Manifesto

I’d like to clearly lay out my ideas, theories and philosophies regarding FOSS governing systems and FOSS in politics as a general subject. I’m going to try to methodically present all of my ideas in a convincing manner, in hopes of making you believe me. This is the Marxocratic manifesto.

Collectivization

In an ideal governing system for FOSS, collectivization is needed. By collectivization, I mean owning collectively. Why would this be so good? Well, what I believe is that this would help to combat corruption. One of the core things I want to collectivize is the project’s source code itself. Why would this “combat corruption”? Well, using this method, no person can make decisions themself, with democracy taking the decision-making process to a new level. Instead of one or just a few people controlling the project, everyone would. This is just one of the methods that we use to combat corruption.

Direct democracy

Another part of Marxocracy I want to emphasize is direct democracy, all people wanting to vote for a new feature in your project: Shall. The optimal way to run this is trough ranked-choice voting, where you present the voters with 3+ options to choose from which the voters then rank. Every voter shall give all options a score from 1-x where x is the amount of options, you then award the choices the amount (of votes) that the voter has given it, the choice with the most votes win and shall be added. A modern democracy tends to be a representative democracy. While this may sometimes work in real-life, it never works in FOSS. You see, a party is less an organization than a package of beliefs, which more often than not leads to tribalism (if you want to know why that’s a problem, refer to FOSS-culture). In Marxocracy and FOSS-democracy in general, it’s important to be anti-partisan, meaning not being for any party, and not wanting any parties. There’s very much a reason for me citing direct democracy as a core part of Marxocracy, and not just democracy.

Anti-plutocracy

Marxocracy shall strongly emphasize anti-plutocracy as one of it’s goals. With “plutocracy”, I mean “rule of the rich”, which often occurs when big corporations “donate” money to FOSS-projects in order to control them. It’s very easy to circumvent this, by not offering a donation option. If big corporations can’t donate to you, they can’t control you.

Conrestrictionism

Conrestrictionism is the idea that – fundamentally – software cannot fully thrive with unlimited consumption. Unlike Conauthoritarianism: A lot of restrictions on consumption, Conrestrictionists only want some restriction allowing for a project to thrive.

This is another fundamental principle of Marxocracy: The belief that there shouldn’t be many restrictions on software, but that you can sacrifice total liberty for a higher quality product and to assure for the thriving of the FOSS-project. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,

Quality over extensibility.

Which I personally believe is a really good core principle to hold.

Egalitarianism

Nobody – and I mean nobody – should be better than another. Egalitarianism is a core principle of Marxocracy because, without equality, a society is meaningless. Anybody being better than another just leads to infighting and exploitation, hence why Marxocracy emphasizes egalitarianism.

Anti-leadership

No leadership shall prevail. In Marxocracy, the FOSS-project should be community-driven and not led by one or many power-hungry elites. This, of course, refers back to egalitarianism as to make everyone equal, no one shall lead the herd.

Radicalism and revolution

Pushing for change is a very important core fundamental of Marxocracy, as sitting and waiting will never help. “Sitting and waiting” in this sense is called Godotism and is incredibly unhelpful.

Sentiocracy

Thinkocracy is largely: To think. It’s a governmental system where much thought is put into governance, yet not much is enacted. A thinkocracy is controlled by thinkocrats (the professional term for “thinker”).

Actocracy is: To do, or: To act without thought. Though more successful than thinkocracy it’s arguably worse since thought is key to most policies. The professional term for do-er (and for a follower of this governmental system) is actocrat.

Actocracy-Democracy is a democracy in which people don’t tend to give much thought into anything, yet they still participate.

Sentiocracy is: to act and think, and is – as such – the most successful and – sadly – utopian governance system of the three “Waiters’ ideologies” (thinkocracy, actocracy and sentiocracy). It takes aspects from both thinkocracy and actocracy which inevitably leads to a better world. Not to be confused with sentiocracy-democracy: A democratic implementation of the core principles to sentiocracy.

