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The Economist On The Economics of Sharing
RCulpepper writes "The Economist, reliably the most insightful English-language news publication, discusses the economics of sharing, from OSS programmers' sharing time, to P2P users' sharing disk space and bandwidth. " True indeed (about The Economist, I have to remember to renew my subscription); one of the main supports for the article comes from Yochai Benkler latest piece, which is excellent.
about The Economist, I have to remember to renew my subscription
/. editors have to remember to remove personal notes from the stories.
and
Most open source projects revolve around a core of developers with the odd donation of time and code from users who extend the code to suit their needs. Ditto with most P2P networks, most casual users are happy to leach whilst most of the bandwidth is provided by hardcore users. Perhaps the exception to this is Bittorrent where users are more inclinded to share fairly.
Why does the /. story have to mainly concern itself with word-of-mouth advertising about the publication rather than the article?
Sharing of information has proven very beneficial in science and there is no mention of this in the article. You'd think that this would be one of the first things that would come to mind when one thinks about innovation in ideas.
UBU
... for the flood of right-wing complaints about the "liberal media." Expect challenges to the "most insightful English-language news publication" from devotees of the Washington Times and Little Green Footballs. ;)
Pre-emptive strike: when The Economist, which is the leading voice of center-right journalism, speaks favorably of F/OSS, it's time to drop the "communism" line and come up with something else, folks.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I'm not sure presenting OSS and P2P in the same context of sharing is appropriate - sharing something you wrote yourself is one thing, sharing something some others wrote without those others' consent is another.
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
I'm not saying it would be easy, but imagine if...
The CB App. What's your 20?
WooHoo!
Sure, the Economist has an obvious bias (free markets, privatized everything, western democracy, and modest but well-enforced government regulation). Sure, it makes mistakes (lauding Taliban, the invasion of Iraq, etc.) However, if you compare it to pretty much any other English-language press -- the BBC, any American newspaper or magazine, or (deity forbid) American television -- you will see that it stands out as the lone isle in a sea of shite.
If the only language is English, and you have any ability at all to filter editorial statements out of news stories, you should subscribe to the economist -- and I say this even though I am a registered pinko commie bastard.
The Economist is a weekly magazine with hundreds of pages of world news. I had a subscription for a couple years before I realized I just could not keep up reading it. Before I stopped subscribing I even tried skipping over those things that held little interest for me. I found it far better to let other people find the interesting things (like this article) and have them eventually posted on Slashdot where I could then read them.
It's a very interesting magazine though if you can find the time to commit to it.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Something that the article doesn't really mention, that helped explain a lot of things about corporate support of OSS, is a theory that (as far as I remember) Joel Spolsky wrote about. It's best explained by an analogy.
The analogy runs as follows. Suppose that a street has a bunch of bun vendors and a bunch of people who sell sausages to put in the buns (wow, talk about decoupled designs). People might be willing to spend $1.50 for a bun plus a sausage - nominally $1 for the sausage and $0.50 for the bun.
Now, suppose that someone in the sausage industry comes up with a way of "open-sourcing" buns - now buns are free! This happening, you've got a bunch of customers wandering around buying sausages with an extra $0.50 in their pockets. They were clearly willing to spend more on the sausage+bun combination, so maybe you can jack up your price to $1.10 or $1.20 (very unlikely you'll be able to go to $1.50).
Of course, like all simplistic analogies, this depends on a lot of assumptions. For instance, we
expect that the customer won't go off and buy something new (a 50 cent Coke, maybe).
Now, think about companies that have major OSS support. The best example is IBM - which makes its money of hardware and services. Are they the sausage vendors in this case?
I don't know if this is nonsense, but it's an interesting theory. If anyone has a good counter-argument, let's hear it. If anyone has a silly pun about "open-saucing" hot dogs, well, remember that I'm a computer scientist and can generate an enormous static charge from your keyboard to Get You.
Sharing becomes prevalent only when it 1) close to free and 2) earns kudos/buying power for the sharer. Unfortunately, in today's global society of mass production and mass distribution, this is largely impossible. What we need for sharing to regain prevalence is the rejection of the idea that it's OK that almost everything we consume comes from far, far away.
