A worker-inquiry: The Objects of Communism, State-form Hacks

Free-market capitalist ideology died in the financial crisis of 2008. But its zombie flesh eaters – destruction of the planet and human spirit, its wars, thieves and speculators – might linger for centuries. Unless we make it obsolete. Dismissing the parliamentary capitalist framework as dysfunctional is easy. 1) what do we replace it with?; 2) and HOW do we replace it?

We need a new egalitarian project. A new attempt at implementing the ideas of communism. I conceptualize it as communism hacked with Open Process [1]. Hacked with ethics and organization, both in the political domain and through the eventual replacement of the capitalist economic model, of its trade secrets and commodities. Namely, hacking ‘to reinvent the organizational principles of mediation between productivity and circulation that wouldn’t go via alienation through commodification and general equivalent of money’ [2], nor via alienation and corruption of the representative political models.

The open-process model can be derived from communities of hackers, engineers, academics and hobbyists that gave us the Internet, the Web, their protocols and tools. Open Source is a capitalist appropriation, selectively composed rewritten history of partially excluded original communities for the purpose of fitting the capitalist economy. Free Software stands for ethics, Internet Engineering Task Force for open process, Open Source for capitalism.

If Tronti’s idea that creativity of workers comes first, and capital develops by reacting to it, is correct, or even partially correct, Open Source capitalist social movement is the biggest proof of it in recent times. It reacted to strip the Free Software social movement of ethics: sharing of and cooperating (knowing how technology works is a prerequisite) on what is socially beneficial (like software ) – all in order to integrate the productivity of those communities into the capitalist economy stripped of any demands, as an engine of new ways of valorization; including the new ways to utilize the commons for profit (Google, Red Hat business models, Software as Service breaks GPL, hence AGPL license to force provision of source code [3]).

Today we’re betrayed by a special form of abstraction:

‘abstract citizens or isolated atoms within the totality of the state, but [at the same time they/we] are always concrete human beings who occupy specific positions within social production, whose social being is determined by this position. The pure democracy of bourgeois society excludes this mediation [between abstract citizens and concrete human beings]. It connects the naked and abstract individuals directly with the totality of the state’. [4]

Lukacs calls this process ‘disorganizing classes as classes’, reducing them to mere citizens, and soviets are a way to counteract this disorganization [5], people must be educated and trained ‘for active and independent participation in the life of state’, where ‘one of the noblest function of the Soviet system is to bind together those moments of social life which capitalism fragments’ [6]. As we know, Soviet system ended up being subordinate to the centralized party system, where the party and its organs stood for the concrete humans occupying specific positions.

A gigantic wave of rapid binding of atomized, disorganized, humans, is i claim what we’re seeing in the rise of intellectual commons, rise of communication, group creation and cooperation, initially amongst software and networking communities, now spreading. What is missing is taking these new forms and objects and entering with it all the domains of society, including the State. Such move would relate us as concrete humans with the State, ensuring that working within it is not the privilege of small bureaucratic only professional groups.

Yet, to think that one can merely seize the State power directly everywhere, like we witnessed in Venezuela, would be a mistake; relationship with it, must, precisely following Lenin, remain dialectical and applicable to the people who are meant to carry the change (illiterate peasants and factory workers couldn’t carry direct democracy of Soviets, as Lenin realized in disappointment) [7]. While people of the more networked parts of the world stand a chance of utilising new organizational forms to hack the State forms and economic units (today known as corporations, firms, companies) by making them, for the first time, democratic: directly and participatory, through open processes. A small example is the Lewisham People Before Profit platform with principles: rough consensus decision making, open participation for any members in steering committee, monthly meetings open to all who agree with aims and goals, minutes published on the website. Another recent far more important example is the way students occupying Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb/Croatia have organized, with plenary sessions (67 held to date, often with attendance of 500, lasting for four hours) open to anyone interested, open working groups, refusal of representation (no leaders, regular press releases read by different anonymous students), and in continuous re-assessment. Communisms of the future has to learn from anarchist practices of today.

