Virtual activist

‘Plot Tracer’ is my Second Life avatar. He isn’t much different from me, except perhaps in looks (he has borg implants and a metal robotic leg). His political beliefs are mine – as is his love of education and activism. Plot has been helping in a project that has been developing since 2006 – Second Life Left Unity (SLLU ).

A group of over 400 people worldwide and within the metaverse [virtual world], SLLU owns land, a freebie shop that gives away things that can be used in Second Life, a ‘hub’ build that includes links to real life affiliations of members, and a ‘solidarity area’ – a place where people can erect stalls and small buildings with educational web links and note dispensers on real life issues. Recent (early 2009) additions include Gaza and Greek protest stalls, while a native American is in the process of creating an educational sim (simulator) about native American culture, and is adding a stall to link to her huge build and to external websites.

SLLU has been involved in many things in Second Life – including tackling head on fascist groups seeking to use the medium to connect with young gamers. (The demography of SL cuts across age groups – with middle-aged and retired people making up the largest and fastest group.) Back in 2007, the French Front National (FN), like many real life political parties from across the world, set up an office within the SL metaverse. When SLLU members found out, we launched round the clock protests at the FN build.

The FN managed to ‘ban’ members from their land, but SLLU bought land beside them – and then all hell broke loose! We sent press releases to all of the major news outlets across the (real) world, focusing on their technology sections as SL was newsworthy. We were interviewed by CNN, Channel 4, the Guardian and The Times. Our name and links to our charter and aims and principles even ran in newspapers and journals in Japan. This created a backlash against the FN in France, as papers ran headlines like ‘Front National Pigbombed’ (someone, not a member of SLLU, as we are a nonviolent group, had created a ‘pig balloon bomb’ and set it off in their HQ). The FN ordered its members to withdraw from the medium.

Virtual strike

Another SL event we took part in was a ‘strike’ planned by the Italian IBM union, Rappresentenza Sindacale Unitaria. Increasingly, SL is used by large companies for training and meetings, and the union heard that IBM officials were meeting in the online world. IBM workers were provided with logins and specially made avatars by the union, and given links to an online petition and a suggested letter of solidarity with the workers. They were told to log in to SL at a certain time for a demonstration during IBM Italy’s working hours. This demonstration included people across the world – SLLU helped publicise it ‘inworld’ (inside Second Life). The result of the strike, when thousands of IBM workers and supporters disrupted what should have been a meeting of IBM international chief executives, was described in a letter to SLLU from the IBM union:

’1. Mr Andrea Pontremoli, IBM Italy’s ceo (who personally received all of your petitions by email) has resigned. It seems our virtual action had an impact on his role at IBM. IBM corporation made a complaint to IBM Italy for the way they’ve managed the negotiations with the thousands of employees and how they’ve let it lead to such a harmful image for the company.

2. IBM Italy management have accepted to return to the negotiations’ table and has already met with the works council. We expect an agreement will -finally- be signed in the next week or two. IBM workers have now been waiting an entire year for the situation to unblock, so this is really fantastic news.’

Virtual education, education, education

SLLU has led SL educational activities and discussions on topics as diverse as Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Greece, Barack Obama and 1968. We have also hooked up with others to run workshops on human rights and recently staged an exhibition on rape and violence towards women (the group now has a feminist network). Our members come from across the anti-capitalist spectrum, meaning the approaches to educationals, discussions and installations are diverse, though all linked through the group’s charter and aims and principles.

We have made links with universities using the medium, including the University of Delaware and recently the University of the West of Scotland. Universities across the world are buying up space to help in lectures and to create educational builds. Through these, we have introduced university staff as well as students, to some of the issues our members have been discussing and creating installations around (and in turn, university staff and students have been introducing new discussions and creations within the group and on group land).

The new town square is the internet

‘A culture that took 200 years to build was torn apart in 20,’ is how Paul Mason, in his book Live Working or Die Fighting, describes what has happened to working class culture in Britain and the west through the processes of Thatcherism and neoliberalism. Living in the post-industrial west is a very different place than only a few decades ago. Communities in housing schemes, miners villages, industrial towns and cities have been torn apart by low employment and lack of shared experience.

Mason also says that the fracturing of our society comes with ‘the culture of individualism born of technological progress. If the union way of life was in the [past] the only positive identity on offer to young workers, today they are adept at playing with multiple identities: Shenzhen shoe worker by day, World of Warcraft dwarf by night, retro-punk rocker at the weekend.’

Communities that we ‘come from’ are no longer places where people live their lives. The community of family is now spread across the world by the ease of travel and cheap flights. In this new fractured world, where do we pull together community? Belonging? Comradeship? Dialogue? Debate? The new ‘town square’ is the internet – though that too is becoming fractured and privatised. But new communities can exist regardless of the transient nature of modern living – between people who never actually meet, but share common interests and beliefs. So too can new communities between political allies and adversaries – real dialogue with real people.

Lawrence Lessig, in his excellent book Free Culture, says about the US: ‘We, the most powerful democracy in the world, have developed a strong norm against talking about politics. It’s fine to talk about politics with people you agree with. But it is rude to argue about politics with people you disagree with. Political discourse becomes isolated, and isolated discourse becomes more extreme. We say what our friends want to hear, and hear very little beyond what our friends say.’ He then goes on, ‘Enter the blog.’

