17 ms·

Hello, my name is Reginald and I am a Socialist

90 points by raganwald 16y ago

forgottenpaswrd 16y ago
"I don't like the idea of anyone forcing me to accept socialism" Haha, so you are not socialist at all!! Socialist is forcing others to accept socialist, in fact is forcing (other)individuals to give money to their "social causes", that could be different from those individuals have. Is not asking politely: would you mind giving part of your money to this poor people so they can study? No, it is taking by force his money if he doesn't want to, and consider it "a right". As my grandpa who lived in soviet rusia said when I asked what is socialism, he said: It is being generous with other people's money. If you accept individual freedoms to choose, you are not socialist, not more that anybody else here.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  You're operating under a very narrow, incorrect definition of socialism.
  - forgottenpaswrd 16y ago
    Narrow? No, is broad. It applies to every socialism in existence, planning and managing others resources, not your own. A private socialism is not a socialism at all, because you need a society to comply. Maybe you could give me a better definition.
    - steveklabnik 16y ago
      > Socialism is an economic and political theory advocating public or common ownership and cooperative management of the means of production and allocation of resources. Nowhere does this say "take my money and give it to other people." For example, anarchism is a socialist political philosophy, but abhors the state, and all forms of hierarchical control.
      - lzw 16y ago
        Anarchism is inherently capitalist, because without the state, there would be nobody to stop capitalists from deploying capital to do startups. There would be nobody ot impose your socialist values to make everyone act the way you dictate.
        steveklabnik 16y ago
        I'd suggest that you do a little more reading on this topic, because you're grossly misinformed. Wikipedia is a decent intro, and "An Anarchist FAQ" is a very long and thorough discussion of the topic: http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/index.html http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/index.html
        lzw 16y ago
        Your dishonesty does not constitute misinformation on my part. If you cannot be honest, or are so ignorant and unwilling to be corrected,o then there is no point in discussion. I don't dispute that there are socialist liars whovcall themselves anarchists, just as there are liars who call themselves libertarian, like yourself. Linking to such liars proves nothing, but that you would be so presumptuous as to lecture me and back it up with a link shows that you are incapable of critical thought or debate, and thus a waste of time.
        steveklabnik 16y ago
        Thank you for the discussion. I'm not going to respond to you any more.
      - philwelch 16y ago
        For anarchism to actually eliminate violence, it has to have some mechanism to protect society from Genghis Khan and Jack the Ripper. Statistically, Genghis Khan will eventually be born somewhere outside your society and eventually show up at your doorstep with hordes of horseback archers, and you can either surrender, join his empire, and pay taxes (ending your experiment in anarchism) or have your entire society destroyed almost to the last man, leaving a few survivors to warn other societies of the tale (ending your experiment in anarchism). If you had the only anarchist society in a world of states, you could probably freeload on those states to stop any full-scale Genghis Khan from getting too powerful. Let's hope your experiment in anarchism is landlocked between several states who will leave you alone. You could allow for voluntary defense, and theoretically handwave away defensive violence against people outside your society as "doesn't count". But on some level you have to realize your society depends upon some violence to survive. Jack the Ripper will show up inside your society and fuck up your voluntary social contract all on his own, when he goes around killing disreputable women (luckily, many forms of anarcho-socialism lack money and thus would have no prostitution per se). In that case you would need some sort of violence (possibly voluntary on the part of the violent people) to either kill Jack the Ripper, or lock him up in a cage, or kick him out of your society. If you do that, you have violence within your society--if you don't, you have violence within your society in the form of Jack the Ripper. It turns out all of human history has been an extended experiment in solving these very problems, and the only steady state, as discovered in parallel by nearly every culture on earth, is in fact the State[1]. At best you can have voluntarism within the State, but you cannot sustain anarchism without the State. [1] Existing primitivists, such as the bushmen of Africa, have largely been forced out of their traditional lifestyle by the State. If there are primitivists who do, in fact, maintain their traditional lifestyle, they only do so under the explicit protection of the State, as discussed in the freeloading example above. In other words, it's still an anarchism that requires the State to function, which is a contradiction in terms. Hunter-gatherers are not necessarily anarchists. Many of the greatest empires in world history were built by hunter-gatherers, who on account of their hunting and gathering made much better soldiers than people living in civilizations. They ate a more balanced diet, got more exercise, knew how to kill things, and knew how to kill things as a team. Horseback archery isn't a skill you get to hone much as a farmer. If you have that basic skillset, civilizations make pretty good targets once you run low on animals.
gaius 16y ago
Socialists advocate a method of compensation based on individual merit or the amount of labour one contributes to society The thing is, this makes no sense at all, especially not here on HN, where one of our core assumptions is that people should be compensated on how productive they are, not the hours they put in. Why should anyone care about the amount of labour, as opposed to the value of the end product?
- raganwald 16y ago
  one of our core assumptions is that people should be compensated on how productive they are, not the hours they put in. I must have missed that in the FAQ. Where is the list of things we swear we believe when we decide to hang around here?
  - gaius 16y ago
    PG's essays return to this theme again and again.
    - j_baker 16y ago
      You have considered the possibility that there are HNers who disagree with pg, correct?
      - gaius 16y ago
        Yes indeed. But where's your (or Raganwald's) collection of essays on how people should be paid a standard hourly rate regardless of their actual output?
        raganwald 16y ago
        My essay justifying paying programmers a standard hourly wage is right next to the place where I wrote words advocating the practice. Since I don't advocate that practice, there is no need for an essay on the subject. I cannot read your mind, but are you making certain assumptions about what I believe based on the fact that I quoted certain sections of the wikipedia article about Socialism? Please keep in mind that my words in this essay are quite explicit in stating that my beliefs are not Big S Socialism. I state that at the top and the bottom.
grrrrr 16y ago
I don't buy the analogy. Even if you work for a company that fosters what he refers to as a socialist work ethic that company is still operating in a capitalist system, subject to the usual market forces. What he is describing sounds more like a collegiate environment. The nature of software development, and other similar knowledge economy industries, naturally demand a more collaborative & collegiate approach to getting things done, but they are all fundamentally driven by market forces & constraints such as funding & sales.
- kscaldef 16y ago
  > The nature of software development, and other similar knowledge economy industries, naturally demand a more collaborative & collegiate approach to getting things done, but they are all fundamentally driven by market forces & constraints such as funding & sales. You have heard of this open source thing, right? I don't think that you can argue that the open source ethos has anything to do with capitalism. In fact, I would say that Stallman's views on software are pretty overtly communist, as they contest the very concept of private ownership of a piece of software.
  - lzw 16y ago
    And yet, without the freedom to won the software you create, you cannot give it away. Open source s capitalst because it is based on the presumption that the creator owns the sotftware and can determine the license to it. If stall man really believes nobody can own software, then stallman believes that all programmers should be slaves, unable to profit from their own labor.
    - kscaldef 16y ago
      Copyleft was conceived as a hack of the copyright system, a necessary evil because placing a work in the public domain allows other people to profit from the work. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft: As Stallman deemed it impractical in the short term to eliminate current copyright law and the wrongs he perceived it perpetuated, he decided to work within the framework of existing law; he created his own copyright license, the Emacs General Public License,[8] the first copyleft license. There is nothing that keeps an open source developer from profiting from their labor. Some are employed by a company explicitly to work on OSS, or contract with a company to implement a desired feature. In fact, an open source developer can _only_ profit from their labor, and not at all from their "capital".
jerf 16y ago
That's actually a significant reason I am a capitalist. A capitalist, free-market system is one in which you are free to set up whatever little organizations you want, and they live and die on their own merits. There is no contradiction in running a highly socialist or even actively communist co-op in a capitalistic society, because it is not part of the capitalism idea that you must run that way from top to bottom. This is not a conventional definition of socialism or capitalism. I don't have a problem with that per se, since the terms have long since become so fuzzy as to be useless without definition within an essay, but it is a little odd to see you proudly labeling what would more conventionally be called libertarianism or capitalism as "socialism". In this context, I'm not sure this makes any sense.
- bstills 16y ago
  "it is not part of the capitalism idea that you must run that way from top to bottom" Well then it wouldn't be capitalism all the way down? It would only be capitalism on the outside, socialism on the inside. Capitalism is a system in which individuals are rewarded according to what the market will give them. If you don't do that you simply don't have capitalism.
  - cynicalkane 16y ago
    I don't think there really is a popular definition for capitalism. People who use the word always use it to mean what they want it to mean, usually in the context of praising or criticizing capitalist society. The best definition (in my ever humble opinion) is that capitalism is a society where the means of production live in a free market, which is completely consistent with what the GP said.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - CWuestefeld 16y ago
      I believe that the common definition in most folks' minds is that capitalism refers to the system we have today in the USA, where the government rewards business interests with handouts, protective regulations, and the like. This is not capitalism, though. What people are experiencing and objecting to is corporatism [1]. I believe that if people would give real capitalism a chance, the result would be positive. But as it stands now, the economics are too intertwined with the politics. In order to successfully implement real capitalism, the power that the state wields to erect regulations that can be subverted would have to be stripped: we'd have to neuter the government. Clearly the government would never allow that to happen. [1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Corporatism https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Corporatism
lionhearted 16y ago
Good post, except one point - you're not a socialist. You're someone who believes in people acting individualistically and through voluntary cooperation. Hell, you sound like you've got similar politics as me. I think people should empower themselves and I'm for voluntary worker's collectives, absolutely. I think being salaried when you could go off and do a project with a team you pick is a bad choice. I'm all for people controlling their own destiny. But that's not socialism. Socialism has a definition - it was coined and defined by Marx as an intermediate stage on the way to Communism after the proles have seized the means of production by violence. Marx postulated that after heavy social control and violence against the exploiters, all class and social barriers would melt away into paradise. Turns out, he's wrong. People are different. You're not a socialist as Marx defined it. If you want to redefine socialism and say you're this redefined thing, okay, sure. But it sounds to me like you're more into free action than socialism. That's a healthy place to be. Marxist-brand socialism is not a healthy place to be, or at least, everything that's remotely tried to be it has gone very wrong.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  > You're not a socialist as Marx defined it. Exactly. There's a big difference between 'Socialism', 'socialism', and 'libertarian socialism.' He's a libertarian socialist. Marx advocated Socialism.
  - lionhearted 16y ago
    > Exactly. There's a big difference between 'Socialism', 'socialism', and 'libertarian socialism.' He's a libertarian socialist. Marx advocated Socialism. Most people - like 90% of people - don't know the difference. Reginald wrote, "I don't like the idea of anyone forcing me to accept socialism" - that's good and healthy. Socialism, unfortunately, now has strong connotations of control involved. If he's for people being able to choose their own life and destiny, I think he'd be best off picking a word or phrase that says that. "Free action" is the closest I know. Why lock 90%+ of people out of the discussion because they don't know the terminology?
    - 16y ago
jakehow 16y ago
"self-organized collectives" are abundant in western capitalism, we usually refer to them as corporations. The terms and agreements between parties in these organizations vary but many fit your ideal. The philosophical difference between socialism and capitalism, is the willingness to accept violence and coercion as a means to mold society to a specific vision.
- ahi 16y ago
  "The philosophical difference between socialism and capitalism, is the willingness to accept violence and coercion as a means to mold society to a specific vision." I am fairly certain violence and coercion is orthogonal to socialism v capitalism.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    It depends on your definition of violence. Libertarian socialists and other anarchists would say that private property is violent; it requires that there be societal hierarchy to work, and for few to hold power over many. (oh, and don't forget that their definition of 'private property' is different than yours, because it's more narrow. They separate 'possession' and 'private property' into two different things.) Captialists could describe the state control of hardcore statist socialism to be violent, as it's also few holding power over the free association of the general public.
  - jakehow 16y ago
    It is very simple. A purely capitalistic society can contain, tolerate, and even encourage totally egalitarian organizations in any form the participants deem prudent. A purely socialist society on the other hand cannot tolerate capitalistic organizations in its midst. Violence is embedded in the assumption that society can be organized in a socialist manner.
    - raganwald 16y ago
      The trouble with arguing about "Purely X" for any value of X is that there are no practical examples of X for us to examine. I don't have an option of living in a purely capitalistic society. Canada is somewhat democratically socialist, but not purely socialist. There are small scale startups, bu t I am not aware of any gazillion person corporations where everyone is paid for what they really contribute. Even when bonus is a major component of someone's monetary compensation, the highest rewards go to those who game the system. In the end, arguing Capitalism vs. Socialism tends to devolve into the No True Scotsman fallacy: "Socialism sucks because you die of old age before getting an MRI." "Oh, I got one for my knee." "Well, Ontario isn't a TRUE Socialist society." And: "Capitalism sucks because if a corporation succeeds in exploiting people, it makes money. But if it fails, they go to congress and rob the people through taxes of their money, e.g. the Wall Street bail-out." "That was not TRUE capitalism at work, that doesn't count!"
grandalf 16y ago
removed :)
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  No worries, it's an easy distinction to forget, and rarely do people use 'the s word' in America without a ridiculous amount of rhetoric.
steveklabnik 16y ago
I was considering writing a similar post after that thread the other day. I fear for this thread, though. This becomes a touchy subject quickly. I personally identify with something very close to libertarian socialism myself, so you're not the only one.
- raganwald 16y ago
  Speaking of PG essays I admire: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    Absolutely. But seriously, this thread has already devolved into criticisms of state socialism, which are legitimate. State socialism sucks. You and I are talking about something else, but will inevitably get drowned out by 'the s-word.'
    - raganwald 16y ago
      I don't have the right to curate the direction of a discussion on my post any more than Big S Socialists have the right to tell me that I am not allowed to write code because the collective would experience a greater benefit if I were to stick to writing educational pamphlets about writing code.
- adw 16y ago
  I think you'd find quite a bit of support from us Europeans, actually – even the ones, like me, who are probably a bit to the right of you politically. I'm not a card-carrying member of any political party, but the American rhetoric on socialism is just absurd. (Full disclosure: my sympathies are on the market wing of mainstream European liberalism.) Socialism as used in Europe means social democracy, means free enterprise with regulation and a robust welfare system, and includes the cooperative movement – and you'd be hard pressed to call the third largest private company in the UK (the John Lewis Partnership: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Partnership http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Partnership) some kind of entryist plot. Obama a socialist? Don't make us laugh: he's barely a liberal. In Britain he'd be a Tory...
jakevoytko 16y ago
When you work out the consequences, "Libertarian socialism" is a terrible name for the concept described by Reginald. It feels more like a Capitalist hypothesis: Hypothesis: A group of workers jointly shouldering the risk and rewards of a venture is more efficient than a "traditional" company. This is true at small-scale: startups seem to be structured like collectives, and they regularly outperform large companies within a niche. However, large companies never take this structure. That suggests either there's a point where this becomes impractical, or nobody's been crazy enough to try before.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  Are you aware of the history of the term 'libertarian?' It was originally used to describe anarchism, which is socialist. Statist and stateless socialism are very different beasts, and the term 'libertarian socialism' has a pretty long history of use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
