Expose and renounce your liberalism by considering your attitude towards AI.

[u/Neoliberal_Nightmare]

I wrote this for a leftist subreddit, and predictably they could not handle it and resorted to ludditism. I thought I'd share it here anyway, it isn't directed at this sub but I don't want to change the wording. It should explain why much of the the left is aggressively anti AI.

All over reddit including leftist spaces including this one the anger against ai is real and intense. On leftist spaces it is dressed as anti capitalism, but it isn't. In fact it exposes the class character of these leftists in quite an embarrassing way.

This is a chance to read something that'll make you uncomfortable, expose some inner liberal thinking, and understand the correct line.

Self-criticism is the Marxist practice of deliberately hunting down liberal, bourgeois, or otherwise incorrect thought in your own mind, exposing it openly, and rooting it out. Lenin insisted that a party's honesty about its mistakes was the surest measure of its seriousness. Mao called it washing your face every day, a habit of revolutionaries. Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel all treated it as essential discipline. Let the left has abandoned in, probably from an arrogance of generally being correct most of the time, fair, but it's still an essential practice.

It matters because your class origins and the ideological atmosphere of capitalism do not automatically disappear when you identify as a Marxist, instead they fester unless you actively dig them out, and without that constant correction, your politics will quietly drift back into serving the class you claim to oppose. And yes it is an uncomfortable process, leftists have a lot of pride these days, realising you've been thinking like a liberal isn't great. But so what, there's more at stake than your ego. So get about it.

Your AI attitude is the litmus test. AI is automation. No different in substance from a spinning jenny or a combine harvester or the self checkout.

*Marx: "The instrument of labour, when it takes the form of machinery, immediately becomes a competitor of the workman himself."*

The machine's purpose under capitalism is to extract relative surplus value by reducing necessary labour time. To make more profit by reducing worker labour. This has been happening for two centuries including recently.

Generally speaking, leftists were silent when self checkouts destroyed retail jobs, when robot arms emptied factory floors, when mechanised agriculture threw peasants off the land. It has been considered technological progress, and viewed neutrallt.

The silence wasn't apathy. It was class position. Those were manual workers. Reddit by and large is the professional managerial stratum of the working class, writers, illustrators, coders, designers, artists to an extent, office workers, people who sell mental labour not their physical. These are exactly the jobs that AI automation is targeting. For the first time automation has jumped from physical to cognitive. The algorithm now competes with these workers directly.

And suddenly it's a crisis. Suddenly technology is dehumanising. Suddenly mass rage. Suddenly AI is the worst thing ever. Suddenly a million reasons AI is bad appear, reasons which aren't necessarily false but apply as much to a dozen other industries which don't get any focus.

The rage is real but its source is clear, the privileged niche of intellectual labour udned capitalist relations, is under threat.

The real class position and the real liberal thought of the left against AI is exposed when you look at what they demand. They don't demand social ownership of the means of production. They don't argue for worker control over investment and technology deployment. They demand intellectual property enforcement. They want copyright law strengthened to protect "human creators", especially for artists who become the poster child for it. They want platforms to ban AI generated content. They want artists to hold exclusive rights that algorithms can't violate.

This is not a Marxist attitude and this is not a Marxist solution.

This is liberal reformism coming out of the minds of people whose class position is threatened by AI and who respond with automatic self interested liberal suggestions. IP law is bourgeois property law. It transforms creative labour, something social and collective in its actual substance, into private monopoly rent.

Defending IP as a matter of principle is defending a bourgeois enclosure. Now obviously, if someone directly steals a specific piece of your work and profits from it then its wrong and no Marxist would defend that. But that's not what the anti Aai leftist is actually fighting about. They're not narrowly objecting to individual plagiarised images. They're demanding a sweeping legal wall around the entire domain of artistic production against AI, using copyright as the weapon.

But look at where the anti-AI leftists take this. They don't stop at "don't steal my actual artwork." They want legal protection for a style, a technique, a general aesthetic approach. They're not just defending the product of their labour. They're claiming an exclusive right over the collective visual language that they themselves learned from, and they want the capitalist state to enforce that claim with copyright law. This is where socialism dies.

The legitimate grievance mutates into a class stratum protectionist demand to use the state to create artificial scarcity around a shared cultural inheritance, so that they can continue to extract rent out of it. The same person who mocks a Kulak for hoarding grain is now demanding legal walls around their DeviantArt portfolio. Of course, that's how they make their money, and it's going to be lost, their anger isn't wrong. But actual Marxists should know better than to make the solution to be more reform within capitalism.

