These days I don't see much production around.

It's probably somewhere in the industrial zones on the outskirts of cities, but it's not something many people do.

As a software developer I produce code. How would you exert democratic control over means of such production? Will it involve lots of tin foil?

> As a software developer I produce code. How would you exert democratic control over means of such production?

Open source software is already a model that approximates such democratic production. If us developers didn't have to make a wage to survive, how would we develop software?

Frankly speaking, I would prefer a fair amout of income inequality to that.

Exactly - and speaking of class here is further speculation on semantics of an equitable world system: as late as possible dynamic binding(real time adaptation for all actors), lexical scope (affinity groups), functions that provide utility for the masses rather than fragile hierarchies of turgid dominance(object oriented is the perfect description of our current economic and political structures. Beside how much cooler and arrogant does it sound to describe your political leaning as “functional”).

"Abolition of class. Democratic control over the means of production"

Oh wow, these people still exist.

We tried that in the last century and it ended up being the most horrific, mass-murdering, totalitarian, controlling era in all of history.

About half of my schoolmates growing up in Canada came from places like Cambodia, Vietnam, Ukraine, Russia, Czech, China, Serbia, Slovenia, Poland, Estonia, Hungary ... see the common thread there? :)

> Cambodia

> Vietnam

Buddy. I've got some news for you.

The Communists were the root problem in that area, obviously they came about due to other forms of ostensible dysfunction, but they were the worst, possibly the worst ever ... and really the core of the problem.

And FYI Cambodians were not fleeing bombs dropped near their homes by Americans, they were fleeing Communists who murdered 3 of 8 million, making it one of the worst genocides in history, easily comparable (on the same scale as) the '6 million' who died at the hands of the Nazis.

Everyone from there hates the Communists, much like almost everyone fleeing Cuba hates Fidel, it seems their only supporters are those who are not from there , and who have a very academic view of it all.

bingo.

There's no revelation that geopolitics is complicated, nor is there any abnegation of blame which squarely upon the Communists for their mass murder of Cambodians, of their long war in Vietnam, and resulting totalitarian control and oppression of Vietnamese people for generations.

That sounds very much like "we the people have voted to take your factory". That is, it sounds like the "democratic" in "democratic people's republic".

Fortunately, we have this Constitution that places limits on the amount of democracy we have, partly to keep it from running amuck in exactly that way...

Class is much more than income (or wealth), and enforcing income equality won't get rid of classes.

No, but income equality with a class system would cause the system to destabilize. The long-term behavior of such a system would have to resolve the contradictions of capitalism.

Democratic control? You mean that 51% can bar the other 49% from having access to the means of production?

Collective ownership of all MacBook Pros? Or of my efforts with the one I use? I suppose I wouldn't get to choose the terms with which I distribute my software, at the very least?