Market failure, creativity, and online gouging

Cory Doctorow has written an article in the Guardian entitled "Just because everything has value doesn't mean it has a price". Cory Doctorow: Charging for everything kills creativity About the implications of charging for every little bit of imagined use that can be extracted from an online offering. It's part of a series called "Digital rights, digital wrongs". It's interesting because of its focus on something that capitalism just can't handle, namely "externalities". Better otherwise known as "market failure". His line is that charging for everything will kill creativity.

I commented:

We're back with the problems Marx faced trying to work out the relationship between social production and private appropriation, value, price and profit, and the inadequacies of Adam Smith and Ricardo's attempts to resolve them.
Nothing of value is produced without our labour. So it's natural to expect an equivalent return for it. The problem is a) what is a true equivalent, and b) who will determine this and implement it in society.
Marx resolved the problem of "true equivalence", so problem a) is taken care of. But problem b) is in complete contradiction to the findings of a), since the people determining and implementing equivalence exploit most of us (wage-earners) by creaming off what we produce above and beyond survival (keeping body and soul together at the normal standard of living for our society) and making it their private wealth instead of our shared social wealth.
Cory D ignores this, and ends up arguing for Utopia, since he implies there's a way of accommodating a) with b). This is nonsense, cos ownership is all in our society, and ownership of capital (control of other people's work) is a class monopoly.
This is a pity, cos the main thrust of his argument goes some way along the constructive realistic road discussed seminally by Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionhttp://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
The thing is that the whole of capitalist production today is a market failure. In other words the traditional (or post-traditional, imperialist) market is a useless mechanism for coordinating and eliciting socially useful effort. Market techniques can be very useful in some kinds of distribution, in that they provide spontaneous feedback and self-organization, but they're no good when it comes to deciding social priorities at the limits of resource availability, and they're disastrous in relation to the inevitable necessity of disaster management.
Production and distribution today is a huge social problem worldwide, and some of its most glaring effects are in the realm of ideas and culture. But the solution isn't going to come from economic measures but from political measures that affect the economic foundations of our society.
Till we introduce socialism (non-capitalist ownership and control of production) there will be no solution and Cory will have to keep repeating himself and running on the spot (not to mention the idiots who claim that locking everything down and charging us for the air we breathe is the right way to go).

Communism - good on paper but doesn't work

Here's a short Facebook exchange about "communism" not working. Naz had been discussing things at home with her dad.


Naz: 
Hello chops I was having a talk with my dad about communism and he was telling me that it looks good on paper, but it doesn't work. If you nationalize land there's less production, he said south africa was more successful under apartheid because they had more production. He also included that Poland had a lot more progress in 3 years of Capitalism than in 40 years of communism! Explain!! 

Thanks 

Me: 

Hi! Depends how you measure being "successful", doesn't it.

Ask him that first. Success is what? And for who? Would he be among those enjoying the "success"? Why?

Poland. "Progress" is like success - depends what you mean, how you measure it and for who.

And Russia is more appropriate to look at when it comes to what happened under the Stalinist version of "communism". Poland and the other eastern European countries did make progress under the Soviet regime, but they were also badly hit by being treated as occupied semi-colonies and forced to be run for foreign interests by agents of the foreigners.

Despite this Polish women have suffered very badly since 1990, and education and culture have been under the thumb of a very primitive Catholicism since then, too. And the jury's still out on the effects on the peasantry (the mass of small independent farmers) of the return of capitalism. So far the governments haven't dared to attack them in the interests of agribusiness the way they do in most other EU countries.

As for Russia, I don't think anyone living there thought life between 1990 and 2000 marked an improvement over Soviet days, except in relation to certain limited areas of civic rights (there was greater formal freedom of speech, but you could get shot if you exercised it) and the availability of some foreign goods. In the USSR people had money but little to buy. In post-Soviet Russia people had no money (their Soviet savings were DELIBERATELY wiped out by Yeltsin and his pro-western friends) but lots of things they could (NOT) buy with it.

Also the majority of Russians resented being governed by a drunken clown and his robber baron oligarch cronies - and the MOB, which was a genuine product of reborn capitalism. People died younger, were sicker, committed suicide more, drank more, were worse housed, got worse education and health care, had to put up with the horrors of racism, terrorism and war, and watched US-style crime grow unchecked.

Progress and success for some...

Now that was between 1990 and 2000. After Putin became president in 2000 most ordinary Russians felt an improvement came. A lot of the most important resources were brought back in to national ownership (oil, gas). A lot of the least "patriotic" oligarchs were driven abroad, jailed or bankrupted. The mob was tamed. Russia started winning international sports competitions again (like ice-hockey). Russians were very proud of Soviet achievements, and felt humiliated by Yeltsin turning them into a mockery and selling their arses to anyone with a fistful of dollars.

I'm inclined to think that Yeltsin himself was sick of being the laughing stock of the world. From super-power to mange backstreet mutt in ten years flat....k

Yeltsin chose Putin to be his successor. I'm pretty sure one of the reasons was to get his revenge on all the people who had been laughing at him to his face.

You should ask your dad what he thinks about Putin's Russia. By all the criteria of success he seems to use Russia is doing pretty well. But it's doing so by laughing in the face of the US and going back to greater state control. It's looking after its own interests, thank you very much. And of course it's tightened a lot of the civic freedoms that were relaxed after 1990.

Does that make the new Russia "communist" again?

It certainly looks like "our" (ie the West's) enemy again.

But of course the real question behind all this is what is "communism"?

Ask your dad what he thinks capitalism is, and when it started.

Ask him if he thinks capitalism in the US after independence was such a great success.

If he does, ask him if he really thinks the slavery of its first 90 years were such a great thing...

The thing is, new social systems grow, and even though they can be fundamentally stronger than previous ones (capitalism was fundamentally stronger than feudalism) their early years can be very ugly indeed.

Especially if they are surrounded by very hostile and powerful representatives of the old system doing their damndest to exterminate them, which was the case in the USSR.

And one last thing, if capitalism is so good and free and successful and progressive, how come it didn't just cheerlead the whole world to celebrate a capitalist white christmas after world war 2?

The poor people of China threw it out and laughed. Same thing in Cuba and Vietnam.

And all those millions of East Europeans just let themselves be corralled into slavery???

Stalin wanted to hand Yugoslavia to the West on a plate (like John the Baptist's head), but the Yugoslav's didn't want to be a head on someone else's plate and made their own revolution.

He did manage to hand Greece to the West, but not until the Greek people had fought and lost a revolution of their own.

Ask him to look at the world today. And ask him how attractive the rest of the world finds the US. Ask him how often he sees poor people in some war-torn part of the world running on the streets waving We Love America placards. Ask him why US soldiers don't dare walk around in jeans smoking Marlboros chatting and smiling to the locals.

Ask him what kind of success and progress a bunch of armoured SWAT goons smashing through a poor family's wall represents to the ordinary people of the world. US life on TV soaps is one thing. Murderous thugs in your back yard, pissing on your relatives' dead bodies and burning your sacred books, is another.

US forces don't even walk around smiling in places like Iceland any more.

Maybe Bob Hope and Bing Crosby looked like success and progress once. And John Wayne. But they're dead and no one wants them back. Their success has turned out to be a huge historic failure. US history is on fast rewind. Right now we're back in the Great Depression.

Have a great day, Naz! I

I'm taking the dog out for a walk now...

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