Both are important. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to resort to containers, VMs, or compiling from source, just because some application decided to only provide packages for Arch or Debian.
Agreed. I used to be the tech support for my family members. Everyone I switched to Mint Cinnamon stopped calling me. (That’s also when I realised my relatives never call me to share good news or to ask about me.)
backed up by the threat of violence against anyone who doesn’t play along.
Every political ideology includes that. What good are rules without enforcement? Just because the enforcers are supposed to be random individuals in some ideologies doesn’t mean the threat of violence for not playing along is gone.
I’m an anarchist, and my take is that anarchism isn’t pacifism, and “no coercion” is a bad summary. It’s more about the absence of hierarchical coercion and instead distribution of power to all people and communities.
If you’re going around burning down houses, your anarchist neighbors are going to use force to take away your matches and gasoline if you don’t stop.
Yup, that is my understanding as well. Likewise, if you’re going around stealing, and someone happens to think that’s bad, they can use force to stop you because there’s no state telling them otherwise.
The idea that if there’s no state we’d automatically be living in communist utopia where everything is shared and nobody owns anything is flawed on its face. It’s certainly possible that there would be groups or tribes of people that choose to live that way, but other tribes would form around the idea that property rights should be protected and build a community around that.
You’re very much misrepresenting how anarchism is supposed to work with that “automatically” statement. No one thinks if will happen by itself, there’s a whole library on thought on how to go about making it the societal norm, with quite a lot of good points that humanity already largely acted like this for most of its two to three hundred thousand years of existence.
Supposedly, anyways. I suppose paleolithic man might well have been selling mammoth futures and executing debtors in the street.
But I also don’t really buy it in a urban society unless that society is largely run by the Culture’s Minds.
I only put that there because the thread starter seems to be an anarcho-communist who thinks that in absence of a state enforcing property rights, property rights simply won’t be enforced. That is not the case. They may or may not be enforced, either by the property owner themselves or their tribe/community.
Ok I should preface by saying I think ancap is dumb and having a slight disagreement with what you’ve said does not mean I’m not defending them. They’re asshats.
But: imo, anarchist thought escapes definition. There’s no such thing as anarchism (in the sense of an agreed-upon political philosophy), only anarchists.
Readers of Rene Girard might describe coersion (insofar as it’s a natural result of hegemony), as a sort of force of nature, like violence, that, if society doesn’t find a healthy way to express, will come out sideways, in ways that are anti-social.
Capitalism is primarily an economic system, not a political philosophy. And while it requires property rights in order to function, it is primarily concerned with solving problems in the absence of coercion, so it is absolutely compatible with anarchy.
You’re making a fundamental error when you think that property rights would not or do not exist in anarchy. What doesn’t exist in anarchy is the enforcement of such rights by a STATE. A property owner (or in this case, really anyone who lays claim to a property, since a state that could issue official deeds does not exist) still has the right to defend their property using violent means if necessary.
So yes, capitalism and anarchy are absolutely compatible.
Anarchy requires the absence of a state… And private property… Anarchy is to the left of “workers siezing the means of production”.
But anarcho-capitalists are, as you’ve said, only focusing on the economic system of their politics. If you ask them about the politics and government of their fantasy? Well, they all reveal a desire for a deeply coercive state. Anarchy, and also Libertarian, are words being co-opted.
Nope, anarchy is only the absence of a state. Like I said, it is still possible to enforce property rights in such a scenario… as long as you do it yourself.
This likely WOULD lead to less hoarding and more wealth distribution, because you cannot keep what you cannot defend. But it’s definitely wrong to assume all property would automatically become public and “free use” and everyone would share freely as in a communist utopia, because that requires agreement between people. And in the absence of a state, there is no authority that could enforce such an agreement.
I’ve always wanted someone to explain how you eliminate capitalism or the symbolic exchange of value to achieve a socialist/ anarchist state without violence.
The nice part about anarchism is both systems are free to coexist in the absense of the state. That cannot be said under communism and socialism.
If you think about it, such communities probably already exist: most families, even in capitalism, are communist internally: the parents contribute far more to the household than the children do, who tend to consume far more than they produce. From each according to their ability to each according to their need.
