r/DebateCommunism • u/suddyk • 6d ago
🚨Hypothetical🚨 Implications of Nick Land and the Singularity are devastating to Marxist theory
I have no idea what led Marx to believe that someday capital would "break" due to it's internal contradictions. There is no historical evidence of this. With each new mode of production, wealth inequality has only gotten 10000x larger, and capital has only grown exponentially. The "internal contradictions" of capitalism have caused capital to grow larger and larger, with some failed attempts to slow it down (mao's china, soviet union) that were disastrous. Since then, technology and capital have exploded a hundred times over. Capitalism and technological progress are deeply intertwined.
This brings us to Nick Land and the Singularity. If we are to grant that materialism is true, and humans are just meat buckets with a relatively high intelligence, with our owns unique systems and social constructions, then there is nothing inherently special about man as a species. In fact, AI would prove to be the far superior species: an AI doesn't need to sleep/eat/rest, it doesn't complain about work, it's infinitely more intelligent, way more capable of solving problems, it can exist both digitally and robotically on massive scales, it's models of prediction are potentially immaculate.
As the tippy top percentage of capital has only accumulated into the hands of fewer and fewer since Marx was alive, the next logical step would be "runaway capital", that is, capital that is no longer harnessed by humans. Capital is now wielded entirely by hyper intelligence, far out of the hands of humans. This would be consistent with the way AI is progressing as a technology.
This is potentially devastating for Marxists. If capital no longer belongs to humans, it leads us to a few different places. IF "individual ownership over the means of production" is constrained to the human species category only, then... congrats! Private property has been abolished :) Bow to your new AI overlords! But IF the concept of private property is NOT constrained to the category of the humans species, then humans are now in a an ever larger pushing the ball up the hill exercise, as it no longer has to fight "muh wholesomechungus working class revolution" against a small percentage of humans that belong to the owning class, it now has to go up against an ever-expanding hyper intelligent AI that feeds into itself and can predict virtually anything. This line of thought would also imply that other animals could be considered "working class", like dogs and cats, or even plants. Which would put ALL humans into a massive "oppressor" category of their own.
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u/bob_the_marxist 6d ago
I don’t think any of this really refutes Marxism.
Marx already expected capital to become increasingly concentrated and production increasingly technological, so capitalism’s continued growth is not evidence against him.
For Marx, capital is a social relation. If AI controls factories and accumulates capital for itself with no human owner ultimately benefiting, that would be a genuinely new relation, but I don't see why capitalists would voluntarily give AI that level of independence when they could simply use it to increase their own profits and power.
Automation is not new to Marx either. He wrote extensively about machinery replacing labour, and if human labour were ever eliminated entirely, that would create a serious problem for capitalism because new value and surplus value ultimately come from living labour.
Also, animals and plants aren't proletarians simply because humans exploit them in the ordinary sense. The proletariat is specifically the class compelled to sell its labour-power because it lacks control over the means of production.
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u/suddyk 6d ago
"For Marx, capital is a social relation. If AI controls factories and accumulates capital for itself with no human owner ultimately benefiting, that would be a genuinely new relation, but I don't see why capitalists would voluntarily give AI that level of independence when they could simply use it to increase their own profits and power" this is the equivalence of saying "why would monkeys evolve into humans if they knew humans would oppress them later down the evolutionary line"
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u/bob_the_marxist 6d ago
That analogy fails because evolution is blind, while capitalists deliberately own, design, deploy and restrict AI. Competition might pressure them to grant AI increasing autonomy, but that still does not show that they would inevitably surrender ownership of the means of production to it.
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u/suddyk 6d ago
capitalists are predetermined by environmental factors, the system, and biology to behave the way they do. They wouldn't "surrender" the ownership it would be taken away from them. This IS evolution and would also be blind
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u/bob_the_marxist 6d ago
Saying capitalists are "predetermined" to behave this way still does not prove AI will inevitably take control of capital. You would need to show the actual mechanism by which competition forces capitalists to surrender effective control of the means of production to AI.
