In fact, it sounds like the kind of deliberate mistake the Libertarians regularly make, as an excuse for their inexcusable denigration of all government and law.

On this point, I am in agreement with you. When I first glanced at the article about a month ago, I was impressed with the boldness of the idea. However, the way the author defines socialism (“When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge”), means that this new economy is NOT socialism.

As you say, Fbook et al. are not doing this out of the goodness of their heart. Thus, when we share online, we don’t own what we create: my Facebook profile belongs to Facebook, not me. If I do something they don’t like, they can delete my profile without giving me warning. That does not sounds like “owning the means of production” to me.

in your book Code you say that “code” (i.e.,the set of instructions that dictate how a machine should operate) is law. as others in this thread have observed, any rule of law is coercive. it is thus not a matter of coercion versus no coercion. indeed, web 2.0 is an effort to memorialize into code certain rules behaviour that are highly coercive. (there is nothing more restrictive to freedom than code stacks.)

with its fundamental (we mice would say chinese red guard extreme) hostility to private property, the coercive shoe of “socialism” well fits the foot of web2.0.

wear it.

The word ‘socialism’ is the perfect example because it has so many meanings depending on the context and the country. The meaning of ‘socialism’ in Austria is quite different than in Russia or the USA. ‘Web 2.0′ is close to meaningless, expecially considering that most of what is ascribed to ‘Web 2.0′ were central goals of the World Wide Web as it was created.

I think that ultimately, these debates detract from actually getting things done. People can easily get stirred up for and against various ‘isms’ even though the likely agree/disagree with many related ideas. An example of a different approach would be to stick to actual practices surrounding an issue. Take health care, if we survey the top 50 countries for health care, we find basically all of them have some kind of single-payer plan. Seems pretty obvious that it works pretty well, no need to discuss ‘sociailsm’.

This discussion is probably a very American one.

In Germany, 30+% of voters are voting for parties (Social-Democratic Party and The Left) that have “democratic socialism” in their program.

Although… if we are trying to avoid the use of loaded words then I’m not sure ‘Peer-to-Peer’ is really gonna fly!!! I’ve encountered this confusion before and the way I generally get round it is by usually appending ‘collaboration’ to the end of the term and making the distinction between when computers collaborate by sharing their resources (ie: in the file-sharing sense) and when humans do so.

NB: I’d highly recommend reading Michel’s essay: P2P and Human Evolution (http://p2pfoundation.net/Manifesto)

If we turn to socialism, the Marxist tradition contained with it a strong anarchist component – these people were often denounced and killed for the crime of ‘left deviationism’. But it is not true to say that Marxism entails statism – Marx has no plausible account for how and why the state would ‘wither away’ after the Revolution, but that is what he hoped would happen, and many, though by no means all, of his followers agreed with him. And Marxism is not the only, or the most important, tradition in socialism today. The anarchists are dedicated to the end of coercion and see themselves as socialists. Chomsky doesn’t describe himself as a libertarian socialist for larks, after all.

There is a strong statist tradition in socialist thought and practice – but there is also a tradition of seeing the state as an institution to be transcended by free human beings engaged in free cooperation and collaboration. There are plenty of problems with describing the various initiatives on the web as socialist, but they cannot be resolved by lexicographical fiat.

Please consider your use of the term “corruption.” Consider the immediate impact of that word, and estimate how much explanation a reader with “an attention span of 140 characters” must digest to understand what you actually mean.

Now ask yourself why you use that word; then consider again why some use the term “socialism” to describe the emerging ethic of the digital commons.

Also remember that the origins of Libertarian Socialism are roughly contemporary with those of the better-known statist forms of socialism; neither has a convincing claim to exclusive use of the term.

I think that there is the risk to identify socialism with everything that could be classified as “a good thing” or an “humanitarian way to live the own life”, or with everything that sounds charitable or that is did with the aim to share something with someone else. In this case I think that socialism is not the proper word because there are people who do all these kind of things every day without the need to call themselves socialists.

Socialism, like capitalism, is identified by a set of laws. I think, more precisely, that the main difference between socialism and capitalism is the way to distribute among people the sum of collective goods: a distribution based on market and free enterprise (capitalism) or a distribution based on the set of laws that Lessig called “coercion” (socialism, that is different from communism, I know). After that, everyone can give his own meaning of that word, but in that case everyone is speaking using a word whose meaning is not well specified and is clear to himself but not to others, and everyone can coin his own “socialism” that matches with his own vision of the perfect world. But words are import and they should be use carefully.

For example all the free software movement, following this way of thinking, should be classified as socialism, but I think that free software is not socialism, even if it leads to community and voluntary cooperation. In fact, as Stallmann explain, the free software movement embodies the American Way, and I don’t think that the American way could be defined socialism. This is only one example, but there are many examples like that. I think that the identification of free software with socialism could be harmful for the movement, and not because socialism is a bad concept.

