To properly convey our immediate goals, we must first inform the reader of our basic positions, which are not shared homogeneously between those who contribute to our group, but which do inform the tactics of our organization, insofar as providing a reasoning for our goals.

Our ultimate intent is the desire of all communists: The realization of the communist revolution and the destruction of class society. This revolution can only be realized with the struggle of the proletarian class, and this revolution must be international. Let us elaborate.

First, what is the proletariat? This class is one which works for a wage, and, most importantly, cannot turn that wage into capital by making significant investments. That latter part is all too often omitted, but it is important, because it makes clear that the relationship which defines class is, to us, not a mere relation of (non-)ownership of the means of production, it is also a relationship of consumption, and a relationship which takes into account the social division of labor within society. We do not subscribe to a statistical view of class, be it the statistical view of the capitalist mainstream (that class is a mere name attributed to a threshold of income), or the statistical view of the left of capital (that class is purely a relation of ownership).

Today, those wage laborers who can turn wages into capital compose a different strata of wage labor, which was called the “labor aristocracy” in Marx’s time, but which today is far bigger than a few individuals, and thus composes a different strata of wage labor, sometimes referred to as the “middle-class” by a few writers (a term which has nothing to do with its definition in the common lexicon).

Social positions are not a moral indictment, and thus, it is perfectly possible for a holder of small capital to engage with communist militancy. What we are concerned about are the political tendencies these wage-dependent capital-holders present, which generally tend to be reactionary. Here, when we say “reactionary”, we mean in reaction to historical progress, and to the development of the means of production, in order to maintain a hold over a meager amount of capital which is likely to be liquidated. This sort of reaction can manifest itself with many varying ideological baggages, be they right-wing or left-wing, but this ideological character is non-exclusive.

Let us take reactionary values traditionally associated with the right, which are, in the less extreme expressions, characterized by concerns about certain types of “consumer freedom”, by defense of certain antitrust measures, and by the rigorous application of laws regarding the right of the individual inventor. The more extreme form is ultra-libertarian, or “hyper-capitalist”, and defends, among other things, the regression of the system of fiat currency back into the gold standard, or some equivalent standard, either real (like the “commodity basket” form, where the exchange-value of the currency is backed by the average price of certain basic goods) or imaginary (like cryptocurrency, where the exchange value is theoretically backed by compute time).

Notice that the defense of the individual inventor may go from being a right-wing talking-point, often paired with talk of the american dream, to a left-wing talking point paired with the defense of creative fields against automation. The anti-trust of yesterday, which was aimed against Microsoft and Internet Explorer, takes a wildly different character than the anti-trust of today, aimed at ByteDance and TikTok. The opposition to fiat currency, which was often correlated with antisemitic conspiracy theories about the “jewish central bankers”, is already becoming popular amongst some sects of the left-wing of capital, which view cryptocurrency as the first step towards some sort of financial upheaval. This is because the unifying factor here is not an ideological one, instead, it is a want to return to small production. Obviously, the clearest example of this today is the hilarious phenomena of people who call themselves “anti-capitalist” while defending a typical libertarian program from the early 2010s. Recognizing these tendencies is quite important for us, because it allows us to understand the root of many political phenomena within (and related to) the technology space.

Now, let us labor on the international nature of the revolution. We posit that there is basically no corner of the Earth which is untouched by capitalism, and that the capitalist mode of production has overtaken all previous forms, even at a local level. Today the vast majority of those who labor in the field are rural proletarians, and so-called “semi-feudalism” is not dominant anywhere at a national or regional level. Even at the level of the latifundia in South America, for example, farmers who live in abject poverty are chained to extremely precarious wage labor, in systems that aim to constrain the flow of their wage out of their immediate surroundings by keeping its circulation within the services of the latifundia itself. The existence of wages is what defines wage labor, not the circulation of the wage, and thus, we do not believe there is a need for an inter-class collaboration with the peasantry which would represent the interests of that class within the revolutionary movement, simply because the peasantry no longer really exists.