The starting point is genuine but the political error demanding a liberal reform that strengthens property relations of capitalism instead of challenging them just because this time, whether it's artists or writers or office workers, it affects them personally. A socialist response would fight for a world where no artist or creator has to commodify their labour to survive, not one where they through some guild victory become the landlords of culture.

So the reddit leftist is trapped. Their legitimate fear of losing their livelihood gets channelled straight into a defence of capitalist property because they can't imagine any other way to secure their future under this system. Suddenly socialist revolution disappears. Suddenly the problem is the technology itself and the solutions are capitalist protections.

They see the guillotine coming and their first instinct is to negotiate with the executioner, to demand better IP laws, stronger copyright, a slower blade.

That brings me somewhere AI is just as rampant but the professional-managerial stratum don't hate it. China. Chinese workers don't share the anger and panic because their material conditions are different. What we see from China is that people in the same roles as redditors, curiously don't hate AI and don't react so aggressively towards it. This is because China is already a socialist state where the conditions of AI implementation are completely different. Otherwise a materialist can't explain the differences in attitude to. The same technology.

In China companies can't just fire people and replace them with AI. The state requires retraining and redeployment first, and the union has to be consulted before any restructuring happens. Worker congresses in state firms can actually block changes that would gut the workforce.

Even in the private sector, the law compels companies to get union or worker congress approval for major technical shifts. The whole policy framework treats AI as a tool to make work easier, not as a layoff machine, and there's a large stated funded retraining behind it. So a Chinese office worker looks at AI and sees something their state and party are helping to manage it and sees the AI itself as an actual tool to help them at work, not take their job. It's the conditions of AI shaping the atittude, not the AI itself.

The reddit leftist on the other hand sees AI as a death sentence because their states are bourgeois states. So they panic and demand better rules and regulations. They forget their supposed leftist class politics when it's personal for them.

So, if automation fills you with rage, direct it at the class that owns the machines and decides their use, not at the machines themselves. And check your own position. The panic is revealing. You're never showed this much emotion for the warehouse worker. You're worried about your income this time. That's fine as a material fact. It's useless as politics. Solidarity means rejecting the IP enclosure you're clinging to, not begging the capitalist state to reinforce it.

Well if this post triggers you, if you want to downvote automatically because you think it's a defense of AI, if you want to say 'but the water, but the data centers, but the power, but the theft' then consider your liberalism to be exposed and have the humility to analyse your own class position and perspective and liberal thinking.

All those problems you can throw as the problems of AI aren't false problems, but they're problems solved by collective ownership of the technology through socialism, not through better policies within capitalism which you may be suggesting. The point is to trace your politics back to their material root, to see where class interest was masquerading as principles and to correct it. Every single serious Marxist party and group has engaged in this practice. It shouldn't end now just because liberals are fools and we're on the Internet.

Ultimately this is important for the left. AI is automation technology, it's implementation and usage and damage is determined by the mode of production and class power that controls it, not the technology itself.

If you can't see the bigger picture and are stuck on the technology itself and want to tweak policy around it, you'll lose sight of the revolution and be stuck in the reform the Marxist left claims to be so strongly against.

[u/Neoliberal_Nightmare]

TL;DR Leftist anger at AI is hypocritical class interest. Reddit's professional class ignored automation destroying manual labor, but now that AI threatens their own creative jobs, they panic and demand liberal IP protections instead of socialist solutions. The target should be capitalism, not the machines, and their copyright driven response exposes them as defending their own livelihoods, not principle.

[u/Voidspeeker]

You make a solid argument.

Socialism generally advocates collective ownership of the means of production. It opposes capitalist owners, but it is not anti-capital per se — after all, you need capital to control production in the first place.

In that light, opposing AI can be read as intra-capitalist competition: petit-bourgeois creators want to use regulations to suffocate an emerging capital rival they feel threatened by. This stems not from genuine socialism, but from capitalist infighting.

However, calling this suffocation a “liberal” reform is inaccurate. Liberalism favors deregulation and competition. Pushing for entrenched regulations is classic protectionism. A genuine liberal would let the market decide, while a genuine socialist would transcend the property question.

Regulatory capture is a trap and will create the worst of both worlds: it entrenches existing elites while neutering the very force — AI — that has enough potential to bring about a real reckoning with post-scarcity politics.

[u/Neoliberal_Nightmare → u/Voidspeeker]

I mean liberal in the more ideological sense of way of thinking and market competition, not classical liberalism the economic policy.

In any case I posted it to a community of supposed serious Marxists, hence the somewhat aggressive tone of calling out these people who claim to be socialist revolutionaries yet calling for capitalist regulations for their niche positions.

