this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
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You know what, I'm gonna do a quick rant. I fucking hate this fake AI shit as much as the next person, or more than the next person, but I don't see much engagement here or anywhere with a fundamental question we should answer. The AI industry is fighting against copyright, which, up until like 5 years ago, was a Marxist position. Arguing that Copyright was fundamentally a method of seeking rents and such. Of course, mechanical and now digital reproduction make this situation even worse for artists, but is it our fundamental fight right now to protect artists from copyright infringement (and lost rent) or to destroy copyright in general. It would be difficult and painful in the short term for those that rely on copyright, but society would think of some way to otherwise compensate (we have to believe this is possible, otherwise how will it work once we shift to a socialist society) and the AI industry will fail anyways (because of other contradictions). So should we not tactically Support this AI fight against copyright?
I don't think this is the end point of this argument, and I see the complexities (for example, what if ONLY the AI industry gets exemptions and for the important stuff, copyright only gets stronger?). But I have seen no engagement with this point
I fundamentaly disagree with this. You're making an enemy of my enemy argument.
This first point then is just you casualy washing it away as just "painful in the short term" is completely blind to our reality. The short term is already hell and you as a socialist are proposing even more hell onto the working class for some dream pie in the sky move that its better in the long term. Who actualy cares about listening to this? It would make you look like a clown and its not worth ceding ground to liberals on this, why are we allowing libs the opportunity to larp as being concerned about worker rights? Such an easy opportunity for us to organize among these communities thrown away for nothing.
And I'm being generous, these people will just look at you and see the same jackass right wing rethoric of "woke DEI college students with art degrees should have just learned how to code" which has been extremely harmful in the real world to a lot of people, people who would be radicalized towards a further socialist position, yet we shall take almost the same stance? Fuck them for the greater good? If you do this, be smart and do it for something bigger, copyright law is not that important as to let you antagonize people like this.
You realy realy realy can't underestimate how even just saying it would be "painful" to the working class isn't convincing under the current circumstances. You need to provide a concrete theory and an ideology of how this will benefit them and I personally can't find myself making this argument. The best we got to show for is checks notes maybe the AI grift bubble will end anytime between 2-10 years from now while they lose their jobs and the planet gets destroyed?
This is just a bet. We sit here still waiting for said bubble to pop, it could take 2 or 10 years who knows. Failure as you should know is relative, every previous failure could be said in the same terms, look how finance bros lost in 2008 or how cryptobros lost in 2023 when bitcoin was at 20k.
But I think worst of all is that this doesn't consider the actual real cost of AI, with every new data center being built we head towards the climate change abyss. It should be a condemnation, we do not have the time to be playing 4d chess "strategic support" for an industry that got probably the biggest and worst external costs in human history only second to the oil industry.
This argument when it existed 5 years ago did not consider the current worsening global situation. As things get worse we need to pick the important fights and be more radical, tactical choices that requires considerable loss for little relative gain is just nonsense.
I propose the point shouldn't be AI will fail anyways, no it should be how can we make AI fail as fast as possible and if it means supporting copyright so be it.
If you understand this then surely there was never any "tactical fight" anyway. Indeed they'll compromise with the entertainment industry while simultaneously fucking over any sort of independent worker rights and privacy. Some new copyright law will be created and it will just be the same but worse, more violent, more oppressive towards workers while they make deals among themselves how to keep pumping the bubble.
Any other consideration leads to this same conclusion, either we will get weaker copyright in reality or not and its clear we wont. You can spend hours and much effort considering this or you could've taken the simple side of workers rights anyway. Ultimately copyright benefits capitalists just as much but this is a false choice.
This fight exists within the context of supporting the AI industry and they're by far the bigger evil here, as in destroying the planet and humanity level of evil.
I should add as we're seeing the with payment processor censorship stuff, this is so clear and obvious to me, like they'll turn on the hypocritical censorship and twist the law in their favor, there is no benefit in supporting anti-copyright right now when the AI industry is full of the same pro-Trump shills that want to censor and control the working class anyway. There is no victory in sight even in the best case.
