Pirate Party of Canada Forum

To Jack Daniels, who accused us of lacking a good grasp of our underlying ideology I would like to rise up to that challenge. The Pirate Party ideology is, at its most extreme, the abolishment of intellectual property. Is this really a libertarian ideal? It would seem that creating laws preventing the ownership of intellectual property could be seen as an attack on one's liberty. Certainly we could reason that the very idea of intellectual property is, itself, limiting people's freedom and thus deplorable to a libertarian but this is somewhat of a stretch.

Should we not look to a political ideology already much better suited to this type of reasoning, namely Marxism. Marxisms founding principle has been the abolishment of private property. Marxism detests private ownership that is used to control the means of production. This is the core principle of Marxism and fits near perfectly with the ideas of the pirate party. Not only that but the solution advocated by Marxism, the idea of communism, is theoretically quite similar the FOSS and Creative Commons movements(Revolution OS, anyone?).

Granted North American have been taught to equate Marxism to oppressive regimes hardly recognizable as Marxist to anyone who has actually read any of Marx's works. So I can see the allure of spouting an ideology without all the baggage but libertarianism will turn on us in the end. The Free Culture movement is about spurring cultural growth through the elimination of copyright and other restrictions. Libertarianism will eventually come to the conclusion that copyright laws are needed to protect liberty just as laws about ownership of tangible goods already do.

Either way, the PPCA should not be a vector to spreading libertarian literature.

Nor should it be a vector to spreading communist literature.

I do know that there is a significant subgroup within the Libertarian Party which agrees largely with our platform. I don't, however, think the Pirate Party is intrinsically libertarian. And yeah, I suspect the communist parties could find some stuff to agree with too. There's no need to rationalize our existence by aligning ourselves with anyone or any single philosophy.

We arr what we arr, me 'earties.

Jason,

It wasn't an accusation, just a general observation. One easily qualified by some simple questions directed at randomly chosen 'pirates': how much academic literature have you read authored by economists, political scientists, philosophers, etc? Have you ever read anything by Ayn Rand? Robert Nozick? Albert Jay Nock?

My point is that most so-called 'pirates' are simply a subgroup of average people who are inclined toward the aquisition of information (movies, music, software, etc.) through noncommercial filesharing, who see no wrong done since nothing physical is removed from its owner without payment, and who are no more intellectually inclined than the general populace.

So, it would seem that just as the average gun owner does not want to read a book about the 18th Century origins of the 'right to keep and bear arms', the average filesharer does not want to read a book exploring the intricacies and ramifications of private property.

Given that fact, what kind of defense or explanation should one expect from an average 'pirate' to someone who strongly believes that you should not be enjoying a song on your mp3 player that you didn't pay for?

And if the average proponent of our ideas is not interested in studying and learning more about the moral issues behind what this party is about, what kind of success should we expect?

I offered all of the essays more as a buffet, if you will. Take what is useful to you, and leave the rest. It just seems to me that if no one learns anything similar to what I posted, all that will be said is "This is what we like to do, and I think we should be allowed to do it, because we like it."

Is that really all you want to say to an opponent?

I have been rebuked and scolded by friends just because I like to copy movies to give them to friends. According to the material I posted, they do not have a leg to stand on. They are flat-out wrong.

Get my drift?

For what it is worth, I do agree with you somewhat. The average pirate on this forum can hold his or her own quite well in respect to debates over file sharing. Provided, of course, that the debate remains in practical realm and avoids the high-minded philosophical debates that I(and potentially yourself) really enjoy. In all honesty, I find your arrival to these forums quite welcoming.

This does not mean, however, that I agree with you on the flavour of the PPCAs ideological underpinnings. While it is possible that some libertarians will agree with us, pure libertarianism will not. I am absolutely sure, for example, that Ayn Rand would be all for the strictest protections for intellectual property. She advocates for protecting the individual genius from the demand of the masses. She feels that society's need for equality stifles that abilities of our innovators.

