Thanks!

There are so many other reasons to wear clothes then hiding things.

Yes…So what? How does that invalidate anything I said?

You’re confusing the distinction between socialism and communism, and it’s because you view the world through an individualist frame, not a socialist one. You see socialism only through the eyes of an individual worker and an individual capitalist, you do not see classes. As such, you believe the distinction between socialism and communism as the difference between, essentially, elements of communism and the whole society being communistic. This is wrong.

I don’t subscribe to an Individualist worldview, so no.

Communism is the point by which all class distinctions have been eradicated and property collectivized, which discounts anarchism which seeks many cooperative-style cells, which leads to class distinctions between cells.

That’s only true of some kinds of Anarchist thought. Anarchism is a broad category of viewpoints, so you just painting it with a broad brush comes off as ignorance to Anarchist theory. Second, even if you were right and Anarchism universally advocated for a network of “cooperative-style cells” as you put it, you offered nothing to prove that it would lead to class distinctions in cells, you just asserted that blindly.

Restricting the ability of class traitors to go against the working class is not a bad thing. Independent unions that seek greater autonomy for a small subset of a class in a way that goes against the rest of the class is the problem with individualist framing. China has the largest federation of unions on the planet, they do a fantastic job of protecting worker rights. The reason independent unions are not allowed is because these cracks in the system become highly exploitable by a capitalist class that very much would love to overthrow the working classes as the ruling class.

You pack this section with a ton of loaded assumptions, it’s sloppy reasoning. Assuming that any desire to deviate from the State-approved union structure in any way represents class betrayal is ridiculous. It falls into the identical category as religious fundamentalists who assume that even the slightest disagreement or challenge to the existing structure represents an existential threat to the whole, and must be crushed.

You double-down on this dishonest framing that workers and capitalists are the same when you talk about authoritarianism. The state is not outside of class struggle, it is within it, and thus can only be the representative of the ruling class. I support the working classes having state authority to protect against capitalists, and this is not at all the same as supporting capitalists having state authority against workers. This is the same problem you keep bumping into, treating tools as abstractions without looking at what class is wielding the tools. You erase class struggle from society.

As a Statist, of course you wouldn’t view absolute State power as structurally problematic. The same way a religious fundamentalist doesn’t have a problem with the church having absolute power, as long as it is their religious sect that controls it. I disagree, because I am interested in structural critiques of power. I seek to increase the power of workers vs Capitalists, and also to reduce the power and influence of the State. These are not mutually exclusive goals, although they are complex and interconnected.

Your next paragraph just has you add “Capitalist” to the beginning of words, without justifying what makes any of it capitalist. GDP is not capitalist, it’s just a metric used for measuring production. The reason why China is successful is because it’s a socialist country, public ownership is the principal aspect of the economy, and the CPC is a proletarian party, which controls the state. It isn’t “capitalism and authoritarianism,” it’s a socialist market economy run democratically.

I didn’t say GDP was Capitalist, I said “Capitalist GDP growth”, or in other words, pursuing rapid and consistent GDP growth at the expense of other factors in an economy. You then just go on to assert the same Statist assumptions as before.

If China was capitalist, it would fall into the same trappings as other capitalist economies, and would be well on its way down. Instead, it is increasing socialization of the economy:

This one I found quite ironic, because first off, I literally listed multiple Capitalist trappings right above your response, which you just before, “…you add “Capitalist” to the beginning of words, without justifying what makes any of it capitalist.”

You then post a chart, I don’t know what it is from, but it assumes a statist framing, so my previous anti-statist critiques apply to that as well.

As for China being neocolonial, I look at Africa to know that they aren’t. China forgives debt, develops infrastructure, and facilitates south-south trade. It isn’t neocolonial because it has no reason to be, it isn’t dominated by private finance capital, and as a result Africa is rapidly developing, rather than remaining entrapped like it has been by the west.

The USA forgives debt, the EU forgives debt, the damn IMF forgives debt…so what, they’re not evil and corrupt institutions now? The US Army Corps of Engineers builds infrastructure, does that mean the US military isn’t an evil, Neo-colonial institution? You also said, “It [China] isn’t neocolonial because it has no reason to be, it isn’t dominated by private finance capital…” As if private finance capital is the only reason anybody would be interested in Colonizing anything.

