Comment by diego_moita
17 days ago
And both of them failed.
Both the machines and "the system" are alive and well. Did it occurred to you that you're using machines (computers, internet, HN) created by the system to complain about the system?
The bitter truth is that we don't have any good alternative for both the machines and "the system".
For Luddites' and Marxists' chagrin, manual weaving was indeed a crappy job and "the system" brought what they'd call "advance in the means of production".
It is honestly depressing how many people have swallowed the capitalist pill so completely. Most people can't even fathom a world where cooperation actually works better than a cutthroat rat race.
It leads to these total room-temperature takes that the system is the only reason we have the internet or Hacker News. It is exhausting watching people parrot the same old clichés because they are too lazy to actually crack a history book.
The truth is that foundational tech was almost never market-driven. The architecture of the computer, the internet, and the Web were all products of the public commons. They were created by people motivated by discovery and utility rather than exit liquidity. Capital did not invent these things. It just showed up late, threw a fence around them, and started charging rent on human ingenuity it had nothing to do with.
Same goes for the Luddites. They were not anti-machine, they were just anti-starvation. They did not hate the loom. They hated that the loom was being used as a legal weapon to gut their labor rights while the owners hoarded 100 percent of the gains.
Using a computer to call this out is not hypocrisy. It is using a tool that was stolen from the human commons to argue for its return. If you think we owe our progress to the current ownership model, you are not paying attention. You have just been programmed by the marketing.
Hell, the whole idea of open-source on which the entire modern tech world is based upon, which the Internet and Hacker News itself thrived upon, is completely antithetical to capitalism.
The cambrian explosion of tech exists because someone decided to give intellectual property away for free.
I agree with you. My hope and dream is that society is able to move on not by regressing to Luddism, but by restoring technology's position to service the people, as a tool for making life better, rather than to mould, measure and control humanity. Remember the sad meme that the brightest minds of our generations are thinking about how to make people click on ads. It is tragic.
Whether you think it possible or not, this take misunderstands Marxism at a fundamental level.
For Marxists, automation is a good thing - in fact it is a core precondition of socialism.
Marx spent half the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto fanboying over capitalism for the productivity increases brought by capitalism.
So why do you think it was to the chagrin of Marxists? Marx spent decades cheering on the advancement of industrialisation, and specifically argued (in The German Ideology) that socialism would be impossible without these advances in productive forces.
Fair enough: the Chinese Marxists seem to love their robots, a lot.
But, also, they handle all that automation to the capitalists. Because capitalists are simply much better at doing it.
So it seems that, even when it succeeds, socialism can't really get rid of "the system", after all.
The CCP isn't Marxist and doesn't claim to be.
Deng basically copied parts of Lenins "New Economic Policy" of "limited capitalism" because he like Lenin realised they'd made a mistake in preempting dismantling of the market, in direct contradiction of the Marxist view that a socialist revolution requires a well developed capitalist economy, and Marx explicit warning against attempting socialism too soon. That's what I pointed to with the reference to the German Ideology. Because of course taking out profit enough to do meaningful redistribution will harm growth. That's not a "gotcha" - it's an inherent, core assumption of Marxist thinking that socialism only becomes possible because of capitalism.
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You are conflating Marxism with China, which is just a state-capitalist powerhouse using the exact same model of enclosure and rent-seeking we are arguing against. China doesn't "hand over" automation because capitalists are better at it; the state simply socializes the risk and R&D before letting private proxies handle the commercialization. Citing a state-backed monopoly system to prove "the market" is the only way to build tech is total nonsense.
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The marxists got the first man in space while urbanizing (a decimated by WWII) population of serfs without favelas and slums. If that is a "fail", what would you call the 'wonders' brought by the last 30 yrs without them?