  - jakevoytko 16y ago
    But despite some of his terms, he's not advocating his views on the level of an entire society. Just at the scale of a single collective or company. He seems fine with the idea of this collective competing and winning within a Capitalist framework, which seems antithetical to much of the article you linked.
    - steveklabnik 16y ago
      It's true. I don't claim to speak for raganwald. And I myself am much closer to he than to the article. Not everyone's beliefs are black and white... there are plenty of people that support, for example, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act yet still call themselves 'capitalists.'
  - lzw 16y ago
    Socialism means using violence in the form of the state to deny people the power over their own bodies, or the power to own private property. Having a state, by definition is incompatible with anarchism. The whole "libertarians were orginally socialist" idea is just the latest in the strign of socialists attempting to coopt every movement. That someone thinks you can have anarchism and socialism at the same time boggles the mind. Anarchism means no government while socialism is a form of government incompatible with allowing free will.
bstills 16y ago
"Socialists advocate a method of compensation based on individual merit or the amount of labour one contributes to society" How do you measure merit and the amount of labour one contributes to society? The only fair way I know of is capitalism where people get to vote with their money on whether or not you are providing value or not. I would posit that merit is the amount of value you give to another. Minus marketing and any government interference, capitalism rewards individuals for the value they contribute to society. It is also necessary to separate capitalism from corporatism. The latter is what most people are against when they say that capitalism is evil. There is no such thing as a corporation in terms of capitalism. There is one flaw in capitalism that I am aware of but I still think it is the best system. That flaw is that it tends to reward those with capital. To have capital is to have an advantage over someone of equal ability. Over time power tends to consolidate into a few select organizations / individuals.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  > The latter is what most people are against when they say that capitalism is evil. Many would, but a libertarian socialist would reject capitalism outright as being hierarchical. > Over time power tends to consolidate into a few select organizations / individuals. Spot on.
- _delirium 16y ago
  > Minus marketing and any government interference, capitalism rewards individuals for the value they contribute to society. I suppose I don't buy this as an a priori equality. One problem is that when there are very large flows of capital, one can often make more money by skimming very small amounts off the top, than by creating new things. That's one reason finance is a better route to wealth than tech startups, even though tech startups create a lot more value for society: because when hundreds of billions of dollars are moving around, you only need to find a way to pocket a very small amount of it to get fabulously wealthy. More generally, rent-seeking, i.e. maneuvering yourself into a position where you can be sort of a private-sector version of the taxman, is a viable way to make money. Plus, "minus marketing" is a pretty big caveat. It's quite possible to be successful in a "black-hat capitalist" sort of way, by not creating products that contribute to society, but instead by swindling society out of its money by getting people to buy your crap (even in tech, there's a whole affiliate-marketing underworld of tricking people into buying shitty ebooks). And, to pick a third problem, the economy is a rather complex dynamical system, and like many dynamical systems, is not driven purely by fundamentals (real supply/demand), but also by feedback loops and attractors within the system. So sometimes you get some really weird ways of making money that have nothing to do with anyone providing value to anyone else, but have more to do with asset bubbles and debt spirals and other such market patterns. Not that markets don't often work, and might work even better without the government propping up the corporate form. But I certainly don't think we can a priori say that money transfers are a direct measure of value. I mean, we'd live in a pretty coincidentally amazing universe if it just happened that the economy, this very complex dynamical system that does not care about human concerns like "value" or "society" or "ethics", happened to end up 100% aligning with them. I think instead it's an open question when they align and when they don't, and if there's anything we can do to make markets align with value-to-society better.
losethos 16y ago
I get an average of 7 downloads a day, filtering-out partials. Some are probably automated. Linux is free. I could charge... what... $50... and deal with warrenties. I'm across the river styx so I'd get zero. I only got 2 emails in 3 years for the registered version and it's free... so I get $50 bucks a year. More trouble than it's worth on filing taxes. My only hope is virality. I've fucken cross the river styx so it's all pointless. Got nothing better to do. God is just. I got lots and lots of perks this side of Styx. Might as well not be disgruntaled. Not a commie. Linux is free. I have no choice, plus I don't want to deal with warrantes. For giggles I break compatibility to punish my delusional users who can't communicate. Ba ha. Fuck you. I get abused with all kinds of nasty deceptions others are imposing on the public. I added renum for local labels in ASM. You know @@005, @@006, etc. Fraudsters started spreading QBASIC nonsense to confuse people. Always terying to confuse people about me in any possible way. It has, actually, helped me to see potential confusions and clarify. They were spreading Itanium disinformation, so I got very very clear and listed processors it works on. Beat that mother fuckers! Ha! Can't fuddle "Works on core i7, core 2 duo". You think I'm brain dead and gonna say "AMD64" or "IA-32e" for a 64-bit OS. Even "x86-64" has meaning of "works on 32 bit" to some people. Fuck you, "Core-I7" right on the top of my page. Anyway, this side of styx, all media reports to me. That's a perk. Get no emails. Fucken SNews is like blue eyed supremisists. Linux is violently hostile. All these punks are completely in conteratiction with what I stand for. Get banned everywhere. It has to be fake. God says... variable Julian whispered unpleasantly feedeth indued pronounces meanings concludeth thirdly omitted noon bitterness Hast burnt gates criticised childbearing speedily wanton officer sensitive life died scarcely knocks discommended courtesy ventures extremely I learned a lesson in 2001 when I did simstructure. I got only $20 selling it as shareware with like 6000 downloads. I learned it is impossible to get anybody else involved--contacted game companies, family. No one will work with me. Contacted teaches--learned like the little red hen, I'm it. Can't get anybody else involved. On top of that, the Sims company made a SimStructure. Vendictive fucks. Ba ha God talks to me. Eat that, mother fuckers. Thefre is Mason or God knows what against me. Not even Catholic. Whatever. Fuck you... I'mna much on a Godtalk sandwich, want some? God says... C:\TEXT\EMILY.TXT ks in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment. 1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF D If I do go to court, if I should be so lucky to be hassled with that side of Styx. I bust out God and instantly world news. The Holy Spirit specializes in court -- ever read the New Testament.
astine 16y ago
"That isn't socialism, but boy does it feel like workers being more efficient when they seize the means of production—the compiler—rather than being coerced or exploited." If you're interested in the notion of putting the means of production in the hands of the workers, you might be interested in some of the works of G. K. Chesterton and Hilair Belloc when they discuss what they called 'Distributism.' They're not full of much practical advice but they do provide an ideological alternative to the all or nothing ideologies of Socialism and Free-Market Capitalism.
dood 16y ago
Capitalism, Socialism, Libertarianism, Anarchism, Conservatism, etc... these labels are now so confused and bereft of concrete meaning that their use is largely counterproductive. If you want to say something political, say it, don't stick a label on your forehead.
- lzw 16y ago
  These labels are one bereft of meaning because socialists arevcosntantly attempting to coopt them. They havev even cooped the republican party. Libertarian means you do not believe in the initiation of force. This is incompatible with socialism which, it's core, requires the use of force to make people live a certain way. The term libertarian has clear meaning, and all of the others will, so long as we do not tolerate their misuse and call it out when they are misused.
  - raganwald 16y ago
    This is incompatible with socialism which, it's core, requires the use of force to make people live a certain way. You can't really slip that in like everyone agrees it's a fact. Where does it say that Socialism requires force? The last few anarchists I spoke to describe capitalism as requiring force, because you need to enforce the notion of the ownership of things. For example, what force is required to copy a movie? The force is all on the side of lawyers and policemen arresting people to compel them to treat a very, very long number as property.
