TΛVΛR
You’re right, it is not to be overexagerated.
But honestly partys bending to pressure from the base is amongst the best things we can hope for in a bourgeoise republic in the imperial core currently
From a German perspective the Irish situation looks like a major Win, we struggle from a completely marginalized perspective currently. Palestinian solidarity is niche and is facing huge state repression. A slim majority would probably support a ceasefire, but people are silent. All partys are Zionist.
Even the leftmost party is light years away from Palestinian solidarity, after initial dogshit reactions, they were able at some point to adopt a ceasefire stance while being booed by huge parts of the party. They don’t call for a stop of German weapons exports to Israel, they call for Germany to put pressure on Qatar to, in turn, stop supporting Hamas.
Whenever we try to get them to helpnus with local ceasefire protests they make up some bullshit excuse while on a national level the criticize the gov for not pressuring Egypt enough to let the Gazans into Sinai like their only fucking job is to support Zionists in their genocide without people noticing.
And holy shit, Clare Daly, it is completely unthinkable how someone as based as her manages to be elected. I don’t know what’d have to happen in Germany for that to occur
I became a bit teary eyed towards the end of your post ❤️ good luck with your journey and find happiness with your true self 🏳️⚧️
I agree with your premise of capital turning to fascism when push comes to shove. Re: Your 2 chances however:
tldr; Technological progress will not bring salvation on its own. We comrades have to act, otherwise humankind is doomed
- Not a fan of humankind-dies scenarios in general, but about AI I always have 1 point to make: Consciousness is one thing. The actions of any being are not fundamentally driven by its consciousness tho. IMO we often conflate consciousness with a sense of self-preservation, which is wrong. Self-preservation exists independently from consciousness (i.e. in animals or even bacteria) and Consciousness can exist without a sense of self-preservation. It is the evolutionary process that, when it ignited consciousness, had already suplied the drive to self-preservation. Since AIs are not subject to natural evolution a drive to self-preservation is not a necessity, if humans create a superior AI, I wager they will make sure not to instill it with a drive to self-preservation.
A superior AI whether it is conscious of its actions or not will act according to its reward functions. A desire to change any one of them would need to be rooted in a deeper set of reward functions. Without reward functions any intelligence only analyses it doesn’t act. There is a rule in AI development:
“An intelligence can not evolve past the point of hacking its own reward function” bc then it simply has no incentive to da anything - for a crude understanding think: “taking-heroin” as the human intelligence hacking itself.
Hence the consequences of unleashing a superior AI onto the planet would depend on the reward functions it starts out with (assume they aren’t immediately hacked). If you ask me there is a good chance these reward functions will be determined by private coorporations, hence they will mirror capitalists interests and the resulting AI will act to further it, a.k.a. serve the capitalists.
- If cold fusion would have the effect you describe I have to point to your own premise. Capitalists will fight tooth and nail to prevent/defund it or find a way to profit off of it - they do the same already, just look at food. There is no net-scarcity in food production anymore, hasn’t been for a long time - still people die of hunger everyday - bc giving them food doesn’t yield a profit.
If you are among the global poor, you will not receive energy from cold fusion if a capitalist profits more from someone blowing that same energy watching 3D porn in his space limosine.
So yes both technologies are a salvation in the hand of a comrade but irrelevant in the hand of a capitalist.
Particularly the AI could even become a damnation, just look at Israels going full medieval using 21st century tech, imagine what a Zionist-primed AI can do.
You said it yourself we must consider full blown fascists kicking of the AI singularity. Maybe Europe really “needs to secure its Meditteranean coast from refugees” - boom, FrontexAI exterminating refugees without the public noticing it anymore, and no human has to shoot anymore, noone has to worry about insubordination anymore.
Even without fascism: What if technology enables the burgeoisie to overcome the strength in numbers that the proletariat has over them - when there is no need to appease the masses anymore: how long until a society is stratified enough for the burgeoisie to lose remaining empathy, roll back concessions and we go back to straight out slavery enforced by your friendly AI?
If we don’t manage to organize and fight back we might find out where those timelines lead and I’d like to spare humanity that path.
I feel like whats desperately missing is a proper critique of capital.
If you reject it (bc “commies / tankies / Nth iteration of red-scare”) you simply won’t be able to understand the world, period.
Instead what you end up with invariably will be an “explanation” rooted in grave error, blaming an ethnic group, “globalists”,…
Ofc by suppressing Marxist lessons the ruling ideology incentivizes this reaction (as does liberalism being rooted in metaphysics even)
What. The. Fuck. this is the worst comment section I have seen in a long time.
Extermination fantasies all the way down, sprinkled with antisemitism, occasional holocaust denialism and the most vile anti-muslim racism.
