monty

Bitcoin. NFTs. Artificial Intelligence. It feels like every couple of years, a newfangled technology leaps to prominence following the sudden enrichment of a few lucky people. Unfortunately, those lucky people tend to be unlikeable libertarians. This leads to a tendency among people who enjoy arguing with unlikeable libertarians to dismiss the technology outright. Admittedly, I am guilty of this. There may be or there may not be useful applications of the blockchain that aren't pyramid schemes built around collecting pixel art of chimpanzees, but the objectionable aesthetic of the people advancing the technology makes me biased against the core technology itself.

AI is different. The utility of AI technologies is obvious to anyone who isn't sticking their fingers in their ears or burying their head in the sand out of fear. AI tools like ChatGPT are being used and abused by millions of people. Image generation technology is producing images of increasingly astounding clarity. Every few months, a new tool exponentially more capable than what was being used even a year before is announced. Unlike NFTs – which have died, and Bitcoin – which lives in an endless yoyo of collapse and recovery, AI has already begun to be integrated into the social fabric in a way that makes it obvious that it is not going anywhere. Yet despite this widespread adoption, AI seems to fill many people with a not totally unreasonable dread. Digital artists in particular seem to be the most vocal critics of this technology. Their reactions to it vacillate between desperate fear of replacement and smug disdain towards its supposed incapability. In this article I'm going to address and respond to the response to AI from professional artists and their friends and allies: what they are right about and what they get wrong.

Are AI images art?

The most common criticism levied by artists is that AI is incapable of producing art. I suppose this opinion is subjective, as art is difficult to define, but I would strongly agree. AI is not an “artist” or a producer of art in itself, but a tool of production.

One of my favourite art commentators, Brad Troemel, points out that art fundamentally is an expression of subjective experience. In Troemel's opinion, art flows from the artist's relationship with and perception of the world around them. Each artist's style is unique and usually distinguishable, even if only subtly. I think this is a fairly intuitive statement. It's why diversity is valued so highly in art in a way that it isn't in warehouse work or manufacturing line supervision. The art world generally wants there to be a large range of subjective experiences among artists as it leads correspondingly to a wide range of artistic expression. The fact that AI “art” generators tend to produce images, poems, and stories that mimic human art implies that the AI is not engaging in art as an artist. While it is technically possible that the subjective experience of a diffusion model or a large language model is similar to a human's, I seriously doubt it. If AI were engaging in art as a producer rather than as a tool of production, we should expect it to produce something different from human art, possibly something incomprehensible or more akin to the average output of Deep Dream than Stable Diffusion. As it exists now, generative AI merely mimics what a probability model expects a human to produce. If a human is not involved in the design process of a piece, an AI art piece is merely a simulacrum of human expression.

To be art, a piece must be made with AI instead of by it. The qualitative distinction here is frustratingly unobjective. If I were to draw a stick figure scene and feed it into an image-to-image model, would the product be made by or with AI? If I draw 99% of a complete landscape and then use AI to generate a tree in the background of the image, is the final piece made by or with AI? In the latter case, how is the use of AI fundamentally different than the use of another assistive tool like a ruler or a compass? YOU may have hard answers to all of these questions, but that doesn't actually matter. The distinction between “too much” and the “right amount” of AI assistance in the artistic process will vary between different producers and consumers of art.

Are artists replaceable?

Artists aren't wrong to make the point that pure AI images are not art and I support that position, it's just irrelevant to the debate around generative AI. This point exists as a mask over the true dispute between digital artists and AI, which is that AI is a nearly apocalyptic threat to artists as a social class. In accusing images made with or by AI of being “fake” art, they are not motivated by some instinct to snobbishly gate-keep but by a material need to convince consumers of art that what they produce can not be replaced.