All of the benefits you claim come from China’s involvement in Africa can also be, and have been, claimed by Western Imperialist entities about their colonization projects. That’s why it’s Neo-Colonialism, I already said it is miles better than anything the West did, obviously. But better doesn’t make it good, if I bake a cake with 1 cup of feces mixed in the batter, reducing it to 1/4 cup of feces is better, but it’s still a shit cake.

As for the PRC vs. the USSR, both are socialist, the USSR just took a more direct confrontational approach. It does not make the PRC capitalist.

No, the USSR actually was a legit State Socialist project. They actually largely eliminated private property, largely eliminated markets in favor of a centrally planned economy, and largely did not fall into Capitalist trappings like consumerism, vapid entertainment culture, or ultra-luxury goods. It was a disaster in many ways, horribly corrupt and terribly managed, and a lot of innocent people died needlessly. However they still managed to raise living standards for the vast majority of their population, develop interesting and impressive technologies; like a ternary logic-based computer, the first artificial satellite, the second most powerful military in the world for a while, and a rough but functional space program that saw several other “firsts.” Some Soviet technology is still used by modern cosmonauts, like their electro-mechanical orbital computers, which are considered very impressive by modern engineers, Westoids included.

This will be my last response in this thread because I think you and I have hit ideological bedrock. I’ve made all the primary points I wanted to make, and I think I have responded adequately to your statements. I oppose your worldview very strongly, but I do appreciate your civility in this exchange. In a weird way, I am rooting for China, everything they succeed at makes the US look even worse, and hopefully will help inspire a labor resurgence in the USA in the coming years. Right now we need all the help we can get.

Your example of socialism is a common misunderstanding, one that sees petite bourgeois worker ownership as socialist. The problem is that you abstract an element from the whole. Those that do not work at said cooperative do not share in its ownership, and this creates the rise of class distinctions.

A society where all members collectively share in all ownership isn’t a Socialist society, it’s a Communist society, which is what we should be trying to move towards. Going from individualist, Capitalist ownership to a worker-owned model with direct worker democracy is Socialist. Of course ideally all workers everywhere would share equally in the fruits of the labor of the entire society, but again, that’s Communism, not Socialism.

Thus, organizing in a way that undermines the socialist state undermines socialism. You try to justify it by saying independent organization is “healthy,” but you do not materially justify this. This becomes a moralistic argument, not a materialist one, and thus falls into idealism.

No it undermines State Socialism and specifically, that particular State’s Socialist framework, not Socialism as a whole. The whole point of Socialism is to embody worker’s rights to both the fruits of their labor, and the governance of their labor. Restricting that is antithetical to Socialist progress.

You try to justify it by saying independent organization is “healthy,” but you do not materially justify this. This becomes a moralistic argument, not a materialist one, and thus falls into idealism.

There is a lot of material evidence for this, I just don’t feel like getting a ton a sources together and posting them in a comment section debate on Lemmy. That being said, it is easy to find studies on worker-owned cooperatives and how they outperform traditional firms on the whole. The entire open source software movement is a testament to the robustness of independent Socialist organization against Fascist and Capitalist interests.

You fall even further into confusion when you equate MAGA, a fascist movement within a capitalist society, with the CPC, a communist party within a socialist society. The problem is not political loyalty in general, but political loyalty to fascism or socialism! You equate fascism with communism as equal evils here based purely on the similarity in form being political loyalty to the system. Anyone can see that these are very different systems!

I don’t understand what you’re saying here at all. I never said MAGA and the CCP were the same. I argued that merely incorporating workers into a national union structure, especially under an Authoritarian State apparatus, doesn’t make the society Socialist.

Next, “authoritarian rhetoric.” I support the authority of the working class. I do not support the authority of capitalists or fascists. The fact that I support worker states does not mean I support any and all states that support any and all classes. I support a particular form of state, that being a socialist state. Again, you confuse particular similarities in form abstracted from context for absolute similarities in total. This is a metaphysical error repeated.

