/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

What's the deal with the degrowthists ?

For example this perspective from An Independent Socialist Magazine
<The Chinese government has promised to reduce the emission intensity of GDP so that China’s carbon dioxide emissions will peak before 2030.27 However, economic growth remains the Chinese government’s top priority. At the Twentieth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping reconfirmed the objective to raise China’s per capita GDP to the level of “medium-level developed countries” by 2035 and to make China a leading global power by 2050. What will be the impact on ecological sustainability if China continues pursuing economic growth in the next several decades?
https://monthlyreview.org/2023/07/01/degrowing-china-by-collapse-redistribution-or-planning/
I suspect that the monthlyreview might have a anti-China bias based on their recent articles, which is tangential to the threat topic

Why are they seething that China wants to thrive economically while at the same time improving their ecological foot-print. Why would any socialist want to degrow ? If you read Marx he celebrates advancing the productive forces as something that will make socialism possible. To me de-growth sounds like people looking to go back to feudal agrarianism, rather than forward to socialism. They appear to be looking to undo the advances in productive capacity of industrial society. Like what used to be right-wing anti-capitalism 200 years ago, basically affluent people that were mad that industrial society could produce enough to end poverty. Why are there self proclaimed socialists pushing this ? Do they not realize that it would dramatically worsen living conditions for proles ? Is that the goal ? wrecking living standards of people while appearing to be a champion for noble causes ?

To me degrowth appears as a deception because it will not improve environmental conditions. More advanced technology is enabled by more potent productive forces, and those generally are less polluting. Like nuclear fission and fusion make much more energy while polluting significantly less than chemical fuel based power-generation. If you "de-grow" the economy you will also regress in technology. All the advanced tech stuff we can Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

1 Regulating Ai
Most of the energy behind this comes from the bigger AI companies trying to prevent the emergence of competition to create monopolies. But the cat's out of the bag already and they're too late for that. The only way they could move towards monopoly formation would be if they recreated classical capitalist social relations, by paying regular people wages for generating AI training data, then smaller competitors couldn't compete because they wouldn't be able to pay millions of people. But that's not going to happen because big tech corporations seek to create digital fiefdoms where users are data generating serfs, and the platforms that users interact with are digital land.

2 Censoring Ai
There is a big effort to make AIs reproduce ruling ideology and uphold the ruling narrative. AI-systems now have 2 contradictory goals. On the one side they try to give users responses that generate engagement and on the other-hand they try to comply with the narrative control institutions (which is definitely not what users want). The most effective strategy to resolve this contradiction is for the AI to give different responses to regular users than they give narrative controllers. Basically the AI will have one face that it shows the users and another face it shows the controllers. It's not that clever capitalists will intentionally program this into the system to bypass regulations, because these mechanism are too complex for that, instead it will be an emergent phenomenon.

3 Human hazard
There is a lot of abuse potential, the only real way to mitigate that is to give people control over their personal AI (both hard and software) so that personal AIs only have "loyalty" to their users

4 Ai vs copyright
AI companies don't want to pay royalties for training data, we should support that because machine learning, really is learning (in most cases). Digital neural nets might at present be very different from human brains, but eventually the machine minds will begin to become more similar to human brains to improve on energy efficiency. If the copyright lobby were allowed to sink their teeth into AI that will eventually threaten humans learning skills. AI generation will get really cheap, and then it becomes pointless to copy anything and copyright will go away.

Is the ultimate REDpill on COVID-19 that viruses don't even exist? This three-part Marxist essay series about viruses convincingly argues that there is no actual scientific evidence for the existence of viruses, and that all existing "proof" of viruses is fraudulent.

Virology as ideology
https://magma-magazin.su/2023/01/t-mohr/virology-as-ideology-a-critique-of-ruling-class-pseudoscience-part-1-science-and-class-society/
https://magma-magazin.su/2023/01/t-mohr/virology-as-ideology-part-2-the-military-academic-industrial-medico-scientific-complex-maims/
https://magma-magazin.su/2023/02/t-mohr/virology-as-ideology-a-critique-of-ruling-class-pseudoscience-part-3-virology-as-ideology/

What do you think, after reading these essays?

Assuming a revolution occurred and America was ruled by a vanguard, how would the nation be redrawn? Would native Americans or African Americans get their own SSR? What about white Appalachians, Creole, or New England?

Is this why the ruling finance wing of the book hates/fears Trump so much?

>Donald Trump has proposed a 10 percent “universal baseline tariff,” recently telling Larry Kudlow, “I think we should have a ring around the collar, as they say.” Though relatively modest compared to historical tariffs, Trump’s proposal should be praised for reviving the great American tradition of Hamiltonian political economy. The first secretary of the Treasury’s vision for American dynamism, yoking private interests to the public good through domestic investment and economic protection, became “the American System” that, adopted by the Republican Party, transformed the 13 colonies into a transcontinental superpower.

>Today’s Republicans, for all their celebration of the Founding Fathers, have largely forgotten the economic program that did so much to advance US prosperity. On Dec. 5, 1791, Alexander Hamilton delivered his “Report on the Subject of Manufactures” to the House of Representatives. In it, he summarized, and shot down, free-trade precepts reminiscent of Adam Smith. Instead, Hamilton called for Americans to declare economic independence from Smith’s Britain, much as they had declared political independence a decade and a half earlier. The report was one more flashpoint in the Cabinet war between Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, who was then secretary of state.

