Search the archive.

The EU protects databases through sui generis. The literature about whether that has been a success is more mixed.

There are some other more obscure examples but those are the most important two to know.

Previously in the chapter it was said that up until the breakthrough of capi-talism, nation states, and a modern juridical system, commoners tended to identify themselves more with outlaws than with law authorities. Indeed, the social bandit as a champion of the little man is a recurrent theme in folk lore stretching from ancient China and feudal Europe to nineteenth cen-tury America. The argument put forward here is that the hacker movement might signal the return of the social bandit. The status of hackers as either social bandits or criminals depends on their relation towards the majority of ordinary computer users and citizens. Law, norm systems, and technology are intertwined in a struggle over fixating the public image of the hacker as either one or the other.File-sharing networks provide a good example of how a particular archi-tecture can strengthen the social aspects of lawbreaking. The open invitation millions of regular computer users to share copyrighted files with each other has contributed to undermining the legitimacy of intellectual prop-erty. Efforts by law enforcers to isolate infringers and identify ringleaders are frustrated by the response of hackers to dislocate information flows, involve more people, and boost the heat losses of the juridical system. In the old days, a single pirate sold thousands of copies of a copyrighted work for profit, mirroring the position of the official vendor. In file-sharing networks, the position of the distributor has been replaced by thousands of individuals all acquiring a single copy from disparate sources. Since every petty violation of copyright is, in its aggregate, equally destabilising to the intellectual prop-erty regime as any other, the law has to track down every single perpetrator. Hence a growing number of ordinary computer users come to know the punitive side of law and order. Just as with a light bulb, the way to counter for heat losses in the juridical system is to scale up energy. In other words, the penalty for violating intellectual property must be set much higher than is called for by the nature of the crime in order to compensate for the small likelihood of getting caught. At the time of writing, copyright infringers are being fined and sued; however, judging by the current trends, they might soon find themselves behind bars. The distinction which courts tradition-ally have upheld between for-profit and non-profit motives, corresponding with the separation between civil and criminal offences, is being erased from both European and American copyright law. The reason is that if any safety vaults are left in the statute book, whereby some conditions must be met to merit a harsher sentence, hackers will quickly reorganise information flows beneath that minimum criteria. Likewise, the other hallmarks of the rule of law, predictability of outcomes and checks on law authorities, pro-vide loopholes that can be exploited by hackers. Consequently, directives on intellectual property are made obsolete and have to be replaced at an accel-erated pace. Ideally, in order to be effective, the police would need a penalty system that could be adjusted at the same speed as hackers write code. That would require an open-ended law, providing corporate lawyers with a carteblanche for making up enforcement policies as they go. It would require, in other words, a permanent state of exception. The reflections above suggest a similarity in strategies between hackers and the Baader-Meinhof league, though hackers are considerably more peaceful, playful and effective in their course of action. Namely, the idea that by provoking the democratic state into exaggerated and indiscriminate violence, the masses will be forced to choose sides. When legislators become increasingly out-of-step with public sentiments on intellectual property law, people tend to identify themselves with the cause of hackers. It is thus hackers can reclaim the status of social bandits.These observations clarify the proposition made in the introduction of the book: Intellectual property law ought to be read out as a negative shape in the struggle of hackers. The inability of legislators to affect outcomes and enforce policies owes to capital having lost its monopoly over the means to dissolve and reorganise the virtual, networked space. This statement can be examined in more detail by borrowing from the anthropologist David Harvey. He says that the means of distributing space is continuously being revolutionised by capital in the same way as it revolutionises other means of production. In this drive, the incentive to reduce spatial barriers and to shorten circulation time are two guiding principles, in addition to the prior-ity of removing strongholds of working class power. But to dissolve rigidi-ties in one dimension necessarily implies the construction of a new rigid structure on top of which the previous terrain can be restructured. In Har-vey’s words: “In order to overcome spatial barriers and to ‘annihilate space with time’, spatial structures are created which themselves ultimately act as a barrier to further accumulation. These spatial structures are expressed, of course, in the fixed and immovable form of transport facilities, plant, and other means of production and consumption which cannot be moved with-out being destroyed.”53 The Internet is a showcase of how communications and logistics have been reorganised to undermine national borders, over-turn traditions, redefine power relations, accelerate product-cycles, unlock financial flows, and expand global markets. Concurrently, however, the opti-cal cables, the computer terminals, the Internet protocols, the widespread familiarity with a particular graphical interface, to mention just a few fac-tors, cause a temporary fixation of the current setup of the Internet. Note to be taken, capital is not hindered from replacing the Internet because the structure is deeply entrenched. It is the other way around. The Internet is the most fluid form of structure allowing the widest scope of flexibility and per-petual restructuring within its set framework. The benefits are easy to spot. Nationally based working class organisations have been mortally wounded by the removal of frictions to capital, in part made possible by electronic networks. The advantage capital has won in this regard against organised labour is, however, offset by a new challenger. At least in some respects, capital and living labour meet on near equal terms in the computer network, since everyone is moving at the same (instant) speed. If capital finds a way to dissolve the current setup into an even more fluid form, it certainly will. But that would, (1) level the balance of power between living labour and capital/dead labour yet further, and, (2), this time around, it might be labour that dissolves and redefines the latest fixation of space.

