Abstract: The desires and the sources of emancipatory potential of the commons for the cooperative and egalitarian global togetherness, for a new communism born through the new generation of tools and organizational practices, have temporarily been appropriated and hi-jacked by capitalism under the Open Source and to an extent Creative Commons movements. Through and with the Open Process methods of the founding Internet communities, we can make a significant step towards claiming it back. Commu(o)nism, we could call it, is a new emerging form of communism hacked with open process and new commons. The small (o) in the middle stands for open.
Introduction
For the last ten years, the world has been misled. We were lead to believe that the key attribute of cooperation amongst networking and software communities since 1960’s has been that the source code is open. The term to describe it, Open Source, has become synonymous with this idea. The name, and the concept behind it, has captured the imagination in many areas (Category:Open – P2P Foundation). To name just couple of larger, more influential examples in academia, and politics: Open Access, Open Science, and Obama’s pledge for Open Government (Obama 2009).
Open Source was re-applied across society mostly through two aspects. Primarily it is to mean that the final product has to be open (Open Access). In some cases, first aspect was accompanied with the second one, usually through a commitment to transparency and participation (Open Government). Re-applications of the Open Source paradigm that mention in more detail HOW is the second aspect, commitment to transparency and participation, going to be achieved, what are its principles, mechanism, processes and safeguards, are missing.
This is no coincidence. Beyond its founding analysis, Open Source never defined itself through a set of principles that would ensure open processes in cooperation. Instead, it is a narrow, business, for-profit focused subset of the volunteer driven cooperative model that gave us hacking, Free Software, open protocols, the Internet and the Web. It is for this reason that modelling other open systems and concepts throughout society on Open Source results in missing the most important aspects of the model.
It was ethics, in Free Software (FS), and a set of defined and respected open processes, in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), that were at the centre of those communities and their inventions. I propose we call this collection of practices and principles the Internet Model.
To benefit from the ground breaking cooperative methodology of the software and networking communities, we need to think about them, and about their contributions, in a new way. A way that will not be composed of a selective choice according to what suits capitalism and private interests. On the contrary, a way that will make open-process volunteer cooperation that has developed outside and despite of capitalism and institutional bureaucracy and coercive labour, central to it.
It was openness of the processes of cooperation that was the key attribute of communities and their inventions. Hence, I propose we name it the Open Process.
No hidden status: open process computing and politics
From its earliest days in 1959, to the recent generation of hackers (Lakhani and Wolf 2003), hacking meant to enjoy doing something (Levy 1984, 23). To improve on anything, hackers had to know how something works, so that it can be taken apart, improved on and reassembled in new ways. Any obstacle to this procedure of learning and creation was undesirable (Levy 1984, 40). Bureaucracies of any kind, corporate, government or university, were the worst enemy, since they invoke arbitrary rules – a total contrast to the world hackers were building (Levy 1984, 41). For hackers, the world would be a better place if other approached it “with the same inquisitive intensity, scepticism toward bureaucracy, openness to creativity, unselfishness in sharing accomplishments, urge to make improvements” (Levy 1984, 48). Writing a program was “building a community, not churning out a product” (Levy 1984, 56).
It is a striking parallel that close to the birth of hacking, probably the most innovative and the most important programming language was born too. Lisp was first implemented between 1958 and 1962. Some of its key unique properties were recursion, function type (you can store function in variables, passed as arguments), and “the whole language there all the time” (Graham 2004, 188). This last feature is of the special importance: a running program can be interrupted, examined, state changed, and execution resumed. It embodied that “there was no hidden status anywhere” (Williams 2002, 49), a characteristic praised by Richard Stallman when talking about Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS), an early operating system he used in the famous MIT lab.
A user, hacker, could intervene at any point in the process of program execution. This way, not only that “the entire act of hacking relied on intellectual openness and trust”, the structure of ITS was “built to foster this spirit of openness” (Williams 2002, 53). The process is open for being changed, hacking at any stage. These two features, i claim, are at the heart of the hacking spirit, and since they offer a new organizational paradigm, a new model, political consequences of their re-application in new organizational contexts could be immense. Open process and trust: trust in the ability and desire of people to participate in political, economic and juridical tasks, and openness of the processes for participation to be possible.
If we transfer this feature of an operating system (ITS), or a computer language (Lisp) into the political sphere, it would mean complete openness of the source materials and all processes through which materials go, to all interested parties. In practice, in UK, on the level of local councils, it would mean that a resident could have insight in all the work of political bodies. Committees, key places for decision making, are open to citizens. However, whatever a council committee deems secretive gets closed down, and citizens have to leave the meetings when such matters are discussed and documents presented. This limited, selective openness shows both distrust in citizens and reveals what is the overriding founding principle of the liberal democratic order. When processes are closed for local citizens whenever they need to be open for maximizing private profit through commercial interests, we can say that the founding principle of the system is the idea of private property, right to acquire it and gain power over other members of the community based on it.
The source of distrust and founding principle are the same like in the case of Open Source, commercial interests and private profit. In the local council case, in the name of commercial interests, documents containing anything to do with an external private contractor can be, and mostly are, kept secret. Citizens are cut out, the logic of secrecy so central to private accumulation of wealth is imposed. In the case of Open Source, mandate to return any improvements to the distributed code is removed. Again, the logic of secrecy, or market advantage and potential private profit gained by it, is made supreme. Secrecy is essential to the logic of private profit and it goes against open participation, and hence against the possibility of directly participatory democratic systems.
Let us not forget that IBM and Intel, amongst many others, did not believe that anyone would want a small computer (Levy 1984, 189). Steve Jobs’ predictions about the sales of first Apple computer were not much better: he asked one of his components suppliers for a “high volume” order, of fifty units a month. Several years later, the supplier estimated he sold four hundred thousand of those units (Levy 1984, 261). This reminds me of the answer i get when i talk about open process participation of people in political, economic and juridical daily tasks, a new form of direct democracy across key aspect of society: ‘no one cares, no one will be interested’ is the most common remark i get. As the cases of personal computing, electronic networking, e-mail, short message service (SMS) , or social networking confirm, humans embrace new ways of getting in touch with each other beyond what the creators of new ways expect.
