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  • Cory Doctorow has a book, "Walkaway" that is basically exploring the politics of FOSS on a societal scale. It's pretty nerdy obv but I enjoyed it and it doesn't overly glamourize any political system the way you'd typically see in political fiction.

    • There's a book called Opt-Out from Rory Price about a future where humanity starts using AR more and more to the point that it's almost obligatory to have a device of this kind for everything, even as ID. It then talks about a group that develops a free/libre version of this device's OS and they have to decide about personal issues or try to maintain their views. It's entertaining and not too long, but I think it shows a very possible future.

      I haven't heard from its author in some time, but I think they discovered they were someone else too ;), that's why I love this book.

  • What's the real difference between an "anarchist communist" and a "communist"? The first one can have "personal property" while the second cant? So... an anarchist communist can own a car but not a house? According to the internet "personal property" is everything that can be moved (not real estate) and isn't considered for production of something...

    • A big part of the confusion comes from the fact that different people will use these terms differently.

      In a capitalist framework, there's private property and public property. Either an individual (or or specific group) own something, anything, or it's owned by the government.

      In a socialist framework, private property is distinguished from personal property. Personal property is your stuff that you use for yourself. Your coat, your car, your TV, etc. Private property is the means of production, or capital—things that increase a worker's ability to do useful work. Think factories or companies, where ownership in and of itself, regardless of labor, would make the owner money. Socialists think that kind of private property shouldn't exist, because it means wealthy people can just own stuff for a living, profiting off of the people who do the work.

      Housing can go either way. Owning a home for yourself and your family would be far closer to personal property, while owning an apartment building to collect rent would be far closer to private property.

      Socialism, for the most part and historically, is an umbrella term describing social rather than private ownership. That would include anarchism, which largely synonymous with "libertarian socialism." Lenin, on the other hand, used it to more specifically refer to an intermediate stage between capitalism in communism, so you might see people using that more narrow definition to exclude anarchists, democratic socialists, etc.

    • I've never heard anyone argue against personal property. Usually the difference is that Anarchists want to skip the workers' state, while other Communists think it's a necessity to achieve Communism.

    • A few things draw significant differences.

      Anarchism is fundamentally a firm rejection of unjust hierarchy, including the state, via building up of bottom-up structures using networks of Mutual Aid or other strategies (like Syndicalism).

      Communism is fundamentally about advancing beyond Capitalism into Socialism and eventually Communism. It's fundamentally Marxist, unlike most forms of Anarchism (which don't necessarily reject Marx, but also don't accept everything Marx wrote). Communists are generally perfectly fine with using the state in order to eventually achieve a Stateless, Classless, Moneyless society, as each becomes unnecessary and whithers away.

      In essence, Anarchism rejects that a state is necessary at all, and seeks to directly replace current systems with the end-goal of an Anarchist structure, whereas Communists tend to agree more with gradual change, rapidly building up the productive forces, and achieving a global, international Communism.

      Anarcho-Communism seeks to combine these into directly implementing full Communism without going through Socialism first.

      All of this is from a generally Leftist perspective, without leaning into any given tendency, as I believe the most critical battles now are building up a sizable leftist coalition. Everyone should focus on organizing, unionizing, reading, learning, sympathizing, empathizing, and improving themselves and those around them.

  • And the FOSS system seems to be collapsing right now for the same reason that anarcho-communism only works short-term until someone sees commercial value in it and abuses the system to the limit.

    • Big corporations initially providing exceptional services based on FOSS and after a while use their market share to excert undue control about the system (see e.g. RedHat, Ubuntu, Chrome, Android, ...)
    • Big corporations taking FLOSS, rebranding it and hiding it below their frontend, so that nobody can interact with or directly use the FLOSS part (e.g. iOS, any car manufacturer, ...)
    • Big and small companies just using GPL (or similar) software and not sharing their modifications when asked (e.g. basically any embedded systems, many Android manufacturers, RedHat, ...)
    • Big corporations using infrastructure FOSS without giving anything back (e.g. OpenSSL, which before Heartbleed was developed and maintained by a single guy with barely enough funding to stay alive, while it was used by millions of projects with a combined user base of billions of users)

    The old embrace-extend-extinguish playbook is everywhere.

    And so it's no surprise that many well-known FOSS developers are advocating for some kind of post-FOSS system that forces commercial users to pay for their usage of the software.

    Considering how borderline impossible it is for some software developer to successfully sue a company to comply with GPL, I can't really see such a post-FOSS system work well.

    • bro this is depressing. I think CLI projects are less likely to receive donations for some reason and more in danger

  • F**** now I got it! Amazon means from Anarchism to Zyuganovism

  • So is Linus Lenin or Stalin?

    • Neither, the title specifically states Anarcho-Communism, not Marxism-Leninism. Closest analog would be any other AnCom that created a large publicly available service.

292 comments