Building on this heritage, we argue that hacking code/spaces – manipulating for subversion rather than inoperability – represents a key moment of transgressive power within modern society. Coleman refers to hacking as “a site where craft and craftiness converge” (2016, p. 161), also understood as a clever and non-obvious solution to problem-solving especially related to gaining access to resources (often digital). The term comes from computing and Levy’s (1984) characterisation of hackers as prioritising open information, deconstructing systems and community sharing. Central to this definition and actual practice is that the motivation for hacking is not necessarily a political project that easily conforms to offline activism or resistance. Despite this apolitical bent, Coleman argues that hackers’ actions are transgressive in that they represent cooperative projects that “experiment in the making of a social commonwealth; it is there where the hard work of freedom is practiced” (2013, p. 210). This produces a “particular geography of resistance” (Coleman, 2014, p. 393), such as the decentralised network used by the hacker group Anonymous that coalesces around various projects driven by emotive energy (e.g., exposure of a gang rape) via available cracks in computing systems (lax password security and low-cost distribution). According to Coleman this structures resistance so that short-term power is achievable for brief durations, while long-term dominance by any single group or person is virtually impossible. ... In this way, the multitudinal ‘nature’ of Anonymous precludes its subjection to either aspirational figures working internally, or external figure. (2014, pp. 393–394) In other words, hacking can temporarily subvert or redirect attention, resources or rules by exploiting cracks in computer systems to achieve short-term goals. The selection of these goals, however, need not be driven by desire for democratic process, inclusivity or avoiding harm, making outcomes quite uneven and even potentially injurious to individuals only peripherally connected to the ostensible aim of an action. Importantly for this paper, these analyses of hacking emphasise the ethos and organisation of this practice rather than the technology, suggesting that hacking extends beyond the manipulation of computers. For example, Garrett (2013) calls the practice of urban explorers “place hacking” (see also Dodge & Kitchin, 2006). This kind of hacking also prioritises information-sharing and community and focuses on understanding how systems – in this case the built environment of cities – fit together and how one gains access to parts that are normally closed off (Garrett, 2013). While the motivations behind hacking can be diverse – exploration, personal satisfaction, reputational enhancement, etc. – its continued and expanded use echoes long-standing social practices (DeBord, 1995; Lefebvre, 1968). Moreover, while urban explorers primarily see their motives as apolitical, the transgressive nature of them imbues them with politics because they allow one to “rethink not just one’s own identity but also the relationship between power and urban space” (Garrett, 2013, p. 8). Thus, to hack is to transgress and thereby actuate a moment of power relative to the larger capitalist structures in which we live. Even when hacking – be it creating free software, accessing and distributing incriminating materials, drifting through a city or playful mischief – is not deemed overtly political by its practitioners, the transgressive power and ethical concerns remain. Given its transgressive power, the practices and ethics of code/space hacking of the economy and everyday life becomes of fundamental interest. Like other hackers, code/space hackers seek to understand how systems function (in this case how the material world and code are combined via algorithms) in order to access restricted spaces of direct interest or benefit for them. Whereas computer hackers might use scripts to search for unsecured computer ports and space hackers might hop a fence to enter an abandoned factory, code/space hackers alternatively use digital and material elements to access the opportunities and offerings of the hybrid spaces of our economy and everyday lives.

The networked meshing of hackers, artists and activists has made public free/libre, open-source and creative-commons concepts.1 This section will consider the hacker identity and hacker social and cultural relations. I posit that increasing contact with f/los & creative-commons artifacts, technologies and economics and the wider dissemination of f/los & creative-commons memes is raising popular consciousness of several emerging redefinitions for concepts such as freedom, property, production and ownership. Freedom and openness are two central concepts in hackerism and the contemporary social movements it has influenced. This section examines critically the political philosophies of hackerism in order to reveal the meaning of these emerging redefinitions of freedom and openness and the challenges they present to the corresponding dominant liberal notions of the same terms. To hack is to play, to learn, to survive.2 The hacker supports his/her own being through the application of his/her individual characteristics in relation to his/her social and material conditions and gains pleasurable satisfaction in doing so. As MacKenzie Wark puts it in A Hacker Manifesto, the hacker “produces the possibility of production, the possibility of making something of and with the world - and of living off the surplus produced by the application of abstraction to nature - to any nature.”3 . The hacker disposition is demonstrated in the real, lived lives of humans and the development of all human civilisations. What I am suggesting by ascribing these characteristics to all humans qua human is that the hacker is the innate modality of humanity. Hacking, according to Wark, discovers “the nature of nature, its productive - and destructive - powers. This applies as much in physics as in sexuality, in biology as in politics, in computing as in art or philosophy. The nature of any and every domain may be hacked. It is the nature of hacking to discover freely, to invent freely, to create and produce freely.”4 To hack is also to subvert and resist. The desire to hack the information society emerges negatively, in opposition to the challenge of increasingly rapid enclosure of the immaterial and cultural commons and against the dislocation from history and society that virtual and networked property relations effect. Indeed, as both Wark and Himanen have argued, it is the hacker who is capable of answering the property question in capitalist societies by proposing an “alternative spirit for the network society”5 creating “new kinds of relation, with unforeseen properties, which question the property form itself” 6 . This presents a challenge to the dominant spirit of contemporary advanced capitalism. The hacker proposes free production and free access in contrast to the private property of capital. I will return to these new kinds of relationships later.

