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Cybercommunism and the Gift Culture
A number of readers alerted us to the latest Andrew Leonard piece over at Salon. He's covering the latest Richard Barbrook book "Cybercommunism". One of the salient points of Barbrook's latest arguement is that all of this free-software/open-source is "superseding capitalism". For those who remember, Barbrook was the author of The California Ideology, a 1996 screed.
Boy, one would think this guy knew his Marx and Lenin better...
AFAIK, Communism is rooted in the idea that the working man would rise up and overthrow the ruling class, distributing the fruits of labor equally to fellow proletariat. This man thinks the free software culture is communism?
Bah! Humbug!
The Internet is STILL a tiny club of culturally-elite, rich (compared to the rest of the world) burgoise representing everything despised by Marx. Despite our burgeoning population, we represent a tiny fraction of priveleged humanity trodding upon the backs of the repressed masses. We distribute our gifts to other members of this elite class of intellectuals.
The Free Software culture is far from Communism. It more resembles Nepotism, with the talented, rich few giving away to the less-talented rich few -- yet all members of the same, elite club. Maybe if we could bring the Internet to the huddled masses with no concept of computers...
But we can't even feed most of them.
I must agree with the comments noted in the review from others: The idea that the "gift culture" is communism is hogwash.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
Yes, I concur. Statist communism is bad. Libertarian socialism (anarchism) is good. It advocates decentralized decision making and puts freedom at the forefront of its agenda. Futhermore, individualist anarchism revolve around *free market* principles, but with workers selling their own "fruits of labor", insteal of corporation profiting from them.
If you look at the most modern management theory on worker empowerment, decentralised decision making, team building and the such, it bases itself on one common theme - The people who meet the customers and actually do the grunt work are the peopole who are most qualified and knowledgable about their work. In essence, type Y/Z management theory which trust people to actually like to work has many similarities to anarchist ideals.
This contrasts to the original capitalist assumptions that people are in fact lazy and the only motivational factor for them to work is monetary profit (ie. greed). This assumption has turned many of the world's larget companies into bloated bureaucracies such as GM (with it's 15 levels of management to supervise everyone and managment knowing jack about making cars haha). Look what cars GM made in the 80's and you will understand why capitalism, as it was originally intended, has failed.
Capitalism in its truest form exploits both employees and customers for profit. However, we do not live in a strictly capitalist world. We are heavily influenced by capitalism, and for proof, look at how the world is obsessed with intellectual property. Intellectual property is the natural way of extending capitalist control to ideas, literature, music, movies and software.
However, does capitalist property controls belong in the realms of ideas and intellectual (as opposed to physical) works. The argument GNU makes is *no*; property should be physical; ideas should be free (as in speech).
That is the reason why RMS stands so firmly on the issue why FS should not be called OSS. The political and ideological implications for free software is that is ensures the ultimate preservation for freedom of ideas; not just resulting in better software, but a better system for the world.
Futhermore, capitalism and free-market are not synonyms. They should not be used as such. It is possible to have a free-market without predominant capitalist ideals. However, many business and political elites would like us to think otherwise.
Free software, on the other hand, is one step in the right direction. It is relieving monopoly control over the intellectual ideas that they should never of had control over in the first place. They do no behave like physical property and they should not be treated as such.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
> (the use of the oil). Therefore there has to be some system for
> determining who gets what.
Precisely.
Marx: "To each according to his need, from each according to his ability."
Marx lived in an age in which all economics were based on the economics of scarcity. The second half of the little equation implied the use of force.
In a Gift Culture economy, the second half ceases to be an issue; from each according to his whim might be more like it. Given a sufficiently useful thing - say, a SCSI driver - there's bound to be someone willing to get off his duff and code it up, and from that point on, the advantages of OSS which we all know and love, take over. It's in the developer's best interest to see that the code is distributed widely. At that point, anyone who happens to need a SCSI driver can simply download it.