The Economist, reliably the most insightful English-language news publication
Gee, what an unbiased way to present an article for discussion.
True indeed
Coming to a conclusion in an article summary stifles discussion. Stop doing that.
This would only be a problem if everyone RTFA. However, as that is rarely a problem, there is nothing to worry about.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I consider myself a bit of a leftie, and I don't find the Economist very right wing.
I read the old "stone soup" story in school when I was a kid. The teacher and rest of the students didn't seem to see the inherent flaw in the story: an entire village ended up with one stinking pot of soup. Fortunately for Linux, there's plenty of "soup" to go around. Our bowl can be indefinitely replenished. It's worked, so far, because greed and the GPL have been motivating factors in furthering software development.
It should also be noted that not all sharing is good.
I don't remember the last time the Economist attacked anything as "communistic excess" -- and they're not a "tool of international corporatism" because they actually like true free markets without competition. Notice their articles on excessive executive pay, underperforming corporations, etc.
I think that you probably haven't really read too much of it.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
It seems to me that it just described that way it is without some worthwhile analyis what motivates people to share or why should be people reading economiast concerned
...), and that being selfish (wealth stocpiling, idea holding) is not way to become succesfull. and that sharing with poor does not mean beeing stupid.
Well, here are my 0.02:
Why is sharing important:
It breaks down traditional corporate moloch, it teaches that anarchy-like goal-driven structures are perfectly viable and can outperform hierarchical companies.
It teaches that inforamation must be free (both as beer and as freedom), if it isnt, there will always be ways to free it.
It practicaly demonstrates that acting selfish is not way to go (try throttling bt upload to 1kb/s, see results
All in all, its kind of hippie like philosophy crossed with viable economy (thats not based around money, but around ideas).
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
After many years of reading the Economist, I agree with their self-assessment.
Having said that, I've never been comfortable with the 1-dimensional right/left political categorizations. People and politics are far more complicated than that.
I think you're mistaking them for Forbes, maybe.
Actually, they're pretty moderate and reasonable with their analyses, they advocate market solutions for problems that a market can solve i.e. most things.
They go with the least-worst economic system (free-market with a small dash of government regulation to stop the worse excesses of capitalism) since that appears to have won the argument so far. So they obsess about what Greenspan says, but isn't that their job? That's the "Economist" bit in "The Economist".
And hindsight is a wonderful thing. Nobody else was worrying about the Taliban at the time, either.
Please remain calm, there is no reason to pani... wait, where are you all going?
Economies of sharing, as socialism moves forward.
:)
V1.0 - I have axe, you have club, therefore you share everything with me.
V2.0 - I am the government, therefore you share part of everything with me and I decide who to share with.
V3.0 - I have fileserver, you have connection, therefore I share everyone else's stuff with you whether they gave me permission or not.
V4.0 - I have everything you have. You have everything I have. Everyone has shared everything. Life is meaningless.
What is considered "left wing" in the US, is considered far right wing in the rest of the world.
So you'll be cancelling your subscription then :)
Please remain calm, there is no reason to pani... wait, where are you all going?
The Economist, as someone else posted, certainly has their opinion of the world around them, like we all do. I do not always agree with their opinion, but rarely do I find what they have to say is grounded purely in ideology, without some decent reasoning and thought behind it. From what I have read, they tend to weigh each situation or leader, rather than stamping them "ok" or "not" according to whatever faction they belong to. For instance, despite being center-right in their politics, and despite supporting the war in Iraq (something I did not agree with myself), they have not spared the Bush administration criticism for making a mess of the situation.
As to the "right wing propagandistic tool of international corporatism". Wow, good line if it's some sort of attempt at ironic hip retro-sixties radical leftism, but it doesn't have much to do with...well, reality.
The Economist supported Kerry, after all, in the US elections. They have been quite positive about Linux for a long time. They are being sued by Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's right wing leader, because of their scathing attacks on his corruptness. This is hardly the sort of independant thoughts and writing that one would expect from a "propogandistic tool".
This works untiol SCO shows up and claims ownership of the lentils found in every bowl served, and demands that each soup-eater pay them $699.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Here, you can borrow mine...
