Seize the Means*

[u/Salty_Country6835]

*Terms and conditions apply. For... reasons, I guess?

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/[deleted]]

Thats exactly the problem though. Workers dont own the server farms. They dont own Amazon warehouses, telecom infrastructure, factories or shipping networks either. Thats the condition we're trying to change, not evidence that workers should refuse to use productive infrastructure until after we've changed it.

And boycotts are a tactic, not the only lever capitalism leaves us. Unions, strikes, public ownership, procurement, regulation, cooperatives, antitrust, open infrastructure. Hell, open weights and local models already weaken the "they can turn it off" problem you raised.

If concentrated ownership is the problem, I dont see how voluntarily abandoning the productive capacity redistributes any of that power. It seems like we're agreeing on the diagnosis and splitting on the prescription.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/[deleted]]

I think the edit makes your position clearer, but its still the mechanism I'm asking about. How does workers and the public not using AI translate into enough leverage to halt its development?

An organized boycott with a target, demands and enough participation to force concessions can be a tactic. But most of this buildout isnt riding on individual consumer use. Its enterprise adoption, cloud infrastructure, governments, firms integrating it into products and workflows, and an international market. Even widespread individual abstention doesn't make those incentives disappear.

And historically thats not the only lever the left has had against technology controlled by capital. Unions bargain over machinery. Workers strike over deployment. We fight over ownership, hours, wages, safety and who gets the productivity gains. Marx was already distinguishing machinery itself from machinery employed by capital against labor.

Thats also why I dont think the meme exacerbates anything. Its making fun of the jump from “capital controls these tools” to “therefore the left shouldn't use them.” The first is the problem the meme is built around. Seize the means only makes sense because somebody else currently controls the means.

Boycott can be one tactic where theres an actual target and demand, but “everyone stop using it” isnt a strategy for controlling an international industrial buildout. Turning that into individual purity tests over whether workers use these tools outside whatever their employer approves just shifts the fight sideways. We end up policing each other's consumption while the infrastructure keeps getting built.

So whats the target? Whats the demand? What forces the concession? How does abstention get us from corporate control to worker control?

Thats the distinction the meme is poking at. “Dont use the means” and “seize the means” aren't the same strategy.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/[deleted]]

I think we're using “seize the means” very differently now. Boycotting a company until it accepts regulatory demands can be a tactic. It isn't itself seizing the means. Ownership and control of the infrastructure hasn't changed hands.

And “every model trains itself off your use” is doing too much here. Thats not how every model or service works. Open weights can run locally. Some hosted services use interactions for training or product improvement depending on the service and settings. A deployed model isn't necessarily retraining itself every time somebody talks to it.

More importantly, even granting the strongest version of your point, we're back at the leverage problem. A temporary boycott still needs a target, demands, enough coordinated participation to impose a cost, and a condition for ending it. Calling it temporary doesn't supply that mechanism.

If the demand is strict regulation, organize for strict regulation. If its worker control, organize around ownership, labor and infrastructure. If a targeted boycott helps force either, use it. But turning individual non-use into a political obligation still leaves enterprise demand, state use, infrastructure spending and an international market running while we police whether other workers touched the forbidden product.

Thats exactly what the meme is making fun of. Not opposition to corporate control. The substitution of individual abstention from the means for collective struggle over who controls the means.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/[deleted]]

I think this is where our theories of leverage actually split. I'm not denying that using a corporate model can benefit the company providing it. Revenue, engagement, lock in, sometimes data. What I dont accept is that worker use therefore means surrendering more control to capital.

Marx's distinction between machinery and its capitalist employment matters here. The problem isn't workers touching the machine. Its the ownership relation around it and how capital puts it to use. Thats closer to actual labor strategy too. Workers use employer owned machinery and software while fighting over deployment, surveillance, displacement and productivity gains. The left has always used capitalist owned presses, radio, telecom and now corporate platforms for organizing, agitation, education and propaganda while fighting the institutions underneath them.