Authority is not the same as Authoritarian. You didn’t address my core point at all here, which was that the argument that the State must act in an Authoritarian manner in order to reduce the risk of itself being undermined by dissent, is the exact same rhetoric that the US and EU are using right now as they continue to roll out more frameworks for surveillance and control. Unless you are admitting that you have no problem with that, as long as the people you support are the ones who are doing it, which in that case, alright, fair enough. You’re in the same rhetorical spot as MAGA supporters who cheer on ICE raids. They love seeing ICE roaming their streets because ICE is, (for now), acting in accordance with their worldview. Of course the actual critique ought to be structural, which if you analyze ICE through that lens, you quickly see that those same agents who are kicking in immigrant’s doors and dragging them into vans, will eventually come for the MAGA supporters too.

I am against Authoritarianism because I understand the structural critique. I understand that when any entity, a State, a ruler, a group of workers, is granted a structural framework within their society to act with absolute power, it will always degrade and devolve into every form of abuse we see in the world today. I reject Hobbes’s central thesis, humanity is on the whole, cooperative and constructive, not individualist and destructive.

Next, your confusion of marketization as capitalism. We already went over how cooperatives themselves are not socialism, because what matters is the context of the entire system. The capital that exists in China exists only in secondary industries, where marketization plays a progressive role. Critical and large industry is overwhelmingly state owned and planned. If China had a wealth cap, it would not fundamentally change that until production is socialized and collectivized afterwards, there will exist capitalists. However, as long as these capitalists exist within the birdcage set out by the socialist state, they cannot gain political power.

No, I understand that markets are not the same thing as Capitalism, obviously. China embraces Capitalist consumerism, Capitalist GDP growth, Capitalist sector dominance, Capitalist trade, Capitalist work ethic, Capitalist profit motives. They have managed it far better than the USA and most other western nations, but the same can be said for the Scandinavian countries, which are Capitalist. For this reason, I get frustrated watching China succeed so strongly, because it seems like a perfect counter-example to my worldview that Capitalism and Authoritarianism cannot produce long term societal happiness and prosperity. China seems to have figured out, (for now), how to make Authoritarian State Capitalism work. If that remains true in the years and decades to come, then it will be a massive blow against the viability of actual Socialism.

Further, you make completely unbacked and baseless claims of “neocolonialism.” You do not interrogate or substantiate this point. China’s position on the world stage undermines neoimperialism, which operates via IP monopoly, US cultural hegemony, the dollar as the world reserve currency, and US military dominance. Neoimperialism works through neocolonialism. China’s advance in IP destroys the IP monopoly of the west, undermines their military dominance, creates room for south-south trade, and undermines US supremacy, which is necessary for imperialism in the modern era. There is no neocolonialism from China.

China is Neocolonialist for sure, look at what they are doing in Africa. The difference is that China is smart, and understands how to exploit the poorest countries in the world without having to torture and massacre people, unlike most Western countries. I am happy that China is undermining IP monopoly, US and NATO military dominance, and so forth, I am against all those things as well. It remains to be seen if China will actually free people from the evils of IP law globally, I doubt it strongly, but I can dream, same with their military.

The USSR was also good. I will push back on the idea of a “political upper class,” such a term is not founded in Marxist understandings of class but the simple substitution of class for any category. Class is a social relation to ownership of the means of production, administrators in the Soviet Union had equal ownership to any other worker and were paid wages equivalent to skilled laborers.

I don’t have the energy or interest to debate the USSR being “good” whatever that might mean to you. You didn’t address my main point here either, which was that the USSR was a much better example of fighting the US and NATO on their own (The USSR’s) terms, instead of trying to just do Capitalism but better. The USSR’s leadership suffered from horrific corruption, especially at the local level, which is what makes it all the more impressive that despite that, they were able to accomplish what they did…the last true adversary to the USA. China isn’t so much beating the USA as they are just watching the USA rapidly decay after 50+ years of Neo-liberal, Capitalist cancer. Not to take too much credit away from China, they are absolutely doing things no other nation has ever done in recorded history, which is impressive from a Humanist POV.