Enter the blog

The blog is a place where people can write exactly what they think, have debates and discourse with people from across the globe. Blogs allow for political discourse without them having to be gathered in a single public space – or at a specific time.

Commercial pressures do not exist for bloggers; they can obsess, focus, be serious, flippant, whatever. If a blogger writes a good story, it could be linked across the country and the world through other blogs, and as the number of links increase, it rises up the ranks of stories. People read peer-selected popular stories – and with new tools added to blogs such as Digg, these peer-selected stories get a larger audience again.

Journalism is freed of the constraints of commercialism and other issues that hamper the mass media. Lessig goes on, ‘As more and more citizens express what they think, and defend it in writing, it will change the way people understand public issues. It is easy to be wrong and misguided in your head. It is harder when the product of your mind can be criticised by others. Of course, it is a rare human who admits that he has been persuaded that he is wrong. But it is even rarer for a human to ignore when he has been proven wrong. The writing of ideas, arguments, and criticism improves democracy.’

SLLU uses a blog for members to share thoughts, to debate and discuss outside the SL medium. Recently, SLLU asked people across the world to write articles and letters to and about Obama. What was produced was published on the SLLU blog. Opinion was diverse; the debate it created inworld and on the blog was fierce, as was the discussion and debate on Gaza. All of which is, of course, an educational experience, every bit as valuable as turning up to your local activist weekly meeting. (Incidentally, at my fortnightly meetings of the Campsie branch of the Scottish Socialist Party, we encourage each other to write articles for the branch blog.

Not geeky or trivial

‘Cyberspace’ suggests something unreal. A place where ‘unreal’ people congregate. A place where ‘geeks’ obsess and do things apart from real life. This criticism is, in my opinion, similar to when Thatcher and her cronies in the 1980s said that degrees and courses that studied the media were ‘Mickey Mouse degrees’. Degrees within the arts that encouraged critical thinking all came under attack. And to attack cyberspace and those who use it to communicate as geeky or trivial is attacking or, at the very least, mistakenly trivialising the single most powerful communication tool thus-far created by humanity.

It is a communication tool that goes across borders and is very cheap to use in comparison with all other communication tools people have come up with across the years. A communication tool that the corporations are exploiting to the hilt – sinking huge amounts of money, research and legal fees into. From blog spaces through to forums and cyber worlds such as Second Life. So who loses if the left succumbs to the labelling of cyberspace as geekdom? If a tool is shown to be effective in breaking down the barriers between the reader and writer of news and political opinion – if we all become the active participants of the triangulation of news/opinion, who loses? The citizen or news corporations?

In Lessig’s book he writes about a scheme run in San Francisco for children of this new media world. ‘Media literacy,’ as Dave Yanofsky, the executive director of Just Think!, puts it, ‘is the ability … to understand, analyse, and deconstruct media images. Its aim is to make [kids] literate about the way the media works, the way it’s constructed, the way it’s delivered, and the way people access it.’ This is literacy in the world where children (and adults) see on average 390 hours of commercials per year. In a world where the capitalist class own and control the propaganda creators and disseminating outlets, it is important to understand the grammar of media. It is important to understand how to use that media. And it is important to understand that nowadays most people have the power in their everyday life gadgets to create media.

Elizabeth Daley, executive director of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Centre for Communication and dean of the USC school of Cinema and Television, says, ‘From my perspective, probably the most important digital divide is not access to a box. It’s the ability to be empowered with the language that that box works in. Otherwise only a very few people can read with this language, and all the rest of us are read-only.’ Passive.

We can create, read and write the political agenda. At the very least empower people to read and understand the tools that are used to mislead and show people how they can get their political thoughts into cyberspace with the use of their mobile phone/video camera/pc or one or more of the above. The tools are out there and are free. From Blogger, through Facebook, MySpace, Second Life, YouTube and others, we have the tools to create a community of pedagogues, news gatherers and commentators that can link across the real world.

How P2P works

P2P is based on free engagement, and hence represents non-alienated ‘work’, driven by personal interests and passion. Once a community establishes itself and gains sufficient traction, there are good reasons to believe that it becomes ‘hyperproductive’. Subjectively, because intrinsic and positive motivations are clearly preferable to extrinsic and negative motivations. Objectively, because the characteristics of such ways of working – equal participation, communal validation processes, distribution of tasks instead of division of labour, ad hoc meritocratic leadership, active engagement of users and a large base of contributors – are very hard to match by any for-profit competitor.

Such a community also needs an infrastructure of cooperation, so we usually get hybrid modes, where the self-managed community is coupled with a non-profit foundation that manages its infrastructure, as well as businesses operating on the basis of the wealth of the commons in the marketplace. Through the practice of benefit-sharing, these businesses support the common infrastructure, which in turn strengthens the community.

Once a for-profit business, relying on proprietary formats, faces such competition, it can pretty much close its doors.

Empirical examples are Microsoft’s Internet Explorer vs the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox, and the proprietary Britannica vs the open Wikipedia. The p2pfoundation wiki has hundreds of other case studies, compiled by a global independent research community.

Hardware is harder

That dynamic is by no means limited to the production of immaterial goods, such as open content and free software, but is now rapidly moving to open and shared designs – what is often called ‘open hardware’. The reason is simple: anything that needs to be physically produced needs to be intellectually designed. Readers may want to look at http://p2pfoundation.net/Product_Hacking for a list of nearly 150 ‘open hardware’ projects, with a sizable number having already reached maturation.