(George Defamos, Johan Söderberg, Critical Theorist, Researcher, Hacker 2009). The hacker movement as a continuation of labour struggle. Capital & Class, 33(1), 53-73. )//MRS.MRS

In our use of the term hacking, we mean the act of taking a pre-existing system and bending it to serve a different end from that for which it was originally intended, and hence it is implicit in hacking that its significance cannot be known simply from knowing its point of departure. We emphasise this because the political pretensions of hackers can easily be dismissed. The majority of hackers are white, male and belong to the western middle class. Likewise, the profession of programming is descended from white-collar engineers. Historically speaking, those engineers and the main frame computers over which they presided were instrumental in imposing management control over factory workers. As for the internet, most people are familiar with its origin in the military-industrial complex. Without doubt, something of that heritage is reflected in the worldview of the hacker movement. A common point of departure when hackers position themselves in the world is the notion of the information age. The concept was cooked up during the Cold War by US social scientists wishing to replace Marxism with a less subversive master narrative. The ideological load of the ‘end-to-ideology’ argument that underpins notions about the information age has been vividly demonstrated before(Webster, ; Barbrook, ). Thus it is understandable that a chorus of left-leaning scholars over the years has decried ‘cyber-politics’ for being individualistic, consumerist and entrepreneurial The hacker movement as labour struggle Programming and labour struggle(Siegel & Markoff, ; Kroker, ; Liu, ). Many hackers are aware of the paradoxical blend between libertarianism and socialism that underpins their philosophy and indeed, have often pointed it out to scholars. The politics of hacking is hard to pin down because it is a synthesis of many irreconcilable things. To use a fashionable term, it is a hybrid. On the one hand, there is the line running from the white-collar engineers of the 1950s to present-day hackers; and on the other, another line connects hacking to the resistance of the machine operators working under those engineers. In order to prevent accidents and malfunctions, machine operators have often by themselves and against the wish of managers made efforts to become familiar with the instructions relating to their machinery. In addition, once operators understood how the technology worked, they knew how to reconfigure the apparatus and lower its work pace, which had been previously set at a higher speed by managers and engineers. Managers responded to this practice by hiding the mechanics from the operators (Noble, ), and thus the conflict of interest between labour and capital over the exploitation of surplus value was now played out in a struggle over who had access to the technology. It is the same concern that informs hackers’ demand for free access to information and free software tools. What workers and hackers have in common is their rejection of Taylorism. This bond is made evident the more routinised the programming profession becomes (Kraft, ).Routinisation was given a strong impetus in the s, when computers began to be used by businesses. A labour market for programmers was created together with educational organizations trained and certified programmers. The goal of ensuring as mooth supply of computer professionals, however, turned out to be elusive. For as long as a market for programmers has existed, its seems to have been plagued by a supposed labour shortage(Chabrow, ). It is not a shortage of trained programmers in absolute numbers that has troubled corporate recruiters, though. Rather, once managers discovered that some programmers were several times more productive than others, they recognized a problem in identifying the right programmer for the job. Given that living labour accounts for two-thirds of total costs in software development projects (Lakha, ), and that ‘the cost of software has always been development cost, not replication cost’ (Brooks,), the question of how to increase the productivity of labour has been a looming issue (Kim, ). Over the years, managers grew increasingly disconcerted by the absence of ‘a universally accepted classification scheme for programmers’ based on56Capital & Class 9757‘accepted norms with regard to biographical, educational and job experience data’ (Sackman et al., ).The difficulty of employers in deciding whether a potential programmer will perform poorly or exceptionally can be attributed to a failure of capital in measuring this kind of labour. Such a failure is also suggested by the diversity of backgrounds within the software community, as has been often commented by insiders: ‘In what other field are you likely to find a Ph.D and a person whose education stopped at the high school level working as equals on the same difficult technical problem, e.g., the development of a compiler?’ (Orden, : ). The inability of capital to measure the labour of programmers is a result of the irresistance against Taylorism. In the words of a manager, ‘the technologists more closely identified with the digital computer have been the most arrogant in their wilful disregard of the nature of the manager’s job. These technicians have clothed themselves in the garb of the arcane wherever they could do so, thus alienating those whom they would serve’ (Datamation, ).The nascent discipline of software engineering grew, to a certain extent, out of managers’ compulsion to rationalise the work process of programmers. In contrast to the ‘black art’ of code writing, software engineering was heralded in trade magazines as‘the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance ofsoftware’. This is not to say that the academic field of software engineering was a managerial plot; but merely that the innovations that sprang from its bosom were systematically deployed by managers in order to extend their control over the labour process. A case in point is that of the assemblers, compilers and technologies that come under the rubric of‘automatic programming’, designed to perform a functionformerly carried out by a human programmer (Kraft, ; Parnas,). Another set of innovations that descends from software engineering is the use of methodologies. Methodologies (i.e.structured approaches or object orientation) provide frameworks within which programmers are constrained from doing things incorrectly. In the hands of managers, however, these techniques have often turned into instruments of control (Glass, ;Keggler, ; Kraft, ), since they increase managers’ ability to break the programming process down into functions consisting ofa definite number of tasks. Thus specific tasks can be assigned to programmers while managers reserve for themselves thedecision-making authority. There is nothing inherently stifling inthese methodologies, styles, and techniques — were it not the. The hacker movement as labour struggle case that they have been used to turn programmers into fragment labourers and deny them knowledge of the whole of the labour process (Hannemyr, ).

