Really? I know scientific publishing is terrible in a myriad of ways, but communism? Communism? We have to throw out the underpinnings of modern advanced civilization because Elsevier makes too much money?
"There are different kinds of property: 1. Property pure and simple, the dominant and seigniorial power over a thing; or, as they term it, naked property. 2. Possession. “Possession,” says Duranton, “is a matter of fact, not of right.” Toullier: “Property is a right, a legal power; possession is a fact.” The tenant, the farmer, the commandité, the usufructuary, are possessors; the owner who lets and lends for use, the heir who is to come into possession on the death of a usufructuary, are proprietors. If I may venture the comparison: a lover is a possessor, a husband is a proprietor.
This double definition of property — domain and possession — is of the highest importance; and it must be clearly understood, in order to comprehend what is to follow."
In my opinion, and apparently that of the person giving the talk, when we talk about science we don't only want the journals to be free (as in free speech), we want the "means of production" for it to be free. In this way, we believe, science can serve the broader community as a tool to advance knowledge rather than only when it's convenient for profit. As an example, look at how the funding was recently pulled (though I'm not fully up to date on the story) on a US government study into the effects of coal mining on health. I contend that there would have been less motivation to do this, if it was possible at all, in a Communist society.
But we never have seen that happen because in practice communist regimes tend to have strong states that engage in rather heavy-handed central planning of the economy. As a result, funding for scientific enterprises in these societies ends up being directed toward whatever the political priorities of the planners are. In the Soviet Union's case, that was military technologies and Lysenkoism.
Lysenkoism is a particularly troubling counter-example to your US coal mining example. In the US, the political inconvienence (presumably to the new administration) simply resulted in the project's funding being cut. In the Soviet Union, the political inconvience of natural selection resulted in thousands of scientists being jailed or killed, set back Soviet biology at least 150 years, and was partly to blame for the low crop yields that the Soviets kept experiencing.
So yeah, I don't particularly like the status quo in scientific publishing, but it's better than abolishing private property. Abolishing private property is one of those ideas that sounds great in theory and always ends badly in practice.
However we see that in the Soviet Union, places of science remained private property, administered by either private institutions or a state which claimed to be in control of the people, while it was clearly not. The whole Soviet model collapsed very early one because certain factions were banned, and their members executed. I do not think that this is the best that we can do. However I think that the solution, however utopian it sounds, lies in abolition of private property because otherwise we are still beholden to the whims of speculators and their profits rather than the interest of the community. Even if you only democratised science, this would be problematic; the scientists need to eat, and I would argue that they shouldn't have to eat only if the State or a private institutions tells them that they can eat.
There are other examples to go along with what you said. I can't remember the source, but there was a time in the Soviet Union in which scientists wished to implement a much better system of central planning which took into account input and output tables continuously; whether or not the computer power existed at the time I don't know, but the system was quickly shut down by the Soviet bureaucracy - I think because it posed a threat to the power of the State. This is why I tend to by more sympathetic to anarchist ideologies (as a questioner at the end of the presentitaion mentions), because by destroying the material conditions of the state then the state ceases, what you describe as happening has less chance to take hold.
This is why Communism is an anarchist ideology, in recognition of the very problem you have mentioned. Modern day Communists such as Zizek and Badiou accept this, and Badiou urges us to continue with the Communist Hypothesis[0]. The Soviet model was initially radical, but it was not radical enough to overcome the power structures which were much more entrenched than the founders of the revolution thought. So I still think Communism is the answer, but in what way is yet to be found out, and the debate fiercely rages. It's not that I think Lysenkoism is better than what we have currently (including all our junk "science" coming from here and there), it's that I think there is a solution superior to both situations, namely, in the reduction of power of the state and the diminishing of nationalism by making a global revolution as Marx's internationalist roots envisioned. It's not the abolition of private property that was the cause of Lysenkoism, it was exactly what we see now - rigid state bureaucracy and private institutions.
[0] https://newleftreview.org/II/49/alain-badiou-the-communist-h...
there are issues that are even more deeply rooted than that. for example it completely eludes me how luxuries would be handled and distributed according to needs, or if it's ever recognized a need for luxuries and if it were how they'd be distributed to each according to personal interests and preferences
The science publishing business is not in that position due to skill, value add or investment but due to laws that grant monopolies on content for an extended period of time. Copyright on scientific discourse is not an underpinning of modern civilization. It is thus a valid consideration to change these artificial protections of their business.
But this is not communism (i know lot of people in the US are confused by this, even the people that call themselve communist) but rather anarchism ("Libertaire" in french that is a left-wing libertarianism) with the idea that science is one of the common good. This new-wave anarchism take some old idea from Proudhon and enhance them. So you let behind the idea that private property is evil, but private property of the common is. You have the idea that people can't own what is used by other people. So you can have a hundred appartments in a big city, but you can't rent them. You can sell them, speculate on them, but you cannot rent them. And since it is anarchism, a more distributed/less powerfull government is needed too.
On the point of "no private ownership of the common good", this seems like communism, yes (Communism come from anarchism somehow), but communism is the idea that the state have to regulate this, scihub is not on any level a state initiative.
Sorry for the messy thoughts again, conversationnal english is a bit hard for me
Is it possible to work towards Communism without falling into those two traps? I have no idea. But if someone can give good reasons why their proposal would be different, I'm willing to hear them out.
>Here’s Marx in an 1848 newspaper article: “there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”
And commies seem to mostly follow Marx, hence perhaps the deaths. I've never been a fan of Marx - he seems to write reams of pompous twaddle. And then I guess when the pompous twaddley stuff doesn't produce utopia more revolutionary terror is the answer. Perhaps you could come up with a better socialist system without that stuff.
Not necessarily at all, and not only in theory but also in practice. The Kibbutzim[1] in Israel are a relatively successful form of communism -- granted, not on a state scale -- and lasted for about 100 years now (though they can hardly be called communist any more), and they have always been democratic (even if in practice they were sometimes oligarchic, but not much different in that respect from many democracies). The Kibbutzim were a particularly radical form of communism, where children were raised collectively, and lived away from their parents (this practice was particularly criticized in Israel and later stopped in most Kibbutzim).
> In that sense, no different from a fascist government.
There are really so many senses in which communism differs from fascism so completely (e.g. one is founded on exploitation and the other is founded on anti-exploitation) so that even if they were similar in one sense, comparing the two is not very useful. The only sense in which the two can be said to be similar (and this one applies to many ideals, even to opposing ones) is that they're both utopian.