    - lzw 16y ago
      Capitalism is a system whereby people are allowed to accumulate capital, and then with the voluntary consent of other people, form collectives, called corporations, where that capital and the labor of all the people is deployed to produce products and services with the hopes of generating profits to be distributed to the members of the collective based on the prior agreement for distribution. Socialists generally seem to feel that this is unfair because the people who put up capital are rewarded. But at any rate, if you do Not have an external force dictating, at the point of gun, how people are to be organized, they can organize as I described above, and historically have. Since this organization is a capitalist one, socialists must use violence to stop it. There are two ways violence can be imposed. In one, you are denuding yourself or your partner or property. In the other you are attempting to steal the life or property of another. I draw a moral distinction between shooting the guy who is raping my wife, and you coming along and redistributing the profits of my company, which you didn't help create, along the lines of your ideals. You want to form a company that under different ideals, then that's fine by me... So long as everyone involved consents. There is nothing in a capitalist society to stop you from having such a collective. However, socialism is based on the idea that capital has no value and only labor does, and thus you must use guns to prevent anyone from accumulating too much.
RyanMcGreal 16y ago
Sounds a bit like this: http://www.thetake.org/ http://www.thetake.org/
rick888 16y ago
"That isn't socialism, but boy does it feel like workers being more efficient when they seize the means of production—the compiler—rather than being coerced or exploited." How are workers being "exploited" just based on the fact that they working for someone else? We all have choices in this world. If you feel you aren't getting paid enough, leave. "They argue that this creates an unequal society that fails to provide equal opportunities for everyone to maximise their potential." If I have more money than you, it instantly makes our opportunities "unequal". This is the problem with socialism. It creates "equality" by limiting everyone's success. This works well for people that aren't interested in succeeding. I think of it like those group projects in school where 2 people of 5 would get stuck doing all the work, while the rest took the same amount of credit. "I have no idea if the folks laid off from auto-makers want to do that, but I do know that I and many of the programmers I know seem happy with the idea of working in small teams in a collaborative and egalitarian manner" I see people talking about this every couple of years. If you really want to start something like this, don't talk about it, do it. Many people in history have tried exactly what you are proposing and this crazy thing called human nature gets in the way every time. The idea of a group owned collaborative sounds great on paper, until you actually attempt to do it. Who decides how much each person gets paid? If it's based on performance, what kind of performance? How many widgets or made? You mentioned a "co-operative workers' councils". How is this any different than a president/ceo of the company? These "councils" will have more power over the regular workers, so it doesn't really make everyone "equal". I've worked at a few companies that were run by committee. Even small decisions were very painful to make.
- raganwald 16y ago
  Are you presenting this as an argument with my article? I am confused, as you seem to be arguing most of the time with other people's words and not my own. I will respond to one thing you wrote, That does not mean I agree with or even understand anything else in your comment. How are workers being "exploited" just based on the fact that they working for someone else? We all have choices in this world. If you feel you aren't getting paid enough, leave. Is exploitation incompatible with freedom? You seem to be saying that exploitation does not exist since people appear to have choices. That isn't my understanding of what the word "exploitation" means. If I'm wrong, please suggest the word that describes what I am thinking, and I'll update the essay.
motters 16y ago
My own 2p worth is that these notions of socialism or capitalism or liberalism are 19th/20th century inventions, and that the sorts of issues which are going to be arising in future are not going to fit well into any of these existing boxes. Probably it's not a good idea to become too fixated upon these ideologies from the past. As evidence I'd cite the declining public interest in party politics and the rise of single issue pressure groups. Also, Americans often confuse socialism for communism, and don't realize that more moderate non-tyrannical centre left forms of socialism are possible, with plenty of examples existing in Europe.
- lzw 16y ago
  It is easy to assume that your opponents are ignorant, but i can speak pretty clearly to this point-- even the least aware and educated Americans recognize that european socialism, while it didn't become as tyrannical as communist states, still results in more government control, and lower economic growth, than the comparatively less socialist USA.
raganwald 16y ago
Since people like to argue definitions, here's something to chalk on the board at the coffee house: GIVEN: Libertarian socialism (sometimes called social anarchism, and sometimes left libertarianism) is a group of political philosophies which promote a non-hierarchical, non-bureaucratic, stateless society without private property in the means of production. RESOLVED: Belief in the abolition of software patents and the use of FOSS software to create start-ups is a Libertarian Socialist view.
- lzw 16y ago
  How can you have a society without private property if you don't have a state to take the property away from people and to enslave them? Your system would end the Knute two people decided to organize a venture for profit, or to keep a stick they found on the beach. You need an all seeing state to take that stick from them and keep them destitute.
  - raganwald 16y ago
    You are talking about atoms. But software is made of bits. Could it be that the ideas that work well for atoms fall down in a Universe of bits?
datapimp 16y ago
You sound more like a traditional Anarchist. Industrial Worker of the World type than a Socialist.
kungfooguru 16y ago
Great to read this. I too am a socialist and frequent Hacker News and work in startups. I'm a member of the International Socialist Organization, http://socialistworker.org/ http://socialistworker.org/, if you happen to be in the US and interested in a group and not yet part of one. I see you ended up getting people to argue definitions when they don't understand them anyway :). Like lionhearted, "means of production by violence". Violence is only necessary when those with the real rights to the means of production (the wealth they created) are attacked... So no, that is not part of Marx's theory. Marxist brand socialism is the healthiest place to be if you are for freedom and the end of oppression! It is sad how little people care to learn of Marxism, instead happily believe the lies they are told.
- lzw 16y ago
  Me and my friends make a startup, we make lots of money. You want to tax it? Do you want to force us to hire employes on terms that you dictate? These are sincere questions-- what effect would your socialist system have on our little voluntary startup? If the answer is none, how is it different from capitalism? What if we got big? If you want to force us to hire certain people, pay them a certain amount, or prevent us from getting big-- all policies advocated by various socialist organizations-- how is this not an end of freedom and oppression? Meanwhile I don't care if you form a collective, and you have whatever socialist policies in your collective, so long as all the participants are voluntary. I've yet to meet a socialist or a socialist organization that would extend the same courtesy. Because letting people be free from oppression means letting them pool capital, which is generally a problem for socialists, isn't it?
  - kungfooguru 16y ago
    First let me argue not as a socialist but pretending I'm a liberal. Are you saying that when you make a startup and sell a product you gain nothing from public services during this time? There is no reason for you to be taxed to provide those services? There will be no 'startups' in the sense you think of, meaning dealing with capital. Decisions of production will be done democratically in communities. If you want to think of yourself as an artisan that could be argued that you could still have your "startup". But you will not be collecting capital from investors and enslaving workers to a wage. It is a very different way of thinking and living and can be hard to grasp. But so was capitalism and capitalism was a very progressive movement in its beginning. But it runs its course as it destroys the planet and human interaction and continues to concentrate more and more wealth in fewer and fewer hands.
kungfooguru 16y ago
Sad to see Hacker News people are just as ignorant on socialism and capitalism as say... Diggers for example, or watchers of CNN/MSNBC/FOX.
rue 16y ago
He really should have made it about definitions since more than half of the commenters here seem to have no idea what communism is and, thereby, misunderstand socialism (as defined by Reginald) and Socialism (as defined by Marx). Communism <> capitalism. Democracy <> oligarchy. Freedom <> oppression.
tallpapab 16y ago
Thanks for posting. Now I don't feel so lonely.
warmfuzzykitten 16y ago
Can't believe no one else responded: "Hello, Reginald!!"