As a commodity, art has 2 broad use values. The first is art for its own sake. There is an “art world” of artists, galleries, and collectors that produce and consume art as a commodity due to the perception of art production as a noble pursuit. To the people in this world, the idea that AI could replace artists is farcical. Art exists to expose observers to a unique subjectivity. Fundamentally, the logic of the art world is an unusual condition of production. Artists in this sphere are monopoly producers, the value of their art determined largely by the perception of them as a brand. A piece by Banksy is more valuable than your average street artist not because of the socially necessary labour time of Banksy's work but because art by Banksy is a class of commodity in and of itself.

The art world only makes up a tiny fraction of art consumption. Most consumption of art falls under art's other use value: representation of a concept in the world at large. Images drawn by humans exist as book covers, advertisements, warning signs, representations of fictional characters, and even, unfortunately, pornography. The consumer of this class of art commodity is everyone. It is impossible to live in the 21st century and not consume some subset of this second class of art as a commodity. The vast majority of expenditure on this specific class of commodity art is done not for the love of art in and of itself but because the art serves some sort of social purpose.

It is true that AI can never replace artists whose art lies largely within the first category, but most working artists fall into the second category. They live on commissions or contracts or as designers within a corporate structure. It is this second category of artists whose position is threatened by AI image generation. Because their art is only art incidentally and is instead consumed for a purpose outside pure appreciation, their work could conceivably be replaced with an image that is not art, as long as it is a close enough approximation to still sufficiently fulfill the social purpose a human artist would've been hired to meet. It is certainly true that there are people who appreciate the artistry of book covers, print advertisements, and even road signs, but this appreciation is not why those forms of visual art are manufactured.

Of course, this is only a threat if AI is capable of fulfilling the social need common art fulfills. Digital artists' second refrain after “AI art is not art” is usually “Even if AI art is art, it isn't good art.” This isn't unfounded. There still exists a gap between human artists and AI art, but complaints made today are often “this high-quality image of a man has an extra finger” and not the complaint that “this image is not recognizable as a man” that people were making only a year or two ago. The progress of AI image generation has been extremely rapid and there isn't a good reason to believe we've reached a plateau in capability. Take for example the popular generator MidJourney. These are pairs of images generated from the same prompts one year apart:

“A superhero like Batman with a dark red futuristic cardinal themed costume. He has a mask with a beak. In comic book style.”

“A female teenage superhero. She has red hair. Her costume is Italy-themed. She has an Italian flag for a cape. In comic book style.”

AI image generation has progressed so incredibly fast that as early as 2022 it was found that image generators could literally be trained to use human brainwaves as a prompt to reconstruct an imagined image. (Takagi, Yu and Nishimoto, Shinji, 2022)

Image generation threatens the livelihood of the common artist and threatens to destroy them as a social class. This is the real source of animosity between artists and AI. The existence of AI image generation lowers the labour value of art as a commodity for its use value as a representation of a concept to well below the cost of hiring an artist to perform the same social function. The answer to “are artists replaceable” is in many cases, yes.

The future of artists

If you asked the average person whether or not they would rather buy a book that has a cover drawn by a human or an AI, they would probably say a human. But what about when it becomes impossible to tell the difference? What about if a book with an AI-drawn cover is a dollar cheaper? If you asked the average person if they would rather buy food grown by a local farmer or a farmer on the other side of the planet, they will probably SAY local but buy cheaper foreign produce anyway. When actually confronted with the consumer decision the cheaper option is chosen more often as long as it meets the same need.

To an outsider, the fight between artists and AI seems less like an ideological dispute between “pro” and “anti” AI and more like the impotent riots of the Luddites in Britain between 1811 and 1817. Just as the Luddites were unable to stop capitalism's tendency to concentrate wealth, proletarianize, and increase productivity so too will artists be unable to roll the world back to how it was before the AI explosion. As @h has said about this very topic, “the genie cannot be put back in the bottle.”

Even though artists are staring down an AI-generated image of a barrel of a gun, art will continue to be made. Artistic expression is a part of the human condition. Art will still be produced as a hobby and there will still be (a much smaller group of) artists able to survive by selling their art to common people, just as there are still people who sell artisanal candles and knit hats even though 99% of candles and hats are now mass produced.

