i. The User Insurgency

(a) As Critique of property

There is a more precise connection between this mass 'criminality' and the merging productive power; the desire to obtain media commodities for free is a powerful motivation for self-education the acquisition of new skills and knowledge: how to use cryptographic hashes, compression techniques, wider knowledge of less-charted (and thus safer) network spaces, familiarity with formats and the ability to render digital forms as physical objects such as mastered CDs and DVDs, familiarity with publishing techniques, wikis etc. File-sharing forums function as veritable apprentice-yards for the diffusion of techniques which once acquired are portable to uses outside of the reproduction of the commodity circuit.

(b) As Productive Force

"But the worker, as owner and seller of his labour-power, enters into relation with capital only as an individual; cooperation, the mutual relationship between workers,only begins with the labour process, but by then they have ceased to belong to themselves. On entering the labour process they are incorporated into capital. As co-operators, as members of a working organism, they merely form a particular mode of existence of capital. Hence the productive power developed by the worker socially is the productive power of capital." Panzieri

Critical interpretations of automation earmark the introduction of technology as either a reaction to the militancy of or, or an attack on, workers activity. This is sometimes described as the increasing role played by constant capital (investments, machinery) with respect to variable capital (labour). The worker is deskilled as the intelligence formerly drawn from living labour is invested in the machinery itself, the producer ceases to be the subject of production and becomes supervisor of a machine that has taken her place. In some cases the introduction of technology will result in unemployment whose disastrous consequences can be seen in a thousand former industrial towns turned wastelands.

P2P reverses this situation at least in part. As the range of its productive practices grow it substructs tasks from the market and the firm. Instead of 'management' or 'planning' these projects rely upon horizontal negotiation, modular production and exploits the ease and cheap nature of digital communications to overcome the need for a centrally located decision-maker, formerly known as the boss. Widespread social cooperation need longer be constrained to the firm - this is the fundamental change of peer to peer. Distinguishing this practice from real-world volunteerism are the low costs of coordination, the role of information (and its especial public good characteristics) as both raw material and output of the productive process and the access to a near infinite range of expertise and paralellizable workers through the network.

No objections to the creation of value per se.

Produces a decline in the level of political dependence.

(c) The Dark Side of the Collaborative Mode

ii. Response of the State

iii. Response of existing market incumbents

ii. Deregulation of the media

iii. We want the machines to work for us. To improve the standard of living whilst abolishing monotonous, labour.

Assessing the effects of technological innovation between potential productivity and real-world effect allows us to shine light on the social consequences at the level of distribution of wealth and crucially power, rather than fetichizing innovation in and of itself.

"The working-class struggle thus presents itself as the necessity of global opposition to the capitalist plan, where the fundamental factor is awareness -- let us call it dialectical awareness -- of the unity of the 'technical' and 'despotic' moments in the present organization of production. The relationship of revolutionary action to technological 'rationality' is to 'comprehend' it, but not in order to acknowledge and exalt it, rather in order to subject it to a new use: to the socialist use of machines .30" Panzieri

Caffentzis essay commentary

In the master's mind, "the machinery and his monopoly of it are inseparably united"12 Panzieri

iv. Freedom to be where we want and do what we like

"In fact, for Marx, free time for the free mental and social activity of individuals by no means simply coincides with the reduction of the 'working day'. It presupposes a radical transformation of the conditions of human labour, the abolition of wage labour and the "social regulation of the labour process" In other words, it presupposes the total overthrow of the capitalist relationship between despotism and rationality, for the formation of a society administered by free producers, in, which-with the abolition of production for the sake of production-planned development, the plan itself, rationality and technology would be subjected to the; permanent control of social forces, and work would thus (and only thus) be capable of becoming man's 'vital need'."

Difference between opposition within the accumulation mechanism and that at the level of the social relation of power that lies at the heart of the system as a whole.

v. Strategy "The tendential line that can be identified objectively as a valid hypothesis/guide lies in the strengthening and expansion of self--management demands. Since self-management demands are not posed merely as demands for 'cognitive' participation, but affect the concrete relationship rationalization/hierarchy/power, they do not remain closed within the ambit of the firm. Instead, they are precisely directed against the 'despotism' which capital projects and exercises over society as a whole, at all levels, and they are expressed as the need for a total overthrow of the system, by means of a global prise de conscience and a general struggle of the working class as such."

fn41: The representation of communist society as a society of 'abundance' of goods (even if not purely material ones) and of 'free time' is widespread in Soviet ideology, and is obviously the result of denying any effective social regulation of the labour process. 'Technological' illusions intervene today to sustain such ideology; for example, in R. Strumilin (On the Road to Communism, Moscow 1959), 'directing functions in the processes of production' are identified with 'technical' control, with the 'higher intellectual content' of work made possible by the "development of technology with its miraculous automatic mechanisms and electronic machines that 'think' ". Thus, automation will make it possible to achieve a really 'affluent' society of consumers of 'free time'; see above, note 30! As an example of typical deformation of Marx's texts on this point, see G. Friedmann, Industrial Society, New York 1955, where the worker's reappropriation of the product and of the content of work itself is identified with 'psychic-physiological control of work'!