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In addition to the rising threat, as nation level attacks become more plausible, the vulnerabilities have also increased. One cause of this is that in addition to virtually every business being on the Internet, today most homes are also connected. This has become particularly true with the advent of relatively inexpensive DSL and cable connections. To make things worse, most home users do not know that their systems are vulnerable. They often say “I have nothing to hide,” or “I don’t care if someone else sees the information on my computer.” Most of these users do not use a firewall, and they think that because their system came with an antivirus program they are protected. They often do not realize that virus programs need to be updated regularly. A big problem is that home users are not aware that their systems can serve as a jump off point for other attacks. In fact, many of the denial of service attacks use unsuspecting home computers as zombies to be awaken at a specific time to unwittingly accomplish a distributed denial of service. Another reason that things are so bad is because, for the most part, computer security is reactive. That is, system administrators and security professionals are usually reacting to the latest attack. After they fix the vulnerability that allowed the attack, the attackers look for new vulnerabilities to exploit for new attacks. What is needed is a proactive approach. Security is also expensive, both in dollars and in time taken from normal everyday tasks. As a result, security vulnerabilities often exist not because there is not a known fix, but because some administrator does not have the time to put in a patch to fix the problem. Finally, there is not now, and never will be, a system with perfect security. That is, if functionality is a requirement, then there will always be security gaps. Security is a system attribute that must be traded off against user friendliness, efficiency, ease of use, and other desirable system properties.

My analysis draws from the theoretical framework of historical materialism. The use of this theory demands some comment since it has fallen into disarray and been abandoned by many Marxists. The theory lost credibility when its prediction that capitalism inevitable would evolve into socialism was seemingly proved wrong. Theoretically it has been challenged for its tendencies of evolutionism, technological determinism, functionalism and economic reductionism (Giddens, 1981). By partly coinciding with and incorporating this criticism, some Marxists have responded to Giddens' comments stating that a reconstructed historical materialism holds true and is a valuable analytic tool (Wright, Levine, and Sober, 1992). A weak version of the model is sound, they say, to help structure our understanding of past and current history, provided that the theory does not pretend to prophesy the future. In accord with them I find it relevant to evoke historical materialism here because

"the idea that class struggle is crucial to understanding social change is grounded in historical materialist claims. If historical materialism where rejected altogether, these concepts and ideas would lack adequate foundations" [].

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).

Since their inception in 2012, women-oriented hackerspaces have offered local residents a place to gather, share ideas, learn creative techniques, and grow professional partnerships in what some term an “emerging DIY culture” [30]. According to our interviewees, the Berkeley-based Mothership Hackermoms — a community workshop dedicated to the needs of “mothers of all genders” [30] — were first to introduce such projects to the ‘hacker’ scene. Their funding campaign on kickstarter.com and a panel at the San Jose DIY festival Maker Faire sparked a flurry of interest, particularly among participants at women-oriented IT conferences like AdaCamp and women-in-tech mailing lists. Soon after Hackermoms opened its doors, organizers of the Seattle Attic launched what they called a “feminist hackerspace,” a material response to the male-dominated technology community of which many of the members were professionally affiliated. Inspired by subsequent conversations at the 2013 AdaCamp in San Francisco, participants began feminist hackerspaces later that year in Portland (Flux) and San Francisco (Double Union). Organizers of the sites remain connected through what a Seattle Attic member called an “informal network.” They maintain a Google Group featuring continued threads of conversation about their respective hackerspaces and shared resources like example planning documents. They are also connected to other non-feminist spaces by personal relationships like roommates (in the case of Double Union and Noisebridge), or marital partners (who were members of Mothership Hackermoms and Ace Monster Toys respectively). From their inception, the Seattle Attic and Portland Flux have allowed members of any gender (roughly 12 of 18 identify as female at the Attic; 2 of 13 in Flux) while San Francisco Double Union has not allowed members who identify as male. Upstart costs for each of the sites was provided largely by one or at most core set of a few organizing members. Continued funding was collected from membership fees and, in the cases of Seattle Attic and Double Union, successful crowdfunding campaigns. In our conversations with leaders of these spaces, we learned that their original motivations focused on concerns for safety and shared values, often materialized in the physical design of the space. One organizer explained: As a woman in technology, it's like, I'm already part of a like a 10, 20 percent group so it doesn't really take a lot to turn me off. So I think like I'm just more sensitive to like things like the space sucking and being dark and gloomy. Becoming “more sensitive” to the design of the space seemed to come, in part, from feeling marginal to technology cultures. Other members noted discomfort and even vulnerability in their interactions within existing hackerspaces, often declining to share personal experiences in favor of recounting the experiences of others: I would almost rather share the experiences that I've heard from other women in town [… A woman] was working on something and this kid next to her was like bragging to her about how he had gotten a woman online to show him her breasts by threatening to hurt a kid. And she was like "What is going on here? Why are you telling me this?" And she looked at the guy who runs the space and pays the rent here and was like "Are you going to do anything about this?" And then, like, he didn't. Accounts like this one point to the moral character of such retellings, asking us to consider how third-person reports implicate others (a “kid,” a “guy") in the accomplishment of value-laden practices such as sexual harassment. By describing the lone woman in the space and the man’s detached disposition (in a place of authority but doing nothing to resolve the matter), this member suggests a kind of moral imperative to reveal rather than conceal unethical practices. Similar stories of harassment circulated widely in the spaces we visited, reinforcing members’ desire for both awareness and acknowledgement of oppression. They became implicative of the kinds of reflexive practices not normally considered integral to high-tech environments within large corporations or academic institutions. Yet not all members made investments in learning and practicing technology development. While most Seattle Attic members worked within information technology (IT) industries, several of these professions fell under customer service. In Portland’s Flux, seven of twelve members identified as professional programmers. As our work unfolded, we found these affiliations with IT industry shaped how members participated in (and pushed back on) hacking and engineering.

