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DentArthurDent
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16 May 2009, 4:52 pm

Dussel wrote:
They may accelerate a process, but never will be the cause of a process.
Obviously

DentArthurDent wrote:
Engels may have been a member of the Petite Bourgeoisie, ...


Dussel wrote:
Not "Petite Bourgeoisie", much more real Grand Bourgeoisie. Engels owned a factory in Wuppertal, Germany, and did international business in Germany, France, in Benelux and the UK.


This is what I am struggling to confirm. So far I have diverging research. Some say his father had business in Germany and had a share in a mill in England and this is where he worked his way up to the position of partner. Others are less sketchy but do say that he invested on the stock market.

Do you have evidence for your assertions? Not that it really matters, Marx stated that capitalism was necessary in the progression towards a socialist state, that he lived off capital whilst helping to lay the framework of socialism does not concern me greatly. I mean what was he going to do, go around the working class areas door knocking with an Alms bowl saying that he was attempting to write the framework for a socialist ideology that many years into the future was going to benefit the working class and would they mind donating to this great cause!! !


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ruveyn
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16 May 2009, 7:56 pm

Orwell wrote:

No, there is an Ours. Free Software belongs to everyone. Take what you need, give back what you can. Those are the principles on which Open Source is built.


Before free software became Ours it was His (i.e. belonged to the one who created it in the first place). It became Ours because the Owner generously made a gift of it to all the others. Nothing is inherently Ours. All things that are not in nature are brought into being by a person or persons. Before many can claim something it must be made by Some One. Only the things in nature not made by man can be claimed by many.

ruveyn



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16 May 2009, 9:54 pm

ruveyn wrote:
Stallman wants to give away his brain children. Since his intellectual creations are his to give, what is socialistic about that? Is giving Xmas presents to kids socialism? Generosity happens when a capitalist gives away his property to the Proles. Socialism happens when a revolutionary takes my property and gives it to the Proles.
ruveyn


ruveyn, the big software companies are concerned about the free software movement because by its nature, it nibbles away at the aspects of proprietary trade secrets. It gives away an equivalent to your property.

Sorry. That was a terrible sentence. Let me give you an example:

Open Office. If everyone has open office, then nobody buys microsoft office.

So let us say Microsoft creates a novel feature. They call it Pandora. MS copyrights and patents the code. Open Office then emulates that using equivalent-but not plagiarized-code and releases it to the public domain. This is Stallman's brain child. Once again, Open Office is on a par with Ms-office. Except that MS has one less idea, and Pandora is out of the box, never to be reined in again.

Assuming that the programmers at Open Office have equally creative minds, and that these ideas are open sourced, then they too block innovation at Microsoft, because Microsoft is loathe to adopt open source ideas.

In the example of christmas presents, yes, that is socialism, if the gift is something that enables the recipient to duplicate property. That can be a gift of money, resources, a reprap machine, an education, or a number of other things.

Pertaining to the idea of 'Ours', I raise the idea of alcohol, bread, domestication of animals and the cultivation of grains. I bring the idea of a shelter(a home perhaps), the idea of heating created with natural materials(fire, right?), cooking, clothing, literacy, language(an community invention based on an instinct), laws, moral codes, recorded history, and perhaps the ultimate object, which is only ever made by two people, and belongs solely to neither.. a child.

And thats just scratching the idea.


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Orwell
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16 May 2009, 10:07 pm

ruveyn wrote:
Before free software became Ours it was His (i.e. belonged to the one who created it in the first place). It became Ours because the Owner generously made a gift of it to all the others. Nothing is inherently Ours. All things that are not in nature are brought into being by a person or persons. Before many can claim something it must be made by Some One. Only the things in nature not made by man can be claimed by many.

Open source software is a collaborative process. It is not the creation of any one man.


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ruveyn
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17 May 2009, 9:49 am

Orwell wrote:
ruveyn wrote:
Before free software became Ours it was His (i.e. belonged to the one who created it in the first place). It became Ours because the Owner generously made a gift of it to all the others. Nothing is inherently Ours. All things that are not in nature are brought into being by a person or persons. Before many can claim something it must be made by Some One. Only the things in nature not made by man can be claimed by many.

Open source software is a collaborative process. It is not the creation of any one man.


