[Upd-discuss] Article: Copyleft vs. Copyright: A Marxist critique by Johan Sonderberg

[Dean Anderson]

Interesting, but, I'd disagree. Capitalism is about free price and free
trade enabling the distribution of resource allocation decisions to large
numbers of people who are better informed about their needs for resources.  
Communist and Marxist systems have central control of such decisions. If
central vs.  distributed controls are the critical distinguishing
characteristic, then we would probably say that non-free copyright is a
centralized control structure, and that free software (copyleft) is a
distributed control structure.  So, on that basis, I'd say that copyleft
is more compatible with capitalism than with marxism.  Copyleft means the
publicly available works stay publicly available. It does not mean that
programmers aren't paid, nor that they don't respond to or interact with a
market. It means there isn't some central governing control structures
that makes decisions about where to allocate development resources.
Rather, free software development resources are allocated by smaller, more
diverse, and more distributed entities in response to direct information
about their resource needs. I expect that free software is slowly going to
erode non-free softare like capitalism eroded communism, for essentially
the same economic reasons.

This is not to say that blind capitalism always makes the right decisions.  
Clearly not. But I suspect in many of the cases where it doesn't make
correct decisions, the problem frequently relates to the definition of
capital. (e.g. human capital is more than labor cost or formal education,
present value of natural resources should include cost to restore
environment, etc). I rather expect that once you have proper definitions,
principles of free price and free trade should be able to make the best
decisions possible.  But, of course, I'm no eonomist---I can't prove it 
will.

In free software, the capital is primarily human, interacting for money
and pleasure. The capital is not the program. It was a mistake to think
so.  And so, correcting that mistake, capitalism begins to make good
decisions about (free) software development.

And, BTW, I think it is incorrrect to suppose that Copyrights were
invented to promote capitalism, or were associated with capitalism, but
rather to control the presses after the Gutenberg press was invented. I
may have some dates wrong, but I think copyright predates capitalism by
more than a century.

		--Dean

On Sun, 15 May 2005, Zapopan Martin Muela-Meza wrote:

> Sonderberg, Johan. (2002). "Copyleft vs. Copyright: A Marxist critique."
> First Monday, volume 7, number 3 (March 2002)
> http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_3/soderberg/index.html
> http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_3/soderberg/
> 
>     First Monday
>     Copyleft vs. Copyright: A Marxist critique by Johan Soderberg
>     Abstract
> 
> Copyright was invented by and for early capitalism, and its importance to
> that system has grown ever since. To oppose copyright is to oppose
> capitalism. Thus, Marxism is a natural starting point when challenging
> copyright. Marx's concept of a 'general intellect', suggesting that at
> some point a collective learning process will surpass physical labour as a
> productive force, offers a promising backdrop to understand the
> accomplishments of the free software community. Furthermore, the chief
> concerns of hacker philosophy, creativity and technological empowerment,
> closely correspond to key Marxist concepts of alienation, the division of
> labour, deskilling, and commodification. At the end of my inquiry, I will
> suggest that the development of free software provides an early model of
> the contradictions inherent to information capitalism, and that free
> software development has a wider relevance to all future production of
> information.
> 
> 
> --------------------------- * ---------------------------
> "Any man who reads a lot and uses a little his own brain
> falls into lazy mental habits.” 
> --------------------------- * --------------------------- 
> "Cualquier hombre que lea demasiado y utilice poco 
> su propio cerebro cae en hábitos mentales perezosos.” 
> -- Albert Einstein (Thorpe, S. (2001). Como pensar como 
> Einstein : How to Think like Einstein. Bogota: Norma, p. 214)
> 
> 
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