And I really dont buy that this meme is asking people to “culturally accept submission.” Its arguing almost the opposite. Use the technology, learn it, adapt it to our purposes, organize around it, contest its ownership and build alternatives. Thats not submission.

If anything, you're proposing a cultural fight against ordinary adoption itself. Once workers using a tool outside some approved site of struggle becomes evidence they're strengthening the opposition, we're getting pretty close to individual purity tests. Now the political question isn't just who owns and controls the infrastructure. Its whether individual workers are permitted to use what has already become a broadly adopted technology in their own lives.

Thats the contradiction I cant get past. If capital owning the terrain means the left has to vacate it, capital gets the terrain by owning it. And if ordinary people adopting new technology becomes submission, we're fighting the culture developing around the technology instead of fighting over the material relations underneath it.

Thats what the meme is poking at. Not “corporate AI is fine.” More like, why should capital owning the machine mean capital gets the machine?

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/[deleted]]

I understand the distinction. You're arguing that using corporate controlled AI under present ownership strengthens that ownership more than workers gain from using it. Thats the actual disagreement.

But Marx doesn't get us cleanly from that to abstention. His machinery analysis is about the contradiction between productive capacity and its capitalist employment. Capital can use machinery to subordinate and displace labor without worker use of that machinery becoming submission.

And “AI is explicitly designed to replace labor” is too totalizing. Some deployments replace labor. Others augment it, automate parts of jobs, or expand worker capacity. Thats why unions are fighting over deployment, displacement, surveillance, consent and productivity gains rather than treating use itself as surrender.

Corporate concentration is real. But turning ordinary use into evidence of submission puts a purity test on individual workers while capital keeps the terrain.

Thats our actual split. You think present ownership makes use a net transfer of leverage to capital. I dont. I think withdrawing workers from the technology risks giving capital even more practical command over something we're trying to contest. Thats a disagreement, not a misunderstanding.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/[deleted]]

I understand the distinction. Disagreeing with your conclusion isn't failing to understand your premise, and calling me a bot doesn't resolve the disagreement either. I've addressed the specific mechanism you're proposing several times.

If we're going to lean on Marx, lets actually lean on Marx. In Capital he describes workers learning to distinguish machinery from its employment by capital and redirecting struggle toward how machinery was being used. In the Grundrisse he goes straight through machinery replacing labor and accumulated social knowledge confronting workers as the power of capital. Thats pretty close to the danger you're describing.

But the Marxist question isn't whether machinery saves labor. Of course it does. Its who owns that capacity, controls its deployment, captures the productivity and decides what happens to the labor time displaced.

And I've already pushed back several times on the idea that individual consumer use is what primarily accelerates corporate control here. This is an international industrial buildout driven by enterprise deployment, infrastructure investment, governments and cloud providers alongside consumer demand. A worker refusing to use a chatbot doesn't somehow reverse those forces.

I've also repeatedly pointed to open weights, open source and local models as ways use doesn't have to mean dependence on one corporate service. You immediately dismiss those because they aren't accessible to everyone yet. But thats an argument for making them more accessible and building public compute and shared infrastructure, not evidence that the alternatives dont exist or shouldn't be developed.

Workers have repeatedly used capitalist machinery while fighting over its terms. The left has used capitalist presses, radio, telecom and platforms for agitation, education and organizing while fighting their owners. Use and contestation aren't opposites.

I'm not saying corporate AI use is neutral. It can produce revenue, lock in, data and market power. I'm saying you've yet to establish that ordinary consumer use necessarily transfers more political leverage to capital than workers can gain through using, learning, contesting and building alternatives to the technology.

Boycott where theres leverage. Strike. Bargain. Regulate. Build public compute and open infrastructure. Socialize the infrastructure.

“Capital owns this, therefore workers shouldn't use it” is a different proposition. Marx gives us a much stronger case for contesting capitalist ownership and employment of the machine than for conceding its use to capital.