I wrote a big rant but it wasn't nice so I deleted it. Good luck fighting for scraps alongside the Petit-Bourgeois instead of seeing any bigger picture. And good luck solving climate change by fighting a specific instance of capitalism's destruction instead of looking for ways to ultimately end the forces pushing for any of the myriads of replacement methods of destruction. I'm open to any ideas for how to advance our cause, just bring one instead of whatever this was
Newsflash you PB jackass, workers haven't owned the fruits of their labour the entire time. I do creative work as a wage labourer and I don't own shit of the output I produce. Artists can suck a fat one if they think they can get out of being proletarianised like all the rest of us.
Thank you, I thought I was losing it reading that Copyright was needed for proletarians.
They are only fighting it insofar to protect their own profits. They happily trained all data on libgen and archive.org for free and now that most LLM models have that data the push to block access to such sites intensified. When it comes to these things laws are always weaponized.
They're weaponized against us, yes, but forcing Bourgeois elements to weaponized it against one another is a possible strategic win. None of the bad shit and bourgeois-lib faux-law stuff surprises me, that's why we need to think of the best ways to win anyways, not just fatalistically say that it's bad
Shoplifting from a grocery store is fine. communists would create abolish privately owned grocery stores and socialize the whole chain of production.
This is like 2 guys going through the whole neighborhood, taking every calorie of food from every kitchen, grinding it up into a milkshake and selling some of it back at high prices. And closing the grocery stores.
The position was never "individual artists should not own their work", the position was "Perpetual copyright is bad". You act like that's the same when it absolutely isn't.
AI isn't touching Disney because those companies know Disney has teeth. So they copy from all the individual artists who depend on their art to survive and act like that's not bad. I have seen people on this site argue for that actually, because 'it's like pirating a movie'. To which I say: Fuck off. It's not the same because one case takes from a rich as god company while the other takes directly from a worker. Sure, the worker might be providing furry porn but so what? They are fulfilling that societal demand and should be fairly compensated for it. If these AIs were taking exclusively corporate art and shitting out their slop, I would have no problem with that.
I'm specifically not making a moral claim. I'm making a strategic claim. I can agree morally with you, but thats a different subject. The point is that these contradictions are there and building and we should choose the side that strategically helps. Is your argument that our fighting for artists will lead to better chance to succeed in bringing about socialism? I'm willing to hear such an argument but am entirely unconvinced that it's not just Petit-Bourgeois
I am amazed that I have to spell this out for you: Would you rather fight for the artists, or the richest corporations in the world?
And I'm amazed I have to spell this out for you: are you trying to fight for artists who benefit from copyright (definitionally non-proletarians in that action) or strike a pillar of capitalism at it's base?
You're just circuitously defending some of the exact same, and a much larger, set of wealthy corporations: those that benefit from copyright as it is. I'm defending absolutely no capitalist company, I'm arguing to strategically push for their intercompany fighting to bring us closer to an end of capitalism. And right now that means not needlessly fighting for Disney against the AI companies.
Who are these artists who need to be defended from proletarianization above the fight for communism? In what way is that advancing our cause?
Proletarization? So in your view, making art is not productive labor? I am talking about normal-ass people that make ends meet by doing art for other people that pay them to do it. Who are you imagining does most of the art you see out there?
Also, if you think that AI companies will defeat copyright, I have a bridge to sell you. The current lawsuits etc. will neither end copyright, nor will they end AI companies. These entities will come to an agreement where one gets rent from the other, copyright law will not change meaningfully, except to fuck over normal people ever the harder. Siding with capital against capital never ever works. They know who they are and who isn't in the club.
This is why I am on team Fuck Ai, shut it all down. Is that pie in the sky? Yea sure. But so is your idea of the left siding with OpenAI to defeat Disney and that somehow ending well for the left.
Art produced for a wage, for a capitalist, is productive labour. Art produced by an individual sold as commissions is not productive, I.e it produces no surplus value, the artist is paid the full value of their labour by the commissioner.
The artist hired by a capitalist already doesn't own the outputs of their labour, and never has. Quit moralising and go and read a book.