This is the antithesis of our movement. We should advocate that cultural development is a shared process of many individual working together, not the efforts of lone geniuses working in isolation.

In addition, libertarians see property laws as necessary to protect liberty. Pure libertarianism should see intellectual property in the same way. Sure we can rationalize the economics of digital property but this will always remain as an expection to the ethos of libertarianism rather then a member of its core, as it is with Marxism. Why embrace an ideology that strains itself to agree with us when there are ideologies which have already been saying for many years, what we are trying to say now.

Private property to a libertarian does not extend to air or ideas.  Land and gold - yes.  Sound and knowledge - no.
You are wrong to paint them in such a light.

J

You need not worry, Jay. I am not painting them in that light rather I am painting it in that light. I speak about the idea of libertarianism not popular libertarian movements.

Thus it would seem that the libertarians you know simiply misunderstand their own ideology. :)

Jason,

I have been a libertarian for about 12 years now, mostly because of material I've read from The Foundation for Economic Education and the Ludwig von Mises Institute. I don't think you will get much argument from other libertarians that these two organizations represent the pinnacle and ideological authority of the movement. Every movement is splintered to some extent. Some who call themselves libertarians are real whackos - Robert Heinlein wanted pedophilia legalized (Starship Troopers).

In all, I think you are wrong about the movement. You are simply expressing impressions you have had about libertarianism. If you read those essays, and spent some quality time on both sites, I think you would be pleasantly surprised.

On the other hand, I think those essays are a correction to many libertarians who don't understand their own movement. In other words, libertarians who would disagree with those essays are inconsistent in their ideology, and haven't progressed in their understanding enough. Over the past few years, whenever I heard of the libertarian view of patents and copyright, I was very uncomfortable with it. I wanted to believe in patents! That just shows how ignorant I was of libertarianism. I don't even get the Freeman anymore because of family and work constraints. I have no time at all for it. I'm including it in my retirement plans.

More like crypto-anarchism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-anarchism

or even info-anarchism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infoanarchism

Happy reading

If someone calls me a libertarian, I will rage.

Just sayin'.

Mike,

I felt the same way, many years ago. I was a Right-wing conservative, and I viewed libertarians as 'out there.' A Frontline (PBS) program on America's war against marijuana had a big impact on me, as well as the essay Born Again: The Resurgence of American Prohibition.

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/born-again-the-resurgence-of-american-prohibition/

That essay made me angry, because I hated smoking and being in a restaurant with cigarette smoke, and I believed I had the right to eat a meal in a restaurant without having to breathe it.

Most libertarians and socialists strongly support civil liberties like gay marriage and free speech, so overlap on this issue shouldn't be too surprising.

Jason,

Please take in consideration that Pirate Party is in favor for Copyright reform, not for radical abolishment of private property. It is clear that current copyright system is sick, but what should replace it is still an open question. Ideas in discussion range from total copyright abolishment to introducing "Intellectual Property Tax" to stimulate releasing rights to the Public Domain. All this ideas share common notion of Freedom of Information, though.

Also, as you said, "Marxism detests private ownership that is used to control the means of production". But file sharing can not be seen as any form of production. Nothing is stolen, but nothing is produced.

From my point of view, Marxism can not suite Pirate Party as an underlying ideology.

I don't agree with arguments that the pirate party is too moderate or diverse to ally itself with any one particular political ideology. To suggest so just shows that we lack the vision or imagination necessary to fully conceive of our own movement. We should not be afraid to imagine the full realization of what we are advocating. What would the world look like if the pirate party was allowed to create the laws, if we ran the country? What is our utopia?

To say that the Pirate party is just out for Copyright reform is simplistic. We advocate a very specific direction for copyright reform and this is why we are able to take positions against other attempts at reform like ACTA and C-32. Both of those are examples of copyright reform but in a direction we are against.