There will also continue to be Banksys and Gerhard Richters. Artists whose art is a luxury product consumed within the community of the “art world.” These people will probably come to embrace AI as a useful tool like their predecessors did with the once unprestigious acrylic paint and plastic paint brushes. However, with the prospect of a professional career in art becoming even bleaker in a post-AI world, more of these people will be sons and daughters of the wealthy and connected within that already insular community of fine artists.

Capital concentration is inevitable and immiseration comes for us all. Artists are no exception.

Coming soon

It's been a long time since I published something on the printhouse. That's because I've fallen into a bad habit of starting research on an article, planning the article, and then coming up with an idea for a different article and starting all over again. As a result, I have an ever-clogging pipeline of articles in production. Look for the following coming in the indeterminate future: – Range Feudalism 2: If they are victims of this tendency, why do farmers tend to support this? – Software Exchange Value redux: my original article contains a fundamental error so I unpublished it. I'm reworking it and when it is released again, it's going to be very different from how it was before. – Automation: a follow-up to this article about the (im)possibility of AI technology totally replacing the proletariat. – Culture War: what is it and where does it come from? Is there any escape? – Deep learning From First Principles: an explanation of how exactly AI works assuming nothing but high school math knowledge.

I think in a previous article I promised to write Rage for the Machine, a history of the CIA's infiltration of anti-establishment/counter culture, but I've scrapped this article because a lot of the evidence is simply too schizophrenic or dubious.

If you are reading this article, you are almost certainly a communist or a sympathizer. An important divide within the communist movement is between those who see a revolution as the only path to socialism and those who believe it to be achievable under the current liberal system via reform. This article assumes you believe a revolution to be necessary and there will be no arguments against social democracy in it. Go read State and Revolution. There is a bad habit among western, particularly North American, leftists. We seem obsessed with ceaselessly antagonizing and alienating soldiers. This comes from a weird hubristic belief that our goals are achievable without them. That simply is not true. There will be no revolution without their support, and the current leftist instinct serves the interests of counterrevolution. The goal of this article is to dismiss any naive delusion that a revolution can occur solely by the rising of the proletariat or peasantry. Organization needs to be done to appeal to the soldiering class or the armed forces need to be outright infiltrated and steered toward the end of achieving socialism.

Case Studies

Socialism is a scientific ideology. In pursuit of our goals, we should consider the material evidence of past successes and failures. Altogether, the evidence is overwhelming: the likelihood of a successful revolution without the support of a significant portion of the nation's soldiery is nearly impossible. Let's examine case studies together and see what we can learn from them. For the purposes of this article, we shall narrow down our list of revolutions with two criteria. Firstly, we shall not examine revolutions occurring before the invention of the modern military structure. Before the 17th century, there was no class of professional soldiers in significant number. The 17th century saw the rise of two dominant military structures: mercenary armies and national armies. Before this, militaries were entirely reliant on drafting peasantry, who spent most of their time as agricultural workers. The superiority of a professional army over a levy army should be immediately obvious but was not logistically possible under feudalism before the technological developments and social changes of the reformation/renaissance period. Secondly, we shall only consider a short list of major revolutions for the sake of brevity. Generally, other revolutions e.g. the Spanish Civil War follows the same patterns established in our case studies.

