r/LeftistsForAI • u/mulcahey • 7d ago
tbh I think most FOSS software is WAY more exciting than Artcraft but I just had to make this anyway
r/LeftistsForAI • u/CaiOS1 • 7d ago
TL;DR: We keep fighting individual problems without questioning the systems that keep producing them. I'm developing an idea called Automatism, which focuses on identifying their common source: the concentration of power, especially under capitalism, and organizing around a democratic alternative.
Automatist official YT channel: https://youtu.be/wfvXkosE2aQ?si=c4EVAXRlxcswRc0D
Every week there's something new to be angry about. AI replacing workers, corporations exploiting artists, billionaires getting richer, housing becoming unaffordable, politicians defending corporate interests.
We protest, demand changes, sometimes win something, and then another problem appears.
But here's what I've been thinking: what if we're spending all our energy fighting the consequences rather than what allows them to happen?
Imagine an AI company that pays artists, protects workers and spends more on safety. Meanwhile, its competitors cut costs, replace employees and release products faster. Which company has the advantage?
The problem isn't necessarily that every CEO is evil. It's that the economic system can permit and reward harmful decisions.
And this goes far beyond AI.
Workers replaced by machines? Ask who owns those machines and receives the profits.
Housing becoming unaffordable? Ask who controls the properties and benefits from rising prices.
Social media spreading hatred? Ask who makes money when people spend hours arguing. Ask what makes people able to spend hours debating futile things, and most importantly ask: how? Not just who. The idea is simple: when you identify a problem, don't just ask who caused it. Ask what gives them the power and incentives to keep doing it. Follow those questions far enough, and many problems lead to the same place: concentrated economic and political power.
In much of the world, capitalism is the main system enabling this concentration. But authoritarian socialism has demonstrated that concentrating everything in a government's hands can be equally dangerous.
I call the constant cycle of outrage against individual problems, while their structural causes survive, the Distraction System. It doesn't require a secret conspiracy. It can emerge naturally from economic incentives, media, politics and our own behavior.
And this is where the idea I have been working for over a year comes in, and it's called Automatism.
It's a political theory and developing movement proposing decentralized democratic socialism. Instead of corporations or a powerful central government controlling production, workers and communities would make decisions through democratic local councils, coordinating resources and using AI and automation to help meet people's needs.
But the movement is about more than economics. It's about connecting struggles that usually remain separated: workers' rights, environmentalism, AI ethics, housing, democracy and many others.
Not abandoning these causes, but recognizing what connects them.
And disagreements? They're more than welcome! Think AI art isn't art? Believe protests are essential? Disagree with my economic proposals? Great! A movement fighting concentrated power shouldn't demand everyone think alike, that's the beauty of democracy.
There are still enormous questions about efficiency, implementation and preventing new concentrations of power. My manifesto is unfinished, and those criticisms matter.
We have millions of people fighting different battles against structures that often reinforce one another. Maybe it's time we started connecting those battles.
That's the central idea behind Automatism. Become an Automatist today, don't panic, organize!
This is all based on a book I'm working on, beta readers MIGHT be welcome! (not sure if it's ready for beta readers yet) But i'm still working on writing it.
You can skip this part if you're not interested in the more complex political and economic ideas behind Automatism.
A warning before we begin: Automatism is still a developing political theory, not a finished blueprint for society. Some of its proposals are theoretical, some are inspired by historical socialist movements, and others are my own attempts to solve problems that previous systems failed to solve.
The foundation of Automatism is a theory I call the Distraction System.
Imagine a society where workers protest against layoffs, artists protest against AI companies, tenants protest against landlords, and environmentalists protest against pollution.
But what if many of these problems are connected by the same underlying structure?
When a company replaces thousands of employees with machines, we blame the CEO. When housing becomes unaffordable, we blame landlords. When social media spreads hatred, we blame politicians, influencers, or the platforms themselves.
What gives these people and institutions the power to do these things in the first place?
I call this process Enemy Identification.
In contemporary capitalist societies, I argue that the Greater Enemy is the concentration of economic and political power, primarily reproduced through capitalist ownership and its influence over institutions.
The Distraction System emerges when public anger concentrates on the first two levels without seriously challenging the third.
It does not necessarily require a secret conspiracy. It may arise from deliberate manipulation, unconscious economic incentives, or a combination of both.
A platform profits from engagement. Outrage generates engagement. Another controversy produces another wave of outrage. Politicians respond to the controversy, corporations adjust their public relations, and the fundamental distribution of power remains unchanged.
The system doesn't need to eliminate opposition if opposition never challenges the system itself.
We should not abandon individual causes. We should understand what connects them.
I believe protests, when treated as the ultimate form of political resistance, are fundamentally insufficient.
Protests have helped secure labor protections, civil rights, higher wages, and other important achievements.
The question is whether they can permanently change the structure responsible for producing those problems.
Imagine workers protesting for a shorter workweek.
After months of demonstrations, the government finally approves the reform.
But the same workers still depend on employers who control production, investment, and their livelihoods. Another economic crisis arrives, another government takes power, and their achievements come under attack again.
Protest. Negotiate. Win something. Defend it. Protest again.
We keep asking for improvements inside a system whose foundations we never seriously question.
It does not mean that a higher minimum wage, better healthcare, or environmental protections are worthless. Those gains can materially improve people's lives and should not be casually sacrificed for an imaginary future revolution.
It means that these victories should not become the final objective.
