Cowbee

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.

It's more that leftists have been discussing and bringing about better societies for centuries, agitating and organizing, so if we want to take things seriously we need to learn from what works and what doesn't. That's why I made an introduductory Marxist-Leninist reading guide. It's to help people new to theory.

Education is still important, because people's openness to new ideas depends on their current material conditions. As conditions decay, radicalization increases, and so does people's willingness to get organized and read theory.

The existence of AI itself does not imply anything. It's a tool. The social function of AI is determined by the mode of production.

The social role of a tool depends on its relation to the overarching mode of production, it isn't a static thing intrinsic to a tool. AI doesn't care about advancing any ideas, it's just a thing that exists, and its use is up to how humans use it. This seems to be all very idealist and not materialist of you.

I really don't follow, something like Deepseek is quite literally a program trained on inputs that spits out an output depending on prompts. It isn't inherently political, in that its relation to production depends on the social role it plays. Again, a hammer isn't always capital, it is if that's the role it plays.