Responses to Doug and Tayssir:
At around 22/1/07 5:44 pm, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Ravi, you start with a bogus opposition between purists and netroots,
> the former largely adherents of the Church of Marx. Max would not score
> high on any tests of Marxist purity; he's always struck me as a serious
> yet pragmatic guy who works in DC, fer Chrissake. And netroots - what
> are they (and you name Kos and MyDD, both of which prominently feature
> love letters to Nancy Pelosi) but a new constituency for fairly
> conventional Dem politics, with little in the way of politics or
> analysis ...
>
Yeah, I am using Max as a launching pad to take shots at the larger "purist" Left. He isn't around on LBO (is he?) and I doubt he reads my blog, so I think I should get away with it. But I do bring up and discuss the points of criticism offered by Max, and I think he has a good story (wasn't that obvious in my post?). But you do not need to know advanced physics to ride a bicycle and I believe the "netroots" are on the right track (if, as I guess, Max's problem is with their general bluster, then I do agree with him). I do not think that their support for Clinton or Obama makes them the equivalent of these people, and I think there is some validity to their approach (I list a few reasons in my post). WRT the larger purist crowd, I think Jim Straub says it eloquently in his post on the matter. BTW, today some new coalition (The Work For Us?) was announced and it will probably go the same way as other such efforts, but it is still worthwhile to consider that it is supposed to include the left-wing bloggers, unions and other activists.
You jokingly talk about needing only the shine and glitter of Mac OS X, sort of like desiring only the victory of Clinton or Obama (over McCain or Giuliani). Though you are probably not being serious, this is the point of the second part of my post. Leftists, in my book, are simply people who have a communitarian ethos, a desire to pitch in, help each other and thus build something for the entire group. The Internet Left would then be that part of the Internet community that acts in this way. I know such thoughts are anathema, but I would go so far as to claim that the Internet is the first occurrence in my lifetime of a mechanism that creates a self-sustaining community. In that sense, it is not just a means but an end in itself.
Tayssir asks if I would consider Stallman a purist and he quotes O'Reilly. Perhaps it would also be appropriate to mention Linus Torvalds and Eric Raymond (among others, perhaps also Jamie Zawinski) who have "pragmatist" arguments to offer against Stallman. I am with Stallman on the GNU/Linux insistence (I don't personally see it as a purism issue, but just a credit issue -- Linux would be nothing today if not for GNU, especially in the early days of Linux. Hell, if not for AT&T's legal wrangling, we would be talking about GNU/*BSD now), but in many ways (as your own quotes show) he is indeed a purist on the ideology and principles behind Free Software / Open Source. Just as Max or the purists are right about the need for theoretical underpinnings, he is right too. All IMHO, of course.
--ravi