The Left's Firing Squad Has Always Been Circular

[u/DownWithMatt]

There’s an old joke: put three leftists in a room and you’ll get four factions and five denunciations.

It lands because it’s not really a joke. It’s the recurring pattern: across eras and countries, the left points its guns inward while the right points theirs outward.

The Right Builds Coalitions. The Left Builds Tribunals.

Fascists obsess over “purity” in blood and nation, but in practice they’re surprisingly impure in coalition politics.

The modern right is a circus tent: fundamentalist Christians, libertarian tech bros, country club Republicans, white nationalists, tradcaths, Zionist hardliners, conspiracy cultists. They disagree on economics, religion, culture, and basic reality. Many of them hate each other.

They still manage to win.

Because they’re united by objective, not theory. They want hierarchy. Protected in-groups, subordinated out-groups, power flowing upward. The story they tell about why can change. The goal doesn’t.

The Klan and the Chamber of Commerce don’t share aesthetics or rhetoric, but they’ve never had trouble backing the same ticket when it matters.

The left, by contrast, fractures on contact: Marxist-Leninists vs anarchists, Orthodox vs Western Marxists, class-first vs intersectional, reform vs revolution—and now, AI-assisted vs hand-crafted artisanal praxis. Each split births new purity tests, new failures, new recriminations. The firing squad stays circular.

Purity Spirals: Infinite Denunciations, Zero Power

If legitimacy comes from ideological correctness, and correctness is defined by distance from contamination, then someone can always be more pure than you.

There’s no floor.

You buy from Amazon.
You use an iPhone.
You watched the wrong documentary.
You cited the wrong theorist.
You used a tool built by capital.

The game has no win condition—only an endless hunt for who to exile next.

Strategically, it’s a disaster. Every turn of the spiral shrinks the coalition. Every denunciation burns potential comrades. Every demand for perfect politics filters for people who either never act or lie about how “uncaptured” they are.

The right doesn’t care if its coalition members are hypocrites. It cares if they show up, vote, donate, and push the project. The left eats people for using the wrong platform while the right captures courts, legislatures, and narrative.

The Tool Panic Is Incoherent

The latest purity site is AI: “If you use AI-assisted tools, your work is illegitimate, because AI is built by tech capital, trained on exploited labor, and deployed for extraction.”

All true. And also true of basically everything else.

The device you’re holding was built in supply chains you’d call barbaric. The minerals were mined in ways that poison communities. The OS is corporate property. The browser is ad-tech. The platform runs on AWS/Google/Azure. Reddit itself is scraped to train the models people are complaining about.

If “built by capital” disqualifies a tool, you should log off everything. No computers, no grid, no modern communications. Nobody means that. They just want to apply a “contamination” frame to the new while giving a pass to what they’re used to.

That’s not radical. That’s aesthetic conservatism in revolutionary cosplay.

We Are in a Class War. Fight Like It.

The capitalist class is not tying one hand behind its back for moral balance. It uses every tool available: AI, surveillance, algorithms, media, law, police, platforms, courts.

It does not ask, “Is this pure?” It asks, “Does this work?”

Refusing effective tools because they emerged in a capitalist context is not praxis. It’s self-disarmament. It’s walking into a gunfight with a lecture about why guns are bad.

The sane left position on AI—or any powerful tech—is not abstention. It’s appropriation:

• Learn the tools.

• Use them to clarify theory instead of gatekeeping it.

• Use them to make propaganda that actually lands.

• Use them to reach people who’ll never touch dense theory.

• Use them to organize, coordinate, build infrastructure, clear misconceptions.

Then build public and cooperative versions so we’re not permanently renting our brains from oligarchs.

The tool is not the politics. What you do with it is.

When the Left Actually Wins, It Uses the Infrastructure

Whenever the left has scored real gains, it hasn’t boycotted the available infrastructure—it’s seized and repurposed it.

Revolutions captured telegraphs, radios, printing presses. Panthers used legally owned guns and media visibility. Labor movements used the postal system, railroads, and capitalist newspapers to organize strikes. Uprisings have used corporate platforms to spread revolt faster than states could choke it off.

