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	<title>Hack The State &#187; Conference Presentation</title>
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		<title>Hacking ideologies: Open Source, a capitalist movement</title>
		<link>http://hackthestate.org/2010/05/18/hacking-ideologies-open-source-a-capitalist-movement/</link>
		<comments>http://hackthestate.org/2010/05/18/hacking-ideologies-open-source-a-capitalist-movement/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 18 May 2010 12:22:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Toni Prug</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Conference Presentation]]></category>

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Contents
<p>[hide]

1 What is Re-interpretation of FS by Open Source ?
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<abbr class="unapi-id" title="http://hackthestate.org/?p=1048"><!-- &nbsp; --></abbr>
<div class='contents'>
<h3>Contents</h3>
<p>[<a class='show' onclick='toggle_hide_show(this)'>hide</a>]
<ol class='content_list' style='padding-left: 7px'>
<li><a href='#What is Re-interpretation of FS by Open Source ?'>1 What is Re-interpretation of FS by Open Source ?</a></li>
<li><a href='#O'Reilly role: conferences, books, lobbying.'>2 O&#8217;Reilly role: conferences, books, lobbying.</a></li>
<li><a href='#Multitude misunderstood - time for education'>3 Multitude misunderstood &#8211; time for education</a></li>
<li><a href='#Freedom is Politics'>4 Freedom is Politics</a></li>
<li><a href='#Truth of RMS (Badiou)'>5 Truth of RMS (Badiou)</a></li>
<li><a href='#Paradox/Subject: axioms-openness, a missing link'>6 Paradox/Subject: axioms-openness, a missing link</a></li>
<li><a href='#GNU manifesto applied: punishment for capitalists?'>7 GNU manifesto applied: punishment for capitalists?</a></li>
<li><a href='#AIDS/malaria today: Parliamentary Capitalist Ethics of Death'>8 AIDS/malaria today: Parliamentary Capitalist Ethics of Death</a></li>
<li><a href='#Patents, Copyright, Mass Death'>9 Patents, Copyright, Mass Death</a></li>
<li><a href='#Open Source is a neo-liberal, parliamentary capitalist social movement.'>10 Open Source is a neo-liberal, parliamentary capitalist social movement.</a></li>
<li><a href='#Finally ... piracy? WHAT PIRACY?'>11 Finally &#8230; piracy? WHAT PIRACY?</a></li>
</ol>
</div>
<p>Writen as a 24c3 (24th Chaos Communication Congress, Volldampf voraus!) <a href="http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2311.en.html">event</a> proposal. Based on unpublished dissertation &#8220;<a href="/2010/05/01/free-software/">Free Softwar</a>e&#8221;, Aug 2007.</p>
<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;<br />
<em>Believe. &#8220;The World is Yours.&#8221; (Ian Brown, 2007)</em><br />
&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;</p>
<p>The Open Source initiative re-interpreted Free Software to include it into the<br />
neo-liberal ideology and the capitalist economy &#8211; whose aims are contrary to<br />
the FS starting axioms/freedoms. This platform will focus on ideological<br />
and political aspects of this. It will also suggest FS recovery strategies.</p>
<p><span id="more-1048"></span></p>
<p>======<br />
<a name='What is Re-interpretation of FS by Open Source ?'></a><br />
<h2>What is Re-interpretation of FS by Open Source ?</h2>
<p>In The Revenge of the Hackers, Eric Raymond talks about Open Source<br />
goals in clear terms:</p>
<p>&#8220;Our success after Netscape would depend on replacing the negative FSF<br />
stereotypes with positive stereotypes of our own&#8211;pragmatic tales,<br />
sweet to managers&#8217; and investors&#8217; ears, of higher reliability and<br />
lower cost and better features. In conventional marketing terms, our<br />
job was to re-brand the product, and build its reputation into one the<br />
corporate world would hasten to buy.&#8221;</p>
<p>======</p>
<p>The move of the Open Source initiative to bring Free Software<br />
closer to capitalism shows that:</p>
<p>a) <strong>there is a gap between the Free Software movement and capitalism</strong>;</p>
<p>b) without a significant institutional intervention and<br />
re-interpretation that gap can not be overcome;</p>
<p>c) it is the founding documents (practice of Open Source doesn&#8217;t differ),<br />
ethics that Richard Stallman stands by so fiercely, that are<br />
the bite that capitalism can not subsume, swallow in its original form.</p>
<p>======<br />
<a name='O'Reilly role: conferences, books, lobbying.'></a><br />
<h2>O&#8217;Reilly role: conferences, books, lobbying.</h2>
<p>Here&#8217;s some neo-liberal text-book propaganda:</p>
<p>&#8220;standardization, and thus commodification, are both natural market<br />
forces as well as key events in human history&#8221;.</p>
<p>Ian Murdoch, founder of Debianin &#8220;Open Source and the<br />