The spirit of direct action was another key trait that is essential for reuse in political sphere, dropped by the Open Source paradigm. For Stallman, the link seems to be clear, he saw 19th century slavery abolitionist John Brown a historical figure analogous to himself (Williams 2002, 183). Famously, when there were physical barriers to access, hackers resorted to analysing locks during night time incursions in offices, climbing through ceiling structures, creating blank and master keys, and gaining access to whatever they needed: they “did not bother with such ridiculous concepts such as property rights”, and they didn’t steal nor injure anyone in the process (Levy 1984, 102-107). Mischief was prevented through social pressures enforcing an ethic of improvements and not damage (Levy 1984, 63). This spirit can still be seen at hacker gatherings in the form of The Open Organization of Lockpickers holding there their events regularly (TOOOL 2010).
Volunteer cooperation and communities for all
Networking and software communities that were central to construction of the Internet, the Web and their tools consisted mostly of hackers, engineers and academics. Let us call them the founding communities.
Their political importance does not derive from the results and processes of their work alone. The key political ingredients are their methods of cooperation and most of all consistently repeated claim that technological advances should benefit all. For one, life should be less machine alike for all humans (Himanen 2001, 33), and self-organization of work and time should be part of it.
Freedom to self-organize the time that hackers demand for everyone started in academia. While in the Middle Ages work was task oriented, industrialization and the factory imposed time based (Himanen 2001, 35-6), controlled, or as we learned to call it in the 20th century, managed work. Since information technology tools enabling new forms of cooperation have become widely available, we could go back to the task based work. This is especially the case for the latest generation of Web software enabling creation and tracking of working groups and tasks, collective project management and all the corresponding communication.
If repurposed for the specific context, these tools and new forms of cooperation could be utilized across society, in other spheres of production, politics, law, education. Yet, there is no guarantee that any of it will happen. Quite the contrary, the new wave of tools is used to increase the control over workers under the conditions of time based work (Himanen 2001, 37). Currently, the key assumption is that there are only a few people in any organization mature enough to take decisions. Majority of us are deemed incapable of it, and regardless of the rapid technological changes and the possibilities they open, most people are condemned to obedience (Himanen 2001, 39). Hacker desire to share for all, across society, not just software, but as well their forms of cooperation and work, has a long way to go to materialize.
Contrary to the widely held idea, it can be argued that it was software and networking communities in academic research centres, those founding communities, which seized USA Department of Defence projects and funds and developed the Web and the Internet without direct military direction (Castells 2001, 1975). Our challenge today is that technological revolutions do not come without large cultural transformation, they have to be thought of. This does not happen incrementally. It requires “a vision, and act of belief, a gesture of rebellion” – attributes not directly ascribed, but well applicable to Richard Stallman’s work. At the core of the wave of new tools and practices are distribution of processing capacity and increase of innovation potential by cooperation and sharing. Hacker culture was central to it. Hence, to reap the benefits of the revolutionary leap in technology, new organizations have to be built on hacker culture (Castells 2001, 177).
Open Source movement is an attempt to use the innovation potential for the benefit of private profit, for capitalist goals, which, as i’m attempting to demonstrate here, clashes with the most important features of hacker culture. Yet, long before the Open Source movement was formed, many hackers went on to form companies that became large corporations, adopting their hacker traits to fit the purpose (Thomas 2003, XXII).
The goal of this text is to twofold: one, to show how Open Source limits reuse, adoption of hacker culture, of new forms of cooperation, in spheres other than the capitalist economy. Two, how a new concept could remove those limits and open up the possibilities for reuse. For that to happen, for new organizations to have a chance of being built on an adopted form of hacker culture, or for the existing ones to be rebuilt, to be hacked by it, we need a more precise definition of what is the hacker culture, or cultures.
As i have developed elsewhere, key attributes of the founding communities have been formalized best in the IETF and Free Software (Prug 2009). We could summarize them: one, a goal to create something that is shareable – making profit can only be a secondary goal. Two, open participation – anyone can join, based on enjoyment of work – and open processes and results of work. Three, core activity is base on volunteering, working groups and competence. Four, rough consensus and running code decision making principle is the norm, voting is used only in rare and extreme circumstances. Five, responsibilities are defined, to note some examples: for IETF it is protocol ownership, for FS software maintainer, for Debian GNU/Linux operating system package maintainer. Six, rights are based on contributions – in Open Organizations project, we called this implementation work (Geer, Malter, and Prug 2005). Roots of this principle are visible in the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club, the earliest hacker community we know of, where keys to the main room were given to new members, new hackers, only after they completed forty hours of work (Levy 1984, 21). Many authors also hold that having a trusted benevolent dictator is a key aspect(Coffin 2006), i do not share this view.
I proposed that we could describe the model in short with the following formula: the Internet Model = FS + IETF, software + networking, or ethics + organization.
My claim is that organizations implementing these processes would benefit in several ways. Structure and visibility of tasks, processes and work done to complete them will be clearer, which contributes to easier recognition of the workers who contribute most work that matters to the organization. As a result of this visibility, focus on implementation work and continuously carried out processes will increase, which keeps organization alive and developing. Project management will become easier, while decision making will be placed into the hands of those who matter most, who contribute most to the implementation work, work whose progress defines the organization and ensures its continual existence. All of this will attract new volunteers and reduce impact of the existing counter-productive internal participants. First attempt at a more detailed development of this model – set in a concrete, mostly cooperative production context – is in my paper Open Process Academic Publishing.
Today, given the structure of organizations across society, given our time based obligations to work place, and our waged labour, it is no surprise that it is difficult to see how could these new processes of work, this hacker culture, especially its volunteer aspect, be applicable. MySQL is one of the two most important Free Software databases, and one of the most used databases in the world. Sun, a large corporation founded in 1980-s also by an earlier generation of hackers, bought MySQL company in 2008. Two key MySQL hackers were unhappy with how the work was going under Sun, and they decided to leave and form their own company (Moody 2009). What differentiates them is a hacking business model (Greant and Widenius 2009) under which their new company operates: workers have wide array of rights derived from hacker culture, with a mixture of rules that seem to share some spirit of the self-management in Socialist Yugoslavia, combined with a typical capitalist company. This could be a one-off experiment. It could also be the start of a new generation of hackers financially empowered by their hacking, not ready any more to operate under the terms imposed on them by the form of capitalist firms that clash with hacker ethics and culture.
The Internet Model and the Open Process are attempts to conceptualize and appropriately name the ways of working which brought us the Internet and the Web. Ways in which hackers, academics and software and networking engineers, or the founding communities as i call them, played, and still play, a central, constitutive, role. Due to its focus on attracting capitalist investors under terms which included leaving many hacker culture features out, Open Source failed to be a concept through which a comprehensive reapplication of those ways of working across the rest of society would be possible. To make the reapplication possible, we need new concepts. Hence the Open Process and the Internet Model.