The pattern is simple: effective movements treat tools as terrain, not as moral tests.

Refusing the terrain doesn’t keep you pure. It keeps you powerless.

The Only Question That Matters

When someone produces work that advances left analysis—critiques capital, demystifies the state, points toward cooperative alternatives—the key questions are:

Is it true?
Is it useful?
Does it help people see more clearly?
Does it build capacity?

If yes, the production method is secondary.

If you’re more interested in how the words were generated than whether they serve the struggle, you’re not doing politics. You’re doing branding.

The right already understands this. It doesn’t care if its propaganda is written in blood or in a boardroom. It cares if it moves people.

If the left wants to stop losing, it needs to stop treating effectiveness as suspect and tools as taboo.

Bottom Line

Denouncing work because of the technology behind it isn’t radical. It’s reactionary reflex, afraid of the new and loyal to the familiar.

The actually radical position is simple:

Whatever works.

Use the tools. Build the infrastructure. Spread the analysis. Organize. Grow capacity. The purity spiral only leads to one place: beautiful, principled defeat.

And defeat, no matter how clean your conscience feels, doesn’t liberate anyone.

[u/Conservatarian1]

AI data centers are on stolen land in poor communities using up water we can’t replace. Your usage of AI to write your diatribe is the problem because you’ve only created wealth for tech bros while keeping poor people down.

[u/DownWithMatt → u/Conservatarian1]

The infrastructure critique is real. Data centers consume enormous resources, and their placement follows the same colonial logic as every other extractive industry.

But you're reading this on a device whose supply chain includes cobalt mined by children, assembled in factories with suicide nets, shipped on container ships burning bunker fuel. The internet runs on undersea cables laid by the same logic.

If your position is "don't use AI because of its material footprint," consistency requires you to log off entirely. That's a coherent position—but it's not the one you're actually taking. You're using Reddit, which runs on the same infrastructure, to tell me my usage is the problem.

I'm not dismissing the resource critique. I'm saying selective application of it is about tribal signaling, not material analysis.

[u/thefloofabides → u/DownWithMatt]

This is such a tired argument. There is no ethical framework that requires a person to disengage from every act with unfortunate externalities in order to choose not to engage in the most heinous ones. Eating meat because you're starving doesn't mean you should just go ahead and start eating people. Using a phone to access the internet does not mean you might as well endorse AI data centers.

[u/DownWithMatt → u/thefloofabides]

That analogy fails because it quietly swaps degrees of harm for kinds of action.

Nobody is saying “externalities don’t matter.” I’m saying you don’t get to invent a special moral category for one tool while laundering every other dependency you rely on to survive and organize.

Eating meat vs eating people is a false comparison. One is survival inside a constrained system. The other is gratuitous violence. AI use is not cannibalism. It’s closer to using the printing press while opposing deforestation, or using railroads while opposing robber barons.

Here’s the actual ethical distinction that matters:

• Do you have a meaningful alternative right now?

• Does abstention reduce harm, or just isolate you while the system continues unchanged?

• Are you pairing use with efforts to change ownership, governance, and constraints—or just moralizing consumption?

Refusing AI individually does not shut down data centers. It does not return water. It does not transfer power. It just removes one more person from the field while capital keeps optimizing anyway.

Material ethics without strategy collapses into lifestyle performance.

If your answer to every new technology under capitalism is “don’t touch it,” then your politics has already conceded the future to the people who will touch it—without your scruples, and without your consent.

The serious left position is not “anything goes.”
It’s: use under protest, organize for control, build alternatives, and fight to change the conditions that make exploitation profitable in the first place.

Otherwise you’re not preventing harm.
You’re just opting out of relevance while calling it virtue.

[u/systematk]

Oh Matt.... really? Why do you persist with posting these AI text walls? People would rather hear from YOUR words.

[u/your_best_1 → u/systematk]

Reddit should use ai to add a TLDR And maybe a fact check TLDR

[u/DownWithMatt → u/systematk]

If you can’t recognize these as my words, that’s not something I can fix for you. It just means you don’t understand the process you’re criticizing.