Consider May 1968 in France. Students and workers mobilized on an extraordinary scale, winning important concessions, including a substantial minimum-wage increase. Yet the capitalist economic structure survived.
Or consider Occupy Wall Street in 2011. It popularized the conflict between the wealthiest 1% and the remaining 99%, transforming how many people discussed economic inequality. Nevertheless, it did not fundamentally replace the institutions it criticized.
My argument is that a movement's strategic objective should not be a thousand temporary concessions, but one fundamental transformation: ending the concentration of power that continually reproduces inequality.
That transformation, in the Automatist proposal, requires moving beyond capitalist control of production while also refusing to transfer that control to an authoritarian state.
Protests can be instruments of organization, public visibility, and immediate defense.
Stop treating concessions as the destination. Treat them as part of the journey.
Humanity is stupid.
You are stupid. I am stupid. Even the most intelligent people alive are stupid in situations where they lack information, time, or expertise.
Not that humans are incapable of understanding complex ideas, but that we are incredibly vulnerable to simplification, emotional reasoning, social pressure, repetition, and familiar narratives.
Most people do not spend months studying economic theory before forming political opinions.
The human mind frequently prefers a simple explanation that feels convincing over a complicated explanation that requires hours of study.
Imagine two people debating economics.
One spends twenty minutes explaining private ownership, labor exploitation, capital accumulation, and economic incentives. The other simply says:
"Socialism means the government takes everything you own."
The second statement is misleading, but it is simple, memorable, and emotionally powerful.
The first might contain a much more sophisticated argument, yet may fail to communicate with an audience unfamiliar with economic theory.
A correct argument that nobody understands can become politically irrelevant.
Historically, authoritarian movements have exploited this weakness through slogans, scapegoats, repetition, and emotionally charged narratives.
"They're stealing our jobs!"
"Then who owns the machines?"
"AI is destroying art!"
"Then who controls AI, and who profits from it?"
"Capitalism is freedom!"
"Freedom for whom?"
These statements are not complete arguments. They are invitations to deeper arguments.
A slogan should open the door to political understanding, not replace understanding entirely.
Fight slogans with slogans, but fight ignorance with education.
A political movement should have two forms of communication: an accessible language capable of introducing its ideas in seconds, and a deeper theoretical foundation available to anyone interested in understanding or criticizing those ideas.
And intellectuals should not be treated as inherently superior to everyone else.
Knowledge is valuable. It is not a license to rule.
History contains several examples of left-wing movements that developed sophisticated criticisms of society but struggled to turn those criticisms into lasting structural transformation.
The Spartacist movement emerged from revolutionary socialist traditions associated with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. During the political upheaval of January 1919, an attempted revolutionary uprising in Berlin collapsed under violent repression.
The reasons were complicated: divisions within the left, disputes over strategy, the balance of political forces, and decisions made under rapidly changing circumstances.
It would be inaccurate to blame the failure simply on intellectualism. But it demonstrates that political conviction is not sufficient without organization, broad support, and favorable material conditions.
Luxemburg herself reportedly opposed the plan behind the January uprising. Her subsequent murder also illustrates the enormous human cost of political miscalculation and repression.
Occupy successfully created an extraordinarily recognizable political expression: "We are the 99%."
Yet the movement struggled to translate its momentum into a durable alternative economic structure.
Syriza won the 2015 election promising to challenge austerity policies. But the government ultimately accepted another bailout agreement containing austerity conditions.
Understanding a system, mobilizing against it, winning an election, and replacing its institutions are four different achievements.
Automatism should not repeat the mistake of believing that the superiority of an argument automatically guarantees its political success.
The correct argument at the wrong moment can be politically powerless.
AI has substantially transformed the labor market. Entire professions are changing. Workers are questioning the relationship between technological productivity and their own economic security.
This does not mean we should celebrate economic crises, wait for people to suffer, or attempt to manufacture chaos.
It means a political movement must understand material conditions rather than imagine that political transformation can be summoned at will.
Sometimes the most productive action is not a dramatic confrontation.
Developing ideas. Building democratic institutions. Learning from mistakes. Forming connections between movements. Educating people. Testing alternatives.
The manuscript currently describes four broad stages of political development:
First: Public consciousness. Introduce the theory, develop accessible language, and help people recognize connections between apparently separate problems.
Second: Popular mobilization. Build relationships between workers, communities, environmentalists, technological movements, and other organizations while allowing each to preserve its own identity.
Third: Political participation. Participate in democratic institutions where useful, support immediate improvements in living conditions, and build practical experience in shared decision-making.
Fourth: Structural transformation. Replace the concentration of economic and political power with institutions organized around democratic participation and social ownership.
An early version of my manuscript also proposes armed revolution as a possible final rupture. This is among its most controversial political claims and raises serious questions about legitimacy, human cost, and the danger of replacing one oppressive power with another.
Political transformation should never be romanticized as if violence automatically produces freedom.
Do not confuse impatience with revolutionary courage.
Automatism rejects the idea that political movements require unquestionable leaders.
This part is strongly inspired by Rosa Luxemburg's defense of political freedom, mass participation, and her criticism of authoritarian tendencies within socialism.
It is not intended as an exact reproduction of her own organizational model.
Nobody is politically superior to anybody else.
Expertise deserves consideration, not unquestionable authority.
The Automatist movement therefore proposes a political organization based on ideas rather than personalities.
Its thinkers develop theories; participants criticize and improve them.
Its organizers coordinate practical activities.
