what too much digital circus, slopaganda, and warhammer 40k memes makes to your brain. at first you go "for the emperor!" when you notice, you are making part of jehova's witness for nerds

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[–] 5 points 1 hour ago (3 children)

but if your AI can improve the robots doing the slaughtering enough, then you can guarantee your win.

There is a difference between some capitalists have terrifyingly awful ideas for how to control the poors and those ideas having a clear, realistic material path to them that avoids negation of itself. The point I keep trying to make is about how dialectical materialism works. It doesn't guarantee communism and I never said that it does, but communism is the only way we know of to resolve class contradictions. Changing the form of exploitation doesn't resolve class contradictions, no matter how many people you murder in the process; it changes the form of exploitation. This is what I mean when I say, "The only actual way for a capitalist to solve the worker-capitalist divide is to turn class traitor and help the working class take over, in order to transition to a state where class stratification is no more."

It's not that I think a bunch of capitalists are going to turn class traitor out of good sense. My point is that their ideas about overcoming the contradictions with more and better violence is vary shades of delusions; it is out of touch with how dialectical materialism works and (much of the time) probably wholly unaware that it exists, instead operating from idealism and the belief that better, smarter ideas will overcome the material problems. This allows them to wallow in a pseudo-intellectual "rationalist" haze where they can cogitate and navel-gaze over how this next form of mass oppression will surely be the one that stops the poors from revolting.

History has had people who have done worse than these modern techbro grifters with far less technology to do it. These modern grifters push ideology that is so far up its own ass, it can't see the light of day. The world got easily ground to a halt by a global pandemic just a few years ago and that was a relatively mild virus compared to how bad it could have been. Climate change keeps getting worse and could reach tipping points with staggering consequences. Meanwhile, these chucklefucks are techbroing about virtualizing people, while data centers for current generative AI alone require hefty resources to create and maintain.

I fully believe they're terrible people and want to do terrible things. I'm just saying we shouldn't believe the world can work the way they say it does because they desire it to work that way. Identifying threats is not just about reading people's saturday morning cartoon villain aspirations. It's also about working out what the most pressing, realistic threats are.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (2 children)

    I do not know dialectical materialism well enough to be able to respond to your points, but I presume you're addressing similar caveats as what @TabularTuxedo says? Material limitations are absolutely real, but the capitalists hope that AGI will magically solve all of these issues (as I have posted here, and saw that you responded).

    I also don't think this is very realistic, but it doesn't stop them from screwing all of us over in the process. I've noticed we've had this same conversation on previous threads, and I want to make clear that I don't disagree with your points on this plan being much harder to pull off than it seems.

    I just think that this maximalist version of the future that the capitalists want is very good for organizing. It makes explicit all of the psychopathy that they have when they think about dealing with us, and makes clear the two pathways we have ahead of us. The liberals need to realize that if they keep compromising, they will make sure we, the workers, lose forever.

    P.S. do you have good resources on dialectical materialism so I can learn more?

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  • [–] 4 points 58 minutes ago (1 child)

    I think I understand what you're going for. We do need to organize, that is for sure.

    As to dialectical materialism, here's some I have bookmarked:

    By Cowbee: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/12214873

    By Yogthos: https://dialecticaldispatches.substack.com/p/the-toolset-of-reality

    Feel free to return to this conversation after reading more on diamat if you think the points I have made don't satisfactorily hold up to how it works. I want us to be grounded in it, but don't pretend to be an expert on it and am open to discussion.

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