Socialism
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of "ML" (read: Dengist) influence. This is a place for undogmatic and constructive discussion from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
A certain knowledge of socialism is expected, if you are new to/interested in socialism, please visit c/Socialism101 before participating here. Socialism101 will gladly help you by answering questions, providing resources etc.
Memes go in c/Lefty Memes
Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, upvoting good contributions and downvoting those of low-quality!
Rules
1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith discussion is enforced here.
Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism
2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such,
as well as condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavour.
3. No liberalism, (right-wing) revisionism or reactionaries.
That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" (read: Dengist) (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).
4. No Bigotry.
The only dangerous minority is the rich.
5. Don't demonize previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
(if you are reading the rules to apply for modding this community, mention "Xenial Xerus" when answering question 2)
6. Don't idolize/glorify previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
7. Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:
- Racism
- Sexism
- Queerphobia
- Ableism
- Classism
- Rape or assault
- Genocide/ethnic cleansing or (mass) deportations
- Fascism
- (National) chauvinism
- Orientalism
- Colonialism or Imperialism (and their neo- counterparts)
- Zionism
- Religious fundamentalism of any kind
(This is not a definitive list, the spirit of the other rules still counts! Eventual duplicates with other rules are for emphasis.)
What country do you mean though? Is this a country specific sub?
There's a socialist country in the world?
Cuba calls themselves socialist, with some credibility.
Plenty places call themselves it, but they're all either Social Democracy or Capitalist Fascist but coopting the word "Socialist" to sound less scary
Which is why I only listed one credible example?…
Still don't know which country is discussed here - could help to know.
Sorry, meant to reply to gwl, was using Cuba as example of a country that could claim to be socialist.
I can claim to be a banana, don't make me one
Theft of work? Let's flip that over.
AI steals labor from laborers. Capitalists exploit AI to make low-quality work that would be done more effectively and sustainably by humans. Its entire purpose is to replace humans as workers.
Not only is its code-writing shit, I could write a better novel and draw better art while shit-faced drunk standing on my head.
I'm arguing against AI btw. I've seen some leftist rhetoric trying to argue "AI is good and great actually, entirely unproblematic, we all should use it"
Fair enough. Sorry, I'm so used to wireheads claiming that it's good for them and trying to pry out that rotten chunk before it taints the rest of their logic.
Fighting for incremental change and working within the system only serves to prop up the existing system. This is a status quo argument, and is not a revolutionary leftist position. It's a liberal position.
Cool. And your point is?
Buying yourself a little treat to feel better about being exploited under capitalism is also against leftist theory.
But guess what... That doesn't magically turn the person that does into a liberal.
is it petite bourgeois to be a poor farmer that only just sells enough to survive? you sell a basic human need
Art is also a basic human need, though one more abstract, and less essential (though even cavemen had it)
It's capitalism you should be fighting, not technology. That's my point.
Why not both?
I don't think OP wants to actually fight capitalism, the way they talk about art as something capitalistic to sell and make money and not something to admire and enjoy really shows that. OP isn't just accepting capitalism. He is embracing it completely.
Don't be bloody stupid.
I'm accepting that artists need money to live, cause we live in a capitalist society.
It's not being pro-capitalist to say "artists need to eat food, and AI is taking food from their mouths."
You literally said "Art is also a basic human need, though one more abstract, and less essential (though even cavemen had it)" and are interpreting that to mean that Art is a commercial industry that needs to be protected artificially. That's a pro-capitalist viewpoint, and your entire argument here has been "this is the way things are and there are no socialist countries so we shouldn't bother changing things, and just be good consumers." Which is the sentiment of a liberal who does not wish to fight capitalism in any form.
In short it is pro-capitalist to uphold the status-quo, just because of the way things are. That line of thinking doesn't create change or positive impact. It serves to keep things the way they are.
Yes, we live under capitalism, and IP is just one of the bourgeois property forms they use to privatize and subsequently commodify "products of the mind".
While it shouldn't explicitly be fought since it's pointless, it's even more dumb to outright defend it since it's a mechanism that's not there to "prevent exploitation of the masses", but to protect bourgeois and petty bourgeois, with workers in creative or medical fields being hired by those bourgeois for a wage and then truly getting exploited.
This includes the theft of work and wage from independent small time artists
Honestly just read Wage Labor & Capital or something, that sentence makes you sound like some right-wing liberal who's going to cry about striking workers or something.
Honestly just read Wage Labor & Capital or something, that sentence makes you sound like some right-wing liberal who’s going to cry about striking workers or something.
I don't think that's a coincidence because so many people who are part of this movement say crap like that. Because the attachment to intellectual property as a moral foundation of rightness is a capitalistic and therefore right-wing viewpoint. One that is not compatible with a leftist society.
And how does this statement in any way have an effect on the problem at hand?
gen AI is harming people which capitalism is actively trying to crush beneath their boot
And the usage of it is tantamount to a tacit agreement with capitalism doing that.
If we're talking about gen AI as a whole and not just IP law, I assume by the problem at hand you mean small business owners in creative industry being displaced.
And yeah, under capitalism, technological advancement kinda sucks for everyone in general, not just AI. For those being made redundant, it's either proletarianization, going for a shittier more general job or homelessness, for factory owners to get the same profit margins the factory needs to be creating more stuff to keep up with LTV and so on.
Gen AI isn't anything special in this regard either, but the reaction is amplified because a bunch of hitlerite small business owners that run social media accounts and create slop content are afraid that AI is going to take their job.
