Rick Falkvinge is a right wing libertarian who focuses on a number of cultural issues as of late. Normally, his claim to fame is the copyright game, whereby he speaks out about the corporate monopoly created by copyright law and the people that find purchase in maintaining a monopoly control on art.  In a world of publishers, artists, consumers, and marketers, the aim of copyright is to ensure that the publishers get more than their fair share of the pie that consumers are left out of and artists are exploited as they work for publishers who take advantage of them any way they can.

Normally, the world of publishers and developers is left behind lock and key.  But for Rick, a recent article brings out a number of issues in claiming that communism corrupts and entitles authors to seek payment for their productivity.  For a few reasons, the article makes a number of mistakes, including the nature of how markets work.  Capitalism is much more market oriented, no question, but other types of systems had markets as well.  Feudalism before it sold the labor of serfs on markets as well as “Communist Russia” which had flea markets as well as other goods which never went away in that form of state socialism.  The labor of the worker is still sold on the market, it’s mainly a matter of who benefits from the sale in these diverse capitalist economies of our modern democracies.

Professor Richard D Wolff, an economist, can help to explain how markets work:

Markets were and are just one mechanism for distributing resources and products among people and enterprises. In markets, prices allocate scarce commodities to the highest bidders for them, to those who can pay the most. Markets differ from many other, non-market mechanisms that human beings, past and present, have used for those distributions. Religious authorities, community elders, local or regional state authorities, democratically composed collectives, kinship and gift-based organizations developed different, non-market, price mechanisms for distribution. Because recent history exalted markets hysterically, it is time to expose their mixed and often horrific results.

Indeed.  Markets aren’t the only aspect of a society nor should they be celebrated as the only way for resources to be allocated.  As the conversation continues, Rick makes wilder claims about communism and commits crazy comparisons which confuse common terms.  The attack against “planned economies” is just as confusing.  Surely, if planning an economy is so evil, why does he ignore the planning that a CEO and shareholders do?  Trying to allocate resources for purchase requires planning where to put resources and where to cut.  So how is that different from government planning or worker owned enterprises planning resources in a different manner?

From the moment that the non-sequitar of communism was utilized, the argument falls apart.  Rather than attempt to point out the issues with publishers having power through copyright to control artists, which he’s done, we get a very ideologically based argument that confuses how a reinforced monopoly would not be attempted through an actual communist state.  The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) did keep to the tsarist (read: capitalist) form of copyright and even then, the state declared a monopoly on unpublished works among other nuances that a socialist state felt compelled to do over the rights of the worker who created the work.  But the benefits were to the Soviet public along with the rest of the world since the objective was dissemination of information such as the works of Chekov and Tolstoy.

Were there issues and concerns?  Of course.  But tackling a societal problem such as copyright requires looking into how and why a work is created.  We can’t claim that an author requiring money is “communist” when the very laws of the country being demonized fight against such a notion.  It’s also quite foolish to claim that communism doesn’t work when it lasted from 1917 – 1991 and we’ve not looked into the history.  Perhaps it’s time to look into a stronger notion of what copyright is and how to move beyond it instead of fighting imaginary straw which burns under scrutiny.

As it stands, when someone is talking to you about entitlement, copyrights, and communism, it’s high time to recognize that their view may need a glance over and a heavy dose of scrutiny into the facts.