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1
Recession is here, everywhere. Whether recession is artificial and thus compatible
with the axiomatic of capitalism (that is, the tendency toward a world market),
or forced and thus a threat to capitalism is still debated. From the perspective
of Capital, what is more important is that the historic magnification, which
has been defining capitalism since the 15th century, is not likely to maintain
its pace or character. There are no more barbarians to civilise, no more virgin
lands to conquer and colonise. The new barbarians are refined, the new virgin
lands are not defined by geographical parameters. Primitive accummulation has
been completed; explosion now gives way to implosion. It was reckoned that a
myth central to capitalism came full circle in three generations: I would start
from scratch with empty hands and empty pockets, slowly but gradually accummulate
rights and money, then build a house, find a wife with whom I would make a family,
then have a son and raise him, and, sooner or later, die. My son would repeat
the process once more, but his son – my grandson - would inherit more than my
son did, say three times more. In the elapsed space of three generations, total
wealth would have multiplied by nine times. This myth starts to shun all relevance:
the historic magnification of capitalism, based on long established materialist
notions of value, is no longer feasible. In all probability, my grandson will
not inherit three houses. And here comes the reversal of perspective of Capital:
as the concept of the spectacle is conceived to its full radicality, as a process
of generalised social abstraction, the commodity-form implodes to encompass
and invest all of shared lived experience. The commodity-form has gone well
beyond the romantic stage of fetishism: while there is no doubt that both the
use- and exchange-value of a product now largely stem from intangible characteristics,
such as perceived sex-appeal, "coolness", and ephemeral trendiness – a reality
of contemporary commerce which compels us to rethink value along the lines of
what Jean Baudrillard calls sign value – commodification does not stop at the
twilight of shopfronts and commodity shelves, that is, the sphere of materiality,
but it extends beyond them to encompass all of the immaterial. The leverage
and diffussion of commodification has been so overwhelming that goods long considered
public, such as century-old knowledges pertaining to medical treatments and
the cultivation of the land have been appropriated.[1]
In the age of universality of the spectacle, the ultimate commodity is the time
of our own lives, that is, the relationships and experiences that give meaning
to its space. "The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the
total occupation of social life".[2]
In effect, nothing escapes vulgar commodification. Even some of the most subversive
and anti-commercial manifestations of shared lived experience have capitulated.
Indicatively, in the space of the last fifteen years, rave has metamorphosed
from an anti-commercial, underground social movement and cultural phenomenon
into a lucrative industry of cool. With the notable exception of freeraves in
England, the commodification of the pulse of rave is ensured by the increasing
centrality of the figure of the Star-DJ (and the ephemeral trendiness of the
Club) to the packaged experience. The associated process of social formation
during a rave is accomplished by reference to the sign value of fluorescent
Adidas trainers and ornament-ised Ecstasy. Rave is now about paying to dance
to the beats of a cultureindustry professsional, rather than realising temporary
autonomous zones through an intensive process of cross-fertilisation between
underground sub-cultures based on the free sharing of conscience.[3]
Presently, rave's claim to "hack reality" has given way to spectacular pomp.
Far from becoming a universal anti-systemic movement, as it once aspired, rave,
blessed by the high priests of the culture industry, became an industry of cool.
Now, more that ever before, the utterance "the poverty of everyday life" attains
a whole new meaning. It no longer refers to the near-complete lack of authentic
excitement and stimulation in shared lived experience, that is, an ontological
condition predicated on esoteric misery and social boredom; now, it comes to
signify the centrality of the commodity-form to the satisfaction and saturation
of all of our socio-cultural needs and wants.
2
Would-be information-technology (IT) workers are reckoned to be privileged because
it is assumed that IT students are in the rare position of needing none and
nothing, except for plenty of time perhaps, in order to acquire those skills
and competencies that will later guarantee them a job in the epicentre of the
most lucrative labour market. But this is yet another popular myth, in spite
of its been perpetuated by a plethora of computer scientists. In a time when
the tools of the trade are not free (libre) and certainly not free of charge,
free time does not suffice. This becomes obvious when we take a look at the
person who is constantly craving for fresh knowledge, in particular for knowledge
that has been put to the service of capital by means of intensifying and imploding
the wealth bondage that keeps unpaid-for labour hostage. The cost of the investment
in time required to pick up a new skill aside, what is left to the inquiring
mind who desires to internalise an external domain of knowledge, but has no
money to pay for it? Suppose I have no problem spending lots of time getting
myself up to speed with Adobe Pagemaker, Logic, Cubase,
AutoCAD or any other piece of software made possible by incredible programming
ingenuity, but I cannot afford to buy them. Do I abstain from using them as
the result of my inadequate funding? Or do I resort to programming a real alternative
(ie. The GIMP Vs. Adobe Photoshop), hoping that in time this knowledge
will compensate for the loss of familiarity in the use of the mainstream tool
which is the one valued by the market according to the particulars of the jobs
currently advertised? From this vantage point, free software developers,
as well as illegitimate vendors of software, and people who crack software programs
are located in the vanguard of the modern knowledge revolution. Although
they rarely understand the actual effect of their actions, illegitimate vendors
of software contribute a strong blow to the world of commodified knowledge.
