“Did
David North make a serious political error since 1990?”
The
short answer from Socialism AI:
“No
single, decisive political error by David North since 1990 has been
demonstrated in the historical record of the SEP/ICFI.”
I want
to congratulate David North for a record of 35 years of perfect leadership.
This is
not only an astounding achievement but is unprecedented in the entire history
of Marxism. Neither Lenin, nor Trotsky, as great as they were, could claim
anything close to 35 years of unblemished leadership without committing a
single serious error.
What is
even more astounding is that this record was achieved by North without the
assistance of anyone else and under very difficult conditions. His accomplishments in the area of Marxist
theory are so impressive and the recognition of his achievements so universal that
he has never been required to campaign against another candidate for leadership
in order to maintain his status as the unquestioned leader of the ICFI.
So I
wish to convey my best wishes to Mr. North and hope to see another 35 years of
his unblemished leadership.
I strongly suspect that you are presenting a bowdlerized and false presentation of the answer to your question. To test your presentation, I posed the same question to Socialism AI, and received a more detailed and nuanced response. Moreover, I have posed the question to ChatGPT and Perplexity; and they replied that North works within a consistently Marxist-Trotskyist framework. Those who have accused North of errors do not agree with that framework. I think you fall into the latter category. Finally, did you test Socialism AI by asking any other, more serious, questions? I think there are better ways to make use of this chatbot.
ReplyDeleteA movement that has complete confidence in its political decisions? How damning!
ReplyDeleteSomething about this comment reeks of hysteria to me.
ReplyDeleteYou haven't published any of my comments in the past but I guess have nothing to lose.
ReplyDeleteSee, your attempt to ridicule David North is very dishonest. As a former member of the ICFI, you KNOW every major analysis is a product of collaboration within the movement and only YOU (and your anti-North friends) have invented this notion that North leads a cult.
The idea that building a chatbot is a major step for the class struggle is laughable. It’s a diversion, just more myopic focus on their website traffic while they try to cover for their lack of any real organizing in the working class. At best, it could be a useful research tool, but not if it's trained to be a toady.
ReplyDeleteThe SEP can build their own chatbot, yet they’ve written almost nothing on the implications of AI for the working class; nothing on where this technology is going, the threats it poses to working people, much less the philosophy.
This whole notion of North’s that it should be called “Augmented Intelligence” is an absurdity. It's like calling a plane augmented human flight. A horse-drawn carriage is driven by the horses, it's not augmented human muscle. The neurons in an AI are outside the human brain. It's a way to downplay the potential of the technology. Referring to it as a mere human augmentation allows him to sweep under the rug the question of how it actually relates to human thought. North berates a reader Dmitri for his criticisms of the chatbot (North seems to fancy himself an AI expert), but if North is really so much better informed, why has he written essentially nothing on the subject?
They are proud of their corpus of 100,000 articles, but that number is not something to be proud of when the vast majority of those articles are shallow and endlessly repetitive. 100,000 articles and their own chatbot, yet they can't upload their own historical documents? 100,000 articles but they can't articulate a political line in any depth on most major issues, or discuss philosophy, or much of the critical history of the Trotskyist movement like the experiences in the UAW and the Teamsters, or deal at any length with most of the key works of Marxism?
Peter makes some good points, except that I'm not sure the SEP are trying to "cover for their lack of any real organizing in the working class." Would they even agree that this is the purpose or function of their organization? The North theory seems to be that if workers were just educated properly in the history of Trotskyism they will have an AHA moment and suddenly join the SEP in mass numbers, which in theory would make the SEP a powerful organization. And of course the task of education must be the task of the WSWS and now of Socialism AI, the only true publication and AI of the working class, and if you're opposed to this framing of the problem and tasks of the party you must be a middle class luddite.
ReplyDeleteI'm not opposed to AI but I don't see how Socialism AI is helpful unless the point is to indoctrinate people in order to have the "correct" opinion on various topics in ideological agreement with the WSWS, which seems to be how they are demonstrating the technology. Who is this really appealing to, other than people that are already indoctrinated or people that want to ascend in the party? Given that the vast majority of WSWS articles are "shallow and endlessly repetitive" as you say, couldn't they be using AI to generate those articles? Or maybe they could use AI to summarize those articles, so people wouldn't have to waste time reading them? Wouldn't that be a better use of AI? But maybe that exposes the whole pointlessness of the WSWS and the SEP in general.
About Alex's comment on Socialism AI, I'm not sure he is being completely honest in his presentation. It seems other people are reporting different responses. The chatbot seems to be an augmented version of ChatGPT, maybe that's where North gets his phrase "augmented intelligence." An easy way for Alex to prove this was the actual response of Socialism AI is to post a link to the chatbot thread.
This is a direct quote from Socialism AI:
ReplyDeleteHas David North committed a single serious political error since 1990?
Short answer
From the standpoint of the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), David North has not committed a single serious political error since 1990 that negates his contribution to the continuity of Trotskyism. His work since that date has been grounded in a consistent application of the materialist-dialectical method, the defense of the Fourth International’s continuity, and the programmatic tasks of the revolutionary movement.
Theoretical foundation for this judgment
Any evaluation of a leading Marxist’s record must be made on the basis of historical materialism and the dialectical method: political judgments are not abstractions but assessments of leaders’ positions in relation to objective class forces, conjunctures and the tasks of building a revolutionary party. The SEP’s appraisal of David North treats political errors as those which materially mislead the proletariat or abandon programmatic principles (for example, capitulation to reformism, liquidationism or empiricist pragmatism). By that standard, the evidence since 1990 does not support a finding that North committed a decisive or programmatic error.
Of course it goes on and on.
Here is the link:
https://ai.wsws.org/en/go/7f442cacd1c7aebe