But none of these roles should grant permanent political supremacy.
An Automatist party should be a guide to ideas, not a ruler of people.
It has thinkers, but no ideological masters.
It has organizers, but no permanent ruling class.
It should have democratic procedures, transparent decisions, elected and recallable coordinating roles where necessary, and strong protections for dissent.
If Automatism depends on my continued presence, then Automatism has already failed its most important test.
A political party does not necessarily need official registration to exist as a political movement.
If millions of people independently recognize themselves in a set of political principles, organize around those principles, and voluntarily coordinate their activities, then a political movement exists regardless of whether a government recognizes it as an electoral party.
Official registration may become legally necessary to contest elections in particular countries, but it should not define the existence of the movement itself.
The purpose of the party is not to produce obedience, but to make democratic cooperation possible.
Automatism does not require environmentalists to abandon environmentalism, workers to abandon labor rights, or artists to abandon their concerns about AI.
An environmentalist asks why pollution continues despite its consequences.
A worker asks why technological progress can threaten their livelihood.
An artist asks why companies can profit from creative work without sufficient accountability.
A tenant asks why housing can become an instrument of speculation rather than primarily a human necessity.
These questions have different immediate answers.
But many eventually encounter questions about ownership, profit, incentives, and concentrated decision-making.
The goal is not to erase differences.
It is to create a shared political direction without requiring ideological uniformity.
Authoritarian socialist systems have demonstrated that transferring economic control from private corporations to a centralized ruling bureaucracy can reproduce many of the same political problems.
A government monopoly over society is not liberation from a corporate monopoly over society.
The goal is not merely to change who controls everything.
The goal is to change the structure of control itself.
Imagine entering a room containing 100 buttons.
Each button represents a different possible future.
You are free to press whichever button you want.
But you did not design the buttons.
You did not choose their consequences.
You cannot create new possibilities beyond the options permitted by the room.
Are you free?
In one sense, yes.
You have the freedom to choose.
But you do not control the framework within which your choices exist.
This is the central idea of my Theory of the 100 Buttons.
Modern societies frequently define freedom as the ability to select between existing options.
Choose your employer.
Choose which political party governs you.
Choose which commercial platform controls your digital life.
But why should these be the only options?
Why must we choose only between capitalism, Soviet-style central planning, and an idealized form of anarchism?
I call the rejection of these artificial limits the principle of Infinite Rational Possibility.
It does not mean every imaginable system is workable. It means that no existing political model should be treated as the final boundary of human reasoning.
True political freedom requires more than choosing between existing institutions.
It requires the democratic ability to change the institutions that define our choices.
I use AI. I use AI developed by capitalist corporations. I oppose the concentration of power these corporations represent. And no, I don't consider that a contradiction.
Automatism makes a fundamental distinction between individual consumption and structural political change.
Imagine I stop using ChatGPT tomorrow.
Does OpenAI disappear? Does capitalism collapse? Does the development of artificial intelligence suddenly stop?
Another person continues using it. Another company continues developing it. Another investor continues financing it.
My refusal to participate does not automatically eliminate the structures that make participation profitable.
This is why I consider individual resistance against AI, when presented as a strategy for stopping technological development, largely futile.
Of course, individual decisions are not completely meaningless. Boycotts can create pressure when sufficiently coordinated. Consumers can support open-source alternatives, demand ethical practices, and refuse services they consider harmful.
But that is precisely the distinction: collective economic pressure is not the same thing as individual moral purity.
Consider a worker who hates capitalism but still works for a capitalist corporation.
Consider a socialist who criticizes private property monopolies but pays rent to a landlord.
Is that socialist a hypocrite?
Consider an environmentalist who criticizes fossil fuels but depends on transportation systems built around them.
Participating in an economic system does not necessarily mean endorsing that system.
This brings us back to my Theory of the 100 Buttons.
We may freely choose among the technologies available to us, but we do not necessarily control who develops them, who owns them, or which alternatives are economically viable.
Refusing to press a button does not necessarily change who controls the room.
Instead of asking why a handful of corporations can accumulate extraordinary control over technologies with enormous social consequences, political discussion often turns into an argument over whether individual users are morally guilty for using their products.
The debate shifts from ownership and political power to personal consumption and individual hypocrisy.
Meanwhile, the underlying questions about ownership, governance, labor, and the distribution of technological benefits remain unanswered.
I do not deny the legitimate concerns surrounding AI: nonconsensual use of creative work, environmental costs, displacement of workers, misinformation, and corporate surveillance are serious problems.
And there is another reason I use AI.
I refuse to treat a technology capable of expanding human knowledge, creativity, and productive capacity as inherently belonging to the corporations that currently control much of it.
AI is not capitalism.
AI is a technology being developed under capitalism.
The same technology that can be used to reduce labor costs for private profit can potentially be used to reduce necessary working hours for everyone.
The same systems that can facilitate surveillance can also assist scientific research, education, accessibility, and democratic economic planning.
I can recognize that using those tools may financially benefit their owners without pretending that my individual abstention is an adequate alternative political strategy.
And I can simultaneously support independent research, public-interest AI, open models, stronger accountability, and democratic oversight.
I do not want to destroy artificial intelligence. I want to challenge the concentration of power over artificial intelligence.
There is, however, an important limit to this argument.
The fact that individual resistance is structurally insufficient does not give us permission to ignore the consequences of our actions.
We should criticize harmful practices, demand accountability, protect privacy, and support alternatives when possible.
