Cowbee

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

All states are authoritarian, as every state is the extension of a given class. The only way to get rid of the state is through socialism, after revolution, and gradually sublimating all property into collectivized ownership until class no longer exists, ie communism. The administration, management, social planning, accounting, etc will remain while the need to exercise authority will vanish along with class. Until we get there, it is better for the proletariat to be in control, ie socialism, than the bourgeoisie, ie capitalism. The UK is under bourgeois control, while the PRC is under proletarian control.

The extent to which a given state exerts its authority depends precisely on the given conditions and circumstances a state is in. There is no latent desire for exerting authority at the helm, there are class dynamics and reactions to those changing relations through class struggle. Nazi Germany and modern Germany are both authoritarian and both serve the bourgeoisie, but Nazi Germany was in economic crisis and needed to violently suppress the working class to retain private property and bourgeois control. Those same circumstances do not exist in modern Germany, but if they did, the state would be just as willing to wield its authority the same way if the bourgeoisie felt it necessary.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

Huawei is employee owned. Further, it exists in a socialist economy and is subject to state control, it isn't Huawei that has power over the economy, but the state that has power over Huawei.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

I'm sure that's how you were taught in (presumably) Canada, but that's not what happened. The Soviets spent the previous decade trying to form an anti-Nazi alliance with Britain, France, etc, who had instead signed non-agression pacts with Nazi Germany. It wasn't until the eve of wartime that the Soviets agreed to a non-agression pact with the Nazis to buy time before the inevitable war.

The Soviets expected it. The Nazis attacked the Soviets just like everyone knew they would, because the Nazis wanted to commit genocide on the Slavs and because Nazism is inerently anti-communist, and communism inherently anti-fascist, as communism is proletarian and fascism is bourgeois.

Harry Truman, in 1941 in front of the Senate, stated:

If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.

The West wanted the Nazis to exterminate the communists.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

What would that accomplish?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

Not like everyone else. Capitalists do not work for their money, they exploit workers through paying them less than the value they create.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (7 children)

That applies to all of capitalism, though, we shouldn't oppose smartphones just because of the same reasons, but oppose capitalism and imperialism.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Glad it worked out!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (34 children)

Right now, anti-AI rhetoric is taking the same unprincipled rhetoric that the Luddites pushed forward in attacking machinery. They identified a technology linked to their proletarianization and thus a huge source of their new misery, but the technology was not at fault. Capitalism was.

What generative AI is doing is making art less artisinal. The independent artists are under attack, and are being proletarianized. However, that does not mean AI itself is bad. Copyright, for example, is bad as well, but artists depend on it. The same reaction against AI was had against the camera for making things like portraits and still-lifes more accessible, but nowadays we would not think photography to be anything more than another tool.

The real problems with AI are its massive energy consumption, its over-application in areas where it actively harms production and usefulness, and its application under capitalism where artists are being punished while corporations are flourishing.

In this case, there's no profit to be had. People do not need to hire artists to make a banner for a niche online community. Hell, this could have been made using green energy. These are not the same instances that make AI harmful in capitalist society.

Correct analysis of how technologies are used, how they can be used in our interests vs the interests of capital, and correct identification of legitimate vs illegitimate use-cases are where we can succeed and learn from the mistakes our predecessors made. Correct identification of something linked to deteriorating conditions combined with misanalyzing the nature of how they are related means we come to incorrect conclusions, like when the Luddites initially started attacking machinery, rather than organizing against the capitalists.

Hand-created art as a medium of human expression will not go away. AI can't replace that. What it can do is make it easier to create images that don't necessarily need to have that purpose, as an expression of the human experience, like niche online forum banners or conveying a concept visually. Not all images need to be created in artisinal fashion, just like we don't need to hand-draw images of real life when a photo would do. Neither photos nor AI can replace art. Not to mention, but there is an art to photography as well, each human use of any given medium to express the human experience can be artisinal.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

Interesting, it works when I click it on the web version. Might be either a federation issue with Lemmy.world, a delay in syncing, or a connect issue.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

Incorrect.

Socialism has the state, because socialism isn't global, and still has private property in the process of being sublimated from the private sector into the public. You cannot simply stroke the pen and legalize full public ownership, the conditions for social ownership and planning need to be developed and built gradually. As there is still private property, there is still the bourgeoisie and proletariat, and thus the proletariat contains ownership of the state to oppress the bourgeoisie.

Communism exists when all property has been sublimated. There's no need for the elements of society that existed under socialism to keep the bourgeoisie in check, so these wither away, but the development of large scale industry that necessitates administration, management, and planning continues to exist. There's no state, but there remains "government."

Marxism is anti-utopian. Communism is not a utopia, it isn't a formula to create outright. Communism is compelled economically through the development of socialism. As management and administration remains, there is still equal, collective ownership. Complex methods of democracy are built up during socialism, it would be economically impossible to have direct democracy for every single decision to be made in a global economy, hence the need for social planning, administrations, and managers.

You are making a dramatic error by conflating anarchist analysis of hierarchy with Marxist analysis of class, and thus you confuse what Marxists want with what anarchists want. Unless your point is that Marxists aren't communists, of course, but that's just deeply silly.

I really suggest you actually read Marx if you want to speak as though you know what Marx actually advocated for, rather than just assuming Marx was an anarchist with different methodology.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

No. The state is a representative of the ruling class. In capitalism, the state is an extension of the bourgeoisie, in socialism, the state is an extension of the proletariat. The state ceases to exist when class ceases to exist, and class ceases to exist when all property is sublimated into collective ownership across all of society. Without a state, all that remains of government is what Engels calls "the administration of things." Social planning, management, accounting, and administration are core functions of large scale production and society that will remain into communism.

I really don't know why you're so confident in your stance.

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