You’re educated guys but you need to work on your reading comprehension. Lessig isn’t claiming that capitalism or any other political/economic system is free of coercion. He’s only saying that the internet is (mostly). When you violate an RFC, you don’t lose your freedom. Sure, you might lose some data, fail to complete an operation, or suffer the criticism of the digerati. That ain’t the same as going to jail.

Lessig further posits that, lacking coercion, Web 2.0 can’t be socialist. I’m not sure I follow him that far, but if you want to show that it can’t be capitalist, you’ve set yourself a much harder task. I see elements of both systems, as well as elements of much more interesting things.

In fact, because I love to disturb people who don’t wish to be associated with discredited political theories, I think the internet is far more anarchist than it is either capitalist or socialist. (Since we’re all wearing our allegiances on our sleeves, let me be clear that I find that a _good_ thing.)

I honestly haven’t been reading this whole thread, but my first reaction was:

Many of these folks are just taking a direct or indirect lead from Frank Luntz’s playbook on how conservatives should talk about politics. It’s not about anything intellectual at all, merely an attempt to invoke the tired old “common sense” frames that remain at large in peoples’ brains from the last 30 years.

Getting caught up in evaluating the actual meaning of the concepts is in some sense beside the point. They are trying to connect people and ideas with concepts that evoke emotional responses in political discourse and ultimately in the voting booth. (Go back and re-read some Lakoff.) It’s hardly more than trash talk.

It reminds me a little bit of your approach to Eldred, when you relied on principle rather than on tangible results (you described it as something like a swing-and-a-miss at a softball comment during questioning). You’re playing the intellectual game, but these folks are often playing the political rhetoric game.

While there can be some connections between these two games, I would say don’t take it too much to heart. Stick to restating the essence of your position, with the right associations, and don’t fall into their terminology which just reinforces their words in peoples’ brains.

That is question begging retoric rather than serious argument.

To see the problem clearer, ask yourself: what is capitalism? It is a system enforced by law by the invention of private property law and enforced contrary to the way individuals would freely choose autonomously to associate and use the natural resources of our common world if those laws where not in place. It is, with your terms, a system of coercion.

Tool for diagnosing what you’re trying and failing to do:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/#OneConLibFreTriRel

And the fact that the thing formerly known as Web 2.0 has some market driven components does not in itself invalidate socialism as a fitting term. If enought other components of the thing fit well with features ascribable as socialist then the label might all things considered be correct. In comparison, many talk about “capitalist systems” as a convenient shorthand despite the fact that all existing such systems have many forms of redistributive schemes and state organized services in place. KK seemed to me to aim for the main theme things to come and then socialism is indeed a contender for a fitting organizing concept.

Mr. Lessig, your donor strike appears excellent! I have a variation on this and I hope you will get people to sign these petitions.

The Liberal Democratic Party of the United States functions as a progressive legislative political party.

We do not run candidates for office. We usually support candidates of the Democratic party of the United States.

We do not handle money and we do not charge money for membership and we do not raise money.

So you can join our party and still remain a a member of the Democratic, Green, Labor, or other progressive party you belong to.

Instead we create referenda on legislation by boycott petitions where we target the companies which sell consumer products and associate themselves with conservatives. We demand that these company CEOs get the legislation that we want and until that happens our members send letters to these companies indicating we will boycott them.

Why do we use boycotts? Well I hope if Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, or Mohandas Gandhi appeared alive today that they would advocate boycotts of the friends of those who oppose our legislation, in a climate where those who donate money to office holders exercise too much influence over legislation.

Please sign these petitions on single payer health care.

http://bit.ly/single_payer_baucus

http://bit.ly/single_payer

Also sign these petitions.

http://bit.ly/EFCA

http://bit.ly/10_an_hour_min_wage

http://bit.ly/norm_coleman_concede

http://bit.ly/women_freedom_of_choice_act

http://bit.ly/to_the_dnc

Or union members.
That’s as far as I got. You measure the world by what you know and call it reason.
Janteloven is indoctrination and coercion and so is American individualism.
Kelly’s socialism is the socialism of ants: the state isn’t making people do the same things and behave the same way, people are doing both because they’ve devolved into carbon copies of one another. It’s blindly following the mass rather than blindly following the leader. Are there actually any good photographs on flicker? Flicker isn’t culture its the end of culture. It’s the intellectualism of McDonalds.

There’s not such thing as freedom. There’s choice is between responsible awareness and stupidity.

