Walter Water-Walker

There is a dialectic between theory (or head knowledge) and practice. To be a Marxist is to do both things, working through that dialectic to evolve yourself as a practicianer. Additionally, to be a Marxist in practice necessitates interaction with an organized group of other Marxists. This interaction will challenge you to resolve conflicts between ideas, theories, strategies and so forth and develop a practical version of democratic centralism for your organization.

Those who think that Marxism is just learning theory aren’t actually practicing Marxism. They become purists and commit the error of dogmatism. Many Trotskyists fall into this camp (I won’t say all Trotskyists, but I’m still looking for counter-examples). It’s why a Trotskyists probably knows Marxist theory better than I do but is also the most useless leftist on the planet (and can often even become useful to the bourgeoisie!).

If you only ever read theory and do not put it into practice, you are simply doing so for some personal reasons, like to feel smarter than others because you have an insecurity. This is not just useless but dangerous because people like this can sound really smart and like they know what they’re talking about for new leftists. But because they offer no real solution to the material problems of those around them nor any practical avenues for the proletariat to direct their anger and pain from capitalism towards revolutionary action, it drains the energy away from more serious praxis.

Praxis is the hard part. It’s why many don’t do it. But it’s what actually makes any of this make sense.

“The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” — Karl Marx

Does anybody have resources on AGI being a real possibilities beyond just a marketing term and, one day, just a mashup of various different things of AI?

I haven’t read anything about AGI that isn’t a “tech bro” kind of approach. Also, I don’t see how AGI is anything more than a marketing term where, once enough shitty jobs are replaced by it, they’ll hail it a success and that’s pretty much it.

I want an AI, for example, to analyze the material conditions of a country and plan a Communist revolution for me. Can I have that? Will capitalism produce this for me?

Ferengi are the ultimate capitalist realists.

WRT innovation following the economic need, that’s sort of universal and logical. It wouldn’t make sense for the startup Google to begin writing a search algorithm for the Internet if there’s no Internet. The development of the Internet created new possibilities but then created brand new problems: how we going to find all this new content?

WRT capitalism’s different natures at different times, this is NOT STRESSED ENOUGH by leftists! In the early days of capitalism, it was a massively progressive, innovative and yes, even positive force in the world! It no longer is. What changed? What changed was exactly what you said: when it’s goal was to supplant the old system and establish a new one (aka revolutionary), it was a positive force. Now that it’s goal is to specifically STOP any and all revolutionary changes globally, it became a negative force.

The key is technology. As technology moves humanity from scarcity to abundance, in each area, one after the other, we have two choices: 1) accept this and allow ALL people access to the things or 2) build artificial scarcity (paywalls, patents, military conquests, coups, etc) so that this new abundance can be monopolized and controlled. This is the very heart of what is being fought against.

The important thing here is not just that capitalism changed from a positive to a negative force in the world, but to also note that so will socialism. Socialism, after it fully supplants capitalism, will fight against changes towards communism. It will betray its own objective. Indeed, all socialist projects already have this tendency. The struggle will always continue.