Our historical moment is one of rapid expansion of new objects (to be understood as: tools, practices, organizational forms), connecting and enabling cooperation in a plethora of new ways. Capitalism simultaneously thrives on it – extending its control and innovating the exploitation of people and the commons – and is undermined by it (Free Software / Open Source split example). Only through an engagement with those new objects can Lenin’s thought be applied to our historic moment. Applied in ways which will enable our newly becoming communico-cooperative social being to emerge as one capable of constructing new communisms.

A new, third sequence of communism, as Alain Badiou calls it , cannot arise from classrooms, conference rooms, academic offices, books and journal papers alone. It has to be spoken of in plural: communisms, not communism. The application and development of theory in the practice, reprising the core of Leninism, i.e. ‘the culmination of genuine theory, its consummation – [is] the point where it breaks into practice.’ [8] However, this merger of theory and practice for Badiou cannot continue through the perfecting of the second sequence of communism, one organizationally marked with unions and political parties. We have to construct new forms of collective action. What is at stake is conditions of the existence of the communist hypothesis [9].

Let us briefly turn to Marx and Engels. While it is correct that technological developments through which space is annihilated by time [10] are part of capital’s nature, it is also correct that once required material conditions are present and isolation of individuals is overcome, organised power (state and capital in our case, feudalism in previous phase) can be overcome in struggle. So, the key for freeing from feudal ties was ‘setting up of intercommunication between individual towns’ , and ‘these common conditions developed into class conditions’ [11]. In other words, Marx and Engels saw classes becoming possible through intercommunication [12]. Revolutionary proletarians do the opposite to the atomization of people. They take conditions, previously left to chance, under their control, ‘assuming the advance stage of productive forces’ [13]. What makes communism different, is that it: ‘overturns the basis of all earlier relation of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all naturally evolved premises as the creations of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals.’ [14]

If establishing intercommunication amongst towns was a common condition for superseding feudalism, and for the creation of classes, the same could be the case for the rapidly developing personal and group communication in contemporary capitalism. Hence, we ought to analyse technology closely, with a goal to spot possible creation of new intercommunication and new social formations perhaps capable of overcoming, overpowering capitalism and its social relations by a new communist sequence.

This new egalitarian society, its economic units, laws, political bodies, forms of mandatory wide cooperation and controlled competition –all of this has to be designed, built, tested through practice, the redesigned. The process must be seen from the start as a series of continues iterations, as a recursive and open process.

The trick is to stop seeing the objects around us embedded into relations with us dictated by the capital. As beings constituted through social relations mediated through objects, we should know that in different relations, the same objects often appear, and thus are, different . Objects are malleable, adaptable. They take a form that fits the relationship that we form with them. They can be repurposed.

That is precisely what we mean by hacking. To hack is to treat objects as changeable, to utilize them in purposes different than intended by design.

If we take this basic definition of hacking, we can recognize it implicitly present in Commonwealth, unlike in Empire or Multitude, in many places,: Hardt/Negri project’s is about metamorphosis, creation of new society ‘within the shell of the old’ [15]; the transformation of the technical composition [...] indicate a new possibility [...+] process of political composition defined by democratic decision making’ [16]; democratic-capacities of the people [17]; inclination to appropriate imperial governance [18],which can be practically turned into a new democratic system based on an open and socially generalized schema for consensus and cooperation’ [19] (open process communist-democratic hacking!); and finally: tools and weapons that might be used for liberation are produced within capitalism [20].

A new form of social science would make us see that the objects of communisms , of egalitarian societies, are all around us. From Free Software, Unix, Linux, Google and Facebook (open implementation needed), to rough consensus, electronic books and financial and organizational openness – it is our task to rethink and re-purpose whatever possible. We need to become generic hackers, turning anything to our advantage. Learning from capitalists who for centuries used whatever we opposed them with as a source of their own strength. As Nicole Pepperell argues in her reading of Hegel and Marx, we have to treat all components that make up capitalism as ‘potentially severable, potentially appropriable, from the social relations in which they are currently suspended’ [21].