This likely also explains the continued popularity of communism as a political philosophy, especially among young people. Going out into the world, where there is competition and conflict is jarring, and the wish for society to be organized more like a family unit is understandable, although it is far more difficult to organize a large country in this way than a household of no more than, say, a dozen people.
Communism is a classless stateless society, parents within our society literally own their children as property.
This likely also explains the continued popularity of communism as a political philosophy, especially among young people. Going out into the world, where there is competition and conflict is jarring, and the wish for society to be organized more like a family unit is understandable, although it is far more difficult to organize a large country in this way than a household of no more than, say, a dozen people.
Remind me again, what is the political ideology of the new world superpower? The one with 1.4 billion people? You know, now that the capitalist US empire is in obvious terminal decline.
Are you talking about China? If so, I’m afraid they’re communist in name only. They realized many years ago that Marxist economic theory doesn’t work and began to integrate capitalist principles into their economy. There are banks, there is a stock market, and there is private ownership of the means of production, although all of these are tightly regulated by the state and can be rescinded at any time or for any reason (such as not paying enough bribes).
De facto, China is a capitalist-fascist state more comparable to WW2 Germany than anything Marx ever came up with.
Are you talking about China? If so, I’m afraid they’re communist in name only. They realized many years ago that Marxist economic theory doesn’t work and began to integrate capitalist principles into their economy.
You’re kind of incredibly ignorant on China. They’re a mostly publicly controlled economy.
The reasoning for a private sector is to prevent economic and technological siege.
Also marxist economic theory is literally just a structured critique of capitalism. It doesn’t have anything to say about socialism or communism, that is marx’s other works.
De facto, China is a capitalist-fascist state more comparable to WW2 Germany than anything Marx ever came up with.
I would really suggest reading “Economy and class structure of german fascism” and comparing it to the political and economic situation of China. (And actually understand those situations, not just passively absorb ideas from anglophone media) This isn’t meant to be a dig, but this level of political illiteracy is embarrassing.
than anything Marx ever came up with.
Have you literally read any book that Marx wrote? (The manifesto is a manifesto, it doesn’t count, but I’d also be interested in knowing if you’ve read that)
I’m not convinced about the second paragraph. How do you think we ended up where we are? In the stone age there was no government either, and yet some people became royalty and he and his friends became wealthy
A property owner (or in this case, really anyone who lays claim to a property, since a state that could issue official deeds does not exist) still has the right to defend their property using violent means if necessary.
Okay, but if there isn’t a state, who is to say the workers don’t have the right to protect their surplus labor value from theft by seizing the means of production, through violence if necessary?
This is one of the reasons why anarcho capitalism is an incoherent ideology. People who believe in it think that the right of private property is just something everyone agrees should be held sacred, when it only exists because of state violence.
Okay, but if there isn’t a state, who is to say the workers don’t have the right to protect their surplus labor value from theft by seizing the means of production, through violence if necessary?
Nobody. But conversely, if there isn’t a state, what’s to prevent property owners from banding together and protecting their property with violence?
Before you say “but there’s more workers than property owners”, keep in mind that given enough money or gold or whatever, they could also hire mercenaries to prevent workers from rebelling.
It really all comes down to who is better at organizing. So it’s possible that in one scenario, workers would seize the means of production successfully, and if they are good enough at keeping it running, they’d operate as a commune, while in another scenario, there’d be a more hierarchical, capitalist structure of organization.
You’re simply arguing from a standpoint of “but I like THIS approach better” when it’s a question of “but can you make it WORK?”
But conversely, if there isn’t a state, what’s to prevent property owners from banding together and protecting their property with violence?
That would literally be a capitalist state in every meaningful sense.
keep in mind that given enough money or gold or whatever, they could also hire mercenaries to prevent workers from rebelling.
Sorta like a police force of some kind?
It really all comes down to who is better at organizing. So it’s possible that in one scenario, workers would seize the means of production successfully, and if they are good enough at keeping it running, they’d operate as a commune, while in another scenario, there’d be a more hierarchical, capitalist structure of organization.
