Reading about FOSS philosophy, degoogling, becoming against corporations, and now a full-blown woke communist (like Linus Torvalds)
I was feeling the last part had some more story behind it so I went ahead and found this:
Seems like I’m a full-blown woke communist too
Doesn’t read like he’s an actual communist, more insulting people (rightly so) that would call liberals communists.
Nvm
er… did torvalds just say trans rights? based alert
I think he said trans rights in the wording that >90% of people would agree with.
God I wish that were true but there are a LOT of people (well, conservatives) who are vehemently against wider society allowing cross dressing or medical transition. It’s not 90% :(
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It’s strange to me that any of the things he said is controversial.
Just when I thought I couldn’t admire him more…
Common sense on the internet in this economy 😮
Where do I sign up for my Atheist card?
In German we call it “Links Grün vesifft”
Aber die Grüneeeeeeeeennnnnn!!!
I personally think communism especially Marxism sounds really good on paper. The problem is that just about every time it has been attempted things didn’t really seem to work like they are supposed to.
Its like every state that attempts communism just ends up being a perpetual Vanguard state, and it ends up being authoritarian and terrible.
I really think there are several good ideas in Marx theories, but the actual implementation of those theories needs some work to figure out how they should be incorporated without being corrupted and overtaken by tyrants.
Capitalism didn’t appear over night. It took several attempts and iterations to get it anywhere near what it is today. Most modern theories on the implementation of Marxism focus less on centralized government authority and more on democracy in the work place, and eliminating 3rd party shareholders’ control. Much of the struggle with implementation of this, is that the existing financial structures aren’t set up to handle this type of thing well.
What we have today isn’t really even capitalism anymore. It is becoming something else. We don’t have free markets, for example, because large corporate players are not allowed to fail. Under a central banking system, the state can simply print money to fund its corporate protectorates while artificially suppressing interest rates to avoid paying any interest on the debt. And then we use tariffs and policy to pick and choose winners, suppressing competition. This is about as far from capitalism as one can imagine.
Can you point me to a time when capitalism did happen? Where governments and outside forces weren’t picking winners and losers in the market? In such a time what was the plight of the common worker? Did we see overwork, workplace safety, and child labor issues?
Third wave communism doesn’t seek to abandon the “free market” (which is free within bounds), it instead favors democracy in the workplace. Where all members of the organization are employee-owners including ceos and middle management and the “Board” is dissolved into either a representative or direct democracy made up of employee-owners. In this way one increases the incentives for each individual to perform and see the company perform well. This also mitigates much income inequality by allowing the workers a say in the compensation of middle and upper management.
You’re right. Communism is like the greatest social form a society can possibly achieve. The Problem is, that humans are dumb and will always try to get the best out of it for themselves so the concept of communism is ruined by those people. It maybe is practicable in small “society’s” (your family as example) but fails in big societies like states.
I personally think communism especially Marxism sounds really good on paper. The problem is that just about every time it has been attempted things didn’t really seem to work like they are supposed to.
Boy, that’s the understatement of the century. Not only did it not work, it often results in mass murder and the ushering in of a totalitarian regime.
That’s why no country has achieved communism they are all authoritarian!
Linux and open source in general completely blow apart capitalist arguments that profit motive is necessary for innovation and technological advancement. Open source ecosystem primarily run by volunteers has produces some of the most interesting and innovative technologies that we’ve seen. The reality is that people make interesting things because they’re curious and they enjoy making stuff. Pretty much nobody makes anything interesting with profit being the primary motive.
capitalist arguments that profit motive is necessary for innovation and technological advancement
I don’t know who is arguing this because it’s incredibly stupid. The greatest scientific minds of history, the mathematicians, the physicists, the inventors, were not capitalists, they’re people with passion for their work.
If we move to a society that guarantees basic human needs and good education, we’re only going to have more scientists and engineers that progress technology even faster.
Capitalists argue this because it gives them the appearance of a moral high ground.
Enshittification shows how untrue this - capitalism by its very nature will always devolve into worse and worse offerings because it’s reliant on squeezing out ever more profit.
Capitalism will only ever puh out the bare minimum of technological advancement. And keeping people in indentured labour (aka employees) to the capitalist system so that they either have no time to come up with innovations themselves or they own the intellectual property of any indentured workers means that the overwhelming majority of innovation is monopolised by capitalism too. Which also contributes to the appearance of pushing advancement.