90 points by raganwald 16y ago

"I don't like the idea of anyone forcing me to accept socialism" Haha, so you are not socialist at all!! Socialist is forcing others to accept socialist, in fact is forcing (other)individuals to give money to their "social causes", that could be different from those individuals have. Is not asking politely: would you mind giving part of your money to this poor people so they can study? No, it is taking by force his money if he doesn't want to, and consider it "a right". As my grandpa who lived in soviet rusia said when I asked what is socialism, he said: It is being generous with other people's money. If you accept individual freedoms to choose, you are not socialist, not more that anybody else here.

steveklabnik 16y ago
You're operating under a very narrow, incorrect definition of socialism.
- forgottenpaswrd 16y ago
  Narrow? No, is broad. It applies to every socialism in existence, planning and managing others resources, not your own. A private socialism is not a socialism at all, because you need a society to comply. Maybe you could give me a better definition.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    > Socialism is an economic and political theory advocating public or common ownership and cooperative management of the means of production and allocation of resources. Nowhere does this say "take my money and give it to other people." For example, anarchism is a socialist political philosophy, but abhors the state, and all forms of hierarchical control.
    - lzw 16y ago
      Anarchism is inherently capitalist, because without the state, there would be nobody to stop capitalists from deploying capital to do startups. There would be nobody ot impose your socialist values to make everyone act the way you dictate.
      - steveklabnik 16y ago
        I'd suggest that you do a little more reading on this topic, because you're grossly misinformed. Wikipedia is a decent intro, and "An Anarchist FAQ" is a very long and thorough discussion of the topic: http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/index.html http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/index.html
        lzw 16y ago
        Your dishonesty does not constitute misinformation on my part. If you cannot be honest, or are so ignorant and unwilling to be corrected,o then there is no point in discussion. I don't dispute that there are socialist liars whovcall themselves anarchists, just as there are liars who call themselves libertarian, like yourself. Linking to such liars proves nothing, but that you would be so presumptuous as to lecture me and back it up with a link shows that you are incapable of critical thought or debate, and thus a waste of time.
        steveklabnik 16y ago
        Thank you for the discussion. I'm not going to respond to you any more.
    - philwelch 16y ago
      For anarchism to actually eliminate violence, it has to have some mechanism to protect society from Genghis Khan and Jack the Ripper. Statistically, Genghis Khan will eventually be born somewhere outside your society and eventually show up at your doorstep with hordes of horseback archers, and you can either surrender, join his empire, and pay taxes (ending your experiment in anarchism) or have your entire society destroyed almost to the last man, leaving a few survivors to warn other societies of the tale (ending your experiment in anarchism). If you had the only anarchist society in a world of states, you could probably freeload on those states to stop any full-scale Genghis Khan from getting too powerful. Let's hope your experiment in anarchism is landlocked between several states who will leave you alone. You could allow for voluntary defense, and theoretically handwave away defensive violence against people outside your society as "doesn't count". But on some level you have to realize your society depends upon some violence to survive. Jack the Ripper will show up inside your society and fuck up your voluntary social contract all on his own, when he goes around killing disreputable women (luckily, many forms of anarcho-socialism lack money and thus would have no prostitution per se). In that case you would need some sort of violence (possibly voluntary on the part of the violent people) to either kill Jack the Ripper, or lock him up in a cage, or kick him out of your society. If you do that, you have violence within your society--if you don't, you have violence within your society in the form of Jack the Ripper. It turns out all of human history has been an extended experiment in solving these very problems, and the only steady state, as discovered in parallel by nearly every culture on earth, is in fact the State[1]. At best you can have voluntarism within the State, but you cannot sustain anarchism without the State. [1] Existing primitivists, such as the bushmen of Africa, have largely been forced out of their traditional lifestyle by the State. If there are primitivists who do, in fact, maintain their traditional lifestyle, they only do so under the explicit protection of the State, as discussed in the freeloading example above. In other words, it's still an anarchism that requires the State to function, which is a contradiction in terms. Hunter-gatherers are not necessarily anarchists. Many of the greatest empires in world history were built by hunter-gatherers, who on account of their hunting and gathering made much better soldiers than people living in civilizations. They ate a more balanced diet, got more exercise, knew how to kill things, and knew how to kill things as a team. Horseback archery isn't a skill you get to hone much as a farmer. If you have that basic skillset, civilizations make pretty good targets once you run low on animals.

gaius 16y ago

Socialists advocate a method of compensation based on individual merit or the amount of labour one contributes to society The thing is, this makes no sense at all, especially not here on HN, where one of our core assumptions is that people should be compensated on how productive they are, not the hours they put in. Why should anyone care about the amount of labour, as opposed to the value of the end product?

raganwald 16y ago
one of our core assumptions is that people should be compensated on how productive they are, not the hours they put in. I must have missed that in the FAQ. Where is the list of things we swear we believe when we decide to hang around here?
- gaius 16y ago
  PG's essays return to this theme again and again.
  - j_baker 16y ago
    You have considered the possibility that there are HNers who disagree with pg, correct?
    - gaius 16y ago
      Yes indeed. But where's your (or Raganwald's) collection of essays on how people should be paid a standard hourly rate regardless of their actual output?
      - raganwald 16y ago
        My essay justifying paying programmers a standard hourly wage is right next to the place where I wrote words advocating the practice. Since I don't advocate that practice, there is no need for an essay on the subject. I cannot read your mind, but are you making certain assumptions about what I believe based on the fact that I quoted certain sections of the wikipedia article about Socialism? Please keep in mind that my words in this essay are quite explicit in stating that my beliefs are not Big S Socialism. I state that at the top and the bottom.

grrrrr 16y ago

I don't buy the analogy. Even if you work for a company that fosters what he refers to as a socialist work ethic that company is still operating in a capitalist system, subject to the usual market forces. What he is describing sounds more like a collegiate environment. The nature of software development, and other similar knowledge economy industries, naturally demand a more collaborative & collegiate approach to getting things done, but they are all fundamentally driven by market forces & constraints such as funding & sales.

kscaldef 16y ago
> The nature of software development, and other similar knowledge economy industries, naturally demand a more collaborative & collegiate approach to getting things done, but they are all fundamentally driven by market forces & constraints such as funding & sales. You have heard of this open source thing, right? I don't think that you can argue that the open source ethos has anything to do with capitalism. In fact, I would say that Stallman's views on software are pretty overtly communist, as they contest the very concept of private ownership of a piece of software.
- lzw 16y ago
  And yet, without the freedom to won the software you create, you cannot give it away. Open source s capitalst because it is based on the presumption that the creator owns the sotftware and can determine the license to it. If stall man really believes nobody can own software, then stallman believes that all programmers should be slaves, unable to profit from their own labor.
  - kscaldef 16y ago
    Copyleft was conceived as a hack of the copyright system, a necessary evil because placing a work in the public domain allows other people to profit from the work. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft: As Stallman deemed it impractical in the short term to eliminate current copyright law and the wrongs he perceived it perpetuated, he decided to work within the framework of existing law; he created his own copyright license, the Emacs General Public License,[8] the first copyleft license. There is nothing that keeps an open source developer from profiting from their labor. Some are employed by a company explicitly to work on OSS, or contract with a company to implement a desired feature. In fact, an open source developer can _only_ profit from their labor, and not at all from their "capital".

