[Commons-Law] Free Software and Market Relations

[Jeebesh Bagchi]

http://www.oekonux.org/texts/index.html

Free Software and Market Relations
Raoul Victor

The Economic Reality of Free Software
Free Software and Market Society
Free Software and the Law of Value, or the Revolutionary Possibilities of Free 
Software
The Ideology of the Founders of Free Software
Germs of Non-market Relations
What Marx and History Say
"Germs"?
Insufficiency and Validity of Marxism
New Questions

The following is a translation (amateur) of one part of a debate that took 
place on a Francophone internationalist communist listserv. Marx quotes are 
taken from standard English translations. There is only one other note on 
translation: the use of the word gratuite and its derivations. There is no 
direct translation for it, because it is more than ?gratuity,? which sounds 
like restaurant lingo, and more than ?freedom,? which sounds 
bourgeois-revolutionary. The idea is of a principle to replace exchange 
value; as exchange value is to commodities under capitalism, gratuite is to 
products of use value in communism.

In the text "Germs of non-commercial relationships in the midst of the most 
modern capitalism", I attempted to show that the specificities of software, 
in particular the capacity of being reproducible at an insignificant cost, 
thus also the more and more important and determinant place which it is 
called to take in practically all the processes of production, are 
constitutive of material conditions that open new perspectives for the 
possibility of a society of abundance, and thus of a post-capitalist society. 
I also tried to show in evidence the "non-market" character of the principles 
and relations which rule free software, thus also the crucial role that this 
reality could play in the elaboration and diffusion of the revolutionary 
project.

In his contribution of June 29, 2002, JC [another participant on the listserv] 
raises a series of interesting objections to these ideas. The object of this 
text is to respond to them.

JC tackles two principal questions. The first, he summarizes as follows: "I 
want to attempt to establish that 'free software' does not avoid, in its 
economic reality and in the ideology of its founders, market relations"; the 
second: "I wonder about the idea that, in the midst of capitalism, by way of 
new technological developments, 'the germs of non-market relations' could be 
born."

To respond, I will attempt to follow JC in his questioning.

To tackle the specific question of free software, JC begins by making some 
remarks of a more general order.

In posing a riddle--"From whom are these lines?"--in order to prepare his 
surprise, JC cites a researcher and manager of the French government (Bernard 
Lang), who makes statements analogous to those I made. {Informatics 
programs," wrote Lang, "immaterial in essence, tend to reverse the traditions 
of commerce. Conception and development aside, their production and 
distribution costs can be marginal, quasi-zero.... Free software announces a 
major change in civilization: the advent of a society of abundance." JC does 
not follow this explicitly to its conclusion. But what could he conclude? 
That such a statement is false because it's made by a man of the 
establishment? For Lang, "the major change in civilization" of which he 
speaks is evidently not the surpassing of capitalism, but an amelioration of 
the same (we revisit further below the defenders of free software as a means 
of renovating capitalism). That does not prevent one making a statement of 
evidence, of a reality that "tends to reverse the traditions of commerce." 
The intrinsic tendency of software to escape the laws of the market is a 
reality that the new market-makers (practically industrialists), of illegal 
copies of informatics products (business software, video-games, music discs, 
or films, etc.) confirm and exploit daily...or the agents of the state 
charged with suppressing this sort of attack on the market laws.

That which is surprising is not that establishment types could confirm the 
anti-market nature of certain characteristics of software. This nature is 
evident as soon as you think a little about it (we shall come back to this, 
also). That which does not cease to surprise me is the resistance of numerous 
Marxists to this fact. It goes back to Marx, though, to have well established 
the mechanisms of market exchange and the possibility of its surpassing by 
the appearance of conditions of abundance.

Making a second general remark, JC takes up on his account an argument often 
employed by Marxists to deny the fundamentally new character of contemporary 
technological evolution.

"I share," writes JC, "the remark made by RGF at the June 15 conference, which 
signaled that this capacity of reproduction, not only quasi-gratuiticity, but 
gratuiticity period, already existed in the domain of the results of 
scientific research. And thus free software, however much it corresponds to 
this ideal (sometimes for harm, as, for example, with the military) of free 
reproduction and gratuiticity of the results of scientific research, bring 
nothing very new onto the terrain."

The "free and gratuitistic reproduction of the results of scientific research" 
is not a so generalized reality; in part, that which one calls "the hacker 
ethic" of the creators of the first free software forged itself in combat in 
the universities against the pressure of the administration to commercialize 
the products of their research. And one knows, at such a point, patents 
constitute a true barrier against the universality of scientific knowledge. 
But it is true that the essence of this knowledge, under the form of texts, 
theorems, rules, equations, etc., finds itself in the public domain, and that 
anyone can draw from it at will. In this sense, effectively, there is 
something in common between the qualities of free software and that of 
scientific knowledge.

