State-Form Hacks

Source

* Article. Toni Prug. A worker-inquiry: The Objects of Communism, State-form Hacks.

URL = http://hackthestate.org/2009/12/11/objects-of-communism-state-form-hacks-v06/

See also: Hack the State

Discussion

Excerpt:

1.

"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?

We need a new egalitarian project. A new attempt at implementing the ideas of communism. I conceptualize it as communism hacked with Open Process [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’t go via alienation through commodification and general equivalent of money’ [2], nor via alienation and corruption of the representative political models.

The open-process model can be derived 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.

If Tronti’s idea that creativity of workers comes first, and capital develops by reacting to it, is correct, or even partially correct, Open Source 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 engine of new ways of valorization; 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."

2.

"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.

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."

3.

"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.

The trick 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.

That is precisely what we mean by hacking. To hack is to treat objects as changeable, to utilize them in purposes different than intended by design.

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].

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 – it is our task to rethink and re-purpose whatever possible. We need to become generic hackers, turning anything 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’."