Telekommunism

What's this? A new symbol for once? Yeah, I admit I haven't done this in a long time, but here we are anyway.

(From The Telekommunist Manifesto) 

In the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx argues that, ‘at a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production’. What is possible in the information age is in direct con- flict with what is permissible. Publishers, film producers and the telecommunication indus- try conspire with lawmakers to bottle up and sabotage free networks, to forbid information from circulating outside of their control. The corporations in the recording industry attempt to forcibly maintain their position as mediators between artists and fans, as fans and artists merge closer together and explore new ways of interacting. Competing software makers, like arms manufacturers, play both sides in this conflict: providing the tools to impose control, and the tools to evade it. The non-hierarchical rela- tions made possible by a peer network, such as the internet, are contradictory with capital- ism’s need for enclosure and control. It’s a battle to the death; either the internet as we know it must go, or capitalism as we know it must go. Will capital throw us back into the network dark ages of CompuServe, mobile telephones and cable tv rather than allow peer communi- cations to bring about a new society? Yes, if they can.

Marx concludes, ‘no social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their exis- tence have matured in the womb of the old society itself’. The Telekommunist Manifesto is an exploration of class conflict and property, born from a realization of the primacy of economic capacity in social struggles. Emphasis is placed on the distribution of productive assets and their output. The interpretation here is always tethered to an understanding that wealth and power are intrinsically linked, and only through the for- mer can the latter be achieved. As a collective of intellectual workers, the work of Telekom- munisten is very much rooted in the free software and free culture communities. However, a central premise of this Manifesto is that engaging in software development and the produc- tion of immaterial cultural works is not enough. The communization of immaterial property alone cannot change the distribution of material productive assets, and therefore cannot eliminate exploitation; only the self-organization of production by workers can. This publication is intended as a summary of the positions that motivate the Telekommu-nisten project, based on an exploration of class conflict in the age of international telecom- munications, global migration, and the emergence of the information economy.

The goal of this text is to introduce the political motivations of Telekommunisten, including a sketch of the basic theoretical framework in which it is rooted. Through two interrelated sections, ‘Peer-to-Peer Communism vs. The Client-Server Capitalist State’ and ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Free Culture’, the Manifesto covers the political economy of network topologies and cultural production respectively. ‘Peer-to-Peer Communism vs. The Client-Server Capital- ist State’ focuses on the commercialization of the internet and the emergence of networked distributed production. It proposes a new form of organization as a vehicle for class struggle: venture communism. The section ends with the famous program laid out by Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto, adapted into a Manifesto for a networked society. Building on the previous section, in ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Free Culture’, the Manifesto continues with the history and misperceptions of copyright, the free software movement, anticopyright/copyleft dissent, and the political economy of free software and free culture. The challenge of extending the achievements of free software into free culture is addressed by connecting it to the traditional program of the socialist left, resulting in copy- farleft and offering the Peer Production License as a model. This text is particularly addressed to politically motivated artists, hackers and activists, not to evangelize a fixed position, but to contribute to an ongoing critical dialogue.