Lizzy Fleckenstein
aka Charlotte Pabst

Socialism is a complex political theory, but I'll do my best to explain the very basics here.

What is up with capitalism?

In our current capitalism system, there are, for the most part, two classes:

• Most people are workers, regular people like you and me who spend the majority of their life working a job for a salary to pay their bills (i.e. they sell their labor to make a living). It doesn't really matter what they work as. They could be working as a programmer, as a manager, as a construction worker, or as a pilot.
• The other class are capitalists, who own and control corporations. For example, in publicly traded companies, multiple investors collectively own a company, reap its profits in the form of dividends, and decide its fate by voting amongst themselves.

Sidenote: Not everyone fits into this categorization neatly. Some people are disabled and cannot work (more on that later), some people work in their own small business or work for a union or worker's collective, some are government employees. What matters tho is that the majority of the economy is dominated by employer/employee relationships like the ones I've described. Children/students and retired people are still workers/working class, because they will spend/have spent the majority of their lifetime working.

There are two major conclusions from this.

1. This system is fundamentally unfair. Workers generate all the value, all the profit that companies make. Without the workers there is no product, no service, nothing to make money from. But they have no control over the fate of their company, and often the vast amount of the profit they generate is owned and taken away by someone else. This is known as wage theft.
2. There is an inherent conflict between the economic interests of the capitalist class and the working class:

   The workers want better working conditions; they want higher pay, and they want more say in how the company is run.

   The capitalists, generally, benefit from the opposite. The less money workers make, the less breaks they get, the harder they have to work, the more profit the capitalist makes - at least in the short term. Additionally, the capitalists benefit from making workers scared to lose their job, so that workers will tolerate more for less compensation. This means that they will lobby against things like unemployment safety nets, labor laws, unions, heathcare and housing for all.

   All of this is known as class contradiction.

   Sidenote: Does this mean all business founders are evil? No, of course not, and growing a business from scratch is a difficult task that should be valued in society. It just means that when a business gets too big, the economic interests of its owners start working against the economic interests of its workers. There are ways to avoid becoming evil. For one, you can transition your company to an employee owned one and still end up as a multi-millionaire living a comfortable and good life. (By the way - I work for such a company. It's genuinely awesome.)
   But all of this is besides the fact that most businesses are sold off to investors anyway, so the people who own it contributed nothing but, at some point, money. Having rich people participate in stock market gambling to make a profit off other people's work is not valuable for society. This is not something we need. It's just the way that our economy is currently organized.

What does all of this lead to?

Capitalism is inherently contradictory, it consists of two forces with opposing interests. Such systems have never lasted in the past; they have always been overthrown by violent revolutions that have improved the conditions for the oppressed majority: slave economies, feudalism, absolutism, colonialism. This struggle is known as class conflict, and it naturally arises from class contradictions.

What could a better alternative look like?

First of all, workers should own the businesses they work in and reap the very profits that they generate. They should democratically elect their own bosses, and decide what amount of the profits stay on company accounts for future investments and expansion, and what amount is paid out to employees on top of their salary. Essentially the same thing we already do under capitalism, except that instead of shareholders and investors, it's the workers themselves that run everything and reap the benefits. A labor-based economy like this is known as socialism.

Of course, this still leaves many issues unaddressed. Ultimately, the most just system would be a needs-based economy: An economy in which everyone has to work according to their ability, and each is allocated resources according to their needs. This is known as communism, and it is, of course, an utopia for now. Still, it is something that we can and should work towards in a socialist, or even a capitalist system:

• Housing, healthcare and food should be provided to everyone as a human right.
• Disabled people need to be provided with everything they need - not just to survive, but to live - by society.
• There should be a universal basic income.
• Strong consumer protection laws are needed to prevent exploitative relationships between companies and their consumers.
• Education should be free and accessible to everyone.
• There should be free public transportation.

Why haven't we achieved it yet? Why are socialism and communism portrayed as evil and/or a failed system?

Well, in short, because it goes against the interests of the rich capitalists. Controlling money means controlling resources, and controlling resources means power - that's how it has always been in history.

Elections are largely decided by billions of dollars from corporate sponsors. Elected officials are corrupt and the course of politics is decided by lobbying. This is pretty well-documented - there is a Princeton Study on the matter that concluded that the USA is not a democracy, because whether a certain bill passes or not has basically no correlation at all with what the bottom 90% of society prefer, and a lot of correlation with what the top 10% of society prefer.

