Slashdot Mirror
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."
... is that the word no longer means communism. Now it means oppressive government, ala Soviet Union, China, North Vietnam. But these places show no sign of following the idealist philosophy people like Karl Marx set forth.
The concept of owning resources in common isn't anti-individualistic - having neighborhood parks or sharing roads and pipes and cables is just smart resource usage. Probably few people want absolutely everything to be publicly owned and managed, but most slashdotters probably like software and the internet that way.
Once I had a friend from China who really liked to talk about politics. He told me about the Chinese government, and how they are mostly becoming capitalist, even though they keep the name of Communism.
Once he heard about open source, and so I explained it to him, finishing off with, "so in reality America is more communist than the Chinese." He got this shocked look that quickly turned into a bitter vengeful sort of look, and said nothing.
Qxe4
"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
Quote from one of the biggest Communists: Thomas Jefferson
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
Such thought processes have traditionally permeated our culture to the point where every child strives to be that hero. To save the world as it were. The results can be seen in everything from local government (simply amazing small towns built out of nothing) to the larger scale of US resolve during WWII and the later Space Race. Thus the communal aspects of working together have always been a strength for us.
As a Brazilian bombarded everyday by USA-imported-mass-enternainment-industry, I've noticed that this is true indeed. I find it very interesting that it seems important to find a 'hero' in almost every situation - for instance, in 'the most amazing videos', there was a car with something stuck in the accelerator and the car kept moving in circles over and over. Then, a policeman came, entered the car by the window, and stopped it. The thing is: when you hear what the narrator says, it seems that the policeman saved a thousand people.
I've recently read 'The Quiet American', which further investigates this. As I read it, it seems that Graham Greene thought that 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.
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
Communism doesn't fail, people who had power failed communism...
Every political ideology is right.... the people who have power, uses that power until they overuse it to their own profit so much that the majority of the people use their personal power ot overthrow them...
The only good thing that democracy has right now is: it's not crooked enough to have the population revolt against it.
I'm sure there will be one day that the people will wake up and know that their system is so corrupt, that the elected officials are only idiots who are popular and that the majority of the electorate refuse to vote because they know that no choice they can make will the right one, when every choice is a bad one...
It's not only that.
When I choose to help, it's efficient.
When forced to help, there is an inefficiency; and usually someone making a parasitic living off of doing the forcing.
Western culture has been about empowering the individual, about heroes. Conversely, communist nations such as Russia and China are less about individuals, and more about "the good of many outweighs the good of the few".
I think that's a simplification. The one thing that stands out to me about Western society is the rule of law, rather than the rule of man (I know that's a simplification as well).
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
That all sounds very rah rah, but please do contrast your caped and cloaked "superheroes" with philosophers, who try to lay out the biggest problems people face, and the most significant of whom come from outside the US. (I'm not going to try to explain manga here).
US dominance in technology and business comes from the ashes of WW II, where the rest of the world was in ruins, particularly Russia after losing millions to Germany.
This is not an anti US tirade, just trying to bring some balance...
In the early Superman issues, the major bad guys were bankers and lobbyists who wanted to get the USA involved in WW2. Superman had no qualms threatening to electrocute lobbyists and drop them from buildings if they didn't spill the beans on who they were working for so Superman could go crack their skulls. At least he was educational about it "Don't worry, we can touch this powerline safely, there's no path for the current to flow through if you aren't touching the ground. Or another wire. Oops, that was close, almost touched two there!"