Commoditization of Software&#8221; (O&#8217;Reilly)</p>
<p>======<br />
<a name='Multitude misunderstood - time for education'></a><br />
<h2>Multitude misunderstood &#8211; time for education</h2>
<p>Lack of understanding of the difference between Open Source and Free<br />
Software is best seen when in one of the masterpieces of recent social<br />
theory (Hardt/Negri&#8217;s &#8220;Multitude&#8221;) term &#8220;open-source&#8221; was referenced<br />
with the &#8220;Free as in Freedom&#8221; book on Stallman.</p>
<p>======<br />
<a name='Freedom is Politics'></a><br />
<h2>Freedom is Politics</h2>
<p>Badiou/Zizek: politics is not parliaments, debates compromises,<br />
voting. On the contrary, it is subjectively, militantly, unilaterally,<br />
deciding what seems impossible at the time of the decision.</p>
<p>Actually existing freedom is to choose outside of the given coordinates<br />
in which choice takes place. It is to re-configure the conditions, to<br />
change the scope of &#8220;possible outcomes&#8221;.</p>
<p>This is the difference between Lenin&#8217;s concept of freedom and the liberal,<br />
parliamentary, formal freedom, which consists in participating in the<br />
what is already given, already structured. (Zizek, &#8220;On Belief&#8221;)</p>
<p>=======<br />
<strong></strong><br />
<a name='Truth of RMS (Badiou)'></a><br />
<h2>Truth of RMS (Badiou)</h2>
<p>Could we not say that this is precisely what Richard Stallman did with<br />
his choice of leaving the job he had at the MIT Lab to devote all his<br />
time to re-create the world of software, from scratch, with an<br />
entirely new set of co-ordinates?</p>
<p>Respect or disrespect the printer licence? Neither! Free Software instead.</p>
<p>Badiou: acting in follow up to an event &#8212; event that prompts our<br />
reaction/decision &#8212; and pursuing the truth of it through fidelity to<br />
it, through fidelity to the retroactively constructed event that<br />
changes us.</p>
<p>======<br />
<a name='Paradox/Subject: axioms-openness, a missing link'></a><br />
<h2>Paradox/Subject: axioms-openness, a missing link</h2>
<p>One might rightly assume that in the sphere of rational tasks knowledge<br />
and science would be the decisive spheres. Yet, some issues can not be<br />
settled that way.</p>
<p>No science is pure, cleansed of ideology.<br />
Think maths. Axioms &#8211; Not to be questioned.<br />
Does that make maths dogmatic? Of course not.<br />
Sciences rely on axiomatic foundations.</p>
<p>ONE: Free Software relies on the set of principles called freedoms.<br />
These are axioms. Not up for discussion.</p>
<p>TWO: Free Software communities function through open participation.<br />
Its progress is through ongoing collaborative production and critique.</p>
<p>Stallman&#8217;s truth (printer event + fidelity) stands in the sharp contrast,<br />
indeed in total opposition, to the attributes of the movement he founded.</p>
<p>Openness and collaboration flourished from closed starting points,<br />
from axioms. This is what i call The Paradox of a becoming Subject.</p>
<p>======<br />
<a name='GNU manifesto applied: punishment for capitalists?'></a><br />
<h2>GNU manifesto applied: punishment for capitalists?</h2>
<p><em>food, shelter, health, education, labour</em></p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;">from GNU manifesto:</span><br />
&#8220;Don&#8217;t programmers deserve a reward for their creativity? If anything<br />
deserves a reward, it is social contribution. Creativity can be a<br />
social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the<br />
results. If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative<br />
programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they<br />
restrict the use of these programs.&#8221;</p>
<p>Consider applying this to the economy. What would it mean to assert<br />
that economic productivity can be a social contribution only if its<br />
results can be shared? It is already shared, many would say: one gets<br />
a salary for one&#8217;s work. This would not satisfy FS criteria. If we<br />
narrow down the concept of economic productivity to food, shelter,<br />
health, education &#8211; conclusion could be that capitalists restrict use<br />
of the above elements by subverting them into closed, private wealth<br />
generation schemes. And hence, deserve punishment.</p>
<p>======</p>
<h2>Inbuilt obsolescence &#8211; will they expire us one day,<br />
on the retirement day?</h2>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;">from GNU manifesto:</span><br />
&#8220;Extracting money from users of a program by restricting their use of<br />
it is destructive because the restrictions reduce the amount and the<br />
ways that the program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth<br />