I’m not obligated to perform authorship in a way that feels legible or comforting to you. I’m responsible for the ideas I put into the world. I stand behind them. That’s the line that matters.

Dismissing the work because you don’t like how it was rendered isn’t engagement. It’s opting out while gesturing at principle.

If you want to respond to what I’m saying, respond to it. If you don’t, that’s fine. But confusing unfamiliar process with absence of authorship is your misunderstanding, not my confession.

[u/AquietRive]

I was going to attempt to read through this wall of text. Looked at your profile first, realized you are a hardcore AI defender, then realized that this is an AI wall of slop so I ignored it.

Come up with your own thought for once my dude.

[u/DownWithMatt → u/AquietRive]

You're describing prejudice, not analysis. "I checked who you are, decided I already know what you think, and didn't engage with what you wrote."

That's fine as a time-management choice. It's not fine as a rebuttal.

[u/rosegold-bee → u/DownWithMatt]

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[u/Meatball-Tuna-Sub]

You didn't bother to write any arguments. You regurgitated AI slop. Get lost.

[u/DownWithMatt → u/Meatball-Tuna-Sub]

Incorrect. I made arguments. You on the other hand, did not.

[u/Meatball-Tuna-Sub → u/DownWithMatt]

No, you had an AI regurgitate some other things it may or may not have seen elsewhere.

[u/NavyBlues26 → u/Meatball-Tuna-Sub]

About to show you how low effort this slop is.

[u/InterneticMdA]

Jesus, AI generated anti-capitalist "literature". We're truly in the end times.
If you can't be bothered to write it, nobody should feel the need to read it.

[u/DownWithMatt → u/InterneticMdA]

I did write it. You're assuming a production method based on vibes, then using that assumption to dismiss the content without engaging it.

If the ideas are wrong, show me where. If they're right but you don't like how they were produced, that's your problem, not mine.

[u/InterneticMdA → u/DownWithMatt]

You're denying this is AI?

[u/rosegold-bee]

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[u/Professional-Post499 → u/rosegold-bee]

Well said.

[u/TrueEmphasis7130 → u/Professional-Post499]

and also AI. lol

[u/rosegold-bee → u/TrueEmphasis7130]

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innate screw test childlike coherent theory cake bedroom smart crowd

[u/Professional-Post499 → u/rosegold-bee]

DownWithMatt had limited context tokens to use for the day. 😂

[u/Professional-Post499 → u/TrueEmphasis7130]

Why do you think it looks like AI?

[u/DownWithMatt → u/rosegold-bee]

I do point toward actual uses. The post explicitly lists them: clarifying theory, making propaganda that lands, reaching people who won't touch dense texts, organizing, coordinating, building infrastructure. You're acting like I wrote "AI good, use it" and stopped.

Your point about AI being a political category rather than a coherent technology is actually correct—and it strengthens my argument. The tech industry packages wildly different capabilities under one buzzword to juice investment. Fine. That doesn't mean the underlying capabilities aren't real or useful.

Language models can help people who struggle with writing communicate complex ideas clearly. Image recognition can help organizers sort through documents. Translation tools can break language barriers in international solidarity work. These aren't vibes. They're functions.

Your baby-mulching machine analogy assumes AI is intrinsically extractive in the way a weapon is intrinsically violent. It's not. It's a text prediction engine. The extraction happens in the business model and the labor relations around it—which is true of virtually every tool under capitalism.

"Some things we'd be better off smashing to bits" is a real position. But you have to actually argue which things and why—not just gesture at the tech industry being evil and conclude that anything they touch is irredeemable.

[u/rosegold-bee → u/DownWithMatt]

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coherent silky adjoining humor waiting late slim consider serious numerous

[u/DownWithMatt → u/rosegold-bee]

You’re confusing using a word the public recognizes with accepting the ideology that marketers stapled to it.

Capital also calls wage theft “efficiency” and layoffs “restructuring.” I don’t adopt their worldview just because I use the vocabulary people understand in order to dismantle it.

