Depends mostly on who you are. Capitalists and celebrities are more restricted and censored, but for the working classes that doesn’t apply nearly as much. People in China do genuinely support their government, and this is proven by consistent polling by western orgs showing over 90% support.

Kiev is run by far-right neo-Nazis that uphold Stepan Bandera. The Russian Federation isn’t socialist by any means, but it isn’t run by literal neo-Nazis and it isn’t ethnically cleansing anyone.

That would track.

They are taking historically Russian areas like Donetsk and Luhansk. The west is doing what it wants because it’s using Ukraine as a proxy war to damage Russia, and is carving Ukraine out for resources. Yanukovych escaping the far-right Banderites that the west supported doesn’t mean he was a puppet either. You’re deeply confused here.

Yanukovych was not a puppet. The IMF loan came with stipulations requiring austerity, the Russian loan did not. Secondly, Russia is intervening directly in the Donbass region. It isn’t dubious at all that Crimea and the Donbass are heavily Russian, they were added to Ukraine only a century ago.

Marxists tend to critically support Russia over Ukraine here. Russia doesn’t want to “take over Ukraine,” it wants the 4 oblasts and Ukraine to be demillitarized. Donetsk and Luhansk both have been at war with Kiev since 2014 and voted to join the Russian Federation, and the far-right Banderites that siezed power in the 2014 Euromaidan coup have been heavily millitarizing and oppressing ethnic Russians. Ukraine serves a similar geopolitical purpose for the US Empire as Israel, it’s a heavily millitarized anti-communist country surroundrd by geopolitical adversaries.

I explicitly said, over and over again, that AI can never take the place of art. OP clearly did not like the idea of hand-drawing agitprop, and so used a tool to shortcut to the final product. I don’t see art as a burden to be alleviated, and made the case that AI can exist alongside art without replacing it, just as photography didn’t replace hand-drawn portraits.

If you’re going to deliberately ignore what others are saying to you and instead make up brand new strawmen to attack, do you actually care about human expression or is this just a trend of emotional reaction?

As I said, OP could have grabbed a stock image and wordart and made the exact same image. Is it still intrinsically bad? We interact with machines and use tools all the time to shortcut processes that used to be artisinal. Taking photos of people instead of drawing them by hand did not erase the desire for portraits, but it added the ability to shortcut photography for times where applicable.

As for where you’re getting the idea that OP’s image isn’t well-recieved from, I have no idea. Your top comment is at time of writing 50% upvoted and 50% downvoted, and everyone else is talking about the content of the image. Saying we are “cooked and so over” without further elaboration isn’t a point either.

I’m not dismissing my fellow man, especially because I am fighting for the right of tool usage that alleviates artisinal labor from areas it doesn’t need to be.

What is the actual difference in output in the use-case here? What changes about the message if this meme was artisinally created, especially if you couldn’t tell? This is why it’s important to discard idealism and to embrace materialism, idealism adds confusing baggage that clouds our judgement.

Further, it is working. Every other top-level comment is a discussion of the content of the post, not the fact that it was generated.

No.

My point is that technology that eliminates labor is useful, and correctly analyzing where it’s useful and where it isn’t is important. It is better to save time where we can, such is the purpose of technology that amplifies what labor creates.

Any leftist of any sort should be dedicated to improving technology and production so that we can fulfill the needs of as many people as possible with as little labor necessary. AI can’t replace art, but it can certainly help in cases like this, small disposable agitprop memes for sparking discussion (like we are having now).

This is why it’s important to have a dialectical materialist outlook and not an idealist one. Metaphysics isn’t helpful.

Your only complaints are:

1. “It’s icky”
2. “ai sucks”
3. The image itself is generated, rather than artisinally created

The first 2 are non-points to begin with, and the latter is an incomplete point. Again, there is absolutely no reason why this image needs to be artisinally created. Had OP used wordart and grabbed a stock image online for the background, it would have had the same amount of human input but no AI, yet you wouldn’t be calling it into question.

Nobody present is trying to tell you that AI can replace artists making art. You’re making the same mistakes the Luddites did in blaming machinery for the ills of capitalism, rather than capitalism itself. The same argument was had when digital art became mainstream over hand-drawn art, and when cameras came into being. Neither digital art nor cameras have replaced traditional art, nor can they, but that doesn’t mean digital art and cameras don’t have legitimate use cases.

AI has limitations that AI fanatics lie about. AI also has use-cases that people try their hardest to deny. Marxism helps us understand that AI can never replace traditonal art, but can absolutely be used for things like agitprop or stock images.

Requiring that communists spend hours on artisinally producing what is ultimately a disposable image meant to agitate and spark conversation just for you to acknowledge the message is wrong. From a human perspective, requiring this artisinal agitprop in order to acknowledge the point being drivin is deeply anti-human and instead individualist.

Great on you for owning up! If you want to learn more about Stalin specifically, Domenico Losurdo’s Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend is one of the best contextualizations of Stalin to date. Losurdo doesn’t make him out to be a saint nor an exceptional Hitler-like demon, but instead correctly places him in his historical context using western sources. Though, of course, it’s a disservice to the millions of soviets to reduce the achievements of the soviet union purely to Stalin.

Adding this to my Parenti collection! Goes hard.

The point is that analysis of authority without analysis of class is meaningless. The USSR was brutal and totalitarian to the capitalist class, the landlords, the Tsarists, and the fascists. The working classes, via control of the state, made no excuses for the terror they inflicted on their domestic ruling classes, and this terrified global porkie. The KGB, police, millitary, Warsaw Pact, and other use of working class authority was the real manifestation of the dedication of the working classes to preserving the incredible gains they made against domestic infiltration and international aggression and encirclement.

Marxists have learned from the collapse of the Paris Commune that we can’t just take the state, we have to smash it and replace it with a proletarian one dedicated to preserving socialism. Dr. Michael Parenti on socialists defending against imperialists and sabateurs. Applies perfectly to Venezuela today.

Lukashenko and the editor of RT said it, not the Russian government nor millitary.

There’s absolutely no reason why this short, simplistic agitprop needs to be made in artisinal fashion from a Marxist perspective. Labor hours saved is valuable, and nobody is enjoying this agitprop from the perspective of artistic analysis. AI cannot replace art, but the insistence that every graphic regardless of use-case be made in artisinal fashion is reactionary.

You’re on a site where the majority of users are Marxists right now, we’re pretty big fans of the soviet union. It wasn’t some utopia, but it was incredibly progressive for its time. Life expectancy doubled, literacy rates tripled, healthcare and education were free and high quality, housing was free or low cost, wages increased and working hours lowered, and society was democratized. Anti-capitalism isn’t restricted to Marxism-Leninism nor to the USSR specifically, but over here we uphold actually existing socialism.

Consider giving Blackshirts and Reds and This Soviet World a read, or check out the intro ML reading list I made.

It’s definitely going to last longer than any of us want or hope for. The problem is that morality doesn’t make any difference on the unfolding of historical progression and as such true justice is unfortunately rare.

Yep, it’s deeply tragic.

Proper party building, democratic centralism, and a strong adherence to theory and a connection to the working classes.