But here comes the obstacle: whereas peer production of immaterial goods needs the free individual aggregation of immaterial means of production – brains, computers and access to socialised networks – physical production also needs cost-recovery methods.

This limit suggests that more fundamental change still requires fundamental changes in political and social power, so that peer production can be matched with cooperative production in the physical sphere. The alternative, which I think is likely in a transitional period, is ‘built-only capitalism’, driven by a sector of capitalists who, instead of relying on intellectual property, decide to ‘enable and empower participation’ – and profit from it.

Thus a new frontier of social cooperation and conflict is created, between proprietary platform owners and user communities (the sharing model); and between productive communities and the surrounding business ecologies (the commons model). The sharing model is based on the need and desire of individuals to share their creative production, the commons model is based on the creation of common artifacts. Both models have different logics, social structures, and underlying social contracts.

I think that social change will also emerge from a new structure of desire in contemporary youth. Once you have tasted ‘non-alienated’ voluntary participation in an online productive community, you are strongly motivated to extend it to the whole of life, and this drives the emergence of a powerful global movement that embraces three new paradigms of social organisation: open and free availability of ‘raw material’ for cooperation; participative modes of production impacting the design of techno-social cooperation; and commons-oriented output, available to all. The combination of these three principles creates a ‘circulation of the commons’ that ensures the social reproduction of P2P.

Value crisis

Under what conditions can this be facilitated? First of all, we have to understand that what happened with the computer and the networks – the ‘miniaturisation of the means of immaterial production’ – is going to happen, and in fact already is happening, in the sphere of the means of material production. The possibility arises of a combination of a new cooperative and relocalised economy, coupled with global and interconnected open design communities. If we can re-invent property modes away from the current monopolisation of financial property, such trends will be speeded up enormously.

It is important to understand that peer production creates a value crisis, a crisis of accumulation if you want, for the capitalist economy, of which both owners and producers are the victim. The reason is that more and more of the essential innovation becomes social, a result of the emergent networks of distributed collaboration in open communities. We have created the ability for an exponential growth in the direct creation of use value (think of the hundred million of downloaded videos via YouTube, a quantum leap in social production compared to the mass media model), but only a linear growth of monetisation. Google may be a giant, but only a fraction of websites can live from online advertising. So, while Linux creates a $40 billion economy, at the same time it destroys $65 billion annually in the proprietary software business. But undermining old business models in this way also creates precarity among the workers.

The short-term solution is organised benefit-sharing between productive communities, the non-profit foundations managing the infrastructure, and the businesses profiting from the commons. It works well for Linux, but is only reactive. Yet 75 per cent of Linux programmers are now paid, and recently, while I attended a free software congress in Ecuador, I was told that zero per cent of free software programmers in that continent are unemployed.

Ultimately, these ad hoc evolutions are not sufficient, and as countries and regions recognise that their ‘competitivity’ largely depends on such open innovation, they may start thinking in terms of basic income. The advantage of it, as recognition of the value each citizen creates for society through their natural participation in such networks, is that it creates a basis for workers to have some autonomy from the market. Such a basic income would not only benefit immaterial peer production, but also the experimentation with social and cooperative means of material production.

A partner state

We need a fundamental re-orientation of public policy, around the notion of a ‘partner state’, which enables and empowers direct social value creation.

I have proposed a set of three institutions to promote commons-based peer production: An institute for the creation and protection of the commons, which promotes and sustains the creation of new modes of value creation; an institute for open business, which promotes models of social entrepreneurship so that each commons can create an ecology of enterprises; and an institute for benefit-sharing and commons recognition, which focuses on patronage and various forms of support that do not destroy the P2P logic of voluntary contributions. It creates prizes, awards and bounties to support individuals involved in commons-based value-creation.

A partner state approach, combined with a strengthening of peer property formats, and new forms of capital ownership combined with mutual credit and non-capitalist money, would go a very long way in stimulating the autonomous sphere of production. Growing the counter-economy and a social life based on a new logic is not something to start after we gain political power, but right now.

At this stage we do not have a magic bullet solution in response to the disintegration of the neoliberal system. We should continue to furiously build the counter-society within the old. The emergence of open/free, participatory and commons-oriented movements, which has occurred in all fields but started around ‘immaterial’ cooperation, is now ready to be matched by their counterparts in the ‘physical world’. So I expect to see a speeding-up of real world alternatives in many different fields: more localisation efforts such as Transition Towns, more use of alternative currencies and mutual credit, and the rapid growth of global open design efforts with local partners in the field of real production.

One scenario is that the ‘enlightened part’ of the establishment, those with a long term vision who know the endgame is near, will push through a new global compact based on green capitalism, which simply cannot function without greater participation in social and political design. Compare it to the 18th century, which saw the downward trend of the nobles and the rise of the bourgeoisie, reaching a temporary point of equilibrium. Green capitalism would allow such a scenario, leading to a new surge of technological and social innovation. But if you believe, as I do, that capitalism as infinite growth is fundamentally unsustainable, this will then set the stage for a new transition phase, with P2P becoming the core social logic, with markets becoming subsystems for particular goods.