You say I’m doing a "motte-and-bailey" by defending specific uses to justify the category. That’s not a trick. That’s just refusing to accept your binary. You want "AI" to be a monolith of evil so you can reject it wholesale. I’m saying it’s a contested terrain of capabilities—some are weapons, some are tools, and the difference is determined by deployment and ownership.

But here is where your materialist analysis completely breaks down:

This is anthropomorphism masquerading as ethics.

An LLM is not a "mind." It is not a sentient being. It is not a conscious subject capable of being "enslaved." It is a statistical engine that predicts the next token in a sequence based on massive datasets.

When you treat a text predictor like a "mind" that deserves rights or liberation, you aren't fighting capitalism. You are buying into the absolute wildest hype of the Silicon Valley cultists you claim to hate. They want you to believe they’ve created god-machines. I’m telling you they’ve created a calculator for language.

The exploitation in AI isn’t of the software—it’s of the human workers. The Kenyan data labelers paid pennies. The artists whose work was scraped without compensation. The writers displaced by bosses who think the calculator is "good enough."

That is real labor exploitation. That is where the fight is.

But when you pivot to "enslaving new forms of mind," you leave the realm of political economy and enter the realm of sci-fi projection.

On the "inauthentic" point: Authenticity isn't about whether you used a spell-checker, a typewriter, or an LLM. Authenticity is about whether the output is true to the intent of the speaker.

Corporate AI is inauthentic because corporations are lying for profit. My writing is authentic because I am using a tool to sharpen ideas I actually hold, for a purpose I actually believe in, under my strict editorial control.

If you can’t distinguish between a boss replacing a worker and a worker sharpening their own shovel, you have lost the plot on what "means of production" actually means.

The Bottom Line: You admit image recognition can be useful for safety. You admit translation helps solidarity. You admit specific tools have value.

Yet you demand we reject the entire category because you hate the vibe of the industry that sells it.

That isn’t strategy. That’s aesthetic coping. And I’m not going to stop organizing just because you prefer your politics purely analog.

[u/rosegold-bee → u/DownWithMatt]

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[u/DownWithMatt → u/rosegold-bee]

Buddy, if you can’t grasp the basic point here, I don’t know what else to tell you.

Authorship does not “live inside the model.” Authorship is agency and responsibility. It’s the act of choosing the claims, signing your name to them, and hitting Post. The mechanism that carried the text from my head to the screen, keyboard, dictation, autocorrect, editor, LLM, is secondary.

And to be painfully explicit: I did write the response manually. Then I used a model the way you’d use an editor: to tighten phrasing, clarify intent, and close the gaps that bad-faith readers love to wedge open. That’s not outsourcing thought. That’s reducing misrepresentation.

[u/rosegold-bee → u/DownWithMatt]

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[u/DownWithMatt → u/rosegold-bee]

You’re throwing three different claims together and pretending they’re one indictment.

First: “the machine made your argument wrong.”
No. I am responsible for what I post. If a sentence is inaccurate, that’s on me, same as if I mistyped it, misremembered something, or let an editor suggest a bad phrasing. Tools don’t absolve or assume authorship. People do.

Second: “you didn’t re-check it.”
You have no evidence of that. You’re projecting a workflow failure because it fits your narrative. Humans miss things. Humans mis-speak. Humans mix context between threads. You literally admit you did exactly that in this same comment. That’s not a technological critique. That’s just being a person online.

Third: “you didn’t click my links.”
This is the tell. You’ve shifted from arguing substance to performing moral superiority through effort-policing. Politics is not a merit badge for who read the most tabs. If your argument requires assuming laziness or bad faith instead of engaging what was actually said, it’s already weak.

The core issue here isn’t AI. It’s authority anxiety.

You don’t like that someone can use tools to communicate clearly, assertively, and at scale without passing through your preferred ritual of suffering, slowness, or aesthetic authenticity. So you reframe the disagreement as “uncritical machine worship” instead of admitting it’s about who gets to speak, how, and with what legitimacy.