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.

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)

Surviving the threat of extinction will entail, at least in part, expanding our capacity for fear and anxiety and cultivating a renewed sense of the apocalyptic. As Anders puts it: ‘Our imperative: “Expand the capacity of your imagination”, means, in concreto: “Increase your capacity of fear”. Therefore: don’t fear fear, have the courage to be frightened, and to frighten others, too. Frighten thy neighbour as yourself.’ (Theses for the Atomic Age, p498.) We need then to become enlightened doomsayers.30 Anders distils this doomsaying metaphysics into a short parable which creatively retells the Old Testament story of Noah:

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)

If modern philosophy can’t stop returning to the idea of the end, then the same is also true of contemporary culture. Within culture, however, the fantasy of the end takes a number of distinct forms which we will need to be theoretically attentive to. In the 2021 film How it Ends, the central character Liza (Zoe Lister-Jones) decides how to navigate her last day on earth. Sporting an inconspicuous Chanel leather backpack, and with her younger self (her ‘metaphysical YS’) in tow, Liza walks the streets of suburban Los Angeles attempting to settle accounts with her parents, friends and various ex-lovers, before a lifedestroying meteorite finally strikes the earth. The impending prospect of mass extinction is here a breezy affair, involving breakfast pancakes, psychedelic drugs, and a sentimental singalong with the indie-folk performer Sharon Von Etten. In this version of apocalypse, there is no social breakdown, no struggles over access to resources, and no tooled-up military personnel patrolling the streets. Indeed, the film’s key ideological manoeuvre is to displace all evil from inside (capitalist economic and social relations) to outside (the chaotic universe itself), while at the same time presenting annihilation as part of the mildly eccentric everyday run of things. The end is, consequently, not only something over which the characters have no control, but also something which they can enjoy as pure unadulterated spectacle.

But the track record of the collection programs Edward Snowden revealed provides little evidence that massive surveillance will help us identify future terrorist attacks or mitigate these new risks. American spies’ allegiance to massive surveillance is based on faith, not track record. The Boston Marathon bombing in April of 2013 illustrates how broad proactive surveillance is no panacea against attacks. The NSA was conducting its massive spying at the time, and the attacks happened anyway.

In that case, two brothers allegedly built pressure cooker bombs and placed them near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The bombings killed three people and injured scores of others. The older brother died and the younger brother was injured in the subsequent manhunt. The younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was sentenced to death in early 2015. Relevant information about the bombers did not come from electronic surveillance. Rather, it came from another government. A few years before the bombing, the Russian government had warned the FBI that the older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was dangerous. The FBI investigated and found nothing to link either person to terrorism, so they closed the investigation in June 2011. But later that same year, the Russians sent the same warning to the CIA.

There are three potential routes a terrorist group might take to obtain a nuclear weapon.

