woodenghost

Oops, I meant to reply to the main post.

A vivid example of dictatorship in this period is given by Lenin, in a contrast drawn between dictatorship by property and dictatorship by workers. “The state has forcibly to evict a family from a house. This is done time and again by the capitalist state and will be done by our proletarian state. . . . The capitalist state evicts the workers’ family which has lost its breadwinner and is unable to pay rent.” After describing the enforcement by a squad of police of the rights of property against poor people, Lenin continues with the picture of the dispossession of a rich man by the workers’ state.

“Our detachment of workers’ militia consists, let us say, of fifteen people—two sailors, two soldiers, two class-conscious workers (of whom only one, let us assume, is a member of our Party or a sympathizer), one intellectual, and eight members of the toiling poor; at least five are necessarily women, domestic servants, unskilled workers, and so on. They come to the rich man’s house, inspect it, and find that there are five rooms occupied by two men and two women. “This winter, citizens, you must confine yourselves to two rooms and place two rooms at the disposal of two families that are now living in cellars. For the time being, until with the help of engineers (you are an engineer, I think?) we build good dwellings for all, you will have to put yourselves to inconvenience. Your telephone will serve ten families. This will save about a hundred hours’ work in running to the stores and so forth. The student citizen in our detachment will write out two copies of the text of this state order and you will be kind enough to give us a signed declaration that you undertake to abide by it faithfully.” This is a vivid example of a dictatorship over property enforced by great masses of the common people.

Strong quotes Lenin's "Will the Bolsheviks Retain Power?" from 1917

I took part in a very informative protest/guided tour once, that went around the neighborhood of the rich rich of my city. It sometimes took around 10 minutes between houses, because the estates around them were so large. With room for horses, helicopter landing pads, eight garages for one house. I hadn't even known we had people this rich around. Now I'm imagining that same group of people I was protesting with going around those houses, counting the rooms, arranging housing for every single homeless person in the city. It would feel so good!

What? That's still a huge understatement. Link. More like two of three days at least and almost every day in 2024, 2023 and 2022.

Marx died much to young, but the tradition lives.

Previous propaganda innovations, like the printing press, offered benefits to both sides of the class struggle. But AI propaganda potential lies not in generating funny images of Marx. It rests in controlling the model, the training, the pre-prompt instructions, the behavior on the device and the user data. The models and training are much to expensive to be controlled by us, so we have to at least force control over those other things.

I'm not against small scale, decentralized or even local, specialized models that use little training data and don't hurt the environment too much. But we must have a strategy for how to fight AI in the imperial core. And there are many reasons, the last and most pressing of which, no one even talks about:

AI (meaning current LLMs) is born out of the failed attempts to stop deindustrialization. Since Obama, immense state funding attempted in vain to bribe capitalists to stop deindustrialization. Instead they poured it all into the most capital intensive technology ever that, best case, will lower the profit rate even more, further increasing deindustrialization, but will much rather create a massive, destructive crisis, fueling monopolization and fascism (but also potentially raising consciousness).
The main motivation fueling this investment, is the desire to create a weapon against workers. AI is meant to destroy wages and employment, break solidarity and weaken labors negotiating position. To the degree, that AI isn't soly a scam, to the degree that it offers us as marxists any kind of strength, these same capabilities will be wielded as a weapon against us thousandfold. Because we don't yet control it and we won't until the revolution. We have to face that reality. This alone makes sabotage necessary, even if we also harm our own access to this technology in the process.
Even if AI were a complete scam, devoid of any practical use (it isn't, but it's very much overhyped). Capital will use it's grip on the government to enforce AI's intended effects anyway: by bailing them out when the bubble hits, by making us suffer for it, by forcing AI on us anyway, even if it doesn't increase productivity, simply to save their investment.
AI is massively destructive on the environment. (I don't think I need to elaborate)
AI has a massive, almost completely untapped potential for capitalist propaganda. This is the thing no one talks about. As marxists, we often falsely flatter ourselves to be immune to capitalists propaganda. Western Marxism and compatible leftism, consciously build up by the CIA over decades proof how wrong that assumption is. Yet it was done by a few targeted investments, sponsorships and endorsements. AI is on a completely different scale and I'm not just talking about biased training data. It can create a profile on you, link it with data from intelligence agencies and data miners, subtly nudge you to share your deepest fears, anxieties and traumas without even noticing. You will provide immediate feedback through your prompts, offering clues about your mood and thoughts, enabling learning against you. It will first be used to sell you junk, to create desires in you with hidden advertising. But sooner rather than later, the CIA and other intelligence agencies will be handed control over western AI and buy or force control of much of non western AI. You know they will. Don't wait for the reveal in fifty years. They will spend billions on it. And they will absolutely use it against communists. That's their whole deal. They will use it to find us, to turn us, to crush our hope and solidarity, to make us despair and turn towards wrong strategies that are doomed to fail. By subtly engineering answers and learning from feedback over months and years. And that's just marxists. Imagine what they can do to average workers. Fascism could be turned up on a literal dial.