With all the miracle cures Batman comes up with for villain-made diseases and chemicals, you'd think he could cure normal ones too, but no. That's reading between the lines of course. But Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic, he really does invent these things! Lots of his riches come not from selling inventions, but by accepting money to bury them! He cured the common cold but takes monthly payments from big pharma to keep it a secret. I think he invented cold fusion, and takes big payments to keep it in the basement. Modern Marvel had a good narrative reason for all this dickishness. Basically, they thought it was a deficiency that superhero inventors never invented anything useful for anything besides crime fighting. They figured Mr. Fantastic would invent all kinds of useful shit, being the smartest guy on Earth and all. So rather than ignore it, they decided that yes, he DOES cure diseases in his spare time. The trouble is, if he cures all disease, solves world hunger, solves pollution issues thanks to miniaturized cold fusion power, then he moves the entire world very rapidly towards a Utopian Star Trek setting. How can Marvel make hamfisted analogies to current geopolitical issues by having George W. Bush waterboard Captain America, and herd all superheros into concentration camps? They can't! Thus, out of necessity, Reed Richards must take a "Prime Directive" approach to the world, and be very very careful to change nothing outside the scope of stopping the assorted doomsday plots that directly involve him. "THE STATUS MUST BE QUO", etc.
Can you tell somebody got me a "philosophy of comic books" book last Christmas? lol
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
It's the good old navel-gazing which is the default in any culture and common amongst those that never lived in another culture: all that they know about, all that they care about and all their references are what they see and what happens in their cultural group (often a nation, but not always).
The US shows more of this than other countries because:
a) It's big, reasonably wealthy and culturally very uniform (the cultural differences between most people in California and most people in Virginia are a lot fewer than those between most people in Norway and most people in Turkey - an equivalent distance)
b) It produces and exports most of modern media, thus while other people are frequently exposed to US culture as encoded in movies and TV series, most Americans are rarely exposed to non-US culture.
c) The US political system strongly pushes blind, uncritical patriotism as a form of mass manipulation. Typically this boils down to "we're great because we live in a great nation" with the implicit "anybody that criticizes our nation criticizes it's greatness and thus criticizes us all". The side effect of this is to make Americans (and similarly, those people raised in nations where patriotism is overemphasized) exceptionally blind to their own social and cultural issues and closed to accept other people's social and cultural views.
If you don't believe me, just ask any born and bred US citizen which has lived a year or more in any other country (exception being made for those that live in a-little-piece-of-the-US-in-another-land environments, such as military bases).
I agree with your interpretation: one thing Marx criticized was treating economics as an entirely separate sphere from society and politics. In some ways, a non-statist (in the national sense) version of socialism is when your local neighborhood meeting also addresses economic issues as well as transportation and education ones - and markets become ways that neighborhoods and the people in them exchange goods and services.
Encouraging people to fight back in this game is stupid. All you do is make people risk their lives needlessly. If they don't fight, everyone survives and the authorities can catch the criminals on safer ground. If you do fight, you risk having a gun fired in a crowded, pressurised cylinder 20,000 feet up.
I have to disagree with you here, the reason to fight back at this point was to make the risk/reward assumption of hijacking not worth the effort. When the people on the plane don't fight they are putting their lives and well being in the hands of people who have already shown a disregard for those people. And "everyone survives" is not true, granted the majority tend to, but this didn't stop the hijackers from killing people. Additionally, this demonstrates to potential hijackers that this is a viable method of extortion and encourages more hijackings.
By comparision, with the current "fight back" mentality, hijacking is much harder and not as useful as a tool for extortion. We have had plenty of stories of people doing stupid stuff on planes not accomplishing much because the passengers weren't going to be victims anymore.
As for having guns fired in a crowded pressurized cylinder at 20,000 feet, I don't see that as that as particularly scary. First and foremost, this myth of lawful gun owners firing willy-nilly and shooting bystanders just doesn't happen. It's a bullshit canard used by anti-gun activists. The data just doesn't support it. Seriously, go try and find stories of lawful permit holders shooting bystanders while stopping a crime in progress. I'll wait.