that humanity derives from the program. When there is a deliberate<br />
choice to restrict, the harmful consequences are deliberate destruction.&#8221;</p>
<p>Consider inbuilt obsolescence &#8211; a capitalist invention whereby products are<br />
designed to fail in order for the development of new products to be<br />
justified by demand created by the inbuilt timed failure of the old ones.</p>
<p>======<br />
<a name='AIDS/malaria today: Parliamentary Capitalist Ethics of Death'></a><br />
<h2>AIDS/malaria today: Parliamentary Capitalist Ethics of Death</h2>
<p>First, why parliamentary?<br />
Because, as a supreme body, parliaments have the power to stop this.<br />
Yet, they don&#8217;t. The actively encourage and protect it.</p>
<p>Given today&#8217;s drugs, AIDS could be contained worldwide in relatively<br />
short period of time, but corporations, governments (and the catholic<br />
church) stand in the way of dying millions being protected (Alain<br />
Badiou, &#8220;Century&#8221;, 2007).</p>
<p>The production of drugs could follow the example of Free Software, be<br />
created in a more collaborative way, publishing recipes and allowing<br />
it to be freely produced, by anyone, for any purpose.</p>
<p>When ethics and its laws allow death on such scale to occur, although<br />
the society has the means to prevent it, we have to ask: what is the<br />
difference between tens of millions dead in two world wars and the<br />
dead of malaria and AIDS today? The former were killed while later are<br />
let to die &#8211; by the ethics of death.</p>
<p>=======<br />
<a name='Patents, Copyright, Mass Death'></a><br />
<h2>Patents, Copyright, Mass Death</h2>
<p>Hacking needs access to what it hacks on, and it needs sharing to grow<br />
the knowledge of how it operates. Parliamentary Capitalist law aims to<br />
limit access. Such law is opposed to the ethics of hacking.</p>
<p>Sharing of drug recipes for the prevention of deadly epidemics is explicitly<br />
and deliberately forbidden by the parliamentary capitalist law.</p>
<p>No humans, let alone hackers, should support such law.<br />
Patents and copyright belong to the same ethics.<br />
One that allows millions of AIDS and malaria deaths, annually.</p>
<p>======<br />
<a name='Open Source is a neo-liberal, parliamentary capitalist social movement.'></a><br />
<h2>Open Source is a neo-liberal, parliamentary capitalist social movement.</h2>
<p>Neo-liberalism claims they&#8217;re &#8220;just doing it&#8221; for the sake of a better<br />
economy, without any ideological beliefs. As if any economy, or any act,<br />
was possible without decisions determined by a set of ideas and beliefs.</p>
<p>This is why Nike&#8217;s slogan <span style="text-decoration: underline;">&#8220;just do it&#8221;</span><br />
is the best summary of the capitalist ideology ever.</p>
<p>And this is why &#8220;Open source is a development methodology;<br />
free software is a social movement&#8221; (Stallman), misses the crucial point.</p>
<p>Open Source is not just a development methodology, but a social<br />
movement too, a social movement of a different kind, with different,<br />
parliamentary capitalist, goals.</p>
<p>Another problem lies in the claims that Open Source separates ethics from the<br />
technical side of Free Software (Stallman, &#8220;Why &#8216;Open Source&#8217; misses<br />
the point about Free Software&#8221;), thus making it acceptable to corporations.</p>
<p>This implies <span style="text-decoration: underline;">two wrong statements about Open Source:</span></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">a) it has no ethics of its own;</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">b) there are purely technical solutions which can be used without<br />
any ethical, political, or ideological commitments.</p>
<p>The result of these mistakes is widespread comparison of Free<br />
Software and Open Source on false, crucially misleading terms:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">- one (FS) operating under the weight and demand of its ethics;</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">- the other (OS) getting away without being examined at all, basking in<br />
the purity of its technical attributes and various business-friendly tags</p>
<p>This is how the ethics, the ideology and, indeed, the politics of Open Source<br />
slip through unexamined and unchallenged &#8212; like the capitalist ideologies<br />
whose key strategy has historically been to accuse any political opponents<br />
of ethical commitments, while insisting on their own &#8220;pragmatism&#8221; and<br />
on the purely technical aspect of &#8220;just getting things done&#8221;.</p>
<p>======<br />
<strong></strong><br />
<a name='Finally ... piracy? WHAT PIRACY?'></a><br />
<h2>Finally &#8230; piracy? WHAT PIRACY?</h2>
<p>Parliamentary capitalism (in its propaganda materials also known<br />
as liberal democracy) is based on the idea that majority should<br />
determine, via its representatives, how a state is governed and<br />
an economy run. Cisco tells us in their marketing materials that vast<br />
majority of the Internet traffic today is p2p traffic. If vast majority of<br />
users practice p2p and disregard law, should not then, by the<br />
capitalist parliamentary logic of majority rule, law be changed,<br />
since that is what majority wants?</p>
<p>Parliaments and representatives act to prevent us from having laws<br />
that will act on our behalf, regardless of our position of minority,<br />
or majority &#8211; the logic by which they operate is different, it is<br />
the logic of capital.</p>
<p>The hacks we desperately need are in the realm of thoughts &#8211; We need<br />
to change our thinking about the law and its relations to politics,<br />
while continuing expansion of p2p technologies and techniques.<br />
If more hacking of ideas/thoughts was discussed and encouraged,<br />
we would soon render discussions on piracy/laws/illegal/legal<br />
obsolete. Instead, we would focus on what political and economic<br />
structures do we want, to protect whom, to encourage what?<br />
And how do we do it.</p>
<p>=======<br />
&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;<br />
<em>Believe. &#8220;The World is Yours.&#8221; (Ian Brown, 2007)</em><br />
&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;</p>
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		<item>
		<title>A worker-inquiry: The Objects of Communism, State-form Hacks</title>
		<link>http://hackthestate.org/2009/12/11/objects-of-communism-state-form-hacks-v06/</link>
		<comments>http://hackthestate.org/2009/12/11/objects-of-communism-state-form-hacks-v06/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:48:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Toni Prug</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Conference Presentation]]></category>

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<p>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) [...]]]></description>
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<abbr class="unapi-id" title="http://hackthestate.org/?p=668"><!-- &nbsp; --></abbr>
<p>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?</p>
<p>We need a new egalitarian project. A new attempt at implementing the ideas of communism. I conceptualize it as <strong>communism hacked with Open Process</strong> [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&#8217;t go via alienation through commodification and general equivalent of money’ [2], nor via alienation and corruption of the representative political models.</p>
<p>The <strong>open-process model can be derived</strong> 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.</p>
<p><span id="more-668"></span></p>
<p>If Tronti’s idea that creativity of workers comes first, and capital develops by reacting to it, is correct, or even partially correct, <strong>Open Source</strong> 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 <strong>engine of new ways of valorization</strong>; 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]).</p>
<p>Today we’re betrayed by a special form of abstraction:</p>
<blockquote><p>‘<strong>abstract citizens</strong> 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]</p></blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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].</p>
<p>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&#8217;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]</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>The trick</strong> 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.</p>
<p>That is precisely what we mean by hacking. <strong>To hack</strong> is to treat objects as changeable, to utilize them in purposes different than intended by design.</p>
<p>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].</p>
<p>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 &#8211; it is our task to rethink and re-purpose whatever possible. We need to become <strong>generic hackers</strong>, turning <strong>anything</strong> 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].</p>
<p>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. <strong>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.</strong></p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>Ideological mind-debilitating fears still abound &#8211; that of communism and of the strong state (we need ‘a State that doesn’t behave like the State’ – a definition of a hack) &#8211; 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.</p>
<p>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 &#8230; The State-forms of all kinds await our hacks.</p>
