I had a journey

Reading about FOSS philosophy, degoogling, becoming against corporations, and now a full-blown woke communist (like Linus Torvalds)

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The multi millionaire linus torvalds is a communist?
Hahaha..
- I don't think you actually know what communism is.
  
  That tends to be the case for vast majority of anti-communists out there.
  
  To be fair communist rhetoric online is a huge mess.
  On one hand, you have the communists who are like, "human rights inclusive of all gender identity, basic needs met for all, no state and no class society!", very nice and cool, yay!!
  On the other hand, there are communists who are like, "install a dictator who kills all political dissidence, support foreign invasions, let's go Soviet ultra-nationalism!", very gross and yuck.
  
  That's just straw manning I'm afraid.
  
  The same people who call for executions also tend to be narcissistic to the point of never being able to handle any kind of criticism, ever.
  
  No, people just call out your made up criticisms made in bad faith.
  
  Unfortunately I'm not making them up, because if I was, communism would be far more popular.
  Instead of communists going, "well, maybe I could be better", they go, "it's all western propaganda that makes communism so unpopular, it could not possibly be me that ever does anything wrong".
  
  87.6% of young Chinese identify with Marxism, and the party has 95 million members. Seems like communism is plenty popular outside the westoid cesspool.
  
  "Marxism" polls very popular in an authoritarian 1-party dictatorship that strictly controls the internet, media, and speech, polls unpopular where freedom of speech is allowed.
  This is not the flex you want it to be, you're really just proving my point that communists are terrible at messaging.
  
  🤡
  
  (Also just a gentle reminder that dehumanizing an out-group is a red flag for fascism)
  
  project much?
  
  Please explain communism for those who don't understand. I lived in a communist country so it's not for my benefit, but others might be curious.
  
  Okay, maybe Lithuanian will explain better to an Estonian:
  Once in the 19th century there was a rapid industrialization. Farmers and citizen guild-workers lost their economical value and had to turn into factory workers. At that time, there was massive unemployment, and factory owners were unregulated. Then a philosopher Karl Marx went in, and started to analyse. He concluded that, in history, it's always 'slaves vs landowners', then 'peasants vs seniors', and ultimately 'workers vs enterprise owners (bourgeoisie)'. He named this phenomenon 'class struggle', and hypothesised that, after workers will defeat bourgeoisie, then it would be possible to create a perfect egalitarian society with no exploitation, in which people have all the rights except the right to be rich. That was called 'Communism', a proposed ideal society.
  His ideas attracted many followers, which were split into several political campus, for instance, Socialist democracy ('mild' socialism, rich people pay more taxes, etc.), Anarcho-Communism (no state, no regulations, lived only for a short period of time in Ukraine), and many more.
  Then V. Lenin came in, and told there must be a 'peasants' revolution' that abolishes the existing state(s), kill all the enemies of that revolution, become a Socialist country (ie. State controls all the economy) and then slowly progress into Communism. His practices were furthermore refined by Stalin and were called 'Marxism-Leninism'. History of the USSR shows that the power of a Socialist state can be used to create a totalitarian prison.
  So 'Communism' can mean either an egalitarian society or heading towards that direction, basically.
  
  I appreciate your write up, but I think you replied to a different comment from some person in Estonia who might or might not have lived under that regime. Either way, Marxism-Leninism had been drilled into me for decades.
  
  Oops. I thought lemm.ee is Lemmy for Estonians.
  
  There are a variety of views from different authors and political experiences. But they're mostly rooted on not having privately owned means of production (a consensus exists for big corporations at least). This would mean big corporations cannot be privately owned, it must belong to the workers themselves. This implies the destination of profits should be decided between its workers, and not its owners. This might even make many more people rich than just some random dude (like Musk) for owning the whole thing.
  In general, there is no contradiction between being rich and communism. In fact, the workers should get the profits for what they build.
  
  Dude, you don't know the first thing about communism. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." It means you don't take more than you need. "Rich communist" is an oxymoron.
  
  From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
  First of all, I will say I'm definitely no expert on communism, but it's definitely not true that "I don't know a thing about it".
  As I mentioned, there are quite a few views on what communism is. Communism precedes Marx and Engels and there is even a small book from Engels which discusses previous views of communism (called utopian) to their view of communism (called scientific). The phrase you mentioned precedes Marx and Engels's work and they study how that phrase could become true. In their work, Marx and Engels do mention scientific communism cannot be exclusively theoretical (which they call praxis), for the risk of being utopian. So according to past and current experiences (USSR, China, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, North Corea), there are quite a few developments and different views on communism. They don't all agree on everything, but they do agree on "not having privately owned means of production". On the Stalin era of USSR, it was considered something similar to the phrase you mentioned, but it was somewhat inneficient. People need incentives for their work and discoveries and it was not based exclusively on needs, as that phrase implies. The reality was complex, btw. This is really a generalistic view and don't expect it to be flawless.
  
