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[ox-en] Re: Two texts



Hi Raoul and list!

I understood this mail is for public distribution so here it is with
the texts translated to plain texts. Perhaps Raoul can post a link
where the originals (RTF) or HTML versions can be obtained from?

2 weeks (17 days) ago Dorax wrote:
[1  <multipart/alternative>]

Sorry for the delay. I read only the first few lines and so your wish
to post it to the list escaped my attention during a first quick scan
:-( .


						Mit Freien Grüßen

						Stefan

PS: I did not read the (rather long) texts yet :-( .

--- 8< --- 8< --- 8< --- 8< --- 8< --- 8< --- 8< --- 8< --- 8< --- 8< ---

[1.1  <text/plain; iso-8859-1 (quoted-printable)>]
Hi,

I am new on this list and I want to send two texts I wrote, dealing
with the questions discussed in Oekonux... and quoting it. But the
list does not accept attached files. I thought that may be I can
send them to the moderator. I hope it will work.

I was very happy discovering Oekonux (in fact two Stefan Merten's
interviews, in English, my german being really too poor). I found
the same ideas, some times formulated with the same words, I was
arriving to (at least part of them, as I still do not know enough
Oekonux).

I come from a marxist tradition... may be what Johan Soderberg and S
Merten call the "ivory towers" of "conventional marxism" in their
mails of October? Since two years I have been participating in an
"ultra-left- list which tries to understand the failures of the
classical revolutionary theories to explain the XXth century
(decadence of capitalism, or not, revolutionary consciousness, etc.)
In the framework of these discussions I have been defending the
necessity to draw the the consequences of the technological
evolution (revolution) of the recent decades for the revolutionary
theory and project. The two texts attached were written to answer
some objections that deny the importance of this evolution and of
its consequences.

Their approach is, or try to be, Marxist. The starting point is
different from the hackers'one. But the fact that they arrive to
common ideas (free software as germs of post-capitalist
relationships, for example) can be, by itself, a good sign.

Greetings

Raoul

The texts have been translated from French, by different persons and
the help of Googles translator. I hope they are understandable.
[1.2  <text/html; iso-8859-1 (quoted-printable)>]

[2 FreeSoftware.rtf <application/msword>]

The following is a translation (amateur) of one part of a debate that
took place on a Francophone internationalist communist listserv. Marx
quotes are taken from standard English translations. There is only one
other note on translation: the use of the word gratuite and its
derivations. There is no direct translation for it, because it is more
than «gratuity,» which sounds like restaurant lingo, and more than
«freedom,» which sounds bourgeois-revolutionary. The idea is of a
principle to replace exchange value; as exchange value is to
commodities under capitalism, gratuite is to products of use value in
communism.


FREE SOFTWARE AND MARKET RELATIONS

In the text "Germs of non-commercial relationships in the midst of the
most modern capitalism", I attempted to show that the specificities of
software, in particular the capacity of being reproducible at an
insignificant cost, thus also the more and more important and
determinant place which it is called to take in practically all the
processes of production, are constitutive of material conditions that
open new perspectives for the possibility of a society of abundance,
and thus of a postcapitalist society. I also tried to show in evidence
the "nonmarket" character of the principles and relations which rule
free software, thus also the crucial role that this reality could play
in the elaboration and diffusion of the revolutionary project.

In his contribution of June 29, 2002, JC [another participant on the
listserv] raises a series of interesting objections to these ideas.
The object of this text is to respond to them.

JC tackles two principal questions. The first, he summarizes as
follows: "I want to attempt to establish that 'free software' does not
avoid, in its economic reality and in the ideology of its founders,
market relations"; the second: "I wonder about the idea that, in the
midst of capitalism, by way of new technological developments, 'the
germs of nonmarket relations' could be born."

To respond, I will attempt to follow JC in his questioning.

To tackle the specific question of free software, JC begins by making
some remarks of a more general order.

In posing a riddle--"From whom are these lines?"--in order to prepare
his surprise, JC cites a researcher and manager of the French
government (Bernard Lang), who makes statements analogous to those I
made. "Informatics programs," wrote Lang, "immaterial in essence, tend
to reverse the traditions of commerce. Conception and development
aside, their production and distribution costs can be marginal,
quasi-zero.... Free software announces a major change in civilization:
the advent of a society of abundance." JC does not follow this
explicitly to its conclusion. But what could he conclude? That such a
statement is false because it's made by a man of the establishment?
For Lang, "the major change in civilization" of which he speaks is
evidently not the surpassing of capitalism, but an amelioration of the
same (we revisit further below the defenders of free software as a
means of renovating capitalism). That does not prevent one making a
statement of evidence, of a reality that "tends to reverse the
traditions of commerce." The intrinsic tendency of software to escape
the laws of the market is a reality that the new market-makers
(practically industrialists), of illegal copies of informatics
products (business software, videogames, music discs, or films, etc.)
confirm and exploit daily...or the agents of the state charged with
suppressing this sort of attack on the market laws.

That which is surprising is not that establishment types could confirm
the antimarket nature of certain characteristics of software. This
nature is evident as soon as you think a little about it (we shall
come back to this, also). That which does not cease to surprise me is
the resistance of numerous Marxists to this fact. It goes back to
Marx, though, to have well established the mechanisms of market
exchange and the possibility of its surpassing by the appearance of
conditions of abundance.

Making a second general remark, JC takes up on his account an argument
often employed by Marxists to deny the fundamentally new character of
contemporary technological evolution.

"I share," writes JC, "the remark made by RGF at the June 15
conference, which signaled that this capacity of reproduction, not
only quasi-gratuiticity, but gratuiticity period, already existed in
the domain of the results of scientific research. And thus free
software, however much it corresponds to this ideal (sometimes for
harm, as, for example, with the military) of free reproduction and
gratuiticity of the results of scientific research, bring nothing very
new onto the terrain."

The "free and gratuitistic reproduction of the results of scientific
research" is not a so generalized reality; in part, that which one
calls "the hacker ethic" of the creators of the first free software
forged itself in combat in the universities against the pressure of
the administration to commercialize the products of their research.
And one knows, at such a point, patents constitute a true barrier
against the universality of scientific knowledge. But it is true that
the essence of this knowledge, under the form of texts, theorems,
rules, equations, etc., finds itself in the public domain, and that
anyone can draw from it at will. In this sense, effectively, there is
something in common between the qualities of free software and that of
scientific knowledge.

But science is not useful, does not have a direct use value, but for a
very narrow part of society. Generally, it does not enter except
indirectly into the process of production or consumption. Software
can, on the contrary, take the form of means of production or
consumption, directly useful on the assembly line, or for the manager
of an office, for example. It can also constitute a means of direct
consumption, like with films or games. That to which software permits
everyone to have access, by rendering them freely and gratuitistically
reproducible, is not only equations or laws, but direct instruments of
production and goods of common consumption. The number of goods, or
the part of goods, capable of being an object of this gratuitistic
reproduction is limited only by the scale and measure in which the
capacity to digitalize the process of production and goods of
consumption develops itself. That which is "new" is not little. That
is the possibility of the gratuiticity, not only in the area of the
university and the laboratory, but in the heart of social production,
there where, daily, economic and social relations create themselves.

Constantly, in the perspective of establishing that software and
informatics in general "do not bring anything very new," JC echoes the
questions of Henri S on "whether the fundamental industrial revolution
was not that of today, that of informatics, but that of yesterday,
electricity." Independent of the question of the definition of the
term "industrial revolution," one can always say that without
electricity there would have been neither electronics nor informatics,
and there can be no doubt that the generalization of the use of
electricity transformed also the process of production as much as
modes of social life. That is not to denigrate what was perceived by
Kropotkin and Lenin (socialism is the soviets plus electricity) as an
element which would contribute qualitatively new methods to the
creation of the conditions of a society of abundance. But that does
not remove any of the importance of the novelty contained in the new
technologies. Electricity remains a good submitted to scarcity. It
cannot be "freely reproducible." Once produced and consumed, a
kilowatt-hour is no more. On the contrary, the means of production
which take the form of software could, themselves, be "consumed" and
reproduced indefinitely without any significant cost. The contribution
of the electronic revolution is not situated solely on the terrain of
the exceptional growth of the productivity of labor. It also places
itself on a qualitative level, at the base of the economic edifice
itself, that of market exchange, of the law of value, rendered futile
when confronted by goods that intrinsically tend to escape from
shortage. In this sense, the contribution of the new information and
communications technologies cannot be reduced to that of electricity.

But, JC's principal critique is, justly, about the reality of this
questioning of exchange. In taking the most "advanced" case, that of
free software, he attempts to show that it "does not escape from
market relations." For that, he develops his arguments firstly at the
level of their "economic reality," and secondly, at the level of "the
ideology of the founders." I tackle these two levels in the same
order.


