What is living and what is dead in liberalism? (Neo or otherwise). What is living and what is dead in leftism? (new or old style)
These are good 'Hegelian' questions, and while as Brian says, they have been raised on nettime before, the discussion was far from comprehensive or conclusive. I don't much dissent from Keith Hart's excellent primer on the political economy of the 19th century. However, it seems to me to be the kind of explanation one might describe as late 20th century orthodoxy. I'm not sure we are still living in the world for which that was the relevant history. Everyone to his taste, however. It seems to me to under estimate the role of communication vectors and the abstraction of information, and to be far from precise and clear in following this aspect of the transformation of material reality. One has to rethink what is base and what is 'superstructure.' On information as property: Yes, obviously, patent and copyright exist since the 18th century. But they are *not* intellectual property -- a term not much used before the late 60s. They were the 'commons' on which the progressive privatisation of information in law and policy has been built. Copyright was not a form of property at all. The change in terminology is significant. Information itself arises at the nexus of technical, economic and legal determinants. Technically, its roots are in the telegraph, first technology to separate the speed of movement of information from the movement of people or goods. Thus making possible the coordination of the movement of people and goods by the movement of information. Marx was already onto this in the Grundrisse. There is no such thing as the 'world market' without a space of communication wherein values can be identified and transmitted. The great weakness of Marx's otherwise seminal discussions of exchange value is that when he compares, say, 5 coats to 4 bales of linen as euivalents, he speaks as if there were a purely ideal space where these exchange values met. He doesn't address the materiality of exchange value, which rests on the capacity to transmit information about use values -- prices -- across space and time independently of the ability to move the thing itself. Echange value only emerges in a space of communication. This space grows in radius as communication develops. First within the space of the nation, then without. But it is the same process. The interaction of the technical and legal creation of information as an autonomous, abstract value creates a whole new sphere of economic valuation and exploitation. As Keith suggests, it is always useful to look at scale. Look at the proportion of the assets that make up the market value of corporations. The intellectual property portfolio occupies an increasingly large proportion. What comes together to create the economic value of 'intellectual property' is firstly is much more rigid legal protection, and secondly the communication vectors that make it so much easier to store or to transmit. When Brian speaks of "efforts to make universal rights substantial by constructing and defending 'commons' where free access does not equal destruction of resources..." he is talking about what will in the first and last instance be a commons constructed out of communciation vectors and in which information circulates, where both are outside the logic of commodification. The establishment and management of any other kind of commons depends on this. One has to confront the vctoral with its own tools, as Critical Art Ensemble remind us. I've always found it more useful to speak of a vectoralisation rather than a globalisation. The latter term is a bit too freighted with ideological baggage. And it misses the extent to which the becoming-abstract of space (what Felix, quoting Castells, called a 'space of flows') is a vectoral phenomenon before it is anything else. Putting places in touch with each other, which proceeds in a much more haphazzard way than 'globalisation' would lead one to suspect, and which does not produce the liberal-enlightened result of transparency of communication and rational coordination of wants and resources, has proceeded apace for century and a half since the creation of telegraphy. The internet revolution, after all, is really just telegraphy, on a vastly expanded scale, with bells and whistles. This historical movement -- the becoming vectoral of space -- has been going on for a while. But it comes to interact with the transformation of information into property only quite recently. One only has to look at the flurry of legislation -- the Communications Act and Digital Millenium Copyright Act in the US. Or the remarkable amount of GATT and then WTO time taken up with issues of patent and copyright protection. These are relatively new developments, and their significance is not really plumbed by the tools of historical materialism as we have them to hand. While there are aspects of 'neo'-liberalism that seem to return to the past, I think this runs the risk of a misdiagnosis. New terms of analysis are called for, not on the assumption that we confront a new power, but just to avoid the assumption that it is more of the same. Pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will: there is without doubt a serious ratchetting up of the organisation from above of ruling class interests. And, I would argue, this corresponds to a recomposition of those interests. I've seen the maps Brian alludes to by the Bureau d'Etudes. I have them on my wall (thanks Brian!) and they're pretty scary. However, we also have access to tools unimagined by the labor and social movements of the 19th century. This medium in which we are writing here being one of them. Can you imagine what enormous part of the budget of the First International was spent on telegrams? k ___________________________________________________ http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html ... we no longer have roots, we have aerials ... ___________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
