Marxism and Free Software

Marxism and Free Software, an analysis by Raoul Victor

URL = http://www.oekonux-konferenz.de/dokumentation/texte/Victor.html

The author examines three questions: 1) To which extent is Marxism confirmed by the reality of free-software? 2) To which extent is Marxism questioned by this reality? 3) Which relation between class struggle and free-software?

Raoul Victor, May 2004, from the Oekonux archive.

Text

"Marx did not know computers, nor software. But the reality of the contradictions that gave birth to free-software is a perfect confirmation of his vision of history. But that is not all. Free-software is also an evidence of the Marxist idea that the post-capitalist society can be a worldwide non-merchant society, and not a bureaucratic wage-slave society, for example. Finally, it confirms the Marxist conviction that communist ideas are not the product of some brilliant individual brain but the movement of capitalist society itself. Even if many hackers still think that "Marxism" means a hundred million deaths in the 20th century, they are acting, without knowing it, some of the basic ideas of the true Marxism.

To which extent is Marxism questioned by the reality of free-software?

For Marxism there is no possibility of development of a communist economic form within capitalism. The revolutionary class, the working class, is an exploited class, without power on the economy. It cannot have the power to build a new social organization without making first a political revolution, contrary to the past where the revolutionary class, the bourgeoisie, for example, had built its economic power within feudalism, within the old society. Graham Seaman, in a mail in the English list said that this idea "doesn't seem to be ever explicit in Marx. But it certainly seems to be taken for granted by every communist after Marx".

Marx wrote about the workers cooperatives, which were an important part of the workers movement in the 19th century. He said that the capitalist-worker relation was to a certain degree eliminated inside the cooperative. But he insisted on the fact that they remained prisoners of the surrounding capitalist world, that the workers were in fact their own collective capitalists and that they would not resist to the development of the trusts and monopolies. Marx never developed a theory about a possible coexistence between capitalism and lasting, stable germs of communism.

In that sense, if we understand free-software as germs of a communist society, it contradicts a specific aspect of Marxism.

But many questions remain: 1) Can these germs easily coexist with capitalism? 2) Is a war between the two worlds avoidable? 3) Can these germs develop to the point of supplanting capitalism? 4) Is this possible without a political revolution?"

The Debate in French continues, at http://membres.lycos.fr/resdisint/Arch_capit/020629JCrt.htm ; http://membres.lycos.fr/resdisint/Arch_capit/020608RVrt.htm ; all these discussions take place at http://membres.lycos.fr/resdisint/