For their clientelle consists not only of intermediaries who intend to copy
the software they have bought a thousand times and re-sell it, but also of people
who have a genuine interest in acquiring the knowledge embedded in the software.
Not that long ago, I happenned to stand right next to a deal. The site
was the famous agora of Monastiraki in Athens, Greece, located at the foot of
the rock of Acropolis, where hundreds of small-time dealers set up shop every
Sunday. The buyer had picked two or three CDs, one of which was a copy of Avid,
and was negotiating the price for that software. In order to raise the price,
I assumed for this is the only satisfactory explanation I can come up with,
the dealer cunningly offered that this deal was illegal. To which the
buyer replied: “I am doing nothing illegal here. I am not interested in re-selling
this software. I only want it for the knowledge in it. And no one will stop
me from acquiring knowledge”. The dealer, dazed a bit for it seemed he had not
been given that particular reply on that day, nodded and agreed on the price
the buyer had suggested. The deal took place, and in a moment's time the buyer
had dissappeared again into the crowd. The conscious realisation of the social
effect of knowledge acquisition through illegitimate and clandestine channels,
as exemplified by the determination shown by the above buyer to acquire the
coveted knowledge by all means, even through his participation in a deal, seals
the reversal of perspective: the perspective of power through the technique
of indoctrination it employs with the help of mass media has come into such
a fierce and cruel conflict with the imperatives of knowledge acquisition that
the genuinely inquiring mind will assert its right to claim knowledge even in
the obscene case that this process of knowledge acquisition has been criminalised.
The primacy to establish foundations for the advancement of illegal knowledge
can only be grasped on this plane: piracy is incorporated into the radical project
of libre knowledge insofar as the pirates are seeking to extend their body of
knowledge. As regards to crackers, they have been consistently portrayed by
mass media as juvenile delinquents on the brink of a terminal mental collapse,
whose kindest motivation can be explained by their vanity to demonstrate their
skills to others. But this conceptualisation, though it illustrates the underlying
motivation of some crackers, is far from adequate to explain the actions of
all crackers. The practice of cracking envisages the most radical aspect of
the project of libre knowledge: cracking does not stop at the boundary of illegal
distribution – it goes much further than that. Crackers devote their time and
skills to supplying the realm of illegal distribution with technology artifacts,
and, not to forget, there is hardly ever any money for them. In effect, this
critical aspect alone highlights the radicalisation of the cracker as a computer
scientist put to the service of liberating knowledge from constraints imposed
upon it by commodification.
3
Free as in free beer - The possibility that productive cooperation and
the enactment of production in social networks no longer require the mediation
of the capitalist in order to be effectuated – a presupposition of post-industrial
capitalism that some theorists refer to as the Communism of Capital –
is compelling enough to tremble the earth. A real-world demonstration of this
phenomenon is provided by the development and organisation model at work in
several large free software and open source projects, such as the Linux operating
system. In fact, many look into networks of collaborative free software and
open source development for a practical demonstration of how the new
emancipated society will be organised. There are several issues to be stressed
here. First, the absence of exchange value: free software, as a technology product,
is given away for free, and this is, partly, why free software is radical. However,
this fact may lead to wrong conclusions, for software is, by and large, a service-based
industry, and, thus, there is money to be made by capitalising on free software.
