RE: Marxism and monopoly

["Nathan Newman" <nathan.newman@xxxxxxxx>]

>On Behalf Of Chris Burford
>
> a) what are the probabilities of the breakup of Microsoft being enforced?
> It seems that yesterday's critical ruling was a response to the breakdown
> of negotiations at the weekend. The judicial approach to this case had
> clearly been designed to promote negotiations.

Of course the point is negotiations-- that is the point of our whole
cumbersome judicial process, where most accused of crimes are encouraged to
plea bargain and most civil cases settle, whether one their own or
increasingly in court-ordered mediation or arbitration.  AT&T was broken up
not on a judge's ordeer but through a negotiated deal and consent decree.

Note the recent tobacco settlement where the state governments negotiated a
deal.  What is odd about such deals is that they end up acting as surogate
regulatory schemes but without direct democratic input or strong follow-up,
since all the decisions are often packed into singular high-stakes
negotiations and deals.

It's an insanely bad and terrible approach to regulation of the economy,
undemocratic in the broadest sense in that it gives power to unelected
judges and backroom deals, rather than the broad social give-and-take of
democratic politics.

> I submit that anti-trust legislation is a powerful bourgeois reformist
> device for keeping capitalism on the road. Otherwise its natural tendency
> to monopoly would cause such sharpening of the contradictions
> that it would
> place the public ownership of the means of production overtly on
> the agenda.

Of course antitrust is pro-capitalist and pro-reform-- it's explicit goal is
to save competition from the worst excess of its capitalists.  Progressives
in the US have often seized on it because it is one of the only tools that
existed for years for broad regulation of the economy, but it's reformist at
its core, often in ways that undermine the broader rationality and
efficiencies that private monopolies or (better) state-run systems would
achieve.  THe breakup of AT&T was not done in the ultimate interests of
consumers but in the interests of its competitors and ultimately the Bell
companies themselves who were increasingly freed from government regulation
as a result of the breakup.

> But to pose the question about methods to socialisation the ownership of
> the means of production of Microsoft products.

Part of the issue is raising the social basis for the rise of the computer
industry and the Internet in particular.

I just published an article in THE AMERICAN PROSPECT on the government
policies that created the basis for open source software and highlighted an
expansion of that role as an alternative to Microsoft.  It is not
socializing Microsoft per se but socializing its desireable functions that
should be our focus.  Microsoft is attractive to consumers - and maintains
public support - because most consumers know a true "free market" would mean
incompatible products and a lack of integration.  If government was doing
its job of assuring strong computer standards and requiring adherance to
those standards through its regulatory, research funding and government
procurement functions, Microsoft's monopoly could neither thrive nor be
attractive in any way.

Check out STORMING THE GATES
http://www.prospect.org/archives/V11-10/newman-n.html

There are a number of articles on government policy, the Net and open source
software, including a useful article by Larry Lessig about the absurdies of
how legislators themselves deny the already existing regulatory structure
governing the Internet at
http://www.prospect.org/archives/V11-10/lessig-l.html

The bottomline is that the breakup of Microsoft is undesireable (and
recognized as such by most consumers).  I say that as someone who worked at
an organization NetAction that officiallly promoted such a policy, although
I did everything I could in my own research and writing to promote other
alternative remedies, from disclosure of source code to "behavior
modification" - ie. regulation.  Most commentators note that such behavior
modification remedies would, horrors, require continual monitoring of
Microsoft beyond the immediate court decision.  It's called regulation and
leftists should be trumpeting it loudly as an alternative to a ham-handed
breakup of Microsoft, whose benefits are dubious and would serve consumers
rather poorly in the end.

-- Nathan Newman