[Solar-general] El poder de las palabras II

[Diego Saravia]

Pero sin duda recomiendo este dotcomunist manifiesto, entre otras cosas
posterior al de Hipatia.


http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/dcm.html

The dotCommunist Manifesto
Eben Moglen*
January 2003

A Spectre is haunting multinational capitalism--the spectre of free
information. All the powers of ``globalism'' have entered into an unholy
alliance to exorcize this spectre: Microsoft and Disney, the World Trade
Organization, the United States Congress and the European Commission.

Where are the advocates of freedom in the new digital society who have not
been decried as pirates, anarchists, communists? Have we not seen that many of
those hurling the epithets were merely thieves in power, whose talk of
``intellectual property'' was nothing more than an attempt to retain
unjustifiable privileges in a society irrevocably changing? But it is
acknowledged by all the Powers of Globalism that the movement for freedom is
itself a Power, and it is high time that we should publish our views in the
face of the whole world, to meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Free
Information with a Manifesto of our own.

Owners and Creators

Throughout the world the movement for free information announces the arrival
of a new social structure, born of the transformation of bourgeois industrial
society by the digital technology of its own invention.

The history of all hitherto existing societies reveals a history of class
struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and
journeyman, bourgeois and proletarian, imperialist and subaltern, in a word,
oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried
on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that has often ended,
either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the
common ruin of the contending classes.

The industrial society that sprouted from the worldwide expansion of European
power ushering in modernity did not do away with class antagonisms. It but
established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle
in place of the old ones. But the epoch of the bourgeoisie simplified the
class antagonisms. Society as a whole seemed divided into two great hostile
camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and
Proletariat.

But revolution did not by and large occur, and the ``dictatorship of the
proletariat,'' where it arose or claimed to arise, proved incapable of
instituting freedom. Instead, capitalism was enabled by technology to secure
for itself a measure of consent. The modern laborer in the advanced societies
rose with the progress of industry, rather than sinking deeper and deeper
below the conditions of existence of his own class. Pauperism did not develop
more rapidly than population and wealth. Rationalized industry in the Fordist
style turned industrial workers not into a pauperized proletariat, but rather
into mass consumers of mass production. Civilizing the proletariat became part
of the self-protective program of the bourgeoisie.

In this way, universal education and an end to the industrial exploitation of
children became no longer the despised program of the proletarian
revolutionary, but the standard of bourgeois social morality. With universal
education, workers became literate in the media that could stimulate them to
additional consumption. The development of sound recording, telephony, moving
pictures, and radio and television broadcasting changed the workers'
relationship to bourgeois culture, even as it profoundly altered the culture
itself.

Music, for example, throughout previous human history was an acutely
perishable non-commodity, a social process, occurring in a place and at a
time, consumed where it was made, by people who were indistinctly
differentiated as consumers and as makers. After the adoption of recording,
music was a non-persishable commodity that could be moved long distances and
was necessarily alienated from those who made it. Music became, as an article
of consumption, an opportunity for its new ``owners'' to direct additional
consumption, to create wants on the part of the new mass consuming class, and
to drive its demand in directions profitable to ownership. So too with the
entirely new medium of the moving picture, which within decades reoriented the
nature of human cognition, capturing a substantial fraction of every worker's
day for the reception of messages ordering additional consumption. Tens of
thousands of such advertisements passed before the eyes of each child every
year, reducing to a new form of serfdom the children liberated from tending a
productive machine: they were now compulsorily enlisted in tending the
machinery of consumption.

Thus the conditions of bourgeois society were made less narrow, better able to
comprise the wealth created by them. Thus was cured the absurd epidemic of
recurrent over-production. No longer was there too much civilisation, too much
means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.

But the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the
instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with
them the whole relations of society. Constant revolutionising of production,
uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty
and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All
fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable
prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated
before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air.

With the adoption of digital technology, the system of mass consumer
production supported by mass consumer culture gave birth to new social
conditions out of which a new structure of class antagonism precipitates.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by
the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most
barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are
the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which
it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to
capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt its
culture and its principles of intellectual ownership; it compels them to
introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become
bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. But
the very instruments of its communication and acculturation establish the
modes of resistance which are turned against itself.

Digital technology transforms the bourgeois economy. The dominant goods in the
system of production--the articles of cultural consumption that are both
commodities sold and instructions to the worker on what and how to buy--along
with all other forms of culture and knowledge now have zero marginal cost.
Anyone and everyone may have the benefit of all works of culture: music, art,
literature, technical information, science, and every other form of knowledge.
Barriers of social inequality and geographic isolation dissolve. In place of
the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse
in every direction, universal inter-dependence of people. And as in material,
so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual
people become common property. Modern bourgeois society with its relations of
production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such
gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer's
apprentice, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world
whom he has called up by his spells.