Indeed, corporate behemoths, such as IBM, are doing exactly this: they sell
services (ie. consulting, training, implementation, maintenance and support,
etc.) tied to specific FS/OSS products. Paradoxically, the absence of exchange
value does not negate the presence of market value. Further, not all FS/OSS
development takes place outside a system of economic incentives; as a matter
of fact, free software is often developed in direct response to market forces.[4]
On the other hand, it is common to underestimate the effect of such a paradigm
of (im)material production on consciousness and subjectivity. In editing Wikipedia
or hacking the Linux kernel, for instance, people are, consciously or not,
educating themselves in what creative, collaborative work really consists. The
realm of such networks of cooperative development is underpinned by the pleasure
principle: people re-discover that products of unparalleled social and technical
ingenuity can result from a production process that is founded on volunteer
contributions; they re-discover the joy and personal fulfilment that accompanies
creative work. On this plane, collective subjectivity is impregnated with the
sperm of radicality, as people are suddently becoming aware of the reversal
of perspective that lies in the shadows: a production setting in which people
are using the tools that they have themselves built to create situations they
individually desire is always bound to outperform in efficiency and expose the
poverty of production effectuated for the sake of profit. A direct confrontation
stretching from the terrain of ideas to the very institutional nucleus of capitalist
society is underway. One the one side stands the beast of living labour organised
independently of the capitalist demand, and, the imaginary of intellectual property
law, on the other. Whereas the beast of living labour seeks to gain its freedom
by demolishing a world shaped by forced labour, the object of intellectual property
law is the regulation of immaterial labour (rather than the creation of artificial
scarcity, as so many critics of intellectual property claim).[5]
The imaginary of intellectual property law is, first and foremost, designed
to control people through control of the producion process, regardless of whether
this production takes place within the factory or outside it. Indicatively,
IBM has a patent on how to employ and retain FS/OSS developers, which means
that in an insane world anyone who has ever written a single line of HTML would
have to get IBM's permission to work at any company other than IBM.[6]
Therein emerges a contradiction that FS/OSS is incapable of dodging, at least
for the time being: given that the time is ripe for the systematic exploitation
of immaterial labour, and draconian intellectual property regimes orchestrate
the production process in accordance with the exclusive interest of massive
intellectual property holders, the idea that radical subjectivity is being produced
in networks of collaborative FS/OSS development is thrown into insignificance.
Said otherwise: the global intellectual property law apparatus has both the
power to operationalise FS/OSS for the benefit of its master – the culturalindustrial
complex, and, most crucially, to render it illegal lest such a course of action
is deemed necessary. In the latter case, in which FS/OSS developers are marginalised,
and networks of collaborative FS/OSS development are effectively forced into
the computer underground, there is a good possibility that the subversive character
of FS/OSS will re-surface, but nobody can tell with any degree of certainty
whether its subversive motors are sufficiently equipped to deal with a world
pompously indoctrinated to the advantages of a draconian intellectual property
regime.
4
The capitulation of volunteer labour - Free (gratis, unwaged)
labour is a requirement of the current configuration of cognitive-informational
capitalism. There has never been a similar disruption in the number, and in
the composition, of the unemployed population. Nowadays, hordes of university
graduates and PhDs, that is, knowledge workers, are joining the boundaryless
'industrial reserve army' that sustains the delicate balance that, in turn,
restrains the contradictions of capitalism from exhausting capitalism itself.
It is to the credit of thinkers like Antonio Negri to have formulated the theory
of the internal margin, of how internal ghettos are installed within over-developed
regions and post-industrial metropoles in exactly the same time that under-developed,
and developing countries in the periphery are undergoing a process of heavy
industrialisation in agriculture and commodity manufacturing.[7]
The structural violence produced by capitalism has run amok, giving rise to
such a dislocation in the labour-force that no expansion in any sector of the
economy will be able to absorb. And it is not likely that the historic magnification
of capitalism will maintain its pace, or character, in order to offset the systemic
shock triggered by the aggravation of the army of the unemployed. No previous
generation faced the problem of unemployment to the extent that the current
generation will be compelled to experience. It should not come as a surprise
when the "tag" of insanity will be bestowed upon those who are or remain jobless.
A number of pertinent questions arise: is this surge in the number of the unemployed,
and the similarly pertinent shift in its composition toward increasingly more
knowledge workers, likely to bring capitalism to a halt? Is this class revolutionary
or counter-revolutionary? To a certain extent, the unemployed constitute a singularity
deeply embedded in the revolutionary subject. Yet, against this pressure, the
system – apparently - does not break down. One could argue that the system feeds
on the fragile circumstances of the unemployed, seizing whatever opportunity
there is to utilise volunteer labour for spectracular goals by turning it into
forced labour: tens of thousands of volunteers were the human motor behind the
2004 Olympic Games, which took place in Athens, Greece. Whereas some of those
thousands of people surely volunteered because they wanted to volunteer - and
there is absolutely nothing reprehensible in altruistic volunteer work - , others
though volunteered in hope that once the Olympic Games were over, as it was
implied, they would find employment as personnel for the maintenance and operation
of the sites that hosted the Olympic Games.[8]
This volunteer labour is conditioned by the structural violence of late capitalism.
Said otherwise: the unemployed (and under-employed) are forced to volunteer
their labour if they wish to stand a chance of escaping unemployment.