[Johan Söderberg (Associate professor of Theory of Science, at the department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, Göteborgs Universitet, Sweden) “Hacking Capitalism, The Free and Open Source Software Movement” https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203937853, accessed 7-13-2024]

Though these perils are very real, this book will investigate capital’s bid to commodify information from a different angle altogether. The intellectual property regime should be read out as a ‘negative shape’ in the struggle of hackers. Hacking is the prism through which the book moves outwards to look at intellectual property law, computing, the Internet, and networked capitalism in general. It is the restructuring of capitalism and the possibilities of resisting it that is at the heart of our discussion. The critique is made from a general Marxist theoretical viewpoint. Marxism, however, is as multifaceted as the many topics covered in the book. In order to unravel hacking, we have to cross through innumerable controversies, positions and hypothesises, taking issue with camps within the hacker movement, reformist intellectual property critics, mainstream economic theory, as well as different schools within the Marxist discipline. This is “reflected in the style of writing. The argument in the book progresses by a method of triangulation, closing in on the subject from several different angles at once. Few self-described hackers will recognise themselves in the result. Were we to judge the politics of hacking by an opinion poll among the members of the hacker movement, we might have concluded that hacking is predominantly apolitical, and possibly with a bent towards liberal, voluntarist ideology. Appearance to the contrary, however, this book is not a historical nor an anthropological account of the FOSS community. What concerns us is not ‘hackers as a noun’ but ‘hacking as a verb’. Hacking is emancipatory to the extent that it opens up the practice of intervening in computer technology to a non-denumerable mass of people. In other words, its politics consist in that decisions about technological development escape from being confined to either professions or/and subcultures. This potential of hacking is set back not only by intellectual property law, knowledge monopolies, and black box designs, but also by identities excluding outsiders. The hacker movement is of interest in so far as it helps us to understand the practice of hacking. Our ambition is not, though, to explain the FOSS movement with Marxist theory, but to take hacking as a departing point when reviewing Marxist theory in relation to networked capitalism.

The productive forces necessary for socialism exist in the US and throughout the global north. The conditions to eradicate poverty, homelessness, create non- ablest spaces, and so on exist. It just takes the political will to make this material reality free from its capitalist confines. For working- class activists living in the global north, this needs to be emphasized ad nauseum. As Marx says, the bourgeoisie create their own “gravediggers”: “the advance of industry … replaces the isolation of the workers…with their revolutionary combination, due to association (Marx, 1970: 930 FN). However, and most unfortunately, the simple centralization of workers in one place (like a city or a factory) does not automatically produce revolutionary consciousness amongst the workers themselves. Capitalism and all of its vulgarities still persist; something is blocking the transition. Many point to things such as ideology, bourgeois cultural hegemony, “false consciousness,” “desire,” and “mystification” as reasons for the nonexistence of a working- class revolution in the US. The argument goes: the reason feudalism could be transcended was because in feudalism the division between the time when serfs/peasants were working for their own subsistence and directly for the lords was clear as noonday. Feudal exploitation was achieved through “extra- economic” means as Wood (2017) says. In capitalism, “surplus labour and necessary labour are mingled together” (Marx, 1970: 346). “Mystification” is built into the wage- relation itself (see Burawoy, 2012). There is some deal of truth that workers in capitalism can fall for imperialist- capitalist ideology, but I argue that there are actual real material and structural reasons for the nonexistence of working- class revolutions in the US and global north more broadly. If one actually talks to working people, a lot of them know that things in their world are messed up and don’t necessarily buy into capitalist ideology. Though many do not have revolutionary consciousness yet, they are not simply tricked by imperialist- capitalist ideology. “The everyday” for US workers is in the workplace. Many work multiple jobs just to scrape by. Working people just want to come home from work and enjoy the little free time they have, or they are simply working so much that it is almost impossible to have revolutionary consciousness, or if they do they cannot act upon it because they are just trying to survive, and thus doubt better days are ahead. But, these conditions can be overcome. Truly revolutionary working- class ideas do not arise spontaneously within the working class itself. Marxism has to be learned by the working masses, and it is indeed a science that working and oppressed people can learn; it just has to be introduced. It must be introduced by a revolutionary vanguard party composed of the most advanced and class conscious working people. Vanguard parties provide the material and infrastructural foundation for working- class people to join the ranks of the revolutionaries (see Dean, 2016). Workers must be able to understand and explain the class character of all political phenomenon—Marxism provides this. In “What Is to Be Done?” Lenin says that a class conscious worker cannot be left to work 11 hours a day in a factory if we want the worker to develop clear revolutionary class consciousness. Thus, as he says, the party must make the arrangements necessary to ensure that the worker can have more free time for organizing and developing revolutionary class consciousness. The vanguard party form makes joining the revolution truly accessible to the vast masses of people. To paraphrase Lenin (1987 [1929]), the working class left to organize themselves will fall into trade unionism, which is ingrained in bourgeois ideology and thus cannot transcend the capitalist mode of production. A Marxist (i.e. historical materialist) understanding of society can indeed be understood by the masses of people, which will in turn unleash the power of class consciousness itself as a real material power. The way Marx explains how the capitalist mode of production develops through time empowers workers and provides revolutionary optimism/hope. As the productive forces develop, more and more proletarians are produced and less and less capitalists exist (due to competition and monopolization, etc.). Out of market competition, “[o]ne capitalist always strikes down many others” (Marx, 1970: 929). The means of labor are transformed into forms “that can only be used in common.” Thus, as the capitalist mode of production develops, The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production … The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. (Marx, 1970: 929) The “immanent laws of capitalist production” itself leads to not only class struggle but also to communist revolution. The laws of competition within the capitalist mode of production have the tendency to constantly revolutionize/ develop the productive forces even in the era of monopoly capitalism. The developed productive forces that are created in capitalism create the foundations from which socialist society can arise (see Phillips and Rozworski, 2019). In Capital, Marx says it will be easier to move beyond capitalism than it was to move beyond feudalism, for the simple fact that during the transition from feudalism to capitalism “it was a matter of the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers.” But in the case of transitioning out of capitalism, “we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people[!]” (Marx, 1970: 929–930). Thus, to end capitalist private ownership of the means of production, we only have to usurp a handful of capitalists, which numerically speaking should be easier to do than usurping millions of people as what occurred within the process of primitive accumulation that created the social conditions necessary for the capitalist mode of production. The inert power working people have exists at all times (even in eras of global working- class defeat and retreat); workers can simply shut production by striking, occupying the workplace, and so on (see Allen and Mitchell, 2003; Glassman, 2003). A nice made- up scenario I like to give students is that no one would really notice if all the bosses/ CEOs did not show up to work for one day, but if all workers did not show up for one day, all of society would simply shut down and reach a standstill. Additionally, and most importantly, the proletariat can use its class power to overthrow and transcend the bourgeois order by seizing political power—that is, the state—and radically transform it to serve the class interests of the working class. This cannot be dismissed as utopian. It has been done in history and it will occur again. This revolutionary takeover allows for the working class to make “despotic inroads on the rights of [bourgeois] property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production” (Marx and Engels, 1978: 490; see also Lenin, 1987 [1932]: 336).