With this change, man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real
conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. Society confronts the
simple fact that when everyone can possess every intellectual work of beauty
and utility--reaping all the human value of every increase of knowledge--at
the same cost that any one person can possess them, it is no longer moral to
exclude. If Rome possessed the power to feed everyone amply at no greater cost
than that of Caesar's own table, the people would sweep Caesar violently away
if anyone were left to starve. But the bourgeois system of ownership demands
that knowledge and culture be rationed by the ability to pay. Alternative
traditional forms, made newly viable by the technology of interconnection,
comprising voluntary associations of those who create and those who support,
must be forced into unequal competition with ownership's overwhelmingly
powerful systems of mass communication. Those systems of mass communication
are in turn based on the appropriation of the people's common rights in the
electromagnetic spectrum. Throughout the digital society the classes of
knowledge workers--artists, musicians, writers, students, technologists and
others trying to gain in their conditions of life by copying and modifying
information--are radicalized by the conflict between what they know is
possible and what the ideology of the bourgeois compels them to accept. Out of
that discordance arises the consciousness of a new class, and with its rise to
self-consciousness the fall of ownership begins.

The advance of digital society, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie,
replaces the isolation of the creators, due to competition, by their
revolutionary combination, due to association. Creators of knowledge,
technology, and culture discover that they no longer require the structure of
production based on ownership and the structure of distribution based on
coercion of payment. Association, and its anarchist model of propertyless
production, makes possible the creation of free software, through which
creators gain control of the technology of further production.[1]  The network
itself, freed of the control of broadcasters and other bandwidth owners,
becomes the locus of a new system of distribution, based on association among
peers without hierarchical control, which replaces the coercive system of
distribution for all music, video, and other soft goods. Universities,
libraries, and related institutions become allies of the new class,
interpreting their historic role as distributors of knowledge to require them
to offer increasingly complete access to the knowledge in their stewardship to
all people, freely. The liberation of information from the control of
ownership liberates the worker from his imposed role as custodian of the
machine. Free information allows the worker to invest her time not in the
consumption of bourgeois culture, with its increasingly urgent invitations to
sterile consumption, but in the cultivation of her mind and her skills.
Increasingly aware of her powers of creation, she ceases to be a passive
participant in the systems of production and consumption in which bourgeois
society entrapped her.

But the bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all
feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the
motley feudal ties that bound man to his ``natural superiors,'' and has left
remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than
callous ``cash payment.'' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of
religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in
the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into
exchange value. And in place of the numberless and feasible chartered
freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom--Free Trade. In one
word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked,
shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

Against the forthcoming profound liberation of the working classes, whose
access to knowledge and information power now transcends their previous narrow
role as consumers of mass culture, the system of bourgeois ownership therefore
necessarily contends to its very last. With its preferred instrument of Free
Trade, ownership attempts to bring about the very crisis of over-production it
once feared. Desperate to entrap the creators in their role as waged
consumers, bourgeois ownership attempts to turn material deprivation in some
parts of the globe into a source of cheap goods with which to bribe back into
cultural passivity not the barbarians, but its own most prized possession--the
educated technological laborers of the most advanced societies.

At this stage the workers and creators still form an incoherent mass scattered
over the whole globe, and remain broken up by their mutual competition. Now
and then the creators are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of
their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding
union. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are
created by modern industry and that place the workers and creators of
different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact
that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same
character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class
struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers
of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the
modern knowledge workers, thanks to the network, achieve in a few years.

Freedom and Creation

Not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it
has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons--the
digital working class--the creators. Possessed of skills and knowledges that
create both social and exchange value, resisting reduction to the status of
commodity, capable collectively of producing all the technologies of freedom,
such workmen cannot be reduced to appendages of the machine. Where once bonds
of ignorance and geographical isolation tied the proletarian to the industrial
army in which he formed an indistinguishable and disposable component,
creators collectively wielding control over the network of human
communications retain their individuality, and offer the value of their
intellectual labor through a variety of arrangements more favorable to their
welfare, and to their freedom, than the system of bourgeois ownership ever
conceded them.

But in precise proportion to the success of the creators in establishing the
genuinely free economy, the bourgeoisie must reinforce the structure of
coercive production and distribution concealed within its supposed preference
for ``free markets'' and ``free trade.'' Though ultimately prepared to defend
by force arrangements that depend on force, however masked, the bourgeoisie at
first attempts the reimposition of coercion through its preferred instrument
of compulsion, the institutions of its law. Like the ancien régime in France,
which believed that feudal property could be maintained by conservative force
of law despite the modernization of society, the owners of bourgeois culture
expect their law of property to provide a magic bulwark against the forces
they have themselves released.

