-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Farewell Oekonux, we barely knew you. Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:38:42 UT From: "Dmytri Kleiner/ Friends." <dk at telekommunisten.net>
http://dada.telnik.net/mail.cgi/list/friends __
Farewell Oekonux, we barely knew you: A Open Goodbye to the Neo-Utopians. Dmytri Kleiner, 2008.
"The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own
surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves
far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the
condition of every member of society, even that of the most favored.
Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction
of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people,
when once they understand their system, fail to see it in the best
possible plan of the best possible state of society?. Hence, they
reject all political, and especially all revolutionary, action;
they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavor,
by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the
force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel."
-- Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848.
By 1848 the European continent may have been haunted by the spectre of communism, as feudal relations where unraveling and transforming while the major European powers where experiencing violent social spasms as they adopted the Industrialism pioneered by Great Britain, however back in the "Workshop of the World," the newly privileged English working class had noticeably mellowed.
As Great Britain entered the second phase of the Industrial Revolution, her own industry turned away from (now highly competitive and thus low profit) textile markets, and moved to far more lucrative Capital Goods.
Income from Steel and Machines sold to newly industrialising nations on the continent, the new world and beyond made the United Kingdom the world's dominant financial power. Her workers, if perhaps only for a brief moment, enjoyed a level of relative wealth and social stability far removed from the gruesome, inhumane conditions brutally imposed during the first phase of Industry.
After a century of Capitalization, all the newly formed productive capacity created a massive increase in the supply of basic consumer goods, prices where in free-fall across the board. And, with the repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws in 1846, British tables where overflowing with cheap imported food.
The radical convulsions of Luddites, Levelers, and Diggers, from the eras of enclosures, civil wars and the birth of industry, where long over and even Chartism was quickly disappearing.
Wealth, however briefly, had fattened the worker, the Capitalist, the Landlord and the State alike, whose raw, ruthless, violent power, so crucial in the primitive accumulation that created the basis of Capitalist social relationships, whose history is written in "Letters of Blood and Fire," was now hidden behind the chubby, smiling face of British Imperialism and wrapped in the legitimizing veneer of Tradition.
The Socialism of the day, the Socialism denounced by Marx & Engels in their
Communist Manifesto, was Utopian Socialism. A Socialism that doesn't chose sides, denies struggle, denies even class. A socialism that ignores the dialectic nature of change, and assumes that some new form of organisation,
born from the inspiration of a kind of enlightened social designer, driven by a technologically determinist world view, will be adopted whole-scale on the basis of it's undeniable merit by worker, capitalist, and landlord alike, the latter two classes happily abandoning the privileges that distinguish them and uniting with the meritous worker in a new homogeneous mono-class of postindustrial Utopian Man, living happily in Phalanstère and New Harmonies ever after.
Utopian Man never came about.
The brief gravy train of the British worker derailed in a train-wreck of depression, unemployment, general glut and Capital flight. The teeth and claws of Power and naked Imperialism where again shamelessly exposed as two world wars shook the world. Utopian Socialism quickly became a historical curiosity as Anarchist and Marxist Communism spread among workers, politicians, and intellectuals world wide and erupted in various syndicalist, political and insurrectionist forms, none of which hesitated in denouncing the Bosses.
In the aftermath of Soviet collapse, the dream of Homo Utopicus returned.
An accelerated plundering of second and third world alike, unhindered by a now lost geostrategic balance of power, valourised triumphant Capitalism and the Capitalist State alike.
The Internet, born of Cold War military funding, introduced the most significant technological development since the dawn of electricity, a medium of communication and exchange that was synchronous, peer to peer, and international.
A network of equals, communicating and exchanging globally, A free network that could route around censorship and State intervention alike, a network where citizen journalist played on equal footing with media tycoon, a network that could expand anywhere where one node consented to inter-connect with another.
The territorial monopoly on violence that was the essence of the State and its landlords now made obsolete by Cyberspace. The control of the circulation of capital and product that was the lynch-pin of Capitalist wealth now undone by direct online commerce. The scarcity of the instruments of production that chained the worker to his employer and social station now obliterated by immaterial capital, nonreciprocal production, free software, free culture.
"The Californian Ideology," replaced class struggle with techno-utopianism and economic liberalism. The Neo-Utopians where born.
However once again, Utopian man hasn't come about.
The Internet, born in the generous nursery of the arms race, was now forced to pander for finance from the very Capitalist ruling class it's anarchic structure was supposed to neutralize.
Mom and Pop ISPs with backrooms full of consumer-grade modems are replaced by giant telecommunications corporations with shiny and expensive DSL infrastructure. Networks become less neutral and more asymmetrical.
Like the downfall of the heyday of the pre-Depression British industrial worker, the dotCom bust marked the explosion of the era of domino asset bubbles, precarious McJobs, wars of economic desperation and naked State repression.
Strengthened copyright laws, enhanced data retention laws, digital rights management, software patents and other. political legal, and capital interventions combine to make the data you store, receive, and transmit a matter of national security and property privilege. Usenet is replaced by Yahoo! Groups, email is replaced by Facebook, Napster is replaced by iTunes. IRC by Skype, All funded by great accumulations of wealth and firmly in the hands of the ruling class.
Day by day, communications systems are becoming more and more centralized and exclusively mediated.
The role of peer to peer technology, the core breakthrough of the Internet, is more and more a contraband technology, a technology for criminals, pirates, rebels, maybe even "terrorists."
The days that we can continue to pretend, despite all evidence to the contrary in a world of rapidly increasing wealth stratification, that mankind will anyminutenow be emancipated by Ubuntu, Wikipedia and Facebook are over.
If we are to create a society where we produce and share as peers, where direct unmediated communications and commerce allows peer producers in informal, translocal communities to throw off the chains of Monopolist and Rentier, then we must resurrect the language of resistance, of class struggle, and acknowledge the fact that no privileged class will give up it's advantage gladly, that bottom up revolution will always face top-down repression.
If we are unwilling to identify the thieves, we can never end the theft.
-- Dmytri Kleiner editing text files since 1981
http://www.telekommunisten.net