The dotCommunist Manifesto: How Culture Became Property and What We're Going to Do About It

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Dot Communist Manifesto
written by Eben Moglen

Part of the ibiblio Speaker Series, given on 2001-11-01

The Speech

It is conventional to thank people for introduction. Thank you very much, I really appreciate it. I notice that I am very young in this introduction. That's good because I feel very old. So to be reminded that I was an infant [....] particularly in this company.

I too want to thank Kevin and Paul and all the others who join together. Being here it makes me worry because I know I am going to disappoint everybody. Those who want me to talk about free software, those who want me to talk about cultural history. Those who wish I wouldn't talk at all. They are all going to be really disappointed this evening. But nonetheless it is a pleasure and an honor to be here.

A spectre is haunting multinational capitalism. A spectre of free information. All the powers of globalism have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcise this spectre, Microsoft and Disney, the World Trade Organization, The United States Congress and the European Commission. Where are the advocates of freedom in the new digital society who have not been decried as pirates, anarchists, communists? Have we not seen that many of those hurling those epithets were merely thieves in power whose talk of intellectual property was merely an attempt to retain unjustifiable privileges in a world irrevocably changing. But it is acknowledged by all the powers of globalism that the movement for freedom is itself a power. And it is high time that the movement for freedom should publish our views in the face of the whole world. To meet this [...] of the spectre of free information, for the best of our own. That's where it begins. [...]

Of course the history of all previous societies is a history of class struggles. And of course the system of European industrialization which did in fact seem to simplify the class system into a conflict between two great conflicting powers, bourgeois and proletariat, [...] And out of it we can to the sad state where we are now. So on the history side let me take a moment trying to show how we came from the primordial slime to the current mess.

The book is the first and in many ways the most successful article of mass production in the history of Western culture, and represents the first successful experiment in the relationship between industrial processes and production and the system of distribution of information. It is in many respects the ideal article of bourgeois culture, industrially produced, globally available, imperishable, imperialistic. Has in its embryonic form all the characteristics of the culture in which we now live. But the book isn't the problem. The system of information production that the 19th century knew at the moment when political theory first understood that spectre of communism and acknowledged that it was a power. That system of production took for granted, as Marx and Engels said, that the confrontation between the new means of industrial production, ever seeking their own refinement, ever overthrowing the social arrangements of the past, would end in fact with a perfect division between owners and workers. A division on one side expected to maintain an ever-frozen relationship of power in society and on the other expected to end in a general expropriative conflict between the two remaining classes in society. That did not happen. Instead the bourgeois capitalism that Marx thought tended inevitably towards its own destruction found a compromise. The worker became not merely a worker but a consumer. Not merely a force to make for ever expanding markets owned by someone else, but force upon which wishes could be made. Pay the workers 5 dollars a day before a [...] and then you grow up to buy a car. And society will be stabilized. The inevitability of the dictatorship of the proletariat to institute actual freedom was a help. When it turned up it did not sell, at least for very long for very many. And the system of producing a worker who was also a consumer, and who increasingly consumed not merely products but knowledges of bourgeois production, further qualify the apparently inevitable conflict between a proletarianizing collection of human beings to be labeled and an apparently efflorescent bourgeois set of owners. Universal education was a communist idea in its [...]. The Manifesto said we shall overturn the family of private property and have universal education. Of course that too became part of the bargain for the peace of the bourgeoises. Universal education produced a worker upon whom new wants could be more easily formed and whose production could be trained more thoroughly. To qualify that enormous crisis of recurring over production which Marx thought was the essence of the problem confronting bourgeoises with workers who could consume what was produced. And whose minds were made open to the creation of wants for things that could be further produced for time to come.