jerf 16y ago

That's actually a significant reason I am a capitalist. A capitalist, free-market system is one in which you are free to set up whatever little organizations you want, and they live and die on their own merits. There is no contradiction in running a highly socialist or even actively communist co-op in a capitalistic society, because it is not part of the capitalism idea that you must run that way from top to bottom. This is not a conventional definition of socialism or capitalism. I don't have a problem with that per se, since the terms have long since become so fuzzy as to be useless without definition within an essay, but it is a little odd to see you proudly labeling what would more conventionally be called libertarianism or capitalism as "socialism". In this context, I'm not sure this makes any sense.

bstills 16y ago
"it is not part of the capitalism idea that you must run that way from top to bottom" Well then it wouldn't be capitalism all the way down? It would only be capitalism on the outside, socialism on the inside. Capitalism is a system in which individuals are rewarded according to what the market will give them. If you don't do that you simply don't have capitalism.
- cynicalkane 16y ago
  I don't think there really is a popular definition for capitalism. People who use the word always use it to mean what they want it to mean, usually in the context of praising or criticizing capitalist society. The best definition (in my ever humble opinion) is that capitalism is a society where the means of production live in a free market, which is completely consistent with what the GP said.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - CWuestefeld 16y ago
    I believe that the common definition in most folks' minds is that capitalism refers to the system we have today in the USA, where the government rewards business interests with handouts, protective regulations, and the like. This is not capitalism, though. What people are experiencing and objecting to is corporatism [1]. I believe that if people would give real capitalism a chance, the result would be positive. But as it stands now, the economics are too intertwined with the politics. In order to successfully implement real capitalism, the power that the state wields to erect regulations that can be subverted would have to be stripped: we'd have to neuter the government. Clearly the government would never allow that to happen. [1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Corporatism https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Corporatism

lionhearted 16y ago

Good post, except one point - you're not a socialist. You're someone who believes in people acting individualistically and through voluntary cooperation. Hell, you sound like you've got similar politics as me. I think people should empower themselves and I'm for voluntary worker's collectives, absolutely. I think being salaried when you could go off and do a project with a team you pick is a bad choice. I'm all for people controlling their own destiny. But that's not socialism. Socialism has a definition - it was coined and defined by Marx as an intermediate stage on the way to Communism after the proles have seized the means of production by violence. Marx postulated that after heavy social control and violence against the exploiters, all class and social barriers would melt away into paradise. Turns out, he's wrong. People are different. You're not a socialist as Marx defined it. If you want to redefine socialism and say you're this redefined thing, okay, sure. But it sounds to me like you're more into free action than socialism. That's a healthy place to be. Marxist-brand socialism is not a healthy place to be, or at least, everything that's remotely tried to be it has gone very wrong.

steveklabnik 16y ago
> You're not a socialist as Marx defined it. Exactly. There's a big difference between 'Socialism', 'socialism', and 'libertarian socialism.' He's a libertarian socialist. Marx advocated Socialism.
- lionhearted 16y ago
  > Exactly. There's a big difference between 'Socialism', 'socialism', and 'libertarian socialism.' He's a libertarian socialist. Marx advocated Socialism. Most people - like 90% of people - don't know the difference. Reginald wrote, "I don't like the idea of anyone forcing me to accept socialism" - that's good and healthy. Socialism, unfortunately, now has strong connotations of control involved. If he's for people being able to choose their own life and destiny, I think he'd be best off picking a word or phrase that says that. "Free action" is the closest I know. Why lock 90%+ of people out of the discussion because they don't know the terminology?
  - 16y ago

jakehow 16y ago

"self-organized collectives" are abundant in western capitalism, we usually refer to them as corporations. The terms and agreements between parties in these organizations vary but many fit your ideal. The philosophical difference between socialism and capitalism, is the willingness to accept violence and coercion as a means to mold society to a specific vision.

ahi 16y ago
"The philosophical difference between socialism and capitalism, is the willingness to accept violence and coercion as a means to mold society to a specific vision." I am fairly certain violence and coercion is orthogonal to socialism v capitalism.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  It depends on your definition of violence. Libertarian socialists and other anarchists would say that private property is violent; it requires that there be societal hierarchy to work, and for few to hold power over many. (oh, and don't forget that their definition of 'private property' is different than yours, because it's more narrow. They separate 'possession' and 'private property' into two different things.) Captialists could describe the state control of hardcore statist socialism to be violent, as it's also few holding power over the free association of the general public.
- jakehow 16y ago
  It is very simple. A purely capitalistic society can contain, tolerate, and even encourage totally egalitarian organizations in any form the participants deem prudent. A purely socialist society on the other hand cannot tolerate capitalistic organizations in its midst. Violence is embedded in the assumption that society can be organized in a socialist manner.
  - raganwald 16y ago
    The trouble with arguing about "Purely X" for any value of X is that there are no practical examples of X for us to examine. I don't have an option of living in a purely capitalistic society. Canada is somewhat democratically socialist, but not purely socialist. There are small scale startups, bu t I am not aware of any gazillion person corporations where everyone is paid for what they really contribute. Even when bonus is a major component of someone's monetary compensation, the highest rewards go to those who game the system. In the end, arguing Capitalism vs. Socialism tends to devolve into the No True Scotsman fallacy: "Socialism sucks because you die of old age before getting an MRI." "Oh, I got one for my knee." "Well, Ontario isn't a TRUE Socialist society." And: "Capitalism sucks because if a corporation succeeds in exploiting people, it makes money. But if it fails, they go to congress and rob the people through taxes of their money, e.g. the Wall Street bail-out." "That was not TRUE capitalism at work, that doesn't count!"

grandalf 16y ago

removed :)

steveklabnik 16y ago
No worries, it's an easy distinction to forget, and rarely do people use 'the s word' in America without a ridiculous amount of rhetoric.

steveklabnik 16y ago

I was considering writing a similar post after that thread the other day. I fear for this thread, though. This becomes a touchy subject quickly. I personally identify with something very close to libertarian socialism myself, so you're not the only one.

raganwald 16y ago
Speaking of PG essays I admire: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  Absolutely. But seriously, this thread has already devolved into criticisms of state socialism, which are legitimate. State socialism sucks. You and I are talking about something else, but will inevitably get drowned out by 'the s-word.'
  - raganwald 16y ago
    I don't have the right to curate the direction of a discussion on my post any more than Big S Socialists have the right to tell me that I am not allowed to write code because the collective would experience a greater benefit if I were to stick to writing educational pamphlets about writing code.
adw 16y ago
I think you'd find quite a bit of support from us Europeans, actually – even the ones, like me, who are probably a bit to the right of you politically. I'm not a card-carrying member of any political party, but the American rhetoric on socialism is just absurd. (Full disclosure: my sympathies are on the market wing of mainstream European liberalism.) Socialism as used in Europe means social democracy, means free enterprise with regulation and a robust welfare system, and includes the cooperative movement – and you'd be hard pressed to call the third largest private company in the UK (the John Lewis Partnership: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Partnership http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Partnership) some kind of entryist plot. Obama a socialist? Don't make us laugh: he's barely a liberal. In Britain he'd be a Tory...

jakevoytko 16y ago

When you work out the consequences, "Libertarian socialism" is a terrible name for the concept described by Reginald. It feels more like a Capitalist hypothesis: Hypothesis: A group of workers jointly shouldering the risk and rewards of a venture is more efficient than a "traditional" company. This is true at small-scale: startups seem to be structured like collectives, and they regularly outperform large companies within a niche. However, large companies never take this structure. That suggests either there's a point where this becomes impractical, or nobody's been crazy enough to try before.