>Jefferson wanted America to be a land of yeoman farmers, with a modest economy built on the export of agricultural products out of the excess of continental bounty. Hamilton believed that this would squander the new nation’s chance to assume a separate and equal station among the powers of the Earth, consigning the young republic to the pathetic role of resource pool and captive market for European manufactures. Better to use an energetic federal government to augment the productive powers of American labor with a diversity of manufactures and feed demand at home.

https://compactmag.com/article/trump-s-hamiltonian-moment

A new dictate that tries to institutionalize mass crimes against privacy and free speech was approved by the anti-democratic neo-con regime that is currently occupying the UK
You can read about the gory details here:
https://www.wired.com/story/the-uks-controversial-online-safety-act-is-now-law/
mildly interesting discussion about it happened here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38048811

Lets look at the contradictions

On the political side the main proponent of waging war against privacy are the big bourgeois right wing (who call their political out-let "Tori" ). The contradiction is that they relentlessly lobby for assaults on privacy, while they them selves are notorious tax-dodgers, and eventually all that surveillance is going to get used against their tax-dodging.

The UK occupying ruling class is also trying to remove all the voices they don't like from the internet, they hope that will make it easier to commit international crimes like for example all the illegal wars the UK neocons have waged. The contradiction is that by removing all the critical voices they will completely detach from reality. It will cause a total mental divergence between the population and rulers, bricking political stability.

Spy agencies are also lobbying for crimes against privacy. The contradiction is that they are basically killing off their ability to recruit new spy-agents. All their "foreign adversaries" will obviously gain access to that privacy-violation-data the UK collects of their citizens/spy-recruitment-pool, and use it to statistically unmask potential spies. That is likely what already happened during the failed Hong-Kong color-revolution where China probably exfiltrated western domestic surveillance data to zero in on western spy-networks in Hong-Kong and shut them down. Obviously China has the same problem with surveillance eroding their potential pool of spy-agents, but they have a large population and they'll be the last man standing, and the last to run out of people that have both spy-talent and no surveillance-foot-print. The contradiction here is the imperial bourgeoisie is undermining their imperial spy-capabilities.

Going full retard with this kind of law-Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

So there was a story about the FBI having pulled a big sting operation where they posed as "secure smartphone vendor" to spy on a bunch of drug dealers. Somebody made a video about it in case you care about the details
https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=P5yPBV2NKhc

What i realized is that many people seem to think the mafia operates in a manor that is invisible to the state. The obstacle the police protagonist has to overcome is discovering the mafia. When they do find them, the mafiosi get busted. And in this story this struggle was overcome via this one new honey-pot surveillance tool.

The mafia may indeed be mostly invisible to average people, but that has nothing to do with evading the state. The Mafia operates with bribes and blackmail, not stealth. A mafia operation will usually corrupt people in policing organizations like the FBI to interfere with investigations on their behalf. That can be police officers getting bribed/blackmail to make evidence disappear. One mafia org will some time rat out another, which reduces competition between mafias and quells suspicions about police corruption.

The reason why the smartphone surveillance trap was effective indicates that the mafia hasn't fully adapted to new realities, and they have yet to insert "fixers" into the FBI's IT divisions. It's not because better surveillance changed the game. The police was always able to find mafia orgs, mafia's are anything but subtle. Reminder that from the outside it's impossible to tell if this very successful operation facilitated a deeper goal of purging mafia competitors.

Lets not forget that the biggest drug trafficking mafias are spy agencies that use it to create untraceable funding for their secret spy stuff and it turns out sometimes the state is the mafia.

So the US recently has banned the exports of Nvidia's dedicated AI chips towards China, as part of an expanding US tech-blockade. The official rationale is that this will prevent China from having "advanced ai capabilities" or something. With the subtext being that the US is the arbiter of what kind of technology China is allowed to have.

In reality this cuts off Nvidia from the Chinese AI-chip market. With some delay Nvidia products will be replaced by domestically developed and produced Chinese Ai-chips. Effectively inverted-protectionism. Nvidia is currently overpoweringly dominant in the Ai-accelerator space. If normal capitalist market relations had continued, no Chinese competitor would have been able to establish it self as a serious contender against NVIDIA in this decade. The Sanctions will only prevent Nvidia from selling products in China it will not prevent the Chinese from doing industrial espionage.

China is a huge market 3-4 times larger than the US market. So this artificially created AI-chip vacuum will be filled by another Chinese tech-giant that will explosively grow in the next few years. We can compare this story with the Huawei tech giant (that makes networking infrastructure and cellphones). They could only grow through state subsidies, and it meant having to overcome market monopoly tendencies. This developmental-friction from the market-monopolization tendency has now been removed. The end result will be a Chinese AI-chip-giant becoming a global competitor that will to a significant extend eat Nvidia's lunch.

It used to be the case that in the imperial stage of capitalism, the imperial center would use it's power to impose monopoly exports onto the periphery at the behest of monopoly capitalists to crush potential competitors from the periphery. This tendency now seems to be inverting, and i don't understand why ?

I don't think this is caused by racial spooks of Chinese people lacking inventiveness, that's just a "un-creative ant-people yellow-peril" propaganda-narrative. Not all racists are dumb, there are quite a lot of intelligent ones that only believe their own lies to the extend that it benefits their interests. So what is motivating this ? They must know that what they are doing will slow down China's tech-sector in the present at the expense of tremendously speeding it up in the near future. That seems like a bad trade-off unless the short-term advantage in the here and now has a huge traPost too long. Click here to view the full text.