Neigher left nor right | PirateTimes

Posted: September 20, 2012/Under: Creator, News, Pirate Topic, Zbigniew Łukasiak/By: Zbigniew Łukasiak

Neither left nor right – an essay on Pirate politics

September 20, 2012 · by Zbigniew Łukasiak · in Pirate Topic

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” is one of the most well known Marxist slogans and it is also how Free and Open Source Software (FLOSS) is being used and produced. Is FLOSS communist?

In FLOSS you choose what you want to do and you do it your own way and you don’t need to ask anyone to let you test your ideas, just like in the free market you can test your business ideas without asking for permission. Is FLOSS libertarian?

FLOSS meets the goals of both communism and libertarianism without following the methods they propose. There is no central planning, no government is dictating what everyone has to do, no state coercion forcing people to follow the plans. But there are also no exclusive private rights over the use of the produced software, everyone can use it freely and people don’t get money directly from selling their product.

And it is not a kind of charity, there are people that participate out of pure altruism – but I suspect that more egoistic motivations are much more important: like proving your point, showing off, getting publicity or, especially in the case of companies, getting an edge in selling services related to the produced software. Let me quote a recent blog post from a venture capitalist:

MongoDB is an open source data-store for web scale applications. The first users were developers who wanted a simple, easy to get started data-store. It was perfect for hackathons and such where the developer needed to get something up quickly. This post I read yesterday does a good job of explaining why MongoDB took off. These developers became a network of users and contributors to the open source project. Many of them worked in enterprises and brought MongoDB into their teams. Soon enough 10gen started getting calls from executives saying something like “I just learned that we have 50 instances of MongoDB in production and I’m eager to get a support contract”.

This is not charity – there is a business case in doing that and there are others. Just like in the case of the famous invisible hand of the free market, the system guides the individual egoistic actions towards a common goal. FLOSS shows how technology changes economy and politics.

Software is only a part of the whole creative economy, that includes music, films, literature, patents and all other human endeavors that, in the current economic dogma, should be supported by selling copies of the original works and rights to making such copies. The idea is to reduce the creativity problem to the free market solution by granting state enforced monopolies to making copies.

This worked pretty well in the last century when making copies was an industrial process. Unfortunately with the advent of Internet and other personal communication media (like exchanging data on memory sticks), this clean solution started to show cracks. It now requires more and more state coercion supported by more and more totalitarian surveillance of citizens. It is a paradox that it is advocated by the same people who were abhorred by the state coercion practiced by the late communist governments.

I can only explain it by them being so in love with the simplicity of the free market solution that they became blind to the problems that arise when it is forced on problems that don’t fit it. It works great in theory, in a theory that does not take into account actual human nature, and in that it follows the very steps of communist regimes. Isn’t that ironic?

The pirate movement started as a protest against that heavy handed state coercion that is the result of enforcing copyright monopolies in the Internet era. It is neither left nor right – it is about pragmatic reevaluation of the policies proposed by the left or right. Do they really work towards the intended goals?

Featured Image: CC BY-SA Elena Olivo

About Zbigniew Łukasiak

I am a 40 years old programmer from Poland. I am fascinated (and scared) by the way Internet changes our societies and I want to take a part in that. I believe the changes has only just begun and they will be deep. I have a degree in Computing Science – but I read a lot on psychology, sociology and other other related subjects. I am agnostic or even atheist but I am fascinated by Rene Girard. I am a Free and Open Source Software passionate (https://github.com/zby) and I joined Interenet Society Poland when there was a Free Software chapter, and I stayed there while ISOC Poland fighted the patent directive and retency laws in the European Parliament. I have been involved in reinstaing the Polish Pirate Party. Pollitically I am maybe close to libertarians – but I am not a dogmatic and I also believe that our new ways of communicating and working will also require new politics. I speak fluently in Polish and English and I can communicate in Russian and French and know a bit of Spanish. I joined your list mostly to look around – I am not a professional writer – but I am very interested in working on the Pirate pollitical dogma and I think this needs to be done internationally.
I have three blogs:
http://brudnopis.blogspot.com (general)
http://perlalchemy.blogspot.com/ (programming related)
http://brudnopispirata.blogspot.com (pirate related, in Polish)

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Tags: FLOSS

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- Arno Nym
  
  I call BULLSHIT on this.
  
  The german pirate party has become over the last year clearly a leftist party with socialist leanings. Specifically thru the actions, decisions an manipulations of pirates from Berlin.
  
  Pirates were once “Neither left nor right” – Now they are only a bad copy of the “Linke”
  - - Anton Nordenfur
      
      @Arno The German party is one among several dozen. Even if they are, as you say, a leftist party, that doesn’t mean the entire movement is. And for that matter, please provide some examples showing the leftist tendencies. Could be interesting.

- Zbigniew Łukasiak
  
  Are German Pirates the main force in the pirate movement now? They had a lot of success recently – but, at least from the outside, they look more like a generic ‘protest party’ then a party that tries to promote the original pirate ideas.