<p><strong>The END </strong>(presentation ends here. the rest is my notes, rough ideas for discussion)<br />
<span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong> </strong></span></p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>NOTES on Objects</strong></span>: 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:</p>
<blockquote><p>‘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]</p></blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Summary:</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 &amp; cooperation in. Whenever possible.<strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Appendix: </strong>An Object of communism is Crabgrass. A AGPL software libre for network organizing, by the<a href="http://riseup.net"> riseup.net</a>, autonomous tech collective. Diagram of a Group with its sub-groups (Committees) and non-members limited participation (within sub-groups):</p>
<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-673" title="crabgrass1" src="http://hackthestate.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/crabgrass1.png" alt="crabgrass1" width="303" height="303" /></p>
<p>From<a href="https://we.riseup.net/users/committees" class="broken_link" > https://we.riseup.net/users/committees</a> &#8211; a help page for permissions.</p>
<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-674" title="crabgrass2" src="http://hackthestate.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/crabgrass2.png" alt="crabgrass2" width="650" height="379" /><br />
<a href="https://we.riseup.net/crabgrass/groups" class="broken_link" >https://we.riseup.net/crabgrass/groups</a> &#8211; A help page for groups.</p>
<p><strong>Notes:</strong></p>
<p>[1] Prug, “Open Process Academic Publishing.”<br />
[2] Medak, “A Continuum of Knowledge &#8211; A contribution to the Political Economy of Copyleft.”<br />
[3] Capobianco, “AGPL is OSI approved. Sweet victory..”<br />
[4] Lukacs, Lenin, 63.<br />
[5] Ibid., 64.<br />
[6] Ibid., 65.<br />
[7] Ibid., 67.<br />
[8] Ibid., 89.<br />
[9] Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy. For two great historical sequences of communist hypothesis, see chapter 9 &#8216;The History of the Communist Hypothesis and Its Present Moment&#8217;.<br />
[10] Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, 524.<br />
[11] Ibid., 85.<br />
[12] Ibid., 96.<br />
[13] Ibid., 89.<br />
[14] Ibid., 90.<br />
[15] Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 8.<br />
[16] Ibid., 352.<br />
[17] Ibid., 354.<br />
[18] Ibid., 372.<br />
[19] Ibid., 374.<br />
[20] Ibid., 137.<br />
[21] Pepperell, “Beyond Telos and Totality: Immanent Critique as Selective Inheritance.”<br />
[22] Thomas, “Gramsci and the political: From the state as ‘metaphysical event’ to hegemony as ‘philosophical fact’.”<br />
[23] Badiou, Logics of worlds, 37.</p>
<p><strong>Bibliography:</strong></p>
<p>Badiou, Alain. Logics of Worlds. London; New York: Continuum, 2009.</p>
<p>———. The Meaning of Sarkozy. London: Verso, 2008.</p>
<p>Capobianco, Fabrizio. “AGPL is OSI approved. Sweet victory..” Mobile Open Source:, March 13,<br />
2008. <a href="http://www.funambol.com/blog/capo/2008/03/agpl-is-osi-approved-sweet-victory.html">http://www.funambol.com/blog/capo/2008/03/agpl-is-osi-approved-sweet-victory.html</a>.</p>
<p>Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. 1st ed. Harvard University Press, 2009.</p>
<p>Karl Marx, Frederick Engels. The German Ideology. Prometheus Books, 1988.<br />
<a href="http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/">http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/</a>.</p>
<p>Lukacs, Georg. Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought. 2nd ed. Radical Thinkers 4. Verso, 2009.</p>
<p>Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Penguin, 1973.</p>
<p>Medak, Tomislav. “A Continuum of Knowledge &#8211; A contribution to the Political Economy of<br />
Copyleft,” 2004.<a href="http://www.makeworlds.org/node/96"> http://www.makeworlds.org/node/96</a>.</p>
<p>Pepperell, Nicole. “Beyond Telos and Totality: Immanent Critique as Selective Inheritance,” 2009.<br />
<a href="http://www.roughtheory.org/content/marx-philosophy-society-talk/">http://www.roughtheory.org/content/marx-philosophy-society-talk/</a>.</p>
<p>Prug, Toni. “Open Process Academic Publishing.” draft, August 2009.<br />
<a href="http://hackthestate.org/open-process-academic-publishing/">http://hackthestate.org/open-process-academic-publishing/</a>.</p>
<p>Thomas, Peter. “Gramsci and the political: From the state as ‘metaphysical event’ to hegemony as<br />
‘philosophical fact’.” Radical Philosophy, no. 153 (February 2009).<br />
<a href="http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2188&amp;editorial_id=27458">http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2188&amp;editorial_id=27458</a>.</p>
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