Second, a bullet hole in a passenger plane at 20,000 feet (or higher even) is not really a cause for concern. Despite what Hollywood tells you, the plane will not fall out of the air, it will not explosively decompress, in fact it's decompression will be rather slow. At worst, the pilot will get a light on his console telling him that there is a loss of pressure, he will put his mask on, descend below 10,000 feet, declare an emergency and land at the nearest airfield which will handle his aircraft. And the passengers might have to put their masks on too. Even a dozen bullet holes are not going to cause a problem. Here, read about Aloha Flight 243 and consider for a moment that the aircraft involved lost the entirety of it's roof, actually did suffer explosive decompression, and the pilot still landed the airplane. The only loss of life was one flight attendant who was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As a free citizen, you are the first response to a crime as it happens. You have the choice to get involved and stop it, or you can sit by and encourage criminals by making it seem like they won't face resistance. That choice has been around a lot longer than the last 8 years. It's sad that the US Government seems to prefer encouraging criminals, but we the citizens need to realize that it's not helping anyone to stand idly by and let criminals take over our society. And the government is certainly doing us no favors by trying to take away from us the tools to do so.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
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.
Yeah, that worked out great for Russia now didn't it. Those crazy people holding the power of the state machinery just said, "Okay, we've crushed everyone now let's just sprinkle this power all around to them to make them feel better."
Voting them all out of office, now that's change I can believe in.
It's a testament to the state of our political discourse that we think of those terms in an either/or manner. There's a reason those two words have the same root, and were both used long before Karl Marx took pen to paper.
The maxim "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" is precisely what's going on when you're helping your neighbor move out without charging him a fee or putting a similar condition on your act. Up until comparatively recently, market behavior was understood to be the precise opposite of "community," and was not welcome in it.
The Fight for Student Power on Campus: www.forstudentpower.org.
Your post is only true if you pretend subjective opinions are objective truths.
Who is being compelled against their will to contribute? While each individual may contribute to their ability, it is on a voluntary basis. "Each according to their need" is ONLY being met as market demands and individuals consider it in their best interest to meet that demand.
You're defining communism as requiring forced contribution, while overlooking the fact that people are forced to contribute in capitalism. The difference isn't compulsion per se, it's the nature of the compulsion.
In a capitalist society, you have to contribute, starve, or rely on the charity of others. Under communism it's exactly the same. The main difference is you generally have more choice under capitalism because more of the economic decisions are distributed, while the economic decisions are more centralized under communism.
But in neither system can you generally expect to skate by without contributing.
Just because the exchange can not be measured in per unit monetary compensation does not make the contribution "selfless".
Only if you define away "selfless" to meaninglessness. By your definition, it's essentially impossible to be selfless. Take the most selfless person you can think of--a parent, a teacher, a soldier, a nun, a disaster recovery volunteer, whatever you want, and every single one of these people derives some benefit from their sacrifice.
Selfless, is more about voluntarily giving up some good or service at a loss without concern about making up those losses down the road. For example, MS giving away Windows to schools isn't selfless, it's self-serving. On the other hand, someone not set to benefit from MS Windows adoption anonymously giving away the same number of Windows licenses to the same schools is selfless, even if they get warm-fuzzies in return.
Karl Marx would have called for government to come in and heavily regulate software. Designate a central authority to manage the development of software, public schools train a specific number of necessary software developers, outlaw the possession, development, or use of "rogue" compilers to help protect people from poor quality software that wasn't approved by the state, and possibly imprison people for unauthorized forking of projects arguing that such action "steals" the necessary resources of the state and impedes progress.
You're thinking of Stalin and Lenin.
James Madison and Thomas Jefferson both said that with no natural right to real property ownership, there is no imaginable justification for natural rights over an idea (Jefferson Letters). Does that make THEM Communists?
No one is cut from whole cloth. The most capitalist person in the world has some communism in them, and vice versa.
Further, just because everyone wins does not make it collectivism. Collectivism asks for self sacrifice, that you as an individual is not as important as the many. Really? That is why people develop software? Hackers don't have really huge egos when it comes to their accomplishments? Gee, guess I had it all wrong.
Capitalism asks for self-sacrifice. Or is somehow the classes I've had to take to learn subjects I'm not interested in to spend time working in a place I'd rather not be doing things I'd rather not do not self-sacrifice, while taking classes to learn about people around me I don't generally care about and paying taxes or volunteering to help homeless people I don't know is self-sacrifice?
Both collectivism and capitalism demand self-sacrifice. But as mentioned above, it's more a difference in style and choice than anything else.