The solution is to objectively describe what is happening, i.e. free self-aggregation of individuals around common goals and value creation, while bypassing, but not being necessarily opposed, the use of the state or corporate form to achieve this. The best term for this is peer to peer. Such choices have an underlying ethos, which invovles the open and free, participatory and commons oriented value systems or paradigms, but can be expressed politically in various ways, both left and libertarian and liberal and even conservative. It all depends on the importance you place on peer to peer aggregation in the overall scheme of things, for example subservient to the market, or better than the market. The P2P Foundation has been created to document, research and promote peer to peer alternatives, as described by Kevin Kelly. The relation to socialism is that it also represents a practice aimed at greater equality, though the practical choices are best described as equipotentiality, but other political traditions carry these values as well, and peer to peer does not mean an adherence to this particular political agenda. So I believe Kevin Kelly was mistaken in chosing the term, Larry correct in questioning it, but unfortunately, with the dominant misunderstandings of that tradition that are prevalent in the U.S., which has made other political choices in its political history, opposed to its ‘socialist’ competitor, and therefore driven by the need to mischaracterize and demonize it.

Michel Bauwens, http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

@Lessig
Your readiness to accept and propagate negative connotations of socialism is disappointing.

West Wing season 7. Santos vs. Vinnick debate.
—
SANTOS
I know you like to use that word ‘liberal’ as if it were a crime.

VINICK
No. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have used that word. I know Democrats think liberal is a bad word. So bad you had to change it. What do you call yourselves now, progressives? Is that it?

SANTOS
It’s true. Republicans have tried to turn liberal into a bad word. Well, liberals ended slavery in this country.

VINICK
A Republican President ended slavery.

SANTOS
Yes, a liberal Republican, Senator. What happened to them? They got run out of your party. What did liberals do that was so offensive to the liberal party? I’ll tell you what they did. Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things every one. So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, ‘Liberal,’ as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won’t work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor.
—

In the minds of many people around the world socialists have played much the same role as liberals portrayed in the above scene and as such we feel betrayed when you so eagerly want to distance yourself from that term.

As an Australian, I’m often struck by the way that American culture is often so blind to how other cultures think, feel, and express themselves. The American understanding of what constitutes socialism is such a dilution – and it’s such a shame.

http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secHcon.html
http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secGcon.html

Let’s look at the definition.

“That’s fair. By ‘coercion’ I meant simply law — that “socialism” is a system enforced by law, and enforced contrary to the way individuals would freely choose autonomously to associate.”

This definition works by defining systems of law into those “the way individuals would freely choose autonomously to associate.” (presumably, ‘capitalist’?) and those contrary to that.

The counterfactual in the middle of that definition is one big dodge. What would constitute the way individuals would freely choose autonomously to associate?”

If we look at the way people associate when there is no law, we get some indication. Robbery, looting, murder, gangs of thugs, piracy, and the rest – as we see, for example, in Somalia.

Certainly, we can assert that *some* people would choose to associate in that way. Otherwise the laws – all laws – would not be necessary.

But surely it isn’t ‘socialism’ to have laws enforced that prohibit Robbery, looting, murder, gangs of thugs, piracy, and the rest ? Wouldn’t that be an overly broad definition of socialism? Otherwise, our contrary (capitalism?) is the system of government that allows robbery, looting, murder, gangs of thugs, piracy, and the rest.

Well – that might not be that far off.

More seriously, how do we establish “the way individuals would freely choose autonomously to associate?” If it is not a question of how any and all humans would so choose, perhaps it is some subset. Like, say, a ‘majority’ then?

But this can’t be it either. Because then, by definition, any socialist government elected by a majority would, upon taking office, cease to be socialist.

No, the definition at work here of “”the way individuals would freely choose autonomously to associate” must be some kind of undefined naturalism. Some sort of appear to the way humans are ‘naturally’, even if this is not always instantiated in systems of laws or even majority governments.

But this definition will not work either. People ‘naturally’ (whatever that means) band together to support each other and eliminate threats. The basis of socialism is, indeed, legislation to take action against “robbery, looting, murder, gangs of thugs, piracy, and the rest.”

Modern socialism is a bit more than such a mutual self-defense pact, in that it defines the ills that assail society more broadly. Modern socialism recognizes that unfair trade practices, monopoly industries, prejudice and discrimination, inequity and poverty, etc., are the modern equivalents of the evils that used to plague society. That the robber of old became the robber-baron of the industrial age became the ponzi scheme artist and influence-peddler of today.

The term ‘coerce’ in the definition is meaningless. If it refers to ‘a system of law’ as this current definition proposes, then it is indistinguishable from the laws used by the capitalists to legally rob the poor. No, it was intended, in its original use, for the connotations the word contains. The use of ‘coerce’ was deliberately intended to evoke some sense of force, and not merely law, as those socialism must be imposed, and never elected.

The connotations and sloppy argumentation continue in this post, with the reference to “95 percent of Americans” (first, totally unsubstantiated, second, irrelevant in a global society, and third, an illegitimate appeal to popularity), the mention of “national socialism”.

None of this is intended to defend Kelly. It is nothing more than a defence of socialism from a naive and propaganda laden mis -characterization.