I will quote my sources on the explanation for these journalistic positions:
[In response to an anonymous reporter's question "Why do you rob banks?"]:
"Because that's where the money is." - Willie Sutton
[from the bottom of the current Slashdot page in which I'm submitting this post]:
"I don't have any solution but I certainly admire the problem. -- Ashleigh Brilliant"
--
make install -not war
"News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"
One of those is incorrect. Plz fix, kthx, bye.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Uh, there's always the potential "loss" of the credit for other discoveries based on that knowledge. Think Rosalind Franklin and the discovery of DNA; "competitors" saw her crucial photograph and some unpublished work, and she's never really gotten some credit she deserved. Even when you're formally releasing whatever information you have, by publishing it, there's a certain loss in that sense -- of control, or something close to it.
The scientific method transcends those petty human "losses" in a larger sense, but they sure do affect how people within the scientific world behave. People are very conscious of the tradeoffs between sharing information and withholding it.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
The trick is to pause before each article long enough to recollect what has been going on there, then skim the article to see what's changed. Do NOT get bogged down in reading every word. For instance, an article on Nigeria appears every few issues. Don't read it word for word. Recollect that they have a "new" president who has promised to eliminate corruption, that there are problems in the boonies with locals extorting money from the pipeline operators, etc. Then skim the article with that in mind. Usually it's just an update ... new ministers making more promises about corruption, some stats to back it up or refute it, more stats on pipeline problems ... you can finish an entire issue in just a couple of hours that way :-) It's not as satisfying as reading every word, but it gets you thru an issue in a reasonable time. I have to choose between skimming and cancelling the subscription.
Infuriate left and right
Am I the only one who thinks that the article is completely void of substance?
The author barely even mentions what Open Source is, does not analyse the reasons for Open Source, and gives two-three obvious explanations. Then he attempts to compare Open Source programming with file sharing and SETI@Home. It is wrong to compare these two examples since they're based on unused resources. Spare time is not an unused resource.
Nobody else was worrying about the Taliban at the time, either.
Well, gee, with the collusion of apathy and cheerleading amongst news sources, it becomes difficult for the common man to become educated enough about things like future Talibans in order to become concerned.
The American CIA is similarly insulated from public worry. People commonly go about their lives utterly unconcerned about the documented offenses of this agency. In part, that's because of the press blackout.
The old sentiments are quite correct on this matter: Without a free (or diverse) press, our democracies simply cannot function.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
The problem is that most people who are in the middle consider The Economist fair. It's generally people way out on either side politically that suggest The Economist is unfair. Knowing what I do of you from your history, it seems you are one of those people. No flame, mind you, but your politics are not... centrist.
For most of the people doing reviewing, the Economist is really very fair and reasonable in its reporting.
Is it possible you are just politically marginalized, and that your views differ significantly from the rest of ours?
Is there a publication you recommend? That isn't filled with lunatic fringe ravings? Seriously, I would like to try it.
But I don't agree with that point in the least.
Communism is all about the "common good" and giving to the collectivity. OSS and free-sharing knowledge is just what Science has been for a very, very long time. It's sharing knowledge freely with one another, so that knowledge can grow. It's not giving blindly to the collectivity. Big difference. I surely would hope nobody (nobody decent, at least) would claim that Science is communism.
Actually, most harsh defenders of industrial IP rights "against" OSS and patent-free stuff are the ones who act more for the "collective good" in mind, even if that's not their primary intend. They are defending the rights of their company, or sometimes a whole industry, sometimes in a forceful mamner: to me, that closely looks a lot more soviet-like than the spirit behind OSS. They also are often the ones who stole stuff from others: but in a legal way. All you have to do is patent it first - even if you didn't invent it.
It's a pity, but at least it means that in an Economist article you can usually identify the compulsory editorial slant bit and discount it. And the Economist has a chance of perceiving how FOSS and the prevention of governments from allowing software parents have beneficial free-market implications. But just one day I would like an Economist article which, say, admits how limited protectionism can have benefits for the environment or the protection of the rights of the poor in some countries.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
As I understand it, "liberal" once meant simple "freedom", even in political terms. In the US it came to mean "freedom from corporate oppression" back in the mid-to-late 19th century, when the workers were heavily victimized by powerful rich factory owners (who were often not all that readily distinguishable from the government.)