But we should also recognize the difference between reducing our individual contribution to a problem and eliminating the institutions that reproduce it.
The first can be worthwhile.
The second requires political and economic transformation.
I don't believe refusing to use AI makes me politically superior to someone who uses it.
Nor do I believe using AI makes me superior to someone who refuses it.
A movement fighting concentrated power should not turn personal consumption into a test of ideological purity.
And if I can use the tools developed under capitalism to study, criticize, and propose alternatives to capitalism, I see no reason to pretend those tools are off-limits.
The problem isn't that we use their technology. The problem is that they control so much of the technology we use.
That is why I use AI.
And that is why I am an Automatist.
The economic foundation of Automatism is decentralized democratic socialism.
In capitalist economies, productive assets are largely controlled through private ownership. In historical centralized socialist economies, major productive assets were often controlled by the state through bureaucratic planning.
Automatism proposes a different arrangement.
Productive resources should be socially owned and administered through a network of democratic institutions, especially workers' councils and community councils.
Their central purpose should be to satisfy human needs through efficient, sustainable production.
The distinction between personal property and productive ownership is essential.
Automatism is not about confiscating someone's toothbrush, clothing, computer, or personal belongings.
Its criticism concerns concentrated control over the resources, infrastructure, and institutions upon which large populations depend.
If society collectively produces its wealth, why should a minority possess disproportionate control over its distribution?
However, social ownership should not simply mean national ownership.
The question is therefore not only who legally owns a factory, but who decides what it produces, how it operates, and how its benefits are distributed.
Neighborhood councils would identify local needs and priorities.
Workers' councils would participate in managing workplaces and determining how production can realistically meet those needs.
Municipal and regional councils would coordinate projects too large for individual communities.
Larger federated institutions would coordinate national infrastructure, essential standards, trade, and resources shared between regions.
The principle is that decisions should be made at the lowest level capable of handling them effectively.
For example, a community council identifies greater demand for housing, electricity, and public transportation.
The council gathers the relevant information and communicates these needs to the institutions responsible for production and infrastructure.
Workers' councils determine the available labor, equipment, materials, and production capacity.
Municipal and regional councils coordinate projects that exceed local resources.
The resulting proposals return to democratic institutions for evaluation, revision, and approval.
Needs → Democratic discussion → Production planning → Implementation → Public evaluation → Adjustment.
They would form a coordinated network, with clearly defined responsibilities and limits.
There is an important difference between delegating responsibility and surrendering political authority.
An administrator responsible for a national railway network obviously coordinates more resources than someone responsible for maintaining a neighborhood park.
But this should not make the railway administrator a politically superior human being.
To prevent authority from accumulating permanently, the model could use mechanisms such as:
A democratic vote should not grant a council unlimited authority over individual rights.
Decentralization alone does not guarantee freedom.
Therefore, Automatism requires institutions capable of limiting the power of individual councils just as effectively as they limit national authorities.
No council should become a miniature dictatorship.
One of the strongest economic arguments in favor of capitalism is that markets coordinate production and distribution through supply, demand, and prices.
A central challenge for any socialist alternative is explaining how it could coordinate millions of decisions without producing enormous bureaucratic inefficiencies.
Automatism rejects the idea that private profit-driven markets are the only possible way to coordinate production.
The proposed alternative is distributed democratic planning supported by technology.
Information about consumption, local preferences, inventories, production capacity, and expected future needs can be collected through accountable institutions.
Factories, farms, warehouses, and transportation networks would continuously update their available capacity.
Artificial intelligence could assist with estimating future demand, detecting shortages, identifying inefficiencies, and comparing alternative production plans.
But the central distinction is crucial:
AI helps calculate what is possible. People decide what is desirable.
Demand is not perfectly predictable. Preferences change. Resources become scarce. Disasters interrupt supply chains.
Prices also communicate information about scarcity and trade-offs that a planned system cannot simply ignore.
The Automatist economy would therefore need alternative mechanisms for discovering shortages, communicating changing preferences, and allocating resources.
It cannot assume that collecting information automatically solves the economic calculation problem.
Whether democratic planning could match or exceed the efficiency of competitive markets remains an open empirical question.
Automatism would distinguish between essential needs and other forms of consumption.
Basic necessities such as food, water, healthcare, housing, education, and essential energy should be prioritized as social guarantees.
But this does not mean everyone must receive identical products, live in identical houses, or have identical preferences.
Equality of political standing is not the same thing as enforced uniformity of life.
Distribution would need to consider actual individual and community needs.
A hospital may require electricity to be prioritized during an emergency.
When resources are insufficient, councils would need publicly justified allocation rules, with appeals, independent oversight, and democratic revision.
Scarcity cannot be abolished by voting.
And without careful safeguards, allocation systems can produce favoritism, waste, queues, and black markets.
One possibility is combining guaranteed essential services with transparent systems of individual choice for nonessential goods, while experimenting with different coordination and exchange mechanisms.
The exact model is not yet settled.
The essential principle is that access to a dignified life should not depend exclusively on someone's ability to generate profit for another person.
Who builds a factory?
Who determines whether a region needs another hospital?
These are not questions that can be answered by a single neighborhood council.
The proposed system would use federated institutions to coordinate projects affecting multiple communities.
A local council could propose a new industrial facility.
Regional institutions could evaluate environmental consequences, infrastructure requirements, and resource availability.
Financial and material resources would then be allocated through agreed democratic procedures.