Therefore, if the Pirate Party has direction then it also has a destination. The question is: what does that destination look like? Does it resemble libertarianism, marxism, techno-anarchism? Libertarianism, for example, can accommodate our movement but it will always be a curiosity to the libertarian, a odd quirk in a movement with otherwise fiercely upholds property rights. Libertarians will make an exception for us while the pirate ethos fits right smack in the middle of Marxism. We so much advocate a realization of Marx then we could almost develop into a Marxism 2.0. A communism for the 21 century. The pirate party is the logical conclusion of a society which has overcome the productive forces necessary to transition from a socialist country into a communist one. The internet is the liberation of the everyman, not the misunderstood genius.   

For the Libertarians this is not so, the libertarian movement welcomes us now but will not always do so. Inevitably the need for Intellectual Property rights will be seen as necessary to protect society's innovators. Are we really supposed to believe that John Galt would of supported file-sharing? hardly.   

You assume that everyone in the party shares a common destination as well as direction.

I can not agree with that. As a physicist I know that direction and destination may exist independently. More than that, many destinations may share the same direction at some moment of time.

And I am sure it is what the Pirate Party is about. It unites people who share the direction (towards Freedom of Information), but it doesn't enforce any common utopia between its members. For the same form of copyright reform could be very different people:
- libertarians
- communists
- regular nonpolitical capitalists
- nonpolitical human right activists
- nonpolitical academic scientists (now, when current patent system is mathematically proven to be wrong).
- and many others, I did not intend to list them all, just wanted to illustrate the diversity.



I am here to make the change. I do not want to rule the World. I do not even want Pirate Party to rule the country. I think that we must implement and stay on guard of Information Freedom. And let the Free World with free ideas and free information to choose its utopia.

This.

But it does have a direction! we both agree on that. I do not want to enforce a common utopia on the folks around here. I encourage them have their different beliefs and ideas. But the pirate movement does have a direction, it is moving towards something. I want to, purely for the sake of argument, imagine that something at its logical extreme. I want to see what the pirate movement looks like when you apply it categorically.

I fully realize that not everyone would agree that the pirate system should be applied categorically(I probably would not agree myself) but it is a useful thought experiment for determining which philosophy underpins your movement.

What for? As long as we all understand the direction and agree on it, I do not see any problem.

For example, consider Green Party. Everybody knows what they campaign for. But who asks them what is their utopia? Do they want for humankind to disappear, merge with Mother Nature or what?

On the other hand, there is very real danger in describing categorical PPC utopia. It will be extreme and will repel moderate people.

To make my point clear, I do not want to discourage you from mental experiment on building the world lead by Pirate Party, but I want to prevent you from using its result to explain and illustrate Pirate Party goals.

Well the original point of this thread was to discuss whether or not we were a libertarian movement. My argument was that if we apply PPCA ideas categorically then we resemble a marxist movement more then a libertarian movement. This was in response to the claim that we cannot pin down the ideological nature of the PPCA because its membership is too diverse.

I personally don't believe that you can determine the ideology of a political movement with a show of hands.

Either way I am happy for the discussion it provoked and I thank you for providing interesting counter arguments. I wish that these forums were more willingly to have the kind of discussions that you, myself and Jack Daniels had.

I thought the original post was more pro-communism than anti-libertarian.

Because you know....communism leads to freedom.

Ditch the Marx - go read some Edward Bernays because that's really the power structure of the fantasy world we currently live in.

Oh and delete that Zeitgeist and Kymatica off your hard drive....they have soiled your wonderfully conditioned capitalist mind and replaced it with Eco-Facism.

J

If you are a physicist then you should know that all directions leads to some form of destinations and all destinations requires directions to reach the said destinations. Directions are the progression of space, time and matter while the destinations are categorizes by series distinguishable events, one after another.

Thank you for the discussion too. It was a pleasure.

Biogrand, I'd like to answer you, but that would be total off-topic here. I do not agree, but I do not want to argue on that now. I'm sorry. You are welcome to contact me via forum's message system, though.