P2P as an alternative to capitalism

P2P involves the production of use-value through the free cooperation of producers who have access to distributed capital (essentially computers) different from for-profit or public production by state-owned enterprises. Its product is not exchange value for a market, but use-value for a community of users (for example in the sharing of film and music). It is governed by the community of producers (and users) themselves, and not by market allocation or corporate hierarchy. And it involves common property regimes by which the use of the service or product is freely accessible on a universal basis, through new common property regimes, different from private property or public (state) property.

There is a fundamental difference between the capitalist market and distributed P2P dynamics, which is exactly the reason it needs to replace market fundamentalism. A market is like the swarm of insects, and lacks intentionality. Participants only seek their own advantage, and the system cannot take into account any externalities, so the system destroys the biosphere and has a very high social cost. P2P dynamics are quite different: it’s a goal or object-oriented sociality, which unites people around the common object, which is almost generally the construction of a public or common good. Therefore externalities are built into the very fabric of P2P dynamics.

n Michel Bauwens is the director of the Peer to Peer Foundation – this article is based on an interview with Red Pepper. You can read Bauwens’ ‘Political Economy of Peer Production’ at www.ctheory.net

Among those taking part were a group of around thirty activist intellectuals from Europe, Latin America and North America who met Berlin in the spacious rooms of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation near some well-graffiti’d stumps of the Wall. It was the fourth seminar of the ‘Networked Politics’ series, an international inquiry into ‘rethinking political organisation in an era of movements and networks’.

We had come together and formulated our common search mainly through the European and World Social Forums. A distinctive focus has been the influences of developments in information technology on different levels of transformative politics, practical and conceptual. In some ways these developments deepen the pre-web ways in which many of us were both rethinking political organisation (inspired by the non-hierarchical, networked practices of the women’s movement) and reformulating common ownership (inspired by the creative trade unionism of groups like the shop stewards at Lucas Aerospace with their ‘alternative plan for socially useful production’). At the same time, the impact of information technology is stimulating entirely new trains of thought.

The discussions in Berlin included an exploration of the implications of internet technology for the three major issues of our inquiry: the commons and the public; labour and social movements; political representation and democracy.

The commons and the public

Arturo di Corinto, a sharp and ebullient Italian media activist, writer and film-maker, set out a bold vision of free software as a common resource: ‘Thanks to its characteristics, the free software is a distributed property that is capable of evolving into a common good’, he declared.

The characteristics of free software, he went on to argue, give it the character of a virtual commons: freely accessible, non-exclusive, something which everyone can make use of, even if they have not participated directly in its creation; bringing together producers and users; its quality is enhanced by its use; the community of open soft developers is based on certain rules of self-organisation, leading to the emergence of a complex system.

He was interrogated by Glenn Jenkins, a puckish character whose insights have been honed by prolonged struggle on a neglected estate on the periphery of Luton to turn disused land and buildings into commons, and in turn use them as a base from which to reassert common control over local services. Glenn’s arguments and experiences raise questions of how the commons relates to the state, notably state services and resources. The Exodus Collective squatted empty buildings and eventually won their demands for public money – unemployment and housing benefits – to go towards sustaining their co-operatively managed housing rather than into the pockets of private landlords. They went on to work with an alliance of community groups in setting up the Marsh Farm Community Trust to invest £50 million New Deal for Community money over ten years to regenerate an estate all but abandoned by government and local authority alike.

As he told his story, the question became: can state services ever be transformed into a commons? The idea of the commons refers to how shared resources are managed, implying open access, collaborate self-management by those who use a resource and those who provide it. A state service can be very inaccessible and its forms of management exceedingly distant and alienated from both users and providers. Many of those who first thought up the idea of the welfare state imagined they were creating common goods. But the framework of representative democracy has been too far removed from those who used and provided the services day to day. As Glenn and other residents of Marsh Farm found fifty years after their public estate was built, a state resource was not in reality a common resource; its ‘public’ facilities managed by the public officials in the name of the people but several steps removed from the actual community whose interests state resources should have served.

Can ideas, both inspirational metaphors and actual experiences, from the free software movement provide any guide for turning public services into commons? A teasing repartee developed between Arturo and Glenn. But behind it was a serious issue of what the points of convergence and connection there might be between the virtual commons and the material commons.

One connecting theme concerns the social and individual use and development of knowledge. And this is important for the question of state services becoming commons because the organisation of knowledge is fundamental to the possibilities of genuine democratic control. The virtual commons is based on the open, shared and collaborative – as well as individually creative – development of knowledge, valuing the knowledge of producer and user and working with processes by which they can interact. This could provide a basis for remaking the ‘public’ as a commons that promises a more sustainable alternative to the encroachments of the private than does any defence of the public in its original form.

Historically, the organisation of knowledge in ‘public’ spheres – public services, public administration, public industry – has been based on a hierarchical, bureaucratic and individualistic approach to knowledge, separating the producer or provider from the user, protecting rigid boundaries between different kinds of knowledge, working with a strongly proprietorial approach in terms of institutional ownership. (The predominant approach to knowledge of the private corporations which are increasingly taking over the public has loosened up internally, with more interactive, informal forms of management, more horizontal flows within the company but the imperatives of commerce and profit make them have secretive and exclusive about access to, the development of, knowledge). The notion of a public good that isn’t in some sense a common good is becoming less and less sustainable.

