[OPE] The spectre of Soviet society

Well, for many businesspeople it is very frightening to think that you could have a fully functioning, peaceful community of people, with all modern amenities, organised and operating without any commerce. If you think this is a ridiculous, just consider the enormous hostility to just the free availability of open-source software. What post-capitalist societies show is that in principle you do not need commerce to organise society, or that it needs to play only a subordinate role - that social life will carry on regardless anyway. That very idea is very threatening to many people, the idea that there are alternatives and that those alternatives might work just as well as commercial exploitation. Inversely, for many socialists the idea that particular forms of commercial trade aren't a bad thing or indeed progressive is also a very threatening idea.
But that is to say that most ideologies about how society ought to function are religious or quasi-religious, not based on fact or science.

J.

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Received on Mon Sep 8 02:40:44 2008