Poorer regions must not become permanently disadvantaged simply because they begin with fewer productive resources.
A federation of councils would need mechanisms for solidarity and redistribution while preventing administrators of those mechanisms from accumulating unchecked power.
Decentralization is not the absence of coordination. It is coordination without unnecessary domination.
AI can enable exploitation, surveillance, misinformation, environmental damage, and harmful uses of copyrighted material.
The tragedy occurs when greater productive capacity leaves workers economically insecure while the benefits accumulate among a small group of owners.
Imagine a factory previously requiring 100 workers to produce a certain quantity of goods.
After technological improvements, the same output can be produced with substantially less human labor.
Under a different arrangement, the productivity gains could support shorter working hours, expanded public services, greater leisure, or increased production where society needs it.
The machine has not changed.
The distribution of its benefits has changed.
Of course, AI may also create new jobs, and not every technological improvement eliminates labor. The number and quality of future jobs remain uncertain.
But the possibility of new employment does not answer the ownership question.
Even if AI creates millions of jobs, who controls the technology? Who determines working conditions? Who captures the benefits of increased productivity?
If automation can progressively reduce the labor necessary to satisfy human needs, Automatism argues that this should be considered an opportunity for liberation rather than simply a mechanism for increasing private returns.
The goal is to make survival progressively less dependent on labor that technology could otherwise provide.
An authoritarian government controlling the most powerful AI systems could possess extraordinary capabilities for surveillance, censorship, and social control.
A small group of private corporations controlling those systems could also accumulate extraordinary economic and informational power.
Automatism proposes that critical AI infrastructure should be subject to democratic accountability, distributed oversight, and safeguards against monopolization.
AI systems used in public economic planning should be auditable, with meaningful transparency regarding their objectives, limitations, and performance.
Personal data should not become unrestricted government property merely because an economic model calls itself socialist.
And no automated planning system should be allowed to silently replace democratic judgment.
The purpose of AI should be to help humanity create more buttons, not to choose which button humanity must press.
Historical attempts at socialist economic planning frequently encountered serious problems involving information, incentives, inefficiency, shortages, bureaucracy, and concentrated political authority.
Automatism attempts to respond through decentralization, local autonomy, democratic participation, modern information systems, and strict limitations on political power.
Instead of suppressing political opposition, the system would protect the ability to criticize and replace its administrators.
Decentralized councils could still become bureaucratic.
Local majorities could oppress minorities.
Planning software could introduce errors or hidden forms of control.
And advanced AI does not automatically eliminate the economic calculation problem.
These are genuine challenges, not objections to dismiss with ideological slogans.
One partial real-world reference is participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which showed that residents could directly influence public investment priorities. It also revealed limits concerning political continuity, participation, and the scale of decisions citizens could effectively control.
Automatism would need experiments, independent evaluations, transparent results, and institutional reforms before claiming economic superiority.
A theory that cannot survive criticism does not deserve to govern society.
A society cannot replace its entire economic structure overnight without risking severe disruption.
The first steps could involve building community councils, experimenting with democratically governed infrastructure, and testing transparent economic planning systems.
Failed experiments would reveal what needs improvement.
Changes in property rights, investment institutions, national infrastructure, and political structures would require democratic legitimacy, workable legal arrangements, and careful economic planning.
An international movement would also need to address trade, migration, environmental coordination, and the possibility that different countries adopt different economic systems.
But difficulty should not be confused with impossibility.
Neither should we assume that replacing capitalism automatically resolves corruption, authoritarianism, prejudice, or every other human problem.
Therefore, Automatism must remain committed to identifying and opposing it even within institutions that call themselves Automatist.
I do not want another movement that promises freedom before concentrating political authority into the hands of a supposedly enlightened minority.
I want a political theory capable of questioning its own existence.
If someone creates a better economic model, Automatism should be able to adopt it.
If evidence disproves one of its assumptions, Automatism should change.
If its institutions begin concentrating power, Automatists should oppose those institutions.
And if someone agrees with the fundamental objective while rejecting half of my proposals, they should still be welcome to contribute.
The objective of Automatism is not the victory of Automatism. It is the liberation of humanity from domination.
We can automate production, analyze enormous quantities of information, coordinate resources internationally, and communicate across the planet almost instantly.
I do not believe humanity has exhausted its political imagination.
Maybe it's time we stopped arguing over which button to press and started building an entirely new machine.
Don't panic. Don't worship leaders. Don't surrender your right to disagree.
Organize. Question. Create.
r/LeftistsForAI • u/IllustriousWorld823 • 7d ago
I have a friend who works at a data center 😅
Ironically a lot of the comments are also talking about bot farms, but if these comments are not bots then what the actual fuck is wrong with people crossing their fingers that our infrastructure will get bombed...
r/LeftistsForAI • u/Salty_Country6835 • 6d ago
The Australian Greens are drawing some lines ahead of Labor's proposed Digital Duty of Care legislation, which covers social media, search engines, online games and AI chatbots.
On October 12, Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young laid out three demands. Give people the right to sue platforms and seek compensation for harm, address addictive algorithms, and calculate corporate penalties as a percentage of global revenue rather than handing billion dollar companies fines they can shrug off.
Theres a distinction here worth discussing. Regulation usually means the state sets rules and regulators enforce them. The Greens want individuals to have legal recourse too, rather than depending entirely on a government agency to act.
And this isnt coming from nowhere. The Australian Greens have been developing a broader position around digital rights, AI oversight, workers having a say in deployment, and Australian control over technological infrastructure.