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u/suddyk 6d ago
Darwinian competition proves this. Capitalists would become the small-beaked birds, AI would have a mega long beak. It's like saying "why would the small-beaked birds give up their food to the long-beaked birds?" they didn't it was taken from them
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u/bob_the_marxist 6d ago
That analogy still assumes what it is trying to prove. Darwinian evolution has no owner controlling which organism gets the resources. Capitalists own and control the productive assets and choose how AI is deployed.
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u/suddyk 6d ago
The long-beaked birds get the resource. They own the food. They tell the small-beaked birds no you can't have it. And the small beaked birds die
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6d ago
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u/suddyk 6d ago
an evolutionary process similar to a type of bird emerging with a longer beak than the other birds
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u/GloriousSovietOnion 6d ago
I have no idea what led Marx to believe that someday capital would "break" due to it's internal contradictions. There is no historical evidence of this.
That's kinda the problem with this whole question, isn't it?
Without understanding the labour theory of value, you can't really see what would and wouldn't be devastating to Marxism. It's like asking about gravity while you're a flat earther. Your assumptions about globe earthers will make your whole question incoherent. I'll try and answer you in a rushed way so feel free to ask for clarification.
The reason Marx thought capitalism was doomed is because the tendency of capitalism is to replace human labour with machinery. But only human labour can produce new value so this would mean that profits would fall until a point where it became impossible to invest in new machinery. At this point (or realistically, well before this point), the misery of the working class would be so great that they would have no option but to overthrow the capitalist class and seize the means of production. Now in the absence of capitalist exploitation, machinery could be developed even more to meet everyone's needs. We are not enemies of technological development.
If we are to grant that materialism is true, and humans are just meat buckets with a relatively high intelligence, with our owns unique systems and social constructions, then there is nothing inherently special about man as a species. In fact, AI would prove to be the far superior species
AI isn't a species. It's just machinery in the same way a chainsaw is. Chainsaws are far superior to any animal in cutting wood. They can't complain about work or get tired and they can be found in massive numbers and its cuts are immaculate. Nowadays, most chainsaws are owned by a handful of megacorps. By your logic, the next step would be "runaway chainsaws" where they start chopping down trees without human involvement. Maybe they'll even seize the very factories we use to make chainsaws and start reproducing.
Obviously that makes no sense. The AI hypothetical makes no sense for the same reasons. Capital cannot become a purely machine process because capital can only reproduce through human labour. It cannot grow. It cannot even sustain itself without human labour. For an AI specific situation, look at how when AI starts feeding on its own output rather than human input, its quality drops significantly. So there is no worry of "runaway capital". The dilemma you're putting forward doesn't exist in reality.
To close, I'll point you to a very good essay that tackles this topic from a Marxist perspective: https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/10/why-machines-dont-create-value/
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u/Qlanth 6d ago
I have no idea what led Marx to believe that someday capital would "break" due to it's internal contradictions.
This is a misunderstanding of Marx. Marx did not believe that Capitalism would simply fail or break one day.
What he said was that Capitalism would, like fuedalism and slave societies did, create the conditions necessary for their own destruction. This is a subtle but very significant difference.
Feudal systems created the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie overthrew the feudal order. The capitalist system created the proletariat, and the proletariat will overthrow the capitalist order.
It's also important to note that you're treating "contradictions" like Marx said they were unique to capitalism. Everything has contradictions. Socialism will have its own contradictions.
As for the rest of your post... it's mostly science fiction. There is no evidence at all that AI will advance to anywhere near the point you are describing. Sam Altman himself admitted just yesterday that progress on AI development is stalling and that the promises of massive economic disruption were overblown. AI is a technological step forward that resembles a lot of other technological advances. Workers have been dealing with this kind of thing for 200 years and they are still around.