But to call this "communism" - when it requires economic products (software) that were not only nonexistent, but inconceivable within the socioeconomic framework in which communism was invented - smacks of intellectual dishonesty of the highest order.
We'll take it as axiomatic that communism is coercive and bad under the economics of scarcity - you have to coerce people who don't buy into the system to "give" up their material posessions, or you have to coerce them into buying into the system. Whether you deprive them of their stuff or try to reprogram their minds, it's coercive, and leads to the disasters we've seen in the 20th century whenever an attempt is made to implement it on a large scale.
So much for superseding capitalism in any economic activity involving atoms instead of bits. Been there, done that, it didn't work. So let's try it with software:
Under "cyber-communism" - who writes the code for the payroll systems? The point-of-sale terminals? The inventory software for McDonalds? All the other "boring" stuff that isn't "fun"? Or does "from each according to his ability" simply mean that instead of taking your grain or your barrels of oil, the Central Committee will simply take your time and force you to work on some mind-numbingly dull project becase, after all, you're able to code payroll?
So much for superseding capitalism for all the grunt work.
What's left is what we already know to be true - for certain types of software...
> giving away my software is the greedy thing to do.
> Schemes intended to facilitate distribution of other kinds of wealth just aren't needed.
Back to the cybercommunism article, however - exactly how this very limited subset of economic activity (i.e. the development of cool software of broad-based application) can "supersede capitalism" is utterly beyond me. Furthermore, what this has to do with communism - a philosophical system invented in an age where a Gift Culture was inconceivable - is equally beyond me. But saying that "Giving cool and useful software away is fun" doesn't quite sell as many books as using buzzword-compliant postmodernisms such as "cybercommunism" or the "California Ideology", does it?
I concur with Ami. The arguments offered by the author just don't compute.
Sorry, but I'm going to have to take issue with this. An information "gift economy" does not supersede capitalism; that's ridiculous.
:) profit is among his motivations. Fine, that's the way the world works.
Look at it: An information gift economy (the focus of the Salon piece) essentially allows information to be free (as in speech, not beer, according to the hallowed cliche). Does that mean that the info has no value? No, it means that information's value increases as it spreads. Essentially, it's the distribution of information that becomes important. Linuxcare and RedHat are good examples of this. Linuxcare offers support services, right? The information they provide is essentially already available if you know where to look and how to interpret it. But by providing it in a different format to people who don't know where to look or how to interpret the information themselves, there is value. And I daresay that the founders of Linuxcare were motivated (at least in part) by profit, the foundation of capitalism. RedHat is perhaps a better example, since they freely give away the OS via the Net, and allow you to redistribute copies of what you do buy. Again, the value comes from providing support information and services.
To take it a step further, yes, I can find all the information I want about, say, firewals on the Net. But I still own the O'Reilly book Building Internet Firewalls because there is so much information condensed that having it in book format is valuable. And as Tim O'Reilly has pointed out recently
Taking a look away from the information economy (which is still far smaller than the rest of the economy), capitalism is in no real danger. Think GM's going to start giving away cars and trucks to just anybody? How about DeBeers opening up that warehouse?
C'mon folks, let's not get carried away. Information should be free, but that doesn't mean that people aren't going to try to get ahead in life. That's the profit motive, and that's human nature.
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
The ideas of capitalism and communism are rooted in the problem of how to best divvy up scarce resources. There's only so much food, land, oil, etc. to go around. If I have a barrel of oil and I give it away, I've lost something (the use of the oil). Therefore there has to be some system for determining who gets what.
Software works in the opposite way. If I give away a piece of software I write and other people use it, I haven't lost anything (I can still use the software myself). In fact, the software I have actually becomes more valuable if more people use it: 1/I'll be able to exchange files with other people (this is why MS Office is so 'valuable'), 2/I'll get bug fixes and improvements from other people.
In other words, giving away my software is the greedy thing to do. Schemes intended to facilitate distribution of other kinds of wealth just aren't needed.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow