Dot-Communism Is Already Here 554
thanosk sends in a story at Wired Magazine about how online culture is, in many ways, trending toward communal behavior. Sharing and collaboration have become staples of active participation on the Internet, while not necessarily incorporating a particular ideology or involving a government.
"Most people in the West, including myself, were indoctrinated with the notion that extending the power of individuals necessarily diminishes the power of the state, and vice versa. In practice, though, most polities socialize some resources and individualize others. Most free-market economies have socialized education, and even extremely socialized societies allow some private property.
Rather than viewing technological socialism as one side of a zero-sum trade-off between free-market individualism and centralized authority, it can be seen as a cultural OS that elevates both the individual and the group at once. The largely unarticulated but intuitively understood goal of communitarian technology is this: to maximize both individual autonomy and the power of people working together. Thus, digital socialism can be viewed as a third way that renders irrelevant the old debates."
Re:no. (Score:4, Informative)
Which - to quote the tragically overlooked Star Cops [imdb.com] - means "without ruler", not "without order".
I'm sure you knew that, but it's frustrating how many people don't.
Re:Communal != Communism (Score:2, Informative)
Communism is a socio-economic structure and political ideology that promotes the establishment of an egalitarian, classless, stateless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general.
Let's get that definition here, so people don't go off on a tangent, talking about stuff that isn't actually communism. ... Like this bullshit / flamebait article.
Re:no. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:False opening statement (Score:3, Informative)
Actually you've just beautifully illustrated his point. He was saying that we're indoctrinated with a false dichotomy that either it's the state or its the individual, and there's no compromise. He's arguing that in actual fact the greatest benefit to both comes somewhere in the middle, which is what you're going on about yourself in the rest of your post. By failing to see that point you're actually illustrating his idea.
Incidentally, the USSR wasn't the fucking Borg. There wasn't some Marxist Hive Mind in which individuals are inidentifiable. There's a lot of hero worship in Russia and China, in much the same sense that there's plenty of group pride in the USA.
Re:Completely confused (Score:5, Informative)
Sometimes it leads to collusion
I don't think that word means what you think it means... How can total volunteerism lead to anything forced, as through fraud or the violation of rights?
Which can also lead to progress.
That is no justification for the inherent violation of individual rights that comes with such actions, though. That is why free market capitalism is the only moral system.
capitalism also demands forced collaboration
Words have meanings, regardless of whether you choose to acknowledge them. Any examples you could label as "force" under capitalism would be restrictions on the violations of individual rights - ie, self-defense or government retaliation against force.
Re:He is describing Anarchism (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed, few people recognize that one of Anarchism's greatest proponents was a leader in the International Workingmen's Association, along with Marx. Their political (but not economic) differences eventually led to a split in the International. And Bakunin predicted quite early that Marx's "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" would simply be a dictatorship. He best summed this up by saying, "Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice, socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality".
Re:Nothing new, but encouraging (Score:3, Informative)
Americans can't imagine how other people could want something different from what they have, and how could they think different from what they, Americans, think. I don't know if it's true, but it's a very interesting POV.
sounds more like a Christian view rather than just an American view, but I guess since a large portion of our population is Christian it may still hold up. Either that or its just easier not to try to think about other's POV. Take your pick, I'm too lazy to pick for you :P
US != West (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not quite sure where the author got that idea. The US has always been based on the idea that the individual is paramount.
I think you answered your own question. He got that idea from the US and, as is unfortunately rather stereotypical, forgot that there are more countries than the US in "the west". In most of those countries there is far more of a balance between the individual and the state. In fact even in the US this seems to be rapidly becoming the case because power is held increasingly by corporations and while US laws seem to regard these as individuals of some description they are in fact communal groups with rigid heirarchies.
Re:Communal != Communism (Score:3, Informative)
Agreed. Commun-ism as presented by the Marxist-Leninist-Maoists is a particular form of communalism that is mandatory and top-down. It advocated class warfare and violent revolution. At the very best, it was entirely amoral. And today, it is entirely discredited.
