Hmm. Self-organizing projects whose workers work on them entirely based on their need to be done, and the results freely distributed to anyone who wants a copy?
I think it is not. Certainly most projects aren’t solely personal utilities, but devs working for fun rather than profit will almost inevitably produce something skewed towards their own tastes and skills. See: the presentation of any FOSS graphical app vs a paid equivalent.
Things like FOSS stuff makes you think people can organize and work together freely to achieve a common goal, and maybe anarchy could work. But then, you see a busy intersection when the traffic lights go out and you realize the general public are idiots and everything devolves into selfish chaos as you’re stuck a half mile back, as cars shoot through in no particular order and you inch closer to the madness terrified to make your left turn. I have zero trust in society without some form of rule and order.
Decentralization doesn’t necessarily mean disorganization. You can create a Lemmy instance with no moderation and rely purely on the community itself to self moderate, much like someone can create an instance with rules, and if someone disagrees with the rules they can create their own. Both are part of a decentralized system, so no one is actually coerced into participating in any system by regulation, just social pressure.
Think about a roundabout though in comparison, no lights or specific order, and there is a learning curve, but overall they reduce traffic better then stoplights under many conditions.
I guess my point is sort of extrapolating that a structure/presentation also heavily influences how users perceive or use a product/idea
That’s a pretty weak definition. “Legitimate” especially is a vacuous term, and every form of democracy ever proposed is (theoretically) “accountable”.
Sure, but is that how we talk about our institutions? Things I hear that buck anarchism while supporting American democracy:
The Constitution should be interpreted with “originalism” or at the very least venerated
Police sacrifice X, therefore it’s okay if they do extralegal Y
I’m not saying there aren’t systems of accountability that legitimize various institutions. It’s that the stories we tell to legitimize an institution comes in many different flavors, and those based on authority from power/position (ie “our founding fathers were smart people”) are not accepted by anarchists. Edit: Imagine how different our legal framework would be if it reflected that mentality?
I think I almost understand what you’re getting at. If I do, it’s uncodifiable. You can’t draft an organisational system with a clause that no one is allowed to use logical fallacies to defend it.
I find it a bit ironic that cars and traffic lights are being used as a metaphor for why anarchy won’t work. Let’s put aside that the example is of poor collective planning to build urban environments. Go to Vietnam and see how people drive without traffic lights, it’s complete madness. But it works, and in some ways it works better than what we have because the accidents are fewer and less severe while also serving more diverse modes of traffic.
Agile is the anarchism of software development: sounds nice on a high level but basically no theoretical foundation behind it and thus in practice everybody makes it whatever the fuck they want it to be.
There’s some theory and computer science behind parts. The value of peer review is evidence-backed. The idea that dev teams should self-organize is consistent with some varieties of management theory. Retros have been shown to have value, though the way they’re often done in Agile teams I’ve worked in has left much to be desired. Estimation with dimensionless points has zero evidential backing. The notion that the team should be able to set dates rather than having milestones imposed by management is, at best, woefully naive, since it presupposes a commitment by management that, in real life, few managers are willing to make. And in most cases where the shit has hit the fan, we later find that we needed more analysis, more planning and more design up front, rather than less. There are only certain application domains where you can get away with being as minimalist with those disciplines as Agile exponents claim you should be.
There’s plenty of theory to draw from, like the Cynefin Framework or Wardley Mapping. But like the left, there’s no real consensus on what we ought to be doing but no shortage of opinions.
Authoritarianism is an empty label since it’s used against one’s opposing ideologies. Rarely if ever is the inherent authoritarianism of the current or any system of government acknowledged.
Understandable. But how does a government choose the label, in this case, communism, when the it’s governed by a very small group of individuals and in most cases against the will of the people?
The governing body is the vanguard which is to downsize overtime and the country is to eventually shift to a worker lead government. It would be anarchy to deploy communism without first building the systems to allow for a workers lead government, especially off of the back from a greed riddled society and like wise surrounded by greed riddled capitalist countries.
I should also so that mention communism isnt often implemented against the will of the people, Russia pre communism was an awful place, low literary, low life expectancy and the working class/ peasantry were exploited by the west and ruling class. They had a long bloody civil war and held strong. Then after which things slowly improved under communism.
I’m definitely not an expert on this. But let’s take foss as an example. I find it to be an amazing bottom up community that contributes to itself freely. I can’t imagine how a top down system would flourish if a small group of people decided what was good for the foss community and deleted what they thought wasn’t. Is there is a distinction? Is there different versions of communism I should check out?
