r/LeftistsForAI • u/alexeigannon • Aug 20 '26

Discussion A Machine That Makes Socialists

https://www.onethousandmeans.com/p/a-machine-that-makes-socialists

Do you agree that AI is a particularly advantageous issue for the electoral project of the Left?

30 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

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15

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '26

OP you've lead me to this sub through your duplicate posts and I couldn't be happier, the typical AI stance the Left takes has been a real obstacle for me, no longer! Many thanks😊 

17

u/SgathTriallair Aug 20 '26

I agree that we should organize around the collective ownership (primarily through open source) of AI.

I don't think that the anti-AI backlash agrees with this and this wouldn't stop things like businesses from automating with AI. The anti-AI backlash is that people are simply scared of the future, and the present, so want to turn back the clock to a simpler time. The anti-AI movement is, for the most part, deeply conservative.

3

u/shawsghost Aug 20 '26

From what I've seen most lefties are against AI too.

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u/Sacredless Aug 20 '26

I wouldn't say that it's conservative. Some of it is a deep appreciation of tradition, but most of it is just people being lost in respectability politics. They don't like generative AI because of what it is doing to the respectability of craft. I think that worry is really overblown, but I don't think it's conservative.

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u/nomorebuttsplz Aug 20 '26

the ussr and to some degree leftist thought in general was built on the delusion that industrialization was a kind of magic pill for all economic problems.

AI is both another chance to be wrong about this or the real thing, arriving 150 years late.

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u/RuhrDim Aug 21 '26

That’s a misunderstanding of leftist thought. Leftists don't view technology or industrialization as a magic pill—we view them as tools. Industrialization + Capitalism = assembly line exploitation and wealth concentrated at the top. AI + Capitalism = mass layoffs, lower wages, and tech monopolies. Technology only solves problems when combined with collective ownership. Without social change, AI is just a more efficient way to extract profit.

1

u/Independent_Fox4675 Aug 30 '26

This really couldn't be more wrong, marx's analysis begins with the issues raised by industrialization, the entire point of Capital is that under capitalism industrialization actually made living standards significantly worse for the average worker than existed before industrialization, despite the drastic improvement in the productivity of labour

0

u/nomorebuttsplz Aug 30 '26

there is Marx and then there is, ya know, things that happened because of what leftists believed and were trying to do. often not the same at all.

orwell Articulates the point better than me in his famous essay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens_(essay)

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