Libertarian Socialism?

[SuburbanFarmer]

It's not my ideology. I guess you didn't even bother to read it.

Trying to put people on the defensive is also sophistry, and you do it all the time. Stop it.

What the fuck are you talking about??

You should just repeat this statement any time you come into a topic about philosophy.

[Speaker to Animals]

Trying to put people on the defensive is also sophistry, and you do it all the time. Stop it.

What the fuck are you talking about??

You should just repeat this statement any time you come into a topic about philosophy.

He's not even making any sense. He's attacking me like I am defending libertarian socialism when I didn't. He then accuses me of putting him on the defensive when I didn't.

pro tip: read the fucking post before you attack the person for what they posted (or what you assumed they posted, I suppose).

[SuburbanFarmer]

You're both using different definitions for the terms that you're arguing.

Socialism <> Marxism
Libertarian <> Mad Max

[Speaker to Animals]

???

Socialism as in: the needs of the group come before the wants of the individual.

No. Socialism as in social ownership of a means of production.

State socialists accomplish this through government theft of capital goods (like taking over a factory). Libertarian socialists are about free association creating new means of production that is free for anybody to use for production (free as in free speech, not free as in beer).

Where I disagree with them lies in the fact that somebody still needs to manage the thing. Even in open source software, somebody in particular controls the project. Anybody can use Java to develop commercial software without paying a dime to use the language or IDE, but somebody owns/controls both the language and IDE.

This only works when the people controlling the maintenance and development of those projects can profit from their labor. Sun Microsystems died because they couldn't make a profit with projects like Java. Now Oracle controls it, along with other projects. I don't see how they make it worth their time and resources.

Imagine how untenable this would be for an actual factory.

Wikipedia does not have an ownership, other than the guys that route donations to pay for server space. It's controlled by everyone. There is no central authority. Same for Bitcoin, same for Unix, and a lot of things.

Open Source won't work where there's wage slavery involved, but it could, once the robots are our slaves.

Wikipedia is still controlled by Wikimedia Foundation. The only way they can continue doing it (right now) is through fund raisers.

And here you are talking about the simplest form of socialization. It's just managing a server and paying people to do some basic web programming and editing work.

Somebody has to manage the MediaWiki project as well.

Most of this stuff is done because people are donating a lot of labor on their own time for free.

But can you run an entire economy on that? I doubt it.

[Speaker to Animals]

You're both using different definitions for the terms that you're arguing.

Socialism <> Marxism
Libertarian <> Mad Max

I know what we he is saying. I tried to clarify to him what libertarian socialists mean by the term and he accused me of putting him on the defensive without reading a word of it.

The fucking irony is that I agree with his characterization of what the average socialist is about.

[Speaker to Animals]

In my opinion, I think a hybrid approach is what could work, and does work in the tech industry. Oracle maintains and expands upon Java, which is free to use. They make money, however, on proprietary and optional suites, as well as their B2B solutions for finance and other industries that run on Java.

It can possibly work because the corporation doing all this is not really doing it for the sake of humanity, but because they create a large user base and ecosystem in which their commercial products can better compete.

Most of the successful open source projects are run by corporations or they end up being run by foundations that then operate a little bit like a corporation.

I don't really see how you can escape the idea of a corporation, really. You still need some institution to "own" the means of production, at least in the sense of maintenance and development, even if if that corporation allows anybody to use said means free of charge.

The absolutely key operator here is "free association". People have to creates these means freely. Nor does it replace privately-owned means of production.

[Fife]

Oracle doesn't need the state to do it's thing, does it?

Quite the opposite it seems to me.

[DBTrek]

This all sounds like a bunch of horse-apples staked tall on a pile of bullshit.

If Libertarian Socialism is simply non-government coerced collective cooperation, then how does that differ from regular ol' libertarianism? A bunch of people freely associate to collectively work on a project, that's libertarianism. Unless we're calling any form of human cooperation "socialism" these days.

"Thanks for holding the door open for me"
"VIVA SOCIALISM!"

[Speaker to Animals]

Oracle doesn't need the state to do it's thing, does it?

Quite the opposite it seems to me.

The way state socialists frame it, you don't need the state to have socialized means of production.

Where I think they are wrong, as I already stated, is that you still need somebody to maintain means of production, schedule its use if necessary, collect any fees to cover the cost of usage, or run some kind of donation drives to raise said funds.

You essentially need a property owner no matter what. Even something as ephemeral as Java, which is free to use for all and doesn't cost a dime to compile your source code, still requires Oracle to maintain it. Oracle has to make money off it somehow, or they will just sell it to somebody else. And if you start your own development environment from scratch, you still will need some kind of foundation to manage the project.

[Speaker to Animals]

This all sounds like a bunch of horse-apples staked tall on a pile of bullshit.

If Libertarian Socialism is simply non-government coerced collective cooperation, then how does that differ from regular ol' libertarianism? A bunch of people freely associate to collectively work on a project, that's libertarianism. Unless we're calling any form of human cooperation "socialism" these days.

"Thanks for holding the door open for me"
"VIVA SOCIALISM!"

The difference would be that libertarian socialists believe nobody actually owns truly socialized means of production (not even the government).

Horse-apples staked tall on a pile of bullshit comes close to how I think that pans out.

Maybe a good analogy would be the village elephant somewhere deep in the SE Asian rainforest. He does work for every family, but the whole village takes care of him.