But that was only Ford, there was also Edison. From the moment that the grand experiment in going beyond the book to a more general possibility of the mass production of culture came, the whole story took a turn more unforeseen than any other of the changes of the 19th century's political narration. Music for the whole history of human beings was an acutely perishable non-commodity. A social process, a thing occurring in a place at a time, consumed — if you want to think of it as being consumed — where it was made by people who were indistinctly differentiated as consumers and as makers. After Edison, music was non perishable commodity that could be moved long distances. And that could be — pardon me for using the technical term — alienated from those who made it. No longer a social process, but a thing. No longer a communion, but a transplantation. And that was just music which was familiar. The moving picture was another whole layer of human experience capable of reunification for the first time. The exploitation of those possibilities like the exploitation of all other technical possibilities was, as the thinkers of the earlier 19th century pointed out, an imperative of the class that owned. But this in itself further encouraged the idea of the worker as consumer, as the market for the substantial re-absorption of all that magic surplus that bourgeois industrial capitalism created. So after Edison, all of what was being made was made in a new context. Even the physical things, what do we call it now, the merchandising aspect, was inherently related to the symbolic aspect. And it was in the symbolic aspect of cultures production and distribution, in the ability of the new technology to replace communion with transplantation that the wanting that absorbed production could occur. And that too was only the beginning. It took the new owners of the new symbolic goods two generations from Edison to figure out what their business was. It was not, as they first supposed, the making of music, or the making of movies. The business of the new owners was the making of celebrity. The creation of artificially large human beings that sells alienated copies of real human beings. With whom fantasy personal relationships could be had. These large artificially prominent alienated persons could absorb the wanting of that large number of workers who have been brought by education to want. And in the manipulation of those fantasy personal relationships the great engine of wealth lay. So that we now find that it no longer actually is clear to us whether these great large human beings make music or movies. Is Christina Aguilera or Britney Spears a musician, an actress, a prostitute? All roles actually merge because all fantasies in the relationship are available once the thing that used to be a person is big enough. And that too is [...] Because after that it all went digital. Oh you remember how that goes. All that was substantial melts into air. [...] It melted into air, and as air it achieved the apotheosis of bourgeois hope. Property could be made literally out of nothing. Indeed it is its very nothingness, which completes its excellence as property. The fact of its insubstantiality is the key to the untold riches that they represent. So he was right. Bourgeois invention was on itself destroying the very fabric of what it makes, true. But that was victory not defeat, that was excellence not revolution. That was the achievement of an unexpected utopia for owners.

Which is where we come in. What happened when it all went digital, when all that was substantial melted into air. Pardon me for a moment for addressing the economists. It's harsher on everybody else, I know, but it must be done. We are entering a phase of human civilization, in which for the first time in the history of human economies, the dominant and most important goods that everything makes and consumes have zero marginal cost. This is the new thing under the sun. The new truth of human political economy. The presence of a dominantly large sector of goods with zero marginal cost in an economy is a thing unknown.

Oh, but in can be analyzed in the ordinary way. No problem. The first and easiest thing that one deduces from the magical graph of the relentlessly downward sloping demand curve on it. It says in a perfectly competitive market the price of goods asymptotically reaches towards marginal cost. A vast amount of ingenuity now goes into denying the obvious inference. The great moral question of the 21st century is this: if all knowledge, all culture, all art, all useful information can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price at the same price that it is given to anyone. If anyone can have everything, everywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything? If you could make lamb chops in endless number by the mere pressing of a button, there would be no moral argument for hunger ever anywhere. I see no system of moral philosophy generated by the economy of the past that could evolve a principle to explain the moral legitimacy of denial in the presence of infinite profusion. And we are there, and we are there. Not there in esse everywhere at the moment, but there in posse everywhere. We are entering into what we ought to call not "the Internet" and not "cyberspace". Not a thing and not a place, but a social condition, the Internet society. A place where everyone is — actually or potentially — connected to everybody else directly, without intermediaries. The simple political economy is the economy of the non-scarcity of the goods that matter: knowledge, culture, wisdom, art, utility.

But more follows from that, so let us draw distinction between two classes of goods that have zero marginal cost. Some goods that have no marginal cost are collaboratively produced, and are functional. The archetype is executable computer software, programs. Such goods are inherently superior when produced without ownership relations. That's the free software idea, what I had elsewhere called anarchist production. If nobody owns and everybody shares and shares alike, the result is inherently better stuff; with respect to stuff like that, owning it makes the stuff worse. Why? Simply because the forces of production are inherently imbalanced. The people who want to use cannot make, the people who want to improve cannot fix. The people who would perceive a problem cannot repair, the people who would foresee a use cannot foresee all of them. The relation of persons to the means of production is distorted by property relations with respect to the class of goods that have zero marginal cost, are collaboratively made, and are functional. Unless coerced by political power and legal rules, anarchist production inherently out-competes proprietary production of such goods.

We have been doing it now for a little under 20 years starting from zero. We have 30% of the server market, we will have a 100% of the palm-top market in the next 2 years. But thats just the beginning. In the end, the stuff that works and that has to work well if people are going to use it will be produced without property relations. Because the proprietary producers will have failed to make adequate stuff at competitive prices. That's Mr. Gates' problem, he knows it, so do we.