Having said that, it was a reaction to some pretty terrible stuff that was going on at the time. And certainly, when they weren't indoctrinating their students with propaganda, you could get a damn fine education in many of those countries for free.
The problem was that the particular solution, all things taken together, was actually worse than what it was trying to remedy. Communists ended up in factories just like they would have under capitalists, only the factories were government owned, and so they were accountable to no one. Capitalists are good at polluting places, but have you seen some of the insanely polluted areas of the Soviet Union and China?
All of this is the result of top-down Communism. Do you think similar results would have been seen if initiatives came from the population rather than from the Party?
For communal initiatives to work, the people involved need to be willing participants who have an enlightened understanding that their contribution, and their forbearance in not trying to cheat the system, are the key elements. It may well take a revolution of sorts, but not a violent one. Certainly not a class war.
I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding between people who vote for more government because they believe that we need to work together, and those who vote against bigger government. Improving our ability to work together toward a common goal without a profit motive is not "Communism" nor is it "socialism". It's simply people working together on their own to develop their own solutions from bottom up. Unfortunately, the -isms have staked out the territory in a way that is completely counterproductive to making communal strategies work.
On one hand, you've got the Communists and socialists who are in favor if public ownership and working together towards a goal, but you have to tolerate their bureaucratic, politicized top-down mandates.
On the other hand, you have the capitalists who I believe rightly reject the intrusion and top down control of socialism, but then regard *any* community project as being Communistic, simply because it sounds like something a Communist would say.
In reality, the linkage could not be more destructive. Why do we believe that top down control actually helps communal projects? Just look at what happened to the "Communists". They started out as a group that wanted power, and have turned into nationalist fascists in everything but name and flavor.
I'm 100% in favor of breaking down capitalism into something that is more equitable for everyone. But we do need to understand that just because you give things to people for "free", doesn't mean you have made the world a better place or that it is even "communal". There still needs to be some sort of accounting about the true costs of programs and communal projects or you will find that against all odds, you have made the world a worse place to live in. Control and coordination of some form is needed, but it is a necessary evil, not a solution by itself.
Re:The problem with Communism (Score:4, Informative)
So why the need to force it to happen through a government-backed monopoly?
Because, NOMINALLY, the government is accountable to the people and will not abuse its monopoly. A private enterprise owning all the roads will. The market will converge to a monopoly due to network effects.
"Oh, you have a road, how nice. It's a real shame it costs consumers 1000$ to cross the roads adjacent to yours."
Judge for yourself whether that's reality.
In economics, there's something called a Vickrey Auction, where you have n distinct goods and m players, each valuing each subset S of {1..n} at different levels.
(having 23 volumes of a 24 volume encyclopedia is worth less than 23/24 times the value of a full encyclopedia; having a million apples is worth less than one million times the value of one apple: they rot)
It's possible to solve a Vickrey Auction for maximal social benefit (IIRC), and each person ends up paying their externality---that is, how much "damage" they cause to the other participants.
I wonder if microeconomics 101 (supply curve crosses demand curve at the market clearing price) can be derived from this.
But I assume it's the reasoning behind green taxes on gas (you pay for the damage you cause to others due to pollution) and weight taxes (since your heavy car wears out the roads more than other cars, you pay for the repair work in proportion to how much you cause it).
In some economic games, government intervention is preferable to anarchy (in theory). ISTR network construction and/or routing being among those games.
Re:communism? (Score:3, Informative)
Right on. It seems that this author is profoundly unfamiliar with his own heritage, and so is grasping out for the label 'socialism,' even though it doesn't make much sense. Tocqueville investigated what he found to be the peculiarly American tendency toward association.
One could go on pulling relevant quotes from Democracy in America on associations and civil society, but it's apparent that the author of the Wired article has either 1) never read any literature on civil society, or 2) has an agenda to push regardless.
Re:Nothing new, but encouraging (Score:3, Informative)
"I think therefor I am," was the first step in a long, convoluted attempt by Descartes to prove the existence of God.
Re:The Inviasible Gun (Score:3, Informative)
"Capitalism is about the right for individuals to own property"
Not. Capital is not property; property is not capital. Capitalism is about giving almighty power to capital disregarding everything else.