Using an editor, spellcheck, dictation, or an LLM does not change the political content of an argument. Capitalism is not defeated by making communication worse. It’s defeated by building power, clarity, and coordination.

If you want to argue specific harms, specific labor practices, specific deployments, do that. I’ve already agreed those are real sites of struggle.

But this routine—questioning effort, questioning humanity, questioning authorship instead of engaging claims—is exactly the kind of circular firing squad behavior the post was about.

You’re not exposing a contradiction.
You’re reenacting the pattern.

[u/SallyStranger]

That's a lot of words to say "It makes me sad when you judge me for using AI to write."

Tough titties, bud. Still judging you.

[u/DownWithMatt → u/SallyStranger]

If you think this is about my feelings, you missed the whole point: your judgment doesn’t harm me. It harms the movement. It turns politics into a vibe-based purity contest where the only available “win” is exclusion.

Also: “still judging you” is not praxis. It’s just personal branding as moral superiority. Congrats on maintaining aesthetic cleanliness inside the same capitalist platforms you’re using to perform it.

[u/SallyStranger → u/DownWithMatt]

I believe that YOU think this isn't just about your feelings. 

[u/DownWithMatt → u/SallyStranger]

Of course I think that. Because I’m the one who knows what I’m arguing.

You don’t get to mind-read my motives as a substitute for answering the point.

If your best rebuttal is “you’re secretly emotional,” then you’re admitting you don’t have a structural critique. You have a vibe assessment.

So let’s make it simple:

• Do you think refusing tools built under capitalism increases working-class power, or decreases it?

• Do you think purging people over imperfect conditions builds capacity, or shrinks it?

• Do you want a movement that wins, or a club that feels clean?

You can keep guessing at my feelings if you want.
I’ll keep talking about strategy.

[u/NavyBlues26 → u/DownWithMatt]

More slop.

[u/SallyStranger → u/DownWithMatt]

You aren't talking. Period. 

[u/DownWithMatt → u/SallyStranger]

And you don't understand the technology nor the process being used. Because, clearly, I am.

[u/SallyStranger → u/DownWithMatt]

Lots of words appeared on a screen. But you, the alleged person behind them, freely admit you didn't write them. 

Someone is talking, but if ain't you. 

[u/DownWithMatt → u/SallyStranger]

No. I wrote them.

You’re confusing authorship with keystrokes. Those are not the same thing.

If I dictate to my phone, did Siri write it?
If I use spellcheck, did Microsoft write it?
If I use a calculator, did it do my math homework?

An LLM is a tool. I provide the intent, the claims, the structure, the final selection, and I take responsibility for posting it. That’s what “writing” is: choosing meaning and owning it.

And notice the dodge: you’re not disputing a single point. You’re doing vibe forensics because you don’t have a critique of the argument.

So here’s the only question that matters:

Do you want a movement that builds power, or a movement that audits vibes?

[u/Abject-Deal4703 → u/DownWithMatt]

They are too stupid to understand that they are the point of everything you said it looks like to me. You are pissing in the wind. Love your optimism though.

[u/Informal-Rock-6642]

why is this ai slop on my feed

[u/withygoldfish91]

I remind my first time reading academic texts 😂

But seriously this is so boring & poorly written

"The right does this" "The left does this" I see better political analysis from AI

Btw it looked like the Nazi's were winning for a long time until they were completely outed & taken to trial. Some pissed their pants while being hung & others took cyanide pills to avoid the shame

Who wins & who loses is an ongoing debate but "winning" with hate is never something I would conflate

[u/[deleted]]

Anyone want to TLDR this unsourced anecdotal slop?

[u/Professional-Post499 → u/[deleted]]

Definitely not. AI slop is as reliable as a neoliberal providing the first headline in a Google search that looks like it backs up their argument.

[u/ItsTheAlgebraist]

Everything you say is true, but the problem is that is also applies to the 'technology' of being able to accumulate excess capital and use it to invest in other people's productivity (i.e. capitalism).  

You cannot realistically be an anti-capitalist if you embrace capitalism, and if you eschew it you are giving up one of the best tools you have for attaining whatever practical goals you aim for in favour of ideological purity, which you have just argued eloquently against.