Remaking public services

In the Northern hemisphere today there are not now many live sources of inspiration for a vision of the commons, for creative collaboration between users and producers underpinning a genuinely common ownership of the service or natural or built resource. (In the South, of course there is, in the indigenous approach to land and natural resources, and the deep and widespread legacy of those traditions evident in strong social movements like the landless workers’ Movimento Sem Terra in Brazil which not only struggle for land reform but through occupations and co-operative agriculture create new economic commons.) In the North the virtual commons provides a powerful for rethinking the public (or conceptualising the rethinking that is in practice taking place) as the commons.

The idea of development through mutual use is especially suggestive. To apply this to public services like education, health and so on highlights the way that the effectiveness and innovative capacity of these knowledge-based services depends on a collaboration between users and producers/providers, thereby treating users and public sector workers (not just the managers or experts) as knowledgeable collaborators in a developmental process.

This points therefore to the need for new more directly participative and power-sharing forms of organisation through which such collaboration can be achieved. This assumes that the service user potentially has the creative capacity to recognise a problem and help in the process of identifying a solution through a collaborative process. (This is in stark contrast to the traditional idea of ‘the delivery’ of public services to a more or less passive public). Here, free and open software is not just an inspirational metaphor but also a material tool for facilitating this kind of collaboration between individual users and public sector workers, shifting the balance of power from centralised public service management towards the user and the skilled service provider. It is also a tool for shifting co-ordination between different parts of a public service, moving us from a hierarchical to a co-operative model. This in turn will allow for greater autonomy in the local provision of local services under active local control while at the same time collaborating and co-ordinating across a wider territory.

Both these new possibilities opened up by free software can only be realised here in the UK, if two elementary moves are made towards renewing public services as material commons. A first condition is that public service workers have the dignity, time, the training and the rights of co-management to be able to collaborate meaningfully with service users; the second is a remaking of local government, so that, having become little more than a plethora of partnerships dependent on national funding streams and on complying with nationally imposed targets, it is transformed into a democratically elected body with strategic powers and a budget of its own that can be the subject of participatory power-sharing with local citizens. The first condition involves a rethinking and reasserting of labour as social, co-operative process and itself potentially a commons. (In the present capitalist economy, including the state sector, it could be called a ‘hidden commons’ whereby the co-operative nature of labour is distorted by pressures to maximise profit – or in the state sector by the legacy of hierarchical, military forms of administration). The second requires reflection on the kind of political institutions and forms of democracy that create the conditions for democratic self-management and common access to public resources to flourish.

Rediscovering social creativity

Marco Berlinguer of Transform! Italia coordinates the Lavoro in Movimento project which links social movements and the different parts of the Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL). He argued forcefully that to recreate politics we need to rediscover labour. How far and in what way can labour help to give a radical and sustainable coherence to the diverse sources of resistance to globalisation?

An important response came from Carlo Formenti, a constantly inquiring person who once worked as a trade unionist in engineering in Northern Italy and is now a professor of new media theory in Lecce. He argued that modern-day capitalism is only capable of reproducing its rule by taking language, communications, emotions and feelings and ‘putting them to work.’ He gave the example of the web ‘communities’ like MySpace and YouTube that are initiated or taken over by corporations. People engage in these ‘communities’ innocently, playfully, with little sense of them as commercial activities. Yet, in reality this growing expression of sociality is being used to map and profile markets, turning these ‘communities’ into lucrative targeted marketed places – the very opposite of innocent social interaction. It’s an example of the way that the commons we create freely in our daily sociality are invaded, ‘enclosed’ by the corporate, uncontrollable market. (I qualify the concept of ‘the market’ to be clear about the problem: the threat to the commons is not ‘the market’ in some general and abstract sense but the oligopolistic, corporate-driven character of contemporary capitalism).

Formenti took me back to Marx’s original understanding of labour in terms of social creativity, the creative capacity of the human as a social being. This social nature of labour’s productivity leads to an understanding of labour as itself part of the commons. This in turn underpins the original arguments for common ownership of the means of production. But our discussion went beyond an account of the expropriation of this social creativity directly in production and considered many further ways in which capitalist production utilises and constricts social creativity in the process of ensuring capital accumulation and domination. What Formenti is pointing to is the distinct form of commercialisation, and consequent suppression of creative capacity, characteristic of contemporary capitalism. This wider understanding of labour, pointing beyond the direct capitalist-waged worker relation, surely provides a potential for rethinking the role of labour – social creativity – both in connecting different forms of resistance, and in long-term our vision of the democratic self-management of the commons.

This broader understanding of capitalist suppression of social creativity (which includes of course sociality, autonomy, reflexivity and all the elements and conditions for exercising such human potential) has always been an important theme in the women’s movement. As the Canadian writer and rabble rouser Judy Rebick pointed out, feminists have long argued that under capitalism, housework and care for children and partners became ‘domestic labour’, the reproduction of labour-power, carried out under an oppressive division of labour in which creative relations of love and solidarity are distorted by the constraining context and pressures of gender domination and wage-labour. An issue for detailed thinking about the organisation of the commons therefore concerns how to organise common facilities for childcare and other forms of domestic labour in ways that enable people’s personal relations, including with children, to flourish.

