[lbo-talk] Lefty library of pdfs

nathan tankus somekindofheterodox at gmail.com
Tue Sep 11 18:28:00 PDT 2012


I'm rather confused by this argument. Electronic writing is like many other things after technological innovation under capitalism: it has very high fixed costs but the marginal cost is near (or at) zero.

We can rue the fact that capitalism tends to revolutionize branches of production in this form, but we can't put the genie back in the bottle. It is going to take public policy (and thus an organized social movement given the state of our elites) to design a system that makes sure writers and artists are adequately paid. No "don't pirate" consumer movement is going to solve these problems. Just like boycotting goods "contaminated" with slave labor as an end and not a means to larger political movements tend to fail, So would such a movement centered around electronic goods.

-- -Nathan Tankus -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



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