But science is not useful, does not have a direct use value, but for a very 
narrow part of society. Generally, it does not enter except indirectly into 
the process of production or consumption. Software can, on the contrary, take 
the form of means of production or consumption, directly useful on the 
assembly line, or for the manager of an office, for example. It can also 
constitute a means of direct consumption, like with films or games. That to 
which software permits everyone to have access, by rendering them freely and 
gratuitistically reproducible, is not only equations or laws, but direct 
instruments of production and goods of common consumption. The number of 
goods, or the part of goods, capable of being an object of this gratuitistic 
reproduction is limited only by the scale and measure in which the capacity 
to digitalize the process of production and goods of consumption develops 
itself. That which is "new" is not little. That is the possibility of the 
gratuiticity, not only in the area of the university and the laboratory, but 
in the heart of social production, there where, daily, economic and social 
relations create themselves.

Constantly, in the perspective of establishing that software and informatics 
in general "do not bring anything very new," JC echoes the questions of Henri 
S on "whether the fundamental industrial revolution was not that of today, 
that of informatics, but that of yesterday, electricity." Independent of the 
question of the definition of the term "industrial revolution," one can 
always say that without electricity there would have been neither electronics 
nor informatics, and there can be no doubt that the generalization of the use 
of electricity transformed also the process of production as much as modes of 
social life. That is not to denigrate what was perceived by Kropotkin and 
Lenin (socialism is the soviets plus electricity) as an element which would 
contribute qualitatively new methods to the creation of the conditions of a 
society of abundance. But that does not remove any of the importance of the 
novelty contained in the new technologies. Electricity remains a good 
submitted to scarcity. It cannot be "freely reproducible." Once produced and 
consumed, a kilowatt-hour is no more. On the contrary, the means of 
production which take the form of software could, themselves, be "consumed" 
and reproduced indefinitely without any significant cost. The contribution of 
the electronic revolution is not situated solely on the terrain of the 
exceptional growth of the productivity of labor. It also places itself on a 
qualitative level, at the base of the economic edifice itself, that of market 
exchange, of the law of value, rendered futile when confronted by goods that 
intrinsically tend to escape from shortage. In this sense, the contribution 
of the new information and communications technologies cannot be reduced to 
that of electricity.

But, JC's principal critique is, justly, about the reality of this questioning 
of exchange. In taking the most "advanced" case, that of free software, he 
attempts to show that it "does not escape from market relations." For that, 
he develops his arguments firstly at the level of their "economic reality," 
and secondly, at the level of "the ideology of the founders." I tackle these 
two levels in the same order.
The Economic Reality of Free Software
Free Software and Market Society

On the economic level, the arguments proposed by JC essentially concern the 
relations of free software with the capitalist environment. He shows how, 
around free software like Linux, a series of commercial companies gravitate, 
who live from the sale of services facilitating the installation and the use 
of the software, those that lead to "what one could call sometimes a pretty 
high invoice for a Linux installation." JC illustrates again the influence of 
the market environment on free software in citing examples of its use by 
state institutions: for national French education, for research into the 
reduction of "costs of formation of the workforce"; by the French and 
American armies, which "are wary, for security reasons, of software over 
which they don't have complete control." He also invokes the existence of a 
"group lobbying in favor of Linux and free software," very active among 
circles of the French political class. He states that certain of the creators 
of free software are paid for this task by commercial enterprises, and thus 
that those who "benevolently" made it, often with "lost hours," get a salary. 
And last but not least, JC puts in relief the support provided free software 
by certain enterprises: "But," he writes, "free software is supported by a 
series of enterprises involved in the information market, that have an 
interest in the destruction of Microsoft's monopoly over software, and in the 
first ranks of them: IBM."

In concluding, JC says: "Free software is not a "freely" reproducible good; if 
there is a contradiction in the kingdom of market laws, it is the very 
classical one between the position of the monopoly acquired by Microsoft and 
the other enterprises in the same sector; it is not a revolt of the 
productive forces against the relations of production which they have 
engendered, but the revolt of information enterprises against a monopoly 
situation that is contrary to the general interests of capital."

