Cross-posted from “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution” by @Db0@dbzer0.com in !dbzer0.com@dbzer0.com
I see tankies keep trying to argue with people about “Actually Existing Socialist” states like USSR and China and try to argue with me or others about how “they were good actually”. It’s bad enough when most of their arguments are whataboutism, but it grinds my gears when I hear then prattle on about all the statistically significant material improvements the life of the people received. It’s like listening to a terminally-liberal prattle on about how “statistically, the life quality actually increased under capitalism”.
Why is this bothering me so much? Because tankies completely suppress the freedom aspects of those states. Sure the improvements in life quality in those nations improved compared to the feudal/agrarian societies they had before, much like liberal capitalism also improved those same metrics.
But the freedom of the populace barely improved improved whatsoever because that freedom is anathema to authoritarian regimes. When anarchists talk about our ideal society, we mean both positive and negative freedom together together. It’s not enough if your health expectancy is increased and infant mortality is reduced, if you have to constantly fear the secret police knocking on your door. It’s not enough to have food on your plate, when the state determines what you can create and where you can work. It’s not enough to get a free car and internet, if your family member got shipped to the concentration camp for criticizing the movement leaders online.
Tankies explicitly avoid this. They are desperate to argue that “authoritarianism is not a thing actually”, hilariously and endlessly promoting the worst socialist essay ever written to justify this. But authoritarianism is very much the crux of the problem here. A society with a hierarchical structure like capitalism or marxism-leninism (i.e. state capitalism) can never be good. It might be better than other states, but it will only get worse and worse as power concentrates to fewer hands and the grip of authority tightens the more control slips through their fingers.
We keep seeing this historically both in liberal and ML states. Clearly material quality of life is not enough to justify the system, or even be stable long-term, when actual human liberty is the sacrifice for it.
Reminds me of this reply to my comment on lemmy.world simply asking if there was a non-liberal non-authoritarian apologist communist:
https://lemmy.ml/comment/15506678
On mobile trying to paste
authoritarian regime
Both of these terms are obfuscstory propaganda that mean a person hasn’t placed enough scrutiny on what they have internalized. That might sound like I am simply attacking you, but I mean this as a way of answering your (combative) question: you want a space where people have some basic ideas about cold war propaganda but where they retain a significant amount of chauvinist framibgs from that propaganda. You can find like-minded people wherever left education arrests itself, which is why you won’t find it in organizations or spaces that require reading on these topics.
To explain my response, I’ll go over the two words.
Authoritarian. This word is poisoned beyond clear meaning. Every state is authoritarian, so what is the meaning of calling a particular state authoritarian? Every revolution is authoritarian, so do you also criticize them as such and seek out anti-revolutionary spaces? In reality, I know that this term is just thrown around in chauvinist contexts as a dog whistle. In this context it just means “bad” and “the enemy”. It’s the liberal version of, “they hate us for our freedoms”.
Regime. This term is synonymous with givernment or state, but just colors it as, again, “bad”. Venezuela must always be described as being led by a regime, not a government. As a target of imperialist propaganda, it must be implicitly propagandized as illegitimate and bad. Think of someone saying, “the Biden regime”. How often do you hear that phrase? If you’ve heard it, it was a socialist trying to make this point and even the playing field.
If you remove the propaganda aspects, your framing becomes, “still not pretend it isn’t a government”. Becomes less spicy, doesn’t it? Despite having no differences in meaning outside of implying it is bad.
Finally, Xi didn’t make himself president for life, he must be regularly reelected. The government itself removed term limits in the normal way: with a vote. Imperialist media calls this “president for life” because they are chauvinists. When the US had no term limits, was every president “president for life”? Aren’t term limits antidemocratic, i.e. more authoritarian?
In short: please do some self-criticism on this internalized chauvinism and you will find it easier to find comrades. You are currently in an incoherent position and that means you’d only find comeradery among the incoherent snd incurious. Be around people that challenge you based on their reading and knowledge.
Ye this kind of argument is so well known in anarchist circles, it’s very hard not to roll our eyes at it.
This is news to me! Could you suggest any easy reader on such topics? Such as comparing the two’s merits?
Communism is appealing in what it can materially achieve but there is never a could communist answer to anti-authoritarianism and the problem of police. I’m always just told well communist police will be better because they’re of the people, lol
There’s also a decent Bakunin piece on the topic of authority here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mikhail-bakunin-what-is-authority which I think helps to differentiate between freely choosing to regard someone or some organization as an authority, versus it being forced upon you by some external power (e.g. the State).
I didn’t get the other thing he is arguing but this paragraph is a banger:
Does it follow that I drive back every authority? The thought would never occur to me. When it is a question of boots, I refer the matter to the authority of the cobbler; when it is a question of houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer. For each special area of knowledge I speak to the appropriate expert. But I allow neither the cobbler nor the architect nor the scientist to impose upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and verification. I do not content myself with consulting a single specific authority, but consult several. I compare their opinions and choose that which seems to me most accurate. But I recognize no infallible authority, even in quite exceptional questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such an individual, I have absolute faith in no one. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave and an instrument of the will and interests of another.
Yep, it’s a gem.
Thanks pal :)
Have you read this?
You can dance if you want to. You can leave your friends behind. Cause your friends don’t dance and if they don’t dance then they’re no friends of mine.
Save the Pogo dance!
Keep your AI shit out of anarchist spaces.
How is this not equivalent to “don’t use shovels, dig with your hands”? Gatekeeping technology… so anarchist. /s
Lmao you’re talking to the very person who hosts this anarchist space
Hosts? Doesn’t sound very anarchy to me.
Oh fuck off.