What neo-liberals promise, to measure and quantify, we can actually implement (of course, with our choice of what to measure and how). Our economic and political units can be interoperable, participative and open. Theirs can’t, the race for profit corrupts it and prevents it. Foundations of local governments, parliaments, and corporations rest on closeness, trade secrets, and on manufactured scarcity of knowledge and information traded as commodities. All of it being deciding elements of the competitive advantage. That is, if the cartel monopoly does not operate in the given economic sector. Just look at academia today: our publicly funded knowledge is imprisoned and commodified in corporate publisher’s books and journals. Do not be fooled by Open Source, Open Government, open this and open that. These are smokescreens. Secrecy is the wholly grail of capitalism and parliamentarism. By having open processes as our foundation, we stick the dagger in the heart of the vampire.

In Peter Thomas’ reading of Gramsci, the only way to get out of parliamentary-capitalist model is: ‘on the basis of renewing an organic relationship between leftist theory and forms of organization that already exist in the wide variety of practices and relations’. The current task for left political theorists and philosophers is not to elaborate a new, alternative ways of doing politics, in order for the left to master politics in its own way (return to 2nd sequence). Nor is the task, although such work is necessary, to critique existing bourgeois politics and its continual attack on socialist project: ‘the task today is to attempt to put politics ‘in command’ within philosophy itself [...] to formulate adequate theoretical ‘translations’ of the concrete social and political relations and practices of resistance’ [22] (Free Software, resistance; Open Process, theory).

Ideological mind-debilitating fears still abound – that of communism and of the strong state (we need ‘a State that doesn’t behave like the State’ – a definition of a hack) – can be dispelled if we embrace new technologies and ways of cooperation as parts of a directly and participatory democratic, cooperative, economico-legal egalitarian future.

Adoption of hacking is a political possibility that is here and now, in front of us. Its spirit, its ethics and organization gave us the Web, the Internet and the means to produce new collective entities and open plethora of decentralized, yet synchronized and resilient battling fronts. Local councils, courts, parliaments, political parties, unions, childcare, health, education, elderly and social care institutions, etc … The State-forms of all kinds await our hacks.

The END (presentation ends here. the rest is my notes, rough ideas for discussion)

NOTES on Objects: objects in the common, of the common, are objects of communism. Object whose properties ensure its commonness and longevity. Some objects of communism cannot be privatized. Take public transport: although it can be estranged, the experience is still one of common. Most important, objects are always the engine of practices which material effects bring us closer to new communisms. Examples can include: organizational forms, electronic books, social movements, ethical rules, laws, economic units, university departments, tenants associations, currencies and credit systems, software, political parties, anarchist collectives, etc. Obviously, having examples listed gives very little of what I mean by objects of communism. Best to say that the question cannot be satisfactory answered at this point. It took Badiou a lifetime to come up with an ontology and couple of chapters on the Object in the Logic of Worlds:

‘But what is an object? It could be said that the most complex and most innovative argument of this book is aimed at finding a new definition of the objects, and therefore of the objective status of the truth. [...] I subordinate the logic of appearing, of objects and worlds, to the trans-worldly affirmation of subjects faithful to the truth. The path of the materialist dialectic organizes the contrast between the complexity of materialism (logic of appearing, or theory of the object) and the intensity of the dialectic (the living incorporation into truth-procedures). ’ [23]

Perhaps a way to answer is through the fictitious structure of reality. In its firmest, in its most stable appearance, reality is structured like swiss cheese, full of holes. In its most fluid, it’s like fog, hardly any stable structures can be seen, the shadowy world of murky half drawn creatures and shapes rules with vengeance, while we tremble in dusky gloom incapacitated by the never self-confessed, yet always hidden behind the array of marketable faces of confidence, fear. Of course, we live in foggy times. Neo-liberal deregulated financial system is the best example of it. In foggy times, objects are hard to spot. Nothing appears firm, reliable, or resilient. In foggy times, ‘all that is solid melts into air’. It is only in communism that objects can exist. Capitalism, being based on private profit, private wealth, private utilization of socially produced advances, private rule and deliberation over most of planet’s resources, is thus always subjective. The only possible objective state of the World, one objectively existing for all, that can be experience by all, is that of communism. Despite of the neo-liberal claims, the objectivity they offer is always partial, private, subjective, based on exploitation of the commons and labour, wrapped in blood, sweat and tears with radically opposed experiences of the processes that are presented as the objective reality. Hence, it is subjective. In other words, i will try to develop that the objects of communism are the only objects that there are.

