Dan Hunter’s article arguing that open source development is a form of contemporary Marxism led me to read Coase’s Penguin, the classic paper by Yochai Benkler that provides an economic explanation of open source software and other peer production endeavors like Wikipedia.
Marxism argues in favor of collective production and against monetary rewards out of political belief that capitalism is inherently exploitative. The way to ensure a just society is collective production where production is organized and rewards are distributed fairly through central planning. But centrally planned collective production proved inefficient and corrupt.
The first puzzle about open source peer production isn’t whether or not developers have marxist political beliefs, but why it works, especially since the Marxist collective model failed miserably.
This is what Benkler explains elegantly. Coase’s Penguin builds on the theory of Ronald Coase, who explained in the 30s that firms exist when the cost of separate transactions with many independent parties is greater than the price-efficiency of a competitive market. The problem Coase was trying to solve at the time was to explain the persistance and dramatic growth of centrally managed corporations, if a market is an ideal way to allocate economic resources.
Benkler solves today’s version of the same problem. If money is the ideal way to incent and co-ordinate production, why are we seeing the persistence and dramatic growth of production methods that don’t use money?
Benkler explains that commons-based peer production is more efficient than either firms or markets for information goods, where the costs of communication and distribution are low, and the difficult problem is allocating human creativity. When there are masses of potential contributors, and it’s easy to participate in little chunks like an open source plugin or a wikipedia article, the best way match skills and work is a million little decisions by independent contributors.
Mandatory, Marxist-style collective farming doesn’t benefit from these resource allocation efficiencies. Workers on collective farms have pre-defined work and can’t leave. Collective farms don’t gain the benefit of unique, voluntary contributions by thousands of distributed workers.
Another attribute of political marxism is an belief in mandatory equality. Peer production projects often have a meritocratic culture with dramatic inequality, where founding leaders and high-value contributors have greater prestige, influence, and sometimes financial reward. It’s not considered inherently unjust that leaders of open source projects like Perl and Python have received grant, foundation, and corporate funding to do their work (although visible leaders of peer projects can also become lightning rods for criticism).
Another marxist value is opposition to a money economy. Cash is seen as a symptom of the alienation of workers from the products that result from their labors.
Clearly, the motivation of many thousands of open source, wikipedia, livejournal, and other peer content producers is non-monetary. But is it anti-monetary?
Benkler deals with the incentive question in the excellent third section of Coases Penguin. Benkler makes an astute distinction between activities where money is commonly thought to be an inverse motivation (sex), and where it is seen as complementary (sports, music). Many people who like basketball would love to be NBA stars. By contrast, most people who like sex would not like to be prostitutes.
Some Free Software activists are in fact marxists, with beliefs that money is inherently exploitative, and visions of a world that is socially and economically organized without money.
The GPL license, a strict license that forbids the redistribution of modified code with a nonfree license, doesn’t forbid selling the software in a package, or customizing software for money, or selling services based on knowledge of open source tools.
For many people, software development is pretty clearly in the complementary category, where the rewards of prestige and satisfaction coexist with monetary rewards. There are Apache developers on corporate payrolls, and companies supporting open source technologies, ranging from IBM to MySQL, Zope, and Jabber. There are developers who make a living consulting based on free software expertise.
So, while some software developers are marxists, it doesn’t follow that peer production is inherently Marxist.
commons-based peer production is not communism
Adina has a nice essay about why participants in what Benkler calls commons-based peer production are not necessarily communists. If you don’t have time to read Benkler’s 80 page Coase’s Peguin paper, I suggest you read Adina’s essay which picks…
commons-based peer production is not communism
Adina has a nice essay about why participants in what Benkler calls commons-based peer production are not necessarily communists. If you don’t have time to read Benkler’s 80 page Coase’s Peguin paper, I suggest you read Adina’s essay which picks…
Commons-based peer production is not communism
Adina has a nice essay about why participants in what Benkler calls commons-based peer production are not necessarily communists. If you don’t have time to read Benkler’s 80 page Coase’s Peguin paper, I suggest you read Adina’s essay which picks…
Commons-based peer production is not communism
Adina has a nice essay about why participants in what Benkler calls commons-based peer production are not necessarily communists. If you don’t have time to read Benkler’s 80 page Coase’s Peguin paper, I suggest you read Adina’s essay which picks…
Marxism, Open Source and New Economy
Adina Levin posts Red Penguin about whether or not the open source movement is some kind of contemporary marxist thing. She has read Coase’s Penguin, which is a classic paper written by Yochai Benkler, providing an economic explanation of open source s…
Short excitement
Two short topics for today:
Peer-collaboration vs communism, vs corporate organization. Started from reading this today.
