I had a journey
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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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.
** record of authoritarians that called themself communist.
nOt rEaL cOmMunIsM
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?
I agree on that, but that doesn't mean that those who outed themselves aren't communists. They were communists, and all of the attempts at a communist system has failed horrifically. I say this as a person who lives in a ex-communist country.
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.
Communism isn't about exegesis. It's not about who understands the source texts or believes in the correct unadulterated virgin idea. There are many schools of communism and they have all changed with history in some way.
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.
Lmao source please? For the church/zealots-part. Also I don't think you understood the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the way Marx uses language to get his point across. Maybe you should read more secondary literature?
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.