But we can still win the fight for control over AI. And we can use this struggle to win other fights. Class consciousness around AI is incredibly high and rising. We need to agitate around struggles against data centers. And the bubble will burst sooner or later, we can use this to our advantage. AI won't disappear, so we need to gain leverage with strikes, force transparency and local models without hidden pre-prompts, restrict which professions introduce AI and on which timeline and wage struggles around wether workers or capitalists get to reap the benefits and pay for the inevitable shortcomings and failures of AI. Sabotage and rejecting AI as whole are at this point a valid strategy in this fight to win time and gain ground.

They have a beak and it's their only hard part. They can squeeze through anything that will fit the beak.

Also education, housing, environment, protecting minority cultures and peace.

That hotel is actually not a paradox, just normal math. Not, yeah, it's crazy. (Hilbert's Hotel)

I think it might just be plastic instead of paper. Or a very thick plastic coating on paper. Inhaling burning plastic is incredibly unhealthy, but in the context of smoking, which is already toxic...

They are destroying the used book stores entire industry, since these rely on books being sold and re-sold. They destroy them because of a loophole in copyright law. Since the original is destroyed, there's no "copy". Just one book that's first on a stable medium, able to last decades, than on a very volatile medium, that will last ten years max (and will probably be deleted earlier, after used for training or when this company gets sold/bankrupt at the latest).

Look at the sheer scale of these operations:

Honestly serves them right. I remember watching a video where someone from ASML explained they didn't expect anyone to be able to copy their technology any time soon, because it's so complicated. They underestimated China.

Sounds like it's working

Imagine if Iran or anyone were to bomb those LNG liquefaction terminals on the US East Coast... Would they be offline for years too?

The largest one is Sabine Pass (Cheniere) in Louisiana with 27.2 million tons per year and the largest under construction is Plaquemines with 58 million tons per year, also Louisiana.

The CAPEX for LNG terminals is 42% liquefaction and refrigeration. Huge turbines, compressors and heat exchangers are needed. The heat exchangers can be 50 meters long and weigh 5000 tons. They are full of highly flammable gas under pressure. I think if it burned, the cooling tubes inside might melt together rendering it into one big block of scrap metal.

Many human right organizations are spreading propaganda too. CIA propaganda. Like human rights watch or the "national endowment for democracy". You're right though, it's good to cross check news. You could look for official Ukrainian news talking about the attacks on warehouses. They are not covering them up or anything.

Totally agree. The only way forward is to struggle now.

