[p2p-research] Fwd: [knowledgelab] <nettime> Pirates of the Internets - unite!

[Kevin Carson]

On 6/30/09, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> excellent analysis of the political nature of the pirates


>  -------- Original Message --------
>  Subject: <nettime> Pirates of the Internets - unite!

However, the heritage of the Swedish
>  pirate movement in the dot-com universe shines through in that the
>  spokespeople of piratedome deny that the conflicts in which they are
>  involved has anything to do with ownership, accumulation of capital, and
>  the like.

>  As for the second arm of the Swedish pirate movement, i.e. the
>  blogosphere, it is harder to give a precise reading of its political
>  colour from the cacophony of opinions. Anyway, having now followed the
>  discussions over a period of five years, my impression is that among the
>  blogs which carry heavy trafic and have high visibility, they either
>  claim to have surpassed the right-left divide altogether (often
>  expressed in the Deleuzian sound-bytes that were in vouge on the
>  contintent in the 90's and chastised by Richard Barbrook in his essay
>  'The Holy Fools'), or they openly announce an, often idiosyncratic,
>  neo-liberal interpretation of the world.

>  Finally, as concerns the core team behind the Pirate Bay, if judged by
>  their own statements, one of them, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, has declared
>  himself a supporter of  the Ayn Rand-ish the Classic liberal party,
>  another, Peter Sunde, is a recent member of the green party, while the
>  third is awovedly apolitical.

In fairness, I would point out that the open-source movement is
objectively at war with the basic structural foundations of
neoliberalism.  The draconian "intellectual property" regime enforced
by the WIPO Copyright Treaty, TRIPS, and the DMCA is at the heart of
the corporate global economy, and the leading sectors in the global
economy are all dependent on IP for their business model.  Even in
conventional manufacturing, patents are vitally important for
cartelizing markets and restricting the diffusion of production
technology ownership, so that Third World countries are locked into
the position of supplying sweatshop labor for Western TNC-owned
factories.

And if anyone from TPB is affiliated with an Ayn Randish anything,
there is a fundamental contradiction, since Ayn Rand and all the other
Randroids have been  dogmatically in favor of patents and copyright.
She defended them as property in the "product of the human mind,"
which she regarded as the basis of all property.

This reflects back on the claim
>  that the pirate movement stands beyond the right/left divide. What it
>  says is basically that questions about intellectual property, the
>  Internet etc. are detached from the main point of contestation between
>  the right and the left, i.e. how economical resources in society should
>  be distributed.

Agnostic on left-right issues or not, any movement centered on
organized defiance of IP law is challenging one of the most important
structural bases of the present distribution of economic resources.
To engage in revolt against IP law while expressing sympathy for
neoliberalism and Randianism, would be the equivalent of someone in
1400 actively fighting for an agenda of "the land to the tiller" while
professing sympathy for feudal landlords.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html