The labor of software engineering under capital is systemic and constrained by the methodologies of capitalism, hacking disrupts these measures by the resisting of labor being quantifiable.

(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, ).