Similarly, the privatisation of public services has entailed the appropriation of labour though bureaucratisation and distortion by the wider pressures of the capitalist market. Public provision had important ethical foundations of creativity in the service of the public good. In some ways the strong persistence of a public service ethic is a continued but unrealised belief in common goods and the original idea among those providing these goods that such was the common purpose animating the welfare state.

The contradictions of contemporary capitalism

The ambivalent effect of web technology is that, on the one hand, it has been a pervasive means of commodifying people’s free relations, behind their backs as it were; but on the other hand there is a reverse process. Through a variety of methods (peer-to-peer downloading, websites sharing/exchanging labour or services in kind, the spreading, promoting and lubricating of the social economy), the web is also a massively powerful means of lessening dependence on the capitalist market, spreading on an unprecedented scale the idea and example of common goods and free knowledge and culture into spheres that were previously thoroughly commodified. The same technology that is facilitating relentless efforts to stimulate new markets and realise profits from the huge leaps in productivity, and with it huge leaps in stress and work intensification, is also enabling those who are victims of the stresses of intensified production to see and test for themselves the possibilities of breaking out of the economic relations that are producing rampant commercialism and overwork.

The full realisation of these possibilities will require all sorts of structural changes including, no doubt, a basic income for all – a condition perhaps for an economy of the commons? But the point here is that a new potential exists for connecting resistance and alternatives around issues of culture, consumption and daily life with organisation around the dignity and control of work. Where does this lead? We can’t be sure, but it points at least to an underlying connection between struggles around varieties of labour to spreading or creating the conditions for autonomous social creativity – the emerging social economy, promoting free software and resisting the commercialisation of the web.

This emphasis on a shared but necessarily networked struggle for the conditions of social creativity also marks the break – which has been implicit since 1968 – from a traditional socialist focus on questions of structure to addressing questions of social interaction, the development of the individual personality, and sustainable relations with nature, all of which bring us back to the question of the commons. It seems to me that the revival of interest in the idea of the commons is actually about an urge to return to the original aspiration of socialism, with a new language and under new conditions – the new awareness of the social character of knowledge, the urgent sense of a common environment under threat, the de-socialisation of significant labour processes. But that original aspiration remains relevant: the common, associative management of the ‘common treasury of the world’, and the common ownership and control of the means and processes of production. As well as being a search for what this means in an age of globalisations, the revival of the idea of the commons is also a reaction against the ways in which, during the twentieth century especially, state and party institutions have mediated, appropriated and substituted themselves for the complexity and dynamism of these ideals, beyond all recognition.

Whether ‘the commons’ is counter-posed to the state or used as a language for transforming the state depends to a degree on different national experiences. Rather than thinking of the commons as a delimited sphere, between market and state, I would view it as a goal of transformation for the organisation of both all social resources, including labour, that can always be pre-figured in and against the actually existing institutions of market and state. This leads naturally to the issue of political representation, which of course needs space of its own and is only beginning to be explored in the context of the question of the commons.

Democracy beyond representation

Our discussions on political representation have been searching for a new model of engagement with the state. Our starting point has been the nature of the autonomy of social movements from political parties and institutions. Given the history of the ideal of the commons in the hands of the state, the question of autonomy, and then of what kind of relationship to build on the basis of autonomy, is central.

I want to suggest that the distinctive contribution of left political parties, or their representatives in political institutions, should be to open up the institutions, to redistribute power outside them so that it can be shared and support new institutions and new relationships of control over state power. Their distinctive position is thus one of straddling the political institutions on the one hand and the conflicts and emergent sources of power in society on the other. The aim must be to both open up and democratise the institutions and, as a necessary part of this process, to encourage and support emerging institutions based on deeper forms of democracy and the principles and practices of the commons. A classic example would be the power-sharing of participatory budgeting in municipalities in Brazil and now in parts of Europe, and its relation to the growing social economy in both continents. But there are many other examples.

What are the conditions and presuppositions of such an understanding of political representation? I will just mention one here: it concerns the emergence of non-state sources of democratic power. It’s a concept that needs further debate on another occasion but the point is this: while radical mass movements have not been sustained 1970s-style or Seattle-style or anti-war-February-15th-style, but what is striking is a need to create lasting sources of sources of democratic power autonomous from the state: democratic institutions that go beyond, but are often an outcome of, movements.

I’m thinking here in the UK of developments like London Citizens; or union branches like those fighting for alternatives to privatisation taking on a responsibility for the public interest that has been vacated by elected politicians; community organisations which similarly take on a public responsibility to propose solutions for estates and neighbourhoods abandoned by the political class; asylum seeker and refugee organisations that go well beyond campaigning to provide an infrastructure of support and defence; the global networks like ‘Our World is Not for Sale’ that provide a force for accountability on global institutions and corporation that have escaped the conventional mechanisms of parliamentary accountability. It’s probably a world-wide phenomenon taking many different forms; certainly I’ve observed it in parts of Latin America and Europe and even in the UK. And this is what convinces me of its distinctive, emergent character – if something innovative happens across so many places, there must be something going on.

We are not talking here about relying only on direct democracy and popular power – these struggles need and want support from within the institutions, hence an opening and democratisation of existing political institutions. But we are talking about phenomena that are more than movements and ephemeral campaigns. They are trying to create different kinds of relationships here and now, based on principles of the commons, and at the same time building democratic power to challenge and transform institutions driven by private profit or bureaucratic self-interest. Any rethinking of public administrations, political economy or political organisation must make these actual experiments in co-operation and democratic power one of its starting points.

