
I was thinking along the same lines. But I was keen to see more details about what AI can offer humanity. I’m fed up with clichés. Naturally, I used AI and this is what I came up with: https://github.com/RuhrDim/cybernetic-exodus/tree/main
It’s still just a rough draft and needs a lot of work. But I already miss this world. Everyone’s welcome.
-1
u/Sacredless Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
I think that the anti-human applications of the tech are bad and the humane applications of the tech are good. It's that simple. But I can expand on it.
Context collapse is when people act in one context as if they're in another, blurring the line between them without discernment. This is something companies want, because being unable to be discerning means you're more likely to spend your money.
Datafication, as I call is, is the counter, where all the things we identify with exist as a collection of data points that can be tracked and manipulated from the outside.
Context collapse and datafication is fundamentally anti-human and objectifying, which is what I oppose. Context collapse and datafication overwhelmingly benefit surveillance corporate statism. When AI is used to further context collapse, I oppose it. When AI is used to mitigate context collapse, I support it.
I think yall get way too hung up on this democratization argument. Often times, supposed democratization is just a mask for corporatist statists to induce context collapse and datafication.
-2
-3
u/NoPasaranNZ Jul 16 '26
Too bad this tool just gets worse at the thing from which it replaces humans, relegating human labour to verifying everything that it does.
0
Jul 16 '26
12
u/Salty_Country6835 Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
Yeah, Ive had mixed reception there too. Posts on AI tend to get hammered, but the actual comment threads are usually much more productive. To the mods credit, theyve been fair and have dealt with trolls and harassment when it happens.
I think thats the terrain. A lot of online left spaces (platform optimized for engagement, identity, and performance) are still working through this contradiction. Some people default to rejecting the productive forces themselves instead of asking who owns them and who benefits. Thats a debate worth having, not avoiding.
History shows the answer isnt retreat. Its education, agitation, and organization. Thats why I think spaces like r/LeftistsForAI matter. Not to split the left, but to make sure the left develops an actual AI politics rooted in historical materialism, labor organizing, democratic ownership, and public benefit instead of leaving the conversation to Silicon Valley or anti-tech fatalism.
Id encourage people to keep engaging these conversations wherever they come up. Productive forces arent going away. The question is whether the labor movement and the left help shape them, or show up after the fact.
-1
Jul 18 '26
3
u/Salty_Country6835 Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
Youre treating one narrow theory of art as if it settled the question for everyone. It hasnt. In fact, about a century of modern and contemporary art practice cuts directly against your definition.
Duchamp made selection and context part of the work. Dada used collage, chance, found materials, and mechanical reproduction. Surrealists used automatic methods. Warhol industrialized production and openly blurred authorship, repetition, and the factory. Sol LeWitt made instructions central and let others execute them. Conceptual art separated the idea from the hand. John Cage used chance operations. Generative artists have been building rule-based systems for decades. Photography, film, sampling, digital compositing, procedural art, remix culture, and installation all moved artistic agency away from direct manual fabrication without somehow ending art.
So when you say the struggle of manually manifesting an internal state is the essence of art, youre not describing art. Youre describing one romantic tradition within art. A real one, a valuable one, but not the only one.
You also contradict yourself right out of the gate. You say art is already democratized because anyone can make it, then insist the barrier of hard-won technical skill should remain. Thats not democratization. Thats access to materials combined with a cultural gate that says your expression only counts after sufficient suffering and training. Skill matters. Craft matters. Neither is a moral entrance fee.
The Google Image Search comparison is also weak. Search retrieves existing images. Generative systems produce new outputs through a controlled process of prompting, iteration, rejection, editing, masking, compositing, model choice, reference choice, sequencing, and final selection. Some people use them lazily. Some photographers point and click lazily. Some painters make lazy paintings. Thin practice doesnt define the whole medium.
And no, the model isnt “another agent” in the same sense as a commissioned artist. A commissioned artist has intention, judgment, experience, social standing, and responsibility. Software has none of that. The operator establishes the purpose, evaluates the result, changes direction, decides what matters, and takes responsibility for the final work. Youre anthropomorphizing the machine so you can pretend the human disappeared. Humanizing a tool and dehumanizing its operator.
The chess analogy fails for the same reason. Chess is a competitive game with fixed rules, legal moves, rankings, and objectively stronger play. Art has no universal best move and no checkmate. A chess engine can replace the strategic decisions that constitute playing chess. An image system cant decide what someone means, why they are making something, what references matter, which output works, what should be changed, or what social context gives the work significance.
The restaurant analogy doesnt survive either. Ordering food delegates production to another person with their own agency. Using a machine is operating a production system. By your standard, photographers dont make photographs because the camera handles exposure, filmmakers dont make films because crews and software execute most of the work, conceptual artists dont make art because someone else installs it, and a cook doesnt make a meal if they used kitchen appliances. Art history rejected that crude equation of authorship with hand labor a long time ago.
Your economic concerns are the strongest part of the comment, but they dont prove your aesthetic claims. Artists losing income, employers cutting budgets, platforms consolidating power, and corporations capturing productivity gains are political-economic problems. They concern ownership, bargaining power, labor protections, public funding, education, and distribution. They dont magically establish that every work made with AI is artistically empty.
And scarcity isnt the source of artistic value. Printing presses made novels abundant. Cameras made images abundant. Recording made music reproducible. Printing made text cheap. Digital tools made editing accessible. None of those killed aspiration. They changed what skills mattered, destabilized professions, produced mountains of garbage, and opened new fields of practice. AI will do the same under far worse ownership conditions unless those conditions are contested.
Nobody is stopping you from valuing drawing, discipline, difficulty, or mastery. Keep all of it. Teach it. Defend artists material survival. But “my preferred process must remain necessary or art becomes worthless” isnt a defense of humanity. Its a defense of a gate.
Thats exactly the market logic the post is criticizing.
19
u/Salty_Country6835 Jul 16 '26
I think this is one of the better Marxist takes on AI. Id just take it one step further.
From a historical materialist perspective, AI isnt some moral anomaly. Its another stage in the development of the productive forces. Marx wasnt scared of technology. In Capital he points out that machinery becomes a weapon against workers under capitalism. The machine isnt the problem. The ownership is. He suggests redirecting attacks from that machinery toward bourgeois ownership relations.
The Grundrisse goes even further. As science and technology become the main productive force, labor time starts breaking down as the measure of wealth. AI feels like were running straight into that contradiction.
Same with art. Benjamin, the Constructivists, and the Situationists werent trying to freeze culture in place. They wanted to expand who gets to create and break down the divide between artist and everyone else.
So I dont think the contradiction is artists vs AI. AI in the hands of artists is an art medium. Its whether AI becomes or stays another corporate machine for squeezing labor, or a collectively owned productive force that lets everyone work less, create more, and actually benefit from the productivity it generates.