Later, that became associated with fighting for other sorts of freedom, such as civil rights for minority groups.
The association of "liberal" with "poor and minority groups" has led the term somewhat away from its original meaning. Over time, it's become associated with improving the lot of poor people even where they're not activily being oppressed but merely poor: welfare, medical care, affirmative action, etc.
Liberals argue that the causes of poverty are side-effects of less obvious rights violations by rich people and companies. They'd argue that a company which employs many people in a town has an obligation to those people to continue to employ them, even when that factory is no longer profitable. That obligation by the company is the right of the people.
I wouldn't say that the Economist is "all for" corporate tyranny. They'd say that a factory which isn't profitable cannot employ those workers because there simply is no money to pay them. That strikes them as simple level-headedness: you cannot pay workers from nonexistent money.
But they do hold the company responsible for its non-economic externalities. If the company is dumping cadmium into the water and poisoning those workers, even if it's proftable for the company it is wrong to do so. Simple economics will not prevent that, so they recommend well-chosen and well-enforced government regulation.
I often find myself disagreeing with them. Their notion of free-market capitalism often assumes frictionless changes that are untrue. If a company moves a factory from Flint, Michigan to Bangladesh, yes, I suppose it does improve the US economy by allowing Americans to purchase the goods more cheaply, thus freeing up their capital for investment in other things.
But the people of Flint, Michigan don't realize those improvements directly; they don't immediately acquire programming skills and move to San Francisco to get better jobs. Nor do they disappear. Even if the simple "invisble hand" argument works for the good of the country as a whole, it can cause vicious harm in microeconomic terms, and those are externalities which shouldn't be ignored.
Remember that we're talking about economic theory here. As with any theory, it's based on a set of formal definitions. You can consult any introductory textbook for coverage in depth. The article gives a short, intuitive definition for "non-rival good" by suggesting that, "Your use of it does not interfere with my use."
A textbook would go to greater length, for example pointing out that a definition such as this concerns inherent properties of a thing in economic terms.
It's obvious that legal effects, on the other hand, are not inherently associated with goods at all. The legal system, first of all, has a completely different theoretical basis, and second, is related primarily to actions, not things.
With those points in mind, let's look at what happens when information is shared. The actual information which I possess is inherently the same, whether or not you also possess it. Got that? So economic theory classifies it as a "non-rivalrous good".
Of course there could be consequences to me in your knowing this information, but that attaches to what you do with it, not to the information itself. What your actions then signify in law depend on a particular body of law, without reference to which the discussion has no meaning. So for example we would have to decide whether to talk about specific US copyright law as enacted in 2005, the traditions of English common law which began circa 1066, or Socratic notions of civil law circa 400 BCE.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
I can think of a lot of other examples of successful sharing in meatspace. Just a random off the top of my head list, not extensive:
Food banks, share surplus food around, everything from surplus garden produce to hunters harvested game meat to "normal" food so it gets used and not wasted
Seed banks, many gardeners share seeds with each other, helps to maintain long term biodiversity and a hedge against catstrophic failures with bioengineered seeds possibly in the future
Volunteer fire departments, obvious good advantages there
Not for profit "thrift" stores, allow folks to donate useful but surplus items so they can be reused by other people cheaply instead of contributing to landfill mess
Orgs that do work like Habitat for Humanity, besides sharing labor to help folks out immediately by providing affordable to them shelter, down the road it's psychologically good to have children raised in decent homes and not in slumlord run cheap no win rental housing. hard to put an exact economic price on that, but I would bet it's pretty useful for society as a whole
Normal neighborly collaborative work, the concept of the "barn raising" is still there all over. Everything from Joe down the block is a good mechanic and helps his neighbors out to neighbors helping neighbors with community watch or shared child care, etc. Still alive and well all over.
Community free concerts, still a phenomenon practiced all over, most any weekend across the US you can go find free music and art that is "shared"
and etc etc
I would imagine there are way more examples of "sharing" that go on voluntarily that don't make it into the raw economic figures but contribute to the basic over all health of the economy and society.
