Sociology, Economics, and their philosophies...

My main question is this:

Why is there a significant and serious amount of backlash to business, the desire to make $L, and capitalism in SL?

To be humble and realistic, I'm sure many people see SL in different ways. Some people see it as an entertaining commune of creativity and limitless possibilities. Some see it as a vast playground of culture, society, and economy. Others may see it as an investment of time, money, and energy.

But whatever the case may be, I think we can (or maybe ideally should?) all agree that these are personal perspectives and influence how we interact with the world of SL.

However, I've often come across opinions that suggest everything should be absolutely free. In the extreme, I've heard opinions that even go as far to suggest that anyone trying actively to accumulate L$ is motivated by greed.

And so this got me asking more questions (as many things do). Especially since I'm at a point of intellectual interest in economic and sociological philosophy. This interest has led me to believe that "capitalism" and "communism" are roughly the same model of economy. The differentiating factor being the difference between motivation for economic security and reward.

I also recently finished "The Hacker Ethic," a reformulation of Max Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," based on developments and motivations in the hacker community. By and large, I agree with many aspects of Pekka's views and those supported by the community from which she draws them, but when I look at the context of SL's sociology and economy; I can't help but wonder...

What is so fundamentally wrong about accumulating L$ wealth?

I don't want to go on further in an attempt to answer my own question, so I'll let the thread be taken away (dialectically I hope).

Because they have it and I DON'T!

By definition, capitalism is a system where means of production and distribution are privately owned, and communism is a system where they are owned by "the people" i.e. the government.

They are sort of two ends of the spectrum, on this question of who should control the means of production and distribution. Events in the 20th century showed that people were better off in the long run if they had private ownership of their companies and homes and farms.

Unfortunately, under either system it was actually concentration of power by whatever means that led to the evils people decry when they complain of capitalists and communists.

The way I look at it, we've had capitalism all along in SL. I've no problem with that as far as it goes. What gets scary though is when it looks like some minority of the population is gaining power and wealth out of proportion to their actual productivity. Specifically investment capitalism, where one person provides all the cash and the other provides all the talent and hard work.

So far I don't see this happening very much. So far the hard workers and most creative businesspeople own their own stores and their own land. And personally I think such people deserve every bit of their profits.

If on the other hand more and more stores and businesses get bought up, and somehow a few groups end up controlling the creative efforts of others, that's where profit becomes evil. It seems rather unlikely though, as no one here actually needs work.

A rather interesting perspective... classical, but practical nonetheless.

From a sociological perspective, communism and capitalism both have their roots in the Protestant Ethic, which in turn, derived most of it's ethics from monastic rules. It supports your point of view however:

in communism, it's the motivation of the people to work equally for the security of the individual.

in capitalism it's the reward of work that motivates the individual.

This of course is it's purest form (and then obviously, probably not all that close to reality). However, if we begin to look at political systems, communism has always tended towards leftist republics while capitalism has always tended towards liberal democracy. There's nothing to say that a leftist republic couldn't develop a capitalist system to run it's economy... it just hasn't been done yet (besides not being the most practical). It's my theory that the fears of "corporate control" and such is derived from the lack of control democracy has had on our capitalist economy. There are rules and taxation systems in place that would've kept a corporation from becoming too large a hundred years ago, but the over-institutionalization of government makes the relationship of those systems more like a race between tortoise and hare. The hare, whatever motivates it, is primarily focused on how much it can do... which technically is the spirit of capitalism, but I think the hare has started to use the reward moreso than the achievement to start the race... and the bloody tortoise can't do much to win the race in this case.

So in the context of SL where the reward is seemingly devalued by the constant influx of L$, I don't see the motivation being the reward -- I see it being the achievement. Still however, the general SL populace has some underlying anti-capitalism in it's blood. I'm just curious as to how it has developed and the reasoning.

As you can tell... SL offers some food for thought to me.