Domination and…?
I was talking to a friend of Manos’s a few weeks ago who has written a book containg a Marxist analysis of the hacker movement, and Free Software in particular. There’s a certain strand of utopianism around the Free Software movement that puts it forward as a direct alternative to proprietry software, which could replace capitalism without a direct antagonism towards it. Yet, at the same time, corporations and pro-capitalist ideologues love Free Software, seeing it as precisely what an immaterial free market needs to avoid copyright monopolies.
We face a similar contradiction from the side of resistance, as well. There’s a pro-filesharing argument that downloading MP3s acts as free publicity for artists, and so boosts sales and benefits the music industry; I’ve always assumed this was put forward in completely bad faith — but what if it’s actually true? If capitalism is becoming increasingly communicative, increasing the communication of commodities is going to strengthen capitalism; yet, of course, _completely_ free communication of commodities would prevent them being ‘commodities’, and spell the end of capitalism.
In other words, the contradications of capitalism seem to be increasingly visible. Hardt and Negri make the good point in Empire that the contradictions of capitalism are contradictions _for capital_; for us, they are opportunities. But of course the important thing is how we grasp these opportunities. Deleuze seems to get this in a way Negri misses:
> Computer piraÂcy and viruses, for example, will replace strikes and what the
> nineÂteenth century called “sabotage” (”clogging” the machinery). You ask
> whether control or communication societies will lead to forms of resisÂtance
> that might reopen the way for a communism understood as the “transversal
> organization of free individuals.” Maybe, I don’t know. But it would be
> nothing to do with minorities speaking out. Maybe speech and
> communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly perÂmeated by
> money—and not by accident but by their very nature. We’ve got to hijack
> speech. Creating has always been something difÂferent from
> communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of
> noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.
Hardt and Negri, with their belief that communicative labor directly prefigures communism may, in fact, be stuck in the ’70s, when the worker’s flexibility seemed to be an immediate challenge to capitalism. But we know now that capitalism can capture communicative labor for its own valorisation; the goal of communists, then, cannot simply be to develop communicative labor, but must instead or also be to find ways to sabotage its capture.
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I’m gonna write and present a paper at this year’s “Future of Social THeory” conference onjust that issue of piracy vs or with money economy. My take is slightly different, or my set of questions, but it’s great to read that other ppl are thinking through this with a similar conceptual vocab.
The CFP is available through upenn I think.
cheers
Comment by steff @ 8/28/2005 10:53 am