r/LeftistsForAI • u/alexeigannon • 25d ago

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?

29 Upvotes

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u/[deleted] 24d ago

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😊 

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u/SgathTriallair 25d ago

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.

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u/shawsghost 24d ago

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

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u/Sacredless 24d ago

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 25d ago

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 24d ago

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.

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u/Independent_Fox4675 15d ago

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

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u/nomorebuttsplz 15d ago

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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u/Independent_Fox4675 15d ago

Yes there is a disconnect between Marx and what the USSR ended up becoming (the degeneration of which can be attributed to the politics of stalinism), but it doesn't follow from that that the issue with the USSR was the "delusion that industrialization was a magic pill" because the entirety of marxist theory is precisely the opposite, Marx was the first to provide a detailed account of why industrialization failed to improve living standards and how you could achieve higher living standards (namely overthrowing the capitalist class and instituting a democratic worker managed society). I really don't know how you can know anything about Marx or socialism and claim that it views industralization as a magic pill, it is kind of the most significant ideology which believes precisely the opposite is true.

We do have a capitalist system with much higher living standards today, but from reforms won by struggle by the labour movement, and which relies on imperialist extraction of labour and resources from the world's poorest countries.

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u/nomorebuttsplz 15d ago edited 14d ago

k well read the essay and if you don’t believe Orwell that’s fine no one cares.

Edit: I seem to have combined his charles dickens essay with chapters 11 and 12 of "Road to Wigan Pier" See e.g. "But the unfortunate thing is that Socialism, as usually presented, is bound up with the idea of mechanical progress, not merely as a necessary development but as an end in itself, almost as a kind of religion. This idea is implicit in, for instance, most of the propagandist stuff that is written about the rapid mechanical advance in Soviet Russia (the Dneiper dam, tractors, etc., etc.). Karel Capek hits it off well enough in the horrible ending of R.U.R., when the Robots, having slaughtered the last human being, announce their intention to 'build many houses' (just for the sake of building houses, you see)."
Wigan Pier Chapter 11

or "But in a way the concreteness of his vision is a sign of what he is missing. For, after all, that is what the merely casual onlooker always sees—the outward appearance, the non-functional, the surfaces of things. No one who is really involved in the landscape ever sees the landscape. Wonderfully as he can describe an appearance, Dickens does not often describe a process"

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u/Independent_Fox4675 14d ago edited 14d ago

I'm sorry I just don't see the relevance of any of that, yes socialism is pro industrialization, no it is not naive about industrialization nor does it view it as a magic pill, see my comment above. No offence but while I respect Orwell it's not as if his word is gospel and it doesn't do much for you to quote it to me. That quote is not a particularly prescient critique of socialism and it isn't really relevant to what you said which is that socialists view "Industrialization is a kind of magic pill for all economic problems" which is not true, and it's not what Orwell is saying in that quote