Open Source as a capitalist ideological castration
Adopting new terms for an important and widely spread concept is a difficult task. It does not help either that financial power behind Open Source and associated business interest is enormous. Public imagination was captured with the 2001 IBM announcement that they are investing 1000 million US dollars in Linux development. IBM was convinced that “Linux can do for business applications what the Internet did for networking and communications’, which will ‘make computing easier and free from proprietary operating systems’” (Wilcox 2000).
This type of business reaction was precisely what Open Source founders were looking for. In their open source “re-labelling”, their primary, publicly stated goal, was to attract business (Raymond 1998). To make hackers’ software and networking communities and their products look like a good place to invest vast sums of money. In short, Open Source was primarily a business pitch to the world’s largest IT corporations. We know that the goal of capitalist economic organizations is to make profit through exploitation and domination, through coercion of both workers and political organizations (lobbying, corruption).
Open Source initiative and for-profit organizations have been incredibly successful in appropriating only aspects of software and networking communities’ unique cooperation that suit them. However, every such appropriation is a closure of other possibilities. Given the dominance of capitalist relations, it is most often a removal of what does not fit its core logic of domination and exploitation for profit. Tracing the processes of these appropriations is necessary to evaluate what was left out, or added, to construct a capitalist, profit making suitable concept, like Open Source.
If we look at the various stages of cooperation in software and network communities, although many successful businesses were setup by the members of those communities, we will not see explicit claims, nor implicitly expressed desires, to make profit, nor to exploit or dominate. Quite the contrary, we can see claims to create, to be playful (Stallman 2002b; Levy 1984, 184, 202, 208), to do it with others, collectively through open processes, open to both participation and with a shared final result (H. Alverstrand 2004). Although corporations have been integrating these elements as desirable aspects of work culture (Fleming 2009, 56-76), they are still not the attributes that would be welcome in a typical corporation, especially not in the Open Source founding days in 1998. This is why Open Source appropriation of this history, in its focus on attracting capital and top corporate decision makers, had to exclude elements unacceptable to for-profit capitalist model.
Since large scale controlled cooperation is the fundamental form of capitalist production (Marx 1990, 453-4), it was to be expected that aspects of the Internet Model will be attractive to capitalist organization of labour. When a business friendly subset, Open Source, was offered, a fast rate of adoption was a logical follow up.
A surprising result of this research which i did not foresee, was that Free Software principles, although central and far more truthful than Open Source to the Internet Model, still do not bode well enough on their own to describe innovative cooperation through which the Internet and its most important tools were built.
While the work of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) were one of the key components in the development of what i call the Internet Model, Open Source was an act of capitalist ideological castration. What was potent – what gave life to tools and practices of software and networking communities – was removed, in favour of commitment to the capitalist ideology.
The essential parts of that ideology are: time based wage labour; strictly hierarchical management with no say for those who do the implementation work (although, capitalism is trying to incorporate other models to adjust to what workers want while still have them obey); closed information, trade secrets, reward (wage) secrets; enforced (not volunteer) cooperation through closed processes; selfishness and strictly for-profit motivation; clash of inter-organizational limited open processes and cooperation (employees have to cooperate within the departments they work in) with overall selfishness, overall closed processes and for-profit motivation; active prevention of sharing of what could and should be shared in the name of private profit for the tiny minority (formulas to produce drugs for life threatening diseases being denied to poorer states are the best example), use of technology to increase machine-like time for humans (i.e Fordism with improved machinery and better control over humans in production). The list is long, and the contradictions between the necessary cooperation and non-cooperation are many.
All of the above characteristics are contrary to, and in clash with, many key aspects of the hacker culture. All of it had to be not mentioned, or obfuscated, in order for the Open Source initiative to sound right, sound true. But its truth lies only within the perspective of capitalism and especially within its neo-liberal free-market ideological doctrine. From the perspective of the hacker culture, capitalist ideology and its Open Source initiative, show the necessity of hacker politics.
However, as some might incorrectly conclude here from my remarks, the opposite is not directly true. A truth of hacker culture known to me cannot be easily identified nor placed within the politics of egalitarian ideologies and movements. Yet, there is a lot of shared ideological ground. Far more than it is the case with ideological forms of capitalism. Such comparison requires a separate study.
For now, i would like to point out that i believe that centralization, closeness and secrecy of socialist and communist practices were specific to the historic period in which they originated. The theoretical and ideological base from which these practices were derived from has many principles and beliefs similar to those exhibited in the hacker culture, and to an extent in hacker politics too – FS being an example of it. This was manifest in the socialist states, where sharing of education, health and housing were widely implemented. In socialist Yugoslavia, the principle of self-management brought the system a step closer to key elements of hacker culture.
I can imagine how a new generation of political principles and organizational tools for movements, activist and state forms, could be built consistently with vast majority of the Open Process and the Internet Model principles, with the hacker culture. A new hybrid political ideology, merging of anarchism and communism based on the technological advances of our time, seems a good candidate and a logical way to proceed. In other words, hacking, anarchism and communism could be the basis for a new directly democratic and participatory egalitarian society without strong centralized hierarchies, based on open processes and volunteer cooperation (enjoying work) at its core. A society with common needs and interests – developed in heterogeneous ways suitable to both diversity and commonness – at its centre. I cannot see how a similar ideological proximity, between hacking and capitalism, could be claimed for the forms of capitalist ideology.
A stolen method enabled false claims of uniqueness
There were two central differentiating points made by the Open Source founders. One, that their new concept was unique in making conscious the method of cooperation which was until then a set of customs passed through the practice, the so called ‘bazaar model’. Two, that they were pragmatists, not interested in ideology.
In the three-year study (2005-2008) of a new vast shopping mall, Shopsville in Finland, Murtola describes what happens when critique is appropriated into what is being critiqued. First step is exclusion, separation, “some people are allowed to join, they are specifically selected as appropriate. Others are denied access”. Main decision makers are investors, capital holders:
The process of appropriation can be understood as divided into two stages. The first stage involves choosing a selective, desired part of something and abstracting that part from its social and historical context. The second stage involves inserting it into another context.(Murtola, 15)
My claim is here the following: Richard Stallman’s Free Software foundational ethical principles were his expression of community of software engineers, academics, hackers, to produces collaboratively, voluntarily, without the coercive mechanisms of capital, a non-democratic force imposed on everyone since the days of the industrial revolution. He saw normal state of professional programming work where we do it for the money, wanting to get away from it and forget it as fast as possible, as a tragedy (Williams 2002, 77). Open Source did precisely what Murtola says happens through appropriation: they choose selectively, ignoring key aspects, ethics (FS) and open-process (IETF), extracting parts they selected from the overall social and historic context and embedding them into the new one suitable to capitalist investors.