There’s hypothetically a bunch of different version of communism for everyone. The thing is, Marx described the problems with capitalism, and some vague sense of what socialism could be, some guidelines of what it should aim for, then kind of left the details up to each individual society to get there how they think is best based on their individual material conditions. He gave his own guesses, but didn’t think he could predict that part fully, it would be up to the people of the future to figure it out and build on. A third world country, rural serf based near fuedal society, like Russia, would have completely different needs from some post-industrial country, like if Germany turned communist, for example. If the world’s sole superpower, the US, turned communist, it would probably be a lot different than communist countries that had to transition under siege neighboring imperialism, like Cuba, North Korea, or Vietnam.
This is just to answer your last question. Don’t think this really addresses your other questions, but just wanted to explain that part, as I’ve had it explained to me before. But I generally agree with you. There should still be some form of democracy but it might look different than what we are used to here in the US or liberal west.
foss has a legally binding licence to support itself, this licence can be seen as a vanguard as it steers and protects the software, without the licence people would be sure to steal and monetise others works. But let’s say Foss became the defacto, everyone releases free fully open and no anti feature software, we could loss the vanguard and naturally a classless system would be present.
No, that is just another class of ownership. Whoever maintains the AI would be the ruling class. Or if we’re talking AGI, there’s little reason humanity should trust what humans build over what humans do.
Oh, in that case it’s a Democratic Republic of the Free People. The label the government chooses for itself might not be accurate according to political science.
Communism can be flawed and a flaw it is, but let’s not forget that capitalism imposing indignity is capitalism working perfectly and is not a flaw. We reward greed.
So with this communism if used correctly can lead to prosperity.
I would like to point you towards reading about the transitional period, its an important part of communism and also reading about internationalism, essentially its very hard to move from a greedy society to communism and equally its hard to be a communist country while surrounded by greedy countries.
Airlines can treat people like shit because it’s not a free market. If anyone who wanted could start up their own airline, they’d be a lot more consumer-friendly by necessity.
According to Marx communism is a scenario of complete freedom.
It’s the socialist state that is authoritarian.
I think Marx’s idea is to actively burn away the old and then the new grow spontaneously. I think he’s wrong, since the old is a result of spontaneous growth already, but that’s the theory at least.
“Communism” is always going to be authoritarian if by “communism” you mean a government that attempts to control the whole of society. If by “communism” you mean a society where private property (not personal property) is democratically managed, that has nothing to do with authoritarism. Nor with the Soviet Union, or China, for that matter.
The vast majority of criticism towards .ml and others come from them being tankies, not communists. I’m a communist, by which I mean I want society to overcome social classes and hierarchies, and therefore, defending authoritarian states with hierarchies where the people on top enjoy political and economic privilege is contrary to communism.
So you’re a communist that denounces every communist project atop an ivory tower, instead of understanding the realities of actually building a socialist society (no magical button that will make us overcome hierarchies overnight, I’m afraid). Sounds like you’re just larping about being a communist
i agree but voting 3rd party is the same as nit voting because you only have 2 realistic options which makes it more likely for trump to become president than if you voted for biden (also fuck tankies)
Continuing as usual is defeat. The more votes for 3rd party the more broken the system will look, with this a campaign for real change could take place. Instead you want to bury your head in the sand.
Yes FOSS is communism, spontaneously arising under capitalism, requiring zero bloody revolutions.
Marx was right about the need for people to be nice and give things to each other, but he was wrong about it being necessary to destroy capitalism before this happened.
he was wrong about it being necessary to destroy capitalism before this happened
I thought it was more that (using modern terminology) he viewed socialism as an emergent phenomenon that would arise due to the unresolved contradictions within capitalism. So socialism doesn’t require the destruction of capitalism in order to start, it’s more that once it emerges, it’ll supersede capitalism. The Leninist approach of destroying the old order, then building the new one at gunpoint didn’t work all that well (to vastly understate), leading to a long period of totalitarian state capitalism, where workers had no control over the means of production (which is the main attribute Marx ascribes to socialism) and degeneration into nationalism, imperialist nostalgia and cronyism.
But so far, along with failed revolutions hijacked by totalitarians, the main thing we’ve seen is that spontaneous emergence of working, non-coercive socialist organizations such as co-operatives has been met with strong and sometimes murderous opposition from the incumbent capitalists.
