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Why Science is Better with Communism? The Case of Sci-Hub (2016) [video]
- icebraining 9y agoAs a note, this presentation is by the creator of Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago>"To sum up, we have the following take-aways. Science, as a part of culture, is in conflict with private property. Accordingly, scholarly communication is a dual conflict. What open access is doing is returning science to its essential roots." (Elbakyan, ibid, translated) From the transcription, https://openaccess.unt.edu/symposium/2016/info/transcript-and-translation-sci-hub-presentation https://openaccess.unt.edu/symposium/2016/info/transcript-an.... The video is awful, long preamble, translators that talk to and over each other; the transcript is much better here.
- thehardsphere 9y agoThank you for this link.
- thehardsphere 9y agoReally? I know scientific publishing is terrible in a myriad of ways, but communism? Communism? We have to throw out the underpinnings of modern advanced civilization because Elsevier makes too much money?
- s_kilk 9y agoAs a non-American, this Red Scare hysteria is hilarious.
- AndrewKoszela 9y agoAs a human the body count of communism is terrifying.
- NiklasMort 9y agopretty sure capitalism is responsible for way more deaths
- thehardsphere 9y agoOk, how many more? Communism is estimated to have killed about 100 million people in the 20th century. How many deaths do you attribute to "capitalism"?
- pron 9y agoComparing numbers nominally is a bit unfair, as communism is a much more modern economic philosophy than capitalism, and so operated in a much more populous world, but as to direct violent deaths by capitalism, you can start with many of these here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples It's true that one could say that that kind of capitalism wasn't really capitalism, or that capitalism has changed since then, but the same could be said for communism.
- yorwba 9y agoI'd attribute those to mistakes in central planning (attempting to industrialize agrarian societies without securing the food supply) and to the usual death toll of authoritarian regimes (rounding up dissidents etc.). Is it possible to work towards Communism without falling into those two traps? I have no idea. But if someone can give good reasons why their proposal would be different, I'm willing to hear them out.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- etplayer 9y agoNo, the case made in the talk takes the example of Sci-hub and agreement with its principles into a wider scope to ask, if intellectual property is a problem (itself a radical idea, even on HN) what about property in general? And by this 'property' nobody means one's toothbrush, the Communists and anarchists mean private property. As Proudhon tells us the difference; near the beginning of his most important work (which went on to inspire Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Kropotkin and every other Communist and anarchist) he writes as follows: "There are different kinds of property: 1. Property pure and simple, the dominant and seigniorial power over a thing; or, as they term it, naked property. 2. Possession. “Possession,” says Duranton, “is a matter of fact, not of right.” Toullier: “Property is a right, a legal power; possession is a fact.” The tenant, the farmer, the commandité, the usufructuary, are possessors; the owner who lets and lends for use, the heir who is to come into possession on the death of a usufructuary, are proprietors. If I may venture the comparison: a lover is a possessor, a husband is a proprietor. This double definition of property — domain and possession — is of the highest importance; and it must be clearly understood, in order to comprehend what is to follow." In my opinion, and apparently that of the person giving the talk, when we talk about science we don't only want the journals to be free (as in free speech), we want the "means of production" for it to be free. In this way, we believe, science can serve the broader community as a tool to advance knowledge rather than only when it's convenient for profit. As an example, look at how the funding was recently pulled (though I'm not fully up to date on the story) on a US government study into the effects of coal mining on health. I contend that there would have been less motivation to do this, if it was possible at all, in a Communist society.
- thehardsphere 9y agoI think that very much depends on what your communist society looks like in practice. If you actually somehow managed to create somewhere a successful communist society that actually succeeded at completing the revolution without a powerful state, maybe what you describe would happen. But we never have seen that happen because in practice communist regimes tend to have strong states that engage in rather heavy-handed central planning of the economy. As a result, funding for scientific enterprises in these societies ends up being directed toward whatever the political priorities of the planners are. In the Soviet Union's case, that was military technologies and Lysenkoism. Lysenkoism is a particularly troubling counter-example to your US coal mining example. In the US, the political inconvienence (presumably to the new administration) simply resulted in the project's funding being cut. In the Soviet Union, the political inconvience of natural selection resulted in thousands of scientists being jailed or killed, set back Soviet biology at least 150 years, and was partly to blame for the low crop yields that the Soviets kept experiencing. So yeah, I don't particularly like the status quo in scientific publishing, but it's better than abolishing private property. Abolishing private property is one of those ideas that sounds great in theory and always ends badly in practice.