Early versions of Emacs, Stallman’s earliest software, state that they were “distributed on a basis of communal sharing” (Williams 2002, 85). He found a way for an easy addition of features without disrupting the whole. He shared the source widely, inspiring large number of people to contribute. In words of Hal Abelson, one of Stallman’s colleagues from the time: in a robust structure loose network was collaborating successfully, with Stallman “paving the way for future large-scale collaborative software projects” unlike anything done before (Williams 2002, 86). John Gilmore, a prominent hacker, believes that through GNU project “Stallman pioneered collaborative development of software, particularly by disorganized volunteers who seldom meet each other”, and this may end up being his most important legacy (Williams 2002, 181).
Here we have precisely the invention of the method that Open Source initiative founders claimed differentiates their movement from Free Software. I guess because of open source initiative pressure, Stallman conceded that Open Source is a development methodology, while Free Software is a social movement with four essential freedoms (Stallman 2002a, 57). This, i claim, was a strategic mistake on Stallman’s part. It gave Open Source an advantage, through a false point of uniqueness that even for Raymond, if we read his texts closely, belonged at least as much to Stallman and older FS communities, as it did to a newer generation of hackers.
For Raymond, there were two broadly identifiable ideological positions amongst hackers, and variety of positions in between those two. First, one was ideological driven (FS), while the other one was pragmatist, not driven by an ideology (Raymond 2001, 67). Free Software was “historically the best organized and most visible part of hacker culture” (Raymond 2001, 68), since it
supported great deal of open-source development from 1980’s onward, including tools like Emacs and GCC which are still basic to the Internet open-source world, and seem likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. For many years the FSF was the single most important focus of open-source hacking, producing a huge number of tools still critical to the culture. The FSF was also long the only sponsor of open source with an institutional identity visible to outside observers of the hacker culture. (Raymond 2001, 69)
Note this well crafted ideological move: he calls everything open source couple of decades backwards, even though he is just in the process of inventing the term. Equally, he calls FSF a sponsor of open source, erasing from history that FSF supported Free Software, while implanting his fictitious construct that it supported open source, a non-existent term at the time. He continues: in July 1997, more than half of software in the largest and the most popular software archive in the world at the time carried FS General Public Licence (GPL). There were also pragmatist communities in 1980’s and 1990’s, mostly around Berkley Unix, users of BSD licence. However, they “failed to build bazaar communities of significant size, and became seriously fragmented and ineffective.”
In other words, Raymond agrees with widely held belief at the time: Free Software and its GPL copyleft way was a success, while what he calls a pragmatist approach was not. While explaining one of his “open source” principles (the importance of having users), Raymond used Emacs as a positive example of fast development in small cycles (Raymond 2001, 26-8). He thus confirmed what we knew already, as Abelson remarked, that frequent and early releases and cooperative development are models developed by Free Software communities. Yet, Raymond still proceeded and attributed falsely those features to his newly formed Open Source movement.
Emacs was and still is Free Software. Hence, features Raymond named and attributed to his newly founded movement, are the features of Free Software. Calling it something else, especially insisting that that else is based on methods of development invented by Free Software communities, is stealing and appropriating. In short, one of the key reasons why Free Software movement was successful is because it did well what Raymond stole from it and used it as his key argument to define Open Source: advanced methods of cooperation.
Raymond’s central point – point on which the whole reason for existence of Open Source hinges – the difference between the cathedral and bazaar model, is developed in a brief passage argued through Emacs as an example of cathedral style of development. He claimed that in 1992 he tried to merge large amount of Lisp libraries into Emacs, but he “run into political trouble and was largely unsuccessful” (Raymond 2001, 28). Stallman’s recollection of this was quite different. Raymond wanted to “take over the development of a large part of Emacs, operating independently”, while Stallman wanted to judge contributed ideas individually, accept some without being forced in accepting it all. This eventually led to Stallman “accepting substantial amount of Raymond’s work” (Wayner 2000, 113). For Raymond, this behaviour of Stallman was what made him characterize the development of Emacs as cathedral style, with a designer at the centre of the project.
With the appearance of Linux, a different, bazaar style of development appeared. However, Linus Torvalds’ style on which he insisted loudly and frequently on kernel email lists was that he will only apply small patches, that do one thing (Sowe and Stamelos 2007, 112). In other words, he was saying a very similar thing that Stallman told Raymond: changes have to be small, so that they can be selected easily by the project leader who made all the final decisions (Sowe and Stamelos 2007, 107). The process was almost identical, with one important difference: the frequency and pace of the application of incoming patches and releases was significantly, if not dramatically higher. Linus took the existing model and improved on it by speeding it up; this was his big contribution. Otherwise, very little else changed. Especially given that it is extremely rare that any software project attracts number of developers large enough to start functioning like the bazaar Raymond describes (Krishnamurthy 2002).
Distributed peer reviewing, add release early, release often, perhaps the two most important aspects claimed to have made Open Source unique (Raymond 2001), were aspects belonging to many hacker communities. Other than faster application of the cooperative model based on small patches, overall differences between the Free Software and Open Source was so small, that “as a development approach, the two F/OSS movements are indistinguishable” (Dedrick and West 2008, 436). Raymond’s Open Source was indeed a different political project, focused on dropping the GPL’s viral aspect and allowing corporations and institutions to keep their additions to the existing Free Software closed and not shared.
However, it was the invention of copyleft and GPL, work of FSF, and possibly most of all Stallman’s stubborn insistence on the importance of the key FS principles, which made aspects shared between the Free Software and Open Source widely spread and known.
With the rise of Linux, pragmatists finally had a success on their hands (Raymond 2001, 70). Even if this was the case, if Linux was a success of the pragmatist model, the model kept failing until that moment, as Raymond himself admitted comparing BSD’s relative failure, in comparison to GPL projects. Moreover, if so, surely those times, the history before Linux, were successful because of the Free Software, as Raymond also noted. Hence, it is a blatant misrepresentation to call it what it was not, Open Source. However, there is little doubt that success of the Linux kernel and the GNU/Linux system, and subsequent Open Source marketing supported by ultra rich corporations, made some aspects of hacker culture and model of cooperation far more prominent.