One would be for it to be given or sold a bomb by a generous like-minded nuclear state for delivery abroad—the impelling fear about Iraq in 2003. This is highly improbable, however, because there would be too much risk, even for a country led by extremists, that the ultimate source of the weapon would be discovered. As prominent analyst Matthew Bunn puts it, ‘A dictator or oligarch bent on maintaining power is highly unlikely to take the immense risk of transferring such a devastating capability to terrorists they cannot control, given the ever-present possibility that the material would be traced back to its origin’. Important in this last consideration are deterrent safeguards afforded by ‘nuclear forensics’, the rapidly developing science (and art) of connecting nuclear materials to their sources even after a bomb has been exploded.15

Manufacturing a nuclear weapon. To accomplish this, a terrorist group would have to obtain an appropriate amount of one of the two most popular materials for nuclear weapons, highly enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium separated from fuel used in a production reactor or a power reactor. Weapon-grade plutonium is found in weapon manufacturing facilities in nuclear weapon states and is very highly protected until it is inserted in a weapon. Reactor-grade plutonium, although still capable of being weaponized, is less protected, and in that sense is a more attractive target for a terrorist, especially since it has been produced and stored in prodigious quantities in a number of nuclear weapon states and non-weapon states, particularly Japan.

But terrorist use of plutonium for a nuclear explosive device would require the construction of an implosion weapon, requiring the fashioning of an appropriate explosive lens of TNT, a notoriously difficult technical problem. And if a high nuclear yield (much greater than 1 kiloton) is desired, the use of reactor-grade plutonium would require a still more sophisticated design. Moreover, if the plutonium is only available through chemical separation from some (presumably stolen) spent fuel rods, additional technical complications present themselves. There is at least one study showing that a small team of people with the appropriate technical skills and equipment could, in principle, build a plutonium-based nuclear explosive device (Mark et al., 1986). But even if one discounts the high probability that the plan would be discovered at some stage (missing plutonium or spent fuel rods would put the authorities and intelligence operations under high alert), translating this into a real-world situation suggests an extremely low probability of technical success. More likely, according to one well-known weapon designer,4 would be the death of the person or persons in the attempt to build the device.

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.

As real subsumption of knowledge occurs, two historical moments can be considered. The first represents the immediate association between the value of knowledge and matter. The second, which appears in different historical moments in the form of proto-intellectual property(private), unveils the steep decline of the value of knowledge, making its production and reproduction relatively easier. For instance, Johannes Gutenberg’s advancement of a novel printing technology, or the Internet, which presupposes the digital revolution, both imposed a vertiginous decline in value throughout their contemporary intellectual productions. Discussions over intellectual property usually focus on the intellectual dimension and disregard its material dimension (as if they were two separate things). However, regardless of Gutenberg’s invention or the Internet, it is not information or knowledge in-itself that presents a significant variation of value, but knowledge in-and-for-itself within the process of production of books and computers (hardware, server, modem, etc.). While the intellectual side of property gives it content, its material side gives intellectual appropriation the basis for its existence and/or actualisation. They are both void in-themselves; it is only in a relationship of mutual determination that property-intellectual-property can attain an existence in-and-for-itself—in this case, in-and-for-themselves.

Although Alexandra George seemingly acknowledges the intrinsic materiality of a thought that as an ideational object is in one’s head, brain, and mind, she abstracts the objective body’s corporality presupposing it “lacks physical form” and is thus boundless (George, 2012, p. 92). In reality, an individual’s mind may suffice to retain, develop, and transmit a multitude of ideas, thoughts, and knowledge; for instance, even the complexity of entire musical performances can be recorded in one’s mind, allowing one to execute it thoroughly. Alternatively, as Jared Diamond has shown, hunting-gathering peoples, instead of possessing libraries and other means of knowledge objectification and accumulation, were themselves walking encyclopaedias (see infra). Therefore, it is nonsensical to consider knowledge as something immaterial, incorporeal, and abstract. On the contrary, its very existence presupposes materiality.

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.

If wage labour was a condition for productive labour during the nineteenth century, in the twenty-first century, wage-less-labour has become an increasingly important source of the production of surplus labour (see infra). As in contemporary capitalism, reproduction of living labour depends not only on the aggregate value of rent, water, and food (as a gross simplification of nineteenth-century conditions) but also on a greater level of social relations among economic and extra-economic activities, resulting in a more heterogeneous labour-value to be reproduced. Examples of this are the consumption level of mass-consumer goods, entertainment, and drugs, the constant replacement of planned-obsolescent goods, the necessary access to social digital relations with friends, family, work, and the state, etc., by means of combined hardware-software commodities. Therefore, as social subsistence becomes more complex, many vital activities which are imposed occur outside wage labour relations; nevertheless, they remain subsumed under the economic imperatives of capitalism. The socially necessary labour-time, which is essential for the reproduction of the labour-force, is now divided among many contractual relationships. While the first appears to be the one imposed by wage labour, all access to the digital world entails contractual relations that the user—now a prosumer, a creator of surplus-value in the digital realm (see infra)—must subdue to participate in the digital social life.

