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Dot-Communism Is Already Here
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."
Which - to quote the tragically overlooked Star Cops - means "without ruler", not "without order".
I'm sure you knew that, but it's frustrating how many people don't.
Meta will eat itself
Techincally, Communism it the political structure, socialism is the economic structure. As such, socialism can be anarchy.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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.
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".
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
"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.
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.
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).