- NingúnOtro
  
  It is very hard to be neither left nor right in a world polarized with the viral ideological warfare going on since the bourgeoisie instrumentalized by the means of oversimplified formulas on class definition the social feelings of the resourceless to overthrow a landlord, the Russian Tzar Nicolas II, who was thwarting their want of starting up profitable private industries on his territory without him having a part of the profits (getting the rent ? ).
  
  As the awkward definition of the proletarian class goes… anyone not being part of the ones possessing the means of production… is a proletarian. This makes for a very big group of very different people.
  
  Fact is, the idea was an very attractive honey pot for most of the analphabete population of the time in Russia, starting the Russian Revolution, and shortly after other revolutions almost worldwide, like in most of Indochina, Latin America, etc..
  
  But the analphabetes swallowed a lot of shit embedded in the strategy of the bourgeoisie, and muted it to such an powerful ideological package, that the bourgeoisie were unable to control the mutated red virus, and as it was overflooding from its intended target area of Imperial Russia, the bourgeois, who damn well knew the potential because they had designed the strategy themselves… had to counter-attack in sheer self-defence with a no less performant blue counter-virus… fascism, corporate organisation of society.
  
  Both ideological viruses have been battling each other merciless across the Earth, demanding allegiance… or crushing and annexing, any peoples governed by less war faring ideologies like the original liberalism or the original anarchism. Why? Because anyone not enlisted as a friend was someone left alone to become sooner or later the enemies friend and one could not afford such things.
  
  Both fascist and communist elites have fought a cold war… the left elites are losing… only to be replaced by right elites.
  
  Only… there is no such thing as one only right and fascist elite. Just as there has never been an one and only left elite. And while elites have given up the leftist strategy as they have seen the corporate one be far more performing and embraced it with the virulence of the new convert, the merciless cold war now rages between many different corporate elites, some of which breed like harmful cancer cells on what is still left of some social providence states, predating their resources through the governance of the states institutions.
  
  So yes, if we people want to work towards a solution, we better shake off the idiotically manipulative concepts of left and right ideology and start analysing in which fucked up ways it is the logic of the elites, any kind of elites, that is driving the whole of mankind towards extinction.
  
  We Pirates started more or less on the right track, but we are failing to understand the issues, and as we take too much time to come with a proper explanation of the situation suitable for 99% of the people, we are allowing the less knowledgeable part of humanity to continue to be split into a 49,5% red cannon fodder army fighting the other 49,5 blue cannon fodder army.
  
  All the while, the 1% that pulls the strings tries to play a game of multidimensional chess with ass many players as there are elite fractions, a game whose winning conditions are pyrrhic and do not leave much room for a happy humanity.
  
  This situation can not be solved by continuing the battle between the red fractions and the blue fractions till the bitter end. Nor by letting the various ideology-less and pragmatic elite fractions battle it out till the end.
  
  Their scorched-earth and mutually assured destruction maximalisms will not leave us an Earth to live on.
  
  We urgently need to understand the situation thoroughly and act intelligently as peaceful people.
  
  If I believe in the Pirate Movement as an unifying political platform to finally achieve this, it is because it has been able so far, perhaps merely by chance and defiance more than understanding, to avoid many of the traps other traditional parties have fallen into, such as relying on loans to finance the election campaigns. No political party or government can serve the interest of its people while paying back loans at the same time to the institutions of the elites.
  
  All the troubles we go through… are because still too many people understand too little, and use the freedom we would never want them to give up to do too many counterproductive things.
  
  If only we could help them to grow up and be really responsible for their own decisions, merely by getting them to know where they lead to and why…
  
  Everybody could end up making the right free choice.
  
  And we could get a world back we could share without trouble.
  
  Because the trouble is only in our heads, made up by our logic.

- Kristofer
  
  It might help to consider “free” in “free market” as freedom for the citizen, in contrast to freedom from rules and regulations. Also note that the “free market” is the “common market”. Rules and regulation on the common market will increase peoples freedom since the environment tends to be more predictable, less hostile and also allows for people to make some mistakes and learn form them.
  
  The private sphere is always outside of the common market. It is free in the sense of “My home, my rules!”. This limits the influence of the private sphere by simple facts of logistics.
  
  Actors in the common market can be privately owned or publicly owned. Privately owned actors does not necessarily enjoy their own rules as if they had their own private sphere, instead it is common that their operations are subject to many specialized laws: For example to run a nuclear power plant you need a lot of approved processes, to sell shares you need to conform to certain principles of profit presentation etc.
  
  Typical left and right politics, concern themselves with how much ownership the government should have in the common market and they fight over a subset of the rules and frameworks that should be applied. Few ppl argue that there should be no rules or that everything should be regulated.
  
  Politics which concern the private sphere hasn’t been that important before, until the age of Internet when free speech started to matter and the potential of the anonymous citizen suddenly became clear.

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