I believe in freedom, human rights, personal accumulation of wealth, honesty and integrity. I demonstrate it in my personal and business affairs, and I have had a great deal of success. I further believe that people are evolved to live in our current generally mild ecology, and damaging it with pollution is bad for us. I believe that corporations are constructs that work against most of those principles, and mass media owned by them generally serve that agenda. That puts me in agreement with most Americans on the issues, and most people globally who've heard of them, or considered their own personal versions in their own lives. That's why it's called "common sense".
OK, you start off solicitous, then devolve into calling me a liar. Let's be frank: you've decided you disagree with me. Your approach is pretty typical of rightwing gamesters, who are totally committed to your foregone, selfserving conclusions, and engage in "discussion" with the strategy of discrediting their chosen opponent, regardless of the merit of the facts. Drop the pretense. Your corporate comrades have succeeded in coopting the mediasphere, even the language, flinging words like "elite" and "hate" at opponents like masters of newspeak. But it doesn't work on me. BTW, I note that I've had my fair share of capitalist success by harnessing the global banking/media industries. I'm no martyr to the truth, but I'm no liar. You should examine your own baseless position before you come out swinging at me.
--
make install -not war
For a lot of open source project's and P2P networks it's not the case that developers and users are really sharing fairly.
Most open source projects revolve around a core of developers with the odd donation of time and code from users who extend the code to suit their needs. Ditto with most P2P networks, most casual users are happy to leach whilst most of the bandwidth is provided by hardcore users. Perhaps the exception to this is Bittorrent where users are more inclinded to share fairly.
It's not greed, since it's about sharing.
I don't know what to call it, fear of leeching or something?
To sum it up: When you share, if you constantly think about if everybody else is sharing as much as you, you'll end up not sharing.
Period.
When you share, you share.
If people leech, don't bother.
If they spam or hog resources, limit the resources with technical solutions, but you still don't bother.
This is the truth of sharing. The more you give, the more you get. Karma is absolute truth, but you don't give a damn about it. If you do, you get in trouble. If you analyse it all, you will stop the process itself.
So what if you share more than the next guy for some times? If you think about it, worrying about who is on top is really capitalism.
Strange thought, huh?
If you happen to have more / willing to share more, for some time, then just think what an opportunity!
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Professor Benkler's article refers here to Slashdot...
/. 'ers actually agree with sharing their "intellectual goods" when responses are written on company time. An IT professional making $60,000 a year is paid $.50 per minute (hourly liberties taken). If it takes that person 10 minutes to author content for Slashdot they are in effect making a company donation of $5.00. The shareable good is actually paid for by the company who itself hopes the salary investment in the employee returns a greater ROI. For example, receiving valuable IT experience worth more than what the employee is paid and perhaps less expensive than an outside contractor. But the ten minutes is still brought to us by the company.
In this case, the "shareable good" involved is
the time, education, and effort of the users who participate. It is combined
with a public good--existing information--to form what is also itself a
public good--a topical news and commentary source.
The question tho' is whether the employers of many
I am not opposed to the OSS model but I would like to see more analysis of its true economic cost as I was always taught "there is no such thing as a free lunch." The fact that it does seem to produce a superior product is all the more reason to better understand its true costs.
Professor Benkler's 10/22/2004 article is a good read. Thanks for posting a reference to it.
Hopefully this was worth more than $.02
Economists have not always found it easy to explain why self-interested people would freely share scarce, privately owned resources.
In the case of programmers and open source, it is easy to explain. By taking control of the programming environment (i.e. by developing open source operating systems), the software community is organizing to expand their productivity in a way that the corporate environment has always refused to do.
Companies have always routinely forced programmers to adopt the tools and software language that the companies aquire at the least cost. The efficency of the programmer's skills has always been a secondary consideration.
For example, a programmer spends five years mastering C++. Then the company they work for goes bankrupt. In the next job, that company uses Z-- as the development language. The new company judges the programmer to be second rate until they have mastered this new language.
After forty years of having to learn arbitrary new software development systems and tools, the software development community has said, "Enough!". "Now, we will develop the software envirnment, languages, and OS. And you will use it. And it will be free so you can't use the argument that it would cost too much to implement".
They have had to do this in their own best self interest because companies will always be changing the software development environment when this environment is bought and sold as a product.
Everyone originally went to Microsoft because they promised standardization at an acceptable cost. But that is no longer the case in a global network.