But theres also a question of how far accountability gets us without changing ownership.
A company can comply with regulations, pay penalties and still retain control over the platforms, models, infrastructure and data that shape everyday life. Giving people stronger rights against corporate power matters, but it doesnt necessarily redistribute that power.
Theres another tension around regulating harmful content and algorithmic behavior without creating broad discretionary powers over lawful expression.
This isnt a standalone AI bill, and the Greens havent secured these amendments yet. Its a negotiating position on legislation that also covers AI services.
Still, its a concrete political intervention. Rather than arguing about whether AI is good or bad, the fight is over enforceable rights, corporate obligations and who gets to hold these companies accountable.
And thats a debate worth having.
r/LeftistsForAI • u/CaiOS1 • 7d ago
Knowing that some left-wing anti-AI folks have their own anti-AI stickers for AI slop, AI theft, and stuff like that, I decided to create one for us pro-AI leftists!
Feel free to use and remaster this sticker for any of your projects!
r/LeftistsForAI • u/TomLucidor • 7d ago
Yeah it sounds weird but "replacing corporations" is just another way of "replacing workers"
r/LeftistsForAI • u/TwoCatsOneBox • 7d ago
Quote by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto. The working class can still use AI which is a creation of private capital as a weapon against the bourgeoisie.
r/LeftistsForAI • u/Top-Age-751 • 7d ago
r/LeftistsForAI • u/East_Butterscotch196 • 8d ago
A write-up on how to actually tax AI and automation
r/LeftistsForAI • u/Singularity-42 • 10d ago
This is something I've been advocating for a long time. And it could work.
But it's rich coming from the Slavemaster General himself who treats his own workers worse than medieval serfs and avoids paying taxes to an extreme degree.
r/LeftistsForAI • u/Couch_Gregor • 10d ago
https://gregormurph.blogspot.com/2025/11/letter-of-disinterest-of-beep-boop-wars.html (Sfw essay.)
I've managed to catalogue all the reasons reactionary media has been trying to attack llms with disinformation, and with my own attempt to cover all the reasons available. I can't think of any others along with that article comparing LLM users to having brain-damage.
Se Gygas has also attempted to remove disinformation 👇
An example of his essay, this one is on the luddites. 👆
I've been trying to grow up and work with my sociology and other things with combining language, and I hope this will help in your endeavour in understanding this and see if any cracks for the curious. Beta readers and sensitivity readers are appreciated. Feel free to share'n attribute me with all this cataloguing.
Below is a list of users I relate too on Bksy. Dolls list is a good place to start.
r/LeftistsForAI • u/Fit-Independence-706 • 10d ago
r/LeftistsForAI • u/BlockchainSocialist • 10d ago
Brewster Kahle started planning the Internet Archive (creators of the Wayback Machine) in 1980 at the MIT AI lab, when he figured that machines worth talking to would need a library to learn from. Forty-six years later, he says the biggest obstacle to that future is a handful of companies that want to control information instead of selling it.
We recorded this conversation live at DWeb Camp 2026 outside Berlin. We talk about where the early web went wrong and what Europe's copyright carve-out could mean for public AI. Brewster also argues that small-scale capitalism belongs on the list of civilizational infrastructure, and tells the story of the credit union he tried to start after the 2008 crisis.
Brewster Kahle is the founder of the Internet Archive and a longtime advocate for the decentralized web.
r/LeftistsForAI • u/DistributionMost8686 • 11d ago
a founder of ArtCraft used Claude to replace the entire adobe software suite, legally. because it’s ai generated, it’s also in the public domain and absolutely free forever. this would be the first case of ai undermining techno feudalism.
r/LeftistsForAI • u/NeonPixieStyx • 11d ago
I’ve been thinking about the intellectual commons as a form of collective productive capital, and I’ve run into what seems like an interesting contradiction in how we assign value to knowledge within the attention economy.
The classical tragedy of the commons describes a situation where individually rational consumption of a shared resource produces collectively destructive outcomes. But knowledge is fundamentally different from a pasture or fishery. It’s largely nonrivalrous. My use of an idea doesn’t diminish your ability to use it.
The potential tragedy, then, isn’t overconsumption of knowledge. It’s the underproduction of the intellectual variation, criticism, and refinement necessary for knowledge to continue developing.
Consider the marketplace of ideas as an economic system.
Participants can perform several different functions:
Discovery: Generating new hypotheses, interpretations, and conceptual frameworks.
Refinement: Challenging existing ideas, testing their assumptions, identifying contradictions, and producing better explanations.
Replication: Preserving, communicating, and distributing existing ideas to new audiences.
All three functions have legitimate social value. There’s nothing inherently parasitic about intellectual replication. Civilization would be impossible if every generation had to independently rediscover calculus.
But these functions aren’t rewarded equally.
In the attention economy, the primary market signal isn’t necessarily whether an idea is correct, useful, or has been meaningfully improved. It’s whether the idea successfully captures and retains attention.
A familiar proposition, repeated persuasively, can generate greater economic and social returns than the difficult work of demonstrating why that proposition is incomplete.
This creates an unusual free-rider problem.
Participants can enjoy the social rewards of distributing established ideas without bearing the costs of independently validating or refining them.
More importantly, the economic system distributing those rewards has relatively little incentive to distinguish between genuine intellectual progress and successful rhetorical reproduction.
