Professional Documents
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Historical Materialism
Historical materialism [3] starts with the assumption that
human consciousness is conditioned by its physical
environment, and therefore that primacy in society flows
from its material base to its organisation of social life. At
the core lie the 'forces of production' (predominately
machinery, raw materials, labour power, and
knowledge), that influence the 'relations of production',
i.e. the composition of ownership in society. The class
that dominates the relations of production favour a
certain legal, political and ideological constitution of
society (superstructure) that will support their social
order. But because the forces of production develop
continuously, while the established order tends to
conserve its position, the organisation of society will
increasingly become at odds with its material production.
A point is reached when the old establishment fetters the
emerging productive forces. The struggle between the
ruling class and those classes it submerged (which has
been ongoing) now burst into revolutionary change. A
new social order emerges that better corresponds to the
material basis of production (Cohen, 2000).
The prime example of this transition is that from
feudalism to early capitalism. Privileges and tradition
prevented free social and geographical mobility and
fuelled the resistance to factory discipline, while
Christian values despised capitalist virtues. In order to
flourish, the bourgeois class had to tear down these
barriers to the free flow of capital, wage labour, and
market exchange. In the same way, the theory claims,
will capitalism be fettering the future forces of
production [4].
There are numerous difficulties with this theory. A
common objection from post-Marxists (and Marxists
too) is that the 'chain of direction' breaks down because
the superstructure becomes productive in itself in
"... the information age, marked by the autonomy of
culture vis-a-vis the material bases of our existence" [5].
History of Copyright
Intellectual property rights were invented in the Italian
merchant states and accompanied the spread of early
capitalism to Netherlands and Britain [8]. Early forms of
what has become copyright can be traced further back
into history, as is sometimes done by copyright
champions. In Talmud tradition, for example, sources of
information were thoroughly documented, but for the
purpose of ensuring the authenticity of information.
Copyright in a non-trivial sense can only be realized
within the context of a capitalist society, since its
function is meaningless without a developed market
economy (Bettig, 1996).
For most of human existence oral tradition has
dominated. Narratives were in constant flux.
Performance was regarded more highly than authorship,
which seldom could be credited since most culture was
built on religious myths or common folklore, and did not
originate from an individual creator.
With the emergence of a bourgeoisie consciousness of
individuals and property, the spread of market relations,
and technological breakthroughs, especially the printing
press, the need of copyright was created. Consequently,
Great Britain developed the first advanced copyright law.
In the sixteenth century religious conflicts spurred the
circulation of pamphlets, closely followed by legislation
that banned writings of heresy, sedition, and treason.
Brendan Scott (2000) argues that this censorship bears
the legacy of copyright. For example, the custom of
printers and authors to have their name listed with their
creations began as a law demanding this practice, not to
ensure the originator due credit, but in order for the king
to keep track of disobedient writers.
In 1556 a royal charter established the Stationers'
Company and granted it exclusive control of all printing
in the United Kingdom. Limiting the number of
publishers was a key strategy in the government's arsenal
to regulate writings (Bettig, 1996). The two strategies to
consolidate control by eradicating anonymity and
restricting the number of sources of reproduction are
themes that echo into the present day.
The expansion of patents and copyright has grown since.
It entered a new stage with the signing of the TRIPs
Agreement, a global treaty on intellectual property, in
1994 (May, 2000). The tightening of the intellectual
property regime coincides with the increasing exchange
value of information and what is held to be the coming
of an information age.
Marxists on Information
Marxists have been dismissive of literature giving
priority to information over labour and capital in
production. The notion of a post-industrial age has
become associated with apolitical futurists. Claims that
information would replace labour as prime source of
value helped to raise suspicion among Marxists, and (not
without cause) the post-industrial hype was often written
off as a hegemonic smokescreen. Marxists rightly
criticize the post-industrialist advocates for failing to
take account of power relationships, to forget that
information is the result of human labour, to ignore that a
staff of 'symbol-analysts' require a labour force that
satisfy society's material needs, and to downplay the
continuity of capitalist industrialism in the new era
(Dyer-Witheford, 1999). Technological utopias have
been touted before to justify the destructiveness and
smoothen the acceptance of new technologies
(Stallabrass, 1995).
However, the importance of information in production
can no longer be ignored, and the vulgar Marxist position
discarding information as a mere surplus-eater of the
industrial production [9] is no longer tenable.
Dan Shiller represents a tradition of Marxism that
recognizes the emerging importance of information but
disputes the unique value credited to information by
post-industrial thinkers. Shiller criticises those theories
for failing to distinguish between information as a
resource, something of actual or potential use, and
information as a commodity.
Implicit to this view is that information as a resource has
remained constant; it takes information to make a flint
axe too. The change lies in that information has been
commodified. Like other resources before, information is
claimed by capitalist expansion to be produced by wage
labour for and within a market. Shiller rejects the claims
that information commodities have an immaterial
element inherent to them. One of the points I will
advance is that this stance hinders Marxists like Shiller
from recognising the growing contradiction in
information capitalism that is inherent to the intellectual
property regime.
