Re: is Debian an anarchist organization/project?
On Wed, Oct 30, 2002 at 08:34:50AM -0200, Leonardo Dias wrote:
JW>> No... Marx was authoritarian. Are we?
LD> Marx wasn't authoritarian. He simply defended the idea of political
LD> parties formed by the people, the proletarians, the sindicates and
LD> the workers.
The idea of political party _is_ authoritarian, that is why Bakunin was
expelled from the First International, and that is why Bakunin also
predicted that state socialism will inevitably turn into worst
dictatorship possible, half a century before it first happened in
Russia, and then in _all_ other countries where marxists (not
necessarily leninists) came to power.
LD> The way socialism was implemented in Russia was a form of
LD> "marxism-leninism" which can't be discussed as Marx, but rather be
LD> called the "proletarian dictatorship", which is a form of extreme
LD> leftism. Marx was beyond that.
Was he? Quoth "Communist Manifesto":
[proletariat] will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees,
all capital from the bourgeois, to centralise all instruments of
production in the hands of the State, i.e. of the proletariat
organised as the ruling class.
All the key words are there: supremacy, centralise, State, ruling
class... in which way is it not a dictatorship?
LD> And communism, as defined by Marx, is simply the "end of the
LD> State",
It is not that obvious, given the quotation above.
LD> which, somehow, is similar to the idea of anarchism, but it is also
LD> conflictive since it refers itself to the economic domination, and
LD> not the political domination (as the anarchic ideal states).
To retreat a bit from offtopic, I'd like to compare this difference to
difference between Free Software and Open Source movements. Open Source,
like marxism, states that _economic_ advantages of open-source software
are primary goal, and that freedom will follow, while Free Software
maintains that _freedom_ is a worthy goal in itself. Guess what? Open
Source already proved itself unable to properly defend our interest. See
this open letter from RMS for example:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/27121.html
Your advice is that the community should begin practicing politics,
which seems to mean, working in nontechnical ways for success. This
is ironic because the term "open source" was coined to avoid
politics.
...
The open source movement was founded in 1998 by people who wanted to
talk about our system without mentioning the political ideals that
motivated us to develop it. They got lots of publicity, and as a
result most of the users of our software think it was developed
under the name of open source for apolitical reasons. A recent
survey showed that more developers prefer the affiliation with free
software, on account of our principles, but the users get a
misleading picture of this. That picture contributes to the
political weakness in our community.
P.S. Now that I've managed to combine in one post marxism vs. anarchism,
Open Source vs. Free Software, Russian Revolution, and even reference to
RMS and Bakunin, I bet I can rest assured and watch the flames roar ;-)
--
Dmitry Borodaenko
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