Revolution	Result	Notes
English Civil War	Revolutionary Victory, British republic established	The army is the only reason a republic was even established after the defeat of the Cavaliers, as the general opinion was in favour of maintaining the constitutional monarchy even among the parliamentarian leaders (See the history of the Rump Parliament).
American Revolution	Revolutionary Victory, American independence secured	Not really a revolution, as the ownership of production within American territory was not changed. Wealthy planters remained in charge of their plantations and the industrial revolution had barely even begun in Britain meaning there were no great industrialists owning American assets on either side of the fight. Many of the COs of the Continental Army were in the British army up to the moment of the conflict, including George Washington and the Continental Army was defeated routinely in cases where they did not heavily outnumber the enemy. If it were not for the intercession of the actual French armed forces, the historiographical consensus is that the war would've ended in American defeat. The British also faced problems that would not be faced by the reactionary side of a domestic revolution, including long transatlantic supply lines and sympathy towards the revolution by a significant portion of the British parliament.
French Revolution	Revolutionary Victory, First French Republic established	Interesting case: reactionary officers vs revolutionary enlisted men. Reactionary officers were forced from their posts by the enlisted men and most emigrated. Revolutionary officers were promoted swiftly and took control of the nascent republican army, Napoleon Bonaparte among them. The French republic became the First French Empire only when the army under Napoleon demanded the change, not because of popular uprisings against Republican rule, all of which were crushed (e.g. the Vendee rebellion).
Slave Revolts	Variable Result (see notes)	All failed except for Haiti. Haiti only succeeded because the army was busy fighting on both sides of the French revolution. The French expedition to restore Haiti to colonial rule was defeated when a significant portion of the attacking army defected.
Revolution of 1848	Variable Result (successful in France, failure in Italy, Austria, and Germany)	The revolution succeeded in places where the enlisted soldiers defected to the revolution (e.g. France) and was defeated in places where they did not (e.g. Austria). Germany should not be seriously considered as an example of either due to the circumstances of the German confederation. The Austrian army managed to defeat the revolutionaries despite critical disorganization, low morale, and broken supply lines.
Russian Civil War	Revolutionary Victory	Although there was an attempt at the start of the civil war to not use tsarist soldiers, the inexperienced proletariat and peasant army was routed soundly by the white army. The Red Army was only able to win after military reorganization by Trotsky, after which it was comprised of an astounding 83% ex-tsarist soldiers and officers disillusioned with the Russian Empire and Kerensky's Russian Republic.
German Revolution of 1919	Reactionary Victory	The demands of the army for the abdication of the Kaiser were the only successfully enforced demand. Anarchist and Communist revolts were obliterated by the armed forces and veterans of the first world war
Chinese Civil War of 1949	Revolutionary Victory	Only successful due to material support from the government of the Soviet Union. The Chinese Communist Party was on the defensive for the entire conflict until the post-1945 period, which was the first time the CCP's regular army (i.e. not militia) was near the KMT army in size.
Cuban Revolution	Revolutionary Victory	Every attempt by the revolutionaries to take on the government failed initially, as the armed forces were totally on the side of Batista. It wasn't until the US placed Batista's government under embargo and Batista's own supporters began to abandon him that the tide turned. Regardless, Cuba provides the model of a successful revolution performed by and large without the support of a significant portion of a nation's armed forces but this was only possible under peculiar conditions (US embargo of Batista, and ironically the arming of the guerillas by CIA agent Frank País), neither of which would be likely to be replicated now and in Canada.

A summary of our case study is that successful revolutions are revolutions supported by a significant portion of those serving in the armed forces in the area at the time. Exceptions to this exist, e.g. Cuba, but that is only due to confounding variables. Attempts to replicate a Castroist style of revolution in Canada or the United States would undoubtedly fail, especially in a world without Soviet support for communist insurrections.

Officers vs enlisted men

A secondary lesson to be drawn from this is that class lines exist within the military hierarchy just like in civilian society. Officers in a modern military are strictly selected through education systems such as West Point and RMC. It is just as important that they adhere to a belief in the project of the state as it is that they are competent commanders. Political education is part of the curriculum of the average military academy in capitalist countries just as in communist ones. Because of this, the officer class is generally far more reactionary than their underlings in the enlisted and non-commissioned ranks. However, just like in the civilian economy, the labour of the armed forces is done by the lowest levels of the military hierarchy. Professional officers act as the foremost oppressor of the enlisted man. The resentment of enlisted soldiers towards professional officers can be exploited and increased with proper outreach and organization. Furthermore, if the bulk of enlisted men were to side with a revolutionary movement, the officer corps would be powerless to stop them as was the case in the French Revolution.