On top of that, capitalists own most of the media. They produce mountains of red-scare propaganda to make people believe that socialism is when you share your toothbrush with your neighbor.

And for decades the CIA has murdered countless democratically elected socialists in Latin America and Africa, and the USA has sabotaged and waged wars both military and economic on any socialist or communist country, and has done absolutely everything to make it seem like socialism always fails without exception.

It's because the capitalists make it fail.

So what can we do to better the situation?

The biggest advantage that we have over the capitalists is that there is significantly more of us than of them. But to harness this advantage, as many people as possible need to understand the situation that we are in (class consciousness), and workers need to stick together and see each other not as economic enemies but as comrades in a struggle against a common enemy (class solidarity).

There are many things we can do. Organize. Have solidarity with our fellow workers. Talk to them about (dis-)satisfaction with company policy or pay. Join a union or socialist organization. Read socialist theory. Educate others. Go on strikes and demonstrations. Understand that immigrants and minorities are not your enemy, but capitalists are. Have solidarity with people who are homeless and/or jobless. It could happen to you, too.

Labor organization has achieved so much. Without it, we wouldn't have the weekend, minimum wage or the 40-hour workweek. While the only way to truly resolve class contradiction is an inevitable revolution and reorganization of society, we can improve working conditions under capitalism - not via electoral politics, but by putting the capitalists under enough pressure to force them to make concessions.

What about the other stuff?

There is still so much that I haven't addressed.

• The fact that our economy can't keep growing forever, because our planet has limited resources, and we are in a climate crisis that capitalism has failed to address.
• The fact that imperialism and neocolonialism is ongoing and first world luxuries are based on exploitation of third world countries.
• The way that fascism pits different sections of the working class against each other to prevent solidarity against capitalism.
• Historical materialism.
• The importance of intersectionality.

For further reading I recommend:

• Marx & Engels: Manifesto of the Communist Party
• Marx: Capital, A Critique of Political Economy
• Lenin: State and Revolution
• Lenin: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
• Luxemburg: Reform or Revolution
• Luxemburg: The Russian Revolution
• Engels: On Authority
• Parenti: Blackshirts & Reds

The www was originally created for sharing interconnected information (Markdown is, in many ways, what HTML originally aimed to be).

It has developed into a general-purpose application platform, today the web is probably the primary way to deploy end user applications. While such a technology is in itself useful and beneficial, it is built on frameworks created for manually writing documentation (HTML and CSS), which makes it, in many ways, fundamentally flawed.

Additionally, the strong focus on network interaction and applications that store data on a server rather than on the client machine creates privacy concerns. Lastly, the web has also been perverted from it's original purpose. Because fancy web technologies exist, everyone and their grandma thinks they have to use them. This has lead the accessibility of information to suffer; instead of providing you with information in a simple and readable manner, many sites throw fancy graphics and interactive/reactive elements at you.

Abusing web technologies like this hurts everyone:

• Users have to spend more time looking for the information they need and are easier distracted
• Scrapers and search engines have a harder time understanding the content. This also applies to client side tools/plugins (e.g. reader view)
• Sites take up a lot more more bandwith when downloading, and also take up more cpu/mem if they are interactive
• Web developers have to spend more time on building and maintaining the sites
• Because so much content on the web uses advanced features, you need a very feature rich browser even to access small subsets of the web. This creates a browser oligopoly, where only a few modern web browsers exist, and many of them rely on the same engine (Chromium). And because the web is so important, it subsequently creates/reinforces an operating system oligopoly, because modern browsers are huge and hard to port,
• Requiring JavaScript (or even CSS) to view a page is bad for privacy, because these technologies can be used for tracking/deanonymisation. Excluding users who choose to disable support for these technologies in their browser hurts privacy, even if your page does not use the technologies to track users.

Please, if you make a website that hosts information, keep your frontend simple and at least free of JavaScript and complex frameworks. Yes, I know you're a great programmer and want to show off your web development skills. But making a good website is a lot more about what you chose to leave out than what you chose to add. Show some restraint.

Intellectual property is the single most harmful thing humanity has ever created.

Applying the restrictions of physical objects to intellectual goods like ideas, media and software which are infinitely reproducable and sharable is a stupid, made up, concept that obviously primarily hinders the progress of humanity.