London, Author of several Books at the Intersection of Political Philosophy and Current Events. “Beginning again at the End: A Dialectics of Extinction,” New Formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics, Volume 107-108, accessed via ProQuest / spp)

I. Capitalism as the time of catastrophe; catastrophe as capitalism’s chronic condition: this is the point from which radical thought needs to begin.

So, back to the recent Labour victory, one can see how it not only involved a hegemonic reappropriation of a series of motifs which were usually inscribed into the Conservative field—family values, law and order, individual responsibility; the Labour ideological offensive also separated these motifs from the obscene phantasmatic subtext which sustained them in the Conservative field—in which ‘toughness on crime’ and ‘individual responsibility’ subtly referred to brutal egotism, to the disdain for victims, and other ‘basic instincts’. The problem, however, is that the New Labour strategy involved its own ‘message between the lines’: we fully accept the logic of Capital, we will not mess about with it. Today, financial crisis is a permanent state of things the reference to which legitimizes the demands to cut social spending, health care, support of culture and scientific research, in short, the dismantling of the welfare state. Is, however, this permanent crisis really an objective feature of our socio-economic life? Is it not rather one of the effects of the shift of balance in the ‘class struggle’ towards Capital, resulting from the growing role of new technologies as well as from the direct internationalization of Capital and the co-dependent diminished role of the Nation-State which was further able to impose certain minimal requirements and limitations to exploitation? In other words, the crisis is an ‘objective fact’ if and only if one accepts in advance as an unquestionable premise the inherent logic of Capital—as more and more left-wing or liberal parties have done. We are thus witnessing the uncanny spectacle of social-democratic parties which came to power with the between-the-lines message to Capital ‘we will do the necessary job for you in an even more efficient and painless way than the conservatives’. The problem, of course, is that, in today’s global socio-political circumstances, it is practically impossible effectively to call into question the logic of Capital: even a modest social-democratic attempt to redistribute wealth beyond the limit acceptable to the Capital ‘effectively’ leads to economic crisis, inflation, a fall in revenues and so on. Nevertheless, one should always bear in mind how the connection between ‘cause’ (rising social expenditure) and ‘effect’ (economic crisis) is not a direct objective causal one: it is always-already embedded in a situation of social antagonism and struggle. The fact that, if one does not obey the limits set by Capital, a crisis ‘really follows’, in no way ‘proves’ that the necessity of these limits is an objective necessity of economic life. It should rather be conceived as a proof of the privileged position Capital holds in the economic and political struggle, as in the situation where a stronger partner threatens that if you do X, you will be punished by Y, and then, upon your doing X, Y effectively ensues.

Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director emeritus and founder of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, believes if we go much above 2°C we will quickly get to 4°C anyway because of the tipping points and feedbacks, which would spell the end of human civilisation.