THE ECONOMIC REALITY OF FREE SOFTWARE

Free Software and Market Society

On the economic level, the arguments proposed by JC essentially
concern the relations of free software with the capitalist
environment. He shows how, around free software like Linux, a series
of commercial companies gravitate, who live from the sale of services
facilitating the installation and the use of the software, those that
lead to "what one could call sometimes a pretty high invoice for a
Linux installation." JC illustrates again the influence of the market
environment on free software in citing examples of its use by state
institutions: for national French education, for research into the
reduction of "costs of formation of the workforce"; by the French and
American armies, which "are wary, for security reasons, of software
over which they donít have complete control." He also  invokes the
existence of a "group lobbying in favor of Linux and free software,"
very active among circles of the French political class. He states
that certain of the creators of free software are paid for this task
by commercial enterprises, and thus that those who "benevolently" made
it, often with "lost hours," get a salary. And last but not least, JC
puts in relief the support provided free software by certain
enterprises: "But," he writes, "free software is supported by a series
of enterprises involved in the information market, that have an
interest in the destruction of Microsoft's monopoly over software, and
in the first ranks of them: IBM."

In concluding, JC says: "Free software is not a ?freely?
reproducible good; if there is a contradiction in the kingdom of
market laws, it is the very classical one between the position of the
monopoly acquired by Microsoft and the other enterprises in the same
sector; it is not a revolt of the productive forces against the
relations of production which they have engendered, but the revolt of
information enterprises against a monopoly situation that is contrary
to the general interests of capital."

However, all these facts show, not that free software does not possess
a nonmarket character, but that it is immersed in a market world. Any
of the aspects of economic reality cited by JC do not concern the
nonpaying, gratuitistic nature of free software itself. They show how
merchants are able to make a profit in selling products connected with
free software. But, it improper for JC to deduce that "free software
is not gratuitistic software." The paying character of that which can
be connected to Linux does not remove any of the perfectly
gratuitistic character of Linux itself. JC states also that recourse
to free software is interesting economically to commercial enterprises
or state administrations because it is synonymous with the reduction
of costs. But that does nothing but show the reality of its
gratuiticity (or quasi-gratuiticity), denied by JC, because it is just
because they are gratuitistic that they entail a diminishment of
costs. As for to the argument citing the use of free software by
armies, it only gives evidence of the effectiveness of certain of its
technological advantages, without dealing with the gratuitistic nature
of the software. Finally, the idea that the development of free
software would be essentially the product of "the revolt of
information enterprises against a monopoly situation [Microsoft] that
is contrary to the general interests of capital," is also excessively
reductionist, and ignores the importance that some free software are
taking. It is true that if IBM and other computer manufacturers
participate in the development of free software, and prescribe Linux
as the OS for certain of their machines, that is, in large part, to
emancipate themselves from their dependence vis a vis Microsoft. But,
the same fact, that the top global information enterprise should be
forced to have recourse to free software translates into the
superiority of this type of product and the inevitability of its
development.

The still small world of free software evidently does not escape the
commodity environment in which it lives. Why would the merchants who
dominate the society deprive themselves of the technical and economic
advantages of this new type of product? What would forbid it from
becoming like a weapon in the permanent war among them, on the
military level or that of the struggle for control of the market?

The question that poses itself is that of knowing whether this market
environment extinguishes the nonmarket character of free software and
condemns it to being nothing more than a tool of reinforcement of the
dominant system, of "regularization of market relations," like JC
says.

History furnishes examples of the coexistence of two types of economic
relations, in particular during the course of the period in which a
new mode of production is developing in the midst of the old society,
as in the case for capitalism in the midst of feudalism, or of
feudalism in the midst of ancient slavery. In these two cases, like I
have implied in the text criticized by JC, "there is a phenomenon
which sees the ruling class of the old system being forced to have
recourse to products of a mode of production which is antagonistic to
its own."


In the ancient Roman slave empire, the colonat, a first form of
feudalism in which the slave is emancipated and transformed into a
free colonus but subordinated to new economic obligations,
progressively develops itself up to the point of becoming the most
important mode of production in the late Roman Empire of the 3rd
century. The slave state drew its profits, not always easily, from the
growth of productivity that the new economic relations brought, by
levying ever-heavier taxes on their production and even in
transforming some of their own slaves into coloni.

In the coexistence between feudalism and capitalism, recourse by the
old dominant class, the feudal masters, to the means furnished by the
new relations, capitalism, which had developed themselves in the
cities and by commerce, is even more spectacular. The feudal crusades,
which led to the extension of the European fiefdoms all the way up to
the Orient, of the 11th to the 13th century (creation of the Kingdom
of Jerusalem, of the principality of Antioch, etc.), would not have
been possible but for recourse to the forms of capitalist production,
which, in cities like Venice, produced the boats which transported the
feudal armies and Oriental booty. It was in using the capitalist
financial wealth developing particularly in the cities of Genoa and
Venice that the European masters found the means of financing their
imperialist enterprises in the Holy Lands. In France, since the 12th
century, the monarchy extended its power at the expense of the large
regional feudal masters by leaning on the cities, in which the
bourgeoisie and capitalist relations would develop, and to whom the
king granted specific privileges. The feudal masters of all Europe
could, during centuries, continue to draw their profit from the
capitalist commerce which was developing, not only in procuring goods
otherwise unattainable, but also in withdrawing innumerable taxes of
passage for the commerce that crossed their fiefdoms.

What can one deduce in relation to the debate that concerns us?
Firstly, that the fact that the old dominant class draws profit from
the products of new social relations does not remove their novelty,
their antagonistic character. Secondly, that the economic and
political power of the old dominant class inevitably constitutes a
restriction of the development of the new relations: There had to be
the bourgeois political revolutions to clear the feudal taxes of
passage for the development of commerce, for example. But, thirdly,
that, beacause of the fact that the new relations contain a new
productive capacity, the old dominant class is forced to have recourse
to them, even if it is nothing more than as a partial means, marginal
at first. In so doing, that class stimulates their development. (The
feudal crusades, for the Italian cities that contributed to them, were
a source of the first capitalist prosperity.)

Even today the use of free software by commercial enterprises or by
state administrations does not destroy its nonmarket nature. The
states multiply new legislation and repressive bodies to stop the
attacks on copyright and other foundations of property and capitalist
profit, put in harm's way by the logic of free software. But the same
states, like all capitalist enterprises, are at some point obliged to
have recourse to it. And this can do nothing but stimulate its
development.


Free Software and the Law of Value,
orthe Revolutionary Possibilities of Free Software

JC's arguments have led us to the terrain of the relations of free
software with the market milieu. But the central question, on the
economic plane, is to comprehend by what "internal" logic free
software is by nature nonmarket, noncapitalist, and contains
revolutionary possibilities. JC, unfortunately, does not tarry at this
point, except to reject it as an illusion, and send the problem back
to the reality of market competition: "My initial argument," he
writes, "portrays mostly as an illusion that in free software there
could be seen new 'revolutionary' possibilities, beginning with their
reality in the play of market competition."

It suffices to remember what the market relations are, and their
specificity in capitalism, to understand how free software is their
negation.

Market relations rest on exchange. Exchange is to acquire or to cede
something by means of a counterparty. The barter is in the most
elementary form of it. A good or a service is directly furnished in
exchange for another. The market relationship establishes that this
exchange must follow the rule of equality, the good furnished must
possess a market value, exchange value, equivalent to that of the good
received. The law of value measures this value by means of the labor
time socially necessary to produce the good exchanged. The use of a
particular commodity as a universal equivalent, money (livestock in
certain ancient societies, in which the term "pecuniary," of or
regarding pecus, which in Latin means cattle; eventually metallic
pieces, notes, bank money, etc.), thus authorizes a flexibility
unlimited by exchange, and offers the possibility of accumulating
value, dead labor. Capitalism constitutes the most fully achieved form
of exchange and of market relations, thus it extends its domination to
all domains of social life, in the first place to labor power, which
it transforms into a commodity by means of wage-relationships.

But the logic of free software situates itself outside of exchange
itself. When someone "takes" free software off the Internet, even if
its production required millions of hours of labor, there is nothing
given in exchange. One takes without furnishing any counterpart. The
software furnished is not exactly "given," in the classic sense of the
term, since the provider still has it after the taker has helped
himself. (In this sense, the term of "economy of the gift" that
certain people use apropos free software is incorrect.) There is
indeed the transmission of a good, but with neither loss of possession
nor counterparty. The foundation of capitalism, exchange, is absent.
In this sense already, free software has an intrinsically
anticapitalist, potentially revolutionary nature.