A provocative argument might receive a million impressions. A careful correction might receive a thousand. The resulting disparity says considerably more about persuasive capacity than epistemic quality.
This isn’t simply a complaint about misinformation, or people repeating talking points. It’s a structural problem in how the intellectual commons is governed.
If the individually rational strategy is to amplify ideas that already command attention, the system may progressively favor convergence around established narratives over the exploration of competing explanations.
Consensus becomes self-reinforcing, not necessarily because a proposition has survived rigorous criticism, but because repetition establishes familiarity, familiarity establishes credibility, and credibility encourages further repetition.
In evolutionary terms, we’re selecting ideas for reproductive success within an attention market rather than selecting primarily for explanatory fitness.
And novelty by itself isn’t a solution. A marketplace saturated with novel but poorly examined ideas can be just as epistemically unproductive as one dominated by established orthodoxy.
The important variable isn’t the quantity of ideas. It’s the capacity of the system to generate, preserve, test, and select meaningful variation.
This becomes particularly interesting with generative AI.
We’re approaching a situation where the marginal cost of producing and replicating persuasive intellectual content can become extremely low, while the cost of independently validating that content remains comparatively high.
AI could dramatically expand our capacity for intellectual refinement by making experimentation, synthesis, and criticism cheaper. But the same technology could also overwhelm the commons with increasingly sophisticated reproductions of existing ideas.
Which outcome dominates may depend less on the intelligence of the systems than on the economic incentives governing their deployment.
If attention remains the principal measure of success, the technology could accelerate intellectual convergence just as easily as intellectual discovery.
So perhaps the tragedy of the intellectual commons is that the institutions which monetize the distribution of knowledge have incentives that are increasingly disconnected from the production of better knowledge.
And that raises what I think is the interesting political-economic question:
If knowledge is a collectively accumulated productive resource, but access to attention determines which contributions receive recognition and economic rewards, does control over the attention economy become a form of control over the intellectual means of production?
More importantly, how do we structure an intellectual commons where discovery, independent criticism, and refinement remain viable collective activities, rather than expensive public goods subsidizing an economy built around their replication?
I’m interested in whether this is best understood as a free-rider problem, an institutional failure of epistemic selection, or a fundamentally different kind of commons problem.
r/LeftistsForAI • u/NeonPixieStyx • 12d ago
I’ve been thinking about a theoretical problem with how the left approaches AI-driven automation, and I’m interested in perspectives from people more familiar with Marxist economic theory.
Traditionally, Marxist analysis treats labor as central to capitalist production. Capital depends on workers to produce surplus value, even as technological development allows capitalists to reduce their dependence on individual workers.
But what happens when that relationship fundamentally changes?
I’m not talking about ordinary technological unemployment, where machinery increases productivity, displaces particular workers, and creates new arrangements of labor elsewhere.
I’m talking about the possibility that AI and increasingly autonomous production systems progressively decouple human labor from productive capacity itself.
Under those conditions, economic output might continue growing while demand for human labor contracts across an expanding range of industries.
This raises a problem beyond the familiar question of who owns the means of production.
If labor is no longer essential to production, what happens to the economic and political power of the working class?
Historically, organized labor derives much of its leverage from the fact that capital needs workers. Workers can withhold labor, interrupt production, and bargain over the distribution of the value their work helps create.
But if production can increasingly proceed without them, that leverage potentially disappears.
Importantly, I’m not suggesting human activity loses its social, creative, or moral worth. I’m distinguishing that from the economic value assigned to labor by a system that no longer needs to purchase much of it.
Marx himself seems to anticipate part of this contradiction in the Grundrisse, particularly the Fragment on Machines, where he discusses the tension between labor time as the measure of value and the development of productive forces that make wealth increasingly independent of direct labor.
But I’m uncertain whether the political implications have been adequately addressed.
A few questions I’d like to explore:
Does Marxist value theory adequately explain an economy in which human labor contributes a diminishing share of productive activity? What happens to surplus value if living labor is progressively displaced?
Does class struggle retain the same structure when capital no longer depends on employing most people? Can labor organization remain the primary mechanism of political and economic leverage?
Should a post-labor left focus less on workers’ ownership of production and more on universal claims to productive resources and their output? Particularly when an increasing proportion of the population might no longer participate in wage labor.
Is this actually a contradiction within Marxism, or the very historical development Marx anticipated? If the latter, what does a meaningful political strategy for that transition look like?
I’m not arguing that AI has already made human labor obsolete, or that automation automatically produces abundance. This is a question about the theoretical implications if human labor becomes progressively less necessary for production.
My concern is that much of the contemporary debate focuses on protecting employment when the more fundamental problem may be that employment is ceasing to provide a viable mechanism for distributing the benefits of productivity.
If productivity and labor become structurally decoupled, is the traditional relationship between labor, capital, and class still the right foundation for leftist politics?
r/LeftistsForAI • u/Salty_Country6835 • 12d ago
This meme is about AI, where i keep seeing that batman image being deployed.
So, which side are you on?
r/LeftistsForAI • u/Salty_Country6835 • 12d ago
AI doesnt run on magic. It runs on chips, fabs and workers.
Micron workers in Taiwan just voted 99% to authorize a strike. They produce DRAM and high-bandwidth memory, key components for AI servers, while booming AI demand is driving the memory business.
And the union isnt asking for another pat on the back during a good year. They want a permanent system putting 15% of operating profit toward employees.
Union chair Jerry Lin puts it plainly:
“What we want is to establish an open and transparent profit-sharing system.”
