communism

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

The verb "maximising" suggests a measurable "utility" which can be "maximised", rather than needs which are either met or not.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

The important thing to understand is that even if you hate capitalism, neoclassical economics provide provides a pretty useful framework for analyzing and understanding it

It really doesn't—which was Marx's whole project as a critique of political economy, not "communist economics", not "Marxist political economy", etc.

But my point is that what people call a “market” in neoclassical economics is literally just any situation where you have a bunch of relatively autonomous groups of people all trying to accomplish various goals all interacting with each other

Communism abolishes the individual as economic subject, and the conflicts of interests found in a "market". Communism abolishes exchange, and abolishes economies. So, no, there is no "market" in a communist mode of production, even by your definition.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

what you think utility is

"Utility" is not a concept I subscribe to per se, unless you just mean use-values in the same sense Marx uses them. I am responding to the concepts you are using. In a communist mode of production, production is, in the famous quote, "according to need"; in a capitalist mode of production, production is divorced from need, and we find production for the sake of production.

who do you think is being exploited in economic institution that literally has to internalize all of the external cost

Marxists use the word "exploitation" differently to its colloquial use. "Exploitation", in Marx's critique of political economy, refers to the extraction of surplus-value. I'm not sure if you know what that means or not. I can explain it if you want but you can also look it up; it's a pretty basic part of Marx's critique.

Also believe it or not I didn’t actually express any political beliefs here so I would appreciate it if you didn’t just assume that because I’m challenging you on your conception of things, it means that I disagree with your politics

I'm assuming you're not a communist because you don't seem to be familiar with communist views, and seem to be advocating for/in defence of a mode of production that is not communist. I don't know how exactly you label yourself politically but it seems based on this short conversation that we can exclude communism from the list of possibilities, meaning we disagree.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (6 children)

I am opposed to "maximising utility" because I am a communist. Production should serve needs, not production for the sake of production.

compulsively reinvest all their excesses and internalize all of their external cost

Ok, still exploitation.

I can see that those are your political beliefs. You are welcome to have those political beliefs. OP is asking about communists, and communists do not want this, so this is rather orthogonal to the question.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Do you think that it's not possible to interact with each other outside of a market, outside of capitalism?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago (8 children)

Because they are subjected to market forces. I'm not referring to the decisions an individual worker in a coop might make—an individual may well decide to give away all their money and become homeless, that doesn't mean it's in people's interests to. In a market, you must compete with other businesses, otherwise you will be out-competed and not survive. The "profits" obtained by a coop are still surplus-value; all the laws of capital outlined by Marx are still at play. Marx's critique of political economy did not really hinge upon the specific boss/employee relationship; it's about impersonal domination of the market over people who live in a capitalist mode of production. In Capital Marx spends quite a bit of time talking about how even capitalists are subjected to and dominated by capital; the domination is impersonal, and the domination of (hu)man by (hu)man is only secondary to that impersonal domination.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (30 children)

The hell of capitalism is the firm itself, not the fact that the firm has a boss.

The forces of the market and of capital do not go away just because the workers own the company. In worker-owned cooperatives, the workers exploit themselves, because the business still needs to grow. They simply carry out the logic of the capitalist themselves on themselves, using their surplus value to expand the business's capital, and paying for their own labour-power reproduction. i.e., the workers all simply become petit-bourgeois.

There are extant organisations (some political parties, some NGOs) that push for more workers' cooperatives, and none of them are communist nor call themselves communist. If you believe in a cooperative-based economy, you are not a communist. I don't mean that as an insult, it's just a fact, the same as if you want, for instance, the current US economic system, you are not a communist. You can advocate for coops but you would fare much better in that political project if you didn't try to put it under the banner of something it's not, and something far more controversial than just "worker coops are good" anyway.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 days ago (27 children)

Death to Germany

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

I also thought it was because it looked like pommel, and I was like well that's not very funny...

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago

I'm subscribed to their tech, gaming, and news communities. They're fine, I don't care to make an account on their instance but nothing wrong with the Hexbear communities I subscribe to.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Listen to music or watch a video, if you don't want to read?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

I prefer Mullvad. I've found it a lot more reliable. I was a paying Proton customer but still had connectivity issues a non-negligible number of times, whereas I've literally never had Mullvad be the cause of connection issues in my years of using it. It's great that they take cash and have literally only an account hash associated with your account.

