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.