You're right, fascism is an unstable death cult, but she's also right: the fascist phase of capitalism stabilizes the economy and the whole system. That's the dialectics of it. Fascism isn't stable, because it doesn't solve the crisis tendencies like communism does. But it does have a mid term stabilizing effect by delaying the crisis:

A huge amount of value gets destroyed in fascists wars mitigating the crisis of overproduction. (That's the main stabilizing factor)
Patriarchy gets reinforced in reaction to the crisis of reproduction of labor power.
Unions are destroyed, labor gets disciplined, burgoise democracy gets dismantled, enabling increased exploitation in reaction to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. (That's the main motivation for capitalists. They inevitably turn to fascism, when profits can't be stabilized within burgoise democracy.)
All the crisis raise the consciousness of people, which, in combination with organizing, leads to the looming threat of communism. Fascism kills all communist sympathizers first thing after taking power, effectively neutralizing this threat. That's stabilizing too.

After fascism: the value is still destroyed, the economy booms from rebuilding, restrictive labor laws aren't repealed, fascist officials remain in power, fascist values stay ingrained, communists stay dead.

Just look at Germany. It all played out after the war. The "economic miracle" during rebuilding. General strikes and political strikes are still illegal, Germans are still incredibly racist, Nazis lived long, happy lives in positions of power, new Nazi parties are being build up by intelligence agencies, communist orgs had to start from zero and they are often illegalized, communists are continuously prosecuted from the party bans after the war to the employment bans in the 70s to the imperialist crack down on free speach now.

Fascism needs to be fought and stamped out before it comes to power. If it's already in power (like in the US) it needs to be fought all the more. China won't save a people who aren't willing to save themselves.

You're not that strange. It's natural to want to share your material possessions, your knowledge and your experiences. But know, that there are different options for that than only the traditional patriarchal family: friends, comrades, roommates, neighbours. You could join a political org, volunteer at a local action like a shelter, a library, a museum, a community theater, a community kitchen. Join anything that you have any appreciation for and be ready to not just share your wisdom, but learn from others too. There are people out there who aren't drunk jerks and even if they have some bad takes, they probably have some wisdom to teach you, if you listen closely.

Khan’s “removal was determined by a process in which he was never given a fair opportunity to be heard, and in defiance of the conclusions of the independent judges who examined the full evidential record,” attorney Tayab Ali said in a statement. He said Khan’s legal team would challenge the decision “through all available legal mechanisms.”

woodenghost [comrade/them]

@ woodenghost @hexbear.net

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woodenghost [comrade/them]

This Soviet World reading group — Week 3, Aug 3–9: Chapter 3

This Soviet World reading group — Week 3, Aug 3–9: Chapter 3

What's wrong with America?

Karl Marx on AI

Karl Marx on AI

Karl Marx on AI

Sup

obviously

i dont know

China, why.

AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop (and destroying them after) – 404media paywall removed 😎

AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop (and destroying them after) – 404media paywall removed 😎

Bulletins and International News Discussion from July 27th to August 2nd, 2026 - America's Munition Depletion Hits Hard / Ansarallah Finally and Explosively Joins Regional Conflict

US Embassy warns of "unintended consequences" as Ireland bans goods from Israeli settlements

How many marxists does it take to change a lightbulb?

One big winner in War on Iran: US natural gas exporters. Big loser: Europe. | Inside China Business

Why Ukraine’s strikes on Russia’s Amazon reek of war crimes

Donald John Trump "jokes" about running for a "4th" term

Donald John Trump "jokes" about running for a "4th" term

I’m starting to believe I’m a very strange person. Help?

ICC chief prosecutor removed from post over sexual misconduct allegations, diplomats tell AP

"IMF" by Black Wizard (1992)

Does anyone have the greentext style text about someone who wakes up in a communist utopia and speaks with a stranger who turns out to be Marx?

Translators Note

Rev Left Radio: Unequal Exchange: The Engine of Modern Imperialism

Which historical Communist would be the best roommate?

Help, my (ML) brother is a Trotzkyist! How can we still connect over politics?

"You're a scientist? Name all 30 cockatoo dance moves."

How to explain why supporting war is bad, for libs/budding leftists?

Thoughts on Hopelessness

Still figuring out your gender? Why not try God's own gender™: JUSTICE (also beauty, might, infinity, freedom, truth etc.)

Left Unity