  You lived in a country that called itself communist, in the same way that North Koreans live in a country that calls itself democratic. There has never been a country that actually achieved communism, because communism requires there be no state. At best these countries would claim that communism was their goal, but honestly most were lying, or at the very least co-opted and turned against their ideals somewhere down the line.
  
  I do agree that the ideal communist state has never existed, though I need to challenge the assertion that communism demands the existence of no state. Anti-state philosophies are generally characterized as "anarchism" -- it's certainly true that communists and anarchists have historically held common interests, but in general they do not view themselves as members of the same group.
  It's a weird distinction, but the distinction exists for a reason. Communists do not reject the establishment of a governing apparatus, so it's actually very inaccurate to say that "communism requires there to be no state". You could instead adopt the anarchist argument that "communism is self-defeating because it leads to the creation of non-communist states", but keep in mind that this is in-and-of-itself a rejection of communism in favor of communal anarchism.
  
  The back and forth on what is and isn't communism will continue until there aren't two humans left to argue about it. I've described the classical Marxist view of communism including the withering away of the state. It has been redefined by various persons and groups over time, but I don't have a high opinion of those definitions.
  Communists do not reject the establishment of a governing apparatus
  Anarchists also do not inherently reject the establishment of a governing apparatus.
  
  The back and forth on what is and isn’t communism will continue until there aren’t two humans left to argue about it. I’ve described the classical Marxist view of communism including the withering away of the state. It has been redefined by various persons and groups over time, but I don’t have a high opinion of those definitions.
  Very eloquently put! If you'll forgive me for quoting Engels (circa 1872) rather than Marx, I'd like to highlight a salient excerpt from his letters (bolded emphasis is my own, italicised emphasis preserved from original translation):
  While the great mass of the Social-Democratic workers hold our view that state power is nothing more than the organisation with which the ruling classes, landlords and capitalists have provided themselves in order to protect their social prerogatives, Bakunin maintains that it is the state which has created capital, that the capitalist has his capital only by favour of the state. As, therefore, the state is the chief evil, it is above all the state which must be done away with and then capitalism will go to hell of itself. We, on the contrary say: do away with capital, the appropriation of the whole means of production in the hands of the few, and the state will fall away of itself. The difference is an essential one. Without a previous social revolution the abolition of the state is nonsense; the abolition of capital is in itself the social revolution and involves a change in the whole method of production. Further, however, as for Bakunin the state is the main evil, nothing must be done which can maintain the existence of any state, whether it be a republic, a monarchy or whatever it may be. Hence therefore complete abstention from all politics. To perpetrate a political action, and especially to take part in an election, would be a betrayal of principle. The thing to do is to conduct propaganda, abuse the state, organise, and when all the workers are won over, i.e., the majority, depose the authorities, abolish the state and replace it by the organisation of the International. This great act, with which the millennium begins, is called social liquidation.
  [...]
  Now as, according to Bakunin, the International is not to be formed for political struggle but in order that it may at once replace the old state organisation as soon as social liquidation takes place, it follows that it must come as near as possible to the Bakunist ideal of the society of the future. In this society there will above all be no authority, for authority = state = an absolute evil. (How these people propose to run a factory, work a railway or steer a ship without having in the last resort one deciding will, without a unified direction, they do not indeed tell us.) The authority of the majority over the minority also ceases. Every individual and every community is autonomous, but as to how a society, even of only two people, is possible unless each gives up some of his autonomy, Bakunin again remains silent.
  As you can see, even early Marxists did not actively advocate for the abolition of the state and in fact strongly sought to be perceived as separate from those who viewed abolition of the state as a fundamental prerequisite. Engels even ridicules the idea of completely abolishing state authority as magical thinking despite conceding that communism could eventually lead to the obviation of traditional state functions.
  
  Fantastic! I thought that communism was impossible to achieve in a state, but if it is only achievable in 'no state', then we have to come up with a word more negative than 'impossible'.
- The multi millionaire friedrich engels is a communist?
  Hahaha..

550 comments