Then it is the product of the efforts of a Few, not the general property of Mankind as are the things in Nature. If the Few wish to be generous, that is their right. The Generality of Mankind has no unconditional claim on the product of the labor of the Few or the One (Jesus! I sound like Spock!).

ruveyn



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17 May 2009, 11:18 am

Fuzzy wrote:
ruveyn wrote:
Stallman wants to give away his brain children. Since his intellectual creations are his to give, what is socialistic about that? Is giving Xmas presents to kids socialism? Generosity happens when a capitalist gives away his property to the Proles. Socialism happens when a revolutionary takes my property and gives it to the Proles.
ruveyn


ruveyn, the big software companies are concerned about the free software movement because by its nature, it nibbles away at the aspects of proprietary trade secrets. It gives away an equivalent to your property.

Sorry. That was a terrible sentence. Let me give you an example:

Open Office. If everyone has open office, then nobody buys microsoft office.

So let us say Microsoft creates a novel feature. They call it Pandora. MS copyrights and patents the code. Open Office then emulates that using equivalent-but not plagiarized-code and releases it to the public domain. This is Stallman's brain child. Once again, Open Office is on a par with Ms-office. Except that MS has one less idea, and Pandora is out of the box, never to be reined in again.

Assuming that the programmers at Open Office have equally creative minds, and that these ideas are open sourced, then they too block innovation at Microsoft, because Microsoft is loathe to adopt open source ideas.

In the example of christmas presents, yes, that is socialism, ...


You have a mixture of economic institutions which are for profit, other are not under different legal structures. When the decision which form of production is chosen is a pragmatic one, often based again on markets.

But this is the way software was always created: You had the commercial companies and the academic sector, often state paid. Even if no line of actual source code would pass between the for-profit sector and the non-for-profit sector, the flow of ideas couldn't be suppressed, because of personal connection and persons between both sectors. It is therefore not surprising that big name like IBM and SUN (how it will go with SUN in future we need to see) play their role in the non-for-profit sector, whilst others work for profit within the free source sector (SuSE/Novell, RedHat, etc.).

After all: When I had classify such a structure, I would call it "social democratic", because it has elements of the capitalist system as-well-as a socialist system, which basically the hallmark of a social democratic system.



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17 May 2009, 11:29 am

ruveyn wrote:
Fuzzy wrote:
I much prefer Stallman socialism to Marxist communism. Stallman has changed the world considerably more than Marx, and in a far shorter period of time. It seems likely that some element of what he has wrought will persist. What he has done for software has begun to spread into the material world.



Stallman wants to give away his brain children. Since his intellectual creations are his to give, what is socialistic about that? Is giving Xmas presents to kids socialism? Generosity happens when a capitalist gives away his property to the Proles. Socialism happens when a revolutionary takes my property and gives it to the Proles.

What differentiates socialism from generosity is that socialism involves taking the means of production and re-assigning them by force. It involves a destruction or at least a radical redefinition of what Property is.

What is Yours is Yours and what is Mine is Mine. There is no Ours.


I need to attest you an over simplified idea regarding the nature of "property". There is one side something I would call the "natural" property as the things which are in your direct realm and control. But there is also something a concept of society of property. Both are not always easy to distinguish, but nonetheless both forms exist.

The social concept of property is regulated by complex laws. You do not need complex laws to regulate the property on your chair, but you need such laws to regulate the property of stock company or of intellectual property. The natural property is something which raises from our instincts even in childhood ("It is my set of pencils."), the other kind of property raises from social convention and law and is therefore also subject to this convention and the law.

This society concept of property is much more abstract and has for the society a function. What states do, since centuries, is to manipulate this abstract concept according to their needs. Therefore you have regulation how to open a bank or in which cases you are allow to use an other person intellectual products (and when not).



Last edited by Dussel on 17 May 2009, 6:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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17 May 2009, 2:03 pm

well, as with any other ism (or religion for that matter), the 'facts' are stretched to explain 'situations' didn't exist in the time of their creators.

You could say that Jesus produced the copy, but it was Paul that created the bedrock (and the Romans that codified it)

Marx and Engels produced a detailed study of mid to late 19th century economy, and we're trying to apply that to a 21st century world.

Lenin identified in one of his books (Chto Delat? not really sure...;) that capitalism would create empires in the 3rd world in search of the lowest-cost raw materials. now they do the same thing, but it's lowest-wage workers...

