So today I thought I would write a bit about Free Software and modes of production. Unfortunately I have to think that out more carefully than I have, especially since there are people who are going to have a rather sceptical and potentially negative response, with reason, both within Free Software and Marxist circles, the former because objectivism is the pet ideology of many Free Software authors–though uncommon in Europe–and the latter because people have been all too willing in the past to talk about new classes and modes of production that purportedly invalidate traditional class analyses, which is not at all my case. However, until I have a better constructed argument I’ll limit myself to something less ambitious.
I’ve recently read some essays which present a very strong–at least rhetorically–criticism of diamat. They go as far as saying that Dialectical Materialism has damaged the Marxist cause, being perhaps not sufficient, but a contributory cause for “Dialectical Marxism’s” failure to attain the emancipation of the working class. Now I should say I haven’t read the whole list of essays–it is a lot of material–nor am I any kind of expert on diamat or Hegel’s logic, but the general thrust of the argument seems to come from the overreliance that analytical philosophy has for formal methods. Thus, we get a defence of formal logic that, paradoxically, I have rarely seen from actual logicians, sustaining that logic can represent change, processes, etc. I have quite a strong background on mathematics, and a certain predisposition for this kind of support of formal methods, which are very attractive insofar as they function, when correctly applied, as guarantors of correctness and truth. However, a distrust of such formal methods is, I think, justified from a few standpoints, perhaps the most powerful and fundamental one being the limitations of analytical solutions as such, which lead to the necessity of simmulation and modelling in order to solve some problems. At any rate, I don’t feel qualified to make a judgement on this topic at this poin in time, but I can point out some indications that diamat may be more useful than suggested: the failure of so-called analytical Marxism, the obsession of bourgeois economists for formal methods which fail to apprehend reality, and the inspiration dialectics gives us to look at some concrete problems.
A curious observation is that ruling class ideology, at all times, incurs in contradictions. A simple example would be that of Medieval Europe, where chastity and the sanctity of marriage were paramount, and yet there was a ius primae noctis (although the exact parameters of the ius primae noctis are not well known, and the actual enforcement of outright sexual intercourse with the newly wed bride probably didn’t happen, it seems clear that some form of symbolic rights of sexual interference did exist, together with a tax paid in redemption thereof). With the bourgeois revolutions and the change in ruling class ideology, many of these contradictions were resolved in some sense, at least in part. We shouldn’t forget that, although the institutions of bourgeois marriage and monogamy keep existing as “bulwarks of morality”, and the traditional practices of arranged marriages have in most bourgeois states withered away just as the traditional status of serfdom, cases of sexual harassment within the context of exploitation in the workplace are still deplorably common, not to speak of the de facto right capitalists–and in particular male ones–claim for themselves to have mistresses, and other sexual outlets that are considered contrary to the bourgeois moral platform. It is nonetheless true that these contradictions in the personal sphere have weakened with time. The bourgeoisie is a pragmatic class which concerns itself not with the acquisition of symbolic benefits, but with the strengthening of its material supremacy as a class, and, for each particular bourgeois, the sgrengthening of their material position with respect to their peers. It is in the sphere of economic activity, of labour and trade, where we can observe the most remarkable bourgeois ideological contradictions: the bourgeoisie, which has commodified so many ancient social relations and transformed them, covered them so to speak under an economic form, has not and cannot resolve the inherent contradictions entailed by the subsumtion of labour power–source of value–under the dictates of capital. One of the areas with the greatest profusion of contradictions is that of intellectual monopoly (see my essay on intellectual property for more details, and some of the reasons why Intellectual Property embeds dangerous semantic assumptions). Professor Lawrence Lessig has pointed out some of these in his work Free Culture, in particular in relation to the way Disney appropriated successful characters and stories from the public domain, and then managed an “enclosure manoeuvre” by virtue of copyright, which keeps extending in time and scope to the point of unrecognizability, making a mockery of the purported limited time, limited to tomorrow, just the way artificial intelligence is always around the corner. Another good example is in the commodification of software and the transformation of source code into a trade secret. This particular contradiction is all the more striking insofar as the very essential nature of source code, its whole reason for existence, is to serve as an artifact of communication. Someone unconversant with computer programming, when thinking of source code, would today probably think first of its role as a secret, as a competitive tool, when the very reason why software is written in source form is the necessity to talk to other humans about what the program is doing, the necessity to cooperate. While before Microsoft this was widely understood, the current status quo under challenge by Free Software and to some extent Software-as-a-Service is that source code is proprietary information which should ideally never see the light of day. It becomes ironic then, though not surprising as such for those who have an understanding on how programming and the education of programmers work, that “Microsoft owes its very existence to this access to source code“. As this article points out:
I don’t think the producers of the show realised the significance of this admission, since they quickly cut to another segment. Reading between the lines, Gates is essentially confessing that he would not have progressed had he and Paul Allen not found the source code. Without this knowledge, and without this opportunity to understand and experiment with how the internals of a computer worked, Gates and Allen would have been severely constrained in their ability to found a software company and develop products.
It’s often like that with the bourgeoisie. First they exploit a source of uncommoditized value, and then they conduct an “enclosure manoeuvre” which appropriates that value exclusively and removes the opportunity for others to make use of it, pulling the ladder after themselves, so to speak. A similar dynamic can be observed in relation to free trade and protectionism, whereby the old bourgeois nations which utilized tariffs and other monopolistic obstacles to trade to build up their industrial base now fulminate against any similar behaviour from the developing world, on the basis of high-sounding rhetoric, extortion in the form of sanctions, and in the end ultima ratio mercatorum, which, now the traders have dominion of the State, looks just the same as ultima ratio regum.
These ideas, although no proof, are at least an indication of the value which dialectics can have, as an inspiration, if not more.
Tags: capitalism, copyright, criticism, dialectics, economics, english, free culture, free software, free trade, intellectual property, marx, microsoft, protectionism, trade secret
