[ox-en] The dotCommunist Manifesto, by Eben Moglen
- From: Stefan Meretz <stefan.meretz hbv.org>
- Date: Sun, 13 Jun 2004 13:32:51 +0200
http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/dcm.html
The dotCommunist Manifesto
Eben Moglen*
* Professor of Law, Columbia University Law School.
January 2003
A Spectre is haunting multinational capitalism--the spectre of free
information. All the powers of ``globalism'' have entered into an unholy
alliance to exorcize this spectre: Microsoft and Disney, the World Trade
Organization, the United States Congress and the European Commission.
Where are the advocates of freedom in the new digital society who have not
been decried as pirates, anarchists, communists? Have we not seen that
many of those hurling the epithets were merely thieves in power, whose
talk of ``intellectual property'' was nothing more than an attempt to
retain unjustifiable privileges in a society irrevocably changing? But it
is acknowledged by all the Powers of Globalism that the movement for
freedom is itself a Power, and it is high time that we should publish our
views in the face of the whole world, to meet this nursery tale of the
Spectre of Free Information with a Manifesto of our own.
Owners and Creators
Throughout the world the movement for free information announces the
arrival of a new social structure, born of the transformation of
bourgeois industrial society by the digital technology of its own
invention.
The history of all hitherto existing societies reveals a history of class
struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and
journeyman, bourgeois and proletarian, imperialist and subaltern, in a
word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one
another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight
that has often ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of
society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
The industrial society that sprouted from the worldwide expansion of
European power ushering in modernity did not do away with class
antagonisms. It but established new classes, new conditions of
oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. But the epoch
of the bourgeoisie simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole
seemed divided into two great hostile camps, into two great classes,
directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
But revolution did not by and large occur, and the ``dictatorship of the
proletariat,'' where it arose or claimed to arise, proved incapable of
instituting freedom. Instead, capitalism was enabled by technology to
secure for itself a measure of consent. The modern laborer in the
advanced societies rose with the progress of industry, rather than
sinking deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own
class. Pauperism did not develop more rapidly than population and wealth.
Rationalized industry in the Fordist style turned industrial workers not
into a pauperized proletariat, but rather into mass consumers of mass
production. Civilizing the proletariat became part of the self-protective
program of the bourgeoisie.
In this way, universal education and an end to the industrial exploitation
of children became no longer the despised program of the proletarian
revolutionary, but the standard of bourgeois social morality. With
universal education, workers became literate in the media that could
stimulate them to additional consumption. The development of sound
recording, telephony, moving pictures, and radio and television
broadcasting changed the workers' relationship to bourgeois culture, even
as it profoundly altered the culture itself.
Music, for example, throughout previous human history was an acutely
perishable non-commodity, a social process, occurring in a place and at a
time, consumed where it was made, by people who were indistinctly
differentiated as consumers and as makers. After the adoption of
recording, music was a non-persishable commodity that could be moved long
distances and was necessarily alienated from those who made it. Music
became, as an article of consumption, an opportunity for its new
``owners'' to direct additional consumption, to create wants on the part
of the new mass consuming class, and to drive its demand in directions
profitable to ownership. So too with the entirely new medium of the
moving picture, which within decades reoriented the nature of human
cognition, capturing a substantial fraction of every worker's day for the
reception of messages ordering additional consumption. Tens of thousands
of such advertisements passed before the eyes of each child every year,
reducing to a new form of serfdom the children liberated from tending a
productive machine: they were now compulsorily enlisted in tending the
machinery of consumption.
Thus the conditions of bourgeois society were made less narrow, better
able to comprise the wealth created by them. Thus was cured the absurd
epidemic of recurrent over-production. No longer was there too much
civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much
commerce.
But the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the
instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and
with them the whole relations of society. Constant revolutionising of
production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions,
everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch
from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train
of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all
new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is
solid melts into air.
With the adoption of digital technology, the system of mass consumer
production supported by mass consumer culture gave birth to new social
conditions out of which a new structure of class antagonism precipitates.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of
production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws
all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices
of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all
Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate
hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of
extinction, to adopt its culture and its principles of intellectual
ownership; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into
their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it
creates a world after its own image. But the very instruments of its
communication and acculturation establish the modes of resistance which
are turned against itself.
Digital technology transforms the bourgeois economy. The dominant goods in
the system of production--the articles of cultural consumption that are
both commodities sold and instructions to the worker on what and how to
buy--along with all other forms of culture and knowledge now have zero
marginal cost. Anyone and everyone may have the benefit of all works of
culture: music, art, literature, technical information, science, and
every other form of knowledge. Barriers of social inequality and
geographic isolation dissolve. In place of the old local and national
seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction,
universal inter-dependence of people. And as in material, so also in
intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual people
become common property. Modern bourgeois society with its relations of
production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up
such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer's
apprentice, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether
world whom he has called up by his spells.