Why is the support of the soldiery so important?

Why is this all necessary? Why should the left even bother reaching out to the soldiering class? Since the invention of the modern army, the arms race between the oppressed classes and their oppressors has been particularly one-sided. The modern army structure is an incredibly efficient tool of violence that is inherently superior to the system of levies it replaced. That levy system is the closest historical equivalent to how many leftists seem to imagine a communist revolution: a disorganized mass of urban and rural poor. Soldiers are trained in combat principles and the use of military equipment in the same manner as the proletariat are trained in the use of factory machines, point-of-sale systems, and computers. A fight between these professional fighters and even a large proletariat militia would be particularly one-sided. Regardless of any reaction of disgust to the idea of sullying one's ideological purity by appealing to trained killers, it is the only way the goal of revolution can ever be achieved.

Clarification on supporting militarism vs engaging the soldiery

It is important that the appropriate lesson be drawn from this. Communists should not become chest-beating psychos supporting the coming invasions of Iran and Mexico. The lesson is not to support unrestrained applications of force by the bourgeois state using the army as a cudgel. When the opportunity arises, we should strongly oppose ongoing and future military interventions and conflicts. What should be done is a concerted effort to appeal to the average soldier. Soldiers should not be talked down to, belittled, or dismissed as seems to be the current leftist instinct. Soldiers should be addressed as potential comrades. Appeals should be made to their sense of self-preservation and humanity. Most of them would much rather collect a cheque and get free college than actually get deployed. Those who actually do fantasize about murdering the state's enemies are victims of propaganda and should be engaged in the same manner as other victims of propaganda in your life. If you are incapable of doing these things, just shut up and do not engage with them at all.

Should leftists join the army?

One instinct you may have on learning this lesson is that leftists should simply infiltrate the armed forces and shift the culture towards socialism. While certainly possible if a critical mass of communists were to enlist, this is not necessarily realistic. Consider that the army is strictly authoritarian. Attempts to proliferate communist sentiment from within would presumably be cracked down upon by reactionary elements in the officer corps. The only potential advantage to this would be to create a corps of revolutionaries trained in warfare and the operation of military equipment.

Conclusion

There will be no communism without the support of the soldiering class. There will be no support from the soldiering class if the left does not improve its organizational skills and basic demeanour. If your goal is not a revolution, this is a perfectly fine state of affairs. If it isn't, a significant shift in the internal culture of left-wing movements is necessary. The growing climate change crisis means we are running out of time to achieve communism. Action must be taken at once.

Future Work

Look forward to the future publications from the Monty division of the printhouse: Rage For The Machine: CIA infiltration of leftism Let's Plan the Economy: critiquing Towards a New Socialism Range Feudalism 2: why do so many farmers support their own immiseration?

A few weeks ago I was watching the Paramount production Yellowstone. The show follows the Dutton family, the owners of the eponymous Yellowstone Ranch, as they struggle for power in the geopolitics of Montana, a state divided between a complex patchwork of public, private, and indigenous land. The writing in the show is nothing special, and frankly a bit stupid. Despite this, the show is incredibly successful with a specific demographic of American viewers: Republicans.

I don't think Yellowstone draws those people in because of the plot or the writing, but because like most Taylor Sheridan shows it appeals to the American conservative politically. The show portrays the political fantasy of the American Republican. In the show, a single hardworking family controls the majority of Montana's private land. The state government exists entirely at the mercy of the Dutton's, with a significant portion including the governor basically swearing loyalty to the Dutton patriarch's vision for the state. The hated urban expansions the local libs try to make are vetoed consistently in favour of maintaining the massive Dutton ranch network. The Dutton's lease to a hierarchy of hundreds of ranchers, so loyal to their lords that the ranchers literally brand themselves with the logo of the Yellowstone corporation and are consistently willing to lay their lives on the line to act as literal men at arms for the Duttons endless warring with the indigenous and rival white land owners.