However, all these facts show, not that free software does not possess a 
non-market character, but that it is immersed in a market world. Any of the 
aspects of economic reality cited by JC do not concern the non paying, 
gratuitistic nature of free software itself. They show how merchants are able 
to make a profit in selling products connected with free software. But, it 
improper for JC to deduce that "free software is not gratuitistic software." 
The paying character of that which can be connected to Linux does not remove 
any of the perfectly gratuitistic character of Linux itself. JC states also 
that recourse to free software is interesting economically to commercial 
enterprises or state administrations because it is synonymous with the 
reduction of costs. But that does nothing but show the reality of its 
gratuiticity (or quasi-gratuiticity), denied by JC, because it is just 
because they are gratuitistic that they entail a diminishment of costs. As 
for to the argument citing the use of free software by armies, it only gives 
evidence of the effectiveness of certain of its technological advantages, 
without dealing with the gratuitistic nature of the software. Finally, the 
idea that the development of free software would be essentially the product 
of "the revolt of information enterprises against a monopoly situation 
[Microsoft] that is contrary to the general interests of capital," is also 
excessively reductionist, and ignores the importance that some free software 
are taking. It is true that if IBM and other computer manufacturers 
participate in the development of free software, and prescribe Linux as the 
OS for certain of their machines, that is, in large part, to emancipate 
themselves from their dependence vis a vis Microsoft. But, the same fact, 
that the top global information enterprise should be forced to have recourse 
to free software translates into the superiority of this type of product and 
the inevitability of its development.

The still small world of free software evidently does not escape the commodity 
environment in which it lives. Why would the merchants who dominate the 
society deprive themselves of the technical and economic advantages of this 
new type of product? What would forbid it from becoming like a weapon in the 
permanent war among them, on the military level or that of the struggle for 
control of the market?

The question that poses itself is that of knowing whether this market 
environment extinguishes the non-market character of free software and 
condemns it to being nothing more than a tool of reinforcement of the 
dominant system, of "regularization of market relations," like JC says.

History furnishes examples of the coexistence of two types of economic 
relations, in particular during the course of the period in which a new mode 
of production is developing in the midst of the old society, as in the case 
for capitalism in the midst of feudalism, or of feudalism in the midst of 
ancient slavery. In these two cases, like I have implied in the text 
criticized by JC, "there is a phenomenon which sees the ruling class of the 
old system being forced to have recourse to products of a mode of production 
which is antagonistic to its own. "

In the ancient Roman slave empire, the colonat, a first form of feudalism in 
which the slave is emancipated and transformed into a free colonus but 
subordinated to new economic obligations, progressively develops itself up to 
the point of becoming the most important mode of production in the late Roman 
Empire of the 3rd century. The slave state drew its profits, not always 
easily, from the growth of productivity that the new economic relations 
brought, by levying ever-heavier taxes on their production and even in 
transforming some of their own slaves into coloni.

In the coexistence between feudalism and capitalism, recourse by the old 
dominant class, the feudal masters, to the means furnished by the new 
relations, capitalism, which had developed themselves in the cities and by 
commerce, is even more spectacular. The feudal crusades, which led to the 
extension of the European fiefdoms all the way up to the Orient, of the 11th 
to the 13th century (creation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, of the 
principality of Antioch, etc.), would not have been possible but for recourse 
to the forms of capitalist production, which, in cities like Venice, produced 
the boats which transported the feudal armies and Oriental booty. It was in 
using the capitalist financial wealth developing particularly in the cities 
of Genoa and Venice that the European masters found the means of financing 
their imperialist enterprises in the Holy Lands. In France, since the 12th 
century, the monarchy extended its power at the expense of the large regional 
feudal masters by leaning on the cities, in which the bourgeoisie and 
capitalist relations would develop, and to whom the king granted specific 
privileges. The feudal masters o f all Europe could, during centuries, 
continue to draw their profit from the capitalist commerce which was 
developing, not only in procuring goods otherwise unattainable, but also in 
withdrawing innumerable taxes of passage for the commerce that crossed their 
fiefdoms.

What can one deduce in relation to the debate that concerns us? Firstly, that 
the fact that the old dominant class draws profit from the products of new 
social relations does not remove their novelty, their antagonistic character. 
Secondly, that the economic and political power of the old dominant class 
inevitably constitutes a restriction of the development of the new relations: 
There had to be the bourgeois political revolutions to clear the feudal taxes 
of passage for the development of commerce, for example. But, thirdly, that, 
because of the fact that the new relations contain a new productive capacity, 
the old dominant class is forced to have recourse to them, even if it is 
nothing more than as a partial means, marginal at first. In so doing, that 
class stimulates their development. (The feudal crusades, for the Italian 
cities that contributed to them, were a source of the first capitalist 
prosperity.)

Even today the use of free software by commercial enterprises or by state 
administrations does not destroy its non-market nature. The states multiply 
new legislation and repressive bodies to stop the attacks on copyright and 
other foundations of property and capitalist profit, put in harms way by the 
logic of free software. But the same states, like all capitalist enterprises, 
are at some point obliged to have recourse to it. And this can do nothing but 
stimulate its development.
Free Software and the Law of Value, or the Revolutionary Possibilities of Free 
Software

JC's arguments have led us to the terrain of the relations of free software 
with the market milieu. But the central question, on the economic plane, is 
to comprehend by what "internal" logic free software is by nature non-market, 
non-capitalist, and contains revolutionary possibilities. JC, unfortunately, 
does not tarry at this point, except to reject it as an illusion, and send 
the problem back to the reality of market competition: "My initial argument," 
he writes, "portrays mostly as an illusion that in free software there could 
be seen new 'revolutionary' possibilities, beginning with their reality in 
the play of market competition."