- heisenbit 9y agoThe issue is not Elsevir making too much money but that the current science publishing regime imposes a too high tax in terms of money, organizational overhead and excluding too many from quality information for decisions, education and furtherance of true progress. These externalities to Elesvier and similar are a huge burden on the society. The science publishing business is not in that position due to skill, value add or investment but due to laws that grant monopolies on content for an extended period of time. Copyright on scientific discourse is not an underpinning of modern civilization. It is thus a valid consideration to change these artificial protections of their business.
- orwin 9y agoElsevier taking "too much" money is incidental, and not the main problem in science right now. And this Scihub solution do solve this incidental issue and more, but this is a fraction of all the issues in science (i can't explain this very well in english, so i won't, but the eastern/western culture clash, ego war, bureaucraty, lack of good HR that lead to depressed/apathic scientist, and the publishing race are some other issues not solved yet). But this is not communism (i know lot of people in the US are confused by this, even the people that call themselve communist) but rather anarchism ("Libertaire" in french that is a left-wing libertarianism) with the idea that science is one of the common good. This new-wave anarchism take some old idea from Proudhon and enhance them. So you let behind the idea that private property is evil, but private property of the common is. You have the idea that people can't own what is used by other people. So you can have a hundred appartments in a big city, but you can't rent them. You can sell them, speculate on them, but you cannot rent them. And since it is anarchism, a more distributed/less powerfull government is needed too. On the point of "no private ownership of the common good", this seems like communism, yes (Communism come from anarchism somehow), but communism is the idea that the state have to regulate this, scihub is not on any level a state initiative. Sorry for the messy thoughts again, conversationnal english is a bit hard for me
- krona 9y agoCould someone explain what Sci-Hub has to do with the common ownership of the means of production? The presentation didn't even attempt to explain this from what I gathered. To me, Sci-Hub sounds a lot more like anarchism than anything (property is theft and so on..)
- viraptor 9y ago> To me, Sci-Hub sounds a lot more like anarchism than anything The more I see people pushing the idea of communism lately, the bigger overlap with anarchism I see. Even explicitly mentioned. Maybe people are ok with that.
- thehardsphere 9y agoCommunism as originally described by Marx is essentially an anarchist ideology. The idea of having a state attached to it before the complete transition to classless society worldwide is complete and how powerful that state should be, are areas of debate that came up later. Given that we've seen most communist states fail or abandon non market-based economic models, the anarchist flavor seems to be in greater intellectual vogue these days.
- icebraining 9y ago"The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery." -- Marx
- etplayer 9y agoCommunism is an anarchist ideology, and though some forms of anarchism stand opposed to it (such as Stirner's egoist anarchism) they are all in some sense against property; Communism isn't only the common ownership of MoP, rather, the Communists contend that this follows naturally from the abolition of private property, not such that everything becomes everyone's property, but that it becomes the property of nobody. Marx once said (I paraphrase) that the theory of Communism can be summed up in one sentence: the abolition of private property. Engels also said that just as the slave frees himself by abolishing the human aspect of private property, so does the proletarian by abolishing private property in general.
- NiklasMort 9y agoIn an ideal world people would not even argue about whether knowledge/research should be free and open to everybody. The current situation only shows how primitive the world still is.
- sw00pur 9y agoThe problem is that research isn't free. (Free as in free beer)
- adrianN 9y agoNo, the problem is that publishers take research that they didn't pay for, ask researchers who they aren't paying either to review it and then and put it behind paywalls.
- chestervonwinch 9y agoOf course, researchers don't have their work "taken" by publishers; there are big incentives (via the citation count metric of academia) to provide their work to these publishers. This problem has been hashed out so many times, and I'm so upset that we're still at the status quo (especially since I'm at the end of my graduate student years, and will soon no longer have access to the university's library!)
- vbezhenar 9y agoResearch is funded by governments. Governments collect taxes from people. People should have access for research they paid for.
- tertius 9y agoAnd they generally do, in 6 months or so.
- icebraining 9y agoReally? How so?