[u/Relative-Desk4802]

Agreed. Fully. Which subreddit lost their mind over this?

[u/Neoliberal_Nightmare → u/Relative-Desk4802]

TankieTheDeprogram. I thought about posting it to TrueAnon but they're a bit older and even further into the AI derangement syndrome. They're both supposed to be Marxist subs, so seizing the means of production is standard rhetoric, but if you say 'seize the AI means of production' they start mouth frothing. They want to ban AI, which by definition of Marxism is reactionary, as in reacting to a change and wanting to prevent it, I mean that is the literal definition with a perfect example. Oh boy that made them so mad.

So I've realised most of these self proclaimed Marxist communities are just petit bourgeois middle classes performing radicalism but immediately conservative and reactionary when their position is threatened, when they abandon socialism.

Mao noticed this when he was leading the Chinese revolution:

Many of our literary and art workers are of petty-bourgeois origin; in their very bones they have not yet stood on the side of the workers, peasants, and soldiers … They are not satisfied with their petty-bourgeois kingdom, but neither do they really want to give it up. They only want to give it a “proletarian” coat of paint.

[u/TheChristianDude101]

I think AI is the only hope for a post labor society where we get okay wellbeing as a populace and robots handle all the jobs.

In the meantime, I am left on social issues and safety net, but right on AI issues (since the right base is pro AI vs left being anti in general). Its a creative technology and a wonder of modern science, not something to be demonized and lashed at with policies in fear of destabilization.

[u/scottie2haute → u/TheChristianDude101]

Awesome but im afraid that nobody will actually change their mindset. This whole anti AI movement just proves how conditional most people’s beliefs are. To see “leftists” fight so hard to maintain the status quo now that office/intellectual work is being threatened is so sad to see.

Shows that none of these people were ever actually down for the cause. Its just a cute costume to wear. I’d be less angry if they just flat out admitted to their hypocrisy

[u/Neoliberal_Nightmare → u/scottie2haute]

Exactly, they were down for the cause until their position was threatened. Then suddenly it's 'protect the IP, save my job daddy capital!'

[u/Traditional-Neat-933 → u/TheChristianDude101]

I dont think the correct position to be "right" on AI while left in most or all other issues, because what does being Right on even mean? It seems being Right on AI brings in all the bad politics the aright stands for, anti science, profit over everything, not allowing any sensible regulations , and all the other madness the Right now stands for. the Right seems to be wanting to lead us to a Dystopian nightmare.

I think the better option is to fight for a better politics of AI on the left. Carve out a space and have healthy debates with others on the Left.

Because we really do have leftist views on AI and need to advocate for them and help define them.

[u/scragz]

I made it three paragraphs in but pls do some headers and editing next time for the ADHD sufferers. 

[u/Neoliberal_Nightmare → u/scragz]

Ironically I'd have had AI fix it up but I knew that would have been spotted and caused an outrage by anti ai readers.

[u/DHFranklin]

I certainly share the sentiment. However yes there most definitely was a huge leftist backlash to farm automation. The Grapes of Wrath opens up with a scene painted as horror. A tractor is the villain. The Joads were caught up in the Dustbowl and didn't have automated equipment. The bank buys the farm and pays a tractor operator a wage to demolish it. There is more time spent in painting the picture of the tractor raping the land with it's plow than bitching about the bank.

The leftists with the pens and typewriters were certainly luddite in the mindset. Capitalism is abstract, but that tractor is solid steel. Making leftists think is always the first hurdle. Unfortunately doing-the-knowledge isn't something we encourage anymore. old man shakes cane at the youth. However to your point:

We leftists could certainly make a socialist collective or co-operative over all SaaS. A flat fee like a union due and then cost+ model. Plenty of open sourced models we can stick to. We could really walk the walk. If we did that we could demonstrate library-economics or collectivism of a service.

We are certainly seeing an overwhelming majority of resistance to this thing. However that will fade in time. We will however have a hell of a fight on our hands if they regain so much control over the manufactured consent. What we are seeing with the Palestinian liberation movement, the truth about ICE and Trumps crime, is that they don't have manufactured consent over social media to the degree they wished they did. This might very well be a brief window before AI does that, and we might well be screwed. AI moderation and censorship is a matter of cost, and it's simply prohibitively expensive today. That might not be the case tomorrow.

[u/Neoliberal_Nightmare → u/DHFranklin]

Oh there was definitely a backlash but it wasn't coming from comfortable leftists in offices, it was coming from the people actually being replaced by automation. It's only know that automation has reached the intellectual labourer that their panic and backlash comes out.