The Pirate Party may not be explicitly libertarian or anything else for that matter. But it does not preclude us from moving in the same general direction...

No doubt the pirate pary will share some common goals with other parties. However, I think delving too deeply into other parties speciific issues will dissolve and weaken our own identity. What we have going for us is the ability to reach out and appeal to anyone and everyone because we dont bother with all the small crap. We have a goal and a purpose that's fairly narrowly defined. Stray too far from that narrow definiton and we'll end up like Party A and Party B, moving to the left or the right when we should be moving forward.

Beliefs do not just spring anew from nothing, they are premised by other beliefs, assumptions, doctrines, etc.  The belief in free culture is a belief built on the ideas of Marx. Marxism is at the core of the PPCA. Denying it is not only futile but disrespectful to the thinkers whose contributions have made our perspective possible.

These labels at least are a convenient shorthand with which we could of actually gotten a good discussion going. We could have probed deep into the assumptions of the party and all come out with a much clearer vision of what we stand for. Rather then this lame "We care nothing for the major political movements of the twentieth century, we just are doing our own thing".

It really shows what many of our detractors have argued to me on other forums, that our party lacks maturity.   

Bullshit.

PPCA does not embody communism if u ask me....
In terms of the party lacking maturity....
Hmm....naw....i think the party just needs moar chicks.

J

The mistake you are making is that while our core ideals are largely compatible with Marxism, this is not unique:

• Reduction of Intellectual Property - Marxism believes that there should be no private property, so intellectual property controls shouldn't exist. Libertariansm believes that there should be no artificial regulation of activity, so intellectual property controls shouldn't exist.
• Open Government - Marxism believes that citizens should all be equal in the government, so everything within the government should be equally accessible to all citizens. Libertarianism believes that there should be no government - that is, there should be no entity with a monopoly of force, and opening up the government weakens the monopoly.
• Privacy - I do not believe either Marxism or libertarianism directly concerns itself with privacy, or would generally support the notion.

Look at something like the GPL, it is not about freedom from the regulation of activity. It is the exact opposite in fact, it aims to regulate very specific activities. These regulations do not lead to a greater overall freedom for humanity. We should not confuse getting free software online as an inherent freedom for people. The media we consume on the internet is not leading to some mass emancipation for society.

What things like GPL and Creative Commons do is regulate activities for the purpose of creating higher quality media. This regulation leads to better cultural innovation but not greater levels of libertarian style freedom. Remember when the CBC could not play creative commons music because of the non-commercial attribution. The non-commercial attribution is a blatant example of the type of regulated activities that a libertarian is against.

Marxism, however, is not about getting rid of personal property entirely just personal property that is a means of production. This is exactly like how the Creative Commons distinguishes between commercial and non-commercial use. Communism is about the antagonism between the Owner of capital and the wage laborers. Completely analogous to the antagonism between musicians and record labels. The collective interest of the owners at odds with the collective interests of the workers. 

The Creative Commons and the GPL has shown what Marx had originally intended when he distinguished between personal property and bourgeois capital. The bourgeois' capital has been taken from him and the workers take over the industry and run it as some non-autonomous collective. Is that not what the Pirate Party envisions for the music industry? the software industry, the movie industry, the fashion industry, etc.

An idea is not private property.(You don't control my mind)
A sound is not private property.(You don't control my amplification)
A color is not private property. (You don't control what I see)
A catchy phrase is not private property. (You don't control how I communicate)
1s and 0s carefully assembled in specific orders are not private property. (You don't control my internet)
Frequency is not private property. (You don't control my radio)
Light is not private property. (You don't control my food garden)
Air is not private property. (You don't control my carbon emissions)
And so forth...(I will never surrender my Sov for your protection.)

Property must be tangible and have value based on non-artificial scarcity.

J

There is a difference between communism and Marxism FYI

Sure - whatever.

Don't waste your time talking to be aboot "pure" this or that.
This discussion is aboot "labels".
Study some history and then go find out what really happened.

J