For The Economist to claim that the software developers of open source are not acting in their best lnng-run interest is naive of them.
If corporations are enemies of freedom and human rights, what would you propose? I also think you should define your use of "corporation" more finely. I don't think corporations as entities for conducting businesses are inherently evil. I know the small corp I created for consulting is certainly not evil. And on that note, when I think of a corporation like H-E-B (a small grocery store chain) or Linksys, I don't really think of them as being threats to freedom or human rights. If you are referring to specific corporations that you meet your claims (and we all know these companies exist) then you should limit your attacks to those.
Economists have not always found it easy to explain why self-interested people would freely share scarce, privately owned resources.
In the case of programmers and open source, it is easy to explain. By taking control of the programming environment (i.e. by developing open source operating systems), the software community is organizing to expand their productivity in a way that the corporate environment has always refused to do.
Companies have always routinely forced programmers to adopt the tools and software language that the companies acquire at the least cost. The efficiency of the programmer's skills has always been a secondary consideration.
For example, a programmer spends five years mastering C++. Then the company they work for goes bankrupt. In the next job, that company uses Z-- as the development language. The new company judges the programmer to be second rate until they have mastered this new language.
After forty years of having to learn arbitrary new software development systems and tools, the software development community has said, "Enough!". "Now, we will develop the software environment, languages, and OS. And you will use it. And it will be free so you can't use the argument that it would cost too much to implement".
They have had to do this in their own best self interest because companies will always be changing the software development environment when this environment is bought and sold as a product.
Everyone originally went to Microsoft because they promised standardization at an acceptable cost. But that is no longer the case in a global network.
For The Economist to claim that the software developers of open source are not acting in their best long-run interest is naive of them.
"The Economist, reliably the most insightful English-language news publication"....
As a good Brit would say: "Utter rubbish"
Yeah, it's amazing that people still use the "liberal media" cliche every time reality doesn't support conservative gospel. Maybe they don't know that 95% of American mass media is owned by seven big corporations, or they think guys like Rupert Murdock who run those outfits are flaming liberals. Or they just don't think period. I'm guessing number 3.
Historical context:
In the days before canning armies would starve when on the move, unless they could steal food from villages that they passed. If they did, the villagers would starve.
So, three soldiers show up in a village... of course the villagers don't know that there are only three, and they don't know that they CAN'T just steal all their food. So they pretend that they've already been robbed, and don't have any left. The stone soup is a con game to allow people to safely contribute without being robbed blind.
One reason that potatoes were so valuable is that they could be left in the ground until you were ready to dig them up. This made it quite difficult for an army to just march through and steal your entire food supply, leaving you to starve to death. And to death is NOT a figure of speech, but rather a frequent fate of the villages that were robbed.
In this context the story makes perfect sense. The villagers had time to make sure that they were safe. The soldiers didn't have to split up into small(er) ambushable groups. The locations of the villagers food remained secret. Nobody was forced to contribute more than he could spare. Etc.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
While I agree wholeheartedly with your title (Communism is not equal to Socialism), you are quite wrong otherwise. I will also address a misconception in one of the child posts.
First, Communism is a form of Capitalism. The reason this probably sounds strange to the average person is because they have stopped thinking of Free Market Capitalism as a form of Capitalism, and think of it as the ONLY form.
Communism is State Capitalism. An economy of administrators and workers, hierarchical, with central control of economic planning, distribution, and consumption. In the "free world" these functions are less centralized, and we elect semi-democratic governments to oversee administration of the economy.
But really, at the heart of things, "Free Markets" and "Communism" are not incompatible. If you don't believe me, consider a factory worker or teacher in one economy being moved to the other. What adjustments must be made for them to be productive in their new environment? Hardly any (aside from cultural, that is). Their job complexes (their tasks, duties, and relationships to co-workers and bosses) are structured in very similar ways.
In a Socialist society, however, they would have to involve themselves in all sorts of domains that workers are not expected to participate in within a Capitalist framework. They would have to contribute to the management of their workplace, share work in a fair way with their peers, become politically active in order to help set strategic goals, and contribute to economic planning somehow.
A Capitalist society sees society as a resource to be sued to maximize economic processes. A Socialist society would see economic activity as a means to achieve social end.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.