This is true to some extent, but the best, most successful open source software is nowadays to a large extent made by for-profit businesses developing it for their own use but sharing it with the world.
There is a strong correlation between “is this kind of software mainly used by businesses vs. individuals” and “does this kind of software tend to be open source”. Hardly anyone uses proprietary version control or web server software anymore. But (other extreme) in the area of video games, nearly all of them are still proprietary and probably will be for a long time. Software such as web browsers or office suites sits somewhere in between, both kinds exist there.
Biggest and most popular projects are attractive to companies as well as individuals for the same reasons. However, the original point was that companies are not needed for open source to exist or for innovation to happen.
I disagree somewhat.
A lot of high tech development comes with a greed motive, e.g. IPO, or getting bought out by a large company seeking to enter the space, e.g. Google buying Android, or Facebook buying Instagram and Oculus.
And conversely, a lot of open source software are copies of commercially successful products, albeit they only become widely adopted after the originals have entered the enshittified phase of their life.
Is there a Lemmy without Reddit? Is there a Mastodon without Twitter? Is there LibreOffice without Microsoft Office and decades of commercial word processors and spreadsheets before that? Or OpenOffice becoming enshittified for that matter? Is there qBittorrent without uTorrent enshittified? Is there postgreSQL without IBM’s DB2?
The exception that I can see is social media and networked services that require active network and server resources, like Facebook YouTube, or even Dropbox and Evernote.
Okay, The WELL is still around and is arguably the granddaddy of all online services, and has avoided enshittification, but it isn’t really open source.
The idea that these things wouldn’t exist without commercial analogs is silly. You do realize that things like BBS boards and IRC existed long before commercial social media platforms right? In fact, we might’ve seen things like social media evolve in completely different directions if not for commercial platforms setting standards based on attracting clicks, and monetizing users.
This is so wrong. It’s not volunteers writing this code it is people employed by companies who are paid to write this code. You do know people have to eat.
Open source has existed long before companies started getting involved with it. Meanwhile, people having to eat has nothing to do with the argument being made which is that capitalism and profit motive are not required for creativity and technological progress.
Wait. So where are my FOSS-bucks?
The Linux to trans anarchocommunist catgirl pipeline is very real. The moment you move to Arch it’s already over.
I’m feeling called out
It didn’t happen to me despite using Linux for 8 years. I guess I am a Windows user in disguise.
:3 .
Well, I’m probably fucked then. I even have Arch on my gaming PC with KDE and Arch on my school laptop with GNOME(Gnome for Laptops is insanely cool)
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.
You’re describing communalism, if you’re interested.
Thanks. Maybe, kind of. My knowledge on the topic is limited, but I think communalism (or some version of it) could involve some form of loyalty to one’s ethnic group or community, which absolutely disagree with.
Social responsibility: Yes. But loyalty, especially towards something ultimately meaningless such as ethnicity: No.
My values are respecting individual choices, rights and well-being of others (which also entails some responsibility).I completely agree. However, as I understand, the tradition as it stems from Murray Bookchin explicitly condemns this arbitrary categorisation.
local communities managing themselves (something like city states maybe?) and their relations to other communities
Your describing a Soviet you filthy commie.
But for real what your describing is communism as marx originally thought of it. The one example marx gave as a model for what communism would be was the Paris commune which adheres to a lot of what you said. Most leftist agree that that’s the end goal it’s just a matter of how to get there. Lenin originally pitched the Soviet Union as just that, a bunch of local councils(soviets) freely cooperating and making there own rules. He saw how the Paris commune’s openness and military indecisiveness led to it being brutally suppressed though and wanted an interim top down dictatorship and rapid brutal industrialization to handle this threat. The threat never went away though, first with the Nazis almost annihilating them then the u.s. pointing nukes at them, so neither did the dictatorship.
Their end goal was still avowedly the same though, and communism, to me at least, is about that goal. Their are a bunch of different theoretical paths to it, and there’s tonnes of infighting as to which ones the best, but all communists agree that the commune/Soviet/city state should have all the power.
Thanks for the explanation.
The problem is exactly the “how”, as you described. And personally, I don’t really have any idea, since all the possible ways seem to involve somehow contradicting that goal “temporarily” (by using violence, limiting individual liberties, etc.), which I don’t like. I think maybe over time, (a very long time, perhaps?) the way of thinking of human societies will slowly (and through a painful process) shift to that direction (and maybe not! who knows!).