Since files can easily be copied, intellectual properly is largely ineffective at protecting people who want to sell their work. Piracy is easy, and tracking down pirates costs more than it's worth (depending on their opsec). Many people who pirate also wouldn't even be finanically able to purchase the product they are pirating, and estimates of losses are almost always inflated by disregarding this simple fact. DRM mostly worsens the quality of the product and worsens the paying user's experience, while being insecure by design (it can always be bypassed, it's just a matter of effort).

In practice, any small or medium sized entity producing intellectual goods professionally already can't rely on restricting the produced good, and has to enter different business models. E.g. selling support for software, offering cloud services/hosting, relying on trust/donations, doing art comissions etc. Copyright and intellectual property often even harm creators (every few years there is a new copyright strike drama on youtube).

Intellectual property exists to protect the interests of big companies who have the resources to take each other to court, and who want their "infinite money glitch" to go on forever (Being able to copy and sell software infinitely after it has been written).

IP is not a tool of justice or equality.

I agree with the FSF on the issue of intellectual property, I use their GPLv3 License for my projects, and I use many pieces of GNU software. This does not mean that I full endorse (or reject) the FSF and Stallman however.

Stallman has been associated with questionable takes in the past, and I find the FSF's behavior regarding naming issues (GNU/Linux vs. Linux, Free Software vs. Open Source) especially childish. If it gets the point across, there is no need to bitch about it. Use whatever terminology you want to.

The FSF also sees itself as an ethical authority regarding stuff like licenses or git hosters and is - again - very stubborn about it, in a way that doesn't really benefit them or the free software movement in any practical sense. I really don't care a lot about whether the FSF approved the license of a program I use. It seems like a hubris to me.

I'm also not too exclusionary about using free software, if proprietary software is useful to me, I will use it (Games are a notable example). I'd much rather use free software alternatives, but if there are no alternatives or existing alternatives are significantly worse I'd rather use software that (in some cases hypothetically) restricts my freedom. Apply some pragmatism. It must be noted however that it's crucial to not coerce people into using proprietary software. Being able to choose to, or choose not to consensually give up parts of your freedom should be part of freedom itself.

GitHub is proprietary and sucks in several ways, feature-wise. However, it's not primarily just a storage for your code, it's a social media platform. It's used to discover and collaborate on software. It's used by employers to discover people. I use GitHub for the same reason I use twitter and reddit. It's not so much about the features of the platform, it's about the (amount of) people that use it.

Using a more free alternative to GitHub is cool, self-hosting a git service is very cool, but I still see large advantages to using GitHub.

As an advocate of digital decentralization and federation, I fully understand the appeal of decentralized currencies. Ideally, currencies would not be dependent on central entities. In practice however, there are several major issues:

1. Many popular cryptocurrencies (like Bitcoin), contrary to popular belief, are not private/anonymous at all. Monero is the most well known exception to this (secure, private, and untraceable).
2. Cryptocurrencies suck for the reason all currencies without inherent, non-speculative value (which are all currencies that are at all practial) suck. Investing in crypto (just like investing into stocks, property or anything else) is nothing but gambling.
3. Even tho there is no central authority that can "infinitely print money" (which btw is an oversimplification of how governments interact with central banks), cryptocurrencies are a lot more unstable than fait currencies because significantly less people use them and even less people actually understand how they work.
4. Many blockchains are very centralized, with some entities controlling large parts of the network's hash rate. As an individual miner, you are stongly disadvantaged since dedicated ASICs are exponentially better at mining crypto than CPUs and GPUs usually built into PCs. Monero attempts to combat this by utilizing an ASIC proof algorithm which prevents devices that specialize on mining Monero, but even the Monero blockchain has been shown to be highly centralized. Entities who have a lot of fiat (like governments, banks and large corporations) are able to heavily exercise control over blockchains by acquiring the devices used to increase hash rate. Because the "real world" economy is so unjust and imbalanced, crypto is going to be as well. It's inseparable.
5. Proof of Work mining (which most currencies including Bitcoin and Monero use) is disastrous for the environment. To mine crypto, extreme amounts of energy and resources used to manufacture hardware are wasted.
6. Proof of Stake mining (which e.g. Ethereum uses) just benefits those who already posses, which heavily reinforces points 2. and 4.

TL;DR I recommend against using crypto unless you have a good reason. For the most part, crypto is useful for illegal and half-legal transactions, e.g. exercising free financial control as a minor (working and getting paid etc.), buying drugs or medicine (Such as DIY HRT for trans people). If you need to use crypto, use Monero.