Law in the Internet Society
When we talked today about political economy, I started thinking - I must confess, as I am prone to do - what would Marx make of this?

Well, he would probably think he was right. Such thinking fits neatly with his thinking: the spread of machines, or the creation of the all-encompassing, pervasive neuro-anatomy of the internet reminded me of a quote from the Communist Manifesto: 'the need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.'

Such prescience is characteristic of Marx. (Speaking of which, when I googled that quote, it actually returned this. But I digress.)

So then, how would Marx agree that the consumer driven economy as a method of resolving the problem of surplus? (o be honest, I'm not sure he would accept that this resolves the problem, which arguably was better managed by the destruction of capital via two World Wars. Perhaps the reliance on a consumer is mere temporary management of the chaotic nature of capitalism rather than its resolution.

For Marx in that sense, then, does the creation of the internet - like the industrial revolution, or the proletarianisation of Chinese peasants, say - pave the way for revolution? Is this what transforms the working class into the revolutionary class (like the bourgeois who now dominate)? Or is that age passed now? Is there another class of people who are the lynchpin to production (and consumption) that have the power to transform society? It leads me to an uncomfortable possibility that this class may in fact be techies and nerds. I doubt it, I still think it's the working class - the people who make and consume things - that make the world go around. I'd be curious to know if others agree.

-- LizzieOShea - 17 Sep 2015

You could take my contribution to this rumination to be the dotCommunistManifesto of 2003, I suppose.....

Yes I like this! And if anyone ever needed a justification for the abolition of property in ideas, surely this serves that purpose. Imagine a world where this was renationalised or re-appropriated!

My concern is that if we do think that 'the creators' are the revolutionary class (and this probably needs greater analysis) I'm a bit worried that this will go awry. There are so few people with knowledge and understanding of the web and how it works that a key project must be to develop such literacy more broadly, kind of like general literacy. The Rights of Man was read aloud in pubs because people couldn't read - so there are ways around it. But I'm concerned that the creators do not have political grounding (or a developed political culture) that protects against cooptation or compromise. There is no real movement to hold them accountable. Many techies I meet also think that technology will find a solution to many of these problems, like surveillance, data accumulation etc. That seems fundamentally to misunderstand the world we live in.

So we need more people who can speak their language to argue about these points and more people who speak the language to orient toward mass movements, away from power and privilege. Obvious really, I guess, just hard to put into action.


I share Lizzie's concerns, and add that I remain unconvinced by Eben's answer to my question today in class. As much as I agree that "increasing the quantity of human knowledge" is important for increasing class consciousness, I nonetheless feel that this revolutionary prescription departs from Marxist canon, the persuasiveness of which relies on its intimate marriage with the really existing material forces that govern human existence.

The production of human knowledge has two requirements. The first requirement is that human beings actually exist, else there would be no one to create knowledge. To exist, a human being must produce the means of her own subsistence. "By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life." Karl Marx, The German Ideology Ch. 1. A human being that does not produce food, water, etc. will not exist for long and will therefore not produce knowledge. Unfortunately, too often the global economic system organizes itself around the production of useless luxuries and frivolous intermediaries for the conversion of capital into itself. This reality impedes the pace with which human beings produce their material subsistence, which in turn impedes the existence of human beings, which in turn impedes the production of human knowledge. Thus, a central priority for the advocate of human knowledge production should be the redistribution of resources, labor, and capital from frivolous production to the production of the means of subsistence - the expectation being that once humans have the means to survive, they will do so long enough to engage in creative production.

The second requirement is that human beings possess time enough in their daily routine to produce creative work. Unfortunately, to survive in a capitalist society, proletarians are forced into a system of labor relations that alienate them from the the product of their work and inhibit their freedom to participate in creative production. A central priority of the human knowledge advocate should then be to liberate individuals from oppressive labor relations - the expectation being that freedom from exploitation will unlock creativity.

Ask yourself: what is biggest impediment to creative expression for the worker who spends 80 hours a week behind a desk to feed her family? For the young child in Mumbai who goes to bed hungry? For the wife of a cancer patient, who spends her life fearing she will wake up a widow the following morning? Are IP laws and Facebook news feeds really the biggest obstacle to their freedom? Color me unpersuaded. Ask any of these individuals, and they will be more than able to articulate the source of their exploitation, free software educational system or not. The Revolution need only reach them, through any means necessary. Through this lens, are Twitter, Facebook, etc. substantially less effective means to disseminate the language of freedom than, say, Diaspora? The former requires us to relinquish our right to privacy, but as larger networks they also allow us to reach more comrades. Why could it not be the case that through these exploitative systems, capitalism is "carry[ing] the seeds of its own destruction"? Karl Marx, Address to the Communist League.

To be clear, I do not dispute that use of free software is a valid expression of freedom or that in Utopia all creative material will be distributed freely and outside the influence of centralized power brokers. My qualm is with the implicit contention throughout these lectures that the Revolution turns on free software, when it has always been clear to me that the central problem is one of resource allocation. When humans can live without existential anxiety or fear, everything else follows naturally. That means the primary objective, rather than the secondary goal, should be to address the really existing material problems that plague humanity: starvation, disease, etc.

I will of course keep an open mind over the remainder of this class, but this is the current state of my thought development. I fear that our working theory requires us to spend too much time building a "new" box in which to accumulate human knowledge rather than filling in the boxes to which we already have access. We already possess the means to condemn the hypocrisy of those in power, even if the software, learning systems, networks, and tools are less than perfect. What prevents us from simply using what we have?

-- ShayBanerjee - 23 Sep 2015

 

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r5 - 23 Sep 2015 - 23:25:30 - ShayBanerjee
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