Marx is back...get used to it

[Am I allowed to say that in this country? Darn. I am probably going to be red flagged or something...damn]

After a very lively Berkely Cybersalon yesterday afternoon, I started researching elitism versus the voice of the commons and I happened upon something I haven't read since second year university, The Communist Manifesto.

Okay...okay...scary territory for some of my American readers. Being Canadian, you have to understand, means that I wasn't raised in an education system that looked down on socialism or communism. In fact, Canada is considered a socialist state with our universal health care, higher taxes (although to tell you the truth, I pay as much if not more in California for a whole lot less), strong social system and less forgiving policies on big business. Sure, even Canada is moving more in a capitalist direction, but in school, I learnt that communism is just another type of government: one based in the commons with less centralized power.

So, when I read Andrew Keen's article entitled, Web 2.o is Reminiscent of Marx, I instantly thought of it as a complimentary piece. I was surprised to read that it is anything but. Apparently, Keen doesn't think much of Marx.

Alright, alright...so yes...many of the people behind the movement are oozing with priviledge and 'elitism'. A cute term for this emerged a couple of years back in Toronto. We were called 'BoBos' or The Bourgeoise Bohemians...yes. We are free to throw our utopic philosophies askew, crying for a better world into our crystal champagne glasses, blogging on our brand new MacBook Pros. Wah. Yes. That's icky.

[and for the record, I'm hardly wealthy or powerful, but I have a crazy amount of priviledge that allows me to rant and bark and spew right here right now]

But re-reading the CM, I was, once again, swept up in the following passage:

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

To sum it up in todays terms, under marxist communism THE COMMONS WILL OWN THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION AND WILL CALL THE SHOTS. I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty rockin' to me. But then again, I have faith in human beings.

Egad, experts are human, too. Suroweicki's Wisdom of Crowds gives oodles of accounts of expertise falling down. From his website:

Experts, no matter how smart, only have limited amounts of information. They also, like all of us, have biases. It's very rare that one person can know more than a large group of people, and almost never does that same person know more about a whole series of questions.

So, too, the elite? I say a big, fat YES.

Things are changing. Yeah, maybe the growth is currently isolated to small, but loud communities, but it won't take long before we start to see other communities empowered by the same thought. There WILL be a critical mass and ivory towers WILL fall.

UPDATE: My PiC has an additional rant that came out of last night's experience. Sigh, we are so dangerous together. ;)

[photo credit: speerfish of a t-shirt made by a very commie company, Threadless]

[tags: communism, communistmanifesto, marxism, jamessuroweicki commonsbased, newmarketing, web2.0, fuckelitism]