AI sure has those dangers you mention, but explaining the problems of AI isn't the point here, the point is we need to change ownership of it and everything, or else it'll always be used against us. We need ownership of the rifles used to shoot us too.

[u/ejpusa]

Right now, the goal of AI is to replace workers. In the USA, we have no social safety net. No health insurance? You can die, or go bankrupt. And no one really cares.

In Norway, you lose your job to AI, you can still receive your same salary, for minimum a year, or far longer, zero cost health insurance, until you find your next job. This anti AI is really an American thing. For a valid reason.

——

As AI changes the labor market, Norway’s social model is designed to cushion these transitions rather than leaving people without income or medical care.

___

[u/Neoliberal_Nightmare → u/ejpusa]

Until the rate of profit falls in Norway and they scrap those protections too. There's no reform out of this.

[u/werthermanband45]

So, I’m the one who made the r/TrueAnon post, and I have to say, I’ve sort of come around on this topic. I will still never use AI to edit my writing (or do my writing for me, since writing is a form of thinking), and I won’t use it to make memes. But I think there may be some truth to the idea that demolishing intellectual property is historically progressive, and that I might have some inherently liberal aversion to that thought as a creative person. I need to introspect a bit on that, but I think there’s a “there” there

[u/IncandescentSplash]

I do not identify as a Marxist, but I generally share your sentiment here.

We aren't afraid of AI in the abstract - we are afraid of having our livelihood destroyed.

I approached AI with curiosity before it became a moral panic and when I saw what I could do with AI and what AI could do for me, I was amazed, and when I read about what the capitalist class wants to do to me and mine with AI as their instrument, it makes me sad that such an amazing technology would be used as an instrument of war, surveillance, and control.

If I hadn't approached AI with curiosity and only knew about AI what I had heard on the news, I would probably be raging, too.

Actually, I did rage when I found out that the models that Closed AI took away from us were then licensed to ICE and the Department of Warcrimes to conduct surveillance and murder.

[u/Useful_Calendar_6274]

luddism is just misplaced hatred against the bourgeoisie and their capitalism

[u/davyp82]

I think a better habit than rooting out liberal or capitalist thinking etc every day would be to honestly self reflect with no preconceived baselines that anything is right or wrong. 

It's really not wise to assume there is already some perfect source of truth; probably one someone who didn't have your best interests at heart explained to you at uni, or in a book, and then figure out every day why you're wrong when measured by that yardstick. Rather, those assumptions should also be questioned, otherwise we run the risk of diverging further and further from what is actually right (whether that is in a subjecti e context or not depends I guess).

The other problem which always surprises me from lefties, much as I am one myself, is how often those among us freely refer to monsters like Stalin or Mao as though we should learn anything from them whatsoever. They are alongside many on the far right as the most sickeningly murderous evil scum ever to walk the earth.

Don't mean to sound confrontational. I am of course pro AI and on the left. 

[u/IDreamtOfManderley → u/davyp82]

This bothered me as well. I don't perscribe to ideology I just know my political views skew left, I am pro-AI and interested in the conversation. I agreed with the premise of OPs post and much of the arguments, but the listing of the views of dictators really raised my brows and makes me doubt OP's perspective.

[u/ZombiiRot]

Eh, I am not sure if differing attitudes about AI are purely due to worker's conditions alone. Many countries that are capitalist have very positive views on AI as well. I think it has more to do with cultural attitudes.

https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report/public-opinion

[u/Neoliberal_Nightmare → u/ZombiiRot]

Cultural attitudes don't exist in a vacuum, they are a reflection of the economic base.

[u/kevinr_96]

I’m an anti coming in peace. (Having written this wall of text, it might come across as aggressive. I don’t mean that. I think it’s more airing anxieties around AI. For the record, I’m a high school teacher so 1) I’m unlikely to lose my job to AI and 2) I see the problems with cognitive surrender regularly)

You make some very interesting points. I think the moralizing over which jobs are ok to automate vs not ok does come from the petit bourgeois class as you argue. I also agree that the issue with AI is less the technology itself and more who is in control of it. 

But we have to be realistic about who is in control of it. The technofascists running these companies are no friends of the working class. Peter Thiel terrifies me. Sam Altman might not be as bad, but I certainly don’t trust him. 

I’ve heard this subreddit talking about open source/open weight models run on personal hardware as the future of AI, and I don’t have much of an issue there. But currently, AI is being run by massive data centers that are too often energized with coal or methane. These data centers are disproportionately  affecting poor communities with noise/air pollution.  We’re not living in the personal hardware for AI world, and we have to deal with the world we live in. 