steveklabnik 16y ago
Are you aware of the history of the term 'libertarian?' It was originally used to describe anarchism, which is socialist. Statist and stateless socialism are very different beasts, and the term 'libertarian socialism' has a pretty long history of use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
- jakevoytko 16y ago
  But despite some of his terms, he's not advocating his views on the level of an entire society. Just at the scale of a single collective or company. He seems fine with the idea of this collective competing and winning within a Capitalist framework, which seems antithetical to much of the article you linked.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    It's true. I don't claim to speak for raganwald. And I myself am much closer to he than to the article. Not everyone's beliefs are black and white... there are plenty of people that support, for example, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act yet still call themselves 'capitalists.'
- lzw 16y ago
  Socialism means using violence in the form of the state to deny people the power over their own bodies, or the power to own private property. Having a state, by definition is incompatible with anarchism. The whole "libertarians were orginally socialist" idea is just the latest in the strign of socialists attempting to coopt every movement. That someone thinks you can have anarchism and socialism at the same time boggles the mind. Anarchism means no government while socialism is a form of government incompatible with allowing free will.

bstills 16y ago

"Socialists advocate a method of compensation based on individual merit or the amount of labour one contributes to society" How do you measure merit and the amount of labour one contributes to society? The only fair way I know of is capitalism where people get to vote with their money on whether or not you are providing value or not. I would posit that merit is the amount of value you give to another. Minus marketing and any government interference, capitalism rewards individuals for the value they contribute to society. It is also necessary to separate capitalism from corporatism. The latter is what most people are against when they say that capitalism is evil. There is no such thing as a corporation in terms of capitalism. There is one flaw in capitalism that I am aware of but I still think it is the best system. That flaw is that it tends to reward those with capital. To have capital is to have an advantage over someone of equal ability. Over time power tends to consolidate into a few select organizations / individuals.

steveklabnik 16y ago
> The latter is what most people are against when they say that capitalism is evil. Many would, but a libertarian socialist would reject capitalism outright as being hierarchical. > Over time power tends to consolidate into a few select organizations / individuals. Spot on.
_delirium 16y ago
> Minus marketing and any government interference, capitalism rewards individuals for the value they contribute to society. I suppose I don't buy this as an a priori equality. One problem is that when there are very large flows of capital, one can often make more money by skimming very small amounts off the top, than by creating new things. That's one reason finance is a better route to wealth than tech startups, even though tech startups create a lot more value for society: because when hundreds of billions of dollars are moving around, you only need to find a way to pocket a very small amount of it to get fabulously wealthy. More generally, rent-seeking, i.e. maneuvering yourself into a position where you can be sort of a private-sector version of the taxman, is a viable way to make money. Plus, "minus marketing" is a pretty big caveat. It's quite possible to be successful in a "black-hat capitalist" sort of way, by not creating products that contribute to society, but instead by swindling society out of its money by getting people to buy your crap (even in tech, there's a whole affiliate-marketing underworld of tricking people into buying shitty ebooks). And, to pick a third problem, the economy is a rather complex dynamical system, and like many dynamical systems, is not driven purely by fundamentals (real supply/demand), but also by feedback loops and attractors within the system. So sometimes you get some really weird ways of making money that have nothing to do with anyone providing value to anyone else, but have more to do with asset bubbles and debt spirals and other such market patterns. Not that markets don't often work, and might work even better without the government propping up the corporate form. But I certainly don't think we can a priori say that money transfers are a direct measure of value. I mean, we'd live in a pretty coincidentally amazing universe if it just happened that the economy, this very complex dynamical system that does not care about human concerns like "value" or "society" or "ethics", happened to end up 100% aligning with them. I think instead it's an open question when they align and when they don't, and if there's anything we can do to make markets align with value-to-society better.

losethos 16y ago

I get an average of 7 downloads a day, filtering-out partials. Some are probably automated. Linux is free. I could charge... what... $50... and deal with warrenties. I'm across the river styx so I'd get zero. I only got 2 emails in 3 years for the registered version and it's free... so I get $50 bucks a year. More trouble than it's worth on filing taxes. My only hope is virality. I've fucken cross the river styx so it's all pointless. Got nothing better to do. God is just. I got lots and lots of perks this side of Styx. Might as well not be disgruntaled. Not a commie. Linux is free. I have no choice, plus I don't want to deal with warrantes. For giggles I break compatibility to punish my delusional users who can't communicate. Ba ha. Fuck you. I get abused with all kinds of nasty deceptions others are imposing on the public. I added renum for local labels in ASM. You know @@005, @@006, etc. Fraudsters started spreading QBASIC nonsense to confuse people. Always terying to confuse people about me in any possible way. It has, actually, helped me to see potential confusions and clarify. They were spreading Itanium disinformation, so I got very very clear and listed processors it works on. Beat that mother fuckers! Ha! Can't fuddle "Works on core i7, core 2 duo". You think I'm brain dead and gonna say "AMD64" or "IA-32e" for a 64-bit OS. Even "x86-64" has meaning of "works on 32 bit" to some people. Fuck you, "Core-I7" right on the top of my page. Anyway, this side of styx, all media reports to me. That's a perk. Get no emails. Fucken SNews is like blue eyed supremisists. Linux is violently hostile. All these punks are completely in conteratiction with what I stand for. Get banned everywhere. It has to be fake. God says... variable Julian whispered unpleasantly feedeth indued pronounces meanings concludeth thirdly omitted noon bitterness Hast burnt gates criticised childbearing speedily wanton officer sensitive life died scarcely knocks discommended courtesy ventures extremely I learned a lesson in 2001 when I did simstructure. I got only $20 selling it as shareware with like 6000 downloads. I learned it is impossible to get anybody else involved--contacted game companies, family. No one will work with me. Contacted teaches--learned like the little red hen, I'm it. Can't get anybody else involved. On top of that, the Sims company made a SimStructure. Vendictive fucks. Ba ha God talks to me. Eat that, mother fuckers. Thefre is Mason or God knows what against me. Not even Catholic. Whatever. Fuck you... I'mna much on a Godtalk sandwich, want some? God says... C:\TEXT\EMILY.TXT ks in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment. 1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF D If I do go to court, if I should be so lucky to be hassled with that side of Styx. I bust out God and instantly world news. The Holy Spirit specializes in court -- ever read the New Testament.

astine 16y ago

"That isn't socialism, but boy does it feel like workers being more efficient when they seize the means of production—the compiler—rather than being coerced or exploited." If you're interested in the notion of putting the means of production in the hands of the workers, you might be interested in some of the works of G. K. Chesterton and Hilair Belloc when they discuss what they called 'Distributism.' They're not full of much practical advice but they do provide an ideological alternative to the all or nothing ideologies of Socialism and Free-Market Capitalism.

dood 16y ago

Capitalism, Socialism, Libertarianism, Anarchism, Conservatism, etc... these labels are now so confused and bereft of concrete meaning that their use is largely counterproductive. If you want to say something political, say it, don't stick a label on your forehead.