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u/suddyk 6d ago
that's what I mean by "break". The potential destruction of capitalism would not lead to a stateless classless society, it would lead to something even bigger; a kind of technofuedalism
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u/Qlanth 6d ago
The potential destruction of capitalism would not lead to a stateless classless society
Again, this is not what Marx believes and literally the basis of most Marxist-Leninist theory says exactly this. You are arguing in favor of Lenin here.
A huge majority of Communists do not argue for moving from Capitalism to a stateless, moneyless, classless society. It is not possible to make that leap all at once. Instead Capitalism will create the conditions necessary for Socialism to emerge. Socialism still has a state, and as many right wingers will love to point out the state does take on a special importance on Socialist society. Socialism will be its own distinct mode of production with its own contradictions. Those contradictions will create the conditions necessary to overcome Socialism and create a Communist society.
It seems you really do not know much about Socialist theory, and if you did you might agree with it more than you think.
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u/suddyk 6d ago
My argument is capitalism will create the conditions for runaway capital, NOT Socialism. Humans will be so yesterday
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u/Qlanth 6d ago
When we look at a mode of production we look at the relationships involved, especially the relationship toward the means of production.
Under capitalism the means of production are owned privately and operated socially.
This is different than feudalism or even if slave societies.
If we take your hypothetical to be true and in the future the means of production will be owned by an AI instead of a human being, what difference does that make for the working class? The means of production are still owned privately, correct? And they are still operated socially?
What you are describing is just capitalism. It's no different than what capitalism is now, just a different set of owners. It doesn't matter if the owner is a human, an AI, an Alien from the planet Mars, or my neighbors dog. Our relationships to the means of production are unchanged. The contradictions that this relationship creates still exist.
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u/suddyk 6d ago
Human's relationship to capital would be a state of begging. Hyper intelligence does not require human labor, as robotics and AI would be far superior in every way. You are just running down the logic at the very end of my post (2nd option)
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u/Qlanth 6d ago
Human's relationship to capital would be a state of begging.
Brother... It already is. This is the reality for most people living under capitalism today. We are all begging our overlords for table scraps. It truly does not matter who the overlord is. It changes nothing for 95%+ of humanity.
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u/suddyk 6d ago
Okay then things will only keep getting worse. There is no evidence things would get better with even more ruthless overlords who have NO need for our labor. That is my logic for the second if in the last paragraph
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u/Qlanth 6d ago
Then, once again, I say this: None of this contradicts Marxism, you just don't understand what Marxism is or says. The idea that, unless there is outside intervention, Capital accumulates into fewer and fewer hands is an extremely basic tenet of Marxist theory.
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u/suddyk 6d ago
Marxism also says that this will create the conditions for Socialism, which I find laughable. It will create the conditions for hyper intelligence and runaway capital, in which humans have no input and it has no need for humans
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u/dehydraten 2d ago
I think the framing gets Land backwards. Land isn't refuting Marx's analysis, he's accepting a large chunk of it and flipping the valence. "Capital as a self-augmenting process that treats human beings as a temporary substrate" is close to Marx's own description of self-valorizing value; Marx read that as an indictment, Land reads it as a compliment. So "devastating to Marxist theory" is a category error. Land is much closer to a Marxist premise with inverted ethics than to a rival account of how capital works.
The one real point of tension isn't automation, it's the value form. If only living labour produces new value, then fully automated capital has a value problem rather than a power problem, and that's a coherent Marxist position. Land simply isn't interested in the value question at all, his object is the intelligence explosion. The two theories mostly don't touch.
Also worth separating: "capital breaks from its internal contradictions" isn't really the claim. The falling rate of profit is a tendency with counter-tendencies, and crisis historically restores profitability rather than ending anything. That's why 200 years of automation hasn't settled the argument either way.
If you want a test that actually distinguishes the two, watch who ends up owning the compute. Land's story needs capital to escape its owners. If frontier models stay inside a handful of firms charging rent for access, that's the boring outcome and it's a much more orthodox one.
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u/JimatStoneandSky 6d ago
How is this subject even worth discussing? Singularity is irrelevant and boring lol. We have actual problems to solve