Especially since the launch of chatgpt but from my entry into wider communist circles I have seen one thing constantly repeat itself. Many comrades love treats, I won't deny that they're good, I love them too but many have seem to forgotten how to think outside of this system of treats. Many have made it their whole personality, electric cars? Crypto? NFT? LLMs? People eat this stuff up like yea electric cars are nice and all but don't we want to move away from the car centric hellscape? Many don't when they see a way to paint their desires nutured by the capitalist system into a red paint, they take that chance and run with it. "Oh you don't like cars? Well you must be an anti-communist because China has amazing cars" Same is for crypto, for nft, for llms, even if they can't use excuse of China for everything, they just use "Oh you're criticizing life choices of a comrade so much for the tolerant left" and what are the life choices? Propagate every single capitalist bullshitary, not do it mind you, propagate it, promote it, I think this is in major part because they want the liberal dream to come true. Being brought up under the liberal system, it is the liberal dream to have technology be the solution all the problems of the world, worst form of which is techno-optimism of fascists but that's a very extreme version instead we need to talk about this tech obsession amoung our own. This is the strain which says "every tool is without ideology and thus every tool developed capitalism is not be destroyed instead expropriated by the oppressed, it is even rooted in a form of orthodox Marxism, specifically the chapter 5 of The Capital however many forget that Marx can be wrong as well, Marx was wrong about many things, Marx and many others think that luddites were rebelling against machines because they were the competitors to the workers, Marx's theories were right about automation but Marx himself and people got something wrong about luddites, the machines that came in weren't fully automatic looms, they were to be operated by the workers, textile workers but he textile workers didn't want to operate these because they were made for industrialists with profits in mind not for workers with their labour in mind, they tried to fight to stop the their installation but when they saw there wasn't any option they rebelled by smashing the machines, luddites weren't out of touch, they were given shelter by textile and sympathetic workers and were eventually defeated not because every other worker chose to install machines but because state forces came upon them and Marx was right about this that there wasn't proper organizing for their efforts to be successful, you can't fight bourgeois state without a full apparatus separate from it. Now with that, we are equipped to tackle it, when people say expropriate the machine, but that's the problem we don't want to work on these machines, we don't want them, they alienate us, in chapter on Alienation, Marx talked about how workers are alienated from their labour by specialising the labour further and further to the point the worker is mindlessly repeating a single task, this is even more true for the gen ai and nft because all these machines make us their servant and they aren't ours and gen ai is even further along it because it first alienated us from our labour and ourselves in artworks and personal data and then enslaving us. When conversation about productivity gains comes up, people need to realise we already produce too much for our needs, we don't need anything else, especially something that makes the workers' work day worse for them. However some people don't even bother with even trying Marxism, they just straight up want stuff, more flavours of cigarettes, more types of vapes, more powerful computers, more demanding games, more more more but socialistly. People can't get their mind out of certain things, ableism, sexism, consumerism, all amoung them.
Kinda pointless to debate a vague post, but
Marx himself and people got something wrong about luddites, the machines that came in weren't fully automatic looms, they were to be operated by the workers
Whether the cotton looms were fully automatic misses the essential purpose of the loom for the bourgeoisie, which is that it appropriated the technique of production, taking skill previously bound up in the workers’ hands and converting it into intellectual property in the form of patents. The production technique was almost entirely converted from variable capital into constant capital, with labor afterward figuring in the process only as simple labor that sets the machine in motion.
Marx had a firm understanding of this:
Speech by Marx
“Another consequence of the use of machinery was that it entirely changed the relations of the capital of the country. Formerly there were wealthy employers of labour, and poor labourers who worked with their own tools. They were to a certain extent free agents, who had it in their power effectually to resist their employers. For the modern factory operative, for the women and children, such freedom does not exist, they are slaves of capital.
“There was a constant cry for some invention that might render the capitalist independent of the working man; the spinning machine and power-loom has rendered him independent, it has transferred the motive power of production into his hands. By this the power of the capitalist has been immensely increased.” - source
Idk which communists you talked to who think we can just seize the means of capitalist production, without modification, and jump directly to communism. Marx was adamantly against this reading since at least the failure of the Paris Commune
post? Because this reads like a 