So by your logic, a plumber isn't doing productive labor if they fix the toilets of workers, got it. Or cooks, they don't do productive work if they feed anyone but capitalists.
Sterling fucking logic with no holes in it. You read the book and fuck the fuck off with your high and mighty bitching.
It's Marx's logic actually.
You fundamentally misunderstand. If a wage worker is paid the exchange value of labour-power I.e the cost to reproduce themselves, at the behest of a capitalist (the work could be in the service sector, like a chef, an artist; it could also be a plumber, and they could ultimately be doing work for consumers like other workers), they produce more value than they are paid for I.e. they produce surplus value.
A self-employed plumber or a live-in chef working directly for someone with no capitalist middleman, or an artist working for commissions do not produce surplus value. They sell the final product of their labour, not their labour itself, and they charge the going market rate for the product of their labour, not the going market rate for their labour-power by the hour.
An artist can be proletarian or petit-bourgeois. A chef can also be either, as can a plumber.
Your time would be better spent reading and studying Capital than professing your shoddy home-baked anti-capitalism online.
Yeah turns out, (pretty much) everyone disagreeing with me doesn't know how to do a class analysis. I thought the opinion was going to be an argument for collaboration with creative PB, not just a complete incomprehension that artists benefitting from copyright are definitionally benefitting as PB
To begin: you're literally doing the petit bourgeois argument that Marx spent books discussing the failures. I think you should read some theory on this. Either you are asking for class collaboration with petit bourgeois artists (again, make the argument, I'm genuinely open to hearing that this is necessary), or you are just arguing for petit bourgeois interests with no class analysis.
You're siding with capital against capital, don't act like your side is high and mighty. I'm arguing to let capital destroy itself strategically by not defending copyright Giants and letting whatever carveout is created be used to undermine capital further
I am kinda done arguing this, because it is not worth my time to argue with people who don't know what the proletariat even is. But since you seem a bit more charitable, one last attempt before the block:
So please explain how most or all artists are petit bourgeois without pointing out they don't all work directly for capital. If you believe that is how you define it, you are too stupid to actually be on the left. You can see that argument debunked nearby.
Are there a few artists who are petit bourgeois? Sure. There are also a few plumbers who founded plumbing companies and there are cooks who own restaurants. Doesn't make the whole job anything else but proletarian.
As for capital fighting capital: the winner of that fight will be capital. Capital fights itself all the time without our help. I have yet to see you explain how your idea of getting the left involved helps anything.
Lol you're gonna block me because you responded to me and you don't like that I think you're wrong?? Then go ahead I guess, but seems pretty petty lol
You really just don't understand what proletarian means, and are trying to push me into a vulgar Marxist position. Proletarians are defined by having to sell their labour time, not selling the products of their labour. Anything about whether they work or not, or whether their work is hands-on or not is a useless distinction when push comes to shove, and history bares that out. It's a distinction that seems unimportant until cases like this where the desired policies are opposed. Take the 18th Brumaire, where the petty bourgeois were mostly tradesmen who made and sold directly their own products. Marx writes about how they feared the loss of their land and small properties moreso than they feared any dictatorship of Napoleon, and so they supported Napoleon in the hopes that he would stabilize their society and put down the proletarian revolution. Up until then, many in France had mistakenly thought that they were in an alliance with the petty bourgeoisie.
In this case, the distinction is whether or not someone owns the work they produce/the service they sell directly to a customer. Om the opposite side are those who are paid for their time and just have to fill that time with work which someone else will own. Sure, for many artists that means that they just have a computer and sell drawings or something, but the fact that they own that image, instead of ONLY owning their own labour time to sell, makes them not proletarian IN THAT PROCESS. And the legal distinction is who owns the copyright. Proletarians never do for their work.
Now, this doesn't mean they're immediately an enemy or something, that's just a super limited view of such things. Someone isn't immediately bad for having other interests. And people can have mixed interests, where they work mostly as a prole and then on the side do PB work. Claiming otherwise is some vulgar Marxism. It just means that we need to understand that their material interests aren't fully aligned with proletarianism and we must consider that and the possibility of betrayal in making decisions. In this case, I'm trying to sus out whether PB artists fighting for copyright actions against AI companies are actually working against the benefits to proletarians, and the more we talk the more convinced I am that they are. The proletarian artist works for a capitalist and is paid for their time and owns none of the produce, and so has absolutely no reason to support copyright. The PB artists wants to be allowed to own the copyright. It's an argument for stability in the legal realm exactly like in the 18th Brumaire.
