Slashdot Mirror
Reclaiming the Commons
NeuroManson writes "What do fresh air, medicine, culture, copyright, and government have in common? Perhaps not exactly what you think. Up until recently, I considered the term "commons" as an archaic term from Victorian or Elizabethan times. However, apparently it still exists both as a concept and a philosophy. Despite its almost ancient connotations, it's an eye opener regarding how concepts centuries old hold true even today, but much like freedom, require eternal vigilance to protect, and covers everything from the air you breath through the GNU, HDTV, and copyright issues. Read on." Bollier's article and the responses are superb intellectual reading. If you don't have time today, bookmark it, come back later.
BTW, since when did Slashdot start openly shilling for Communism?
Bollier also has an excellent book entitled 'Silent Theft', which takes the theme of the article and expands upon it. I highly recommend it.
"What we have here, is a failure to communicate." - Cool Hand Luke
Hardin discusses what happens when everyone's individual interests are optimized by exploiting a common -- until the common is destroyed. It's a standard pattern of human behavior, IMHO, and is useful in analyzing any situation involving something held in common. I use it for software architecture ideas, for example.
As usual with Hardin, he brings in diverse topics like game theory, economics, politics, etc.
> Bollier apparently wishes to join the likes of Stalin, Lenin, and Pol Pot who feel they must "liberate"
> private property from the capitalist pigs.
I read the article; you are putting words in his mouth.
Making property or land publicly owned is an old, well-documented legal idea. The Roman jurist Gaius describes it in his _Institutes_: ``Public things are regard as belonging to no individual, but as being the property of the whole world [ipsius enim universitatis esse creduntur]." As a result, Gaius argued that these public properties were not subject to the law of nations, but of an older, natural or common law -- ``communis onmium hominum jus" -- that is derived from custom, & not from legislation.
Last I checked, neither Gaius nor the hundreds of Civil Law jurists whose work derives from him were communists. Which is not surprising in that he lived some 1500 years before Karl Marx was born. And if he were, that would mean that the law of much of Europe & the rest of the world -- which is derived from Civil Law, as distinguished from Canon or Church, & from Common or Anglo-American -- follows Communist law.
Only a parochial US citizen would argue that much of the world follows a ``Communist" law. The same kind of person who instinctively equates communist with mass murderer, although there have been far more mass murderers who did not profess communism than did so.
In short, one can easily argue for the existence of a commons if the existence of intellectual property is assumed. And the concept of intellectual property is something that was invented only in the last few decades.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
In a world where these entities not only act in practice but even use the LANGUAGE of class (hell, the language of feudal aristocracy!) to describe their 'peasants' and the cash value of same, I feel it is wrong not to acknowledge the situation.
We are not talking about suspicions that 'maybe these corporations don't fully embrace the humanity of their lesser employees', or speculations on how they talk behind closed doors (which they must- Enron? WorldCom? There's someone making a lot of judgement calls to hose the 'peasants', in corporation after corporation). We are not even talking about suspicions that corporations will play lotto on the lives of its peasants and ex-peasants, because that is PROVEN and hard fact, again in corporation after corporation. We're talking about the fact that in at least one case the corporation was on record in literally using the words 'dead peasants' to describe this group of people. Not 'dead guys', not 'dead ex-employees' but 'dead peasants'. This, in spite of well reported reluctance to reveal the practice at all, much less the mindset behind it, and it's so widespread that one corporation just came out and said it (in internal reports- I believe specifically it was a memo that came to light requesting a printed-up chart with the dead peasants in a certain column).
Please tell me why 'corporate classes' is not exactly the right way to refer to this situation in which corporations are referring to American citizens as peasants, speculating on their lives for corporate gain, and behaving as if American citizens have no more intrinsic value than livestock, grain, or office supplies (to use a Dilbert reference).
I will settle for that, though there isn't a point you make that I wouldn't dispute. Don't see how spending money on advertising deserves government-granted monopolies, and you have the whole environmental thing backwards- the article is talking about private interests taking property previously held by government, not the other way around! I would say 'fine' to merely nailing down all public lands as protected areas and not bothering to expand this, but all public lands are basically under heavy attack to be privatized and strip-mined^H^H^H^Hdeveloped ;)
That's as may be. You do everyone a disservice by complaining about the term 'corporate classes'. What the hell else would you call it?