I don’t give a shit about copyright but I do care about the environment and about culture, and GenAI is bad for both. It didn’t democratize art, it enshitified it. You should be fucking ashamed for using that corpo ancap bullshit.
Ok, lets take a step back please before the name calling and insults continues.
This AI image was almost certainly created with AI Horde (the OP is the main developer of it), which despite some general issues with how the model was trained, is about the closest to democratized and relatively environmentally benign AI image generation as it can get. Feel free to still dislike it, but you are directing your anger at the wrong person.
My local gens don’t harm the environment and the image I create for my blog posts doesn’t harm culture. Get some perspective.
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I wholeheartedly agree with you and wish this post had gone better for you but it has to be said your point was obliterated by your obstinate defense of your complimentary AI image. Clearly people do not agree with your stance that your AI, though locally grown, open source, and energy efficient, is not in theory stealing. In my opinion, unfortunately, it sort of is stealing unless you source the input data yourself. I read somewhere in the thread you possibly did source your own data and thats really cool if so. But I think that it just goes to show that at least on Lemmy your receptive audience just… doesn’t like AI art in principle. I’ll say it universally looks groddy to me and I had the same gut reaction to seeing the art even though I like what it depicts and love the message (and title!).
Another thing is… Know your audience. The premise of this thread already means you were going to be engaging with prickly Marxist-Leninists to begin with… Since they do practice whatabohtism as you stated, they just need a thing to dig into to discredit you, and you sort of gave it to them. Not saying you have to be the perfect flawless diplomat with how you comport yourself online (god knows I’m not) but to an audience who aren’t receptive anyway your defense of your practices while not broadly clarifying the source of your training data is just going to lead them to thinking of you as a reactionary in favor of art regurgitation, indicating you are more about your aesthetic than your message. I think you have pirate party politics and I respect the long term vision of a world without constraints on how art is shared and understood, but this specific tool we’re discussing requires far more attention than not in order to be wielded ethically. People are gunshy just seeing it, even if theoretically they don’t know what you’re showing them is a home made original piece with original constituent data.
You can’t really wear a big hat on the internet that says ASK ME ABOUT MY ETHICAL OPEN SOURCE AI but perhaps you could have user flair in your nametag. On your blog you could caption your art with a disclaimer and a github link to the resources you use/used to build it.
There’s no argument I can make towards the GenAI haters that will work. This is a situation where people have dug in their heels about their position and see neither arguments nor nuance.
I don’t particularly care if some people dislike the disposable art I use for my blog. I also don’t think “people disagree” with my use of GenAI. It’s a few ones that do but they’re very loud when they do. Most other don’t give a fuck about it either way.
I understand that moralizers won’t like how I work, but I’m used to hear these bad faith arguments from anti-pirates for decades now. I’m used to it.
“Disposable art” see, you’re telling on yourself about how you view art and artists. There’s a reason people aren’t a fan of this even if you’re doing it as “ethically” as possible.
Mate are you trying to be as uncharitable as possible to get upset? , I didn’t call your art or all art disposable. Cheezus crust…
It’s not my art. It’s how you view art in general as “disposable”.
I don’t view art in general as disposable. I view this specific piece of art for this specific blogpost as disposable. Stop being uncharitable ffs!
They said the artistic output was disposable not the input. Whether that matters is up fot debate.
This is AI garbage
The image is generated with AI (and isn’t done very well), but the blog post has nothing to do with that. Its just nice to have a pic to go with your blog post, and using AI is a quick and easy way to make sure it’s both unique and copyright-free
Edit: also, I feel it’s worth pointing out, you’re commenting on a blog post by db0, from an account made on db0’s instance, and db0 is the main developer of AIHorde, an open source genAI project
The words that go with it are fine, the AI image is a waste of energy and water, offensive to actual artists, and AI is just theft of artists work as “training” data.
It looks like it was generated with flux, and was probably generated locally, using less electricity than most modern video games (flux is very energy efficient and fast).
I’m not well equipped to discuss the theft part of it, but I don’t think it’s fair to call it theft (and I’ll say upfront I’m not prepared to defend that opinion lol)
Edit: regarding the ‘actual artists’ part- some people use generative AI to make ‘actual art’ and are themselves artists
As an artist, the training data used for most of the image generators is stolen work. As in, the original artists didn’t give permission for their work to be used that way. Some aren’t stolen, such as adobe’s ai tools, which are trained on imagery that’s licensed for it.
Piracy is a big theme in this instance
Lol at you promoting corporate Adobe and attacking those use local open source genai. You’re a goddamn tool!
Don’t get me wrong I hate adobe. But. They at least got AI right. These aren’t big corporations you’re “stealing” movies from. They’re everyday people like myself who’s art is being used by AI for training against my wishes.
I ain’t stealing shit. Nothing I do takes anything away from you. And you’re a tool because you think what adobe is doing is “right”. Because you have no understanding of capitalist power differentials. As if it wouldn’t be a massively worst world for Artists if the only owner of GenAI was adobe and everyone was paying adobe only to use GenAI.
That’s not what “theft” means
The imagery used for the training data isn’t licensed to be used as such. It’s stolen.
Not what “stealing” means either. Also I will point out this instance is both pro-piracy and pro-genai and we shit on copyrights
We’re democratizing the end of culture with this one
Stealing from big companies like movie studios? Whatever. Stealing from the working class? Not so great. People should 1. Have the right to not have their work used as training data and 2. If they agree to be used as training data, be compensated.
Again, not what “stealing” means. And I don’t recognize anyone’s rights to tell me what I can do with the content they’re sharing with me. Copyrights is a shitty state monopoly, not a natural law.
Rut roh gaming piracy
dafuq are you talking about?
The “art” that goes along with the writing (not the writing itself which I assume is your actual writing)
This is hilarious. Nice post, well argued