Also on the topic of international capital, it is important that we do not have a simplistic view of imperialism. We see imperialism as a stage of capitalism precisely because imperialism is also universal within the system, and thus, is not a binary, as many of those on the left of capital would claim. It is perfectly possible for a country to be imperialized while being imperialist at the same time. The clearest example of this in the modern world is Iran, but the most instrumental example is Rwanda, a small african state whose bourgeoisie is enriched via extraction of diamonds and lithium in the DR Congo, and which serves not only as an outpost of euro-american imperialism, but instead acts as a broker, itself holding a lot of influence.

With our views on class and international capital out of the way, we then proceed to our views on revolutionary doctrine. While the previous comments on class were relatively thorough, they were so because they inform our actions, because an understanding of class is critical to constructive work. In contrast to our views on class, we do not hold any firm stance on the correct line from the 1800s until today, as in, it is not an important task for us to correctly retell the previous 200 years of history, because we will never be the vanguard of the revolution. However, there are some instrumental comments to be made.

First, on Marx and communism itself. Proletarian doctrines have always existed, along with proletarian organizations, but we view the communists as taking on an essential task. The most well-known communist militant, Karl Marx, pitched in with instrumental work by being the first to convey the methods of the class struggle, and by defining a large share of the goals and means of organization we utilize today. We believe the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) to be an essential text because it is precisely the first pamphlet which takes on these tasks, analyses, and goals.

We stand by a large swathe of Marx’s work, and we do not adore him, that is to say, we attach no emotional or moral value to the label of “communist”, and we don’t view someone as a worse person because they are not a communist, but we do believe that rejecting the whole of Marx’s work excludes someone from the communist movement. Of course, the movement is fundamentally different from its labels, and it is no business of ours to decide on the meaning of words, or to dictate what someone may or may not call themselves. The label of “communist” today is quite useless, as it applies to a range of movements, and clarifies nothing. There are things that need doing which are way more important than trying to secure the meaning of a word. Fighting over meanings is, above everything else, a fight proper to an “ideology”, to an identity with no substance which seeks only to reenact the past.

On a related note, we also see “socialism” to be a useless word today, and “socialist” to be an even more useless label. When reading anything we write or which we reproduce, keep in mind that, to us, socialism has nothing to do with any state, and is already a society without classes, wage labor, and commodity production, where significant remnants of the old society still live on. It is truly the “lower stage of communism”. The dictatorship of the proletariat is not socialist. Let us not leave it merely implied, and outright say that this means we completely reject stalinism, or any group which labels itself as communist while defending concepts such as “socialism in one country”, and defending the existence of a “socialist commodity form”.

Second, on the period our movement currently exists in. The movement has been in free-fall since the early 20th century, barring some outbursts here and there. The trendline of activity for the last two generations has firmly gone downwards, and today, independently of the reader’s opinion on the party form, they ought to admit that there is no class party, no leading class organization, and that, furthermore, the proletariat is not autonomous, it is not a class-for-itself.

Ever since the late 1980s, the situation has been especially dire, and there is no denying that the dissolution of the capitalist USSR signaled a pretty big shift. The massive gap in communist activity between the 1990s and early-2010s means that the movement is still prone to decline, simply because the senior members of many organizations are dying off, and the gap in experience between the militants of yesterday and today is significant. In practice, this decline means many groups which were founded in the 20th century will change drastically or dissolve, and this is, in fact, already happening.

It is because of the unfavorable period we live in that our group exists in the first place. Any communist organizations that exist today cannot focus on too many things at once, and just have too much on their table to coordinate within and in between themselves on matters of informatics.