Overall, I defend China from a Marxist position, you are attacking it from, at most, an anarchist position.

Bingo, Anarchist here. That explains a large portion of our disagreements.

Public ownership under capitalism is not socialism

Worker ownership is Socialism, that’s literally the most basic definition of Socialism, when workers own the means of production. A business where 100% of the ownership is possessed by the workers, where workers have full democratic control on the deployment of capital, where class distinction is eliminated and role distinction is elevated but confers no special privileges, is a Socialist business.

What matters is what class controls the state

If the only way that workers are allowed to influence a state is from within the State-approved structure, then it’s meaningless. Chinese workers aren’t allowed to organize organically, they are required to organize only within the approved bounds of the CCP.

If tomorrow, Trump announced that the US government was automatically enrolling all workers into a national MAGA union, but the rules stated that all other unions would be dissolved and all membership transfered into the MAGA union, would that be Socialism?

Independent worker union rights within the context of socialism can be a barrier to socialism.

Independent worker unions are essential to a healthy Socialist movement.

Independence from this cohesive socialist system can be levereged into disunity and resistance towards socialism, which can be especially dangerous for a society that still retains some degree of private ownership. Any crack becomes a lever.

This is authoritarian rhetoric, the exact same as what is currently being used by the USA and the EU to justify more surveillance, more population control, and more repression of dissent to Capitalist, Neocolonial interests.

China has billionaires because it has capitalists. China has capitalists because marketization is enormously useful for turning backwards production into socialized production, at which point it can be more effectively publicly owned and planned. Public ownership of backwards production is enormously difficult, which is why marketization is employed.

I actually agree with most of this. But there is still no excuse to allow Billionaires to exist even in a Capitalist market, same with centi-millionaires and the ultra-wealthy in general. Where Capitalism flourishes, so do all these things, and they will shift the class interests at every level. Ironically, the CCP is far more friendly to Capitalism than to Socialism, and if that doesn’t change, China will follow the same path as the EU and US. Capitalism is a cancer that spreads deep and fast through a society. China is kicking the EU and US’ asses right now, that’s indisputable, but they’re beating them at their own game, Capitalist, Neo-Colonial dominance.

The USSR, despite its many massive flaws, was actually a much better example of fighting the US/NATO on its own terms. The fact that they led the space race for many years, were a comparable military power for decades, and managed to construct quite a few megaprojects while operating a highly inefficient planned economy and having a highly corrupt political upper class, is pretty shocking and impressive.

So if the US government purchased controlling shares in its largest defense contractors and tech companies, it would be a socialist country?

China’s constitution does not grant independent worker unions rights, it does not grant independent worker-owned cooperatives or collectives rights.

China allows and has hundreds of billionaires, more than any other country except the USA, it also has thousands of centi-millionaires, ultra wealthy celebrities and one of the largest ultra-luxury goods industries in the world, selling to their own people, not just exports to other Capitalist countries.

Stop diminishing the actual Socialist/Communist project by crediting Capitalist countries with being Socialist/Communist.

Don’t feed into the rhetoric, China is not any more Socialist or collectivist than countries like Sweden, Finland, France, etc. China is fundamentally a Capitalist country, at least in its current form.

Better than countries like the UK or USA? Sure, but that’s a low bar.

I do have something to hide. I wear clothes, because I don’t want everybody to see my naked body. I keep my debit card hidden in my wallet, my keys to my car and house hidden in my pockets, my passwords are hidden in my password manager, my phone’s unlock code is a secret, my SSN is hidden on a card in a secure place in my house, which I also lock up securely. I close the stall door when I use the bathroom, I don’t walk around with my medical records taped to my back, I don’t tell people all the invasive dirty or violent thoughts that randomly pop into my head, and I don’t keep my car’s title in the front seat, nor my bank account and routing numbers written on my arm.

And I would wager most other people are the same. All of those are completely legitimate things people have to hide, good reasons to keep them secret and locked away. It has nothing to do with being a criminal, or a sick pervert, or a domestic terrorist, or any of the other bullshit fake “explanations” for why people would value their privacy.

