Gates Plays All the Engels
Jeffrey C. Dege
On Fri, 24 Oct 1997 02:55:18 GMT, Max <m...@mamia.opsys.com> wrote:
>Mark Hamstra <mark.h...@bentley.com> wrote:
>
>: Done that. there is great deal of difference between the
>: socialist dictatorship of the Proletariat advocated by Marx and Engels...
>
>You say so; but Marx and Engels wrote prolifically and the record
>is plain - while Marx himself lived quietly and suffered poverty personally
>without personal violence, he urged revolutionary bloodshed. He was very
>aware that the dictatorship would be resisted by those to be swept aside onto
>the ash heap of history, and would require violent and bloody force.
>
>He did not shy away from what he saw as the historical necessity of
>destruction. Indeed, he would have been a fool if he had actually believed
>that any dictatorship to gain power would not have to use such revolutionary
>tools.
Did Marx _advocate_ violence, or did he _predict_ violence?
--
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new
discoveries, is not "Eureka!" ("I found it!") but rather "hmm....that's
funny..." -- Isaac Asimov
Max
Mark Hamstra <mark.h...@bentley.com> wrote:
:>
:> All the excesses of Lenin and the wretched excesses of Stalin and Mao find
:> their justifications in the writings of Marx and Engels, who called for
:> murder and violence and preached the necessity of dictatorship
: Done that. there is great deal of difference between the
: socialist dictatorship of the Proletariat advocated by Marx and Engels...
You say so; but Marx and Engels wrote prolifically and the record
is plain - while Marx himself lived quietly and suffered poverty personally
without personal violence, he urged revolutionary bloodshed. He was very
aware that the dictatorship would be resisted by those to be swept aside onto
the ash heap of history, and would require violent and bloody force.
He did not shy away from what he saw as the historical necessity of
destruction. Indeed, he would have been a fool if he had actually believed
that any dictatorship to gain power would not have to use such revolutionary
tools.
And it went beyond that: Marx and Engels advocated terror as a political
weapon. They were intellectual and political theoreticians, yes, not
brutally crude thinkers as Stalin, but they were under no illusions as to
the inevitable violence of the struggle they advocated.
As their personal and private correspondence now reveals, they had no
scruples or conscience (they had already "abolished all truth, all morality"
in favor of the historical inevitability of socialism whatever the cost) so
that the end of socialism supposedly justified any means. They were even and
especially contemptuous of the proletariat, and rather than being motivated
by love, it was bitterness, jealousy and hatred of anyone else, including
fellow revolutionaries who disagreed. These are not good motives to base the
hoped-for transformation of society on. The results are all too likely to be
consistent with the hostile mindset carrying out practical application of
the theories.
In Dostoyevsky's The Demons, a novel contemporary with the socialist and
revolutionary forces permeating mid 19th century European intellectualism,
it is made clear that the theoretical ideas of 1848 if carried out would
inevitably translate into the forced deaths of millions in less than a
hundred years. They were carried out, and they did. Even Bakhunin, an old
Bolshevik liquidated by Stalin, said that in retrospect it was all
inevitable and they had learned nothing from the similar failure of the
French Revolution in which the revolutionaries devoured themselves as well
as their enemies.
So don't compare Linux with Marxism - an open design and development effort
with no limitations on the capacity for either commercialism or free
distribution has NOTHING in common with the conspiratorial, underhanded
attempt to install a dictatorship through coercion.
Hey! That sounds like... Microsoft! (Engels was wealthy, after all... no
real contradiction, just a special example of the dialectic of materialism -
wealthy industrialist Armand Hammer was as Soviet as they come. Thesis,
antithesis, synthesis. )
One could make a point about the Marxist bent of Berkeley Unix, though...
(politically correct milieu, tightly controlled development team, clashing
intolerant egos, rabid denunciations, splits over tiny philosophical
differences, degeneration into competing factions) ... hmmm :-)
But wait! Bill Joy was to Trotsky as Bill Gates is to Stalin... the
revolution usurped on a grand scale...
: If you've shown one thing clearly by your post, it is that even the mention
: of Marx
: is too politically charged to allow any such parallels to be profitably
: discussed.
Ah, c'mon. Git off the intellectual ice floe and duke it out with
some *real* revolutionary penguins!
Roy Stogner
> So don't compare Linux with Marxism - an open design and development effort
> with no limitations on the capacity for either commercialism or free
> distribution has NOTHING in common with the conspiratorial, underhanded
> attempt to install a dictatorship through coercion.
I think one of the reasons people become so enthralled with the
economic/political philosophy of Linux (as opposed to the people who use
Linux, because, hey, free UNIX) is because it does something extremely
rare (I would say unprecedented) politically.
