re: joxe's empire of disorder (etc)

[McKenzie Wark]

As Are reminds us, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act is no joke, and
there is already a criminal proceeding. Heiko points out that there are
'traditional exceptions' in the WIPO treaties. I would say these reveal
a kind of 'class compromise', which in any case may be made moot
by developments in the 'technical-economic base' which make read-
write media a thing of the past.

While I agree with Phil that we ought not to take the dogmatic versions
of 'base and superstructure' too seriously, the coherence of a Marxist
view of history does depend on showing a coherent relationship between
economic development and class conflict.

This is what my Hacker Manifesto text seeks to do. It looks at the same
nexus Marx looked at: property. Property is what connects the possessing
classes to the dispossessed, and its evolution in the institution of law
formalises the relations of production.

To pick up the thread of a debate between John H and Felix: the abstraction
of property has proceeded through three rough phases.
1. The astraction of land as property, cut from a continuum or fabric of relations. This is the basis of agrarian commodity production and the rise of a landlord or pastoralist class.
2. The abstraction of the thing from the land. This is the basis of
manufacturing and the rise of a capitalist class.
3. The abstraction of information from the thing, which is the basis of the current phase of the commodification of information and, i argue, a new fraction of the ruling class, the vectoralist class.

In each phase, the abstraction of property creates a plane upon which resources can be combined in new ways, and a new phase of economic development. But it also creates a class antagonism, of have and have nots, which is quite different from traditional forms of the 'commons' or communal right. We are experiencing the potential extinction of the last domain of common right, common cultural and communication rights, as we speak -- witness the ElComsoft Prosecution, as just one example.

Note, please that while information can now be abstracted from any *particular* material base, it cannot be abstracted from materiality in general. One avoids flights of cyberhype fantasy -- the 'weightless economy' etc by making this clear conceptual distinction.

Kermit has as usual contributed a very dense and thought-provoking post. I would like to see some of these connection spelled out more. Perhaps I can start
where I think I follow the arguement.

Negri's concept of the 'general intellect' comes from Marx. It's not quite the case that the Negrists and the neoliberals are agreed that knowledge is capital. The Negrist position is Marx's: knowledge may be capital, but capital is labor. Marx's critique of liberal economic theory applies just as readily to the neoliberal. In treating only the space of exchange, not the space of production, (neo)liberalism erases the space of exploitation, where property is at work not as trade among its possessors, but as (unequal) exchange between its possessors and those it has dispossessed.

Knowledge is labor. But labor is dispossessed of its capacity to utilise the value of what it 'knows'. It has to sell what it knows to those who possess the means of realising its value.

Knowledge, however, is very slippery stuff. As information, it has no particular material expression. And so it is quite difficult -- and contrary to nature -- to make it a commodity, where its value rests on its unique attachment to a material form which can in turn be commodified.

Far from being progress, the commodification of information retards its development by *limiting* the range of possible combinations and permutations intowhich it can be put. Commodity development really does reach a limit, as Marx anticipated, although not in the form he anticipated.

To put it another way: As Lessig argues, information is a non-rivalrous good. My possession of it need not dispossess you of it. This is not true of either the land or the thing. The property relation, when applied to the land or the thing, is always a relation of dispossession. At the price of the inequality this dispossession causes, one gets a remarkable economic development. The abstraction of property allows for a remarkable permutationof combinations of things.

Yet with information, this is not the case. Property intervenes as an *artificial* scarcity. It extends commodity logic where it need not belong. Unlimited wants do not confront scarce resources, where information is concerned.

The continuous innovation in the process of production is a given in Marx's
thinking. If one finds this idea in Negri and the Austrians, it is not necessarily from Sorel, but from Marx, who in turn takes in from some of his sources in classical political economy. But as a *theory*, it is Marx's. It arises out of the producing classes, the dispossed classes. Only those classes are no longer farmers and workers, but also what I chose to call 'hackers' -- creators of intellectual property.

What distinguishes these three dispossessed classes is really just a degree
of abstraction, a spatial dislocation, if you will, that proceeds progressively from the alienation of land from the earth, of the thing from the land, of information from the thing.


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