Division of labor and specialization is generally just more efficient. In our society, though, it also entails heightened exploitation and alienation. Hopefully we can eventually reconcile the contradiction.

“Now look how the bosses do things! They have a good wish to make out like honest people with the worker from whom they buy labor power, with the merchant from whom they buy raw materials, but they have an eternal flaw, and the rest of us workers, who know how the industry works, shall go on strike. But to sell a commodity for more than it is worth is like selling with false weights, which is illegal. Therefore, if the workers were to expose their bosses’ tricks, they would be forced to close their factories; and to produce goods based on need, maybe they would open large government facilities; that would be much better.”

So the daydreaming worker arrived at home; and there, dined, went to bed, and slept deeply, dreaming of the disappearance of bosses and the creation of government workshops.

Sleep, poor friend, sleep in peace, while hope still rests within you. Sleep in peace, for the disappointing day will soon come. Soon you will learn how your boss can sell their goods for profit, without defrauding anyone. He will make you see how one becomes a capitalist, and a large capitalist, while remaining perfectly honest.

Now your dreams will never again be so peaceful. You will see capital in your nights, like a nightmare, that presses you and threatens to crush you. With terrified eyes you will see it get fatter, like a monster with one hundred proboscises that feverishly search the pores of your body to suck your blood. And finally you will learn to assume its boundless and gigantic proportions, its appearance dark and terrible, with eyes and mouth of fire, morphing its suckers into enormous hopeful trumpets, within which you’ll see thousands of human beings disappear: men, women, children. Down your face will trickle the sweat of death, because your time, and that of your wife and your children will soon arrive. And your final moan will be drowned out by the happy sneering of the monster, glad with your state, so much richer, so much more inhumane.

Just a tiny one, occupied by a single person

There’s a tiny blue dot outside the red circle.

Try for yourself https://github.com/ShiftHackZ/Stable-Diffusion-Android

But that’s (very clearly) beside the point, which is that you can run a variety of models locally on your PC or phone for miniscule energy. Once a model is trained the damage has already been done.

As always, it’s the corporations using the resources and doing the damage, so pearl clutching about random individuals is less than useless.

Training models takes a stupid amount of energy. Using them after the fact uses very little.

I could generate something like this on my phone using any of the dozens of local models.

Trotsky is good at appearing “right” because he plays fast and loose with the details so he can retroactively claim to have been for or against something after it already happened.

One example off the top of my head (forgive me if I misremember the specifics) is the NEP, which according to Trotsky and Trotskyites was originally his idea that Lenin initially disagreed with but eventually came around to. But, ignoring the fact that timing matters and a year is a long-ass time in a revolutionary period, the details also matter, since the goal wasn’t to retreat to capitalism but to very carefully reintroduce certain market incentives to help develop certain sectors of the economy that had been obliterated during the war. So you can’t just claim “oh I had this idea first” when your idea, at least according to Lenin, would overly benefit the Kulak class without adequately fostering a respective proletariat (or something along those lines). Lenin goes into this in great detail both when he dismisses Trotsky’s plan and also when he introduced the NEP.

But he was also an asshole, notoriously elitist and dismissive of anyone he deemed intellectually inferior.

Honestly reading through the debates and speeches from the party meetings and congresses is great for breaking through a lot of the ahistorical western bullshit.

Long history of wrecking/coopting movements and orgs.

I know good individual trots, but the trot orgs in my area are all white college students that show up uninvited to things they had no party in organizing, then selling shit or starting fights. We have a lot of coalition building among MLs, anarchists, and DSA types here, and it’s always the Trots that refuse to find common ground or show any support whatsoever. Their praxis consists of wrecking/splitting, raising money, and defending sex pests.