You know what is really fucking organized? A state. It is almost like at the beginning of the country all the large landowners and capitalists got together and made one of those to protect their interests.
You’re simply arguing from a standpoint of “but I like THIS approach better” when it’s a question of “but can you make it WORK?”
Lol. I am literally asking how your hypothetical system would handle class antagonisms, the primary concern of politics. I am very directly asking “but can you make it work”
I’m certainly overly reductive of politics. When we’re talking ideology, though, yeah I’m going back to my ethics. A government can’t act on our behalf with more rights than us - we just end up creating our master. Pragmatic actions, in the real world, are different from ideological conversations, though.
I’m somewhat confused by your separation of ideology from practical actions. That sounds internally inconsistent.
I am willing to accept a state if it is necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and their toadies, so long as that continues to be necessary. I would prefer we lived in a communist society but we can’t get there overnight and socialism is how you transition to it.
It’s similar to your position. I just have a different path to a stateless, voluntary society. I also don’t really care what the economic system looks like, so long as human rights are recognized.
I consider freedom of the press to just be freedom of speech, which we all have.
As for the homeless chap, it depends on their situation. I’d live in a community that would try to help them. I think we’re ethically obligated to help people in need as best we can, but I’m not comfortable using violence to force you to help them.
I consider freedom of the press to just be freedom of speech, which we all have.
The thing is we don’t. There is no such thing as free speech, any speech that meaningfully threatens the government will be cracked down on. See Fred Hampton. Free speech is a legal fiction in our country.
But my point is that the limited bourgeois privileges you get don’t matter if you’re starving on the street. You can’t meaningfully have those privileges without economic security.
As for the homeless chap, it depends on their situation. I’d live in a community that would try to help them. I think we’re ethically obligated to help people in need as best we can, but I’m not comfortable using violence to force you to help them.
So it is more violent to take food from a grocery store because that hurts the owners bottom line than it is to prevent a starving man from taking bread from a grocery store by kicking his ass and throwing him in a box? Is that your perspective on this issue?
I meant that freedom of the press shouldn’t be limited to just people that work for CNN or whatever. I don’t think they’re separate rights. I didn’t mean to say they’re appropriately implemented.
Theft of small amounts of food isn’t really something I care about. I’m not a fan of police or jails/prisons. We can handle these sorts of crimes more ethically. Robberies are a bit different. If you’re someone that visits San Francisco to bip cars then goes back home, you could prolly use a good kick or two if you’re caught by your intended victim.
Regardless, I think we, as a society, should be there with the bread. It shouldn’t be an issue we have to face.
Regardless, I think we, as a society, should be there with the bread. It shouldn’t be an issue we have to face.
But you don’t think we should use violence to enforce the idea, so how do you enforce the idea in the transition when former small business tyrants chafe at the idea of sharing? What if they don’t submit to nonviolent methods of control?
Private Property cannot exist without a state. That which gives private property legitimacy is a monopoly of violence, otherwise you have a winner-takes-all might makes right system.
Collective ownership of property can be enforced via the collective itself, without a need for a governing body.
Anarchism is certainly idealistic, but Anarcho-Capitalism is pure fantasy.
I mean, first of all, have you taken a look at our current society, and second of all, this is just a thought experiment to prove that anarcho-communism is pure fantasy, or at the very least not inevitable.
Anarcho-Capitalism cannot exist, it would cease to exist the very second it did.
Anarcho-Communism is a lofty goal, but is fully capable of existing.
That’s the fundamental difference, what you consider to be Private Property simply wouldn’t be, it would either be personal property or you wouldn’t have it. It is only through threat of violence that one can own the products of tools despite not doing the labor.
Okay, as frustrating as it is to have you simply repeat your initial statements despite any arguments made to the contrary, it seems as though your point hinges on the distinction between personal and private property.
However, I don’t see how private property couldn’t be maintained as long as you have the ability to defend it. Hiring guards for instance does not constitute a monopoly on violence, since others can do so as well. In an anarcho-communist scenario, for instance, if the workers want to maintain control of the means of production after ousting the owner, they would potentially have to post guards as well, or the property owner could hire a bunch of mercenaries to take the property back.