It is incorrect to call the project a “rebranding exercise” of Free Software in Open Source (Moody 2001, 169). In rebranding, the brand changes in a given moment of time by those, in most cases who own it, while history is preserved. There is no negation of the previous brand, only the introduction of a new one. In rebranding, history is not rewritten. Finally, to start with, you need to have a brand. Free Software was never a brand. Brands are ways to market, categorize, position, and sell commodities, ways to limit the use of collection of attributes which constitute the brand, in other to make profit. Free Software was, and still is, a social movement. It came out of hacking communities, based on hacking culture.
Core hacking values do not fit in the for-profit, capitalist ideology and practice. Hence, Raymond and his group had to start from stripping attributes that do not fit, in order to have an object that can both fit capitalism and be commodified. Only such, new and suitable concept, could have been branded. Raymond created this new concept by rewriting and falsifying the history of Free Software. He negated it first through the creation of a new, hostile concept. He then proceeded to call its history, its products, methods and communities with a new name. The circle was complete. It was an act of ethical cleansing: it cleansed the community formed under the new concept from Free Software hackers and their ethics.
On practice and ideology
Open Source creation was not just a creation of a new concept. It was an extensively conceived project, and Raymond who took central part in it has shown to be a successful ideologue. Rejecting that the notion of ideology applies to you is a typical attribute of an ideology and an ideologue. Raymond’s beliefs are with free trade and forces of the market, which are, according to him, both opposed to coercion through ideology (Moody 2001, 153). There are two mistaken basic theoretically assumptions here. One, that there is non-ideological set of beliefs and practices (Žižek 1994, 17). And two, that free-trade and market forces are those non-ideological entities. Ian Murdoch, founder of Debian project, expressed similar neo-liberal ideological views:
“commoditization is a natural and unstoppable force that is good for everyone involved if that force is allowed to develop on its natural course” (DiBona, Stone, and Cooper 2005, 92).
These claims might have stood in the eyes of many prior to the 2008 banking crashes. However, it is clear now that it is only through the gigantic and swift state intervention that the capitalist financial sector has been saved from a total collapse. Let us be clear on this: Alister Darling, UK minister of finance at the time, spoke openly for the first time about the seriousness of the crisis in the summer of 2009. On that weekend in 2008, we were forty-eight hours away from the two of the four largest UK banks closing down its cash points and declaring bankruptcy [REF]. The state had no choice, but to intervene and pump as much money as it was needed to prevent this. No one, not to my knowledge, has spoken on the possible consequences of two largest banks closing down on a Monday morning, with no cash to be withdrawn. Can you at all imagine such situation? Do you believe that the population of UK would have remained civil and peaceful to each other in the face of a large percentage of population having their current accounts locked out? For one, i do not. I believe the army would have been on the streets, and UK would have entered a period of civil unrest with unimaginable consequences.
Neo-liberal free-markets were never free. Any meticulous student of neo-liberalism not entirely taken by its ideology would have discovered this. In the year 2008 the whole world had a gigantic proof that free-markets were entirely dependent on the acts of states to develop, nurture and bail them out when necessary. Unregulated, left to their own freedoms, markets – lead by the financial one where innovation in products and trading schemes originated – developed into an enormous danger to the entire society. Rightly, citizens’ trust in them worldwide has collapsed (Globescan 2009).
It is through emphasis on practice, entirely based on the methodology appropriated from Free Software and other communities of hackers, that Raymond states his claim. Here is how he described Richard Stallman’s work:
In 1985, RMS published the GNU Manifesto. In it he consciously created an ideology out of the values of the pre-1980 ARPANET hackers — complete with a novel ethico-political claim, a self-contained and characteristic discourse, and an activist plan for change. RMS aimed to knit the diffuse post-1980 community of hackers into a coherent social machine for achieving a single revolutionary purpose. His behavior and rhetoric half-consciously echoed Karl Marx’s attempts to mobilize the industrial proletariat against the alienation of their work.(Raymond 2004, 69)
In short, Stallman created a ideology. While Raymond and his group did not:
“Open source” was explicitly intended to replace Stallman’s preferred “free software” with a public label that was ideologically neutral, acceptable both to historically opposed groups like the BSD hackers and those who did not wish to take a position in the GPL/anti-GPL debate.(Raymond 2004, 74)
What we have according to Raymond is ideology (FS) versus ideology neutral (OS). However, when he states, “for me, the working method is the ideology” (Moody 2008), he exposes one side of the broken logic of his claim bare. If, as Raymond claims, methodology is central to Open Source, and methodology is ideology, Open Source is not ideology neutral. Its ideology is, as he says, methodology. Hence, by his own logic, Free Software and Open Source would be just two ideological concepts and communities. Free Software would be an ethico-political ideology, while Open Source would be ideology based purely on methodology of work.
However, as i demonstrated above, the claim of being methods based is false. Methods were developed and made widely popular and successful largely by the Free Software movement, Open Source appropriated it. Hence, not only is Raymond’s key claim about ideology (FS) versus ideology neutral (OS) untrue, its starting points are false too. In other words, he did not even have a coherent starting point. The only thing that is unique to the Open Source group is their approach to capitalism, their embrace of free-market ideology.
It is thus not a surprise, but rather another confirmation of capitalist ideology as the only valid point in Open Source, that interviewees did not care about either Free Software (freedom, community, sharing) or Open Source (methods) ideas, and instead based their decision mostly on the low-cost aspect and freedom from vendor lock-in (Campbell-Kelly and Garcia-Swartz 2009). Authors’ mistaken view, which destroys the possibility of a more useful analytical development of their research, is to contrast ideology with pragamatism. This is typical of liberal notion of ideology, one found in liberal political science textbooks, in which capitalism is naturalized, and in which acting according to the rules of a capitalist firm, or a government agency, is not seen as ideological. Socialist firms and government agencies in Yugoslavia, and most importantly the overall relation between the producer and consumer, had a lot in common with capitalist firm and forms of government, which perhaps explains a rapid conversion to the consumption model of the free market:
But what constituted the failure on behalf of the socialist project was that it rehearsed the divorce between the productivity and consumption in the subjectivity (differentiation between worker and consumer otherwise also known as alienation of producer from his products) and the mediation between them via the process of abstraction and mediation by means of the general equivalent the same way the capitalist project did. In this regard it remained tributary of the capital relation and consequently was essentially deserving of the name it got – state-capitalism. (Medak 2004)
The point Medak make is a crucial one: Free Software offers an intervention into the main nodes of the capitalist production (alienation of labour and circulation of commodities via abstraction of money – all of this free of ideology, according to liberal theorists), perhaps better than socialist state projects from the last century did. Which does not diminish their importance, it merely points out one of possible key causes for their failure, and possible path of development of new egalitarian political projects.
