Communism and the GPL

[Lucifer]

Ok, so I get random email from people reading my website. Some of it's really nice and rewarding, some of it's just flames (no return address on those, the cowards). Occasionally I get something that is just so weird I have no idea what to make of it. Like this:

Dear comrade!

We like your site about GNU GPL community. Keep up a
great work! We will win! Could you be so kind to place
a link to our site from your site? We are advertizing
collective property rights, and free software approach
as a basic step of global communism.

<a href=http://geocities.com/commulinux/>GNU GPL
Communism</a>

Thank you.

Have any of you read much of my website? I would be surprised if it didn't bleed capitalism on every page, especially with the Gooooooooogle ads on every page, since I am a pretty hardcore capitalist myself.

So what do you make of it? (I'll wait a little bit and then jump back in with my response to this email and the subsequent response, which finally elicited a laugh out loud from me)

[Tank Program]

Wow... That's interesting...

[Lucifer]

Well, at first I didn't know what to make of it, so I sent back an email asking if this was serious, and here's the response I got:

We are seriously considering GPL community as New
Proletariat.

We invite you to join Sourceforge.net

So I responded with this:

In that case, this is funnier than hell. And, for the record, I'm already
a member of several projects hosted on Sourceforge, and at least one project
not hosted on sourceforge (hosted by SEUL, actually).

But I seriously oppose communism. It's been implemented many times and has
failed everytime. It's a nice idea in theory, but fails in practice.

And I got this in return:

You are creating communism actually. Because you are
New Proletarian. GNU GPL software will undercut
capitalists. We will prove that collective property
rights are better then private egoism.

Capitalistic software companies will be replaced by
communistic GNU GPL software communities!

Dear comrade, we wish you good luck! Keep up a great
work!

Visit our site: http://geocities.com/commulinux/
Ideology of R. Stallman, goals, agenda and future of
GNU GPL Communism.

So I responded with this:

> You are creating communism actually. Because you are
> New Proletarian. GNU GPL software will undercut
> capitalists. We will prove that collective property
> rights are better then private egoism.

Oops. It is well proven that collective property rights are a net failure.
We saw this in the Soviet Union. There's some argument to be made that China
couldn't survive with a free market due to basic resource management
problems, but the Soviet Union proved for all intents and purposes that
collectivism is a failure.

You see, when you take away individual ownership of property and reduce
everyone to the same standard of living, you take away a person's drive to
have a better life. A person will be more productive and enjoy a greater
standard of living when they can influence their standard of living directly
with their own choices and their own skills. But take that away and you take
away a great deal of the single most important freedom, the freedom from
which all others are derived, the freedom of choice. Under Gorbachev, the
man to whom credit belongs for ending the Cold War, the Soviet Union went
through a series of changes that granted more individual freedoms, and this
resulted in the overthrow of the communist system.

Communism leads directly to totalitarianism, and totalitarianism leads
directly to oppression (if it's not in the system already). If you don't
like the oppression found in the free market, you should try living under the
oppression found in the former Soviet Union and also in Germany under the
National Socialist party. You can do so by moving to China, if they'll take
you, or any number of African nations, North Korea, and North Vietnam.

Why don't we just take the good intentions and the lessons learned from
communism and apply them to existing problems, and hopefully we can make a
better standard of living and reduce oppression here and now rather than
pursuing a dead economic system dreamed up by an impractical idealist and
proven to fail in achieving all of its goals? Sure, the goals of communism
are quite noble, and it's a beautiful system in theory, but like anarchy,
it's impractical in the real world.

> Capitalistic software companies will be replaced by
> communistic GNU GPL software communities!
>
> Dear comrade, we wish you good luck! Keep up a great
> work!
>
> Visit our site: http://geocities.com/commulinux/
> Ideology of R. Stallman, goals, agenda and future of
> GNU GPL Communism.

Unless you have a private line to RMS that I don't, I can safely say that he's
not very interested in communism. He loves freedom and has a humanitarian
agenda, both of which are incompatible with any workable real-world
implementation of communism.

Now, I'll be the first to admit the free market and (especially) the US are no panacea, and I certainly don't have any real idea what sort of political affiliations there are on this website, so I'd hate to make any assumptions here about who the choir is and whether or not I'm preaching to it, but seriously, what do you guys make of this? (besides the fact that it's a big waste of my time, since obviously I'm not going to convince the guy of anything and he's not going to convince me of anything)

I should point out that even in this email exchange I *know* I haven't even addressed the point of whether or not the GPL is communist. It should be self-evident that it's not if you take what I've written to be true (which I think it is, but I could be wrong) and consider the fact that the GPL is all about protecting user's rights and is neutral to any economic system (and near as I can tell, compatible with any economic system).

[ishAdmin]

OK, I'll bite, this sounds like fun. I want to be one of the communists.

[nicolas.b]

an interesting debate, to be sure. as a matter of fact i don't know that any form of government has been shown to decisively fail or decisively succeed. just like with religion, any defender of the concept can say that the existing implementations of the system were flawed and should not be held up as valid examples. capitalism can arguably be held up as a disastrous experiment just as much as communism can.

then again... i tend not to trust many of the works of civilisation. animals know best.

[Lucifer]

an interesting debate, to be sure. as a matter of fact i don't know that any form of government has been shown to decisively fail or decisively succeed. just like with religion, any defender of the concept can say that the existing implementations of the system were flawed and should not be held up as valid examples. capitalism can arguably be held up as a disastrous experiment just as much as communism can.

then again... i tend not to trust many of the works of civilisation. animals know best.