The long and short if this is, I don’t see how anarchy would favor either the creation of capitalist or communist structures of organization. Most likely, there would be both, and survival would be a matter of who is better at organizing.
There are numerous critical flaws of what you just said.
Why would Guards support you? If you become a robber-baron, hiring muscle to protect your factories from the Workers, you have to deal with the fact that either you don’t actually control and own your factories, the mercenaries do, or accept that you have become a micro-state.
What is preventing any of these micro-states from absorbing others and becoming a full state? Nothing.
Why would anyone willingly work for you, unless it already reached the point where you are essentially a state? They could make more money simply by working cooperatively.
Private Property cannot maintain itself unless you have a monopoly on violence and thus a state.
Cooperatively owned property, on the other hand, supports itself and is maintained cooperatively. There are no avenues to realistically overturn it.
I don’t think you’re wrong about the idea of micro-states forming, but I don’t see how a communist cooperative isn’t a micro-state by the same definition as well.
As far as cooperatives being naturally more efficient, I highly doubt that. Centralized structures are far more conducive to decision making. While your commune is still debating about whether both Marx’ and Engels’ birthdays should be a day off, the capitalists are already working.
Also, the idea that property somehow magically supports itself by virtue of being communally owned is complete fantasy. You clearly have no actual experience and are just spouting off a bunch of dogma you’ve read somewhere.
If everyone has equal power, there’s no statist component.
Cooperative structures are not inherently more efficient, but Cooperative work structures would result in higher paid workers. The strawman about a lack of decision making in the Cooperative could easily be flipped, while the Workers are already producing, the Capitalists are figuring out how to extort their customers and workers better.
Communally owned property supports itself by virtue of being communally owned. If nobody has an individual claim to it, someone who tries would be contested by the community, hence its communal ownership.
You only have strawmen and vibes, no actual points.
I really hope you get to fulfill your dream of living in a commune one day so you’ll have some actual first hand experience of what you are talking about.
I’d pay good money to see your face the first time you get outvoted on something you think you are absolutely right about.
I dont know, let’s ask Chinese feudal lords how their ability to enforce private property went after the CPC stopped enforcing their private property rights for them like the old government did.
Anarchism can only exist when there’s a single individual not interacting with any other person, period. Every human interaction immediately breaks any sort of anarchism, there will always be some agreed upon behavior, whether implicit or explicit, violently enforced or not.
I suppose most ancaps are actually minarchists, or “minimal state” proponents, because capitalism fails terribly without laws and some way to enforce them. Without a state (even as small as a group’s leadership), “ownership” doesn’t exist, whoever’s stronger owns the thing. You blink, you lose. You die, it’s first dibs. Fell for a scam? Too bad, you should’ve been smarter. Got captured and sold into slave labor? Too bad, you should’ve seen that coming. Someone stole your stuff? Too bad, you should’ve secured it better.
Not a hot take at all. Asking someone to go from a GUI heavy operating system to a command line heavy one and be just as productive is lunacy. Like all major changes it is important to ween off the old thing.
My biggest hurdle with the switch has been permission related issues, and you can’t deal with those cleanly with a UI, and every help thread under the sun throws out a bunch of command line commands giving a solution without explaining why those changes are needed. It may seem like Unix 101 to experienced Linux users, but it is really cryptic to newcomers coming from operating systems that are…cough more lenient with their permissions.
There is also a mentality that UIs are much more idiot proof than command line. UIs are written by people who actually know the OS so we can’t accidentally delete our home folder because of a typo. It is a very legitimate concern.
I guess I’m open minded because I’m a noob with Linux yet I’ve worked with XFCE, LXQt, KDE, and GNOME (in that order), and none of them were a pain, except possibly LXQt, which was super clunky to customize, but it ran amazing on weak hardware, so I’m giving it a pass. I reckon I’d be cool with Cinnamon, MATE, Unity, or even one of the lightweight DE’s.
Yet, all of these DEs I’ve used were on Ubuntu based distros. I feel afraid to encounter weird things with other distros. For example, doesn’t DaVinci Resolve only run on Ubuntu based distros?