- bytefederal-ceo 9y agoScientific advancement and technological innovation both greatly benefit from societies that have the greatest individual liberty and the least central control. The ultimate abstraction of this has yet to be designed but I'm thinking that it will be some form of ethical anarco-capitalism. I'll take a page from Dashcoin mining, where at the point of currency creation 10% goes into a general fund. The pseudo-central micro government functions solely out of it while the free market allows all companies to compete to ever decrease its market share. As transparency is a requirement of any truly ethical society, usage of blockchain technologies become ubiquitous in virtually every aspect of business and personal interaction. This then catalyses real time global value governance and regulation giving rise to a society entirety driven by dynamic hierarchies, where an individuals level of power directly correlates to their value to specific market / solution domain. This type of dynamic global ethical anarco-capitalism has at its roots a resurrected US Constitutional based Republic. The transitional process is in its infancy but the forces of cryptocurrency cannot be undone. As I said on 1490am Henry Raines show yesterday (slightly more developed), if we are to succeed we need to ensure that those allowed to regulate cryptocurrencies are as intelligent as those who created them. At the foundation of programmatic global value transmission are the keys to real time micro-economies that, by their very nature, foster the rapid evolution of dynamic hierarchies.
- etplayer 9y ago>Scientific advancement and technological innovation both greatly benefit from societies that have the greatest individual liberty and the least central control. Communists agree, and this is why democratic Socialistts such as Oscar Wilde praised the fact that Communism nurtures individualism, especially for those in the arts and sciences. He wrote about this in The Soul of Man Under Socialism: "What is needed is Individualism. If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first. At present, in consequence of the existence of private property, a great many people are enabled to develop a certain very limited amount of Individualism. They are either under no necessity to work for their living, or are enabled to choose the sphere of activity that is really congenial to them, and gives them pleasure. These are the poets, the philosophers, the men of science, the men of culture – in a word, the real men, the men who have realised themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains a partial realisation. Upon the other hand, there are a great many people who, having no private property of their own, and being always on the brink of sheer starvation, are compelled to do the work of beasts of burden, to do work that is quite uncongenial to them, and to which they are forced by the peremptory, unreasonable, degrading Tyranny of want." Your idea that anarcho-capitalism is a legitimate heir of the liberal ideas which were used to found the US is, to be honest, a silly one - as one can see the exact opposite in the writings of the Communists and anarchists whose whole idea was based on the freedom of individuals and their free association, something which even individualist anarchists such as Stirner realised is not possible with private property.
- z3t4 9y agoIf you write a paper, no one is allowed to copy the paper without your permission. When you patent writing papers, no one is allowed to write a paper without your permission, which is ludicrous (and I'm pretty sure you can't patent something like that). Meanwhile there are people sitting on great ideas that would be good for humanity or able to make lots of money or whatever, but are too afraid to tell anyone because they are afraid their idea will be stolen.
- neilwilson 9y agoRule #1 of entrepreneurship. There are at least ten other people out there with the same idea. With seven billion people on the planet it is highly unlikely that anything is so special and unique it requires hamstringing the rest of human creativity to reveal it.
- etplayer 9y agoI think it's a shame that the HN article title was changed from something which is clearly expounded by the video i.e Communism, and mentioned several times even with quotes by proto-Communists and Communists themselves, and the attack on private property. Copyright is merely used as an expemplary in the talk. Why was the title changed? Is it that Communism is seen as "click bait" or too radical for the HN audience that it must thus be tuned down to something with less flare?
- drops 9y agoBecause Communism is cancer.
- etplayer 9y agoWhy do you say this?
- drops 9y agoBecause I live in a country that was under Communism for almost 90 years and actually experienced how bad it is first-hand.
- etplayer 9y agoYou lived in a country that was under Party rule of an emulation of a Marxist-Leninist vanguard state which operated on the functions of private property, money and was clearly a class society, I'm guessing, unless you lived in revolutionary Catalonia. I am currently living in a country that's still under capitalism and I'm experiencing how bad it is right now.
- janus28 9y agoExplain to me how bad it is and compare it with statistics on poverty from the best communist country you can find me.
- fellellor 9y agoThe woman is a hero, as far as I am concerned. Also note that at least one researcher in researchgate chose to mail their paper to me when I asked, once I found it wasn't available on sci-hub. This was extremely nice of them and made my day. As a student I love this decade for finally having access to such a vast repository of knowledge that wasn't available to me in the previous years. I am also thankful for the researchers whose work I am accessing now.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoInterestingly, most anarcho-capitalists are opposed to intellectual property precisely because it violates physical property. Being opposed to intellectual property is not unique to communism.