This means we are not an equal part of the revolutionary sphere, as we do not see ourselves as an equal to other groups, in that we don’t aim to form a class organization in coalition with other revolutionaries. Instead, if the RTC still exists in any significant capacity once the movement is mature, it will liquidate itself within the leading class organization. This is important, because any influence on equal footing from a group such as ours, which is focused on a single field of endeavor, could only contribute to a technocratic political line. Liquidation is imperative, because it works towards ending the divisions of labor within the communist movement.

OUR GOALS

The Revolutionary Technical Collective (RTC) has the following immediate goals:

1. Utilizing technical-scientific knowledge to the benefit of the communist movement.
2. Mounting an expressive section of communists with technical inclinations.
3. Promoting technical literacy in the revolutionary sphere.

Let us address them point by point, starting from the first one: “Utilizing technical-scientific knowledge to the benefit of the communist movement”. This is, admittedly, a broad goal, and it is deliberately so. Today, this manifests itself in a quite trivial manner, and it means providing the movement with web hosting, circulating small utilities for content management, and dabbling with a project here and there which may or may not be helpful. Of course, as the movement grows, the scope expands, and one day we may be able to implement a solution which is truly beneficial beyond saving on labor-time, and we are actively working towards this. Part of this is not only developing new solutions, but gauging what value existing solutions may provide. With so many things out there looking for a problem to solve, we might just have the problem they’re looking for.

The second point, “Mounting an expressive section of communists with technical inclinations”, would be self-explanatory, if it wasn’t for the fact that no one is in agreement of what a communist actually is. We accept most people who want to be a part of our group (and this document does a great deal in filtering the ones we wouldn’t accept), as long as they agree with our simple definition of the communist movement as a proletarian movement against class society and against the international system of capitalism which exists today. “Technical inclinations” here has an emphasis on computer technology, but is not exclusive to it. An inclination can be a deep dedication, but it can also mean a willingness to learn in a constructive manner (we specify this later on in the document).

We then arrive at our final point: “Promoting technical literacy in the revolutionary sphere”. Here, we use technical literacy in a meaning specific to computer tech, as in, the ability for someone to understand the basic functions of the machine and how to make use of them. This is, of course, broad, as Gerald Sussman and Hal Abelson put it in Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1985): “The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer’s spells”, abstract machines on top of other abstract machines which eventually map to a variety of infinitely complex real machines, and thus, “literacy” here is subjective. So we shall further define literacy as being able to use computers in a productive capacity.

To explain this, we shall reproduce a passage found in Contours of the World Commune, published by the Endnotes journal, which perfectly explains the phenomena of reliance and technical illiteracy:

Like every new productive force, the “digital revolution” can at times point beyond what currently exists and come into conflict with the given relations of production and ownership. Capital has responded with “innovations” that curtail the potential of ever-increasing computing power. In the software industry, a large portion of the research has gone into enforcing the commodity form in the digital sphere for many years. Furthermore, personal computers are no longer “universal machines”: their possibilities are limited by their assigned interfaces and programs so that they function only as the terminus of digital capitalism. This is justified as “user-friendliness”: anyone who uses a computer for reasons outside of research, development and production today is no longer supposed to understand what is going on in the device, and is instead made dependent on digital services. As with most productive forces within capitalism, the development of the computer is characterized by the fact that in dealing with them, the user does not learn any of the skills proper to the productive force. On the contrary, we find ourselves in a situation in which the widespread usability of computers is paired with an extensive digital illiteracy. Technological progress has become a source of social regression; the culturally pessimistic suspicion that smarter phones require ever dumber people is not that far-fetched.

The networked world we live in has introduced new possibilities, but it has mostly introduced new problems in terms of effective agitation and propaganda, along with creating new vectors for communications surveillance. While encryption is now ubiquitous, so is good-faith in the systems which act as the new-age mailmen. While people are reading more than ever in the history of widespread literacy, interpretative ability has declined, with the majority of the population of the United States being reduced to the level of reading comprehension of middle-school entrants. This, of course, not to talk about language comprehension in general. The current age has put us in an interesting position, because, while the level of education has gone down, the transfer of information has been individualized to the extreme, by nature of billions having an internet-connected device in their pocket.