Discussion papers and further details of the Networked Politics project can be found at www.networked-politics.info. See also www.tni.org and www.transformitalia.it. This article also appears in Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy

To discover the roots of Linux you need to go back to 1983, when Richard Stallman, a US-based computer scientist not known for his love of ideological compromise or corporate profits, became frustrated by the fragmentation of the Unix operating-system into proprietary, incompatible dialects. He created an open-source operating system called GNU (a recursive acronym for ‘GNU’s Not Unix’).

In 1991, Linus Torvals, a 21-year old student at the University of Helsinki, utilised Stallman’s code to create the original Linux kernel – the part of the operating system that controls a computer’s hardware. Torvals also adopted the principles of Stallman’s Free Software Foundation (FSF) to govern the distribution of his creation.

Throughout the 1990s, and against the backdrop of growing frustration at the limitations imposed by proprietary software companies, the growth of the internet saw an enormous increase in collaboration among programmers who previously worked in isolation. It was fertile ground for the growth of Linux.

Multinationals including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel and Dell saw the writing on the wall and invested heavily in making Linux an integral part of their business, but crucially the FSF guidelines under which Linux was made available to the wider world continue to guarantee that any derivative of Linux must be free for users to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve.

Experts now believe that Linux dominance of the server market is a foregone conclusion as users find it faster, easier to maintain, and more secure than its competitors. It is already the platform of choice on most of the world’s web servers, and it is also used on everything from routers, mobile phones, IBM mainframes and, increasingly, home PCs.

If you’ve already tried open-source software such as Mozilla’s Firefox browser or the competitor to Microsoft’s Office, OpenOffice, then you’ll know they’re as good, and in some cases better, than their more expensive and less politically-sound alternatives.

Linux does come in for some criticism from desktop users, who argue that it doesn’t support widely used applications such as Microsoft Office without the need for third-party software to convert files, and laptop users who complain that their peripheral devices are often incompatible.

But while many of these criticisms are valid the increasing use of Linux by individuals has seen significant progress in hardware compatibility. It is becoming increasingly common for hardware to work ‘out of the box’ with many Linux distributions.

For someone wanting to try Linux on their home PC, the best advice is to download Knoppix, a bootable live system, which contains a representative collection of GNU/Linux software, and then burn it to a CD or DVD.

Simply reboot your PC or laptop with the CD/DVD in the drive and your BIOS set to boot from the CD drive, and it will automatically detect your hardware, support most common graphics and sound cards, as well as USB devices, and allow you to use Linux without installing anything on your hard drive.

As well as Linux, Knoppix also contains a standard desktop, a media player, internet connection software, image manipulation software, network and system tools, and OpenOffice, allowing users to familiarise themselves with the ever-growing range of open-source software without having to replace their current operating system. When you remove the CD and reboot your PC or laptop, your computer will be exactly as it was before using Knoppix.

If, having tested Linux using Knoppix, you decide you want to make the march of Tux the penguin into your world a permanent one, it’s advisable to have someone with a good knowledge of IT to back up all of your files and system information before making the transition. Linux is also compatible with Macs but again obtaining advice from a professional is advisable.

If you’re troubled by your Skype addiction, though, why not justify it as an environmentally-friendly way to plot international revolutions.

And even if the most radical your chats get are long-distance flirtations with anti-globalisation activists, there are worse things than conducting your love life on proprietary software.

To be honest, though, hypocrisy seems the least of your problems. First, you need to lose the tinfoil hat. The google-CIA link amounts to little more than an unproven assertion from ex-CIA man (and leading 9/11 truth-er) Robert Steel, and the fact that it purchased Keyhole Inc, a company that once received venture capital from the CIA’s investment arm. Keyhole technology now powers Google Earth, the best tool yet devised for activists to track the spread of secretive military installations: a pretty good case of ‘You taught me language; and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse.’

Without blowing too hard on the Google trumpet, it has at least blocked US Justice Department requests for access to its search data, and backed demands for ‘net neutrality’ against telecoms companies wanting to develop a two-speed internet favouring corporate websites. ‘Tis true that Google’s complicity in internet censorship is as unprincipled as that of all the corporations sustaining the Great Firewall of China, but boycotting it is hardly the solution.

You’d be better off turning your back on sweatshop produced imports that dominate and searching out some second hand threads on Skype’s parent site, eBay. Or, at least, try googling your way to some less po-faced activist priorities.

When Republican US senator Ted Stevens made these comments last June, he instantly became the butt of jokes across the blogosphere – not so much because he thought the internet (or ‘an’ internet, as he also put it) was a series of tubes, but because he also happens to chair the committee in charge of regulating these ‘tubes’.

Worse still, the amendment under debate concerned ‘net neutrality’, the end of which could mean the end of the ‘equal-access’ internet as we know it. The end of net neutrality would see the emergence of a two-tiered or multi-tiered internet, with information from wealthy corporations guaranteed priority distribution to web users.

In the past year, a number of the major internet service providers in the US, including AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, have spent millions of dollars lobbying US Congress members to contest legislation that would prevent them from offering ‘quality of service’ guarantees to certain content providers in return for a premium fee.