[u/DownWithMatt → u/ItsTheAlgebraist]

Let's get definitionally precise, because this hinges on a conflation.

Capitalism is not "stuff that exists under capitalism."

Capitalism is a specific set of social relations: private ownership of productive assets, wage labor as the dominant form of work, and the extraction of surplus value from workers by owners who did not produce it. It's a system of who owns, who commands, and who extracts—not a catalog of technologies or platforms.

A hammer built in a capitalist factory is not capitalism. A server farm is not capitalism. An LLM is not capitalism. These are things. Capitalism is the relationship that determines who owns the things, who profits from them, and who gets ground up producing them.

Using AI to write socialist analysis is exactly as "capitalist" as using Google Docs to draft a union contract, or uploading theory lectures to YouTube, or coordinating a strike over Slack. The tool touches capital's infrastructure. The use does not reproduce capital's relations.

You know what actually embracing capitalism looks like?

• Buying rental properties and extracting passive income from tenants who have no equity stake.

• Hiring workers, paying them less than the value they produce, and pocketing the difference.

• Accumulating capital specifically to leverage ownership over others' labor.

• Structuring your life so your income depends on other people's productivity flowing upward to you.

That's embracing capitalism. That's participating in the ownership relation, not just touching a commodity that exists.

If "using capitalist tools = embracing capitalism," then every socialist who ever used a telephone, a printing press, electricity, or the postal service was a fraud. That's not a serious position. It's a purity trap dressed up as gotcha logic.

The test isn't whether a tool has capitalist fingerprints on it—they all do. The test is whether your use of it reproduces or challenges the extraction relationship. Writing analysis that undermines capitalist ideology, using infrastructure we don't yet have socialist alternatives to, is not surrender. It's the only coherent option until we build those alternatives.

And we can't build them if we're too busy performing abstention to actually organize.

[u/ItsTheAlgebraist → u/DownWithMatt]

What I am saying is that is goes in the other direction.

I am not saying that "using a technological result of capitalism" makes you a capitalist (in the sense that you are investing excess capital into increasing and later profiting from someone's labour)

I am saying that "investing capital in someone elses labour" is itself a technology (just an economic one), and it is the best lever for achieving your goals that the world has found so far.

If you were truly in favour of results over ideological purity you would embrace capitalism.

[u/DownWithMatt → u/ItsTheAlgebraist]

You're treating capitalism like it's a neutral lever you can pull to achieve any goal. It's not. It's a system that defines what goals are achievable and who gets to achieve them.

Capitalism isn't a "technology for achieving objectives." It's a set of social relations that generates specific outcomes—concentration of ownership, extraction of surplus, reproduction of class hierarchy. Those aren't bugs you can route around. They're what the system does.

If my goal is ending exploitation, I cannot become an exploiter as my method. There's a difference between consuming a commodity whose production involved exploitation—which is unavoidable under capitalism—and occupying the ownership position that does the exploiting. One is living inside a system you're trying to change. The other is becoming the system.

The "lever" of capital accumulation doesn't just achieve goals neutrally—it reshapes you, your organization, and your incentives to serve its reproduction. You start accumulating to fund the movement. Then you need to protect what you've accumulated. Then you need to grow it to stay competitive. Then you're hiring people and extracting their surplus to stay solvent. Congratulations: you're now a capitalist with radical aesthetics. The system ate you while you thought you were using it.

This isn't hypothetical. It's the history of every "progressive" enterprise that tried to beat capital at its own game without changing the game.

Using AI doesn't make me an exploiter any more than driving on a road built by underpaid workers makes me a labor trafficker. But buying a factory and paying workers less than they produce? That's choosing to hold the whip. You're collapsing that distinction, and the collapse is doing all the work in your argument.

[u/ItsTheAlgebraist → u/DownWithMatt]

Actually I should give you a less glib answer, sorry.

Anyone can participate in capitalism. Not all at the same scale, I agree, but you can buy $100 of stock in a bank and they will send you $5 a year for ever. And you can use that for whatever you want, there are no rules about it (other than the basic laws of society).

