Johan Söderberg
Introduction
Copyright was invented by and for early capitalism, and its importance
to that system has grown ever since. To oppose copyright is to oppose capitalism.
Thus, Marxism is a natural starting-point when challenging copyright.
General Intellect
Marx concept of a 'general intellect', suggesting that at some point
the development of industrialisation would reach a stage were a collective
learning process would surpass physical labour as a productive force, offers
a promising backdrop to understand the accomplishments of the free software
community. "But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation
of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of
labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during
labour time, whose 'powerful effectiveness' is itself in turn out of all
proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends
rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology,
or the application of this science to production." (Marx, 1993, p.704-705).
A school known as Autonomist Marxists has built upon this tradition.
"The organization of the cycle of production of immaterial labor […] is
not defined by the four walls of a factory. The location in which it operates
is outside in the society at large […]" (Lazzarato in Virno & Hardt,
1996, p.136). Because of this, the scene of production changes: "Today
productivity, wealth, and the creation of social surpluses take the form
of cooperative interactivity through linguistic, communicational, and affective
networks" (Hardt & Negri, 1999, p.294).
Community vs. Capital
Hardt & Negri never mention hackering, but their description fits
neatly with the real existence of free software. The technological superiority
and successful distribution of free software, Linux being a case in point,
shows that an anarchistic mode of production can outperform the economic
efficiency of monopoly capitalism (Moglen 1999). Because all activities
in society becomes sources of immaterial labour, and as such are more productive
than the labour that are locked up in the capitalist factory, capitalists
are forced to subjugate the activity of communities and make it: " […]
subject to capitalist discipline and capitalist relations of production.
This fact of being within capital and sustaining capital is what defines
the proletariat as a class." (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p.53)
Open source licensing illustrates how business demands rewrite the
activity of a community in order for it to fit better with commercial interests.
Unlike the General Public License, or copyleft, Open Source code can be
appropriated by a corporation and enclosed by their copyright claim. (Barr,
2001, www.itworld.com). So far, many Open Source proponents have hailed
the corporate engagement with the computer underground as a way forward
to gain respectability in mainstream society. What they fail to see is
that companies ultimately seek to slash labour cost. If companies are allowed
to tap the unpaid innovative labour of the community, it will dump the
employment and wage situation for in-house software programmers, the livelihood
of many in the free software community. The dangers of lacking a critical
analysis could not be demonstrated more clearly.
There is thus an antagonistic relationship between capital and community,
similar to the one between labour and capital, which is likely to erupt,
as community increasingly becomes a source of value to capital. The rising
tension within the hacker underground is expressed in the words of Manuel
Castells: "The struggle between diverse capitalists and miscellaneous working
class is subsumed into the more fundamental opposition between the bare
logic of capital flows and the cultural values of human experience" (Castells,
1996, Vol.I, p.476).
The Ideology of Hacking
The hacker subculture originates partly from the American counter-culture
of the sixties, (Sterling 1994) and academic settings were computers were
first developed (Lerner & Tirole, 2000). The values of free information
that the computer underground inherited from its origins are fuelling today's
political project of hackering. Like the activity of many other 'alternative'
subcultures that are not directly defined by their political engagement;
"the struggles are at once economic, political, and cultural - and hence
they are biopolitical struggles, struggles over the form of life. They
are constituent struggles, creating new public spaces and new forms of
community." (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p.56). The chief uniting and mobilising
force for the hacker underground is the common enemy of Microsoft. (Bezroukov,
1999a). Opposition to Microsoft draws both from socialist anarchistic principles,
and from high-tech libertarianism. The rightwing drift, dubbed as the Californian
Ideology, is a recent transition (Barbrook & Cameron, ccd.wmin.ac.uk),
and not surprising given the hegemonic dominance of the corporate sector
in the United States and the risen stakes in free software for business.
However, it runs counter to the roots of hacking, which essentially is
a reaction against Taylorism. (Hannemyr, 1999). Basic motivations to engage
in free programming are the rush of technological empowerment (Sterling,
1994), the joy of un-alienated creativity (Moglen, 1999), and the sense
of belonging to a community (commonly recognised by hackers themselves
as 'ego', but reputation are only viable within a group of peers, i.e.
a community). Those values may not seem political at first sight, but they
are on collision course with the commercial agenda of turning the Internet
into a marketplace.