While the notion of the social contract represents an idealist theoretical notion, in the digital sphere, one-sided contracts are imposed as an existential condition for the individual’s digital actualisation. “And the development of this material wealth therefore in opposition to, and at the expense of, the human individual. Productivity of labour in general = maximum of product with minimum of labour, therefore as much as possible the improvement of commodities” (Marx, 1988, p. 107). Digital commodification and productive labour thus appear as the summit of productive labour, namely, labour which produces surplus-value. The purpose of the capitalist mode of production is that “the individual product, etc., contain as much unpaid labour as possible, and that this is only achieved by production for the sake of production” (Marx, 1988, p. 107). Marx leaves no room for doubt. The capitalist mode of production presupposes the production of surplus-value because it is its primary and highest goal; productive labour is subordinated to the production of surplus-value, “thus only the labour which is directly consumed in the process of production for the utilisation of capital” (Marx, 1988, p. 108).

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.

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).

Despite seemingly endless understandings of property, Marx’s consideration must be emphasised because, instead of providing a conceptualising definition, he perceives property in a unique fashion which enables explaining both property in general as well as its specific modes of existence. While for Hegel, thinking about an object means appropriating it, making it something immediate mine (Hegel, 2013, p. 47, Supplement §4), in reality, thinking does not exhaust, nor suffice to grasp, nor to make use of, nor to control a concrete object (Gegenstand). The notion of property is often defined a priori, but as stated elsewhere (Hermeto, 2020b), precisely because it is a social relation, it always has distinctive historical determinations and cultural aspects, preventing an aprioristic definition. Marx’s interpretation can be grasped not only by his private property critique but also by the manner in which he interchangeably refers to property and property relations by using yet another concept. Despite noticing that this element appears in the Grundrisse, Peter Drahos curiously disregards its centrality because it is one among many interpretations of what property is (Drahos, 2016, p. 113). Already in the Introduction of the Grundrisse, Marx emphasises: “Every production is the appropriation of nature from the part of an individual within and by means of a determined society. In this sense, it is a tautology to say that property (appropriation) is a condition of production” (Marx, 1983a, p. 23). Thus, Eigentum and Aneignung appear to be synonymous. This intercalation opens a very relevant pathway to the understanding of property among the many interpretations because property as a concept expresses particular forms of appropriation. Whether common or private, physical or intellectual, analogously, being legitimated by fear, violence, common goals (cultural and social values), or by the abstract right, etc., the form of appropriation of the means of doing necessarily reflects the social property relations emerging from particular social relations of production. “The capitalist mode of appropriation arising from the capitalist mode of production” is “hence the capitalist private property” (Marx, 1962, p. 791). Therefore, appropriation perfectly encompasses these differences, and when Marx speaks of property relations, its historical and process character becomes clear and, therefore, cannot be aprioristically confined in a rigid definition (Marx, 1962, 1983b).

As pointed out by Drahos, Morris R. Cohen unveils the character of power of private property over others (Drahos, 2016). Nonetheless, a deeper understanding may be called for. Theory often merely justifies certain social relations instead of explaining them. It is no different with private property. Property acquires an arbitrary existence under theoretical veils, thus hiding its true social practice. Private property, “as opposed to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labour and the external conditions of labour belong to private individuals” (Marx, 1962, p. 789), representing, therefore, the divorce between the unity of labourer and the means of labour (Marx & Engels, 1962, p. 131); such property relations represent an estrangement among people (the producer/labourer and society), between the individual (worker) and his [their] vital sensual activity (the act of production), between the worker and the product of his [their] labour, and finally between the individual worker and himself [themself](Marx, 1968, pp. 454, 515, 517f). Marxian estrangement is consequently not just an economic phenomenon, but it impacts the totality of the human self and social relations. It affects both body and psyche (mind), individual and family, society and nature. The social impact of the estrangement derived from private property relations culminates in social disintegration, powerfully synthesised in the concept of anomy (Durkheim, 1952, p. 350).

