[iDC] Fwd: Farewell Oekonux, we barely knew you.

[Dmytri Kleiner]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Farewell Oekonux, we barely knew you.
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:38:42 UT
From: "Dmytri Kleiner/ Friends." <dk at telekommunisten.net>

http://dada.telnik.net/mail.cgi/list/friends
__

Farewell Oekonux, we barely knew you: A Open Goodbye to the Neo-Utopians.
Dmytri Kleiner, 2008.

   "The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own
    surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves
    far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the
    condition of every member of society, even that of the most favored.
    Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction
    of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people,
    when once they understand their system, fail to see it in the best
    possible plan of the best possible state of society?. Hence, they
    reject all political, and especially all revolutionary, action; 
    they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavor,
    by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the
    force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel."
    -- Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848.


By 1848 the European continent may have been haunted by the spectre of
communism, as feudal relations where unraveling and transforming while
the major European powers where experiencing violent social spasms as
they adopted the Industrialism pioneered by Great Britain, however
back in the "Workshop of the World," the newly privileged English
working class had noticeably mellowed.

As Great Britain entered the second phase of the Industrial Revolution,
her own industry turned away from (now highly competitive and thus low
profit) textile markets, and moved to far more lucrative Capital Goods.

Income from Steel and Machines sold to newly industrialising nations on
the continent, the new world and beyond made the United Kingdom the world's
dominant financial power. Her workers, if perhaps only for a brief moment,
enjoyed a level of relative wealth and social stability far removed from
the gruesome, inhumane conditions brutally imposed during the first
phase of Industry.

After a century of Capitalization, all the newly formed productive
capacity created a massive increase in the supply of basic consumer
goods, prices where in free-fall across the board. And, with the repeal
of the protectionist Corn Laws in 1846, British tables where overflowing
with cheap imported food.

The radical convulsions of Luddites, Levelers, and Diggers, from the
eras of enclosures, civil wars and the birth of industry, where long over
and even Chartism was quickly disappearing.

Wealth, however briefly, had fattened the worker, the Capitalist,
the Landlord and the State alike, whose raw, ruthless, violent power, so
crucial in the primitive accumulation that created the basis of Capitalist
social relationships, whose history is written in "Letters of Blood and
Fire," was now hidden behind the chubby, smiling face of British 
Imperialism and wrapped in the legitimizing veneer of Tradition.

The Socialism of the day, the Socialism denounced by Marx & Engels in their

Communist Manifesto, was Utopian Socialism. A Socialism that doesn't chose
sides, denies struggle, denies even class. A socialism that ignores the
dialectic nature of change, and assumes that some new form of organisation,

born from the inspiration of a kind of enlightened social designer, driven
by a technologically determinist world view, will be adopted whole-scale
on the basis of it's undeniable merit by worker, capitalist, and landlord
alike, the latter two classes happily abandoning the privileges that
distinguish them and uniting with the meritous worker in a new homogeneous
mono-class of postindustrial Utopian Man, living happily in Phalanstère
and New Harmonies ever after.

Utopian Man never came about.

The brief gravy train of the British worker derailed in a train-wreck of
depression, unemployment, general glut and Capital flight. The teeth and
claws of Power and naked Imperialism where again shamelessly exposed as
two world wars shook the world. Utopian Socialism quickly became a
historical curiosity as Anarchist and Marxist Communism spread among
workers, politicians, and intellectuals world wide and erupted in
various syndicalist, political and insurrectionist forms, none of which
hesitated in denouncing the Bosses.

In the aftermath of Soviet collapse, the dream of Homo Utopicus returned.

An accelerated plundering of second and third world alike, unhindered by a
now lost geostrategic balance of power, valourised triumphant Capitalism
and the Capitalist State alike.

The Internet, born of Cold War military funding, introduced the most
significant technological development since the dawn of electricity,
a medium of communication and exchange that was synchronous, peer to
peer, and international.

A network of equals, communicating and exchanging globally, A free network
that could route around censorship and State intervention alike, a network
where citizen journalist played on equal footing with media tycoon, a
network that could expand anywhere where one node consented to
inter-connect with another.

The territorial monopoly on violence that was the essence of the State and
its landlords now made obsolete by Cyberspace. The control of the 
circulation of capital and product that was the lynch-pin of Capitalist 
wealth now undone by direct online commerce. The scarcity of the 
instruments of production that chained the worker to his employer and 
social station now obliterated by immaterial capital, nonreciprocal 
production, free software, free culture.

"The Californian Ideology," replaced class struggle with techno-utopianism
and economic liberalism. The Neo-Utopians where born.

However once again, Utopian man hasn't come about.

The Internet, born in the generous nursery of the arms race, was now forced
to pander for finance from the very Capitalist ruling class it's anarchic
structure was supposed to neutralize.

Mom and Pop ISPs with backrooms full of consumer-grade modems are replaced
by giant telecommunications corporations with shiny and expensive DSL
infrastructure. Networks become less neutral and more asymmetrical.

Like the downfall of the heyday of the pre-Depression British industrial
worker, the dotCom bust marked the explosion of the era of domino asset
bubbles, precarious McJobs, wars of economic desperation and naked
State repression.

Strengthened copyright laws, enhanced data retention laws, digital rights
management, software patents and other. political legal, and capital
interventions combine to make the data you store, receive, and transmit a
matter of national security and property privilege. Usenet is replaced
by Yahoo! Groups, email is replaced by Facebook, Napster is replaced
by iTunes. IRC by Skype, All funded by great accumulations
of wealth and firmly in the hands of the ruling class.

Day by day, communications systems are becoming more and more centralized
and exclusively mediated.

The role of peer to peer technology, the core breakthrough of the Internet,
is more and more a contraband technology, a technology for criminals,
pirates, rebels, maybe even "terrorists."

The days that we can continue to pretend, despite all evidence to the
contrary in a world of rapidly increasing wealth stratification, that
mankind will anyminutenow be emancipated by Ubuntu, Wikipedia and
Facebook are over.

If we are to create a society where we produce and share as peers,
where direct unmediated communications and commerce allows peer
producers in informal, translocal communities to throw off the chains
of Monopolist and Rentier, then we must resurrect the language of
resistance, of class struggle, and acknowledge the fact that no
privileged class will give up it's advantage gladly, that bottom up
revolution will always face top-down repression.

If we are unwilling to identify the thieves, we can never end the theft.


--
Dmytri Kleiner
editing text files since 1981

http://www.telekommunisten.net