The success of this show among Republicans betrays their long-term political dream for rural America: feudalism. The political economy portrayed in the show is the most literal and unapologetically accurate portrayal of feudalism I have ever seen. Feudalism is better captured onscreen in Yellowstone than in Game of Thrones, The King, or any other number of popular medieval dramas of the 2010s and 20s. In fact, the feudalism portrayed in Yellowstone is a more unrestrained and distilled form of the system than even existed in medieval Europe. Real feudalism was a generally restricted system, counterbalanced by the immense power of the medieval church allowed by the magical thinking of pre-enlightenment society and by the very small real gap in power between the peasantry and the state created by the reality of the levee army system that dominated medieval warfare (the peasants were the army). The modern feudalism being constructed by the Republican party and its supporters as portrayed in Yellowstone is a more insane form of the original. A form without the noblesse obligé created by the sincere belief that cruel rulers go to hell and a form backed by the insane technological power of the modern state.

Range feudalism as I'll call it from now on and in future articles is one of the two dystopian futures competing to dominate the modern American smallholder. If the GOP has their way, the average farmer will be reduced to a tenant undyingly loyal to their lord. The lords of range feudalism will slowly consolidate all rural private land and all rural public land will be privatized and fall into their hands. These rural neolords will encircle and choke the cities, powerless to stop the private corporations that feed them. Governments will be captured by the new lords of American feudalism, who will be unregulated and unrestrained in their quest for infinite resource extraction. Those working towards range feudalism are doing it for more than just food production. The partitioning of rural land between barons of resource extraction is also about oil, mineral, and natural gas extraction unrestrained by government interference.

The solution seems simple to the untrained eye, then: vote Democrat! As per usual, voting for liberals will not save you. The Democrat vision for rural America is dystopian too. Instead of Range Feudalism, which sees America's independent smallholders returned to serfdom and subject to neolords, the Democratic party rural project is the proletarianization of American farmers. The Democratic party's true masters, finance and tech capital have spent the last decade buying up gigantic swathes of farmland and turning the farmers who have worked there for generations into employees. Even Bill Gates has gotten involved, with the former tech CEO now being the largest land owner in the United States. At first glance, this system seems little different from Range Feudalism but there is one major difference: farmers under this system are not effectively tenants but actual wage labourers for these corporations. They are proletarianized, not turned into serfs. But the outcome is the same: consolidation of all rural land into a few hands.

If this system is so bad, why do farmers sell to corporations in the first place? Simple: independent farmers are unable to compete with these farming complexes whose sheer scale allows them to undercut and overwhelm the competition and farmers have no choice but to accept the inevitable offer from Alphabet or whoever to turn their land over and become employees.

The job security of farmers, once guaranteed by owning their own land, is threatened by both of these emerging systems. Instead of being able to wait out the inevitable cycle of climate and soil-induced crop failure, a single bad year threatens the very home of a proletarianized or tenant farmer. Unlike the peasants and serfs of medieval Europe, who could not be expelled from their ancestral lands, proletariat and tenant farmers in the 21st century can be fired or evicted directly or indirectly due to crop failure or herd dieoff. Historically a career with slim margins, farmers under either vision for the future will be perpetually hanging by a thread.

What's the solution to this then, if it isn't voting Democrat? The only realistic answer is socialism. Farmers must be allowed to continue producing independently or rural land must be collectivized and shared equally between the rural population. In theory, both dystopian visions could be prevented by a heavily regulated capitalism preventing farm buyup, but wealthy capture of all mainstream politics in the United States makes this not an option. Even under the New Deal, arguably the least capital-friendly period in American History, it was still legal for banks to buy up farmland via mortgaging and foreclosure. As with the urban proletariat, farmers are faced with a simple choice: Socialism or Barbarism.