But that is only one class of goods. You cannot say about anarchist music that it is better than proprietary music. It is not functional, it cannot be tested for betterness or worseness, mean time between blue screens of death, or whatever. No such measures are available, and no competition in the quality of production can therefore be fully engaged. But with respect to that other class of goods, non-functional goods produced in varying degrees of collaboration with zero marginal cost, anarchist distribution inherently is superior to proprietary distribution. This is what I have elsewhere called the Six degrees of separation principle. You remember that the sociologists began in the 1950s to conduct these experiments. You hand a randomly selected person a folder or an envelope addressed to another randomly selected person somewhere else, and say "Here, give this to somebody you think might be able to get it to somebody to get it to somebody to get it to him". And it turns out it is just an empirical test of the depth of the social network. That six nodes get things from here to there in a nation of a hundred and eighty million people more or less, all the time. It is a staggering result because we are taught by our systems of production and distribution of goods to assume that the social network is much weaker than it really is, and much less highly interconnected. Remember that was in a world of the [...]. So when music, as a thing in commerce, has left the post production studio and is now ready to be made into the thing [...], when it has gone through six hands it is in the store now. But if the right to distribute is not bought and sold, if no one excluded from the power to distribute, if the underlying rule is "Here give this to someone you think might like it", when it has passed through six hands, everyone who wants it has it. The proprietary systems of the distribution of culture are the equivalent of the Trabant factories of the German Democratic Republic in the early 1990s. They are profoundly inefficient, they are utterly non-competitive, they are expropriative of the interests of both the creators and the users, and they are going to be destroyed. Not by a class based revolution of a bunch of narrow scheming Bolsheviks in a cellar someplace. But by that very property of that educated semi-bourgeois working class that capitalism created at the end of the 19th century, to save itself from the Paris Commune. That collection of people who just wants and who wants to gratify the wants for everybody else, who have the knowledge, the skill, the education, but [...] a taste, to acquire, to collect, to distribute, to appreciate, to promote.

So what are the class relations of such a system. They are growing more indistinct, as that clarity of differentiation between the bourgeois and proletariat vanishes away. Freeman and slave, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, bourgeois and proletariat, imperialist and subaltern. Have we not always had these conflicts, had they not often led to a massive revolutionary rearrangement in the substance of society? But now the very technology that capitalism made undoes alienation, weakens it. Communion rather than transportation becomes the vehicles whereby things [...] from mind to mind. This is bad news for the owners of everything. Utopia, consisted in one very simple principle, which I call, letting people have everything they want but not letting them keep it. But Utopia is no place, and they are heading no place, that's it. 16-year-olds move the worlds music, whether they like it or not, those owners. And that means that musicians can work again. Most musicians of course could not work. The artificial creation of the big people meant squashing a lot of small people. If you are going to keep 94% of the gross in the production of music, you are going to have only a few musicians. If you are going to say that the reason that you have a legitimate control over more than 90% of the worlds popular music among 5 companies is that they know which music is good. Then the exclusion of the user who cannot afford the music is nothing compared to the exclusion of the unlucky musician who cannot create.

The vast inequity, the vast inequity isn't just the exclusion from culture. It is the exclusion of potential creators from creation. Now in our little corner, this geeky little corner of the programmers' universe, we too made it possible for people to do programming again. We too made it possible and indeed more possible than it had been ever before. Free Software is the single greatest corpus of technical education material ever assembled anywhere in the history of the human race. It is possible for anyone anywhere to come to the state of the art, for nothing. Just by reading what everybody else has already done. We are bringing back the condition in which those of us who began working with this technology when it was young found ourselves in. There weren't any rules about what you could work on, everybody did what he could. And we are there again, because we have shared everything enough that the state of the art in doing almost everything the computer can do is represented by something that anyone can read. Just as once upon a time the only difference between a musician and a non-musician was who happened to be playing. No more.

So ownership is put to a terrible complicated choice. If it only could sustain itself a little while longer, it could sell air, at very high prices. Its manipulation of wants is just beginning. For the technology that we all now possess allows the owner to reach into [...], more comprehensively more widely. But the bourgeois cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing of its consistuent relation. All fast frozen relations of their [...] and venerable prejudices [...] are swept away. They would lose, not a little bit, not some around the edges, but completely. When we fight the music war and RIAA and recording companies say "That's piracy.", they are lying. They want us to believe that they are concerned that some of the audience will cease to pay. 5 percent more will listen for free, or 10% or 15%, that's not the problem, that's not the fear. The fear is that a 100% of the creators will go elsewhere. That the old systems of distribution will be deserted entirely by the people who make the nothing that is sold. And then they lose not a little, not a lot, but everything. For the real relations to the means of production now are the creators, not owners. The bourgeois but not the proletariat. All those minds educated to consume, educated to distinguish, educated to care about the little differences. That that overwhelming impulse to industrial creativity threw up. We had to care what brand of deodorant, we had to care what print of paper towel, we had to educate a bunch of people who could be made to believe that what you ought to do with war time is hug your kids and buy stuff. And so we made, those who thought, and by God they could create [...].

