Welcome again to everybody. Thank you for joining us for the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
• Matrix homeserver and space
• Theory discussion group on /c/theory@lemmygrad.ml
• Find theory on ProleWiki, marxists.org, Anna’s Archive
P.S. I was not late what are you talking about
Can we start telling people that Ayn Rand was a Soviet deep cover agent who was so good at parody they sent her to the west to publish PsyOps that deepened the contradictions of capitalism? We could blame it on trotsky and say he called it operation “Accelerationism in one Country.”
You’re gonna have to pump out a dozen AI gen videos of this per day to make it hit the right people’s algorithm.
Actually it might be a bit too grounded. Could you incorporate ancient aliens somehow?
guess who
Sometimes I try to ground myself by imagining the irrelevance I have within the universe. Voyager 1 just reached 1 light day away from Earth. It is the most distant human-made object out there. 25 billion kilometers from Earth.
Our milky way has a diameter of 100 thousand light years. To give you an idea: Voyager 1 was launched nearly 49 years ago in 1977. At its current pace it would need nearly 1.8 billion years to cross just our galaxy. And there are 2 trillion galaxies out there as per our calculations, which are flawed as well.
Yes, but in how many of those 2 trillion galaxies can you find a decent croissant?
I was thinking about AI recently. It’s really easy to imagine a dystopian future with Robocop-style bots and intense surveillance but I don’t think it’s gonna be so easy to ditch the proletariat as a class .
Like, robot cops (not necessarily humanoid) would need batteries in order to be mobile. They would need to recharge every so often and a battery would be a really weak spot.
I think physical labor is gonna be done by human hands for a long time. Intellectual labor might be easier to replace.
Just thinking statically, that’s been the case a significant portion of the time. The whole thing about labor is it self-reproduces, self-maintains. That’s part of the picture of capitalist value extraction. Put in liberal-friendly terms, the McDonalds worker goes home and tries to recuperate for free. The self-checkout kiosk, on the other hand, costs money to maintain.
Dynamically or dialectically, these tech advancements cause deterritorialization of social relations and class definitions. And it’s difficult to predict how they’ll be reterritorialized.
The gutting/proletarianization of the imperial “intellectual” class is gonna have some ripple effects that, to repeat myself for lack of creative vocabulary, are gonna be difficult to predict. The service class as a whole is hard to replace with tech, but it has developed in tandem with, to serve, the salary class that’s currently being gutted. There’s fewer Disney adults paying for their burger suburban utopia where they can yell at minimum wage workers. There’s less and less money to recirculate within the service class.
More and more people fall out of the system (there’s a compelling argument that this is one of the material drivers of prison systems). But I don’t know what this growing class of people turns into once it reaches a critical mass. What percentage of a population can you sustainably imprison or execute?
Good morning
In The Netherlands we saw the ICE and thought we could do better so state TV made a TV series sanitizing Frontex
A local council woman crashed an anti-AI data center event my comrades held. She showed up with body guards and basically disparaged the work that grassroots organizers have been doing to get data centers out of communities.
She opened by trying to intimidate our community by saying that the Federal government would end up labeling us terrorists because we’re loud. She vaguely tried to connect us to people making threats against politicians across the country. Mind you, we aren’t advocating any violence against people but that’s how a sitting council member introduces herself to the community. She then tried to co-opt the energy in real time before she finished with her spiel.
And of course, this council member has done a PR interview with the corporation thats supposed to build out the data center. It was absurd to watch happen in real time. Data centers are really being treated like political battle grounds here in the US.
I hope you held your ground in the end.
A victory in itself tbh
We definitely did and I dont think she changed any minds. They stuck around to accost some people at the end as well. I didn’t expect the energy around this to pick up this way, but Alysa Liu, the Olympic skater, had reposted the meeting flyer on her Instagram story 😲.
Was in a depressed mood today due to Palestine. I never thought that I would feel so much for people so far away.
Like, there’s always a possibility that the genocide might go uninterrupted. I don’t know how I would feel after it ends on the worst case. Humanity would be unredeemable after this. Fuck.
I’m okay now. I know that there’s reasons to have hope.
If you Google ‘I am alone with a Moroccan’ in Dutch AI will immediately give you the police contact info but let’s pretend it is normal
east is a podcast youtube channel is suspended
ran by Iranian ml their podcast on apple podcasts is still up though
I think Anthony Fantano is my example of “person you already didnt like has a good reason to not like them.” Like i saw his content pop up occasionally and i was like “eh, I’m not really sure I like the vibes” and then it turns out that [like a lot of critics] he cannot take criticism at all
Edit: Joseph Anderson is another great example of “critic who can’t take criticism.” It’s like, he can say “Miyazaki has obviously been lobotomized and is an actual idiot because the boss attacks aren’t what I want” and then is like “fans are so toxic for criticizing my criticisms”
Hate how fascism has taken over Dutch football. Multiple clubs now have firms comfortable enough to hang outright fascist flags and stickers all over the place.
How to learn dialectical and historical materialism? I read the book but don’t think I understand it
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11450117
I wrote about dia.mat. a while ago. It’s of course not everything there is to say about it but it might work as an introduction or supplement. Other than that I think the best way to learn might be to read the classic texts from great Marxist thinkers, especially Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao. You really get a feel for it when seeing them use it. Mao has a text called “On Contradiction” which is also about dia.mat. The early writings of Marx and Engels focus quite a bit on dia.mat. and historical materialism as well.
Was reading up on the term Hikikomori on wikipedia just cause that was the first result that came up in search and noticed how it mentioned neoliberalism like once and other than that it had this tone of like “this is such a hard problem, there are various factors involved.”
Reformists always act like these things are super hard to figure out, but somehow fail to compare the system of power to societies where the issue doesn’t tend to occur. That’s the actually weird phenomenon, the feigned ignorance of anything that exists outside the status quo, not some people ending up as dependent recluses because capitalist society literally does not want to have a place for everyone and introduces scarcity on purpose; the fact that the daily operations of capitalism do not miss the presence of these people is a feature, not a bug. And in not missing them, it becomes very easy for them to exist apart from society. Society is not even meeting them halfway. Capitalists build a society based on “winners” and “losers”, where “winner” is synonymous with material success/power and “loser” is synonymous with material failure/isolation, and then act confused that some people exist in the “loser” category. As if they didn’t build the system to create and reproduce that dynamic.
But they need the feigned confusion because admitting that society is rigged to screw over a bunch of people means it also isn’t the fault of the people being screwed over. As long as they keep the confusion narrative going, they can point and say “I guess it’s a you problem.”
Doing some writing for a marxist magazine in my country. Seems like they’re very well read and stuff. Hopefully I can write something of high enough quality 😅
Good luck!