Either way, life is painful and world is cruel.
I would say you are somewhere between arnachism and socialism with that view but I am no expert ether!
Those two have big overlaps. “Libertarian socialism” used to be another term for anarchism.
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Linus Torvalds is a “full-blown woke communist”? Citation needed.
I have been a FOSS enthusiast since my preteen or early teenage years (mid-to-late 2000s), yet I am not in any sense a communist.
“full-blown woke communist” is US-speak for “Scandinavian socialist”
Nah literally anyone who advocates for basic human rights is a “full blown woke communist”.
Scandinavian corporatist-social-democrat*
His dad was a straight up member of the Finnish Communist Party. He’s still alive, and is even a member of the European Parliament, but seems more liberal/centrist these days.
Linus himself seems to be pretty mum on politics.
To me it always seemed like Linus Torvalds is mostly a pragmatist.
Richard M Stallman on the other hand…
I think the dates are more relevant than the software. COVID pandemic was probably more impactful here than Linux.
He made a comment sarcastically and replied to an accusation labeling himself as such
sudo apt-get install anarchismI now love Debian more than I previously thought possible.
brb installing Debian on all my hardware.
edit: there’s a
fortune-anarchismtoo, amazing.
On Lemmy? Shock
Seriously. I just can’t escape. I think it’s nice to have people who support xism while also having people that support yism and zism, as it creates a healthy environment where we can discuss things throughly; since each member will see, recognize, and interpret what they see differently and possibly contribute more.
Vast majority of Lemmy users are in the same demographic which barely provides differing opinions so there’s basically nothing to discuss (apart from things do not sit well with said demographic).
I really do hope this platform somehow attracts users from every ideology much like Tildes.
ITT: people who have no idea what communism is
People also misuse other *ism words, it is quite normal to make general stereotypes of *ism especially for jokes.
…I just didn’t want windows advertising to me.
But that is sort of why it’s the first step. You were using Windows and were bothered with ads. So you may have looked into an alternative you heard about called Linux. You are new to Linux and maybe ask some questions on forums and interact with people from all over the world that are taking time out of their day to help you, which gives you a sense of community. Then you learn that Linux is licensed as Open Source Software, and that people are working together to create something for the benefit of people, not for profits. Then you start to wonder, what else in my life that bothers me is a result of profit motivation?
Fine, but dont defend tyranical regimes. They are bad no mather who they say they read. They could could claim to be following the teachings of fucking Mr Roggers but if they have concentration camps then thats not utopic or very humanitarian in my opinion, specially if ther is some mad dictator in power with everything no matter how manny extra steps are in between.
Yeah, I hear you, defending America isn’t high on my list either.
Being a Marxist is when you uncritically support the wealthiest countries with the long history of imperialism and colonialism and constantly regurgitate narratives of hate towards any nation that isn’t a US vassal.
https://moneyinc.com/linus-torvalds-net-worth/
How Linus Torvalds Achieved a Net Worth of $150 Million
Red Hat and VA Linux went public, and since they acknowledged it would not have been possible without the programmer, Torvalds received shares reportedly worth $20 million. Before it went public, Red Hat had allegedly paid Torvalds $1 million in stock, which the programmer claims was the only big payout he received.
He revealed that the rest of the stock Transmeta and another Linux startup awarded him were not worth much by the time he could sell them. However, in the case of his Red Hat stock, it must have been worth his while because, in 2012, Red Hat became the first $1 billion open-source company when it reached the billion-dollar mark in annual revenue.
Whether he exercised his stock options is unclear, but the money he makes from the gains could be the reason why his net worth has continued to soar.
Well, that’s one definition of being communist, I suppose. Myself, I think that it’s fairly safe to say that Torvalds is okay with private ownership of industry.
People may have read this and got too excited. He just believes in socially left policy. He’s probably not a communist.
I’m no communist, but your argument is flawed.
Linus is not representative of the Linux community and I think the famous Stallman rant regarding GNU/Linux is actually relevant here.
The free software movement is certainly pretty left leaning, though I wouldn’t call them communist.
now a full-blown woke communist (like Linus Torvalds)
OP’s words.
Mr. Parenti, are you a Marxist?
Parenti: This is my answer. I would wear that label proudly if I knew that you understood what I meant by Marxist. And when someone says: ‘You’re a Marxist now aren’t you?’ and their only intention is to give a buzzword which says ‘this guy drinks the blood of capitalist children’ or something, then I’m going to say no, I’m not your label, I don’t particularly want your label.