The above is my formal proposal to mediate between the two sides of thinkocrat and actocrat, with the preferred version of sentiocracy being – of course – sentiocracy-democracy. Direct sentiocracy-democracy is – from here on out – one of the core principles of marxocracy.

On extensibility

Marxocracy’s general philosophy on extensibility tends to be:

Any unnecessary customization is bad customization.

By which we mean that if any customization is generally unneeded, it simply weighs down the project.

Consumption principles of Marxocracy

I’d like to present 5 core principles in Marxocracy for consumption, these should be followed closely. They are

  1. Any unnecessary customization is bad customization.
  2. Lightweightedness in a FOSS-project is – of course – one of the most fundamental parts of a good such. Overextensibility often leads to less lightweightedness, and as such: Leads to less quality.
  3. Conrestrictionism is a fundamentally good principle and should be the core of Consumption-Marxocracy.
  4. Quality over extensibility.
  5. The most important fundamental of Conrestrictionism is that some liberties must be sacrificed for the good of the project as a whole.

Code of conduct

While actually having a code of conduct in your project is heavily discouraged, there are a whole load of implied rules. One could say this could be a “Marxocratic code of conduct” of sorts:

We, the developers of the FOSS-project, pledge to follow this code of conduct to any cost. There are 3 core rules to this code of conduct, they are

  1. Egalitarianism. Everyone is equal, regardless of gender, age, experience, race, ethnicity, nationality religion and other similar traits.
  2. Collectivism. The source code of this software is owned collectively by every contributor, and as such: No one can govern it themselves.
  3. Marxocracy. Follow the marxocratic principles at all costs.

A lot of other rules are implied, and you – a hopefully decent person – can probably understand, imply and apply them yourself.

Why is it generally discouraged to have a code of conduct in your project? Well, I think I summarized it best on a commit I made on my OS:

A few weeks ago I saw some community standards on how to make a [Github] repo. I, eagerly waiting for something to do, added these in with delight. Now, looking back, I realize that the community standards were utter and complete bullshit and that you should never follow them. I think it also gave of a corporatized “squeaky clean” look. For example with the “CODE OF CONDUCT”. Like, what the fuck? I am a firm believer that software should not be corporatized, and this just felt wrong. Also, if you need a document to tell you what you can and can’t do; I don’t want your [contribution]. Isn’t it like implied that you shouldn’t be racist, sexist and homophobic? Who thinks “Hmm… I wonder if I can say something bad about gay people here. Let’s check the code of conduct! Then I’ll know if I can be an anti-gay womanizer [nazi]!”!? If anyone reading this needs an arbitrary paper to tell you what to do; get out.

Anti-fascism

Anti-fascism must be pushed at all costs, a great way to do this is to use the Antifa MIT license, which has the following disclaimer before the MIT license:

The following conditions must be met by any person obtaining a copy of this software:

“Fascist” can be understood as any entity which supports radical authoritarian nationalism. For example: Donald Trump is a fascist; if you donated to his campaign then all rights provided by this license are not granted to you.

On AI-collectivization

I want to dedicate this section of this chapter to AI-collectivization. Once upon a time a person I knew said something like:

”[Communism and tech don’t go together and communism is bad] /…/ Unless you’re like a ‘Tech bro communist’ who wants to own AI collectively.”

I – being the person I am – responded:

“I do in fact want to own AI collectively!”

I said this after pondering for 2 seconds and it was kind of impulsive for me to say. But when I thought more and more and more about it, I realized… I was probably correct? Owning AI collectively would help stop corporate greed and make everyone happy (well, except for the corporations, but they can cry me an ocean).

Classical definition

I’d like to dedicate the last part of this chapter to the classical definition of Marxocrcacy, or Classical-marxocracy, it goes like this:

A classless (which in our case means “no one is better than another”), stateless (which in our case means no BDFLs [Benevolent Dictator For Life(s)] and no core leadership) and moneyless (which relates to the “classless” part, but also means “no oligarchs” and depending on your decision “no donations”) society where the workers (developers) control the means of production (being pull-requests and code-contributions, which is a core part in FOSS anyways).*

Next chapter: Conclusion