“There is a very big risk that we will just end our civilisation”: Professor Schellnhuber

The perpetually growing economy is generally regarded as a viable and desirable societal objective [1–4]. Whilst ‘infinite growth’ may not be the words used to characterize and exhort a perpetually growing economy, they are nonetheless an accurate characterization of the objective. The words in current fashion for defending the viability of a perpetually growing economy are phrases such as ‘green growth’, ‘dematerialization’, and ‘decoupling’ [5–9]. The decades old question ‘Is economic growth environmentally sustainable?’ remains contested despite its apparent simplicity. The Limits to Growth [10] was a seminal work that warned of the consequences of exponential growth with finite resources. The World3 models underpinning the Limits to Growth analysis were validated using actual data after twenty and thirty years [11,12]. A further independent evaluation of the projections of the World3 models showed that our actual trajectory since 1972 has closely matched the ‘Business as Usual’ scenario [13]. Increasing recognition of the causes and consequences of climate change have generated a great deal of doubt regarding the feasibility of simultaneously pursing economic growth and preventing and/or mitigating climate change [14–18]. Contemporary work in this broad area of assessing anthropogenic impact on the planet suggests that several ‘Planetary Boundaries’ have been crossed [19].

The question as to whether human society can decouple economic growth–defined as growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP)–from environmental impacts has not been settled. The decoupling debate itself is polarized with a preponderance of neo-classical economists on one side (decoupling is viable) and ecological economists on the other (decoupling is not viable) [20]. The divide over the compatibility of economic growth and environms sental limits extends into the general public [2] with substantial polarization in ideas of decoupling, dematerialization, and limits to growth.

This mainstream vision of how to achieve a sustainable world is coherent in theory, at best, but demonstrably it does not reflect empirical reality (see Alexander, 2014). Although many economies around the world are indeed getting better at producing commodities more cleanly and efficiently (a process known as ‘relative decoupling’), overall ecological impact is nevertheless still increasing, because every year increasing numbers of commodities are being produced, exchanged, and consumed as a result of growing economies (Jackson, 2009, Ch. 5). We might have more fuel-efficient cars, for example, but the rebound effect is that we are also driving more and buying more cars. This is but one example of the ‘Jevons paradox’ that permeates market societies and beyond (Polimeni et al., 2009) – a paradox, so-called, because a per unit reduction in the throughput of commodities does not always lead to reduced ecological impact, since those efficiency improvements are often outweighed by the increasing amounts of commodities that are consumed (Holm and Englund, 2009). The implication of this is that technology and efficiency improvements are not going to solve the ecological crisis, as their most optimistic advocates and popular consciousness seem to assume they can (Lovins, 1998) – at least, not unless the highly developed nations also transition away from growth economics. Efficiency without sufficiency is lost.

“Net zero by 2050” (or 2060 in China’s case) has become the new mainstream political mantra on climate change. However, this ambitious-sounding, yet still far from adequate, goal is premised on a series of new technologies that remain untested at best and completely hypothetical at worst.

The name dropping of an array of these high-tech “solutions” to the climate crisis was a feature of US President Joe Biden’s Earth Day summit in April. Among those in which Biden has promised to invest US$35 billion as part of his proposed American Jobs Plan are carbon capture and storage, hydrogen, nuclear, floating offshore wind, biofuels and electric vehicles.

The technological dynamism of capitalism has always been a powerful argument in its defense. But one of its secrets is that at the heart of this change we find neither bold entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, nor established firms.

Investments pushing the frontiers of scientific knowledge are just too risky. The advances sought may not be forthcoming. Those that do occur may not ever be commercially viable. Any potentially profitable results that do arise may take decades to make any money. And when they finally do, there are no guarantees initial investors will appropriate most of the resulting windfall.

While the formal subsumption of labour under capital is based on the extraction of absolute surplus-value, the real subsumption, which gives representation to the specificity of the capitalist mode of production, is grounded in the appropriation of relative surplus-value. That is, “with the production of relative surplus-value […] the whole real form of the mode of production changes and a specifically capitalist mode of production arises (also technologically)”, thus social property relations are subordinated in its totality, “on the basis of which and with which, at the same time, only the relations of production corresponding to the capitalist process of production develop between the various agents of production, and especially between capitalist and wage labourer” (Marx, 1988, p. 95).

The development of production—private property—presupposes improving its efficiency; the increase in output per time unit and productive unit demands the revolution of the factors of production. Private property improvement thus presupposes intellectual property development. The progress of private property cannot be explained by a simple material appropriation—as during the process of the so-called primitive accumulation in which the soil was “enclosed”—again, the result of this process becomes the premise for its further expansion. Intellectual appropriation advances at first as a product of the now-established economic imperatives. The initial competition among capitalists, on the one hand, and labourers, on the other, imposes an immanent compulsion for efficiency over the means of doing. Individual know-how alone does not suffice to actualise this legality.

In an introductory note to the Results of the Immediate Process of Production, Ernst Mandel highlights Marx’s insight that “under capitalism, labour should not be seen as manual labour only, but as the combined or collective labour potential […] of all those whose labour is indispensable to produce the final product” (Mandel, 1976, p. 945); this reinforces both the social character of production and the metabolic dimension of its parts, which also implies that intellectual labour is embedded in this process. Understanding this basis seems crucial to an adequate treatment of intellectual property—because knowledge and information are always embedded in social relations of production as both an input and output (as also Kenneth Arrow noticed, see infra). When its formal subsumption gives way to real subsumption, then its character changes because its universal character within social property relations entails a drastically more significant pressure of universal capitalist legality of commodification. Economic laws are not set in stone because they merely represent the tendency (legality), δύναμις, and logic of a given existing mode of production; thus, “economic categories belonging to earlier epochs of production acquire a specifically different, historical character on the basis of the capitalist mode of production” (Marx, 1988, p. 27). Knowledge is not simply an economic category, but its genesis, development, and constant transformation are the product of ontological relations of production and, as such, attain particular concrete characters. Concrete knowledge dialectically becomes an imperative means for shaping, forming, and transforming social material relations. It is in this sense that one must understand Marx’s assertion: “The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual process of life in general. It is not the consciousness of people that determines their being, but quite the opposite, it is their social being that determines their consciousness” (Marx, 1961, p. 8f).