Summary:

1) anti-State stance is a political/philosophical suicide. Instead, we need to Hack the State (hack as reuse by clever re-purposing, re-engineering of what’s already here), to make it do what we want it to do.

2) Thinking through the concept of Ideas is not enough. We need to think about/through Objects. Objects that will enable us to transform social forms, primarily the State, economic units and laws, and advance our political goals: expand commons, increase equality, widen direct participation, and construct new communisms.

3) Theoretical concepts and practices of communism need revising in the spirit of tools and production methods (cooperative principles) through which the consciousness of currently living beings is developing. Centralization, secrecy and paranoia has to go out, to be used only when critically necessary. Volunteer lead open-process organization & cooperation in. Whenever possible.

Appendix: An Object of communism is Crabgrass. A AGPL software libre for network organizing, by the riseup.net, autonomous tech collective. Diagram of a Group with its sub-groups (Committees) and non-members limited participation (within sub-groups):

From https://we.riseup.net/users/committees – a help page for permissions.

https://we.riseup.net/crabgrass/groups – A help page for groups.

Notes:

[1] Prug, “Open Process Academic Publishing.”
[2] Medak, “A Continuum of Knowledge – A contribution to the Political Economy of Copyleft.”
[3] Capobianco, “AGPL is OSI approved. Sweet victory..”
[4] Lukacs, Lenin, 63.
[5] Ibid., 64.
[6] Ibid., 65.
[7] Ibid., 67.
[8] Ibid., 89.
[9] Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy. For two great historical sequences of communist hypothesis, see chapter 9 ‘The History of the Communist Hypothesis and Its Present Moment’.
[10] Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, 524.
[11] Ibid., 85.
[12] Ibid., 96.
[13] Ibid., 89.
[14] Ibid., 90.
[15] Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 8.
[16] Ibid., 352.
[17] Ibid., 354.
[18] Ibid., 372.
[19] Ibid., 374.
[20] Ibid., 137.
[21] Pepperell, “Beyond Telos and Totality: Immanent Critique as Selective Inheritance.”
[22] Thomas, “Gramsci and the political: From the state as ‘metaphysical event’ to hegemony as ‘philosophical fact’.”
[23] Badiou, Logics of worlds, 37.

Bibliography:

Badiou, Alain. Logics of Worlds. London; New York: Continuum, 2009.

———. The Meaning of Sarkozy. London: Verso, 2008.

Capobianco, Fabrizio. “AGPL is OSI approved. Sweet victory..” Mobile Open Source:, March 13,
2008. http://www.funambol.com/blog/capo/2008/03/agpl-is-osi-approved-sweet-victory.html.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. 1st ed. Harvard University Press, 2009.

Karl Marx, Frederick Engels. The German Ideology. Prometheus Books, 1988.
http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/.

Lukacs, Georg. Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought. 2nd ed. Radical Thinkers 4. Verso, 2009.

Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Penguin, 1973.

Medak, Tomislav. “A Continuum of Knowledge – A contribution to the Political Economy of
Copyleft,” 2004. http://www.makeworlds.org/node/96.

Pepperell, Nicole. “Beyond Telos and Totality: Immanent Critique as Selective Inheritance,” 2009.
http://www.roughtheory.org/content/marx-philosophy-society-talk/.

Prug, Toni. “Open Process Academic Publishing.” draft, August 2009.
http://hackthestate.org/open-process-academic-publishing/.

Thomas, Peter. “Gramsci and the political: From the state as ‘metaphysical event’ to hegemony as
‘philosophical fact’.” Radical Philosophy, no. 153 (February 2009).
http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2188&editorial_id=27458.