https://twitter.com/InfraHaz/status/1759417512591003667It's very strange how self-proclaimed 'Marxists' on social media are hostile to emerging AI technologies.
This is because one of the most important details which set Marx apart from his socialist contemporaries was both his INSISTENCE on the irreversibility of advances in the productive forces, and the view that they, without exception, hastened transition into socialism.
All Marxists should be familiar with the famous passage:
"At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto." (Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)
Is this not exactly what is happening with AI? AI is disturbing relations based on 'intellectual property,' which are the main source of income for 'professional artists.' The facts are irrefutable: These parasites who are attacking AI are reactionaries in the most literal and inarguably traditional sense of the word.
Some argue that AI 'steals the labor' of artists. Aside from the fact that this is a ridiculous use of the word 'labor,' it attempts to hijack quasi-Marxist terminology in a way completely antithetical to everything Marxism is about.
Marxism regards challenging the property question as fundamental to Communism. To quote the Communist Manifesto:
"In all these movements, they [Communists] bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time." (Communist Manifesto, Ch. 4)
The notion that Marxist language can rightly be employed to defend 'Intellectual Property' is absurd just on that basis. But worse, Marx himself was an explicit opponent of intellectual property.
In the Grundrisse, Marx regards the shared knowledge, ideas, and by logical conclusion, artistic products as belonging to what he called the General Intellect (Grundrisse, Notebook 7), which is inherently social.
The notion that an individual can turn a part of the general intellect into their own property just because they expended effort to communicate or discover it, is completely opposed to Marx's view.
Why? Because for Marx, all of society participates in this process, as every individual takes for granted the wealth of knowledge, abundance, and precedent created by others before ever creating something unique.
The idea that someone has the right to an arrangement of pixels on the computer screen, is akin to the idea that you can turn language itself into a form of property, and that by using words we obviously didn't invent ourselves, we are 'stealing' others 'labor.'
Hijacking the language of Marxism in order to defend what is the most ridiculous institution of property created by capitalism yet, by comparing the free proliferation of ideas, software, and visual media to 'exploiting the labor' of 'intellectual workers' is a complete mockery of the Marxist outlook.
Violating someone's 'intellectual property' rights is no more akin to 'exploiting their labor,' then expropriating the property of the capitalist class itself.
In fact, Intellectual Property is even more illegitimate than capitalist property. It is a parasitic, rentier-based form of property, which, in contrast to capitalist industry, does not even produce any material wealth.
As a matter of fact, the first defense of the institution of private property was based on the view, even before classical political economy, that private property is the objective product of human labor, and that questioning it as an institution is akin to calling for the theft of others' labor.
Some may protest, and decry the 'loss of employment' by 'thousands' of 'artists' as a result of AI.
But Marx was no stranger to how the mechanization brought by the Industrial revolution devastated many different ways of life and classes within society, a force which helped drive many layers of society into the proletarian class. Anyone familiar with the Communist Manifesto is familiar with the following passage:
"All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." (Communist Manifesto, Ch. 1)
This process happened on a much larger scale, with far more ruthlessness and ferocity, than anything we could now possibly witness with the rise of AI.
This did not stop Marx from recognizing that it was an objectively necessary historical development. It is not about personal feelings or opinion. To Marx, industrial modernity was irreversible and unavoidable.
And yet, we see a huge outcry over how aspirational 'digital artists,' hollywood writers, and other 'creative' professionals will become unemployed as a result of new technologies.
Keep in mind that leftists barely raised their voices over the decades long automation which destroyed the jobs and livelihoods of tens of millions of industrial workers.
Keep in mind, Pan-leftists constantly cheer on the breakup of small-businesses and small farms, lauding the conquest by monopoly capital as 'progressive' and even using Marxist verbiage to justify this view.
They are somehow ruthless technological and social accelerationists when it comes to small farmers crushed under debt, but become the most sentimental, romantic reactionaries when it comes to 'digital artists.'
Why do they consider 'creative' professionals to have greater moral worth than ordinary people? It's simple: Because many are themselves from this background.
It's very strange how this shamelessly self-serving 'moral outcry' is justified in the language of 'Marxism,' because the Marxist outlook is that of a completely impersonal science of class struggle, which leaves no room for warping reality so that it conforms to ones own feelings.
Some claim that while AI is not inherently 'bad', its present realization will accentuate all the worst aspects of capitalism, therefore, it should be opposed.
This opinion is completely incompatible with Marxism.
Marx and Engels were unambiguous about how, yes, under capitalism, advances in the productive forces are what lay the foundation for ushering in the transition into a qualitatively new era of history, which they identified as communism.
This is because advances in the productive forces centralize, concentrate, and socialize the total productive powers of society, in a way they regarded as an inadvertent result of capitalist accumulation itself. To quote Engels himself:
"Since steam, machinery, and the making of machines by machinery transformed the older manufacture into modern industry, the productive forces evolved under the guidance of the bourgeoisie developed with a rapidity and in a degree unheard of before. But just as the older manufacture, in its time, and handicraft, becoming more developed under its influence, had come into- collision with the feudal trammels of the guilds, so now modern industry, in its more complete development, comes into collision with the bounds within which the capitalistic mode of production holds it confined. The new productive forces have already outgrown the capitalistic mode of using them." (Anti-Dühring)
You may try and argue Marx and Engels were wrong. But if they were wrong, their entire view of capitalism and socialism was also wrong.
This view was not based in feelings, or some narrow moral criticism. It was based in what they regarded as an impersonal scientific outlook.
The notion that AI should be opposed because it will damage the livelihoods of 'workers' is also nonsense. Even if we were to accept the ridiculous view that the 'creative' parasites are 'workers' in any meaningful sense (whose income is IP and rent-based, producing no material surplus out of which capital can valorize itself from scratch), this view is still inarguably reactionary.
It seeks to preserve, against the tide of advancing history itself, antiquated relationships of production, imposing fetters on the development of the productive forces in the name of 'protecting' certain professions. How very charitable! Only, it is reactionary garbage, what Marx called 'bourgeois socialism.'
It's also ironic that social liberals, who demand respect for the diversity of different individual tastes, fashions, sexual orientations, gender identities, etc., simultaneously believe we are immoral scumbags for both consuming and making use of products made with AI technologies.