"Communism claims that individuals are wasteful and inefficient"
Not. Communism claims that individuals should be liberated from the tiranny of capital as an almighty power.
"only an all powerful, all seeing state can best manage the resources and labor of a society for greatest good."
Not. Marx states that only a temporal all powerful all seeing state can crush away the minority of those few greedy individuals that control society by means of capital and use their power to perpetuate such 'statu quo'. Once the goal acomplished, such powerful state machinery would dismantle itself and vanish.
Re:no. (Score:4, Informative)
the real issue is statism vs. individualism.
Correction: the issue is collectivism vs individualism. Collectivism doesn't necessarily imply statism - that's why there are anarcho-socialists/communists, and libertarian socialists/communists. On the other hand, statism, of course, necessarily implies collectivism.
You are correct, however, in that collectivism inevitably leads to suppression of the individual to some degree.
Re:Yeah (Score:3, Informative)
It is authoritarian regime claiming to believe in Communism
It doesn't even do that anymore. Since 1998, North Korean constitution doesn't even reference Marxism - it has been replaced with "The Juche Idea" [wikipedia.org]. From that WP article:
"The North Korean government admits that Juche addresses questions previously considered in classical Marxism and its subsequent developments in Soviet Marxism-Leninism, but now distances itself from and even repudiates aspects of these political philosophies. The official position as maintained in Kim Jong-il's "The Juche Philosophy Is an Original Revolutionary Philosophy" (1996) is that Juche is a completely new ideology created by Kim Il-sung, who does not depend on the Marxist classics."
Re:Karl Marx's Dream (Score:1, Informative)
Who may tell the motives that lead Marx to his theories, be it reading too much Hegel, the appalling conditions of industrial workers, middle class quilt, or the liaison he had with one of his father's household maidservants. Be it as it may, I feel it is immaterial, we should look at Marxism as a set of living preferences, such as (very good)education for all, the use of machine to free man from menial labor, leisure time for the pursuit of artistic drives(however broad you want to make 'artistic' e.g. hacking :) ), the eradication of cities in favor of urbanized and industrialized rural living, all of which I believe sounds appealing to the most of geekdom. Marx was no reformer, and there is no need to apologize for it, certainly better men were reformers, for certainly conditions have changed.
Re:Karl Marx's Dream (Score:2, Informative)
per say
per se
Re:This is Free Market economics, not communism (Score:3, Informative)
fair?
Re:The Inviasible Gun (Score:2, Informative)
Not "free market" (Score:4, Informative)
I think it's a mistake to characterise it as "free-market". It misses the point and obscures the thing which is actually the most interesting about "dot-communism".
A market is a place where you go to exchange goods and services for other things of equal value (="commodity exchange"). What makes it "free" is that you are free to exchange or not. No-one forces you to buy or sell.
But a market is only one possible exchange mechanism. For instance, my girlfriend brought me coffee in bed this morning. On the weekend I'll make breakfast while she sleeps in. This is an exchange of valued goods and services, but it is not a market. I did not pay for that coffee. When you cook dinner for your family, you don't typically expect them to pay you for it. Sometimes kids do get paid for doing chores around the house, and to that extent they are working in a market (though not a free market!). But usually domestic production is carried on outside of market mechanisms, using a form of "gift exchange". Note that gift exchange predates the market, historically. Our distant ancestors did not have money, but they have always had exchange.
Similarly, market transactions are unlike the transactions that take place in a "dot-communist" system. e.g. if I download a piece of free software, and I contribute a patch to that same software, I have clearly made an exchange, but this is not a market transaction. I don't buy the software and sell my patch. I don't swap the software for my patch. I freely (as in gratuitously) obtain the software and am under no obligation to submit my patch, which I submit entirely voluntarily. I could just as easily (more easily) not submit a patch at all. It is this non-market nature which is the unusual thing about "dot-communism".
What's new here (and politically significant), is that non-market exchange is hitting the big-time, outside of the domestic sphere, as part of large-scale, socialised, economic production (e.g. Linux).