And all that doesn’t even touch issues like systemic corporate or state oppression, data exploitation, or labor repression. It doesn’t touch things like fascist governments coming to power and deciding that certain opinions or expressions of speech are “subversive” and must be banned. How easily “nothing to hide” can become “domestic terrorism” when certain groups come into power.

Whatever their rebrand is these days lol.

If that many evil people/corpos are involved, run as fast as you can the other direction.

Give me community-based distros like Debian, Arch, Mint, etc. I like my Linux democratic, anti-corpo, and inclusive.

Check out Linode, it’s easy to use, reasonably priced, and as far as I know, hasn’t done anything disgusting.

Only downside is that they were acquired a little while ago by a publicly traded company, so the likwlyhood of enshitification is higher.

Sure, how and what you ask does make a difference, especially on lower power models. But it’s generally not really significant, like learning how to write more effective prompts takes maybe a few hours of total time? Honestly, probably an hour at most for 95% of people using LLMs in a corporate environment.

The irony of all this, is that one of the supposed biggest advantages of LLMs is that you can just talk to them with natural language in a conversational format. The more people have to use special rules of conversation, format their prompts in specific ways, take advantage or avoid subtleties of the model’s preferred syntactic style, etc. The more LLMs become a technical tool that can only produce high quality results if you use it in very specific, skilled ways.

And one of the big risks with LLMs is staff who can recognise bullshit or questionable results being replaced with staff who unquestioningly accept whatever results they get. And people reading an “AI summary” of something and assuming it’s actually accurate.

That’s exactly the point from people who are making systemic critiques of the “AI” craze. LLMs by their very nature, encourage people to become lazy. I’m not worried about a machine that’s constantly wrong, depending on the application, I can control for that. I am worried about a machine that is almost always right. That’s really dangerous, because it lulls its users into a false sense of confidence and security.

There’s a saying I heard from an old sys-admin once, “It’s better to be broadly right, than precisely wrong.” Modern LLMs are a perfect example of the latter, they will get 95% of a task correct, but then mess up that last 5%. But it messes up that 5% in a way that is very subtle and convincing, and requires somebody with deep, technical knowledge to catch and mitigate. That fact, combined with how lazy people are incentivized to be when using them, is the deadly combo imo.

Eh, more like generalizations based on observations of my own, and many other corporate workplaces that people I am close to, work in.

Has Linus been screeching about how everybody must use AI or get left behind?

Capitalism isn’t being “destroyed from the inside” by you offloading grunt work to an agent. If anything, you may be helping justify future cuts of your job by demonstrating that there is less need for you. Your managers will be all too happy to cut half your department and make the remaining people take on all that work because, “AI makes them 5x more productive.” Of course, none of those people will get a 5x pay raise.

Use it or don’t, it doesn’t make a difference in the long run. This bubble will pop soon anyways and we’ll be on to the next “revolutionary technology.” I suspect it will be quantum computing, I’ve been seeing a significant upswing in news articles and bot traffic about that over the last few months, but who knows.

If your work is pushing AI hard, use it if you need the job, play the game if you have to, just don’t let yourself be mesmerized by the aggressive marketing hype. Anybody who is pushing the idea that tech workers will be replaced in the next 5-10 years with LLMs is a religious fanatic and should be treated with the appropriate levels of mockery and disdain.

Also, if you really want to work on taking down Capitalism, organize your labor, and support other movements that do the same.

It’s really not for most people. You ask a question, the LLM answers. You ask it to do a task, it does it. Most people are not using these things for anything advanced or technically difficult.

I work in a big corporate office, if you exclude the IT staff and software devs, here’s a pretty exhaustive list of what everybody else is using LLMs for:

• Organizing emails.
• Drafting memos and auto-responses in Teams.
• Organizing cluttered files.
• Adding “artwork” to company fliers.
• Doing web searches.
• Summarizing emails and Teams messages and creating to-do lists from them.
• Searching large documents for key terms.