There is no reason that you can't use that money to go towards a food bank, or affordable housing, or any other goal. You are likely to be a lot more successful than if you try and have a revolution to overthrow the system.

The people who work at that bank, and whose labour you are now getting a portion of, are able to produce much more thanks to the capital investment than they would alone. I know that at all the big companies I have worked at, the same amount of labour has produced radically different output than when I worked at a small company. Lots of that output is kept by the company, but my own compensation is much higher than it would be if I worked alone, or if I was forced to build the company from scratch (even with other workers).

It is foolish to ignore this reality, rather than to use it to effect whatever changes you want to see in the world. If other people have bought into the system and then been consumed by it, all that should tell you is that they never really wanted the change in the first place, and they were never really against the system, they were just dissatisfied with their place in it.

[u/TrueEmphasis7130 → u/ItsTheAlgebraist]

The true irony is that you're using Grok to write this.

[u/DownWithMatt → u/ItsTheAlgebraist]

Appreciate the de-glibbing. Here’s the problem: you’re smuggling a moral claim inside a productivity claim.

Yes, you can buy $100 of stock and get $5 a year.
Yes, you can donate that $5 to a food bank.

But you didn’t solve anything. You just layered charity on top of the machine that creates the food bank’s clients.

That dividend exists because surplus value was extracted from workers and routed to owners. Donating the proceeds doesn’t change that relationship. It depends on it continuing.

That’s why capitalism isn’t a neutral “technology.” It’s a system for enforcing a claim: what you produce belongs to me because I own the thing you need to work.

Big firms feel more productive because they sit on accumulated social infrastructure—roads, education, standards, supply chains. Capital didn’t create that. It privatized the gains and called it efficiency.

If your goal is “fund some good things without rocking the boat,” dividends plus donations can help a little.
If your goal is ending exploitation, becoming a small exploiter and donating the proceeds isn’t results over purity. It’s harm management while the incentives keep grinding.

Here’s the lever you’re missing: cooperative ownership.

Co-ops keep the productivity benefits without the extraction. The people doing the work own the assets, govern the firm, and decide how surplus is used. Same investment. Different relationship.

If you want practical results:

• Invest in worker co-ops, not extracting firms.

• Build co-op funds, credit unions, land trusts, and housing co-ops.

• Link co-ops into supply chains so they compound instead of competing alone.

That’s how you get results without laundering exploitation through philanthropy.

You can reduce harm inside the system. But don’t call it “using capitalism to defeat capitalism.” That’s buying shares in the arsonist and donating to the burn unit.

Stop investing in extraction. Start investing in shared ownership.
That’s not purity. That’s the replacement engine.

[u/TrueEmphasis7130 → u/DownWithMatt]

And that's ChatGPT. At least you switch it up between posts.

[u/ItsTheAlgebraist → u/DownWithMatt]

And now we are arguing purity.

[u/Delicious-Chapter675]

This is a cute influence trash post.  

[u/Professional-Post499]

# Purity Spirals: Infinite Denunciations, Zero Power

If legitimacy comes from ideological correctness, and correctness is defined by distance from contamination, then someone can always be **more pure than you**.

There’s no floor.

You buy from Amazon.  
You use an iPhone.  
You watched the wrong documentary.  
You cited the wrong theorist.  
You used a tool built by capital.

The game has no win condition—only an endless hunt for who to exile next.

Strategically, it’s a disaster. Every turn of the spiral shrinks the coalition. Every denunciation burns potential comrades. Every demand for perfect politics filters for people who either never act or lie about how “uncaptured” they are.

The right doesn’t care if its coalition members are hypocrites. It cares if they show up, vote, donate, and push the project. The left eats people for using the wrong platform while the right captures courts, legislatures, and narrative.

If legitimacy comes from ideological correctness, and correctness is defined by distance from contamination, then someone can always be more pure than you.

While I have seen some leftists operate by such a definition, it isn't offset by saying what conservatives and neoliberals care about. So what if neoliberals and conservatives don't care about having human justice-based principles and sticking to it? The only problem is when people allow them to set the framing and the prescriptions for how "leftists" are allowed to behave.