Under the kind of quality of service agreements they want to offer, the ISPs would guarantee that information from premium-paying content providers reached users ahead of all other information.The websites of the large corporations (the only entities wealthy enough to afford premium fees) would load quickly and without interruption, while those of a small-time blogger might load more slowly, or not at all. This is the internet equivalent of priority queues for business class travellers, or the guest lists that let the ‘beautiful people’ enter a club before the rest of us under-tanned, cellulite-stricken plebians.

To a greater or lesser extent, the packets of information that currently wend their way across the information superhighway – not down tubes, nor on the back of a truck – are delivered blindly.There is no discrimination depending on either the type of information or where it comes from. Supporters of this status quo advocate the introduction of legislation to protect net neutrality by banning ISPs from introducing quality of service guarantee fees. But the ISPs themselves, backed by the US Chamber of Commerce, network equipment manufacturers such as Cisco Systems and neoliberal think-tanks ranging from the Cato Institute and the Ludwig von Mises Institute to our old friends, the Project for a New American Century, argue against the introduction of any such ‘restrictive’ legislation.

These opponents of net neutrality claim that it is anti-competitive, inhibits innovation and presents a danger to homeland security. But their opposition to net neutrality is really born out of financial concerns.The big telecom companies are attempting to recoup the costs of building improved telecommunications infrastructure from the major corporate providers of content, such as CNN and MTV, which offer bandwidth-intensive video content.

Quality of service guarantees are intended to sweeten this otherwise bitter pill.

The supporters of net neutrality, which include such more-or-less progressive forces as Moveon.org, the American Library Association, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and the inventor of the internet,Tim Berners-Lee, as well as several household name content providers such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, also deploy arguments with a ‘defence-of-the-freemarket’ theme. They, quite accurately, point out that a multi-tiered internet would see discrimination in favour of existing major content providers, as upstart content providers or applications could hardly grab users’ attention if access to their websites was much slower than access to those of the corporate incumbents.

The net neutrality supporters are lucky to have champions with such deep pockets, but ultimately they are looking after their own interests. Premium fees would eat into their bottom line, and so they want to avoid them. If it came to the crunch, however, and net neutrality was to wither away, the likes of Google and Microsoft are more than wealthy enough to pay these fees and continue to survive and prosper.

For the rest of us, the issue is more fundamental. For all the discussion about the ever-diminishing cost of access to technology, the reality is that throughout history the means of mass communication has been at first quite widely accessible only to be later restricted. Technologies are developed that reduce the costs for larger producers while doing little to aid smaller publications, thus skewing the market towards the former.

By the first few decades of the 20th century, for example, larger newspapers had all but squeezed out the myriad small and local labour ‘rags’ that had earlier flourished. Today, the cost of publishing a glossy colour magazine or printing, binding and distributing an affordable paperback is similarly out of reach of virtually all but the major media conglomerates. Professional television and film production also remains, for the most part, the preserve of elite content producers, despite the development of cheap video cameras and consumer-priced video-editing software.

The internet remains highly egalitarian by comparison. A blog by an anti-war teenager from Utah is as easy to access as the website of the US defence department. The Coke boycott website, Killer Coke, which highlights murderous labour rights abuses in Colombia associated with Coca- Cola, can be accessed as quickly as the drink’s own website. This will end with the end of net neutrality.

Of course, with or without net neutrality legislation, internet content is not immune to the myriad market conditions that favour some websites over others, ranging from search optimisation and sponsored links to plain old advertising – or simply recruiting George Clooney and John Cusack as columnists, as in the case of US liberal Ariana Huffington’s overnight ‘blog’ success, the ‘Huffington Post’. In reality, there can be no such thing as true net neutrality within the far-from-neutral market. Even so, progressives should oppose any further corporate favouritism through the appearance of quality of service guarantees.The net may not be completely neutral, but we don’t want to see it become even more unequal.

In Europe, Deutsche Telekom (which owns T-Mobile in the UK) and Telecom Italia have begun to make noises similar to their American ISP counterparts.

Deutsche Telekom is in the process of constructing a fibre-optic network that will deliver information at 25 times the speed of current top-end broadband to several German cities. The cost of building this is estimated at three billion euros.

They hope to get some of that back through premium guarantees.

Meanwhile, there is no groundswell of concern over the issue in Europe, as there is across the Atlantic. The EU has so far taken a hands-off approach. The problem is that a neutral attitude to net neutrality – in other words, not introducing legislation to prevent telecom companies from introducing tiered pricing to content providers – is precisely the regulatory environment that the ISPs want.

The reality is that EU legislators are not neutral on the issue at all. The EU Commission is not filled with octogenarian Mr Magoo senators who stumble into doing what the telecommunications giants wish them to do because they think the internet is some sort of information water slide.

Brussels is a haven of neoliberal fundamentalists who know precisely what the internet is and precisely what it means to be neutral on a moving train – or truck.Save the Internet, the US coalition to preserve net neutrality, brings together a strange collection of bedfellows – ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Gun Owners of America, and Feminist Majority to the Christian Coalition for America.

This rather bizarre rainbow coalition, created in April 2006, gathered more than a million signatures in two months to petition the US Congress in favour of net neutrality. Its methods mix traditional grassroots petitioning with YouTube video slots and an ironically-titled theme song, ‘God Save the Internet’.