But it does not suffice to be "anticapitalist" to be revolutionary
historically, as shown by the nostalgic anticapitalist thought of a
less dehumanized past. If free software possesses a revolutionary
nature, that is also because its method rests on the concrete will to
liberate the powers contained in the new techniques of information and
communication. This method is the result of the simple acknowledgement
on the part of several universities that certain aspects of market
relations gravely impeded their utilization. If this happens with
electronic techniques and not with other techniques of production,
that is not only because the scientific ethic contains nonmarket
aspects but also because, and above all, in this domain it is very
easy, and costs nothing, to ignore the market laws. In this sense, the
method of free software situates itself inside the movement of history
(in the measure in which the development of societyís productive
forces constitutes the only dimension that, "in the last instance,"
permits one to detect a direction in it), in the direction of the
surpassing of capitalism.


The Ideology of the Founders of Free Software

The creators and defenders of free softwareóare they aware of this
reality?
For JC, the question doesn't come up: ´The texts of the founders of the FSF [Free Software Foundation],ª he writes, ´confirm that they place themselves entirely in the context of market capitalism.ª And, to defend this thesis, JC gives some citations:

Stallman [founding member of the FSF] exposes the ideological and
social references of free software: «The free software movement was
founded in 1984, but its inspiration comes from the ideas of 1776:
liberty, community and voluntary cooperation. That is what leads to
free enterprise, to the liberty of expression and to free software.
Like in the case of ?free enterprise? and ?freedom of
expression,? the term ?free? in the term ?free software? makes
reference to liberty, not to price...» Against Microsoft, Stallman
writes: «But the absence of defense is not the American way. On the
grounds of courage and freedom, we defend our liberty with the GNU GPL
[the GNU General Public License],» and goes on to conclude that:
«Property rights were conceived in order to advance the well-being of
mankind.» [1]

JC thus presents one of the more well-known creators and defenders of
free software as an advocate of prices and private property. The
reality of the hacker?s conceptions is much more complex and
contradictory. To be convinced, it just requires putting some of the
citations JC gives into context. Thus, at the end of the phrase, «the
term ?free? in the term ?free software? makes reference to
liberty, not to price,» Stallman wrote: «More specifically, it
signifies that you have the liberty to study, to modify, and to
redistribute the software that you use.» But, having the right to
redistribute software is to have the right to transmit it
gratuitistically, without price, ignoring property rights and
copyright; studying and modifying software expresses that it?s not to
be secret, protected, like all «proprietary» software. Some lines
further, the same Stallman wrote: «We cannot establish a community of
liberty in the world of proprietary software, in which each program
has its master. We will constitute a new  world in cyberspace...» And
the tidbit JC cited on property rights are in the following context:
«My opinions on copyright would take an hour to explain, but a general
principle applies: One cannot justify the negation of important public
liberties. Like Abraham Lincoln put it, 'each time there is a conflict
between the rights of man and the rights of property, the rights of
man must prevail.' Property rights were conceived in order to advance
the well-being of mankind and not as an excuse to scorn them.»
Stallman effectively defends property rights, but on the condition
that they do not hurt «the rights of man»? which is not very
simple: If the right not to starve, for example, is a right of man,
the right of property over the means of production must be abolished.
In another more well-known text by Stallman, The GNU Manifesto, he
writes: «Extraction of money from the users of a program by
restraining their use of the program is destructive, because, for the
sake of cash, it reduces the amount of wealth humanity can draw from
the program. When choice is deliberately restrained, the harmful
consequences are a deliberate destruction.» [2]

The defense of the use and generalization of free software leads
logically to the defense of nonmarket, thus noncapitalist principles,
such principles as gratuiticity, nonproperty. But this does not imply
that one would obligatorily deny the validity of market principles in
all domains. The founders of free software do not pretend to destroy
the capitalist world. They want to create, in the world of
communications and information, a «cyberspace...a community of
liberty,» to use Stallman's words, on the side, outside, «the world of
proprietary software, in which each program has its master.»

From this inevitably flow contradictions, like when Stallman demands
simultaneously capitalist free enterprise and a community of liberty
with neither masters nor market exchange. That expresses a
contradictory reality which already exists and develops itself within
society because of the coexistence and interpenetration of the world
of free software with modern capitalism. The Internet is a striking
illustration. The principal software on which it depends for
functioning is free software. Without it, the «network of networks»
could not function. However, the Internet has not ceased to become an
indispensable instrument for capitalist, commercial, financial,
administrative, police, etc., transactions, and that on a planetary
level.

The question of the relation to capitalism is at the heart of the
divisions that split the world of the defenders of free software. [3]
For some of them, like the partisans of the Open Source Initiative,
founded in 1998 by Eric Raymond, free software could be one of the
instruments for ameliorating and reinforcing capitalism. Stefan
Merten, of Oekonux, says that he would have called it « 'Free Software
for Business'?or something like that.» [4] Bernard Lang, one of the
authors of the book Free Software, cited many times by JC, is part of
this tendency. He  goes up to the point of defending recourse to free
software as a means of reinforcing and defending European capital
confronted with American competition. The frame of spirit of the
partisans of Stallman's FSF is quite different. Even if one found a
number of differences according to their degree of opposition to the
market world, there are general approaches more interested in
developing a «space of liberty» than in cooperating with market
enterprises. It is true that opposition to Microsoft, which has become
a diabolical symbol of the will to monopoly, attacked even by the
justice of the American state, plays a very important role and sustain
the illusion of the defense of a market world without trusts. But
there are also tendencies that go much further. Marx said that
Protestantism could not make a radical critique of Catholicism without
making a self-critique. It is the same with the critique of Microsoft:
It cannot be radical without a critique of capitalism itself.

In a book prefaced by Linus Torvalds, the creator of the famous
program Linux, the Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen attempts to
define an ethic of the hacker community, of which the most elementary
definition is of a «passion for programming». The book is titled The
Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Era [in English it is
published as The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the New Economy
-Translator] [5], in reference to Max Weber's book, The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, written at the beginning of the
century, which developed the Marxist thesis according to which
Protestantism is a product of and a factor in the development of
capitalism. For Pekka Himanen, hackers, even if generally they do not
claim to destroy capitalism, are leading to the development of a
series of general conceptions which are the opposite of the Protestant
ethic and thus that of capitalism. In this manner, he writes: «The
radical nature of hackerism consists in proposing an alternative
spirit for networked society, a spirit that puts the domininant
Protestant ethic in question. In this context, it is the only time
when all hackers are crackers [programmers who introduce themselves
into big corporate sites and institutions to cause trouble, often
improperly called hackers]. They attempt to crack the steel safe.
(?) There is an inherent contradiction in the cohabitation of
hackerism with a very traditonal capitalism. To begin with, the terms
capitalist and hacker are of very different senses. In harmony with
the hankering of the Protestant ethic after money, the supreme goal of
capitalism is the accumulation of capital. The hacker ethic of work,
for its part, puts the accent on the activity, centered around a
passion and the free management of time.... The hacker work ethic is a
melange of passion and liberty. It is this aspect of the hacker ethic
that has had the most influence.» Or again: «We have explained that
hackers oppose themselves to hierarchical management for ethical
reasons, because that could lead to a culture in which people are
humiliated, but also because they think that a nonhierarchical model
is more effective.»

The author outlines in this manner, across a number of examples, the
tableau of a conception of development leading by its own
logic?altruistic and eager for effectiveness?to the direct
detriment of the dominant, Protestant, capitalist ideology. Himanen
recognizes at the end of his essay that not all hackers recognize
themselves in his portrait. But he is certain that many would.

As we have already said, this thinking inevitably contains
contradictions, product of the relations with the market world in
which it germinates. And few are the hackers who push the logic of
this thinking to its final subversive conclusions. But it is false to
say, like JC claims, that this logic places itself "entirely in the
context of market capital." The critique of market exchange and of
money, the rejection of hierarchy and borders, the critique of
contemporary work and the revindication of passion and freedom as
primary motiviations, of cooperation and of sharing as the foundations
of new relations, all this is found, to a degree more or less
elaborated and coherent, in the "hacker ethic." Now these are elements
that form part of the foundation of the communist project.

The idea of such a statement shocks many "Marxists," wrongly. The fact
that communist principles (even if incomplete) can be rediscovered
from a scientific approach confronted with the possibilities of new
technologies, without any explicit reference to Marxism and to
communist theories of the past, constitutes a spectacular verification
of the Marxist idea according to which communist ideas are not the
product of the benevolent brains of certain thinkers, but the fruit of
the development of capitalist society itself.