Aside with this brief excursion, Raymond is incapable of holding his own constructs logically coherent. The above is one example, there are plenty of others scattered across his texts. Another example is that he saw BSD communities as a pragmatist opposition that rejected GNU’s ideological primacy (Raymond 2004, 71). However, they became included in his Open Source concept, through inclusion of method of work, as a part of the Open Source success story, as an essential argument for construction of the Open Source movement. Again, if ideology is method, and GNU was ideological, as Raymond claims, GNU’s methods were more successful as ideology. Hence, it made no logical sense to include BSD communities under a newly formed Open Source concept as an example of the success of the pragmatist model. It was the GPL, copyleft and the FS movement model that were a success, and not BSD, as Raymond himself wrote on occasions. It gets very confusing and it is difficult to follow.
For Raymond, with his creation of Open Source, communities that objected to FS and GPL, like BSD, which were not successful in comparison with FS and GPL successes, suddenly became important because they fitted his pragmatist category.
Regarding the main pragmatist success story, Linux, Linus Torvalds might have been, and still is, a person who does not agree with Richard Stallman’s firm stance on Free Software principles, but he nevertheless choose them, and still sticks by them, through his use of GPL license. Perhaps pragmatically so, but it demonstrates the efficiency of the Free Software cooperative, ethical and licensing models, and the degree of success of its ideology. As early as 1995, Torvalds openly expressed that he uses and likes proprietary software that gets the job done better (Williams 2002, 157). Regardless of this admission, and his open dislike of Stallman’s hard stance, Torvalds clearly understands that he would not have been able to even start his Linux project, if there was no GNU project tools and libraries, ethics, licensing and Stallman’s unfettered belief in all of it.
Finally, it was people from these pragmatist BSD-license communities, many of them coming from Berkeley, that sometimes “shared by selling the software back to these students and the taxpayers who had paid for their work”. Sun was one of the companies that profited from such privatization of socially funded development (Wayner 2000, 96, 132). So did Microsoft, although quietly and without any commitment to such model (Adamba 2001). This is another feature in line with the neo-liberal ideology of socializing the cost of developing (arms and pharmaceutical industries), while privatizing profits [REF].
Splitting the community: top-down, corporate exclusion of Free Software hackers and their ideals
The key event for the birth of the Open Source was the release of Netscape browser source code. It was a desperate last attempt by a company whose market share was being crushed by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Michael Tiemann explained how Netscape move inspired foundation of the Open Source Initiative: “we decided it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with ‘free software’ in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape.” (Tiemann 2008) In his first announcement to the community, after consultations with a number of interested companies and individuals, Raymond issued the call to arms “Goodbye, ‘free software’; hello, ‘open source’”, in which he stated two problems with Free Software. First, it is confusing and ambiguous, since it is unclear whether free means no money charged, or free to be modified by anyone. Second:
it makes a lot of corporate types nervous [...] we now have a pragmatic interest in converting these people [...] a chance we can make serious gains in the mainstream business world without compromising our ideals and commitment to technical excellence — so it’s time to reposition. We need a new and better label. We suggest that everywhere we as a culture have previously talked about “free software”, the label should be changed to “open source”. Open-source software. The open-source model. The open source culture. (Raymond 1998)
Here we have a series of implicit statements, present from the logic of the text. The key operation Open Source founders executed was getting rid of Free Software ethical principles. If such operation is done “without compromising our” ideals, that implies that Free Software hackers cannot be included in “our”. In other words, Open Source initiative was exclusion of all Free Software hackers who held Free Software ethical ideals. This was never publicly stated, of course, it would have caused an outrage if Raymond came out with such statement. Effectively, he did say it. He just expressed it in a subtle way that required a bit of analysis to render it visible.
Exclusion of all Free Software hackers and their ideals was not just symbolized, but also practically done through the exclusion of Richard Stallman from Open Source founding events (Williams 2002, 165). Tim O’Reilly recalls that at the meeting where a new name was decided on, they voted, and decided to all stick with the Open Source, which got 9 out of 15 votes. This was for O’Reilly “a solidarity message” (Williams 2002, 164). How bizarre! This was solidarity. What about Stallman and large Free Software communities that Stallman’s views were representative of? It certainly was not in any sort of solidarity with them. They were excluded from the start, together with the central ideas on which the communities were built on. Equally important, such strategy was in total opposition with the most fundamental of all Inter Engineering Task Force (IETF) cardinal principles: open process, according to which “any interested person can participate in the work, know what is being decided, and make his or her voice heard on the issue” (IETF, Request for Comments 3935, 2004).
In short, Open Source was a betrayal of volunteer driven open collaboration of software and networking communities in several ways. Apart from betraying the ethics of Free Software and excluding entire large communities of hackers, and apart from betraying the IETF principle of open process, being strictly motivated by the financial rewards derived from the vast investments in the field was another betrayal. Eric Raymond dismissed financial motivation (Raymond 1999). His dismissal is absurd. Not only did he rose from a fringe software hacker to the status of a rich (a millionaire many times over) celebrity, but Open Source was an explicit, clearly stated call for capitalist investors to put their money into this narrow subset of the Internet Model.
Raymond and many others were rewarded by Open Source business co-conspirators with share allocations, once some of the first Open Source companies floated on the stock market and became worth tens, some hundreds, of millions of dollars over night (Moody 2001, 235-6). This stands in stark contrast with the detail from the spring 2000, when Eben Moglen paid a lunch for himself and Stallman, knowing that he was the only one who had some money to pay for it (Williams 2002, 184).
We can speculate what was the extent of the impact of Open Source pleasing investors on the overall phenomena known as the dot-com bubble. However, we can broadly say that Raymond and Open Source founders played an active part in inflated expectations leading to one of the largest financial crashes since the 1930’s crisis, superseded only by the recent financial crisis.