When knowledge becomes commodified, then its particular relations coincide with the universal capitalist commodification. It goes without saying that knowledge is neither intrinsically a commodity nor that all knowledge relations are subjected to real subsumption by capital. It is those social relations of knowledge that, when subjected to capitalist imperatives, underwent (and conversely are still undergoing) a transformation from formal to real subsumption. Real subsumption imposes the necessity of privatisation of intellectual appropriation (property). It is not the division of labour in-itself that affords knowledge its private character; on the contrary, this process of socialisation presupposes and results in an accentuation of the social development and exchange of knowledge. The dependency and interdependency of knowledge corresponding to the unfolding of social relations appear as its general ontological condition. It is thus the process of privatisation itself, the imposition of privatisation as a social-ontological necessity, that metamorphoses intellectual property into a private existence, providing a particular and contradictory existence to the production and appropriation of knowledge.

Words such as “paradise” or “love” or “communion” are certainly absent from our political vernacular, excluded on account of their “utopian” connotations or their lack of steely-eyed “realism.” Although this is a book about the past, I have always kept before me its larger contemporary religious, philosophical, and political implications. The book should make these clear enough; I will only say here that one of my broader intentions is to challenge the canons of “realism,” especially as defined in the “science” of economics. As the master science of desire in advanced capitalist nations, economics and its acolytes define the parameters of our moral and political imaginations, patrolling the boundaries of possibility and censoring any more generous conception of human affairs. Under the regime of neoliberalism, it has been the chief weapon in the arsenal of what David Graeber has characterized as “a war on the imagination,” a relentless assault on our capacity to envision an end to the despotism of money.24 Insistent, in Margaret Thatcher’s ominous ukase, that “there is no alternative” to capitalism, our corporate plutocracy has been busy imposing its own beatific vision on the world: the empire of capital, with an imperial aristocracy enriched by the labor of a fearful, overburdened, and cheerfully servile population of human resources. Every avenue of escape from accumulation and wage servitude must be closed, or better yet, rendered inconceivable; any map of the world that includes utopia must be burned before it can be glanced at. Better to follow Miller’s wisdom: we already inhabit paradise, and we can never make ourselves fit to live in it if we obey the avaricious and punitive sophistry professed in the dismal pseudoscience.

The grotesque ontology of scarcity and money, the tawdry humanism of acquisitiveness and conflict, the reduction of rationality to the mercenary principles of pecuniary reason—this ensemble of falsehoods that comprise the foundation of economics must be resisted and supplanted. Economics must be challenged, not only as a sanction for injustice but also as a specious portrayal of human beings and a fictional account of their history. As a legion of anthropologists and historians have repeatedly demonstrated, economics, in Graeber’s forthright dismissal, has “little to do with anything we observe when we examine how economic life is actually conducted.” From its historically illiterate “myth of barter” to its shabby and degrading claims about human nature, economics is not just a dismal but a fundamentally fraudulent science as well, akin, as Ruskin wrote in Unto This Last, to “alchemy, astrology, witchcraft, and other such popular creeds.”25

Radicals seek to go to the root of current problems, taking on the main currents beneath the melting ice brought to us by capitalist “modernity.” Liberals and progressives prefer to skate around on the liquifying surface.

Take the (just-suggested) topic of climate change, arguably the biggest issue of our or any time (there’s no democracy, common good, equality and social justice on a dead planet).