Instead of them enclosing themselves in scornful ignorance of this
reality, consistent Marxists should get excited and encourage the
tendencies that lead hackerism to a radical critique of capital. Rosa
Luxemburg said "the objective logic of the historical process precedes
the subjective logic of the protagonists." It is urgent that coherent
Marxists take note of the real historical process which unfolds under
their eyes, and that they assume their responsibility of accelerating
the subjective logic of the protagonists.

Before concluding this part on "the ideology of the founders of free
software," I want to say a word on a remark by JC, who wrote: "These
proclamations [of Raoul] are very close to those of certain
free-software activists. Like the members of Oekonux." (6)

I have not had the occasion to read all the documents on this site,
unfortunately because most of them are in German. I do not know up to
what point Stefan Merten, the most well-known of the members of
Oekonux, could be considered on the same level as most of the
"free-software activists," as JC says, in the measure in which he
situates himself in an explicitly Marxist optic. But, as far as I
know, , it is certain that I share certain important points of view
with them, like the context of Marxist theory and the idea that free
software constitutes a germ of a new society: "In Oekonux there is the
idea that free software could be exactly that: an embryonic form of a
new society materialized in the midst of the old." [7]

But that leads into the second part of JC's critique and questions.

(to follow)

Raoul
September 29, 2002

PART TWO

Germs of Nonmarket Relations

In the last part of his text, "by way of conclusion", JC poses "a
general question": "I wonder about the idea that, in the midst of
capitalism, by way of new technological developments, 'the germs of
nonmarket relations' could be born." And he responds in the negative.
His argument is the following:

This idea that the economic (thus social) form of the future society
could develop itself in the interior of capitalist society is given by
Raoul with reference to Marx: «new superior relations of production
never replace older ones before the material conditions for their
existence have matured within the framework of the old society.» I
understand this phrase in the following sense: The experience of forms
of self-organization of the proletariat (workers? councils) is the
anticipation of the forms of organization of the future society; and
it is in the class struggle that the material conditions of «superior
relations of production» will constitute themselves, blossoming
«within the framework of the old society.» As for that, we have
learned through experience that these forms cannot be permanent in the
midst of capitalist society; they are, if they do not win, only
transitory and fleeting.

Now, that which Raoul affirms seems to me to resemble the following:
the creation, not of forms of self-organization spawned by the class
struggle, but of nonmarket economic (thus social) forms in the midst
of capitalism, which, furthermore, tend to eternalize themselves. I
think that what characterizes the proletariat in comparison to the
insurgent classes of precapitalist periods, is precisely its extreme
weakness, the fact that it cannot support itself in the midst of
capitalist society (contrary to the bourgeoisie under feudalism) by
its own economic forces.

If I respond negatively to this possibility of «germs of nonmarket
relations in the midst of advanced capitalism,» via the particular
example of free software, I would tend to give a negative response, in
general, to all analogous possibilities of finding nonmarket (even as
germs) relations in capitalism.


What Marx and History Say

We begin by examining JC?s interpretation of the famous citation in
Marx?s preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy
[www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm],
before attempting to see what history itself says about the passage
from one social system to another.

JC thinks, when Marx speaks of "material conditions" that begin to
"mature within the old society" to permit the existence of "superior
relations of production," that it has to do with the more advanced
social practice of the proletariat in struggle in the midst of
capitalism: the workers? councils. We remark, first of all, that when
Marx wrote these lines, neither workers' councils?appearing for the
first time in 1905 in Russia?nor even the first form of that type
of organization, such as that which surged forth during the Paris
Commune in 1871, existed. Of what "forms of self-organization spawned
by the class struggle" had Marx spoken? Note that Marx did not seek to
define a law concerning the passage from capitalism to communism. He
treated the succession of different modes of production, "Asiatic,
ancient, feudal, and bourgeois-modern," of which he said, "reduced to
their broad outlines," they "appear as progressive epochs of the
economic formation of society." What, for JC, are the "material
conditions" in the case of the other historical transitions?

When Marx, in the same text, treated the "disruptions" which
characterized these transitions, he wrote: "In studying such
transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the
material transformation of the economic conditions of production,
which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the
legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic?in short,
ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and
fight it out."

Without wanting to lose ourselves in exegetical exercises, one could,
if need be, say that JC?s interpretation of the "material conditions"
as the practice of the struggle in "workers? councils," could be
linked to the need to "become conscious of this conflict" that must
"be fought out". But, besides the fact that this would mean a
reduction of the "ideological" dimension of reality, this
intepretation ignores its economic dimension, "the material
transformation of the conditions of production." For Marx, as he
explained it, some lines before, in the same text, "the anatomy of
civil society is to be sought in political eocnomy."

JC?s interpretation of Marx's thinking on this question is, at the
least, very narrow. It is clear that when Marx spoke of the necesity
that the "material conditions" begin to mature in the midst of the old
society, it had to do essentially with the development of the material
conditions of production, in particular, the productive forces.

If one observes the history of two transitions in mode of production
that one knows the best: from ancient slavery to fedualism, and from
feudalism to capitalism, it appears clearly that the material
conditions had unfolded in the midst of the old society. What is more,
this development permitted that the new relations of production
appeared, although in an embryonic form, by taking their place in the
midst and at the side of the old dominant relations of production.

The development of the colonat, had under the Roman empire, in the 2d
century, an important acceleration, but it had to do with an
already-ancient phenomenen. In the 3d century, this mode of
production, which established the economic basis of feudal relations
between exploiters and exploited, had become a normal form of
production on the great properties. The growth of capitalism in the
midst of feudalism also took place during centuries. Since the 11th
century, through the development of commerce, in particular in the
north of Western Europe and in the Mediterranean, capitalism had
become an economic reality in Flanders and in certain Italian cities.
It took, however, above all, a mercantile form, but not uniquely: By
the 12th century, "the arsenals of Venice constructed ships at a pace
unknown till then." It was, nevertheless, not until the 16th and 17th
century, in England and France, that the bourgeois, new masters of the
economy, had the power to sever the feudal kings' heads, allowing them
to expand their affairs more freely. When the bourgeoisie definitively
conquered political power, it had for a long time already had the
power to economically dominate society. The political revolution came
at the end of the process of implantation of the economic base of a
new system in the midst of the old society.

In the case of past transitions, Marx?s theory is easily verified and
comprehensible: Before the new society affirms its definitive
domination, it has already effectively affirmed that of its material
base, economic in the first place; this has blossomed in the midst of
the old society.

But it?s much more complex when it has to do with envisioning the
transition from capitalism to communism. For the past, at least in the
cases we have seen, the coexistence of the two modes of production is
facilitated by the fact that they both have to do with systems based
on the exploitation of one part of society by another. In the late
Roman empire, the slavemasters and the masters of the  coloni were
often the same people. In feudalism, the relations between the
seigniors (nobles, ecclesiasticals) and the bourgeoisie were often
bloody. The wars of religion?which, behind the confrontation
between the new Protestant "ethic" and Catholicism, set tendencies
favorable to the new capitalist-market values in opposition to old
feudal structures?were a murderous and dramatic instance. In spite
of that, the coexistence between the new system and the old was
facilitated by the fact that it concerned modes of epxloitation, with
the dominant classes always ready to get along on the backs of the
exploited. In numerous cases, the aristocratic powers of the old
regime would easily metamorphosize themselves into rich capitalists,
not even losing any of their old [feudal] privileges. The political
revolutions that marked the accession of the bourgeoisie to state
power did not always and everywhere have to take the radical forms
they did in England and France.

But, in the case of the accession to communism, it has to do with
passing from a system of exploitation to a new society without classes
or exploitation. For Marxists, the class that bears the new society,
the proletariat, is the class that produces most of economic wealth,
but it produces them according to relations of production that
subordinate it. This class cannot engender new social relations of
production in accord with its essential interests, the elimination of
all exploitation, without destroying the political framework that
reduces it to impotence. Contrary to revolutionary classes of the
past, its political revolution does not come at the end of a process
of economic implantation, but must, on the contrary, constitute the
initial act permitting the transformation of the material conditions
of production. When Marx spoke of the material conditions that have to
mature under capitalism to permit the proletariat to introduce
communist relations, it?s not about the germs of these relations but
fundamentally about a sufficient degree of development and deployment
of the productive forces under capitalist relations of production.