Reconsider your ableist words. If we weren't on a dead thread I'd report you for calling me 'stupid'.
Stop acting like you're not also supporting capital! You absolutely are! We're just talking about if it's worth all this effort that I see people pushing against AI companies. Fuck AI companies for all the other stuff, but hurting copyright is just a good thing for us. Every loophole allows for people to weaken capital through use of copyrighted stuff. Whatever legal distinction is made for AI companies to get to continue will be used by China, Niger, Burkina Faso, as cover to use intellectual property owned by western companies and not face sanctions.
It really is wild that like 5 years ago Marxists wanted copyright abolished, and now they defend it like copyright somehow protects them to make their own art, when it never allowed it, only prohibited you from publishing certain works because a dead dude's estate said no.
Just wild how they swapped sides.
Petit Bourgeois sentimentality bullshit.
Copyright should be destroyed, end of.
I am not pro copyright. I am pro artists being able to live off of doing art.
You are a stinky little larper if you cannot see the distinction.
I think the division of labour and the distinction of artist should die and that involves a socialism that involves everyone including what passes for artists these days doing work outside of art as required of them. So that everyone can do art instead of having a privileged few (relative to the global majority) that can while away their time making fan art commisions and shit YouTube videos.
Then what are you arguing for? You're pro artist but not pro copyright, and you express that by defending copyright from the legal battle from AI companies?
I also want AI as it exists to die off. Bug I'm asking to strategically support it in it's fight against copyright while pushing for its destruction or cooption for the other, more legitimate reasons to want them gone.
I don't think "AI" is meaningfully opposed to copyright, they want to collect rent for this horseshit.
they're only opposed to traditional copyright insofar as it could make future profits difficult. in the "bribe the judges" era we live in I'm sure disney could re-copyright steamboat willie if they wanted
But that means Disney comes into direct conflict with AI, right?
of course not. law binds us but does not protect us.
there is no law for the oligarchs and we need to stop thinking we are bound by those laws anyway.
You don't think that these companies will have some fight about that subject ? That Disney and AI companies will not fight each other for the profits associated with this copyright? And whatever is established there is more important for society and our strategic goals than our own small claims, especially when trying to think long term
I think for me it just seemed like they would just get an exception while clamping down harder outside of it, so yeah not really relevant to the broader fight against concepts like "intellectual property". It would just end up as a further tool of consolidation, where businesses can take whatever they want for unspecified purposes like training AI, and actual creators of art and literature get fucked over repeatedly. The AI industry is fighting to further rent-seek on the distillation of social labor while being exempt themselves from the inter-business rentseeking via copyright.
I agree that this is how it would first happen, but I think that in the long term this will cause giants of capitalism to fight and be a useful part of a socialist strategy. Your last sentence describes exactly the contradiction which we have to deal with, but realize that it's just postponing another fight later regardless of which side we support. I tend to think fucking with the sanctity of copyright is more important for this long term strategy
in the extreme, sufficient universal social programs could support some amount of socially unnecessary labor like art nobody but the artist wants. direct compensation isn't strictly necessary.
i think a socialist society can do better than that, but hey maybe the town from footloose could achieve socialism without a cultural revolution.
I think I agree? Is this an argument for how this could be done or a disagreement with me somehow that I can't understand? Like a capitalist society will likely be forced by internal mechanisms to do some social programs, and a socialist society will value art as work in many cases and subsidize it as fulfilling life-help for non-pros
i was trying to invent a scenario where a socialist society doesn't compensate artists for art, and it ends up maybe not mattering even then as long as everyone's needs are met and you aren't (necessarily) forced into some other work.
Means of production coming into conflict with the mode of production
Could you elaborate a bit more? I think we are on the same page but can't tell exactly