1. The Linux development model is a perfect communism. OK, this one
should start some shouting, but forget for a moment the whole "brutal
dictator takes over and screws up a nation" capital-C communism that
we've seen this century. Linux is a perfect example of what communism
was supposed to be: "From each according to his ability," with every
Linux developer contributing what he or she can toward free software,
"to each according to his needs," with most software GPLed and available
for free download to anyone who needs to use it - college kids with
programming and networking tools, businesses with database servers -
whatever you need, it is out there and it is yours for the asking.
Linux spans national borders, is unconscious of race, class, or
prejudice, and is available to anyone who wants it.
2. The Linux development model is a perfect libertarianism. In it's
simplest form: "no force," No developer is coerced into working on
Linux projects, no consumer is coerced into buying Linux. No
"Linux-only" sales strategies prevent you from having your choice of
OS. No forced incompatibilities try to hook users into one operating
system. "no fraud," Every piece of software under the GPL has source
code available, so there are no hidden APIs, no fine print in the
liscensing, no proprietary file formats to trap the consumer. There is
no marketing machine spitting out FUD to lure in computer illiterates.
There is no monolithic design to force everyone to use the same kernel,
same GUI, or same window manager. Everyone's contributions to or
benefits from Linux are purely by individual choice.
3. The Linux development model works. The GNU utilities may have
started by emulating earlier corporate designs, but they have ended up
surpassing them. The XFree86 people may not be able to afford
plastering "Where do you want to go today" over every computer magazine
in existance, but their free implementation of XWindows has made
possible window managers like Enlightenment which resemble where
Microsoft will be going in ten years. Open standards (which, in most
cases, means standards based on the plethora of Unices) work. The
entire world networks over IPv4 instead of IPX, communicates with HTML
instead of Word, and in general simply gets more out of open systems
than it can out of software companies which look out for the bottom line
more than for the consumer's interests.
Anyway, putting aside the unbounded praise for a minute (me, get carried
away? Never!), you have three conclusions. Linux is a perfect
libertarianism, a perfect communism, and it works. Until recently, I
would have said that the first two characteristics were impossible to
achieve, that they were doubly impossible to achieve together, and that
they were both incompatible with the third. The idea that all three
could describe the same system (even if it is a computing paradigm
instead of a state, more's the pity) is stunning.
---
Roy Stogner
AP
In article <34511F45...@iname.com>, roys...@iname.com says...
(Off topic)
> surpassing them. The XFree86 people may not be able to afford
> plastering "Where do you want to go today" over every computer magazine
> in existance, but their free implementation of XWindows has made
> possible window managers like Enlightenment which resemble where
> Microsoft will be going in ten years.
Every once in a while, I find a statement that I can't help but react to
... YUCK! I want engineers putting the GUI together, not artists. No
desire for "enlightenment". ;)
(flame off)
AP
Where have all the paddlefrogs gone?
On Sat, 25 Oct 1997 05:44:22 GMT, a small green fish snuck into
Bob Nelson's internet account in order to express the following:
> You forgot one other aspect of Linux: It's also tremendous FUN! In that
> regard, it brings folks with otherwise disparate ideologies together.
> I'm a southern, God-fearing, Bible-reading, flag-waving conservative but
> the form of ``communual cooperation'' characterizing Linux makes me
> believe that maybe Marx got a _few_ things right. :)
Whereas I'm a Canadian, agnostic, CN semisocialist but I see a lot of good
in the anarchistic aspects of Linux :)
IOW, you have made an _excellent_ point.
Cheers!
o r c e l l . p o r t l a n d . o r . u s
In article <87782616...@smyrno.sol.net>,
Kenton E. Sinner <ksi...@solaria.sol.net> wrote:>Technical quibble: communism has collective ownership of the means
>of production. In other words, nobody can do anything with anything
>without engaging in a political process to aquire the permission
>of the group in order to begin.
You're talking about a cheap commodity that can afford lots of blind
alleys. It's not as if you're talking about steam locomotive
research, where every experimental engine weighs 100+ tons and
requires steel mills, machine shops, backshops, and skilled labor to
assemble it.
The permission of the group is group acceptance of the resulting
code.
>> 2. The Linux development model is a perfect libertarianism.
>
>Not much argument there. Of course, some people would argue that
>there is no such thing as *perfect* libertarianism. :-)
In a perfect world, the libertarians and the communists would be
indistinguishable. Not that they're particularly distinguisable
now, as they buzz ineffectually around on the sidelines squeaking
about how everything would be perfect if everyone thought the way
they did, but that's a trivial detail.