That is, or has generally been, up to the present, the Marxist view of
the question. On that level, it?s also what JC reproduces in his text,
at least when he writes: "I think that what characterizes the
proletariat in comparison to the insurgent classes of precapitalist
periods, is precisely its extreme weakness, the fact that it cannot
support itself in the midst of capitalist society (contrary to the
bourgeoisie under feudalism) by its own economic forces." I myself
have always defended this position in the past. However, the new
technological reality and the appearance of the world of free
software, which was driven by it, weaken, in my opinion, this point of
view. It is certain that the idea that germs of new relations of
production of a nonmarket type, containing communist elements, could
arise and "eternalize themselves," to use JC?s term, in the midst of
capitalism, contradicts a part, an aspect, of Marxist theory.

"Germs"?

But, before going further, it is indispensable to explain what one
means by "relations of production" and by "germs" of relations of
production. Because one could object that the relations that link the
creators of free software to one another and then them to the
users?who participate or not in its creation?cannot be
considered true social relations of production, that is to say,
relations that could be generalized to the whole of productive social
activity, as was the case for feudalism or capitalism in the past. The
material capacity of being freely reproduced is possible only for
goods that are digitalizable, transformable into a line of numbers and
characters. We have seen already how that is the case for a number of
means of prodcution, like software to run machines, or consumption
goods, like films, games or music. But, for the moment, we don't know
how to digitize alimentary goods, nor raw materials, for example. How
can such relations, which touch only a very narrow part of society and
materially concern only a very specific category of goods in means of
production and consumption, be considered social relations, or even
germs of social relations? The creators of free software cannot
nourish themselves with software, nor turn them into products for
sale, because by definition it is free. How to socialize relations
that don?t nourish their people?

If one looks at past history, though, in particular the birth of
capitalist relations during feudalism, or if one attempts to project
history into the future, and, more specifically, the place that
digitalizable goods could be called to take in the proces of social
production, two conclusions impose themselves, which permit a glimpse
of how relations introduced by free software could become socially
dominant relations of production.

Venetian merchants, who had made their fortunes in the midst of
feudalism by selling arms or luxury goods from Asia to European feudal
seigniors, did not constitute the heart of social production. Even if
they brought to the narrowness of feudal life?centered around the
fief and its village church?an opening to world commerce (the
courtesans of the European courts could wear robes made of Oriental
products), the relations among the merchants and between them and the
rest of the feudal world remained marginal, and would appear to be
purely subsidiary. The production of essential, indispensable goods
for the subsistence of men (agricultural goods and artisanal ones,
principally), was performed under feudal relations. This marginal,
secondary aspect of capitalist relations in the midst of feudal
society  was so self-evident that even in the 18th century, the first
bourgeois economists, the French Physiocrats, could, without laughing,
pretend that merchants and manufacturers should not pay taxes because
they do not create any true "net product": They do nothing but
transport it or modify its form.

What do we want to deduce? That from their birth, in the midst of the
old society, the superior relations of production, were not
obligatorily born with a complete form, capable of managing the
totality of social production, nor even its most vital part. The fact
that, today, free software and, more generally, digitalizable goods
concern no more than a part, again, marginal, of social production and
consumption, does not constitute any argument showing the
impossibility that the economic relations that they induce will not
one day become the dominant social relations.

That which has permitted capitalist relations to become dominant after
centuries of existence is not only the ideological, military, and
political victory of the bearers of the new capitalist values against
the old feudal regime, even if they have played a determining role,
but the material, concrete fact?which demonstrates daily and by
methods more and more evident?that the new relations were the only
ones that could permit the use of new productive forces engendered by
the opening of coommerce and the development of production techniques.
"In the last instance," it is the economic imperative, the
irreversible historical tendency to the development of labor
productivity, that finishes by imposing its own law.

That which today permits one to envision the possibility that
relations of production founded on the principles of free software
(production with a view toward satisfying the needs of the community,
sharing, cooperation, the elimination of market exchange) could become
socially dominant is the fact that these relations are the most able
to employ the new techniques of information and communication, and
that the recourse to these techniques, their place in the social
process of production, can only grow, ineluctably.

The world of free software does not constitute a microcosm of truly
complete new social relations. Certain of its products begin to take a
significant place in the social process of production: the informatics
infrastructure of the Internet, recourse by the most important
producers of computers and state institutions to Linux, etc. However,
the producers of free software are not nourished by their own product.
The "gratuitistic" logic is not generalized yet to the goods that
assure the material subsistence of the producers. Those who work for
free or are paid by an enterprise to create free software remain
dependent on the revenues provided by the market world. In this sense,
just like the capitalist relations in in their time, the relations
induced by the logic of free software can be nothing but the "germs"
of social relations.


Insufficiency and Validity of Marxism

Marx and Engels could not have foreseen such a reality. Even under the
form of "germs", they would have dismissed all possibility of the
appearance of new economic relations in the midst of capitalism
without a revolutionary transformation. At most, to temper this
statement, one could cite Marx's considerations in the International
Workingmen?s Association, à propos the cooperatives that expressed the
spirit of a great majority of the workers? movement regrouped within
the First International. In a resolution adopted by the first congress
in Geneva in 1866, edited by Marx, it is written: "(a) We recognize
the cooperative movement as a transformative force of the present
society, founded on the antagonism of classes. Its great merit is to
show practically that the current system of subordination of labor to
capital, despotic and pauperizing, could be supplanted by the
republican system of the free and equal association of the producers."
However, the same resolution, against all illusions, questioned that:
"(b) But the cooperative system, limited to the form of minuscule
results of the individual efforts of wage slaves, is impotent to
transform capitalist society on its own. To convert social production
into a large and harmonious system of cooperative labor, general
changes are indispensable." [8] One knows that Marx did not entertain
any illusions about the future of cooperatives as a passage to new
social relations, as this resolution itself shows, or his Inaugural
Address of the International Workingmen?s Association, in which he
states that "this cooperation will never be able to stop the
monopolies that grow in geometrical progression." History gives good
reason. Just like it condemns theories of the possibility of
"socialism in one country," the mainstay of Stalinist lies.

The reality of free software situates itself on another terrain, or in
another dimension. It is not a geographically circumscribed reality.
It cannot be reduced to a change in the relations in the midst of or
within a given community, since its principal characteristic, the
gratuiticity of its products, concerns the entirety of society.
Contrary to cooperatives, which must sell their products on the
market, and thus sooner or later submit to the imperatives of the
market, free software is freely accessible to all. The original
character of the relations free software induces are caused
fundamentally by the unusual nature of the informatic and
informational goods that permit the creation of means of production
and consumption freely reproducible on a planetary level. It?s about a
new reality that neither Marx nor Engels, nor any of the Marxists of
most of the 20th century, either recognized or foresaw.

What?s so surprising about the fact that the Marx?s and Engels?s
vision, defined in an epoch in which mail circulated in large part by
means of horses, must be modified, adapted to the age of planetary
e-mail? Marx and Engels, who followed, with passion, the very least
development of the sciences and techniques of their time in order to
research all that could possibly contribute to facilitating the
introduction of communist society, certainly could not have acted
otherwise, and would, correctly, have been enthusiastic about the
development of the Internet and free software.

Contrary to the vision of an invariant Marxism that has already
foreseen everything and contains no possible shortcoming, whatever the
development of capitalism, Marx and Engels always stayed true to their
critique of dogmatic religious thought: They knew that the role of
theory is not to deny or to ignore facts that contradict it, but to
enrich itself with these new elements, knowing to question itself, to
better develop its explanatory and revolutionary power.

If Marxism has not specifically foreseen the possibility of the
appearance of "germs" of nonmarket relations in the midst of
capitalism, and thus finds itself contradicted in a particular aspect,
the phenomenon of free software constitutes by that same token a
screaming verification of the more general and fundamental aspects of
Marxist theory.

As one has seen in the first part of this text, the principles that
preside over the logic of free software contain important elements of
communist theory. And as it has already been implied, the fact that
these principles would be able to be rediscovered in the appearance of
a new technology represents a confirmation of the Marxist idea that
sees in communist principles, not an ideal invented by any big
thinkers, but the product of the evolution of society itself. On a
more general plane, at the level of the dynamic of history, the fact
that the development of production technologies under capitalism has
managed to engender an economic sector that intrinsically tends to
escape the law of value and that develops itself in the very heart of
the process of social production, gives a new material substance to
the idea according to which capitalism could not be surpassed by
anything but a social organization abolishing market exchange.


New Questions

Denying the existence of germs of new social relations in the midst of
capitalism in the name of Marxism would be to betray the spirit of the
same by upholding the letter. I, for one, believe that the Marxist
theoretical framework constitutes the best tool to respond to the
crucial questions that this new reality poses, and that research in
this domain constitutes a priority, if not the priority, for the
revolutionaries of our time.

The questions are numerous and important. They can be grouped into
two, interdependent, dimensions: those of the relations between free
software and the capitalist economy, in which it emerged, on the one
hand; and those of its relation to the class struggle, on the other.