I've also found that Mullvad customer support are responsive, helpful, and know what they're talking about. I've had experiences with Proton's customer support that were ok, but occasionally had the typical customer service hiccups along the lines of being assigned a new support agent who doesn't read back all the conversation (understandable—I had one bug I was dealing with for months) and you have to explain again what the original issue was and what has been done since.

I think both options are perfectly fine, but I definitely prefer Mullvad, and it's what I recommend to people if they ask me to recommend a VPN service.

 

For a while, I was running a conduwuit server. Conduwuit has been abandoned, and I wanted to migrate my server to upstream Conduit.

Has anyone done this before? I'm using Docker Compose for Conduwuit.

 

Meaning that the author is maybe not very good at their craft, but inadvertently created a work with a lot more meaning than they intended, or they accidentally did something quite clever that they didn't mean to. Or maybe a work which is good in its own right but there's a particular "unofficial" interpretation which makes it so much better.

Obviously a bit of this question involves knowing authorial intentions, but in a lot of instances authors have been able to state that they did or didn't intend a particular interpretation.

 

It appears to work fine (it contains my home partition for my main machine I daily drive) and I haven't noticed signs of failure. Not noticeably slow either. I used to boot Windows off of it once upon a time which was incredibly slow to start up, but I haven't noticed slowness since using it for my home partition for my personal files.

Articles online seem to suggest the life expectancy for an HDD is 5–7 years. Should I be worried? How do I know when to get a new drive?

364
Duck typing (web.archive.org)
 

I was interested in hosting my own mail server that provides a similar level of privacy for users as Protonmail, ie the server admin cannot read any emails, even those which are not E2EE with PGP. Is there a self-hostable solution to this?

I'm aware the server admin can't read emails that were sent encrypted using the user's PGP key, but most emails I get are automated emails from companies/services/etc without the option to upload a public key to send the user encrypted email. If you're with a service like Protonmail, the server admin still cannot read even these emails.

 

I don't own any controllers.

I started playing Dark Souls 3 which I now understand has a controller strongly recommended. I may as well just look into getting a controller of some kind as I have a few games that have somewhat janky kbm controls and are better enjoyed with a controller.

I just wanted to ask for general advice about what controller to get in terms of compatibility. Also if someone has made a controller that's more in the spirit of foss that also works fine with Steam and Proton games that would be nice?

I know Steam is pretty good with Playstation controllers and I used to use a PS controller (don't remember what generation) with some native Linux Steam games, not sure how the whole PS vs Xbox controller thing is affected by running games through Proton if at all? If it matters let me know, and I'll see if I can procure a controller for myself.

 

Hi, was wondering if anyone knew of an app where you can use your camera to scan documents (like Adobe Scan) which is FOSS.

 

You still have to pay for it because it costs money to make. But it's completely open-source beer so you can recreate it yourself if you don't want to buy it pre-made, or you want to modify the recipe.

I have no idea how to make beer otherwise I'd have a crack at this shitpost myself...

 

I've only ever used desktop Linux and don't have server admin experience (unless you count hosting Minecraft servers on my personal machine lol). Currently using Artix and Void for my desktop computers as I've grown fond of runit.

I'm going to get a VPS for some personal projects and am at the point of deciding what distro I want to use. While I imagine that systemd is generally the best for servers due to the far more widespread support (therefore it's better for the stability needs of a server), I have a somewhat high threat model compared to most people so I was wondering if maybe I should use something like runit instead which is much smaller and less vulnerable. Security needs are also the reason why I'm leaning away from using something like Debian, because how outdated the packages are would likely leave me open to vulnerabilities. Correct me if I'm misunderstanding any of that though.

Other than that I'm not sure what considerations there are to make for my server distro. Maybe a more mainstream distro would be more likely to have the software in its repos that I need to host my various projects. On the other hand, I don't have any experience with, say, Fedora, and it'd probably be a lot easier for me to stick to something I know.

In terms of what I want to do with the VPS, it'll be more general-purpose and hosting a few different projects. Currently thinking of hosting a Matrix instance, a Mastodon instance, a NextCloud instance, an SMTP server, and a light website, but I'm sure I'll want to stick more miscellaneous stuff on there too.

So what distro do you use for your server hosting? What things should I consider when picking a distro?

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