Heh. I would tend to agree that we can't show decisive success or failure, but we can show that historically some tend towards failure more than others. iirc, and I haven't actually read the Communist Manifesto (although I have read some of Marx's stuff, just not that), but I seem to recall that early communist predictions (possibly the whole point of the book in question) were that communism would spur growth and innovation early, but end in decline, social decay, and tend towards totalitarianism. Now, the Russian mind, historically, has tended towards xenophobia and totalitarianism, and when the Communists were finally overthrown, the Russian people found themselves free for the first time ever. Not just "free from communist", because czarist Russia was very much totalitarian, and feudalistic to boot. So they're also experiencing capitalism the way we've had it in the west for several centuries, and it's for the first time. So there's certainly room to question their implementation. And since the Soviet Union dominated most implementations of communism, there's room to question those as well. And as Communist himself said, in many ways China has more freedom right now than the US. And Maoist China hasn't exactly been buddy-buddy with the Soviet Union....

Then when you actually peel back some of the layers and look at how collectivism was actually established in the Soviet Union, it was established by Stalin, and preceded Stalin's Terror Years, where he had executed all the real talent in the country so they wouldn't threaten his rule. (This act is given as the main reason the Soviet Union didn't just end the war when Hitler invaded, they had nothing but mediocre intelligence left to fight with when Hitler showed up to fight) You can bet that Stalin didn't exactly pay too much attention to details on actual implementation, just made sure he got what he wanted and the people stayed oppressed.

So, yeah, the Soviet Union wasn't exactly a glaringly perfect example of communism. What we did see, however, is the predicted decline and social decay, the lack of individual drive, and the tendencies towards apathy. All of these are things that are not inherently in the Russian character, so it's safe to draw conclusions in that area, as long as you're willing to change your conclusions later, if need be.

I'm with you, though, nic. The beauty that is anarchy works wonders in the aminal kingdom. MMmmmmm, bush meat. On a completely different topic, I read recently that some scientists (anthros, I think) have decided that the ape civilization is in its Stone Age, and that it is, in fact, a civilization. Interesting stuff. Tasty, too. Mmmmm, bush meat. Oh yeah, and that eating ape is now cannibalism. Mmmmm, bush meat.

[anthias]

Intwesting widdle thwed!

(sorry, elma fudded me)

I think it is important to note that we have never seen anything really that closely resembles the communism of marx. Its also important to recognise that Carl Marx was not a "hero of communism" - he was a political scientist. He was writing the capatlist manifesto when he died. He had a series planned. And what his communism described was a long way from what we saw developed in China or the former USSR. I don't know if the clowns you were emailing with know a lot about it or not - they kind of didn't say anything with meat. I'm not a fan of capitalism, but I wouldn't be joining up with someone whose only sales pitch was "join us comrade" - it smacks of becoming an automoton.

If it was handled correctly and incorporated some of the freedoms we expect in life as modern westerners it could work, but what with human nature and megalomania, I don't expect that will happen any time soon. Howerever, Marx's communism is closer to a true democracy than anything we have yet experienced in the modern western world. I know Australia is not a democracy. Its an autocracy that pretends....

Of course, capitalism is just as doomed to utter failure as any other system. It's just destined to become too top-heavy for its own stability, in fact it allready is. We have not really had it long at all. We were not truely capitalists untill well into the indutrial revolution. While the earlier more feudal influeced systems had ellements of it, it is only really quite recently that we entered a fully capitalist regime (by recent I am applying centuries)

So what was the USSR? well, it was a Pseudo socialist totalitarian autocracy if you ask me. take out equality of living standards (which in that case meant low standards we are led to believe), add rights of private ownership and wait a few decades and you've got the west.

Oh, and thats an intereting notion about the apes. Being an Anthropologist I am often amazed by our un-civilisation

[Sabarai]

omg, not going 2 read al that, it'll take me at least an hour

[nicolas.b]

again, interesting series of opinions and conclusions, i just lack the energy to really explore them all. about the only other thing i can say about communism is that communes are alive and well in the US, and for a period of time i was highly interested in checking some out and possibly even living in them for awhile. (but i feel a little old for that now)

I read recently that some scientists (anthros, I think) have decided that the ape civilization is in its Stone Age, and that it is, in fact, a civilization. Interesting stuff. Tasty, too. Mmmmm, bush meat. Oh yeah, and that eating ape is now cannibalism. Mmmmm, bush meat.

oooh wow, any possibility in posting that to subby's? (swiftparrot.com)

i'd love to hear some more details about that while my pet lemur perches on my shoulder.

[nda]

Ok, so I get random email from people reading my website. Some of it's really nice and rewarding, some of it's just flames (no return address on those, the cowards). Occasionally I get something that is just so weird I have no idea what to make of it. Like this:

Dear comrade!

We like your site about GNU GPL community. Keep up a
great work! We will win! Could you be so kind to place
a link to our site from your site? We are advertizing
collective property rights, and free software approach
as a basic step of global communism.

<a href=http://geocities.com/commulinux/>GNU GPL
Communism</a>

Thank you.

Have any of you read much of my website? I would be surprised if it didn't bleed capitalism on every page, especially with the Gooooooooogle ads on every page, since I am a pretty hardcore capitalist myself.

So what do you make of it? (I'll wait a little bit and then jump back in with my response to this email and the subsequent response, which finally elicited a laugh out loud from me)

YHBT for sure. It's a good one though, I particularly liked the stylized black and white pictures of RMS and Torvalds near the pictures of Marx, Stalin and Mao. Funny stuff ;)