____
david parsons \bi/ should I redirect this to alt.flame.libertia?
\/
Bob Nelson
Roy Stogner <roys...@iname.com> wrote:
[ Excellent, thoughtful analysis snipped... ]
> Anyway, putting aside the unbounded praise for a minute (me, get carried
> away? Never!), you have three conclusions. Linux is a perfect
> libertarianism, a perfect communism, and it works.
You forgot one other aspect of Linux: It's also tremendous FUN! In that
regard, it brings folks with otherwise disparate ideologies together.
I'm a southern, God-fearing, Bible-reading, flag-waving conservative but
the form of ``communual cooperation'' characterizing Linux makes me
believe that maybe Marx got a _few_ things right. :)
--
========================================================================
Bob Nelson -- Dallas, Texas, USA (bne...@iname.com)
http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/6375
========================================================================
Ram Samudrala
Roy Stogner <roys...@iname.com> wrote:
>1. The Linux development model is a perfect communism.
I think you would do better if you used communitarian instead of
communism (simply to avoid the negative connotations). I also think
the whole idea of unrestricted copying is perfect laissez faire
capitalism. The whole idea of intellectual property (patents and
copyrights in the U.S. at least) is more communistic (cf. Article I
Section 8 Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution) than capitalistic, and
actually goes against capitalism.
--Ram
email@urls || http://www.ram.org || http://www.twisted-helices.com/th
Based on the principle that if we were all crooks, we could at last be
uniform to some degree in the eyes of THE LAW... Once we had all broken
some kind of law, we'd all be in the same big happy club. ---Frank Zappa
Ottavio G. Rizzo
Ram Samudrala <ram.sa...@nojunkemail.stanford.edu> writes:
> Roy Stogner <roys...@iname.com> wrote:
> >1. The Linux development model is a perfect communism.
> I think you would do better if you used communitarian instead of
> communism (simply to avoid the negative connotations). I also think
Which negative connotation? :) Programmers of the world united to free
the oppressed masses of computer users...
BTW Doesn't "communitarian" refer to the French "commune"? As far as I
remember, that wasn't any better than your average communist state.
--
Ottavio G. Rizzo Dep. of Mathematics and Statistics
phone: (613) 545-2432 Queen's University
fax: (613) 545-2964 Kingston, ON, Canada K7K-3N6
Ram Samudrala
Ottavio G. Rizzo <ot...@gauss.math.brown.edu> wrote:
>Which negative connotation? :) Programmers of the world united to free
>the oppressed masses of computer users...
From the Webster's:
1 a : a theory advocating elimination of private property b : a system
in which goods are owned in common and are available to all as needed
>BTW Doesn't "communitarian" refer to the French "commune"? As far as I
>remember, that wasn't any better than your average communist state.
: of or relating to social organization in small cooperative partially
collectivist communities
I didn't come up with the negative connotations. <-:
--Ram
email@urls || http://www.ram.org || http://www.twisted-helices.com/th
...because you believe that science is the greatest achievement so far
of the human race and its long term best hope for survival and
enlightenment. ---John Moult
Kenton E. Sinner
Ottavio G. Rizzo (ot...@gauss.math.brown.edu) wrote:
> Ram Samudrala <ram.sa...@nojunkemail.stanford.edu> writes:
> > Roy Stogner <roys...@iname.com> wrote:
> > >1. The Linux development model is a perfect communism.
> > I think you would do better if you used communitarian instead of
> > communism (simply to avoid the negative connotations). I also think
> Which negative connotation? :) Programmers of the world united to free
> the oppressed masses of computer users...
Hackers of the World, unite! You have nothing to lose but your
restrictive licensing agreements! :-)
--
"Death is an imposition on the human race, and no longer acceptable."
-- Alan Harrington, "The Immortalist"
Can't WWW, dont't ask me. :-(
Kenton E. Sinner
Roy Stogner (roys...@iname.com) wrote:
> 1. The Linux development model is a perfect communism.
Technical quibble: communism has collective ownership of the means
of production. In other words, nobody can do anything with anything
without engaging in a political process to aquire the permission
of the group in order to begin. With Linux, and free software in
general, anyone can do pretty much whatever he wants to with the code.
It is closer to *no* ownership than collective ownership. This is
only possible with software, of course, not hardware, since a given
piece of hardware can only be used by one person at a time.
> 2. The Linux development model is a perfect libertarianism.
Not much argument there. Of course, some people would argue that
there is no such thing as *perfect* libertarianism. :-)
> 3. The Linux development model works.
You've got THAT right! :-)