Following statements, from different books and times, show how subtle, clever and thoroughly ideological, Open Source move was:
My impression at the time was that he (Linus Torvalds) had those conclusions as latent knowledge, but that I was causing the knowledge to be-come explicit in his mind. So I think that when he read my draft, he essentially consciously discovered what he already knew. (Moody 2001, 152) [...] The one thing Torvalds did not offer was a new ideology, a new rationale or positive generative myth of hacking (Raymond 2004, 49) [...] You can view it as a continuation of a theme that’s been present in my work all along, which is the conscious elucidation of unconscious knowledge (Moody 2001, 153).
Here we have Raymond uncovered as a mature, clever, respectable ideolog, explicitly defining himself as one who creates ideology for the new movement, in contrast to his early claims that FS is ideological, while OS is neutral, pragmatic. The most efficient ideological moves, or perhaps we can say the only properly ideologically ones, are those that are not false, whose content is truthful. What makes them ideological is what they leave out, what they do not tell us, in order to both hide some existing domination (power-over) and exploitation, and to justify such relation as valid, logical, and acceptable (Žižek 1994, 7-9). This is a simpler form of ideological operation.
What we get from Raymond in the above quote is a more complex move. Not only does he cut out Free Software ethics and hackers and some other key Internet Model collaborative principles, he insists that what he does is only an act of elucidation of what was already an existing unconscious knowledge. He thus puts the responsibility and justification for his ideological move (his creation of a new community, exclusions, betrayals and strictly financial motivations) not on the acts of Open Source founders and his leadership, but he instead projects it onto the internal, personal, psychology of those who accept the new concept and accept being followers of this new community.
The precision by which he expresses this move is striking. As we know from Žižek’s portrayal of Donal Rumsfeld as a philosopher, in the matrix of four possible states of the known/unknown, it is the unknown-known, a combination that Rumsfeld did not mention, that matters most (Žižek 2004, 95). This is the definition of the unconscious: stuff that we do know, but we are not aware that we know it. Raymond stuffed his entire creation into the unconscious, pulling it out of it like a magician pulling the rabbit out of the black hat. Most likely, unaware, or shall we say unconscious?, of the trick he pulled. Here we are, happy to oblige. The trick, after all, was not that great. Raymond misrepresentation of history continues:
“Before The Cathedral and the Bazaar, open-source development was a folk practice, a set of working methods evolved unconsciously by hackers who had no theory about why the things they were doing actually worked. It didn’t have a name—and no, “free software” wasn’t it, because that label was about ideology and goals rather than working methods and communications structures.” (Moody 2008)
As we have seen from Raymond’s claims analysed earlier in the text, these are entirely false claims. His work was all about a new ideology and new goals, as much as work of Free Software communities prior to his Open Source project was about working methods and communication structures. Ideological framing is unsurprisingly present in the official document, History of OSI:
“The prehistory of the Open Source Initiative includes the entire history of Unix, Internet free software, and the hacker culture. OSI was formed as an educational, advocacy, and stewardship organization at a cusp moment in the history of the culture.” (Tiemann 2008)
Suddenly, once the move of the exclusion through the splitting of the community is forgotten, excluded are back, as a supporting argument to the claim that the Open Source Initiative, the main organisation behind the Open Source, includes the entire history of software and networking engineering and hacking communities.
Discussions on a Debian GNU/Linux email lists at the time reveal more about the way Open Source came into life and the schism it caused. Dissatisfaction with the way Raymond was leading the OSI project was so high, that a formal proposal was made for Software For Public Interest (SPI), a Debian umbrella organization, to take over the OSI (Carter 1999). Most of criticism focused on secrecy, lack of community involvement and opaque communication and decision making, all features contrary to the way hackers, and especially project like Debian, operate (Towns 1999; Perens 1999; Schuessler 1999). A discussion continued clarifying the role of OSI to sit between suits (corporate capital) and hackers, asking for “some formal procedures”.
The strongest condemnation of the OSI way of working came in clear terms: “The ‘Open Software Initiative’ is a CLOSED organization. That’s damn near to hypocrisy” (Brinkmann 1999). In the same fascinating thread, the difference between the hackers and business way was boldly stated:
> Admitting your mistakes, your bugs, your design flaws,
> whatever is a key element of free software development.You are absolutely right. That is how hackers do things. It’s
completely lacking in a business environment. If we were to be seen
as hackers, we would get the same regard that hackers have always
gotten: zero.
An angry response followed, stating that Brinkmann does not understand the job they, OSI, have to do, which is to negotiate licences in secrecy, because that, doing it closed, is the nature of how it is done: there is no time for open participation of the community (Nelson 1999a). Because of Nelson’s unfriendly response, another member suggests that this type of response is the reason why SPI should get the control over the Open Source (Winebarger 1999a).
Nelson defends, since OSI has been doing all of the work on Open Source, it hence owns it: “In my universe, those who do the work get to own it” (Nelson 1999b). Same Nelson who just insisted that hacker principles of community, cooperation, dialogue, openness, cannot be withheld, since that is not how you can operate in the business environment (with suits). You have to adjust to their language, not listen to, nor cooperate closely with your hacker community any more, but adopt negotiations in secrecy instead. Yet, when he was challenged about the ownership of the work, Nelson went back to his hacker beliefs and chose to own the work because he was doing it.
However, why would the ownership of the work done with “suits” be allocated according to hacker rules, and why not according to the rules of “suits”, following Nelson’s own way of accepting the business rules over the rules of his community on whose behalf he was acting? According to business rules, the work belongs to those who pay for it, or who have more resources to command the situation, to assert their rule. Nelson’s inconsistency was in line with Raymond’s texts and claims: they both used or discarded hacker ethics selectively, as it suited them. Which is a remarkably fast adoption to how corporations think and act: nothing is sacred, and everything is allowed as long as you are not caught, all in the name of profit. Even when a corporation, or large parts of an entire sector, are caught, as the 2008 financial crisis shows, if your corporation is large and important enough, the state will jump in and cover for your losses.
This discussion on Debian mailing lists showed the extent to which the corporate capitalist ethic was in clash with the hacker ethic, and Raymond’s and Nelson’s troubles to operate between the two ethical systems demonstrate their incompatibility. Nelson got another striking response stating the incompatibility between suits and hackers:
“It may be that the “suits” can identify with a highly closed operation, but the free software community is much more democratic, and its members (I’ve found) tend to be more freedom-concious than average. Backroom dealings might be acceptable as necessary, but without accountability, that acceptance is likely to be low to none” (Winebarger 1999b).