Another Marxist approach to information technology,
pioneered by Harry Braverman, is to study how
technology is deployed to aid capital against labour,
partly through surveillance, partly by transferring
knowledge from labour to machinery. However, since
humanity is divided, and nowhere more divided than in
the labour process:
"... machinery comes into the world not as the servant of
'humanity', but as the instrument of those to whom the
accumulation of capital gives the ownership of the
machines. The capacity of humans to control the labor
process through machinery is seized upon by
management from the beginning of capitalism as the
prime means whereby production may be controlled not
by the direct producers but by the owners and
representatives of capital" [10]
Information as a Resource
Though I stress the importance of recognising the social
construction of information into a commodity, I believe
that the post-industrial advocates are right in that
information as a resource has qualitively changed. The
shift can be extrapolated from capital's ambition to
replace the workforce with machinery and science,
primarily to suppress labour militancy. A consequence of
the replacement of labour with robots is that the cost of
labour in production falls while the expenses for fixed
capital, high-tech machinery and cutting edge science,
sharply rises. Thus comes a rapid shift of relative costs
(exchange value) from labour to fixed capital - i.e.
information. Furthermore, the productivity of industries
depends now more on the development of fixed capital
than the human labour:
"But to the degree that large industry develops, the
creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour
time and on the amount of labour employed than on the
power of the agencies set in motion during labour time,
whose powerful effectiveness is itself in turn out of all
proportion to the direct labour time spent on their
production, but depends rather on the general state of
science and on the progress of technology, or the
application of this science to production" [16].
Information Microeconomics
"If nature has made anything less susceptible than all
others of exclusive property, it is the action of the
thinking power called an idea, which an individual may
exclusive possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but
the moment it is divulged it forces itself into the
possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot
dispossess himself of it" [22].
Recommended Reading
I would like to recommend four books for further
reading.
To get a comprehensive, well-researched overview on
contemporary Marxist's response to the Information Age,
Nick Dyer-Witheford's book Cyber-Marx, Cycles and
Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism
(Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1999) is what
you are looking for. It is available on the Internet at
http://www.fims.uwo.ca/people/faculty/dyerwitheford/in
dex.htm.
Lawrence Lessig in his book Code and Other Laws of
Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999) offers a
convincing argument of why and how information
technology can be transformed from its present,
anarchistic state into a mechanism for regulation and
surveillance.
The most informed writer I have come across who
directly addresses hacking issues from a radical
perspective, is Richard Barbrook. His texts are easy to
find on the Internet.
In addition, I would like to promote Lewis Mumford,
whose works from the 30s are still stunning in their
actuality and perceptiveness.
Notes
1. Attributed to Bill Gates, according to James Wallace,
Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control
Cyberspace, (New York: Wiley, 1997), p. 266; quoted by
Barbook (1998); see also J.S. Kelly, 2000. "Opinion: Is
free software communist?" at
http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/02/11/free.s
oftware.idg/, accessed 4 March 2002, which notes that
"That infamous assertion is often attributed to Bill Gates,
although to be fair he claims he never made it."
2. Wright, Levine, and Sober, 1992, p. 11.
3. Marx's writings on the subject are sketchy, and
opinions among contemporary Marxists differ on what
he really meant. I will follow the authoritative, orthodox
interpretation of historical materialism as G. Cohen
defined it in his book Karl Marxs Theory of History: a
Defence.
4. "Beyond a certain point, the development of the
powers of production becomes a barrier for capital;
hence the capital relation a barrier for the development
of the productive powers of labour. When it has reached
this point, capital, i.e. wage labour, enters into the same
relation towards the development of social wealth and of
the forces of production as the guild system, serfdom,
slavery, and is necessarily stripped off as a fetter." Marx,
1993, p. 749.
5. Castells, 1996, volume I, p. 478.
6. Wright, Levine, and Sober, 1992, p. 37.
7. Cohen, 2000, p. 331.
8. The origin of the word 'patent' is equally intriguing It
derives from 'letters patent', open letters granted by
European sovereigns to conquer foreign lands or to
obtain import monopolies; see Shiva, 2000.
9. Advocated by Baran and Sweezy as criticized by
Shiller in Mosco and Wasko, 1988.
10. Braverman, 1998, p. 133, italics in original.
11. Expansionism (imperialism) is driven by capital's
simultaneous need to push back labour costs (wages)
while refining the production capacity. Consumer
markets in the capitalist nations, consisting of workers,
are thus unable to absorb the increased output of goods
and a market outside the capitalist area is required to
solve the crisis of overproduction. But as soon as the
outside is engaged it becomes internalised into the
capitalist economy and the search starts for a new
'outside'. For a comprehensive overview of capitalist
expansionism, see Hardt and Negri, 2000, p. 221 ff. Rosa
Luxemburg predicted that capitals infinite expansion
would collapse when confronted with the finite
boundaries of earth (Ibid., p. 228). Hardt and Negri
propose that globalisation is this point where the whole
outside has been internalised, but instead of collapsing
"capital no longer looks outside but rather inside its
domain, and this expansion is thus intensive rather than
extensive" (Ibid., p. 272). The intensive expansion is the
colonisation of culture.
12. Robins and Webster in Mosco and Wasko, 1988, pp.
65 and 66.
13. Dyer-Witheford, 1999, p. 180.
14. Arguably, Ivan Illich might have considered the
personal computer to be a potential tool of conviviality;
Illich, 1973, p. 22:
"Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can
be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as
desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by
the user. The use of such tools by one person does not
restrain another from using them equally. They do not
require previous certification of the user. Their existence
does not impose any obligation to use them. They allow
the user to express his meaning in action."
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