It’s grunt work, that’s what these things excel at, and that’s how most people use them. That’s fine, but acting like most people are somehow not able to unlock the “true potential” of these LLMs unless they have special training and skills is a marketing ploy to sell overpriced “AI” courses to gullible and ignorant executives and upper managers.

It’s like those stupid DEI courses that corporations have everybody take so they can “learn to not be problematic.” But all the quizzes are filled with stupid stuff like:

Your manager, Sarah finishes briefing you and your coworker, Phil on an upcoming project. After she leaves, Phil says to you, “That Sarah sure is a real juicy piece of meat, I’d love to get taste of her!” What should you do? A. High-five Phil and tell him you call dibs on her secretary. B. Tell Phil that his comment was not appropriate, then report it to HR.

It’s just there to check boxes for compliance and provide an excuse for other companies to charge outrageous prices to tell people that sexually assaulting your coworkers or pulling your eyelids tight and calling yourself “Ching Chong” isn’t appropriate office behavior.

It’s another way Capitalism poisons and hollows out substantive discussions about topics like systemic racism, multiculturalism, and gender relationships, in favor of standardized quizzes that cost thousands of dollars a year to administer.

The amount of “AI consultants” and “AI integration” firms that have popped up overnight is staggering. Just like with the crypto/blockchain craze a few years ago, everybody is trying to get rich quick off the hype.

People who are vehemently against any form of blockchain technology will be left behind. That may be difficult to hear, and even more difficult to accept, but that is the cold, hard, truth. Blockchain is a tool, and just like any tool it has uses. It can be used inappropriately, and it’s valid to criticize those instances. But if you are plugging your ears and going “Lalala!” when people talk about actual valid use cases, or stubbornly pretending that blockchain has none, **you will be left behind**. You will be like office employees from the 80’s and 90’s who refused to use a computer and then suddenly found themselves without a job. It’s your choice if you use blockchain or not. It’s also every company’s choice to not hire you because of your unwillingness to adapt. If you haven’t learned it yet, this is your warning and your wake-up call: Learn how to use blockchain now, or find a different career. It’s not going away, no matter how much you may *removed* and moan. There will soon be two classes of people, those who learned how to use this emerging technology, and those who refused. Things will be much harder for that second group. I don’t say this to be snarky or smug. I hate blockchain myself, but I also recognize how fucking stupid I’d have to be to refuse to use it. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s also the truth.

Ah, there we go, I knew your rhetoric sounded familiar!

Seriously though, what “skills” are you building by learning how to use LLMs at your corporate job? How to tell a chatbot to do a task for you?

Sure, if you’re trying to build a local LLM server from scratch, tune a minimalist harness with a RAG and custom skills, optimize context compaction and concurrent token throughput, and integrate all that into existing automation pipelines, that takes some technical skill. But that’s a tiny fraction of people in the corporate world that need to do anything like that.

I could teach vast majority of corporate workers everything they will ever need to know about using “AI” in a half hour Lunch-N-Learn. There is no skill involved in asking a chatbot to move all your emails about “Project ABC” into a new Outlook folder called, “Project ABC” or asking a chatbot to, “draft a department memo about the new parking policy found in the HR SharePoint site.”

It’s not the next industrial revolution, it’s not the beginning of the Singularity, it’s not the dawn of a new age of our species. It is merely the latest hype-cycle of Capitalism that exists to siphon wealth from the population up to a handful of ultra wealthy billionaires and megacorps, and artificially prop up a dying economy just a little longer. And long term, we will discover the same thing about LLM use as we are finding out now about electronics in school and the mass proliferation of smart phones: That it stunts people’s critical reasoning, reading comprehension, self-image, and social confidence.

The same thing they gain from investing in Leprechaun gold mining companies.

Pick up as many uncensored models as you can store ASAP. Those will absolutely be the first to go.

I agree with Stallman and others on this sort of thing, it should be illegal for any public institution to use proprietary, corporate software in any capacity.

Public institutions are supposed to serve and benefit the public good first and foremost. The idea that they can do that equally well or better by partnering with mega-corps who’s only fundamental drive is to generate as much profit as possible for their shareholders, is idiotic.