At a certain stage in the development of the means of production and of
exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged,
the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one
word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the
already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to
be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and
political constitution adapted to it, and by the economic and political sway
of the bourgeois class. But ``free competition'' was never more than an
aspiration of bourgeois society, which constantly experienced the capitalists'
intrinsic preference for monopoly. Bourgeois property exemplified the concept
of monopoly, denying at the level of practical arrangements the dogma of
freedom bourgeois law inconsistently proclaimed. As, in the new digital
society, creators establish genuinely free forms of economic activity, the
dogma of bourgeois property comes into active conflict with the dogma of
bourgeois freedom. Protecting the ownership of ideas requires the suppression
of free technology, which means the suppression of free speech. The power of
the State is employed to prohibit free creation. Scientists, artists,
engineers and students are prevented from creating or sharing knowledge, on
the ground that their ideas imperil the owners' property in the system of
cultural production and distribution. It is in the courts of the owners that
the creators find their class identity most clearly, and it is there,
accordingly, that the conflict begins.

But the law of bourgeois property is not a magic amulet against the
consequences of bourgeois technology: the broom of the sorcerer's apprentice
will keep sweeping, and the water continues to rise. It is in the domain of
technology that the defeat of ownership finally occurs, as the new modes of
production and distribution burst the fetters of the outmoded law.

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their
already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of
appropriation. Knowledge workers cannot become masters of the productive
forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of
appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation.
Theirs is the revolutionary dedication to freedom: to the abolition of the
ownership of ideas, to the free circulation of knowledge, and the restoration
of culture as the symbolic commons that all human beings share.

To the owners of culture, we say: You are horrified at our intending to do
away with private property in ideas. But in your existing society, private
property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population. What
they create is immediately appropriated by their employers, who claim the
fruit of their intellect through the law of patent, copyright, trade secret
and other forms of ``intellectual property.'' Their birthright in the
electromagnetic spectrum, which can allow all people to communicate with and
learn from one another, freely, at almost inexhaustible capacity for nominal
cost, has been taken from them by the bourgeoisie, and is returned to them as
articles of consumption--broadcast culture, and telecommunications
services--for which they pay dearly. Their creativity finds no outlet: their
music, their art, their storytelling is drowned out by the commodities of
capitalist culture, amplified by all the power of the oligopoly of
``broadcasting,'' before which they are supposed to remain passive, consuming
rather than creating. In short, the property you lament is the proceeds of
theft: its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the
hands of everyone else. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away
with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the
non-existence of any such property for the immense majority of society.

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property in ideas and
culture all creative work will cease, for lack of ``incentive,'' and universal
laziness will overtake us.

According to this, there ought to have been no music, art, technology, or
learning before the advent of the bourgeoisie, which alone conceived of
subjecting the entirety of knowledge and culture to the cash nexus. Faced with
the advent of free production and free technology, with free software, and
with the resulting development of free distribution technology, this argument
simply denies the visible and unanswerable facts. Fact is subordinated to
dogma, in which the arrangements that briefly characterized intellectual
production and cultural distribution during the short heyday of the
bourgeoisie are said, despite the evidence of both past and present, to be the
only structures possible.

Thus we say to the owners: The misconception that induces you to transform
into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from
your present mode of production and form of property--historical relations
that rise and disappear in the progress of production--this misconception you
share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in
the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property,
you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of
property.

Our theoretical conclusions are in no way based on ideas or principles that
have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal
reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing
from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our
very eyes.

When people speak of ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express the
fact, that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been
created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the
dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

We, the creators of the free information society, mean to wrest from the
bourgeoisie, by degrees, the shared patrimony of humankind. We intend the
resumption of the cultural inheritance stolen from us under the guise of
``intellectual property,'' as well as the medium of electromagnetic
transportation. We are committed to the struggle for free speech, free
knowledge, and free technology. The measures by which we advance that struggle
will of course be different in different countries, but the following will be
pretty generally applicable:

   1. Abolition of all forms of private property in ideas.

   2. Withdrawal of all exclusive licenses, privileges and rights to use of
electromagnetic spectrum. Nullification of all conveyances of permanent title
to electromagnetic frequencies.

   3. Development of electromagnetic spectrum infrastructure that implements
every person's equal right to communicate.

   4. Common social development of computer programs and all other forms of
software, including genetic information, as public goods.

   5. Full respect for freedom of speech, including all forms of technical speech.

   6. Protection for the integrity of creative works.

   7. Free and equal access to all publicly-produced information and all
educational material used in all branches of the public education system.

By these and other means, we commit ourselves to the revolution that liberates
the human mind. In overthrowing the system of private property in ideas, we
bring into existence a truly just society, in which the free development of
each is the condition for the free development of all.


*  Professor of Law, Columbia University Law School.

1  The free software movement has used programmers throughout the world--paid
and unpaid--since the early 1980s to create the GNU/Linux operating system and
related software that can be copied, modified and redistributed by all its
users. This technical environment, now ubiquitous and competitively superior
to the proprietary software industry's products, frees computer users from the
monopolistic form of technological control that was to have dominated the
personal computer revolution as capitalism envisioned it. By displacing the
proprietary production of the most powerful monopoly on earth, the free
software movement shows that associations of digital workers are capable of
producing better goods, for distribution at nominal cost, than capitalist
production can achieve despite the vaunted ``incentives'' created by ownership
and exclusionary ``intellectual property'' law. 

-- 
Diego Saravia 
dsa en unsa.edu.ar