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Comment by slowmovintarget | Hacker News Reader

Marxist analysis is essentially nonsense, though it sure feels good. Makes you tap your toes and really feel like "one of the People." But it's been bunk from the day it was penned.

Jonathan Blow took this notion to task when said that the means of production are a $200 laptop you can buy at Walmart.

What's really going on is industrial grade existential angst. "If my competitor trains a robot to do this job, they can run their factory 24x7, dramatically lowering their costs. If they do it and I don't, I can't compete. Therefore, I've got to do it or die." Rinse and repeat for call centers, web shops with "assistants," or software feature mills.

Those CEOs and CTOs are convinced that the other guy is doing it, and their business will fail if they don't. There are a few that know better.

This isn't a class struggle. It's cold-sweats-at-night fear of the future.

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> Jonathan Blow took this notion to task when said that the means of production are a $200 laptop you can buy at Walmart.

That is bunk, in the current age. The means of production is a $200 laptop and a $1B nvidia cluster.

> What's really going on is industrial grade existential angst. "If my competitor trains a robot to do this job, they can run their factory 24x7, dramatically lowering their costs

This is not exclusive to what I said. All this "lowering of costs" is archieved by a reduced dependence on the working class.

No struggle but the class struggle.

This is not exclusive to what I said. All this "lowering of costs" is archieved by a reduced dependence on the working class. No struggle but the class struggle.

Well, to the extent you're right, the capitalists are behaving rationally. What would Marx say about that?

He woulds say that when capital can no longer reproduce itself through productive labor that system must collapse or end in revolutionary transformation(aka probably a lot of killing).

But you seem to be looking for some sort of political argument on top of corrupt and twisted logic, so I don't know exactly what you're looking for here.

> No struggle but the class struggle.

No, see, there are other struggles. The reason Marxism is fundamentally totalitarian and always devolves into a single party dictatorship is EXPLICITLY because it attempts to explain all suffering as caused by class conflict. Thus: if class is destroyed, utopia is achieved.

This is of course farcical.

"no struggle but x struggle" is the very the definition of a totalitarian ideology. You really think there's no struggle but class struggle? When you are suffering because a loved one has died of old age, is that struggle the class struggle?

Fuck off with that totalitarian nonsense.

Marxism isn’t about utopia. Marxism isn’t only about class you are referring to. The people who usually say that sort of thing are white westerners. Marxism is difficult to understand for westerners who center themselves too much like you are doing.

>Jonathan Blow took this notion to task when said that the means of production are a $200 laptop you can buy at Walmart.

This isn't a serious comparison, but Jonathan Blow is one to oversimplify concepts outside of his domain.

Could Jonathan Blow host his streams off his $200 laptop?

> Could Jonathan Blow host his streams off his $200 laptop?

You may be right on the other parts, but, theoretically, yes? We've had the capabilities since BitTorrent to build p2p streaming tools: our main limitation for such situations is not capital, but the ability to coordinate making such tools simple and resilient enough for everyone to use.

Someone else downthread said "No struggle but class struggle", which it really does require a Marxist outlook. My take is "No problems but coordination problems" -- we have enough capital, labor, and raw resources now to solve most of our remaining problem set, we just need ways to coordinate better. Some of that is about aligning incentives. Marxists try to do this too! I just haven't seen them succeed very well without having to fall back on other, more general methods.

Digital technology, the domain of people here, is the main engine of better coordination in the modern era. We need to keep working on it to make it work better for everyone trying to solve problems.

I'm not sure how quite to word this.

You saying "he could theoretically stream off his laptop" is no different than saying a luddite could "theoretically sew clothes with needle and thread". It really comes across like a lack of respect for the argument Marxists make. I'm not asking you to be a Marxist but if you aren't willing to engage the argument seriously, I'm not sure what I can say.

Even your "solution", is exactly what the early Marxists thought. They needed to coordindate to overcome the sole power of factory owners and they did that through striking. What is striking, if not coordinated market power? The rest of your post comes off as Marxism, but in a different font. It's as wishy-washy as the solutions proposed by the Marxists on Bluesky. "if only we would come together and coordinate, the revolution will be here soon!".

The issue with "No problems but coordination problems", is that today, in our society, capital solves coordination problems. And before that was monarchy, and before that was religion. The entirety of human civilization can be distilled with "how do we get n-million people to do x?"

I don't consider myself as a Marxist but the actual problems he highlights are very salient even if his followers have failed to solve them. Just because there's no found solution for P=NP, doesn't mean the entire field of computational complexity is a wash.

Well, yes. Marxists also try to identify and solve these coordination problems, and their analysis is fundamentally one of class analysis. My claim isn't that they aren't pursuing the answers to these problems: it's that there attempts to do so have notoriously failed. Which is fine: these are not easy problems. The best models for successful coordination, as you've described, all have negative externalities.

The point though, is that you really can stream off a laptop: we had BitTorrent; we have WebTorrent. We've built peer-to-peer infrastructure that works. In the last 25 years we have built great collective works with minimal capital outlay -- so minimal that we saw an explosion of capital investments because the returns to low capital were so high. Heck, you're using one of those low-capital, capital-adjacent artifacts right now.

In the class of problems, scaling up peer-to-peer collective action is (I would suggest) difficult, but not as difficult as it would have been to coordinate peer production in the 19th century. We've just barely begun to explore their potential.

Did Jonathan Blow really compare a datacenter and a laptop as comparable means or production?

The guy is smart, but many of his opinions are those of a man who doesn't get much pushback on what he says. It's a common curse of success that you get surrounded by yay men.

It seems like Marx had some good noticings of problems with capitalism, and probably some silly ones, and what he noticed probably wasn’t the first time such things were noticed, but some were valid. But then people go “ah, these noticings are valid, we should listen to this guy”. But noticing a problem does not mean you can design a solution, and Marx’s solutions generally were not good, despite his problem noticing being good. Also other people basically hijacked his ideas and I imagine probably twisted them somewhat, as they offered a way to seize power and people doing that are typically not ideological purists in practice.

There’s a surprisingly long (to me) analysis of Marx in Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies though much of the book might be dated by the conditions of 1950-1960. He writes that Marx correctly saw problems with England’s capitalism in 19th century but never adjusted his views as conditions in England changed during his lifetime(labor reform).

So all those CEOs and CTOs are wrong, and you along with the skeptic camp see the true nature of AI.

But let's assume for the sake of argument that you are wrong. What are the logical implications? Can your worldview allow for the possibility that you might be wrong?

a lot of people were wrong about supersonic commercial flight too

> So all those CEOs and CTOs are wrong, and you along with the skeptic camp see the true nature of AI.

This kind of a statement assumes that all those CEOs did exhaustive, detailed, independent research to arrive at the conclusion that AI is the next big thing.

IME more often than not, they're just following the herd in a way that ends up being a circle.

Whether or not they are right isn't the issue.

The real issue is: what are the consequences if they are right - and what should be done to mitigate them.

Sure, but the herd can still be right from time to time. While it's impossible to accurately predict the future course of AI progress, we can at least agree that the rapid take-off scenario is at least plausible, and that, if it happens, it logically leads to dramatic social and political changes unprecedented in the last centuries; in that scenario, AI-empowered human political operators will quickly become dangerous to humanity and they pose a far greater and earlier threat than the comic book scenario where unaligned AI takes over. We had unaligned HI from the very beginning.

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