Linux, Wikipedia, etc. - capitalistas, comunistas ou o quê?

No LewRockwell.com, há este texto, "Linux is Capitalist" (via My Guide to your Galaxy):

"In 2000, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer made a questionable remark: he referred to Linux (and the open source/free software community) and its development process as "communist." He said that "Linux is a tough competitor. There's no company called Linux, there's barely a Linux road map. Yet Linux sort of springs organically from the earth. And it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it. That is, it's free." Ballmer's statements show his ignorance of economics and the nature of human action."

"Free market capitalism is not characterized specifically by the existence of companies, but by individuals who, thanks to private property, plan the most efficient way of attaining their ends. Companies are in many cases the most adequate unit of calculation for carrying out entrepreneurial action but this is not always the case. They are not the prerequisite of capitalism, but an organizational consequence of it."

"Just because a product is free of charge it does not mean that it is communist. Communism means complete state ownership of every resource within its reach and thus the impossibility of human action without the authorization of the Central Planning Board; it means the absolute lack of private property, including body ownership and labor. Thus, when Ballmer exclaimed that Linux had the characteristics of communism, he completely erred."

"Linux and free software programmers often do not receive any financial compensation whatsoever. Indeed, the "Free software community" is a group of people who voluntarily use their time and skills. But just because they donate time and labor it does not mean that this is communism. On the contrary, they freely direct their human action to the fulfillment of their ends, without any centralized imposition about what had to be done; people are exchanging their scarce resources (time and labor) to satisfy their ends. In the case of the Linux programmer, the end can range from fixing a software bug to adding a new feature or enhancing documentation. Where is the communism here? How is this socialist? Linux is a market phenomenon, just as charity is."

"And as we mentioned above, communism implies that the invested money, time and skills (any means of human action) must be state owned. If Mr. Ballmer were right, then the state must own Linux and direct the time and labor of the coerced "volunteers." As much as he would like to believe that, the development of free software is not communist"

Bem, isso depende tudo das definições utilizadas. Mas, em primeiro lugar, convém ser coerente no uso das definições: p.ex, no seu post sobre o assunto, Dos Santos escreve "a quantidade de vezes que é necessário apontar isto, incluindo a próprios participantes nos projectos de software livre que julgam estar a contribuir para a causa anarco-comunista". Ora, não se pode demonstrar que o Linux não é "anarco-comunista" a partir do texto citado: o texto claramente define "comunismo" como um sistema "em que tudo é propriedade do Estado e que qualquer acção humana precisa de autorização do Departamento de Planeamento Central", logo o "anarco-comunismo" não está incluido na definição.

Mas, será que o software livre/open source (ou, já agora, projectos como a Wikipedia) são "capitalistas"? Charles Johnson escreve que "capitalismo" pode significar 3 coisas:

1. The free market: capitalism has been used, mostly (but not exclusively) by its defenders to just mean a free market, i.e., an economic order that emerges from voluntary exchanges of property and labor without government intervention (or any other form of systemic coercion).

2. The corporate State: capitalism has also been used, sometimes by its opponents and sometimes by the beneficiaries of the system, to mean a corporate State—that is, active government support for big businesses through instruments such as subsidies, central banking, tax-funded infrastructure, development grants and loans, special tax exemptions, funding plants, acquiring land through eminent domain, government union-busting, and so on down the line. Since government intervention is always, by nature, either services funded by expropriated tax dollars or regulations enforced from the barrel of a gun, it’s worth noting that being capitalist in the sense of a free marketeer requires being anti-capitalist in the sense of opposing the corporate State, and vice versa. The fact that state socialists and the anti-communist Right have spent the past century systematically running these two distinct senses of capitalism together (in order to make it seem that you had to swallow the corporate State if you believed in the free market—which the Marxists used for a modus tollens and the Rightists used for a modus ponens) doesn’t make these two any less distinct, or any less antagonistic.

3. Boss-directed labor: third, capitalism has been used (by for example, Marxians and socialists who are careful about their use of language) to refer to a specific form of labor market—that is, one where the dominant form of economic activity is the production of goods in workplaces that are strictly divided by class. Under capitalism in the third sense, most workers are working for a boss, in return for a wage; they are renting out their labor to someone else, in order to survive, and it is the boss and not the workers who holds the title to the business, the shop, and the tools and facilities that make the business run. (Or, as the Marxists would have it, the means of production.) It’s worth noting that capitalism in this third sense is a category independent of capitalism in either of the first two senses: there are lots of different ways that a free labor market could turn out (it could be organized in traditional employer-employee relationships, or into worker co-ops, or into community workers’ councils, or into a diffuse network of shopkeeps and independent contractors) and someone who is an unflinching free marketeer might plump for any of these, or might be completely indifferent as to which one wins out; whereas an interventionist statist might also favor traditional employer-employee relationships (as in Fascism) or any number of different arrangements (as in various forms of state socialism).

Adoptando estas 3 possíveis definições, creio que estes projectos são "capitalistas" no sentido "1" (se descontarmos o facto de se basearam na Internet, uma rede criada pelo Estado e cuja infra-estutura é mantida, muitas vezes, por empresas fortemente reguladas), mas já não serão no sentido "3". Claro que a novidade aqui é ter sido um "capitalista" (o Steve Ballmer) a, implicitamente, ter adoptado a "definição 3" (algo que, em público, só os socialistas costumam fazer).

Já agora, diga-se que a "linha oficial" dos "rockwellianos" costuma ser a de que "o socialismo não funciona porque, sem propriedade privada não há mercados, sem mercados não há preços, e sem preços não há cálculo económico racional". Esse raciocínio já foi refutado em vários sitios (até por outros anti-socialistas), mas, se seguirmos a sua lógica, tal significa que o software livre, a wikipedia, etc. serão "quase-socialistas", já que também não recorrem muito aos preços.

Adenda: como nota o Luis Pedro nos comentários, Bryan Caplan (o tal "outro anti-socialista"), não "refuta" a tese "austríaca" de que o cálculo racional é impossível em "socialismo". Caplan apenas afirma que não se pode, de um ponto de vista puramente teórico, concluir se (e a partir de que dimensão - 2, 100, 1.000 pessoas?) os problemas de cálculo serão suficentemente fortes para, só por si, tornarem o socialismo impossível de funcionar (e se este não terá problemas mais graves).