In the 21st century, does anybody disagree, there will be no such thing as an unpublished poet. In the 20th century there was damn near no such thing as a published poet. My friend [...] says that in 5 years there will be five thousand recording companies, and a million recording artists. Nobody makes 10 million dollars a record, and no musician has a day job. Now that, that's fair, that's equity, that's justice, that begins to answer the great moral question of the 21st century, "Why should anybody be excluded from anything?". Well, "what about incentives?". If they can't exclude people then nobody will have the incentive to create. The only reason music gets made, is because music is denied to some people for the benefit of others. It is not very convincing, is it? "But without us there would be so much music you wouldn't know what to listen to. We are saving you from the glut of culture. You need us to keep you from reading things". Well yes, it sounds comical but I hear it a dozen times a year. I sit on panels with general counsels of AOL Time Warner, AT&T, Microsoft, a division of Gulf+Western. And that's what they say, "you need us to tell you what is worthwhile. We educated you to care, but not to think. We educated you to have a taste for our goods, not for your own. We created wants in you, that only we know intelligently how to satisfy". Alienation is a [...], we get alienated, or we get connected.

And a lot rides on that. So the first principle has to be that "not letting people keep things is legitimate, moral, just, and right". The second principle is "there is no other way to do it, coercion is the only mechanism that works". After all "how otherwise could musicians get paid?", they say. People that is who make most musicians unemployed. "You don't really mean that we would just let people take music and pay what they want for." But why not, why not? The distribution systems of bourgeois capitalism were coercive, they depended on force. We don't give you what to eat, unless you work. We don't give you what to think, unless you pay. We give you no beauty unless you can afford. More or less. And that maximizes beauty. Non-coercive systems of distribution, compensation, and creation are the work of a pervasively interconnected society. Force doesn't work very well. It's not merely that coercion is immoral it is also that it is ineffective. To put every 15-year-old on earth in jail, in order to keep music unfree is an impractical activity. They know this, they are smart capitalists. A man widely admired in the hardware industry for another 6 or 8 weeks named Michael Dell was asked a few months ago at a public speaking engagement about the DMCA, SSSCA, Hollywood-owns-everything, don't-mess-with-content outlook on life, and he said, vindicating his reputation for intelligence, "Gee, it's not a very good business model is it? Suing your customers". Right, it's not. So what has been going on in the last 10 years, is an attempt to maintain intermediaries against whom coercion can be directed by owners. Because if the intermediaries disappeared, there will be nobody left for the owners to attack but their own customers. And those intermediaries, those propped up places where coercion can be applied, but not face to face, not directly in person you claim to be bringing music to, those intermediaries are beginning to pass away.

So, how did culture come to be owned? It came to be abstracted, it came to be increasingly first [...] and then dissolved, it came to a place where it left behind only the concept of itself as a thing that belongs to me. That great oxymoron, the intellectual property system. What are we gonna do about it? We're just gonna ignore it. We're just gonna ignore it, we're gonna make stuff and give stuff away. If we are let, because of course if the great moral question of the 21st century is "why is it moral to exclude anybody from anything?". The answer ultimately must be it's moral because we exclude everybody from everything in some fundamental sense. It used to be that in order to get a patent in the United States, you had to have a working model of something. You could bring the patent office a thing and say "Here it works". No more, quite the contrary. Oh yes, that Thomas Edison, he has more patents than any other in the history of the United States, but then he is only running close with Gary Limosin[?] who never made anything. Gary Limosin[?] is to the later 20th century the perfect example of how everything substantial melts into air. What is the ideal example of a Limosin[?] patent? "You know, it would be really good if we could connect a tape recorder to a camera, and then we could have videotape. I have no idea how to do this, but it would really neat if it could be done". That was a patent. JVC made one [...]. But that was then and this is now, I was reading up long ago a patent on a method for teaching janitors how to clean office buildings. You have to admit that capitalism has advanced a step. It is not merely one's ability to coerce the poor immigrant into cleaning the office building that you are now celebrating, it's the genius of teaching somebody else's immigrants how to clean office buildings, and don't teach them my way unless you pay me. The idea that only some things can be owned and only some things will be excluded from, that's a no longer tenable proposition. Now it must be either everything or, God help them, nothing. And so we watch as bit by bit the philosophy of ownership extends itself beyond the merely intangible to the completely non-existent. And the domain of permissible creation [...] is restricted more and more to that which nobody else has claimed yet. By a sovereign act of will I assert ownership of this idea, don't you dare have it without my permission.

