hydrarchist writes:

"The dotCommunist Manifesto"

Eben Moglen

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.

*  Professor of Law, Columbia University Law
School.

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.