With this change, man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his
real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. Society
confronts the simple fact that when everyone can possess every
intellectual work of beauty and utility--reaping all the human value of
every increase of knowledge--at the same cost that any one person can
possess them, it is no longer moral to exclude. If Rome possessed the
power to feed everyone amply at no greater cost than that of Caesar's own
table, the people would sweep Caesar violently away if anyone were left
to starve. But the bourgeois system of ownership demands that knowledge
and culture be rationed by the ability to pay. Alternative traditional
forms, made newly viable by the technology of interconnection, comprising
voluntary associations of those who create and those who support, must be
forced into unequal competition with ownership's overwhelmingly powerful
systems of mass communication. Those systems of mass communication are in
turn based on the appropriation of the people's common rights in the
electromagnetic spectrum. Throughout the digital society the classes of
knowledge workers--artists, musicians, writers, students, technologists
and others trying to gain in their conditions of life by copying and
modifying information--are radicalized by the conflict between what they
know is possible and what the ideology of the bourgeois compels them to
accept. Out of that discordance arises the consciousness of a new class,
and with its rise to self-consciousness the fall of ownership begins.
The advance of digital society, whose involuntary promoter is the
bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the creators, due to competition,
by their revolutionary combination, due to association. Creators of
knowledge, technology, and culture discover that they no longer require
the structure of production based on ownership and the structure of
distribution based on coercion of payment. Association, and its anarchist
model of propertyless production, makes possible the creation of free
software, through which creators gain control of the technology of
further production.[1] The network itself, freed of the control of
broadcasters and other bandwidth owners, becomes the locus of a new
system of distribution, based on association among peers without
hierarchical control, which replaces the coercive system of distribution
for all music, video, and other soft goods. Universities, libraries, and
related institutions become allies of the new class, interpreting their
historic role as distributors of knowledge to require them to offer
increasingly complete access to the knowledge in their stewardship to all
people, freely. The liberation of information from the control of
ownership liberates the worker from his imposed role as custodian of the
machine. Free information allows the worker to invest her time not in the
consumption of bourgeois culture, with its increasingly urgent
invitations to sterile consumption, but in the cultivation of her mind
and her skills. Increasingly aware of her powers of creation, she ceases
to be a passive participant in the systems of production and consumption
in which bourgeois society entrapped her.
But the bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to
all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn
asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ``natural
superiors,'' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man
than naked self-interest, than callous ``cash payment.'' It has drowned
the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous
enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical
calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value. And in
place of the numberless and feasible chartered freedoms, has set up that
single, unconscionable freedom--Free Trade. In one word, for
exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked,
shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
Against the forthcoming profound liberation of the working classes, whose
access to knowledge and information power now transcends their previous
narrow role as consumers of mass culture, the system of bourgeois
ownership therefore necessarily contends to its very last. With its
preferred instrument of Free Trade, ownership attempts to bring about the
very crisis of over-production it once feared. Desperate to entrap the
creators in their role as waged consumers, bourgeois ownership attempts
to turn material deprivation in some parts of the globe into a source of
cheap goods with which to bribe back into cultural passivity not the
barbarians, but its own most prized possession--the educated
technological laborers of the most advanced societies.
At this stage the workers and creators still form an incoherent mass
scattered over the whole globe, and remain broken up by their mutual
competition. Now and then the creators are victorious, but only for a
time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result,
but in the ever-expanding union. This union is helped on by the improved
means of communication that are created by modern industry and that place
the workers and creators of different localities in contact with one
another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the
numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national
struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political
struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle
Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern
knowledge workers, thanks to the network, achieve in a few years.
Freedom and Creation
Not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to
itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those
weapons--the digital working class--the creators. Possessed of skills and
knowledges that create both social and exchange value, resisting
reduction to the status of commodity, capable collectively of producing
all the technologies of freedom, such workmen cannot be reduced to
appendages of the machine. Where once bonds of ignorance and geographical
isolation tied the proletarian to the industrial army in which he formed
an indistinguishable and disposable component, creators collectively
wielding control over the network of human communications retain their
individuality, and offer the value of their intellectual labor through a
variety of arrangements more favorable to their welfare, and to their
freedom, than the system of bourgeois ownership ever conceded them.
But in precise proportion to the success of the creators in establishing
the genuinely free economy, the bourgeoisie must reinforce the structure
of coercive production and distribution concealed within its supposed
preference for ``free markets'' and ``free trade.'' Though ultimately
prepared to defend by force arrangements that depend on force, however
masked, the bourgeoisie at first attempts the reimposition of coercion
through its preferred instrument of compulsion, the institutions of its
law. Like the ancien régime in France, which believed that feudal
property could be maintained by conservative force of law despite the
modernization of society, the owners of bourgeois culture expect their
law of property to provide a magic bulwark against the forces they have
themselves released.