But the soil of the 18th century was rich, and beneath the surface of its unfairness slumbered many great ambitions, of which the freedom of speech was one. And thus we got with a certain 18th century clarity the idea that Congress should make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. Thus we acquired the idea that in a society of justice, error should be met freely with speech that combats it. Thus we came to the notion of a vast marketplace of ideas. A phrase which owners understood one way and creators understood quite another way. And so we found ourselves, no, not long ago, last week, last month, last year, the year before. Watching as that ambition for the freedom of speech came solidly into conflict with the prerogative of ownership, and this, for those of us who worry about law, this is not the great question of the 21st century, but the great question for the next ten years. How far can ownership control the having of ideas about technology? How far of the ownership of the right to make vast artificial teenagers, belly buttons 12 feet high? How far can that activity require of us that what we run, what we write, and what we look at, and what we carry in our pockets shall be made only for the benefit of the expropriate ownership of the [...]? Not if we are to have free speech, at all very far. And thus an issue firmly is joined, on ground that the bourgeoises considered its own, its intimately own. The instruments used to destroy the class privilege of [...] preindustrial society are now the instruments that we employ to make a freedom we can purposely decompose the system of ownership. A wish we make no apology for, for it is right, it is just, it aspires to three things, liberté, égalité, fraternité. It aspires to commune, it aspires to equalization, and it aspires to freedom. It isn't simple, or else it is very simple. It isn't fair or else it is the only fairness there is on earth. It will inhibit creativity and innovation, or else it is the only protection that creativity and innovation have. In a world, do you remember, where the only freedom is that single unacceptable freedom of free trade. That unconscionable effort to spread one common commercial culture through the world. Cheap goods are that which battered down all Chinese walls, remember? Common culture batters down all walls to such a point that other cultures begin to batter down walls in their turn. Because of that blind driving force that says "we own this culture, you shan't take it". The culture that is not owned has no such needs. It does not force itself on tastes not yet desired. It does not seek to make wants where no wants are. It seeks to offer the opportunity to make, to build, to use, to adapt in any way that freedom can conceive. And it is in that sense an answer to another great 21st century question, where does the imperialism of that insubstantial ownership ever slumber[?]

So we're going to have a party, we're going to dance on the streets. We are going to make things and we are going to hand them to one another. We are going to say "Here I like this maybe you will too". We're going to say "I have done as much with this as I can do, now it is your turn". Share and Share-alike. And we are going to be reprobated as criminals. We are going to be stigmatized as pirates, as communists, as anarchists. Those who have property are going to make bribes of it, and pay the state to take their side. Broadcasting, might I point out, is unconstitutional. Who made the artificially large Rupert Murdoch and gave him the power to speak to the millions? A minor sub-subject to that great 21st century question, "Why is it moral to exclude anyone from anything?", should be used where the thing is bandwidth, the ability to communicate. 20th century technology thought that there were limits to the use of bandwidth by sharing. 21st century technology makes the sharing of bandwidth child's play. The infrastructure we grew up with for the distribution of bits, recapitulated the infrastructure for the distribution of goods. Buy and sell bottleneck stakes[?]. Sharing was an inconceivable technical resolution of the problem of apparent scarcity. All wrong, all dead, all the time[?]. But politics in the whole so-called civilized world depends on the these inequalities of bandwidth. I just watched a man who had the money to buy the bandwidth become the mayor of New York city for no other reason, and because he could conscript bandwidth that was unequally available for those who couldn't pay. And that's a story of no distinctive relevance, it is merely everyday news. But for that too there ought to be no quarter in a world[?] of the search for justice in the 21st century. So we shall be not just pirates, anarchists and communists but heathens for such suggestions, for such heterodoxy in the face of good sense of ownership and the overwhelming [...]

How strange it is, how strange it is now that all those dreams of 19th century political economy have been ruled failures, gone without a trace, sunk. Nothing left, but capitalism and free trade, how strange it is to see that actually this was the moment where it all began to fall apart. I am gratified to see that great human hope for liberation was not dead, but merely silent. There is a spectre haunting, it is the spectre of freedom and the hour is coming very soon now. Thank you very much.