lzw 16y ago
These labels are one bereft of meaning because socialists arevcosntantly attempting to coopt them. They havev even cooped the republican party. Libertarian means you do not believe in the initiation of force. This is incompatible with socialism which, it's core, requires the use of force to make people live a certain way. The term libertarian has clear meaning, and all of the others will, so long as we do not tolerate their misuse and call it out when they are misused.
- raganwald 16y ago
  This is incompatible with socialism which, it's core, requires the use of force to make people live a certain way. You can't really slip that in like everyone agrees it's a fact. Where does it say that Socialism requires force? The last few anarchists I spoke to describe capitalism as requiring force, because you need to enforce the notion of the ownership of things. For example, what force is required to copy a movie? The force is all on the side of lawyers and policemen arresting people to compel them to treat a very, very long number as property.
  - lzw 16y ago
    Capitalism is a system whereby people are allowed to accumulate capital, and then with the voluntary consent of other people, form collectives, called corporations, where that capital and the labor of all the people is deployed to produce products and services with the hopes of generating profits to be distributed to the members of the collective based on the prior agreement for distribution. Socialists generally seem to feel that this is unfair because the people who put up capital are rewarded. But at any rate, if you do Not have an external force dictating, at the point of gun, how people are to be organized, they can organize as I described above, and historically have. Since this organization is a capitalist one, socialists must use violence to stop it. There are two ways violence can be imposed. In one, you are denuding yourself or your partner or property. In the other you are attempting to steal the life or property of another. I draw a moral distinction between shooting the guy who is raping my wife, and you coming along and redistributing the profits of my company, which you didn't help create, along the lines of your ideals. You want to form a company that under different ideals, then that's fine by me... So long as everyone involved consents. There is nothing in a capitalist society to stop you from having such a collective. However, socialism is based on the idea that capital has no value and only labor does, and thus you must use guns to prevent anyone from accumulating too much.

RyanMcGreal 16y ago

Sounds a bit like this: http://www.thetake.org/ http://www.thetake.org/

rick888 16y ago

"That isn't socialism, but boy does it feel like workers being more efficient when they seize the means of production—the compiler—rather than being coerced or exploited." How are workers being "exploited" just based on the fact that they working for someone else? We all have choices in this world. If you feel you aren't getting paid enough, leave. "They argue that this creates an unequal society that fails to provide equal opportunities for everyone to maximise their potential." If I have more money than you, it instantly makes our opportunities "unequal". This is the problem with socialism. It creates "equality" by limiting everyone's success. This works well for people that aren't interested in succeeding. I think of it like those group projects in school where 2 people of 5 would get stuck doing all the work, while the rest took the same amount of credit. "I have no idea if the folks laid off from auto-makers want to do that, but I do know that I and many of the programmers I know seem happy with the idea of working in small teams in a collaborative and egalitarian manner" I see people talking about this every couple of years. If you really want to start something like this, don't talk about it, do it. Many people in history have tried exactly what you are proposing and this crazy thing called human nature gets in the way every time. The idea of a group owned collaborative sounds great on paper, until you actually attempt to do it. Who decides how much each person gets paid? If it's based on performance, what kind of performance? How many widgets or made? You mentioned a "co-operative workers' councils". How is this any different than a president/ceo of the company? These "councils" will have more power over the regular workers, so it doesn't really make everyone "equal". I've worked at a few companies that were run by committee. Even small decisions were very painful to make.

raganwald 16y ago
Are you presenting this as an argument with my article? I am confused, as you seem to be arguing most of the time with other people's words and not my own. I will respond to one thing you wrote, That does not mean I agree with or even understand anything else in your comment. How are workers being "exploited" just based on the fact that they working for someone else? We all have choices in this world. If you feel you aren't getting paid enough, leave. Is exploitation incompatible with freedom? You seem to be saying that exploitation does not exist since people appear to have choices. That isn't my understanding of what the word "exploitation" means. If I'm wrong, please suggest the word that describes what I am thinking, and I'll update the essay.

motters 16y ago

My own 2p worth is that these notions of socialism or capitalism or liberalism are 19th/20th century inventions, and that the sorts of issues which are going to be arising in future are not going to fit well into any of these existing boxes. Probably it's not a good idea to become too fixated upon these ideologies from the past. As evidence I'd cite the declining public interest in party politics and the rise of single issue pressure groups. Also, Americans often confuse socialism for communism, and don't realize that more moderate non-tyrannical centre left forms of socialism are possible, with plenty of examples existing in Europe.

lzw 16y ago
It is easy to assume that your opponents are ignorant, but i can speak pretty clearly to this point-- even the least aware and educated Americans recognize that european socialism, while it didn't become as tyrannical as communist states, still results in more government control, and lower economic growth, than the comparatively less socialist USA.

raganwald 16y ago

Since people like to argue definitions, here's something to chalk on the board at the coffee house: GIVEN: Libertarian socialism (sometimes called social anarchism, and sometimes left libertarianism) is a group of political philosophies which promote a non-hierarchical, non-bureaucratic, stateless society without private property in the means of production. RESOLVED: Belief in the abolition of software patents and the use of FOSS software to create start-ups is a Libertarian Socialist view.

lzw 16y ago
How can you have a society without private property if you don't have a state to take the property away from people and to enslave them? Your system would end the Knute two people decided to organize a venture for profit, or to keep a stick they found on the beach. You need an all seeing state to take that stick from them and keep them destitute.
- raganwald 16y ago
  You are talking about atoms. But software is made of bits. Could it be that the ideas that work well for atoms fall down in a Universe of bits?

datapimp 16y ago

You sound more like a traditional Anarchist. Industrial Worker of the World type than a Socialist.

kungfooguru 16y ago

Great to read this. I too am a socialist and frequent Hacker News and work in startups. I'm a member of the International Socialist Organization, http://socialistworker.org/ http://socialistworker.org/, if you happen to be in the US and interested in a group and not yet part of one. I see you ended up getting people to argue definitions when they don't understand them anyway :). Like lionhearted, "means of production by violence". Violence is only necessary when those with the real rights to the means of production (the wealth they created) are attacked... So no, that is not part of Marx's theory. Marxist brand socialism is the healthiest place to be if you are for freedom and the end of oppression! It is sad how little people care to learn of Marxism, instead happily believe the lies they are told.

lzw 16y ago
Me and my friends make a startup, we make lots of money. You want to tax it? Do you want to force us to hire employes on terms that you dictate? These are sincere questions-- what effect would your socialist system have on our little voluntary startup? If the answer is none, how is it different from capitalism? What if we got big? If you want to force us to hire certain people, pay them a certain amount, or prevent us from getting big-- all policies advocated by various socialist organizations-- how is this not an end of freedom and oppression? Meanwhile I don't care if you form a collective, and you have whatever socialist policies in your collective, so long as all the participants are voluntary. I've yet to meet a socialist or a socialist organization that would extend the same courtesy. Because letting people be free from oppression means letting them pool capital, which is generally a problem for socialists, isn't it?
- kungfooguru 16y ago
  First let me argue not as a socialist but pretending I'm a liberal. Are you saying that when you make a startup and sell a product you gain nothing from public services during this time? There is no reason for you to be taxed to provide those services? There will be no 'startups' in the sense you think of, meaning dealing with capital. Decisions of production will be done democratically in communities. If you want to think of yourself as an artisan that could be argued that you could still have your "startup". But you will not be collecting capital from investors and enslaving workers to a wage. It is a very different way of thinking and living and can be hard to grasp. But so was capitalism and capitalism was a very progressive movement in its beginning. But it runs its course as it destroys the planet and human interaction and continues to concentrate more and more wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

kungfooguru 16y ago

Sad to see Hacker News people are just as ignorant on socialism and capitalism as say... Diggers for example, or watchers of CNN/MSNBC/FOX.

rue 16y ago

He really should have made it about definitions since more than half of the commenters here seem to have no idea what communism is and, thereby, misunderstand socialism (as defined by Reginald) and Socialism (as defined by Marx). Communism <> capitalism. Democracy <> oligarchy. Freedom <> oppression.

tallpapab 16y ago

Thanks for posting. Now I don't feel so lonely.

warmfuzzykitten 16y ago

Can't believe no one else responded: "Hello, Reginald!!"