Wow, strugglesession.net is having a moment over this one.
Edit to add: They’ve removed the post. https://hexbear.net/modlog/73?actionType=ModRemovePost
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2026
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Western leftists continuously struggle with the need to distance themselves from the barbaric society they grew up in and too often get tripped up in "distance as abstention" rather than "distance as revolution". The "master's tools" are, by this mindset, evil because the master uses them, rather than because of how the master uses them. So we get a sort of symbolic, rather than material, resistance. Waging resistance largely in symbolism, in "discourse" removed from praxis; praxis is dirty, flawed, with warts and all. And every time the warts show, it is only used as further evidence that the barbarism can only be resisted in the realm of symbolism, that anything too close to the dirt will have a corrupting influence and replace one barbarian with another. A paradigm that hinges, in part, on the imperialist-pedaled lies that AES states were and are an abject failure, that they are corrupted rather than flawed, lost rather than transitioning, and that better is only possible through a sort of ideological purification in the "marketplace of ideas".
A+ post. There are hundreds of examples of this, but I'm reminded of the anarchist blanket rejection of cops, intelligence services, armies, borders, structured organization... no, proletarian states absolutely need all of these things to survive, but the way they function in a communist society is completely different, because they serve workers, and not capital.
People who grew up in capitalist countries have never seen how these things can manifest themselves in positive and healthy ways, so they ignorantly denounce their communist equivalents.
Well said. I remember getting caught up some in the ACAB type stuff myself in my initial transition to lefty politics. And although I'd probably still agree with it in the context of the US and the way its system operates / has operated, it's not universally applicable and a system that was going to try to replace the US in the region would need something like cops still (but actually serving the workers, like you say).
They also have no solution to the supposed problems, just "don't use it" and crybullying people who disagree with you into agreeing. I guess I should just ignore what China is doing with it and pretend like Hollywood sci-fi movies were documentaries.
There definitely appears to be a kind of tunnel-visioning that can go into it. Like there are valid criticisms of the way the west approaches AI and how that approach embodies, or even accelerates, capitalist tendencies. But ecological destruction didn't start with AI, that has been going on for decades at least. Replacing workers via automation didn't start with AI, that has been going on for... what, centuries?
If AI can be a wakeup call for some people, that helps them reach class consciousness, then great. But if they stop at "AI bad, boycott it, shame, shame, shame" and don't go beyond that, it's not really helping the working class.
In the storied history of the exploiting classes and their abuses and barbarism, AI's abuses are tame, honestly. If people had the same energy for anti-imperialism as they do for anti-AI, maybe liberation would be moving faster in the imperial core. But AI comes more directly for them in a way that imperialism doesn't. For the people living under the shadow of empire, I don't see the same kind of kneejerk response. Like Explosive Media that I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the Iranian group doing those anti-imperialist AI Lego videos. They are in an existential war for survival and they are taking advantage of the tools available to them. They know there's no self-actualization for them within the imperial framework, no chance of "getting theirs" and living a quiet, safe white picket fence life. AI coming for jobs is nothing next to the terror of imperial bombs and the prospect of one's homeland being turned into a graveyard just cause the empire is mad that a people won't kneel.
Well said. It's difficult to even have a neutral opinion on AI without feeling like a pariah these days. I guess that's just a microcosm of the political situation in Amerika where everything feels like tribalism.
Yeah, the fracturing is a screwy thing. To an extent, it's something the exploiting classes manufactured and benefited from (along racial lines, gendered lines, and more). But by this point, it seems like it's something of a runaway monster that has taken on a life of its own, probably in large part due to the empire being in decline, along with the vilification of an alternative (though I have some hope in the numbers sympathetic to socialism and communism, whether or not they all fully understand what it is).
It's like there's something of a "whose podcast do you listen to" thing now (figuratively speaking and sometimes, literally) where things can be fractured to the point of differing views based on which niche piece of media somebody ingests on a regular basis. Like the antithesis of people having a holistic worldview. It makes me think we really need more work done on dialectical materialism and making it easier for people to grasp it and apply it to organizing and worldview because that stuff really helps with a more holistic view. Even with my (I feel) elementary grasp of it, it is still a night and day difference vs. trying to understand the world through a lens of individualism and idealism.
You cooked.
Thanks. I'm sure I'm taking some inspiration there from Gabriel Rockhill, Jones Manoel, and others.
lmao they banned me for 30 days and then orlando@hexbear.net started harassing me privately after, some people on that instance are really unhinged
Part of why I moved to grad after being on hexbear from the beginning and wasting too much of my labor there as a mod. It's mostly good comrades but the culture always seems to get absolutely dominated by a few vocal radlibs.
Better than most social media still, but Christ I wish you could force people to read theory and join an org (or maybe it's good that these people are stuck polluting online communities and not wrecking IRL orgs)
Yeah, most people there are alright and genuinely nice, but there is a really toxic lib minority there that's overly represented unfortunately. Grad being a Marxist space really helps filter that sort of thing out.
that orlando person was being extremely beligerent in that thread, I'm surprise you were the one who was banned.
That of itself says a lot about moderation on there. It's also amusing how they couldn't find a reason in the thread to ban me, so put it down as me having multiple accounts. Never mind the fact that my accounts predate federation and hexbear. It's like yeah, I made two identical accounts seven years ago just for this moment. 🤣
No one ever can nor want to mailto: a fediverse user, so that’s a silly bug.
haha I never even noticed, I guess markdown parser thinks it's an email
I remember the Israhell burning flag debacle. Clique behavior is too common there.
Yeah that kind of stuff is pretty cringe.
Cringe is being diplomatic. Horrifying how supposed leftists had so little self interrogation that they had to “yelled” at after two years, and made to realize the flag of Israhell isn’t a holy symbol and its defilement not anti-jewish.
agreed
Hexbear has a crybully problem.
you can really tell Americans are well represented on that instance 🤣
Oh hexbear ~~never~~ change.
AI is going to in large part be the answer to scarcity. But yes, it’s imperative that the working class take control of its usage and development
AI is going to in large part be the answer to scarcity
How?
Edit: Read the other comments in response to this and that answered my question.
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But it's sLoP (another thought terminating cliché losing all meaning to become a word to describe things people don't like, like woke)
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A lot of the "left" is really just petty bourgeois who long for the days of early-stage capitalism. They center their politics around being anti-monopoly and anti-big-tech and pro-small-business and the self-employed. They really just want "capitalism that works" rather than wanting to move beyond capitalism. AI has done more than any other technology to bring the contradictions between the capitalist mode of production and the regular working person to the forefront, by exposing the enormous disconnect between what regular people actually want and what the bourgeois wants, with this enormous all-encompassing technology progressing and being utilized in a way that is entirely out of touch of the common person. But, rather than recognize this disconnect stems from the disconnect between the material interests of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, people have instead begun to blame it on the technology itself. This is why Luddism is ultimately a form of liberalism, as their "goal" is to destroy the technology to return to an earlier stage of capitalism when the contradictions were not so apparent, and thus to prolong capitalism's survival.
I am incapable of approaching this subject in a mature way, so I'm just going to reference Wumpus World instead.
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