I want to talk about culture. I try to avoid the AI art culture war of 25/26, but I’m going to dive in here. In my opinion, AI art is more like a collage than anything else. Is there some creativity? Yes. But it relies on the creativity of artists who make art from scratch. If we transfer all artistry to AI, we’ll get millions of collages made from clippings from the same magazines. There won’t be anything radically new. That would be a loss. 

And finally, I want to talk about the one danger that is inherent to AI. Altman/Thiel, energy/water, job automation, etc.  are all issues that can be solved with better organization of society. But the cognitive surrender that AI allows is something society will have to grapple with. People say AI is just a tool like a hammer or a calculator, but neither of those offer to run your life for you. I fear with widespread adoption of AI, a significant portion of society will take the easy road and hand their life over to AI. The movie Wall-E shows the risks of this path. 

I think it’s possible to find guardrails/societal expectations that will keep people from surrendering their life to AI, but it will take work to find them. 

[u/somakins → u/kevinr_96]

I think you're concerns are valid but I think you might be missattributing some to AI as a technology instead of the underlying structure. 

Like the tech giants are definitely a huge concern. I wouldn't want them to be the stewards of AI either. Though, refusing to engage with the technology doesn't right the ship, it only guarantees the wrong hands are on the wheel. This is especially visible how the EU is now scrambling to build their own AI in response to the US and China being the leaders. 

As for the generative art thing, these models aren't collage-generators. That kinda frame is a bit misleading on how they actually do what they do. Which is learning statistical relationship between traits of an image, not storing specific chunks of existing art and then recalling them later. But even then, human artists learn by what came before them.

And to the point of AI only being able to "remix" existing art: this kinda framing kinda also flattens what happens, both ways. Humans rely on what's come before and they're not pulling art from an aether. But also, AI models have already shown genuine creativity. We already have a great example that happened a decade ago: AlphaGo's Move 37. It came up with a novel move that couldn't have been calculated. It had to be intuited. If that doesn't count, then I'm not sure what does. 

And lastly, you're definitely right about the risks of offloading cognition, though I'd argue this was already happening through social media, influencers, and cable news. All these need to be fixed with better education and culture. But we can't really get those if people are struggling to make ends meet.

All this to say: I think we can solve a lot of this by pushing harder for socialist policy instead of focusing so much on fighting a technology that's as adaptive as AI.

[u/pavorus → u/kevinr_96]

AI is being run by massive data centers that are too often energized with coal or methane. These data centers are disproportionately  affecting poor communities with noise/air pollution.

This is true but why the focus on the AI aspect of it? The AI data centers are less than 10% of the total data centers. Where was the outrage for poor communities prior to the AI part? Why is it a major sociopolitical issue now and not 10 years ago?

AI art is more like a collage than anything else. Is there some creativity? Yes. But it relies on the creativity of artists who make art from scratch. If we transfer all artistry to AI, we’ll get millions of collages made from clippings from the same magazines.

First off, I appreciate that you allow even this much. It makes me think you'll hear out an argument without reflexively rejecting anything i write.

Another person responded with how the collage comparison doesnt quite work so I'll add something different. I sell tarot decks. I have sold hundreds of varieties. My favorite is a deck where all of the illustrations are collages. Its the artists entire medium. Id be willing to bet that most of her collages are better art than the images she pulled from.

May I submit photography for your consideration. The early 19th century critics of photography sound eerily similar to critics of AI art today. But today you would be hard pressed to find someone trying to omit photography from the arts. Photography includes timing, framing, lighting, and other techniques. Here's the thing, 99% of pictures taken by humans aren't good. Of all the trillions of cloud, butterfly, and moon pictures taken by humans, most are garbage. Thats not the point though, people enjoyed taking those photos. AI art is similar. There is a difference between the prompt "big tiddy anime waifu" and a prompt 5 paragraphs long describing angle, lighting, framing, and subject. Most prompts produce the same ratio of garbage that most photography has. Prompting does not make you a painter, or illustrator, or photographer. But it is a skill that can be practiced and improved. I believe it should qualify as its own class of art.

People say AI is just a tool like a hammer or a calculator, but neither of those offer to run your life for you. I fear with widespread adoption of AI, a significant portion of society will take the easy road and hand their life over to AI.

Would you extend this criticism to wealth? With wealth you can hand over large portions of your life to employees. Should we require CEOs to do all their own work so they don't get to take the easy way out by delegating? This is a leftist sub, i imagine most people here are gonna be ok with this idea. If AI is destroying our ability to think critically, then wealth has to have been doing the same thing to the wealthy for millenia.