This makes everyone a node in the network of capitalism, but not all nodes are equal. In the infinitely complex Input/Output model of a networked class society, specific kinds of information are more widespread, and the non-trivial, meaningful output of some nodes is incomparable to all the rest combined. Compare this with what we had a century ago, where there was widespread illiteracy, but the digesting of information was not individual, and was instead a constructive and collective process, and one quickly realizes that we are lagging far behind the modern world in terms of how we work.

All in all, we must adapt to this new era, and we must empower all militants with the knowledge to use the computer as a universal machine. Having a small group of people empowered with technical knowledge is of no use, because, in a scenario where the movement is large enough, those people will be separated from other kinds of activity and won’t be able to use what they know to its fullest extent. We promote technological literacy in the same way the communists of yesteryear promoted literacy itself.

We will promote this literacy by engaging in dialogue with other groups, and by publishing educational materials. Constant external conversations are important, because they allow us to get our priorities in order by being aware of certain practical realities that exist “in the field” and internally within those groups. Everything we publish should be accessible and straightforward, while not saving on explanations. How we do this is specified later on, in our guidelines for written works.

GOVERNANCE

We are more similar in our methods to a development house than to a true “organization” with an exclusive programme. Someone could summarize the way we work with the big tech moniker of “move fast and break things”, with the difference that we are not moving fast in order to maximize the extraction of superprofits, or breaking things in order to undercut competitive alternatives. Anyone within our group can embark on a new project, with each member of the group benefiting from shared feedback and purpose. Of course, there are things which are more important than others, however, something which is not that significant today may become an object of attention tomorrow, and vice-versa.

Our group operates organically, on a method known as “organic centralism”. This does not mean that we are politically wavering, instead, it means that we are guided by theses and manuals, rather than statutes and spreadsheets. One of the biggest obstacles for the movement today is overcoming mechanisms that were developed when it was far bigger, but today serve only to hinder our work. This is why we adopt an extremely streamlined hierarchy.

For the purpose of coordination, a leader, which, in the organic centralist tradition is called a “Center”, is appointed, and maintains their position for an indeterminate amount of time. While opposition may come and go, time is set aside once a year in a meeting to discuss the situation of the Center. The Center may delegate power as they wish, however, any power which is delegated tends to be maintained by those it was delegated to. Power should be delegated in any scenario where withholding it creates internal bureaucratic obstacles, and, in order to avoid issues relating to trust, systems may be created to handle certain actions where mutual agreement may not provide enough of a guarantee.

The RTC is consensus-driven, barring any situation in which the consensus goes directly against the basic points on communism which are outlined here. This creates a scenario where open disagreements are allowed and where a certain viewpoint is not “codified”, while ensuring that any major disagreements which lead to any sort of fracturing happen for a very good reason.

“Consensus” does not mean a majority, but a general agreement. Members within our group are not “equal”, because the social fabric of any organization is not equal, and deliberately recognizing this is extremely important. Members are subject to the same standards of behavior, which are applied equally (and with extreme prejudice), but to predicate governance on the notions of equality leads to a so-called “meritocracy”, where relations become almost robotic, and standards are instrumentalized to beat down on those who are less fortunate, or who lack on knowledge. Similarly, inconsequential “agreements” between those who are disconnected from the whole of the group mean nothing, even if they are a numeric majority, and are predicated on bureaucratic notions.

Because of this, we do not inherently put everything to a vote, and some decisions may even be made without consultation, depending on how centered a project is on a specific individual or sub-group.

On the topic of projects: They are also consensus-driven, and any disagreements may be taken to a debate, with the weight of contributions of each participant being of importance for conflict resolution. If participants so choose, they may create systems of governance within projects, welcoming contributions from individuals outside the RTC. However, those projects are still within the organization, and the Center is free to intervene in any topic specific to conduct. This is mostly to avoid a common scenario in free and open-source software, where codes of conduct are shifted around for years. To avoid splits over possessiveness or over development direction, any fork by an RTC contributor is still internally maintained, and changes between it and mainline are merged between versions pending reconciliation.