This is the primary demographic of people who are the most affected, it isn't some vague notion of "the masses", and going on a moral high horse being like "if you use genAI you support capitalism, we need to FIGHT the technology so small business can continue creating slop and stuff they don't want to be making since it's profitable", then not only is it promoting lifesfyleism, but has never worked and just puts you in the same category as luddites except reactionary since you want to go back in time now before Pandora's box opening.
You know Luddites were actually not against progress right?
That was dark propaganda against them by the dominant socioeconomic class of the time.
The luddite movement was against using industrialisation to remove workers rights and to reduce safety standards which was prevalent at the time. It started as a direct response to the horrendous death of a child in a factory.
And they did actually win in the end, though as a splinter group after the original fell apart due to the bad PR.
That's why there's safety standards now, and statutory minimum of legally mandatory holidays in EU.
My argument is that genAI is being used for the exact same reason now, to erode workers rights.
Maybe you need to brush up on your history lessons?
Luddites were an embryonic form of workers struggle against labor saving technology back in early 19th century, back when there was no theory or analysis for workers to actually know where the issues were coming from, so way before the birth of scientific socialism.
They were mostly violently suppressed by the government, any gains that they might have had were really temporary and local (like some temporary wage increase), so
That’s why there’s safety standards now, and statutory minimum of legally mandatory holidays in EU.
is just you talking out of your ass, especially considering that luddites were contained within the UK, and it happening ~150 years before EU was even formed. These rights were concessions that bourgeois states gave to the working class to pacify them, since the threat of a communist revolution back when was real AND the post-WW2 superprofits allowed these kinds of rights and welfare in general.
Now if you're gonna go "genAI technology displaces workers, erodes their bargaining power and thus their rights" then yeah no shit, that applies to every labor saving technology under capitalism. If you then hyperfocus on one piece of technology due to moral panic spearheaded by petty bourgeois slop creators who risk getting displaced, saying how it has to go and how that's gonna fix everything - you're just a reactionary that wants to turn time back, it is an impossibility.
Luddites were based in the UK
It's almost like progress in one country can make progress happen in others, but no, that would be impossible!
Especially not when that country had an empire at the time that could force vassals to follow the same rules!
And it happened 150 years before the EU was formed
Cool, what's that got to do with anything? You've heard of "grandfathering" right? Taking existing rules and going "y'know what, they work, will just copypaste as they are"
I love that you keep trying to paint artists as Slop creators. You mean the thing that takes hours of dedicated practice, learning and trial and error? That thing?
Slop creators, those who use genAI, are the ones who try to displace them.
And again, your points all fall apart when you mention one very very very specific thing. We don't live under socialism, so to work towards it, shouldn't a goal be to ensure the Safe and Healthy lives of those who live, right now, in the real world, so they can then work towards improving it and hopefully making socialism real.
And your points would fall apart if you actually decided to read what I wrote instead of cherry picking sections out of context. For instance:
Especially not when that country had an empire at the time that could force vassals to follow the same rules!
The rules in question: "They were mostly violently suppressed by the government, any gains that they might have had were really temporary and local (like some temporary wage increase)". A temporary local response to some movement where individual capitalists decide to temporarily bump up the wages to appease luddites and so they can continue exploiting workers and accumulating capital unimpeded isn't some universal rule that was applied everywhere.
Also this entire exchange literally came about because of some off-hand remark about luddites that wasn't even important to the argument.
Whatever, I'm disengaging.
Sorry for thinking that other humans deserve to live a happy life without fear of their livelihood being destroyed, that's very unlefty of me.
I didn't know that using robots to replace people by doing a bad but cheap job was a core tenet of socialism.
I'll have to read up on the part of the socialist theory that states "For the Robots and the Capitalist Oligarchs that own them, by the Robots and the Capitalist Oligarchy that owns them"
Also i would add that whatever comes out from AI is their (AI) product not yours. Making the LLM user losing its core abilities by delegating their core activity to the LLM, meaning losing even more value as a worker and becoming even easier to replace (that also is one of the. Main reason of this big LLM hype.).
Looks like that marx "capital" is more actual then ever!
And if “they” own AI slop output, does that also mean they also “own” the content the AI trained on (art and such)?
While you’re thinking about that, consider how many working families have been bankrupted by copyright infringement lawsuits. Not many, but while you’re pondering that, ask yourself or look up how much Meta was fined for pirating millions of books (zero).
Quite a few have been bankrupt by it, once every few years they "make an example" by allowing a corporate to sue some random nerd doing piracy for everything they're worth
What i meant talking about ownership in my previous comment, was the AI Slop user, that they could feel to have done something, but they actually didn't the AI did it, and they didn't wrote a line of the LLM output. Meaning that he did to himself more harm, thinking of being more productive. He didn't produce anything, let a tool do it, that has been able to arrive at that point by stealing data all over the internet, without paying a penny. And the user didn't gain anything from it, didn´t learn anything, that in the long term is a loss of skills, meaning a loss of value, and being easier to replace, that was what I meant.
And the big corporations will get out without paying much, they pirated content, but they have money. So any fine for them will be just a bunch of pennies. But I think that now they pirated more than piracy at its peak. But this has been considered fair use (Also the destruction of thousand of physical books, to have them digitialized to train the LLMs...)
I got banned from !leftymemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com for being a "Anti GenAI pro-IP troll" when making exactly the same point