The big problem that any ideology faces is that for it to work successfully, it needs ideal human beings...;) many times we don't measure up to what's expected of us...;)



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17 May 2009, 3:48 pm

ruveyn wrote:
Orwell wrote:
ruveyn wrote:
Before free software became Ours it was His (i.e. belonged to the one who created it in the first place). It became Ours because the Owner generously made a gift of it to all the others. Nothing is inherently Ours. All things that are not in nature are brought into being by a person or persons. Before many can claim something it must be made by Some One. Only the things in nature not made by man can be claimed by many.

Open source software is a collaborative process. It is not the creation of any one man.


Then it is the product of the efforts of a Few, not the general property of Mankind as are the things in Nature. If the Few wish to be generous, that is their right. The Generality of Mankind has no unconditional claim on the product of the labor of the Few or the One (Jesus! I sound like Spock!).

ruveyn

It's not always the work of a few. The larger open-source projects (Mozilla, Debian Project, etc) have hundreds of developers, each of whom have contributed to a different extent. That's not counting the help from people who do the occasional bug fix, or the people who test and find bugs to be fixed, or the people who write documentation for the software. Progress is driven by a community, and those communities set guidelines for how their work is to be licensed. I've contributed a small amount to the Ubuntu documentation, does that mean Ubuntu now belongs to me and not to you?


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27 May 2009, 9:20 pm

DentArthurDent wrote:

Master_Pedant wrote:
The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, managed to undermine the workers soviets and take complete control over the New Regime, which became a centralized party oligarchy. The pattern is too present.


Going to start regurgitating some of John Keeps revisionist drivel are we?


Personally, I associate that interpretation of the October Leninist coup much more with Noam Chomsky.


[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQsceZ9skQI[/youtube]

DentArthurDent wrote:

Master_Pedant wrote:
And don't think that present day workers are onboard with leftism. An unnerving portion of the White American Working Class are reactionary and uncompromisingly socially conservative.


Yes and it is really scary, thanks to the interventions of social democrats Socialism is seen as untenable, we are now starring down the barrel of nationalism.


Social democrats never directly intervened in the United States. Places where social democrats intervened the most (Western Europe, especiall Northwestern Europe) seem to be the least nationalistic. It's places affected by military Kenyesianism (i.e. the United States) which seem the most ultra-nationalistic and religiously fanatical.



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27 May 2009, 9:45 pm

^Did he just refer to Lenin as a right-winger?

Frighteningly enough, I agree with much of what Chomsky said in that video.


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27 May 2009, 9:55 pm

Orwell wrote:
^Did he just refer to Lenin as a right-winger?

Frighteningly enough, I agree with much of what Chomsky said in that video.


Ironically enough, Chomsky was quite the George Orwell fan (even when some of Orwell's writings were inaccessible in the US, during the honeymoon period between Uncle Sam and Uncle Joe).



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28 May 2009, 1:08 am

Orwell wrote:
^Did he just refer to Lenin as a right-winger?


You could even argue that Lenin reinstalled the czarist regime by an other name: The system of the former Soviet Union was in some respect closer to the regime of the czar prior the reforms of 19th century: The ability to move or marry was limited for the peasants within the kolkhoz-system in the same way it was limited for serf peasant prior the liberation in the 1860s. Trade, industry was under state control, exchange with other countries were controlled, etc. All this pattern were not really new in Russia, but part of the czarist regime till the liberal reforms under Czar Alexander II.

It may can be argued further that Czar Alexander II reforms with the intention of creating a more liberal and modern Russia, may be not loved by his successors Alexander III and Nicolas II, but also not been substantially abolished by both rulers, but killed and most brutally suppressed by Lenin and Stalin. So Lenin was a reactionary ruler, covered up as a revolutionary.



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01 Jun 2009, 12:47 pm

Capitalism goes through down periods when it is attacked from the inside. It is not surprising to see a great industry being crippled by greedy unions and further govt. regulations because evidently, making a product that people want is no longer a priority.

All I had to hear today was Obama (first of all, WTF is he making announcements about a car company) saying that GM will be a leaner more efficient car company with less manufacturing plants and dealerships. Well...why not do the same thing with the Federal Govt. if that solution will work for GM? Our president sounds like a Used Car Salesman.

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