What programming language is marxism and what programming language is political anarchism?

What if you look at societies like a computer program and the governments like a programming language?


I was thinking that anarchism is asm or binary and Marxism is java or a managed dotnet language?

Nah, I'd say both could be likened to BASIC - they deal with abstracts and logic based on the assumption things work a given way, but not the granular details of how things actually work. We could say the same about any ideology, really.

Marxism strikes me more as Python..

Hey that's a unique way of looking at it! After some thought.... here is my take:

Marxism = Visual Basic. It looks clean, easy and so inviting to step right in......and get buried with. Ahh.. so much the simple appearance covers and figures you never need to know about.

Capitalism = Ruby. The learning curve is almost beyond being worth it...but when it works well, it's a thing of beauty. Oh, but one comma or bracket out of place and the whole thing breaks.

Socialism (European Style as opposed to Communist) = Turbo C of the old variety. It's clean, simple and what you write is what it does. Nothing much hidden and if you don't like it....you can choose another. Not much room for anything else.

Anarchism = Original Basic of the MS-DOS and CP/M days. What you see is truly what you get and it's as simple as it comes. Grade school kids can learn it inside a couple days and it does real neat and fun things! It just doesn't do much on a large scale and really gets lost on complexity life requires.

Hey.. What do ya know, they all really DO fit a language when you stop and think about it!

I would take a gander that Marxism would be Cobol. Something that was thought to be great at the time, implemented by large bureaucracies, but ultimately faded out because it couldn't keep up with modern day programming.

Anarchism is definitely ASM. Very powerful, but you're easily able to lose focus with the complexity of the program. Yeah it is a processor language, but a nightmare to create anything big with.

reply to post by othwald

So would that place Capitalism as Fortran? Simple enough, yet powerful enough to land a man on moon. But not overly adaptable to emerging technologies.

Congrats, OP! Neat way at looking the mess that is government. S&F!

reply to post by LetsGoViking


I like this one.

Cool.

reply to post by John_Rodger_Cornman


Hah... ok let me give this a shot as a web developer.

Anarchism = JavaScript. You just structure things however you want, there's hardly any strictly defined syntax rules, just go with the flow baby. Lots of crazy and amazing things can happen with this language. In fact you'll find that this language behaves differently depending on which web browser you use, we can't even agree how it's supposed to work.

Communism = PHP. This is one of the most extensively documented web languages, having a huge user base who can all contribute their free time developing and enhancing this open language for all those who use it. You can achieve fairly amazing results with this language but there are more powerful options out there.

Capitalism = ASP.NET. Proprietary baby. It's all about the patents and the profit son. It works well at times, assuming you know all the tricks of the trade and what precautions to take. The basic concept seems simple enough, it's popular and used in a lot of serious projects by people who dedicate their careers to this language.