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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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  • rant:

    I have been using Linux since 2006, a lefty and against the super-rich and big corporations since I remember (to the point of avoiding their products like the plague), also never having understood or accepted gender roles and other stupid traditional concepts, yet never turned into a communist 🤷

    It baffles me that so many people think that respecting gender equality, understanding the evil in big corporations and avoiding them, valuing community and being tolerant (except for intolerance) and against discrimination somehow equals communism... I say this because I've been called a communist by many people who know me, while I have always rejected it explicitly!

    /rant

    • Id recommend you reading "socialism: utopian and scientific" by Engels. Because to me you sound exactly like the utopian socialist of the past.

    • What economic model do you believe in?

      • I can't really say I believe in a specific model, but to my knowledge, and for the current version of our world, welfare states seem to be doing the least worse currently. But really, I think our world is kinda too fucked up right now to be able to have any good social-economic system (in terms of maximum equality and minimum suffering, I guess.)

        Ideally, I'd prefer no state, only local communities managing themselves (something like city states, maybe?) and their relations to other communities... but I know it's just a dream, at least for the foreseeable future, considering the current realities and the ass-people in power. Because that would need many really peaceful, non-greedy and non-selfish people, which... well, never mind.

        P.s. Sorry for the pessimism, and I might be wrong of course, which I really hope I am.

    • Sounds a lot like me. That's not communism, that's just being a decent person. One that respects others and just wants everyone to live a good life without being the target of hate and harassment.

  • Part of how I got here involves reading an assload of textfiles from the '90s and growing disillusioned with the fruits of that optimistic '90s techno-libertarianism

  • This meme shows completely my journey. I became a FOSS advocate in 2020 after realized that all sites that I visited wanted my "cookies". I started to questioning myself about and after some research I became a disciple of Richard Stallman and a Marxist-Leninist.

  • I believe you are not alone. I have the exact same journey. Started installing Ubuntu 20.04 on a mid-2011 iMac. Now, I consider myself as a near-libertarian communist, I spend my free time reading books on communist theory.

  • In my experience I've noticed Linux tends to (disproportionately) attract both libertarians and socialists/communists. I feel like I run into more of both within the Linux community than I do in other communities.

    I started using Linux because I couldn't force myself to use Windows 8. Up to that point I used whatever version of Windows came right before the graphical interface but 8 was too awful so I started playing with mint and never went back..

    I got off the capitalism train in the middle of that but that was only because I decided to major in business and when I saw how the sausage was made I jumped ship but I didn't know anything about socialism or communism or marxism or whatever you want to call it. I was so not into politics or economics that I literally had to search the Internet and ask people on social media what was an alternative to the crap I was reading for my classes.. And then I went down that rabbit hole. If was enlightening. I learned a lot.

    Also... for people who think college is Marxist indoctrination...Marx was brought up for one paragraph in one book at the very very end of my 4 years. But by that point I already knew who he was just from the rabbit hole I went down when I was curious for some alternative to what I was being taught.

550 comments