At a certain stage in the development of the means of production and of
exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and
exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing
industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer
compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so
many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and
political constitution adapted to it, and by the economic and political
sway of the bourgeois class. But ``free competition'' was never more than
an aspiration of bourgeois society, which constantly experienced the
capitalists' intrinsic preference for monopoly. Bourgeois property
exemplified the concept of monopoly, denying at the level of practical
arrangements the dogma of freedom bourgeois law inconsistently
proclaimed. As, in the new digital society, creators establish genuinely
free forms of economic activity, the dogma of bourgeois property comes
into active conflict with the dogma of bourgeois freedom. Protecting the
ownership of ideas requires the suppression of free technology, which
means the suppression of free speech. The power of the State is employed
to prohibit free creation. Scientists, artists, engineers and students
are prevented from creating or sharing knowledge, on the ground that
their ideas imperil the owners' property in the system of cultural
production and distribution. It is in the courts of the owners that the
creators find their class identity most clearly, and it is there,
accordingly, that the conflict begins.
But the law of bourgeois property is not a magic amulet against the
consequences of bourgeois technology: the broom of the sorcerer's
apprentice will keep sweeping, and the water continues to rise. It is in
the domain of technology that the defeat of ownership finally occurs, as
the new modes of production and distribution burst the fetters of the
outmoded law.
All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their
already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their
conditions of appropriation. Knowledge workers cannot become masters of
the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous
mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of
appropriation. Theirs is the revolutionary dedication to freedom: to the
abolition of the ownership of ideas, to the free circulation of
knowledge, and the restoration of culture as the symbolic commons that
all human beings share.
To the owners of culture, we say: You are horrified at our intending to do
away with private property in ideas. But in your existing society,
private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the
population. What they create is immediately appropriated by their
employers, who claim the fruit of their intellect through the law of
patent, copyright, trade secret and other forms of ``intellectual
property.'' Their birthright in the electromagnetic spectrum, which can
allow all people to communicate with and learn from one another, freely,
at almost inexhaustible capacity for nominal cost, has been taken from
them by the bourgeoisie, and is returned to them as articles of
consumption--broadcast culture, and telecommunications services--for
which they pay dearly. Their creativity finds no outlet: their music,
their art, their storytelling is drowned out by the commodities of
capitalist culture, amplified by all the power of the oligopoly of
``broadcasting,'' before which they are supposed to remain passive,
consuming rather than creating. In short, the property you lament is the
proceeds of theft: its existence for the few is solely due to its
non-existence in the hands of everyone else. You reproach us, therefore,
with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary
condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any such property
for the immense majority of society.
It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property in ideas
and culture all creative work will cease, for lack of ``incentive,'' and
universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, there ought to have been no music, art, technology, or
learning before the advent of the bourgeoisie, which alone conceived of
subjecting the entirety of knowledge and culture to the cash nexus. Faced
with the advent of free production and free technology, with free
software, and with the resulting development of free distribution
technology, this argument simply denies the visible and unanswerable
facts. Fact is subordinated to dogma, in which the arrangements that
briefly characterized intellectual production and cultural distribution
during the short heyday of the bourgeoisie are said, despite the evidence
of both past and present, to be the only structures possible.
Thus we say to the owners: The misconception that induces you to transform
into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing
from your present mode of production and form of property--historical
relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production--this
misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you.
What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in
the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the
case of your own bourgeois form of property.
Our theoretical conclusions are in no way based on ideas or principles
that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be
universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual
relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical
movement going on under our very eyes.
When people speak of ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express
the fact, that within the old society, the elements of a new one have
been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace
with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
We, the creators of the free information society, mean to wrest from the
bourgeoisie, by degrees, the shared patrimony of humankind. We intend the
resumption of the cultural inheritance stolen from us under the guise of
``intellectual property,'' as well as the medium of electromagnetic
transportation. We are committed to the struggle for free speech, free
knowledge, and free technology. The measures by which we advance that
struggle will of course be different in different countries, but the
following will be pretty generally applicable:
1. Abolition of all forms of private property in ideas.
2. Withdrawal of all exclusive licenses, privileges and rights to use of
electromagnetic spectrum. Nullification of all conveyances of permanent
title to electromagnetic frequencies.
3. Development of electromagnetic spectrum infrastructure that implements
every person's equal right to communicate.
4. Common social development of computer programs and all other forms of
software, including genetic information, as public goods.
5. Full respect for freedom of speech, including all forms of technical
speech.
6. Protection for the integrity of creative works.
7. Free and equal access to all publicly-produced information and all
educational material used in all branches of the public education system.
By these and other means, we commit ourselves to the revolution that
liberates the human mind. In overthrowing the system of private property
in ideas, we bring into existence a truly just society, in which the free
development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
1 The free software movement has used programmers throughout the
world--paid and unpaid--since the early 1980s to create the GNU/Linux
operating system and related software that can be copied, modified and
redistributed by all its users. This technical environment, now
ubiquitous and competitively superior to the proprietary software
industry's products, frees computer users from the monopolistic form of
technological control that was to have dominated the personal computer
revolution as capitalism envisioned it. By displacing the proprietary
production of the most powerful monopoly on earth, the free software
movement shows that associations of digital workers are capable of
producing better goods, for distribution at nominal cost, than capitalist
production can achieve despite the vaunted ``incentives'' created by
ownership and exclusionary ``intellectual property'' law.
©Eben Moglen, 2003
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in
any medium, provided this notice is preserved.
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