On the economic level: Up to what point could current cooperation
between free software and the market economy go, without negative
consequences at the level of the profitability and the realization of
capital making themselves felt? Up to what point will go the
antagonism between the growing desire of government to protect
copyright for commercial software and the also-growing tendency toward
"piratage" of digital goods? How long will it take before the share of
the digitalizable means necessary for the production of alimentary
goods or raw materials is sufficiently important for the production
cost of those goods to be almost completely eliminanted by simple
recourse to free software? On the level of class struggle, how long
will it take for the reality of free software and its principles to be
known by all the exploited? Would the defense of these principles end
up being a direct object of confrontation with the state? What
modifications in the daily class struggle would the knowledge of or
participation in a practical model of a new type of social relations
entail? The practical example of free software would have a power of
conviction incomparably more important and effective than that, in
their time, of the utopians of the 19th century, from Owens's New
Harmony and Fourrier?s phalansteries to the spirit of the
cooperatives. [9] How, in these conditions, can "the period of
transition" to communism be envisioned?

It took centuries for the germs of capitalist relations, in the 11th
and 12th centuries, to become the socially dominant mode of
production. The history of our time has not unfolded with the same
speed, and the historical situations are very different. Barring the
self-destruction of humanity (unfortunately, possible) by some sort of
skidding out of control of capitalist barbarity, the generalization of
the principles of free software to the whole of productive social
processes (elimination of market exchange, production as a function of
the good of the community, cooperation, and sharing) could take much
less time. That depends on the speed and the intensity of an objective
material historical process, but also on the consciousness that people
have of the existent conflict and the necessity of "fighting it out."

For those, like JC, who want to be able to participate in the dynamic
of this grasping for consciousness, the recognition of the new
historical situation created by the development of "new technology" is
an indispensable step. It is inevitable if we want to respond to the
important and multiple questions that modern circumstances thrust upon
us. [10]

Raoul
October 2002

Notes

1."The GNU GPL and the American Way," 2001.

2.One can find this text of the GNU Manifesto at .

3.This reality explains in part the different forms of nonproprietary
  software that distinguish themselves by the degree of their
  gratuiticity, or liberty accorded to the user. In the strict sense,
  the term "free software" designates in reality only one specific
  type "protected" by the GNU GPL. One can find more details in the
  book JC cites, Logiciels libres (Free Software) (Edispher), by JP
  Smets-Solanes and BenoÓt Frachon.

4.´Free Software and the GPL Society,ª interview with Stefan Merten,
  by Joanne Richardson, November 2001.
  http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/mertentext.html.

5.

6.www.oekonux.org.

7.Interview with Stefan Merten, April 24, 2001.

8.   Karl Marx, Oeuvres, volume I, p. 1469 (Editions La Pleiade,
     1963).

9.In the course of our conference on June 15, in discussion on the
  theme of technological revolution, Mazagan responded to me: "I think
  that Raoul, in the current situation of class struggle, seeks a deus
  ex machina that could bring us comfort". I often wonder about that
  myself. But this question only concerns an argument about the
  subjectivity that would form a thought. It has nothing to say about
  the objective content of the thought. Does an analysis have to be
  contrary to the subjectivity of whomever defends it in order to be
  correct? Would, then, the idea of a communist society be false
  because it "brings comfort" to those who live under capitalism? It
  is true that, for those who claimed to see the premises of a world
  communist revolution in the extraordinary development of proletarian
  class struggle in the course of the period from the end of the 1960s
  to the beginning of the 1980s, the profound and general recoil of
  this combativity over the course of the following two decades has
  constituted an often devastating deception. But instead of lamenting
  over our situation, which would need of "comfort," it is much more
  useful to attempt to respond to the question of knowing why, in this
  struggle which, in certain cases, mobilized a near-totality of the
  proletariat of certain countries (France 1968, Poland 1980), often
  attaining a degree of confrontation with the state of a violence
  unknown for decades, the combatants never joined a movement giving
  itself, explicitly, the goal of the construction of a
  postcapitalist, communist society. Historical realities never have a
  single cause. But among the reasons that explain this
  "self-limitation" of the class movement must certainly be the
  difficulty of collectively perceiving what a postcapitalist society
  could be. The "revolutionary project," as it was discussed at the
  instigation of the more radical elements, was nebulous, opaque, and
  sometimes terrifying. The Soviet model, with all its variants, from
  the Chinese "Cultural Revolution" to the guerrilla centers of Latin
  America, by way of the sinister Albania, pronounced as a model by
  some Maoists, haunted all minds and paralysed many. Even if these
  struggles marked a historical rupture vis-à-vis the enormous
  influence of the Stalinist currents on the wage workers in a number
  of countries, this distance was only the beginning. Inevitably, all
  discussion of the revolutionary project began with debates on the
  qualities, or not, of "communist" countries or those "on the way to
  communism," etc. And when one attempted to go beyond them, the
  impression that one was spouting pious and abstract dreams weighed
  on one as a source of doubt.

  It would be a mistake to underestimate the lack, the crying
  insufficiency of the revolutionary project to explain the weakness
  of past proletarian struggles. The new technologies and the logic of
  free software that they have engendered constitute determinant new
  elements on which to found this project much more concretely.

10.The question of knowing whether the material conditions of
   communism existed or not before the current technological
   revolution is an important question for the analysis of historical
   dynamics of the past. But whatever one's response to this question,
   it is a priority to confirm that contemporary technological
   transformations carry material conditions that facilitate, in a
   qualitatively new manner, the construction of a communist society.

[3 GermsEng.rtf <application/msword>]

Germs of non-commercial relationships

In the midst of the most modern capitalism


 The aim of this text is to answer to Robin Good Fellow?s (RGF):
 "Communism and the industrial revolution" (April 20, 2002).  Like the
 latter it lies within the scope of the "work group" on the
 technological revolution whose constitution was announced at the last
 meeting of the French-speaking wing of the network.  It tries to show
 that, contrary to what RGF implies, the current technological
 progress can have historical consequences for the revolutionary
 project, as significant as those of the industrial revolution of the
 19th century.


Technological revolution or industrial revolution?

It would be a pity to waste time with false debates because we do not
put the same contents in the terms we use.  For me, as for the usual
dictionaries, the term "technological" refers primarily to the
techniques, to the machines and working tools; the term "industrial"
more specifically relates to the general process of transformation of
raw materials into goods for use.  It is usually utilized in
opposition to other sectors of the production: agriculture and
services (1).

In that sense we can  say that a true technological revolution
(concerning the techniques and means of production) is one which leads
to a revolution in industry, and even in the  economic activities as a
whole.  There is an inevitable lapse of time for the generalization of
the use of the new technologies.  Between the technological revolution
embodied by the development of the first steam-machines and the
generalization of their use in industry and transport, decades passed.

Summarizing the contents of their text, RGF writes:  "There is indeed
an industrial revolution, which begins during the 18° century.  This
concept is part of Marxism.  This is not a simple litany of inventions
or a simple 'technological ' revolution, it upsets the conditions of
the production by creating, on one side, the class of the modern
proletariat and the associated work, on the other side, the productive
potential to lay the material basis of a classless society."  It is
not clear whether RGF regards the term of "technological revolution"
as valid. But we understand that their insistence relates to the fact
that one can speak of "revolution" in the field of the production only
if the involved upheavals have revolutionary consequences.  "Its
arrival (of mechanization), writes RGF, poses the material basis of
communism by allowing an unlimited development of the productivity, by
allowing a permanent reduction of the necessary work, by posing the
basis of a society of abundance.  But, it is not all!  Mechanization
induces a process of work specific to the capitalist mode of
production and in a permanent way creates associated social work.  It
creates the class of associated producers who must free themselves
from the dictatorship of the capital to be able to complete the
potential of mechanization, to bring to another level, higher, the
degree of the productive forces of work."

In other words, the industrial revolution of the 19th century created
"the material basis of communism" and only an anti-capitalist
revolution will allow the proletariat " to complete the potential of
mechanization ", to go qualitatively beyond.  Under capitalism, if one
understands well, there has been and there will be only one and single
industrial revolution.


We can understand the concern for RGF to place themselves from the
point of view of the proletariat and to note that even the automation
of the production basically does not change the basic conditions of
exploitation:  "the integral automation of the process of production,
writes Robin, is entirely included within the concept of industrial
revolution. The insulated machine yields the place to the system of
machines."  But, unless we play with words, we can share neither the
idea that "the material basis of communism" were given in the middle
of the 19th century, nor the assertion that, since then, there cannot
be, under capitalism,  true qualitative changes in the development of
these basis, be it on the material level of the creation of the
conditions of the abundance or on the level of the revolutionary
capability of the proletariat.