Post-9 / 11 acceleration of such risky research reveals the logic of state protectionism in U.S. biological warfare research. Like other militarized sciences, the industry embodies a protectionism infused with white masculinity and technoscientific authority. 33 I have in my previous work on U.S. biodefense argued that it is a form of institutionalized “white scientific masculinity”: institutions of science and security associated with white males (e.g., defense sciences) get construed as infallible founts of knowledge and expertise.34 The post-9 / 11 regime of biosecurity thus garnered the U.S. biodefense industry, a trusted institution of “white scientific masculinity,” an even greater ability to conduct risky research without significant scrutiny. But no case better illustrates U.S. impudence in pursuing new avenues of risky research than that conducted with smallpox. Smallpox is known for its historical devastation—it has an approximately one-third mortality rate and was responsible for almost half a billion deaths worldwide in the twentieth century. It wreaked havoc in Native America centuries ago when European settler-colonists—in an early example of biological warfare— intentionally infected native populations who, without prior exposure, were decimated by the disease (Christopher et al. 1997; Duffy 2002; USAMRIID 2004). In 1979, smallpox became the first disease to be successfully eradicated from the world.35 Neither the warfare genealogy of smallpox—as a deplorable tool Europeans had used to commit Native American genocide—nor its status as an internationally eradicated disease and thus a minimal threat—seemed to influence the resurgence of attention the United States gave smallpox at the end of the Cold War. In the context of the breakup of the Soviet Union, U.S. national security circles feared its deployment by so-called terrorist networks and rogue states. The triumph of eradication, moreover, had birthed a new dilemma: whether stocks of variola (the virus that causes smallpox disease) existed outside of World Health Organization (WHO) knowledge, and thus whether it should retain a few guarded stocks for prophylactic, research purposes.36 The WHO would allow the United States and the former Soviet Union to hold onto stocks of variola—for research purposes—in their high-containment labs (the CDC and the Russian Research Institute for Viral Preparations, respectively).37 Thus, the public health triumph of smallpox eradication contorted, within the U.S. national security community, into a problem of U.S. vulnerability—a population with little immunity to smallpox and thus highly susceptible to a smallpox bioweapons attack. The post-9 / 11 era drastically escalated this post-eradication specter, painting Iraq in particular as a looming threat.38 This was extraordinarily ironic since the only military deployment of smallpox has been by Europeans against Native Americans (not to mention the false victimhood the United States adopted to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq). This incongruity notwithstanding, the United States embarked on hazardous research on the variola virus—namely, genetic engineering of novel strains. These are strains to which—by virtue of their novelty—humans would have little or no immunity. As with other instances of pathogen proliferation in the name of biodefense, the strategy was to prepare for and pre-empt others who may be doing the same thing. In 2004, the United States put forward a request to the WHO, in charge of overseeing smallpox studies, for approval to conduct genetic engineering experiments with variola, including creating cross-species hybrids by splicing variola genes into the genomes of other orthopoxviruses; if approved, it would change the 1994 WHO guideline banning such work (WHO 2004). This request was considered at the World Health Assembly meeting in May 2005. It met with substantial opposition from many countries expressing concern about this escalation of research and potential accidental escapes. Nevertheless, the WHO approved all but the most extreme genetic engineering activities (i.e., the splicing of variola genes into other orthopoxviruses) (Enserink 2005). In 2007, the WHO finally banned all research involving genetic engineering of the variola virus, after pushback by many member countries and NGOs, particularly from the Global South, including the Sunshine Project and the Third World Network, a transnational development and environmental policy NGO based in Malaysia (Third World Network 2007b). The U.S. push for genetic engineering highlighted once again a faith in technoscience—as long as it remained under the purview of U.S. state biosecurity. The United States, moreover, relaxed its overall restraints on smallpox research in the post-9 / 11 climate—by continuing to postpone destroying variola stocks. Soon after the WHO agreed to allow the United States and the former USSR to hold onto stocks of the variola virus for research purposes in 1984, it had recommended their destruction once sufficient information had been garnered. In 1990, the WHO assessed that enough research had been conducted (e.g., genome sequencing and clone fragment libraries39) and set a date for the destruction of the remaining stocks—1993. Yet, when that time came, the WHO postponed destruction to 1995 due primarily to pressure from the United States and Russia, both of which argued that they still needed the stocks for further research and to develop new countermeasures. Proponents of postponement even cited the achievement of full genome sequencing—intended to obviate the need for preserving viral samples—as presenting a new danger: scientists could use this to re-create the variola virus (Mahy et al. 1993; Hammond 2007). Technoscientific advancement had generated more risk, yet remained the mainstay of U.S. decision making in its pursuit to control variola. Over the years many nations and independent organizations internationally as well as within the United States have argued for the destruction of these remaining stocks to stem potential proliferation of variola. But in the post-9 / 11 climate, the U.S. biodefense community has only further entrenched its position to retain the stocks in the name of national security. In 2002, after two subsequent postponements, destruction of the stocks was postponed indefinitely (Third World Network 2007b; WHO 1999). The biosecurity regime has been successful in shifting attention away from the dangers that the research industry internally generates—in the form of lab accidents, leaks, and other mistakes, as well as mal-intended deployment by industry insiders like Bruce Ivins, the white male biodefense scientist who was the FBI’s final suspect in the anthrax mailings of 2001. It is precisely the buildup of domestic U.S. biological warfare capacity that poses a tangible, grave danger, domestically and internationally, to those intentionally targeted by the U.S. national security regime—Arabs, Muslims, and other negatively racialized groups and nations—as well as those affected by the biohazards of the research process itself—lab workers and others in physical proximity of dangerous biological agents. That the buildup continues despite these severe costs attests to the power exerted by U.S. bio-imperialism and the national security state and industry interests that drive it.

The nature of world production has changed as a result of the widespread adoption of global supply chain solutions. It has helped corporations to position themselves as constructive citizens; as CSR has increased their authority and legitimacy as governance actors, companies have increasingly been embraced as the solution to problems like modern slavery and ecosystem depletion, rather than the cause of these problems. Alongside the explosion of supply chain solutions, multinational corporations have vastly increased their size, market share, and control over the global economy (Khan, 2017; Petry et al., 2021). Corporations are using this power to shape solutions in their own financial interests – ultimately, becoming richer and even more difficult to govern.

At the same time, global supply chain solutions are distracting from other key shifts; for instance, fair labour initiatives can distract from changes in the union density of a workforce, commercial dynamics that all but ensure suppliers cannot pay minimum wage, or from outsourcing practices well-documented to introduce forced labour into supply chains. Thus, notwithstanding the gains that could be made through individual supply chain solutions, there is cause for concern that the ascendance of global supply chain solutions comes with hidden costs relevant to a whole range of issues in IPE, from market volatility and economic instability of financialization and changing patterns of corporate ownership, investment and market speculation (Clapp, 2018, 2019) to the rise of artificial intelligence (Dauvergne, 2020).