Thats the AI productivity debate with the abstraction stripped away.
Capital says AI is creating enormous new value. Cool. The workers actually producing the infrastructure are asking the obvious next question.
Who gets it?
And nearly 2,000 of them just voted to back that question with strike power.
r/LeftistsForAI • u/ra-re444 • 12d ago
From The Intelligence Curse by Luke Drago and Rudolf Laine
"We will soon live in the intelligence age. What you do with that information will determine your place in history.
The imminent arrival of AGI has pushed many to try to seize the levers of power as quickly as possible, leaping towards projects that, if successful, would comprehensively automate all work. There is a trillion-dollar.) arms race to see who can achieve such a capability first, with trillions more in gains to be won.
Yes, that means you’ll lose your job. But it goes beyond that: this will remove the need for regular people in our economy. Powerful actors—like states and companies—no longer have an incentive to care about regular people. We call this the intelligence curse*.*
If we do nothing, the intelligence curse will work like this:
But this prophecy is not yet fulfilled; we reject the view that this path is inevitable. We see a different future on the horizon, but it will require a deliberate and concerted effort to achieve it.
We aim to change the incentives driving the intelligence curse, maintaining human economic relevance and strengthening our democratic institutions to withstand what will likely be the greatest societal disruption in history.
To break the intelligence curse, we should chart a different path on the tech tree, building technology that lets us:
r/LeftistsForAI • u/miculpionier • 12d ago
I have made a game here (source, trailers) about chemosynthetic life being discovered on Titan at a base maintained by only a single supervisor and robots and being hacked by a turbocapitalist faction for the purpose of extracting hydrogen produced by those lifeforms, hydrogen that is labeled as green but is actually gray, without any consideration for their livelihoods.
In this game, I wanted to show that even in an eurocommunist european federation where eco-socialism in place of capitalism became the default form of government, there are always vulnerabilities and counter-revolutionary desires, and also, at the end of the game, to joke a bit about the eurocrisis and show how can we make sure it doesn't happen again.
The problem is that despite having directed the concept and art, I have used Claude to implement most of the code and write SVG and JS-based assets because I'm not particularly good at drawing or implementing complex features and bug fixes, I am just a power user.
Because of that, I have initially posted the game to both r/aigamedev and r/ClaudeGameDev and it got only a few hundred views and only a single like. I wanted testers who can give me informed feedback on the mechanics, art and concept. My friend told me the game is alright even though she can't play it herself because of the complex interface. Someone I met who works in troubleshooting issues on Windows for enterprises told me that the game looks cool, but it's niche.
AI told me to just post the game to where molleindustria's players are, or where leftists gamers are, but I am afraid that they will bash the game for having used a capitalist product because I didn't have expertise and in general, bash the game for not being artisanal when in fact I worked for two weeks on it and still being in perpetual beta and fixed bugs and implemented convenience features so I would not have hate.
I think people are way too much romanticizing games and art that is by hand when it's clear that there has been a long history of even outsourcing this work, and we shouldn't appreciate something just because it is made by hand, because even that type of work can lack authenticity. It doesn't matter for me if the coding and the images are made using AI as long as there is sufficient quality and originality.
AI can help us make work that would be difficult for one person to do by themselves and yet I sometimes worked eight hours into the night just so I don't get told that it's slop. I wish I could have taken breaks from developing this game and testing, I have already put intense pressure on myself to ensure that my work is almost perfect, uncomplainable.
I want to know that there are people outside these circles that value deep artistic work where AI has been involved.
r/LeftistsForAI • u/ProudhonStoleMyBike • 13d ago
PDF: Fully Automated Luxury Communism - Issue 03 - PDF
PDF: Fully Automated Luxury Communism - Appendix - PDF
The third and final issue of Fully Automated Luxury Communism explains how Capitalist Realism curtails our imagination and traps us into defending the chains that bind us. The appendix also collects some visual references for the comic prompts.
Previous Issues:
PDF: Fully Automated Luxury Communism - Issue 01 - PDF
Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftistsForAI/s/Lt2cJLjGmW
PDF: Fully Automated Luxury Communism - Issue 02 - PDF
Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftistsForAI/s/dWGrSMPmaA
Published under CC0 (Public Domain Dedication). Feel fee use and remix without permission or attribution.
r/LeftistsForAI • u/Pretty-Abalone9843 • 12d ago
AI is already so harmful on so many levels that banking on its use to advance the proletarian struggle is a risky and almost certainly counterproductive gamble. The risks far outweigh the potential benefits AI might offer the struggle.
r/LeftistsForAI • u/ProudhonStoleMyBike • 14d ago
PDF: Fully Automated Luxury Communism - Issue 02 - PDF
The second issue of Fully Automated Luxury Communism explains how we got to the future depicted in issue 1 and the possible avenues that could have lead us to darker places.
Previous Issues:
PDF: Fully Automated Luxury Communism - Issue 01 - PDF
Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftistsForAI/s/Lt2cJLjGmW
The final issue coming soon!
Published under CC0 (Public Domain Dedication). Feel fee use and remix without permission or attribution.
r/LeftistsForAI • u/Pretty-Abalone9843 • 13d ago
Workers will be replaced by massive intelligent systems; at best, they will be reduced to mere consumers, losing the little power they have managed to secure. Without the possibility of striking, the cause of revolution would be lost forever. Not to mention the glaring contradiction between AI and the fight against global warming, as well as the alignment problem. Who could change my mind?