The commercial agenda of the Internet
Capitalists need to utilise the Internet, as it is believed to be the
major production centre and distribution channel of exchange value in the
future. But to accomplish their vision of the Internet as an ethereal market
place, the architecture of the net has to fulfil five requirements; "(1)
authenticitation, to ensure the identity of the person you are dealing
with; (2) authorization, to ensure that the person is sanctioned for a
particular function; (3) privacy: to ensure that others can not see what
exchanges there are, (4) integrity: to ensure the transmission is not altered
en route; and (5) nonrepudiation, to ensure that the sender of a message
cannot deny that he send it." (Gail L Grant, quoted in Lessig, 1999, p.40).
In short, surveillance has to replace the anonymity and anarchy of the
current Internet.
The capitalist class is determined to re-design hardware and software
into so called 'security systems' that safeguard their interests on the
Internet. "Code can, and will, displace law as the primary defence of intellectual
property in cyberspace" (Lessig, 1999, p.126). In the history of factory
production, examples abound were machinery has been tailored to direct
the behaviour of workers. A classic illustration of how technology are
used in this way to control labour activity is the speed set by the assembly
line in a factory (Edwards, 1979). We can expect the same strategy to be
deployed as consumer technology is now disseminating throughout society.
A technology supporting the property regime must build a black box
not comprehensible to the smartest user, and convenient to operate for
users with the lowest possible skill. Users must be deprived of their technological
knowledge that grants them control over the product, or else they will
bypass the security systems. Operation Sundevil, a nationwide law enforcement
campaign in U.S., staged in the early 90's and directed against the hacker
community (Sterling, 1994), should be seen in this light. However, direct
repression against highly skilled users plays only a minor though complementary
part in the agenda of securing the system from independent subjects. Its
real momentum lies in lessening the skill level demanded of the average
user, as is expressed in the deceitful word 'user-friendly technology'.
The future outcome of security systems will be resolved in present
conflict. In Dyer-Withefords words, technologies are: "[…] often constituted
by contending pressure that implant in them contradictory potentialities:
which of these are realized is something that will be determined only in
further struggle and conflict" (1999, p.72). When Napster was closed down
by legal action from the recording industry, and then turned into a commercial
outlet, two new file-sharing programs, Freenet and Gnutella, immediately
replaced it. Unlike Napster, these programmes are not dependent on any
central server, and thus there are no 'head' to put pressure on (Markoff,
2000, www.nytimes.com). One crucial difficulty to the intellectual property
regime is identified by Scott; "[…] [A] large part of infringement is being
shifted from profit making activities to cost reducing activities. Where
before a copyright holder may have had a distributor who was selling tens
of thousands of copies of a work, nowadays that distributor has been replaced
by tens of thousands of individuals all acquiring a single copy of that
work from perhaps disparate information sources." And therefore "There
are simply too many targets, no one which is worth pursuing." (Scott, 2001,
p.16). This reflection is only reassuring if we assume that regulating
tens of thousands of individuals is an impossible feat. If we fear that
computers provide such capabilities, this is precisely the reason why strong
incentives exist to create a fine-grated, full-scale panopticon (Lyon 1994).
It appears as if capital increasingly will rely on redesigning technology
to regulate social behavior in general. In this power struggle resistance
must increasingly be fought with technological skills. It is in this context
that the hacker community and the Free Software Movement are critical.
Conclusion
Marxism offers a theoretical framework to analyse the contradictions
inherent to the intellectual property regime. The success of free software
in outperforming commercial software is a showcase of the productive force
of the general intellect, foreseen by Marx 150 years ago. It underpins
the claim by Autonomist Marxists that production is becoming intensively
social, and supports their case of a rising mismatch between collective
labour power and an economy based on private property.
The productivity of social labour power impels corporations to subjugate
the activity of communities. But here rouses a contradiction to capital,
on one hand it prospers from the technologically skilled, unpaid, social
labour of users; on the other hand it must suppress the knowledge power
of those users to protect the intellectual property regime. To have it
both ways, capital can only rely on its hegemonic force. It is to this
cause that pundits and propagandists of the Californian Ideology readily
offer their servitude. Initially, ideological confusion is caused by capital's
experimentation to exploit the labour power and idealism of collectives
(Open Source licenses being a case in point), which makes the demarcation
line between friend and foe harder to draw. But for every successful 'management'
of social cooperation to boost profits, other parts of the community will
be radicalised and pitched into the conflict. Inevitable, communities will
turn into hotbeds of counter-hegemonic resistance. It is here that Marxism
has its role to play as a toolbox of critical analysis and ideological
awareness. In this struggle the hacker movement is crucial, I stress, because
they can challenge capitals domination over technological development.
Acknowledgements
This text is a short version of the article first published in First
Monday.
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue7_3/soderberg/index.html
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