Re: [ox-en] Re: herrschaft
- From: Graham Seaman <graham seul.org>
- Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 18:57:34 -0500 (EST)
Hi Felix
On Thu, 15 Jan 2004, Felix Stalder wrote:
On Wednesday 14 January 2004 15:54, Graham Seaman wrote:
There is an 'invisible hand' in a free society. It doesn't work
through the medium of money, but directly through need. If I (for large
enough values of I) need some software, but that software doesn't exist
in free form, I will write it. If the software already exists in just the
form I want it, I won't bother. The supply of programmers for particular
types of program is regulated by need: this invisible hand is the hand
that scratches your own itch...
Applying this more generally, if there is no bread available, I (again,
for large enough values of I) will learn how to bake and distribute bread
to people. And if there is no flour for me to use, I will set up a mill.
etc.
I was already itching to write when I read the first paragraph concerning
software. There are plenty of people who need software but it doesn't get
written. Why? Because they don't really need it! This is what the argument
suggests. Applying the same logic to bread should make the non-sense of this
line of thinking so obvious that it feels embarassing to point it out. Why do
peopke starve? Because they don't realize that they need food? No, because
they are structurally unable to gain access to it (and this in the context of
a general overabundance of food worldwide).
I think we're talking at cross purposes - I was talking about a very
utopian possible extension of the way some free software development is
organized, you seem to be talking about the way the world is now. Maybe
you're annoyed about such an abstract discussion when there are people in
the world now starving? My problem with the traditional left was always
the reverse - being told to concentrate on the politics of now to get
something changed rather than trying to write 'the music of the future'.
My reaction to that was that if you don't have any idea of where you want
to get to, even if vague and unreal, it isn't possible to be effective in
more immediate politics either. Marx never really defined communism; as a
result, Stalin could say he was a Marxist while using slave labour. I'd
like some definitions upfront.
OK, that's a general issue. Your more specific point: that a temptation
with my line of argument - about a possible future society, not about
capitalism or about now - is to say 'if hasn't been created, that proves
no-one needed it, or that it wasn't useful'. Yes, I agree, that is a
weakness with it that can easily make the whole argument circular. I'm not
sure if it's fatal or just a weakness. Like Casimir also said, the
undefined concept of 'need' causes problems from the start.
Free Software is free because it serves the (self-)interests of the knowledge
elites
(programmers with a reasonably secure economic basis, large service oriented
corporations like IBM) to have it free.
This makes no sense to me and sounds like you have a much larger gripe
with free software than just with this thread. Free software is free
because a few monomaniacs/geniuses like Richard Stallman and Donald Knuth
decided to make it so, and they convinced other people to join in with
them. There's no way with any empirical basis you can say that 'large
corporations like IBM' created it. Even in the 60s (when people say that
'all software was free', which wasn't really the case) IBM was quite
hostile to user groups who tried to develop IBM's software outside the
corporate structure. I don't know how typical they are overall, but from
the people I've come across I'd say that the majority of free software to
date is developed by people who have relatively large salaries when in
work but who certainly don't have a very secure economic base (especially
over the last few years). Calling them a 'knowledge elite' is importing
a whole theory about the way society is structured (that the fundamental
split is by knowledge or education, not class or location) rather anything
more inductive.
This has very nice side-effects,
because everyone can use it, but this is only a side effect, because it would
be more difficult to create/enforce a boundary around the community than to
simply not care. This is the beauty of a public good, once created, everyone
can use it.
There is just no comparable (self)interest of farmers to make grain free,
among others, because it's not a public good. Mind you, self-interest does
not need to be economic, it can be culturally oriented, or towards personal
self-unfolding. Also the farmer can perfer to grow organic food because s/he
likes the idea to protect the environment, rather than following a mindless
profit-maximizing strategy, but still, this won't really help those who
starve.
In my abstract future society, there would be an incentive for the farmer
to make grain free. It is that the goods produced by others (which the
farmer also needs) are free. In such a society someone who hoards what
they produce (grain in this case) in quantities too great for their
own use is going to seem even madder than a miser does now.
All I was trying to do was merge three strands:
1. A very traditional type of communism, going back at least to Gerard
Winstanley in the 1640s (rather more disciplinarian than suits me, but
in his program grain is to be stored collectively for free access too) and
carrying on through William Morris's News from Nowhere etc, then largely
buried by Marx's 2-stage Owenite system from the Critique of the Gotha
Program.
2. One aspect of free software.
3. The idea of the invisible hand, modified to become an emergent property
of a system based around 1 & 2...
Maybe the end result doesn't hold together logically - but one thing I
certainly wasn't trying to do was suggest how we might get from where we
are now to there.
Graham
Felix
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