Cowbee

I believe what @[email protected] is getting at is that all states are authoritarian, and that there are positive and negative uses of authority. Executing SS officers is a positive use of authority. Since all states are an extension of the ruling class, it is better for that ruling class to be the proletariat, rather than the bourgeoisie, and for the proletariat to use its authority to oppress the bourgeoisie and gradually sublimate capital until all production is collectivized, class ceases to exist, and by extension the state withers away, leaving only administration, management, etc.

Would be funny considering how much Vaush hates Marxism-Leninism.

Your claim, sarcasm aside, was that Marxist-Leninists have a history of glorifying imperialism and state-capitalism, which I rejected, and said not just Marxism-Leninism but all Marxism rejects both. Either you're trying to say Marxism-Leninism isn't Marxist, in which case some heavy justification is required, or I misunderstood your point, in which case I'd appreciate elaboration.

As for the PRC, I didn't list it as state-capitalist for the same reason I wouldn't list the US as socialist. The PRC has a socialist market economy. The large firms and key industries of the PRC are publicly owned, and the medium firms are heavily controlled by the state and rely on the publicly owned key industries to function. Private property and the bourgeoisie don't have political power because they don't control the large firms or key industries.

What distinguishes state capitalism from socialism is private ownership of the large firms and key industries, or public ownership. The US, Singapore, ROK, etc all have large megacorps with firm control of the state, which uses its power to relatively guide and plan the economy for private interest. In the PRC, the opposite is the case, since the large firms and key industries are publicly owned and planned, the bourgeoisie doesn't have political control, the proletariat does. This is reflected in over 90% approval rates for the government in the PRC.

The reason the PRC has a bourgeoisie and private property to begin with is because they haven't yet developed out of it. They are still in a relatively early stage of socialism, market forces are quite useful for small and medium firms to grow into centralized firms that can be gradually sublimated and folded into public ownership. This is a Marxist understanding of economics, and while it isn't what an anarchist would want, I don't personally define socialism in a manner that excludes Marxism.

Does that make sense?

Not really sure what you're trying to say here as "Marxism and Marxism-Leninism." Are you saying these are antagonistic ideologies? Marxism is an umbrella, not a tendency within itself. History has progressed since Marx, and Marxist theorists since Marx have developed theory and practice accordingly. By far the largest tendency in Marxism is Marxism-Leninism, the closest to a "pure" Marxism you can get is Orthodox Marxism, which itself is ironically anti-Marxist and is overall an extreme fringe belief among Marxists.

Correct. Neither imperialism is glorified, nor is state-capitalism like the US Empire, Republic of Korea, Singapore, or Bismarck's Germany if you want an earlier example, are glorified by Marxism of any kind.

I'm a communist, I support communism. Socialism isn't welfare, it's a transitional status towards the gradual sublimation of private property. The US is firmly capitalist and is in no way socialist, socialism isn't "when the government does stuff."

Not AI specifically, but automation in general, yes.

If the capitalist use of machines creates powerful new incentives to heedlessly extend the workday while, at the same time, revolutionizing both how labor is performed and the character of the social organism of labor in such a way as to break the resistance to capital’s tendency to do precisely that—extend the workday—this use of machines also produces an excess population of workers who have no choice but to let capital set all the terms, something due partly to the fact that capital gains access to members of the working class who had previously been off limits, and partly to the fact that other workers made superfluous by machines are let go.70 Hence that remarkable phenomenon in the history of modern industry: machines clear away all traditional and natural limits to the workday. Hence, too, the economic paradox that the most powerful device for shortening labor-time turns into the surest means of transforming the whole lives of a worker and his family into disposable labor-time used to valorize capital. “If,” dreamed Aristotle, the greatest thinker of Antiquity, “each of the instruments were able to perform its function on command or by anticipation, as they assert those of Daedalus did, or the tripods of Hephaestus (which the poet says “of their own accord came to the gods’ gathering”), so that shuttles would weave themselves and picks play the lyre, master craftsmen would no longer have a need for subordinates, or masters for slaves.”71 Antipater, a Greek poet from Cicero’s time, embraced the invention of the waterwheel that grinds wheat, that most basic form of productive machinery, hailing it as a freer of female slaves and creator of a new golden age!72 “Heathens, oh, heathens!” As clever Bastiat discovered, and as MacCulloch, who was even smarter, had figured out before him, these heathens understood nothing of political economy and Christianity. They failed to see, for example, that a machine is the best way to extend the workday. Moreover, while they may have justified enslaving one person in order to enable another to reach his full human potential, they lacked the right, specifically Christian organ needed to preach that the masses should be enslaved in order to allow a few vulgar or half-educated parvenus to become “eminent spinners,” “extensive sausage makers,” and “influential shoe black dealers.”vii

• Capital, Volume I, Reitter translation.

Essentially, automation in general, under capitalism, will exclusively be used by the bourgeoisie to extend extraction from the working class.

As for your second question, tools cannot think, and that includes AI. AI is just a tool that spits out outputs based on training and prompting, whether the user accepts them or not, how they prompt it, how its trained, etc isn't something AI itself actually knows or cares about, because it can't. Markov chains aren't intelligence, just like pens aren't.

You're ascribing metaphysical messages to objects, which I reject the notion of. AI is just a program, a type of one. The social interpretations of its use depend on the mode of production of society.

I reject metaphysics and idealism in general outright.

The AI is not suggesting anything ny virtue of being itself. The social consequences of a given tool depend on the way society is structured, based on the mode of production.

It's more sabotage behavior to call leftists agitating liberals to get them to read theory feds. Rather than trying to provide alternatives to get liberals to read theory, you're defending liberals against leftists while claiming to be a "real leftist." That's wrecker behavior.

That's why it's better to join a good org like PSL, so that the working class can actually take charge, rather than walk hand in hand into barbarism. We need to learn from what's worked in the past to create a better future for all of us, and that starts with proper theory and practice. I made an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list just for my own use when I try to agitate and educate others. I think that would be a good place for you to start if you haven't started reading theory yet.

Returning to the beginning of this thread, the DNC and GOP are both relatively the same when it comes to foreign policy. They already are close to the same domestically, but they are near identical for the global south, because the US Empire is the world's imperialist hegemon. The working class needs to work towards decolonization, anti-imperialism, and socialism, and it can only do so through its own party, not bourgeois parties. We must be practical, simply trying to work with the tools the empire wants us to will never work.

The Principles of Communism is really a nice intro to communist theory, I have it as the first work read in the introductory Marxist-Leninist reading guide I made. That being said, it likely isn't creating a communist yet, just planting the seeds for one. Education doesn't have to just take the form of telling others to read theory, explaining concepts also helps, like imperialism.