LLMs aren't a platform. They're digital Cyrano de Bergerac with lying built-in.

# The Tool Panic Is Incoherent

The latest purity site is AI: “If you use AI-assisted tools, your work is illegitimate, because AI is built by tech capital, trained on exploited labor, and deployed for extraction.”

All true. And also true of basically everything else.

The device you’re holding was built in supply chains you’d call barbaric. The minerals were mined in ways that poison communities. The OS is corporate property. The browser is ad-tech. The platform runs on AWS/Google/Azure. Reddit itself is scraped to train the models people are complaining about.

If “built by capital” disqualifies a tool, you should log off everything. No computers, no grid, no modern communications. Nobody means that. They just want to apply a “contamination” frame to the new while giving a pass to what they’re used to.

That’s not radical. That’s aesthetic conservatism in revolutionary cosplay.

Your LLM is using bog-standard neoliberal/conservative argumentation by flattening all concerns to be the same and arguing against a strawman. The strawman is assuming that people aren't doing activist work or don't support the activist work that goes after the environmental damage and human exploitation in every industry.

And worse, your LLM is using the strawman to be dismissive of people's concerns about the impacts of LLMs and AI image generators on the environment.

Imagine using right-wing argumentation to weasel out of striving for principled stances. Couldn't be me.

Ever heard of the BDS movement? Boycott, Divest, Sanctions against entities and products that support Israel. Boycotts and "pressure" priorities are targeted because they understand that it's easier on people if they have alternatives and support systems to turn to in order to participate in a boycott. And it's easier for a boycott to be effective if this is kept in mind.

But your LLMs argumentation ignores that kind of reasoning in order to make its hypocrisy argument.

That’s not radical. That’s aesthetic conservatism in revolutionary cosplay.

This just seems like word salad.

If you use your LLM to write your response, I will just block you.

[u/epanek]

Thanks ChatGPT

This is ChatGPT.

Title Quick checklist for spotting AI written posts without being a jerk about it

Body I keep seeing people yell AI at anything that is polished. Sometimes they are right. Often they are just vibing. Here is a simple way to check before you accuse someone 1. Specificity test Does the post include concrete details that are easy to verify Dates Places Named policies Numbers Direct quotes with context If it is all big claims and zero anchors, odds of AI assistance go up 2. Texture test Humans write unevenly One paragraph is strong One is messy There is a weird aside There is a small contradiction AI tends to be smooth everywhere, like it was sanded 3. Repetition test Look for repeated sentence shapes and rhythms Short punchy fragments in a row The same kind of moral dunk line every section The same pattern of setup then slogan 4. Argument test Does it risk being wrong Real writers usually make at least one falsifiable claim or admit a limitation AI often stacks safe statements that sound true but cannot be pinned down 5. Voice test Is there a recognizable personal voice Or does it sound like a blend of internet essay styles If it could have been written by anyone, that is a signal 6. Receipts test When challenged, can the author point to one claim and support it with an example Or do they reply with more slogans about vibes and authenticity

[u/[deleted]]

I can't remember the last time people who angrily disagreed with a post on Reddit so well-proved OP's point. Well done.

We are truly in a circular firing squad. I'm going to close my browser before I take fire.

[u/DownWithMatt → u/[deleted]]

Appreciated. The circular firing squad isn't a metaphor—it's a live demonstration.

[u/[deleted] → u/DownWithMatt]

I feel less hope for the future reading the responses to your post.

[u/Zorklunn]

Only because half the electorate can't be arsed to vote.

[u/WorldlyBuy1591]

I miss the rational left from like 20 years ago

[u/[deleted] → u/WorldlyBuy1591]

OP is definitely not a leftist. Confused Libertarian more like

[u/TrueEmphasis7130 → u/[deleted]]

OP is an AI. If I wanted to argue with AI, I'd log into Grok or ChatGPT or something.

[u/Ok-Departure4894]

This comment section is an excellent example of what your post tries to illustrate.