Robots, after being excited by the’s diary yesterday. Coase’s Penguin builds on the theory of Ronald Coase, who explain…
I didn’t see a centralized economy in my reading of Marx and Engels. It’s too bad that people keep saying that the economic systems of countries like the Soviet Union were Marxist–it burdens the term with unfair guilt by association. Stalin was, and the states that inherited from him were, fascist. They called themselves communist countries, but if a tyrant calls himself a president and holds sham elections, it doesn’t follow that he governs a democracy.
The command economy is characteristic of fascism. Marxism, as envisioned by Marx and Engels, can’t exist in a divided world, only in a world united in Marxism. It’s hard to believe that will ever happen. If something is called Marxist, what’s generally meant is that it advances an ideal that was important to Marxism, such as ending exploitation or reducing suffering. Why resist such a label?
These days, labling something Marxist often seems to be a way of attacking it by smearing it with the sins of fascism for promoting distribution according to need rather than merit. However, there is some room in the world for some distribution according to need. I think the Wikipedia and the Open Source movement have the hallmarks of the best of Marxist thought–contribution according to ability, distribution according to need. Amazingly, these movements are working despite the expression of that principle! It just doesn’t seem like that happens much on a large scale, but maybe I’m not looking closely enough. Anyway, because our world isn’t truly Marxist, the expression of the ideal isn’t pure and these movements can be complimented by meritocratic distribution, as you point out.
The analysis of why these particular systems work this way while some others would not is really great. Thank you for that.
Making nonsense of Marx
Joi Ito links approvingly to a short essay by Adina Levin, criticizing the Dan Hunter article on open source and Marxism that I discussed last week. Ms. Levin says that open source is not, in fact Marxist, a claim which…
Making nonsense of Marx
Joi Ito links approvingly to a short essay by Adina Levin, criticizing the Dan Hunter article on open source and Marxism that I discussed last week. Ms. Levin says that open source is not, in fact Marxist, a claim which…
Making nonsense of Marx
Joi Ito links approvingly to a short essay by Adina Levin, criticizing the Dan Hunter article on open source and Marxism that I discussed last week. Ms. Levin says that open source is not, in fact Marxist, a claim which…
Making nonsense of Marx
Joi Ito links approvingly to a short essay by Adina Levin, criticizing the Dan Hunter article on open source and Marxism that I discussed last week. Ms. Levin says that open source is not, in fact Marxist, a claim which…
Making nonsense of Marx
Joi Ito links approvingly to a short essay by Adina Levin, criticizing the Dan Hunter article on open source and Marxism that I discussed last week. Ms. Levin says that open source is not, in fact Marxist, a claim which…
Hmmm, Adina. I gotta agree with some other comments that you seem to have a slightly straw-man version of “Marxism”.
The real point is that a large part of the motivation behind free-software is certainly “left wing” in a broader-sense. It does come from a scepticism of the market as a way of organizing things.
In particular it’s very hard to imagine we’d have much of a free-software movement at all without Richard Stallman. (Despite Raymond and OReilly trying to airbrush him out of the story.) And Stallman’s two contributions – creating the GNU project and devising the GPL – were explicitly “political” acts in that :
a) they were not spontaneous innovations from *within* the market due to reduced transaction costs
and
b) they were motivated by his concern that the emerging software market (and the intellectual property laws that made it possible) were going to enclose and destroy an important culture and value system which had hitherto been part of the commons.