A crucial piece of legislation which helped pave the way towards (almost) total control of private capital over knowledge was the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. US Senator Birch Bayh proposed the preposterous contention that a robust patent system was a prerequisite to secure US-American advantage over competitors by enabling private agents to appropriate “patents in inventions” which were “developed with federal funds” (Drahos & Braithwaite, 2002, p. 163). According to Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite, before this act, publicly funded patents in inventions would go “into the public domain by means of publication” (Drahos & Braithwaite, 2002, p. 163). Bryn Williams-Jones and Vural Ozdemir suggest a rupture in which universities and researchers, on the one hand, and education and athletics, on the other, were constrained to entangle themselves with private capital (Williams-Jones & Ozdemir, 2007, p. 140). Niklas Bruun correctly asserts that this is based on a paradoxical relationship in which universities ought to simultaneously produce long-term open basic research and short-term knowledge to be commercialised and enclosed (Bruun, 2021, p. 9). Knowledge would then be subjected to rivalry (Pellizzoni & Ylönen, 2012, p. 55f), which on an abstract idealised level does not exist.

The culmination of this process, which still impacts most people on a worldwide scale, was the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPS). Gigantic blocs of capital—big pharma, big tech, and showbiz—not only strongly supported it but also played a vital role in its inception and transnational enforcement. Nevertheless, according to Luigi Pellizzoni and Marja Ylönen, “TRIPs [sic] extended the scope of patentability to all commercially exploitable products and processes, including genetically modified plants and animals” (Pellizzoni & Ylönen, 2012, p. 56). As every piece of written information became copyrighted, the expansion of digitalisation simultaneously meant making intellectual property(private) ubiquitous because all social interactions digitally mediated by writing were now part of the intellectual property system. A further paradox arose. While information could be accessed like never before without the then current constraints of space and time, the “proliferation of intellectual property rights inhibits access to such information in areas (basic research in general, the life sciences, software)”, which were mostly part of the so-called public domain (David & Foray, 2002, p. 13). Accessible knowledge meant it would have to be situated outside capitalist markets, consequently constraining profit (Nelson, 2003, p. 1701). Knowledge expropriation was absolutely pivotal in changing this dynamic. The loss of capitalist dynamism after the so-called Golden Age (after World War II) accelerated the need to impose control over knowledge as a necessary condition of production (Sum & Jessop, 2013, p. 292).

According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), a not inconsiderable portion of the US-American economy revolves around intellectual property(private), representing 7.8 trillion dollars of the 2019 GDP (Toole et al., 2022, p. 3). According to the study, US-American industries accounted for 41% of the economic endeavours and comprised 63 million or 44% labour positions. “Output in the IP-intensive industries grew at roughly the same rate as the entire domestic economy during the previous five years, with the exception of the copyright-intensive industries, where output grew at a faster rate than the domestic economy” (Toole et al., 2022, p. iii). The report also shows a distribution of industrial sectors which are intellectual property(private)-intensive: manufacturing; wholesale and retail trade; information; finance, insurance, real estate, and leasing; technical, management and administrative professional services; education and health care services; and arts, entertainment and recreation (Toole et al., 2022, p. 6). Still from the USPTO, a 2022 economic note states: “In 2019, of the 103 industries identified as commodity-exporting industries, 76 were IP-intensive. These 76 industries accounted for $1.31 trillion or 79% of all U.S. commodity exports in 2019. In fact, 18 “of the 20 top exporting industries were found to intensively use intellectual property” (‘Exports and Imports by U.S. IP-Intensive Industries’, 2022). Therefore, it is fundamental to recognise that societies are undergoing at least a phenomenological change in social property relations. However, how much and in which ways does this transformation impact social relations? Which existential conditions remain the same, which are metamorphosing, and which are being dissolved?”

The ongoing artificial intelligence (AI) “revolution” is catalysing this process, and these questions can no longer be avoided. With AI making many wage labour positions redundant, with science being generally applied to production, social relations based on private property attain a qualitative new paradoxical paradigm.1 Private appropriation constantly denotes an anachronic social condition, and power relations lose their ontological determinations. The contradiction between social production and private appropriation becomes so accentuated that complementary power and coercion systems must be implemented to sustain the capitalist mode of production. Going beyond such social arrangements based on domination is hence not only a utopia but also a necessary condition. Forcing old structures with no ontological basis upon collective social life produces enormous social tensions, which emerge in different forms. While knowledge and material productions in the twenty-first century epitomise previously unimaginable degrees of development, which could render starvation, poverty, most diseases, conflicts and wars over resources, economic competition, and social control all things of the past, capitalism not only sustains but intensifies the plethora of existing tensions.