Good question, I remember being a bit insecure writing that sentence. Please don’t put too much trust in that comment of mine as I still have had little praxis to challenge my analysis. Anyways, my thoughts there were a bit convoluted, not sure if it came across correctly.
What I was thinking about when I wrote it was “you can’t have a traditional socialist party that successful”, where I meant only electoral success and only in the short-term. Yeah I’d make out mostly political climate as the cause for that.
I didn’t want to say that the pursuit of a Socialist party is not worthwhile, I think it is. Although I wonder if an obvious socialist party will be able to get off the ground or whether a “Black Panthers” approach (in terms of being not-too-obviously socialist) would be more promising.
Such estimates are always speculative without praxis to probe ones conceptions though.
There are two parties in Germany that bear the label ML (DKP and MLPD), both have next to zero visibility and are under the observation of the intelligence services. They are considered to be enemies of the German constitution (not surprisingly since that grants the right to private property). I believe they are only not banned bc their influence it negligible and a legal pursuit would bind resources and give them previously unknown visibility.
I would see both as some evidence for my claims but I have to say I am not speaking from personal experience I’ve had no interaction with either party (I wonder if I would admit to that online).
But yeah I personally know way more foreigners here who are Socialist than Germans. In France and Italy Socialism is way more present as a concept. We have no clue what the word means. For most of us it means nothing. And for the rest its what the the dusty, old men from the “Unrechtsstaat” GDR talked about when they wanted to steal from and control the people. its a failure of the past, not a success of the future. and speaking of it is dangerous, the economy is bad as it is.
We’ve had the “Radikalenerlasse”, the congress for cultural freedom, the CIA building up our media and intelligence services all purging Socialist knowledge from public consciousness while at the same time our “big brother” helped us to become the so-called richest nation in Europe. The material conditions have been comparably fine for us under liberalism, people fear falling back into the GDR trap.
Germany, having been in the center of US Crosshairs of cold-war efforts has left a nasty scar on us, it will take some time and probably a worsening of the economic conditions but most of all a big educational effort from us comrades to get back.
The way I see it, the next years will both make that a necessity as it was never before but also provide previously unseen opportunities for it.
Thats kinda how I see it. Sorry for digressing comrade
Seems like one moral of the story, is that eclecticism is a problem. Never confuse a bunch of quotes with understanding theory.
Yes, the anti imperial struggle in the periphery can utilize nationalism to a revolutionary end.
And no you can’t compare your conditions in the US to those of Ho Chi Minh and Mao.
We are not liberals anymore where an action is judged outside of its material conditions.
Not the most knowledgeable on the topic, it might be fair to demand a more complete / consistent theory of nationalism in Marxism, but Lenin’s distinction between revolutionary and reactionary national movements is still pretty clear in this case
Living there, was born there, agree with you!
We were exploiting the Euro-zone and now burn it all on the altar of transatlanticism. And all of that with a moronic smugness.
I hate it here. Nowadays German liberal elite has developed a disgusting kind of exceptionalism with a vibe akin to “we are the most humble people in the whole world.”
Ironically having been the perpetrators of WWII and the Holocaust nowadays reinforces the idea that “we are righteous”. We have transformed German guilt into a twisted sense of pride, where our “culture of remembrance” is a sign of our superiority.
(Ofc this culture of remembranc is inherently white supremacist, it’s a different issue)
As if a genocidal holocaust phase is a part of any countries development, other countries just haven’t had theirs yet. So naturally we know better than these “pre-genocide” societies, right?
These days we explain Jewish people what constitutes antisemitism, we explain to the world what constitutes a genocide …
Ofc there is more, we forge ourselves against the US and Israel (incidentally both post-genocide societies) bc it allows us to never question ourselves. Our lesson from WWII, our “humility”, is to accept these 2 entities as our sole judges, as long as they will deem us good we are good, no questions asked
This is borderline patsoc talking point btw.
Can you elaborate? This got me thinking…
Is it bc patsocs use fatalism regarding the struggle of indigenous nations as an “argument” to oppose it? Or is it that its reproducing fatalism regarding a just struggle that needs our solidarity and “pessimism” isn’t helping?
(I hope I am not being insensitive. Pardon me if I don’t have the best read on this. I am not a USian and not super exposed to this and I know far too little about the topic)
I obviously agree that its important to stand in solidarity with the struggle of indigenous nations in the land under US occupation! But I too would think that the Zionist regime would be happy to have their settler colony achieve US levels of “completion” of their genocide (which I also don’t see happening, but that’s besides the point)
I don’t see a contradiction between both. It would simply mean that one deems the struggle against the US settler colony, the struggle for liberation, harder as of yet. Which seems to be an unfortunate but fair analysis or not?