CONDUCT

A standard of conduct is expected from all members. This applies internally, and may apply externally, given the gravity of a violation.

Members may not engage in antisocial behavior, that is, behavior which is hostile to other individuals. Antisocial behavior includes:

• Offensive comments relating to mental or physical disability and neuroatypicality. While references to broad terms may be acceptable, e.g “bumbling idiocy”, directly referencing a condition is unacceptable.
• Aggressions, direct or implied, relating to race, gender, appearance, and sexual orientation.
• Exposing aspects of someone’s private life.
• Inappropriate non-sexual contact, which involves repeated attempts to inquire about personal topics. To avoid this being used in order to repress social awkwardness, contact is considered inappropriate as soon as someone clearly requests for it to cease.
• Closely following someone’s behavior (“stalking”) and intimidation.
• Sexual harassment, in any shape or form. This includes sending unsolicited sexual content, making unsolicited advances, and sexual aggression. Violations of this standard are treated extremely seriously.

One of the foundations of our group is the ability to ask questions and to answer them, with members building upon the knowledge of one-another. Because of this, we have certain standards for productively asking and answering questions. These standards apply to both political and technical matters.

We follow the principle of not asking to ask. When in a text conversation with someone, don’t say:

“Does anyone here know Linux?”

When someone says this, they are introducing friction into the conversation because of the non-immediate nature of text chatting. Instead, ask outright:

“Does anyone here know how I can do XYZ on Linux?”

Additionally, people who ask questions about technical issues are expected to inform the specific obstacle they are encountering. For example, when asking questions about code, instead of saying:

“Hey guys, this doesn’t compile: …”

Copy and paste the entirety of the error output, and try to explain what you understand, even if you think you may be wrong, because the way you rationalize an issue may point to the mistake you made. In the case of compile errors, you should enable as many warnings as possible during the compile process, as errors may be directly related to other mistakes. In the case of C, for example, you could prevent banging your head at the wall over a null pointer assignment by just using the -Wall -Wextra -Wpedantic flags (if you’re using GCC). Then, you might not even need to ask a question.

If the issue you’re having seems common enough, you should search it on the web first to try and find a solution. Read through any available documentation so that you can find out the proper usage for your tools.

Answering also requires standards. The RTC is a voluntary association, and looking down on questions is unacceptable behavior. When someone asks a question and they’ve not asked it perfectly, or haven’t read the documentation, don’t tell them to “RTFM or GTFO”, instead, point them to where they can read more about something. It’s not your task to reproduce entire articles worth of information, but you should point people to where the information is.

LEGAL STATUS OF RTC WORKS

All works released under the Revolutionary Technical Collective name are dedicated to the Public Domain or released under the most permissive terms allowed by the country an author lives in. When one contributes to one of our projects, they do so knowing that their contribution will be released to the world under the Creative Commons 1.0 Universal. For each project, there will be an individual agreement, where each participant relinquishes all their rights over a work.

An exception may apply in the rare case where we are releasing a piece of commercial software with the express goal of fund-raising, or if, for some reason, we end up publishing a project that can be misused. In those cases, they will still be published under permissive terms.

We release most works to the Public Domain because, even if we had a license, it would not be enforced at all, except in extreme cases which are only warranted by works that may be misused, and where the State would cover our legal costs. It is better to avoid the legal minefield of international copyright law, and release as much as possible from its grasp, reverting to the most permissive terms possible if a specific country does not allow Public Domain dedications.

The dedications also prevent the possibility that, if we write anything important, and if a generation from now the world is still under the grasp of capitalism, there will be no petty squabbling among successors of our contributors, with family members trying to claim rights over an anonymous work, lest they start a “Foundation” and sell courses in their name.