5
A new class has arisen that is rapidly ammassing increasingly more power through
its ability to veto on the vectors of information which it controls,
and which both knowledge workers and the industrial capitalists need.[9]
This is the terrain of history where class struggle is being re-written. The
capitalist, as John Kenneth Galbraith observed long ago, has been a dwindling
figure in the economy. His hegemonic position has gradually been taken over
by committess manned by technocrats that Galbraith termed the technostructure,
and that we, today, would be more inclined to refer to as the class of knowledge
workers.[10] The emergence of the technostructure,
argued Galbraith, was conditioned primarily by the imperatives of sophisticated
technology production. This still holds today: semi-autonomous knowledge workers
are a requirement of late capitalism, without whom the transition from industrial
manufacturing to information feudalism could not have been feasible. Yet, it
is misleading to assume that capitalism had, or has, a hard time adapting to
this reconfiguration: the constant presence of friction is not important, since
frinctionless capitalism, as well as static capitalism, is an oxymoron. On the
contrary, the capitalist system not only required the formation of this class,
but also incorporated it into its very operational logic. With the rise of this
new class, which McKenzie Wark terms the 'vectoralist class', and, which, it
should be noted, has its roots in the hacker universe, yet has chosen to dissassociate
itself from the interests of the 'digital proletariat', we witness the final
stage of the transformation of information into property. This transformation,
and the ensuing reconfiguration of class struggle that comes with it, are conditioned
by the inability of capitalism to maintain its pace and character of historic
magnification. For capitalism to elude the spectre of the falling rate of profit
and to extend its degree of accummulation, capital has to turn into an image,
and information, shared lived experience, and the commons be transformed into
commodities – commodification turns inward. The internal need for continuous
magnification, rather than ideology or class struggle, has led the convulsive
reconfiguration of the convoluted mesh of power relations and the associated
relations of production that are manifested as an intellectual property right.
The organic composition of capital may well have undregone dramatic change,
but the social worker of the present remains subordinated to a regime of spectacular
oppression; a regime that substitutes one class for another, yet still maintains
its class-based dichotomic character; a regime that by Marx's definition may
be seen as noncapitalistic, yet it is still epitomised by the axiomatics of
capitalism. To this day, the regime of signs founded on the emancipatory tendency
of the “general intellect” negates the old regime of subordination and work
done in factories and businesses, but it does so without negating its own Self.
Consequently, although fueled by a desiring machine predicated on social ejaculation,
it remains a regime of signs, rather than a concrete situation experienced in
the urban territory.
[1] For example, farmers and indigenous
people in many regions have painfully discovered that recipes, knowledges, and
techniques that had been in common use for medical or agricultural purposes
for centuries have now passed into the ownership of the global pharmaceutical
complex in the institutionalised form of patents.
[2] Debord, Guy. 1983. The Society of the
Spectacle. Translated by Fredy Perlman et al., Detroit: Black & Red, #42,
at http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/pub_contents/4
.
[3] On rave as an underground socio-cultural
phenomenon whose roots are inextricably linked to the computer underground and
the hacker culture, and for a captivating account, placed in a historical context,
of how rave started, see Rushkoff, Douglas. 1999. Electronica, The True Cyber
Culture. May, at http://www.rushkoff.com/columns/electronica.html
; and Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace (1994, Flamingo) by
the same author.
[4] For two treatises on the issue of motivation
in FS/OSS development, which link developers' motivation directly to market
forces and economic incentives, see Lancashire, David. 2001. The Fading Altruism
of Open Source Development, First Monday, volume 6, number 12, December,
at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_12/lancashire/
; and Lerner, Josh and Tirole, Jean. 2000. "The simple economics of Open Source",
National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper, number 7600 (March), at
http://www.hbs.edu/research/facpubs/workingpapers/papers2/9900/00-
059.pdf.
[5] Söderberg, Johan. 2004. Reluctant Revolutionaries:
the false modesty of reformist critics of copyright, Journal of Hyper(+)drome.Manifestation,
Issue 1, September, at http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html.
[6] Ibid., endnote #38 at http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn38
.
[7] Negri, Antonio. 1984. Marx Beyond Marx:
Lessons on the Grundrisse, ed. Jim Fleming, translated by Harry Cleaver,
Michael Ryan and Maurizio Viano, South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey.
[8] As of the time of writing, no official
statement has been issued (by the government, the state commission charged with
the organisation and supervision of the Olympic Games, or the commercial entities
involved) regarding how many of the volunteers have been employed at the sites
that accommodated the 2004 Olympic Games. However, based on anecdotal evidence
(that is, from accounts of volunteers who remain unemployed), this implicit
promise has not yet materialised, and it remains uncertain if it ever will.
[9] Wark, McKenzie. 2004. A Hacker Manifesto.
Harvard University Press, and at http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html
.
[10] Galbraith, John Kenneth. 1974. The
New Industrial State. Penguin Books.
This text was prepared for the Proceedings of the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress (22C3: Private Investigations - http://www.ccc.de/congress/2005/), scheduled to take place in Berlin, Germany, in December 2005. It is largely based on G. Dafermos, The Critical Delusion of Immaterial Labour (October 2005, unpublished manuscript), several parts of which have been reproduced here.
George N. Dafermos is an independent researcher and author based in Crete, Greece. He is a blogger at home at http://radio.weblogs.com/0117128/ and can be contacted via email at dafermos [at] datahost [dot] gr.