The two elements quoted by RGF to affirm that the material basis of
communism existed in the middle of the 19th century, namely
generalization of mechanization and the appearance of the modern
proletariat, constitute indeed essential basis for the realization of
the communist project.  But these elements were in their infancy.  To
deduct from it that the material conditions of abundance and communism
were given, is like claiming that babies, because they have sexual
organs, can make children.  In spite of excessive historical optimism,
an almost inevitable weakness in the majority of the revolutionaries
that led sometimes Marx and Engels to affirm that the conditions of
communism were given in their time, they often hesitated over this
question and expressed opinions more than nuanced (2).

The problem of knowing which material development of the productive
forces, including the proletariat, is necessary so that a communist
society can start to be built, is a complex question. I do not intend
to answer it here.  But, independently from the answer which one
brings to this question, we can?t help  noting that the present
technological progress (primarily the generalization of the use of the
microchips and the new techniques of communication), constitutes a
qualitative step in the development of the two main conditions for
communism:  the "basis of a society of abundance", as RGF says, and
the revolutionary capability of the proletariat.



The development of the basis of a society of abundance

Quoting Marx, RGF, rightfully makes the development of the conditions
of abundance to rely on the process that leads  capital to "the
elimination of man from the productive process.  This exclusion of man
from the productive process opens grandiose prospects for  the
productivity of labor."  To increase the productivity of labor means
to create the same product with less work,  i.e. to replace men with
machines.  However, in this dynamics, the introduction of machines
functioning with microchips makes it possible to replace the work of
man at new levels, with capabilities which did not exist with the
previous machines, which "exclude" even more men from the productive
process.  These machines can replace man 1) in the capability to take
decisions according to parameters;  2) in the capability to perceive
and acquire some of these parameters.  Electronics today allow to
equip the machines with beginnings of capabilities of perception which
required before the presence of man, such as sight, hearing, touch,
and even recently smell and the taste.  It allows the machine to make
decisions taking into account the results of its perceptions according
to pre-established criteria.  It is an enormous leap that includes
qualitative aspects.  Perhaps RGF will say that these are only
"quantitative" developments in a process which started one century and
half ago and whose fundamental basis have not really changed.  But the
most significant aspect in the current technological revolution is not
there, or not only there.

What appears most qualitatively "new" and which makes possible to
speak of "revolution" is the fact that these machines function using a
good, the software, a new means of production, which has the
characteristic to be able to practically escape scarcity once it has
been created.  Certain software, such as those which drive whole
assembly lines of industrial production, may have required as many
working hours as the construction of certain factories or the
production of thousands of tons of coal.  But they can be reproduced
without limits at insignificant costs.  It is as if a factory, once
built, could be cloned indefinitely and free, as if coal, once
produced, could burn eternally.

Robin recognizes this new reality.  In his text of June 2001,
concerning the 'technological revolution', he writes, commenting on my
text "Notes on the technological revolution in progress":  "Where
Raoul raises an interesting problem, it is about software, because
these are also instruments of production, insofar as they control
technical devices in the companies.  Their production cost is
amazingly high, but their reproduction cost is quasi nil."
Unfortunately, RGF does not say why this "problem" seems
"interesting".  Probably because they have not thought about it yet?
Or perhaps because the answer is likely to contradict their thesis
according to which there cannot be any more, under capitalism, true
qualitative advances in the establishment of the material basis of a
society of abundance.

Anyway, one can hardly  deny that the emergence in the capitalist
production process of a free reproducible means of production
constitutes a qualitatively new and essential element for the
realization of a society without scarcity.  This is all the  more
important as the place of software in the capitalistic production can
only expand, irreversibly.

But it is not only the software driving machine tools with numerical
controls that new technologies allow to make free reproducible.  It is
also the case for other means of production and certain consumer
goods.  RGF, again in their text of June 2001, notes it partially:
"When they are goods whose form can be digitalised (the sounds,
therefore the music;  alphabetical signs, therefore newspapers, books;
images, therefore the photographs, the cinema, in short, all the goods
that are a matter for  'cultural goods'), it is clear that the costs
of reproduction are quasi null." Why does RGF limit these goods to the
mere "cultural" field,  ie which are not directly productive? The
images of medical or metal radiographs, the statistics of all that is
accounted for, the recording of the sounds of fish shoals for fishing
or the books of technical instructions, to quote only some examples,
are not particularly cultural goods.  Still they are more and more
digitalised and thus free reproducible.

New technologies in communication, of which Internet is one of the
most significant products, confer also a new capacity to these
digitalizable goods: to be transmissible at the speed of the light to
the four corners of the planet, always at a negligible cost.  And this
gift of free quasi-ubiquity constitutes also a major and qualitative
contribution to the establishment of the conditions of abundance.

Of course, all the goods for production and consumption are not
digitalizable, far from there.  But we  can consider that their
production can be almost completely digitalizable.  There exist, for
example, in Japan, plans for factory-greenhouses, able to cultivate
plants on many stages, entirely automated.  In the same way, it is
possible to consider the automation of work in the extraction of
minerals, etc.

To measure the importance of the historical consequences of such a
reality, it is useful to recall that capitalism is founded on the law
of value, on commercial exchange, which rests on  scarcity in so far
as it constitutes the most effective way to manage it.  Commercial
exchange is not the malefic product of the will of the wealthy
classes.  It is the result of the pressing need for the circulation of
goods in a society developed enough but  subject to  scarcity.  This
is why exchange can truly disappear only for goods that become
sufficiently abundant so that all the needs are largely satisfied, as
for the air we breathe (at least for the moment?).  The voluntaristic
attempts to eliminate or reduce the exchange of goods by force and the
recourse to rationing by the State, as did, for example, the European
countries during the two world wars, the Bolsheviks in the first years
after 1917 or certain Stalinist countries, were always accompanied by
the uncontrolled blooming of the commercial laws in their wildest
form: black market.

Capitalism is the most sophisticated form of commercial society, and
as such, its existence relies on scarcity. The current technical
advancements, while allowing the appearance and the beginning of the
generalization of productive forces which have the capacity to escape
the constraints of scarcity, bring, in the center of capitalism, in
its most modern sectors, the material basis for a non commercial,
anti-capitalist logic.  In this sense, they are revolutionary.



The development of the revolutionary capability of the proletariat

Vis-a-vis this free reproducibility of certain goods, contradictory
with the same basis of the commercial economy, we can distinguish
three types of reactions.

The first attitude, adopted by commercial producers of software and
other digitalized products, consists in countering the free exercise
of this capability.  For that they have recourse to technical and
official means.  On the technical level, on the one hand, they
introduce protections, sometimes very expensive, in the body of the
products they work out, intended to prevent their free reproduction.
In addition, they take profit of  the obsolescence caused by the fast
evolution of the software and the power of the processors, by
multiplying the problems of incompatibility which make the old
software unusable.  Capitalism creates voluntarily and artificially
scarcity.  On the official level, new laws and specialized forces of
police are created to prohibit and repress the unauthorized
reproduction of the digitalized products.  The lawsuit and the
prohibition of the Napster site, which allowed to obtain free copies
of musical recordings from any place in the world, became a famous
example of the struggle of capital to try to prevent that new
distributive quality of the products which it creates do not turn over
against its own logic.

The second attitude, symmetrical with the first, consists in making
profit from illegal copy.  It is not so much the case of the million
teenagers who take from Internet their preferred musical pieces or of
the private individuals who use "pirat" copies of Windows, but mainly
the case of more and more numerous companies living of the sale of
illegal copies of any kind of digitalized products.

The third attitude is that of the creators of "free software".
Contrary to the preceding attitudes, it takes voluntarily its stand
apart from the commercial relationships, endeavoring to get the most
useful and creative profit from the enormous possibilities that are
offered by the new technologies.  It is an attitude which develops at
the beginning in the research atmosphere of universities , aiming at a
better efficiency.  New technologies allow the immediate and free
pooling of the products of the work of every one and the practice of
new methods of co-operation for investigation and creation, among
which the production of open and free software, better adapted and
more powerful than those found in the market.

Some historians explain the emergence of this noncommercial state of
mind by the influence of the student movements of the 1970s (period
which saw the development the first networks of free software)
especially in the United States, influenced by the opposition to the
Vietnam war and by the opening to the anti-capitalist, community,
libertarian ideas that developed in the campuses.  This factor played
certainly a role at the beginning, but it cannot explain the
perseverance and the development of this attitude in the two following
decades.  Its vitality is rather explained by requirements of utility
and effectiveness, founded on the daily observation that the
possibilities of new technologies can be fully used only while turning
the back on the commercial, national and hierarchical logic of
capitalism.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the initial version of Linux appears,
the first free software which was  to know a significant diffusion.
Shortly after the collapse of the USSR, whereas Western propaganda
claims the final victory of the commercial laws ("the end of History",
they say) a team of "hackers" (3) around the young Finnish Linus
Torvalds, shows in practice that the greatest co-operation and
economic creative effectiveness can be obtained without commercial
laws, nor control of the State.

