The expansion of intellectual property rights as a vehicle of capital locks in the rise of the vectoralist class – ensures the commodification of information

Capital is the secondary form of property. The privatization of productive assets in the form of tools and machines and also of working materials gives rise to a class of interest among its owners, the capitalist class. Dispossessed peasants, with nothing to sell but their capacity to work, create this vast stock of capital as private property for the capitalist class, and in so doing create a power over and against themselves. They are paid in wages, but the return that accrues to the owners of capital as property is called profit. The instrument of profit puts capital into play as a form of property that has a greater degree of abstraction inherent in it than that of land. All physical resources now become comparable on the basis of this abstract plane of property. However, capital, unlike land, is not in fixed supply or disposition. It can be made and remade, moved, aggregated, dispersed. A much greater degree of potential can be released from the world as a productive resource once the abstract plane of property includes both land and capital. Where the value of land arises in part out of natural scarcity, the scarcity of things made by productive industry requires the abstraction of property as an artifice to maintain and reproduce scarcity. The possibility of revolt against scarcity arises for the first time at this point in the abstraction of property Capital as property also gives rise to a class interest among its owners, sometimes opposed, sometimes allied, to that of pro p erty [186] [187] [188] pastoralists. Capital threw its political energies into the overthrow of the patchwork feudal class relations, but also found itself sometimes opposed to the pastoralist class that consolidated the feudal property system into the abstraction of land. What capital opposed was the pastoralist ability to exploit its monopoly over land rent to secure the lion’s share of the surplus. Capitalist and pastoralist interests struggle over the partition of the surplus between rent and profit. The pastoralist has the natural monopoly of land, but capital usually prevails, as it has a greater capacity for abstraction. History makes a qualitative leap when the capitalist class liberates itself from the fetter of the pastoralist interest. The capitalist class recognizes the value of the hack in the abstract, whereas the pastoralists were slow to appreciate the productivity that can flow from the application of abstraction to the production process. Under the influence of capital, the state sanctions nascent forms of intellectual property, such as patents and copyrights, that secure an independent existence for hackers as a class, and a flow of innovations in culture and science from which history issues. Capital represents private property to itself as if it is natural, but comes to appreciate the artificial extension of property into new, productive forms under the impact of the hack. Information, once it becomes a form of property, develops beyond a mere support for capital and for a pastoralist class belatedly aware of the value of increased productivity for its rent rolls. It becomes the basis of a form of accumulation in its own right. Just as farmers and workers find themselves confronting a class owning the means of production, so too hackers find themselves confronting a new class of owners, in this case of the means of producing, storing and distributing information—the vectoralist class. The vectoralist class struggles first to establish its monopoly over information—a far more abstract form of property than land or capital— and then to establish its power over the other ruling classes. It secures as much of the surplus as it can as margin—the return on ownership of information—at the expense of profit and rent. Viewed from the current stage of historical development, each of these ruling classes appears to develop out of the productivity of the hack. The pastoralist class develops out of the productivity of private land ownership, a legal hack. The capitalist class develops out of the productivity, not just of private property, but of technical innovations in power and machinery. The vectoralist class develops out of further technical innovations in communication and control. Each in turn competes with its predecessor. Each competes for the capacity to extract as much of the surplus of total productivity as possible for its own accumulation. Each struggles with the productive classes over the disposition of the surplus. But that there is an ever-expanding surplus to struggle over is the product of the application of the hacker’s abstraction to the invention of new forms of production, or new desires for consumption, all within the framework of property. Those dispossessed by the capture of a resource by property come to conceive of their interests in terms of property. They may struggle individually to become owners of it, or they may struggle collectively to reappropriate a portion of it. Either way, property becomes the stake in the struggle for the producing classes as much as for the property owning classes. Land, capital and information all appear as domains of struggle between possessors defending or extending the claim of private property, and the dispossessed, who struggle to extend or defend public property. Farmers struggle against their landlessness. Workers struggle against their dispossession, to claim a social wage. Hackers struggle to socialize a portion of the information stocks, flows and vectors on which the hack depends. The hacker class, which has some sliver of ownership conferred on it by the instrument of intellectual property, finds its rights challenged again and again by vectoralist interests. Hackers, like farmers and workers before them, find that their ownership of the immediate tools of production is compromised both by the market power of the possessing class confronting them, but also by the influence that class can have over the state’s definition of the representations of property. Thus hackers as individuals are obliged to sell out their interests, and hackers as a class find their property rights diminished.