This crisis between OSI and Debian arose around the Apple licence claims to be an Open Source one. It brought to the surface differences between OSI licence processes too. Another user reminded that the Nestscape Public Licence (NPL) went through precisely the process Nelson claims is impossible: it was done through a newsgroup that anyone can join, and amongst many discussions, Richard Stalman, Bruce Perens and Netscape employees discussed issues concerning the licence. Several NPL/MPL drafts were circulated in the process, and while the starting licence was not Free Software, final draft was. Although there were many private conversations between Perens, Raymond and Netscape, there was “also an *open* public process”, and the community of Free Software, have the right to insist on such mandatory open process (Pennington 1999). The day later, Nelson announces that OSI board made a decision to decide on all licences through an open, public, mailing list (Nelson 1999c). Community pressure did have some effect on this occasion.
Not surprisingly, Richard Stallman saw the Apple License in a completely different light than Open Source founders did:
Overall, I think that Apple’s action is an example of the effects of the year-old “open source” movement: of its plan to appeal to business with the purely materialistic goal of faster development, while putting aside the deeper issues of freedom, community, cooperation, and what kind of society we want to live in.
Apple has grasped perfectly the concept with which “open source” is promoted, which is “show users the source and they will help you fix bugs”. What Apple has not grasped–or has dismissed–is the spirit of free software, which is that we form a community to cooperate on the commons of software. (Stallman 1999)
In a response to it, Craig Sander wrote:
i think it is worth pointing out here that the rapid bug-fixing and development of features is merely a side-effect of this spirit of free software. i.e. it is *because* we know that the software is free and can never be taken away from us, and *because* we know we are contributing to the common good that we are willing to volunteer our time and energy and skills to improving free software.
without that security of knowledge, why should we bother? we would be better off putting our time and energy into something which was truly free than putting it into something which may be taken away from us in the future.
free software is, IMO, an example of enlightened self-interest – we are helping others by helping ourselves, and making an investment in software “infrastructure” which will benefit us all for decades (or more) to come. (Sanders 1999)
What Sanders refers to, talking about the software infrastructure which will benefit us for decades, is, a form of commons, a form of wealth and resource available to all, yet belonging exclusively to no one. The enlightened self-interest – which liberals might equate with the notions of individual rights and legal system to protect those, primarily the right to property – is here translated into the common of software. The right to property takes away the collective product created within organizations and asserts the ownership of it by the organization and individuals who own it, thus removing the ability of workers to have any say in it; they have nothing beyond the wage they receive for the labour they sell. This right of owners of capital and of means of production to claim ownership and hence further destiny over what is collectively (every company) produced is closely guarded by the state and laws. Free Software, and the spirit shown in the reaction to the creation of the capitalist Open Source movement is the spirit of non-alienated workers who feel and understand the value of non-alienated, commonly utilized and managed production. The production of the commons. Free Software movement refuses to put aside ‘the deeper issues of freedom, community, cooperation’, and most important, the question of ‘what kind of society we want to live in’. Richard Stallman’s words that proponents of Open Source do not grasp the spirit of Free Software, ‘which is that we form a community to cooperate on the commons of software’, are succinctly stated basis on which we can read Free Software and its hacker communities as a a form of communist spirit, one which becomes more visible in the clask with the capitalist counter-revolutionary acts of Open Source ideologues. Not communist as in the communist state projects or communist political parties of the twentieth century – these were only the forms that the idea of communism took in the past century – but communist in the spirit of the core ideas of communism. It is not for no reason that community is a root word for the ideas assigned to the concept of communism. The desires expressed by Stallman, of workers to take control over the product of their work, and most importantly, of the type of communities they form to cooperate in order to create a form of commons (and not to earn individually split profit), are deeply communist ideas.
The history of industry and commerce (in software and knowledge production) is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces (hackers, Open Access and Open Process in academia) against modern conditions of production (Fordism in software, Java, factory production-line type of division of labour, precariousness in education), against the property relations (copyright, patenting software) that are the conditions for the existence of the (software) bourgeois and of its rule. The productive forces at the disposal of society (the cooperation of the multitude, in Hardt/Negri terms, or simply volunteer cooperation of communities of knowledge and affect workers) no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters (as soon as the multitude becomes political, although hackers and education workers are already engaged in the struggle within the production), they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property (the new commons: shared software, knowledge, arts, even shared recipes for medical drugs). The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented. The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground (communication and knowledge industries) are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself (Marx and Engels 2005, 225-6).
The above paragraph is entirely a quote from the Communist Manifesto, with my comments that bring it to our moment in time placed in brackets.
Free Software and hackers, and their originating environment, education institutions, are the productive forces most intensely involved in the production of new commons. Their impulse to share globally, to be leaders in the decommodification of the knowledge and important type of means of production (software), to be at the forefront of the creation of new commons, is a communist, at minimal commonist, impulse. What could make it communist, is the creation of new political subjectivity, based on rethinking of the idea of communism and the organizational capabilities of the multitude (which for me slightly, but significantly, differs from the concept developed by Hardy/Negri; to be developed elsewhere) today, one that would be capable of expressing and developing new commons as a political project. It is here that we’re faced with some of the limits of Marx’s analysis for our contemporary moment:
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.
This does not resonate with the situation today. Despite numerous efforts to squeeze our situation today into Marx’s framework, we do not have anything closely resembling the working class, or the proletarians. That excludes small left parties, who still try to forcefully bend reality and shove it into Marx’s concepts, rather than write useful theory to extend and patch up where Marx theoretically failed, or where he stopped. Instead, the closest we have is the theoretical framework of the Multitude. Yet, Hardt/Negri concept is still in its pre-political, or early political, phase. Although their Commonwealth book patches up some if it (more on this in the next part), it still lacks enough of common language to speak about both the subjects and the objects of a new communism, or new communisms. Most important, it lacks the organizational framework to take us beyond the retarded party system which both Hardt/Negri and Badiou (2008) reject.
We need a new, hacked communism. A philosophy and a science for the new commons, and a new globally egalitarian political language and practices. Open Process is an attempt to think this problem aloud. As comrade Žižek said wisely in his interview for the BBC2 TV The Culture Show recently, the future will be red. Either from the flames of hell, or the flags of communism. “SEE YOU IN HELL, or IN COMMUNISM!”? Either way, the future is bright. Bright red.
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