Marx believed this unresolved phenomena would lead to violent revolution, Lenin only added his analysis of Capitalism’s evolution into Imperialism, and his theory of Revolution, which focuses on the idea of the most radical workers forming a vanguard to bring the other workers up and help direct them. Marx believed the Revolution would happen and from it Socialism would emerge, hence him advocating for “siezing the Means of Production.” He also pointed directly to the Paris Commune, a hostile takeover of government aparatus, as the Dictatorship of the Proletarait he advocated for in action.
Lenin wasn’t just “hey, let’s ignore Marx and do this at gunpoint,” it was more “hey, let’s listen to Marx, and do this at gunpoint.” Lenin actually addresses this utter de-fanging of Marx in bourgeois society in the opening section of The State and Revolution:
“What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don’t laugh!). And more and more frequently German bourgeois scholars, only yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the “national-German” Marx, who, they claim, educated the labor unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of waging a predatory war!”
As for the USSR, it wasn’t totalitarian. Workers did have control, there were no real bourgeois elements, no competing markets, and the state was not an “other” compared to the Workers. They had democratic measures in the form of Soviets, and the consequences of this were free education, healthcare, high home ownership rates, and so forth. Was the USSR perfect? Absolutely not, but it was history’s first major attempt at Marxist Socialism, and we can study it for that. The revolution wasn’t “hijacked,” it was led by the Workers and continued to be until corruption took hold over time and the USSR collapsed, being hacked up and sold for parts as a part of “Shock Doctrine,” plumetting life expectancy, GDP, and causing 2 million excess deaths.
Co-operatives are met with hostile action because it’s easy to crush them when you have the state and monopoly on your side, hence why they will never likely be a leading force for Socialism within Capitalism, even if they should still be supported by Socialists everywhere.
FOSS isn’t communism, Foss hasn’t eliminated class relations. Using an free open source library to make more money for your boss isn’t communism. While I love FOSS, it’s definitely not communism.
Marx never said people aren’t nice and don’t give things to each other under capitalism as far as I know, where are you taking that from?
And the existence of FOSS is reliant on a few key sectors which capitalism could very well destroy or mutate into something much different than what they are now. I don’t see far-fetched the idea that the entire physical infrastructure of the internet will one day be privately owned, and companies will be able to decide who takes part and who doesn’t, what kind of content is allowed… The fact that the capitalist overlords still haven’t eliminated it, doesn’t mean they possibly can’t.
But it’s not “from each according to his ability”. FOSS is what people feel like contributing. And it’s not “to each according to their need”. It’s take it or leave it, unless someone feels like fulfilling requests.
Traditionally, the slogan meant a duty to work. Contributing what you feel like is just charity.
Capitalism, at its core, is private control of the capital. Copyright law turns code into intellectual property/capital. I’ve read the argument that copyleft requires strong copyrights. That argument implicitly makes copyleft a feature of capitalism. You know how rich people or corporations sometimes donate large sums to get their name on something, EG a hospital wing? That’s not so different from a FOSS license that requires attribution.
FOSS works with the quoted text for the same reason piracy is not technically stealing. How do you make the quoted text work with physical goods or services? How do you allocate the work of a cosmetic surgeon, or distribute nail polish?
Edit to give examples that are more cis male oriented: how do you distribute viagra in an equitable manner? Basically I am asking where do non-utilitarian services or Veblen goods fit into this paradigm. Technically we don’t need computers to survive and mate, so that mitigates the need for FOSS
fuck if i know, i grew up in a capitalist world and live in it i can no more imagine how a communist society would work than a slave in ancient rome could imagine our wold. All i know is that its a good ideal and that it is good to move in that direction, maybe we cant have “from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs” right now but we can atleast have “from each according to their abilities and to each according to their labor” and a basic floor to ensure no one lives in inhuman conditions and then maybe in a few generation people have some ideas on how to achieve the ideal or atleast get closer or maybe they discover an even better ideal idk i cant know, what I know is that capitalism is fucking garbage.
a basic floor to ensure no one lives in inhuman conditions
I am not an expert on political or economic theory, but I think the reason we don’t have consensus on the above is a philosophical issue. A confounding factor is that some people often confuse their greed-induced cognitive distortions as well-reasoned justification for whatever they do. But besides all that, it seems countries with market socialism are faring quite well till now, and I think are probably a good model for other economies.
to be fair , neither the free software movement nor the open source movement (which are distinct ideologically) are explicitly socialist . in a way , especially the free software movement , they embody an extention of liberalism .
both of these movements focus on the individuals freedom and take issue not with developers/companies being systemically incentivized to develop closed source / nonfree software , but with individual developers/companies doing so . thus the solution taken is limited to the individual not to systemic change .
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