The most important thing for most new Linux users would be a pathway to getting support. Because of this the distro you use matters much more than the DE because each of the major distro’s have different pipelines that the funnel users in to getting support. The package manager lock in is distro dependent and depending on the philosophy that they subscribe to can be the difference between how many steps a new user has to take to get a working system up and running. Thankfully, with the rise of flatpak, appimage and snap being more popular than ever package availability is much more streamlined but that is another layer on top of an already overwhelming package system for new users. The defaults for all of this depends on your distro which can be different. Heck we haven’t even gotten to support cycles which depending on user needs can be different. Because not every user has or wants what comes with for example maintaining an rolling release distribution. Did they setup their system to have snapshots so they can roll everything back when the new kernel update breaks something system critical and they have a presentation at 2:00? None of these things are really DE dependent but are baked in to the defaults you subscribe to when you choose a disto. The good part is that if you don’t like how something is configured you can change everything easily depending on how well documented it is. This is why it’s more important to choose a distro with good documentation or at least a active enough community so when you run into hangups you can get some sort of resolution.
Getting “Linux” support online usually means Ubuntu, but I ran into a Mint problem back in the day (I wanna say about 2014 or so…) And Clem himself replied to me personally with, not just a link to a fix, but an actual “copy and paste this exact thing into the terminal” reply, and it totally fixed me up. Clem being the guy who is in charge of Mint.
Always left me with a warm feeling about Mint, and I keep coming back.
Using LMDE 6 Cinnamon on one of my boxes for that reason.
Same here! I joined lemmy right around the time my main hdd took a dump–so there was probably a bit of influence coming from here…While scrambling to get another windows installed (and encountering a bunch of obstacles along the way) i finally decided to just try Linux Mint Cinnamon. Tbh, i wasn’t sure if my computer was bricked by the time i finally got mint to start up via usb. When it started working, i tried a few basic things–browsing the web, playing music, videos etc. When it all worked with a minimal amount of fuss, i decided it was time to give up windows if i could. Haven’t been back to windows since!
This isn’t a bad take. DE is what is going to keep people from running back to windows right away, mostly. I do think it is better for people coming into Linux not to try to emulate the Windows experience. It is easier to learn when you accept it is going to be different from the start.
DE is how you interact with everything else on the computer for anyone thats not a 100% terminal hackerman.
a good, simple, easy to use windows-like DE is probably one of the most important things for a new user. Since it will influence how easily they can handle and do anything and everything else.
I remember doing that for reddit back in the day. I downloaded a bunch of apps, then picked the one I liked best. Good to see devs doing the same for Lemmy!
Nowadays they’re so many options, GNOME and Plasma are nice, but heavy, same for DDE(Deepin) and others fancy DEs I know why it’s heavy, but xfce and lxqt looks better on my PC, xfce you can make looks beauty and fast too
For the WM guys: I’ll try some day, for now only DEs :3
not really, compare installing something like Spotify on Ubuntu vs something Arch Based, something that allows you to access AUR packages with a few simple clicks.
I can’t imagine that there is any overlap between Linux users and Spotify users, considering what a shitty piece of software Spotify is. I think you must be the only one.
many people use linux because they dont like windows and still use proprietary software like spotify, discord and steam (mostly steam, just because of how good it is)
Both made possible by librespot. Not only do some Linux users use Spotify, some great open-source devs have worked to make clients for it. I honestly prefer Spotify-qt to the official one.
the DE is more important. yes, arch has more options than ububtu, but as long as the new person chooses anything that allows using flatpaks (like mint and anything that isnt from canonical), theyll have an easier and better experience since they would already get the DE they want preinstalled and flatpak would help with any proprietary software they want that isnt on the main distro’s repos
The “what you go for it’s entirely your choice” mantra when it comes to DE is total BS. What happens is that you’ll find out while you can use any DE in fact GNOME will provide a better experience because most applications on Linux are design / depend on its components. Using KDE/XFCE is fun until you run into some GTK/libadwaita application and small issues start to pop here and there, windows that don’t pick on your theme or you just created a frankenstein of a system composed by KDE + a bunch of GTK components;
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