Reading about FOSS philosophy, degoogling, becoming against corporations, and now a full-blown woke communist (like Linus Torvalds)
Ironic as I went the other way. I was a Communist when I got into FOSS and as I got older I realized I could never defend the historical record of Communism.
This is what happens when everything you know is based on vibes instead of actually reading any theory or history from primary source historians instead of third.
I’m saying I don’t believe you’ve ever engaged with communism. I don’t believe you’ve read a single book. I don’t believe you’ve even read a single pamphlet. I don’t think you could give me a simplified breakdown of what historical materialism is and I don’t believe you could tell me what the 5 basic classes are that marxists define, along with a simple 1 sentence description of their scientific definition. I don’t think you were a communist and I don’t think you know anything about the “historical record of communism” beyond what you have passively consumed from the far right wing fuckwads that you’ve surrounded yourself with and allowed to rot your brain. I’m saying that the confident manner in which you bullshit about these things is a severe personal failing.
All of these are 101 things that anyone who has actually engaged with the topic of socialism for more than like 1 single week would be able to answer instantly and easily.
I’m saying that your political opinions and knowledge of history is based on vibes that you have attained from the massive quantity of propaganda you uncritically consume and not from any actual meaningful knowledge.
Clear enough?
You do get that Bad People don’t usually label themselves as such right? It would be like the Nazi party (unironically) labelling themselves as the Fascist Genocidal Aryan Elite Supremacists Party instead of National Socialist German Workers Party.
How many people do you think would support fascist, genocidal dictators if they outed themselves as such to begin with?
You’re not more Communist than Lenin. Read his letters and works (they’ve been translated to English) and tell me that’s not a man who truly believes in the things Marx said.
I think if we cooperate like our gentle cousins the Bonobos for a century or two we’d basically have Star Trek. Instead we (Americans) are spending 3x the cost of housing the homeless on hostile architecture and armed goons to raid/destroy their camps with the aim of making our metally ill & vulnerable as invisible as possible- while we slaughter animals we know are able to suffer & grieve as powerfully as any of our beloved dogs, en masse, at absurd environmental cost, washed and neatly sealed from any evident cruelty so they can be consumed or spoil, 50/50 with hardly a thought.
The concept of cooperation transcends any flawed man. We can do better than this but continuing to enable the psychopaths that got us here seems beyond impractical.
You can support some of the ideas while disapproving the leaders whose greed made it fail… which is socialism in a way.
The ideas are why it failed. Thats the core problem. Marx believed he could build in essence a church of Communism that would be incorruptible zealots who would lead society to Communism. A dictatorship of the proletariat led by an enlightened few who could teach and reeducate the masses to live in productive harmony with one another. And that, for many reasons, never works.
you don’t have to defend the history of communism-aspiring countries to be in favor of communism ;)
You don’t have to, but you should. Lenin and Mao practically worshiped Marx and they both attempted to implement his system faithfully to the spec he advocated for. And I know that viewpoint is somewhat controversial in non-Leninist/Maoist circles but I think it’s true.
What’s more I think the historical records of economic collectivism outside of Socialism and political Authoritarianism outside of Socialism are numerous and expensive enough to justify an opposition to Communism as a system.
I think the main realization that made me nominally support Capitalism is it’s performance in a “degraded” state. You can have the absolute worst scenarios (think Pinoche Chile) and Capitalism provides constant incentive to improve things and doesn’t seize up in the meantime. It continues to function even in the face of severe inefficiencies.
