responses to carrol, kelly, michael dawson:
Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> Politics, for me, is coextensive with organizing collective action.
> Private shopping or consumption decisions have nothing to do with
> oganizing collective action, hence no political principle is involved.
>
i had no intention of turning this into a philosophical thread, with my semi-serious plea to the LBO community to adopt open source (in particular, mozilla). but since we are going down that road, i have a few questions:
why is open source not collective action?
snit snat wrote:
> At 11:25 AM 10/25/2004, ravi wrote:
>> Michael Dawson wrote:
>>
>>> Amen. We will not shop our way to a better world.
>>
>> shop? open source is free. perhaps i should've made that more
>> explicit in my message promoting mozilla: you do not have to shop
>> or pay for it.
>
> I think his point is that in any case, you're still advocating one
> product over another, as if choosing firefox (or...fill in the blank)
> will create a better--as in socially just-- world. hardly. might make
> life more bearable in terms of the effects of malware, but that's it.
> it's still consuming and, we've had this discussion before, open
> source is often parasitic on capital anyway.
>
but we have to consume to survive, no? what is wrong with advocating one product (and the underlying methods of "production") over another? for instance, would driving a fuel efficient car create a better world? two questions come to mind: can a just/better world come about through incremental distributed effort or does it require a revolution? second, if a revolution is not the only way, does open source development qualify as incremental distributed effort?
i have not been convinced either way regarding where open source fits w.r.t left ambitions/principles (to begin with, it is not even clear to me whether each of us, who considers himself/herself a 'leftist', shares the same ambitions and principles), but i think its effects are beneficial. the use of "often" above, suggests that at least in your mind, its still ambiguous.
Michael Dawson wrote:
> It was me who said we won't shop our way to a better world. And what
> I meant was that isolated individuals and even occasional boycotters
> will never possess the power to veto capitalism through the retail
> outlet.
>
i am still a bit confused. open source is not available through retail outlets (well you can buy mozilla, etc on web outlets, if you wanted to, but you do not have to). at least i understand using open source as participating in an online community.
> But I even more disagree with people who spend huge amounts of time
> using one kind of software or another because they think it is
> politically radical. It's a gesture, at most.
as far as i can tell, this is a strawman at worst, and unrelated, at best.
--ravi