Admittedly, Linux is for the moment one of the only free software
which starts to be known and whose use spreads, but it is significant
that the main commercial software which it is able to replace is
Microsoft Windows, the most widespread software in the world, produced
by the society created by the person who became, thanks to it, "the
richest man of the planet".

The approach of the free creators of software, even if it is still
extremely small in its achievements, constitutes a first example of
noncommercial behavior within capitalism.


As a matter of fact, the revolutionary faculty of the proletariat,
just like the bourgeoisie?s in its time, depends on the capability to
foresee the contours of what the new society could be.

Marx speaks about the need that the productive forces "are developed
enough in the bourgeoisie itself to allow a glimpse of the necessary
material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat and the
formation of a new society."  (4) And in the famous Preface to A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy , he writes:  "new
superior relations of production never replace older ones before the
material conditions for their existence have matured within the
framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only
such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will
always show that the problem itself arises only when the material
conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the
course of formation."  (5)

Marx is cautious while specifying: "or at least in the course of
formation", rightfully so, since, as we mentioned before, he had
doubts about the degree of maturity of the historical conditions in
his own time.  But, he is right to emphasize the need, for the
development of the revolutionary class-consciousness, for the
capability of  "humanity" to try to build a noncommercial society,
that it can consider in the reality the possibility of its
realization.

Since Marx, the history of capitalism has multiplied in front of the
eyes of humanity, and, first of all, of the exploited classes, the
practical demonstrations of the need for going beyond this mode of
production capable of Auschwitz, Hiroshima or Rwanda.  But, on the
other hand, it has provided only few elements showing the possibility
of this upheaval, which would make possible to make a good use of the
gigantic productive forces created by mad capitalism.  The example of
the Stalinist countries and the generalized lie, which qualified them
as communists, has been harmful to the conscience of this possibility,
during their existence and after their collapse.

This is why, the example provided by the free software, this germ of
noncommercial economy at the heart of the most modern capitalism, even
if it is still microscopic today, constitute and will constitute an
element of force in the development of the proletariat?s revolutionary
conscience and capability.  It is the same for the perspectives opened
to «associated work» (considered by RGF, with reason, as one of the
conditions of the possibility of communism),  by  the generalization
of Internet, which makes possible a society able to function
consciously, universally and instantaneously associated.



Free software and capitalism

What are the chances of development of free software?

The development of free software poses new problems to capital.
First, there are the difficulties for the producer-salesmen of
software, confronted with a competition impossible to fight neither on
the level of prices, nor on the level of quality (6).

There is then the impossibility of legally repressing the development
of this software since they escape the commercial legal framework?
except prohibiting Internet.

Lastly, there is the problem arising from the fall of costs which
their use implies for the companies which have recourse to and which
are thus favored vis-a-vis their competitors.  One can then witness
the strange dialectics that leads the merchants to resort to the
product of the opposite logic to be more powerful merchants.

Thus for example, IBM manufactures and sells host computers especially
designed to function with the free software Linux, and makes even an
advertising argument of it:  "the software costs almost nothing".  In
the same way, part of the French public administration decided to
generalize the recourse to Linux for its data-processing
installations.


Analogies can be found with aspects of the historical periods when the
development of a new mode of production took place within the old
society.  In the last centuries of the Roman Empire, primarily based
on the slave mode of production, one could assist to the development
of the colonus-system [colonat, in French], an early form of
feudalism: an increasing part of the ruling class, of which the State
itself, frees its slaves and places them on its lands as tenant
farmers.  Even if these new "free" men remain attached to the land
they work on and are sold with it, they become exploited according to
new social relationships, different and opposed to old ones.  The
relations between the two modes of production were not always easy, in
particular at the level of tax collection, but the ruling class was
irreversibly forced to resort more and more to the colonus-system, so
much the labor productivity of the coloni was higher than that of the
slaves.  The relations between incipient capitalism and feudalism,
within which it developed, knew also dialectics made of wars and of
co-operation during centuries, until the bourgeois political
revolutions marked the final triumph of capitalism, carried by the
enormous increase in the labor productivity that its form of
organization involved.

It might seem hazardous to make a parallel between these historical
transitions and the current situation between capitalism and the
microscopic noncommercial sector that develops within it.  What is
here at stake is not a relation between two modes of exploitation, but
between the most accomplished mode of exploitation and the end of
exploitation.  However, in this case, as in the past, there is a
phenomenon which sees the ruling class of the old system being forced
to have recourse to products of a mode of production which is
antagonistic to its own.


Technical progress and class struggle

 RGF writes: "It would be an error to think that technique will bring,
 by itself, radical social changes.  It does nothing but create an
 increasingly higher level of labor productivity.  To go beyond, as
 Bordiga said it:  'another social war is necessary, led by the
 material force of men fighting against other men, classes fighting
 against other classes ' ".

It is useless to oppose in an exclusive way the will of men and the
evolution of their techniques.  The men who discovered fire and those
who use computers are not the same ones.

Even if they are powerful, software are never but instruments used by
men.  Their influence on the forms of social life depends primarily on
the men who create them and use them.  What one can foresee is, first,
that the place in the economic and social life of these freely
reproducible goods can only go increasing;  second, that this
development will constitute a practical challenge, a new contradiction
in the kingdom of the commercial, capitalist laws (7).  It is the
revolt of the productive forces against the relationships of
production that generated them.  But, this revolt will succeed and
become effective only by the action of the main productive force, the
social class which does not benefit from the commercial relationships
but undergoes them in the form of exploitation and of alienation, the
proletariat.  The technological revolution in progress, as it will
induce an industrial revolution, will bring new weapons to him.
Raoul
 June 8, 2002

Notes

1. The word industry is more and more used today to speak about the
   activity of sectors considered in theory as services:  industry of
   tourism, of restoration, of communications, which translates the
   "massification" of these and the proletarianization of their
   trades.

2. In a letter to Engels of October 8, 1858, Marx expresses his
   doubts:  "The true mission of the bourgeois society, is to create
   the world market, at least in its broad outline, as well as a
   production conditioned by the world market.  As the world is round,
   this mission seems completed since the colonization of California
   and Australia and the opening of Japan and China.  For us the
   difficult question is this: on the continent, the revolution is
   imminent and will take a socialist character immediately, but won't
   it be inevitably choked in this small corner, since, on a much
   larger ground, the movement of the bourgeois society is still in
   its ascending phase?" ['Translated' by me from French].

   Thirty-seven years later, Engels, in the introduction to the Class
   Struggles in France, wrote:  "History showed that we were wrong, we
   and those who thought in a similar way.  It showed clearly that the
   state of the economic development on the continent was then far
   away from being mature for the abolition of the capitalist
   production; it was proved by the economic revolution which, since
   1948, gained all the continent and which, only at this time
   [1895!], truly allowed the existence of large-scale industry in
   France, in Austria, in Hungary, in Poland and lately in Russia, and
   really made of Germany an industrialized country of first order -
   all that was made on a capitalist basis, i.e. very capable of
   extension in 1848."  ['Translated' from French].

3. The word "hacker" is often incorrectly used to designate only the
   programmers who enter through Internet into the processing systems
   of large companies or institutions to scuttle or taunt them.
   Actually, in the language of this milieu, the latter are
   «crackers», «hacker» being a term much more general indicating all
   those of the programmers impassioned by the creation of software
   and the most thorough use of the data-processing potentialities.
   See The Hacker Ethics and the Spirit of the Era of Information, by
   Pekka Himanen.

4.  Misery of Philosophy, chapter II.

5.
   http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm

6. The development of free software based on the world-wide
   co-operation of voluntary programmers, simply eager to contribute
   their share to a collective task useful for the community (and
   probably to be recognized by their peers), leads to technical
   results of an exceptional quality.  Linux is becoming a masterpiece
   of data processing, in perpetual improvement.

7. The increase in productivity, induced by the integration of new
   technologies to the production process, exacerbates the main
   contradictions which characterize capitalism: the difficulty of
   generating the solvent outlets necessary to the always increasing
   flow of production, allowed by the developing labor productivity;
   the downward trend of the rate of profit, caused by the reduction,
   in the production process, of the share of alive work, only source
   of surplus-value, at the expense of the share of the machines and
   other means of production.



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