[…] Look, I wrote the book about the media. I don’t know what Karl Marx has to say about 20th-century US media, I think he had very little to say because you know… he left early. But there’s been a lot of creative thought and scholarship in Marxist literature and I feel that it’s a scholasticist thing [to say]: ‘Oh, you took your [Marxist] formula and applied it here…’
See, I don’t see these things this way because I’m a Marxist. it’s just the opposite. I started seeing these things and I started realizing that there was an analysis that had explanatory power for that. It gets very frustrating you know. For years I’d knock myself out trying to make an analysis, I’d come to the conclusion and I’d say: ‘Hey you know, the police are not neutral, they’re on the side of property and power.’ Then someone would say to me: ‘That’s Marxism, you know, you’re sounding like a Marxist.’
That’s Marxism… oh. Then I’d say: 'Wealth is largely unaccountable in many of the things it does in our democracy, I don’t understand, that isn’t what I learned … ’ / ‘Oh that’s a Marxist point of view, Marx said that you know.’ and it would go on, one thing after another and I said:
‘Boy, this Karl Marx was really something, you know, every time I put two and two together and come up with an analysis they give him the credit for it.’
it’s a reference to something linus said
https://news.itsfoss.com/linus-torvalds-woke-communists/
https://social.kernel.org/notice/AWSXomDbvdxKgOxVAm
OP is referring to Linus Torvalds’ half-sarcastic quote.
Tell me you haven’t read the Communist Manifesto without telling me you haven’t read the Communist Manifesto.
I don’t even think the meme is about communism as much as it is just venting about how corps turned free-software into the panopticon it is today.
But Idc if Torvalds is a Marxist bc I’m not either, but marx wrote about how the proletariat should own stocks, so that isn’t even disqualifying tho.
And tbh I think most “marxists” just adopt that term because our political discourse is so corrupted that anyone who thinks that we shouldn’t curb-stomp an Amazon employee for wanting a bathroom break is treated like they’re Mao anyway.
I had to look up the panopticon reference, so I thought to share with others: ‘A proposed prison of supervision, so arranged that the inspector can see each of the prisoners at all times without being seen by them: proposed by Jeremy Bentam.’
I too just turned into a Marxist after finding out about Linux and software freedom in 2020 lol
I think there might be more than a handful of us. Welcome, comrade.
🫡
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Fuck communist statist, foss is pure anarchism.
My
brother in ChristComrade in the revolution, Communism is a stateless, moneyless, classless society. Whatever self-proclaimed “Statist Communists” thare are, are no-more Communist than the National “Socialists” who sent our kind to the death camps.The end stage of the dialectic is that, yes. But that’s doesn’t just appear from nothing. Read state and Revolution or What is to be done.
But that’s doesn’t just appear from nothing.
Yea I think that’s kinda their point
Anarchism does not necessarily exclude Communism! :)
Good Explanations: https://www.anarchistfaq.org/afaq/index.html for those interested
How so?
It seeks to undermind the corrupt copywrite systems and promotes decenteralizrd collaberation and cooperation.
Eh, depends on the project
FOSS is Ricks group from The Walking Dead
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Disagree. If FOSS were an anarchism what would be the point of FOSS lincences of which some are very long legal documents? Also corporations would just take your code, say its theirs and tell you to go fuck yourself.
Foss licenses are copyleft, they bar individuals from enclosing the commons built by the collective for profit. Anarchism isn’t just letting people do whatever they want. Anarchism means against hierarchy. Having rules that prevent unjustified hierarchies from forming is entirely with in the bounds of anarchism. Including rules that prevent using copyright as a coercive hierarchy.
All heirarchies are unjustified.
I’d look at foss licenses more as tools of defence against (and within) the current system/context than “rules” that serve to enforce some kind of anti-capitalist “heirarchy”.
Honest question: “Without any authority who gets to enforce the rules?”. Everyone, as they see fit it seems. What makes “your” hierarchy better than “my” hierarchy?
Everyone sort of enforces the rules as they see fit now. The difference is there is an expectation to not resist when someone is abusing their power because they are an authority figure. Under anarchism, it is your peers holding each other accountable, and your right to question actions against you is accepted.
Tell me you don’t understand anarchism without telling me you don’t understand anarchism.
In my view Torvalds is more of a pragmatic stoicist.