It suffices to remember what the market relations are, and their specificity 
in capitalism, to understand how free software is their negation.

Market relations rest on exchange. Exchange is to acquire or to cede something 
by means of a counter-party. The barter is in the most elementary form of it. 
A good or a service is directly furnished in exchange for another. The market 
relationship establishes that this exchange must follow the rule of equality, 
the good furnished must possess a market value, exchange value, equivalent to 
that of the good received. The law of value measures this value by means of 
the labor time socially necessary to produce the good exchanged. The use of a 
particular commodity as a universal equivalent, money (livestock in certain 
ancient societies, in which the term "pecuniary," of or regarding pecus, 
which in Latin means cattle; eventually metallic pieces, notes, bank money, 
etc.), thus authorizes a flexibility unlimited by exchange, and offers the 
possibility of accumulating value, dead labor. Capitalism constitutes the 
most fully achieved form of exchange and of market relations, thus it extends 
its domination to all domains of social life, in the first place to labor 
power, which it transforms into a commodity by means of wage-relationships.

But the logic of free software situates itself outside of exchange itself. 
When someone "takes" free software off the Internet, even if its production 
required millions of hours of labor, there is nothing given in exchange. One 
takes without furnishing any counterpart. The software furnished is not 
exactly "given," in the classic sense of the term, since the provider still 
has it after the taker has helped himself. (In this sense, the term of 
"economy of the gift" that certain people use apropos free software is 
incorrect.) There is indeed the transmission of a good, but with neither loss 
of possession nor counter-party. The foundation of capitalism, exchange, is 
absent. In this sense already, free software has an intrinsically 
anti-capitalist, potentially revolutionary nature.

But it does not suffice to be "anti-capitalist" to be revolutionary 
historically, as shown by the nostalgic anti-capitalist thought of a less 
dehumanized past. If free software possesses a revolutionary nature, that is 
also because its method rests on the concrete will to liberate the powers 
contained in the new techniques of information and communication. This method 
is the result of the simple acknowledgment on t he part of several 
universities that certain aspects of market relations gravely impeded their 
utilization. If this happens with electronic techniques and not with other 
techniques of production, that is not only because the scientific ethic 
contains non-market aspects but also because, and above all, in this domain 
it is very easy, and costs nothing, to ignore the market laws. In this sense, 
the method of free software situates itself inside the movement of history 
(in the measure in which the development of society's productive forces 
constitutes the only dimension that, "in the last instance," permits one to 
detect a direction in it), in the direction of the surpassing of capitalism.
The Ideology of the Founders of Free Software

The creators and defenders of free software-are they aware of this reality?

For JC, the question doesn't come up : ?The texts of the founders of the FSF 
[Free Software Foundation],? he writes, ?confirm that they place themselves 
entirely in the context of market capitalism.? And, to defend this thesis, JC 
gives some citations:

Stallman [founding member of the FSF] exposes the ideological and social 
references of free software: ?The free software movement was founded in 1984, 
but its inspiration comes from the ideas of 1776: liberty, community and 
voluntary cooperation. That is what leads to free enterprise, to the liberty 
of expression and to free software. Like in the case of "free enterprise" and 
"freedom of expression," the term "free" in the term "free software" makes 
reference to liberty, not to price...? Against Microsoft, Stallman writes: 
?But the absence of defense is not the American way. On the grounds of 
courage and freedom, we defend our liberty with the GNU GPL [the GNU General 
Public License],? and goes on to conclude that: ?Property rights were 
conceived in order to advance the well- being of mankind.? 1Scroll downwards

JC thus presents one of the more well-known creators and defenders of free 
software as an advocate of prices and private property. The reality of the 
hacker's conceptions is much more complex and contradictory. To be convinced, 
it just requires putting some of the citations JC gives into context. Thus, 
at the end of the phrase, ?the term "free" in the term "free software" makes 
reference to liberty, not to price,? Stallman wrote : ?More specifically, it 
signifies that you have the liberty to study, to modify, and to redistribute 
the software that you use.? But, having the right to redistribute software is 
to have the right to transmit it gratuitistically, without price, ignoring 
property rights and copyright; studying and modifying software expresses that 
it's not to be secret, protected, like all ?proprietary? software. Some lines 
further, the same Stallman wrote: ?We cannot establish a community of liberty 
in the world of proprietary software, in which each program has its master. 
We will constitute a new world in cyber-space...? And the tidbit JC cited on 
property rights are in the following context: ?My opinions on copyright would 
take an hour to explain, but a general principle applies: One cannot justify 
the negation of important public liberties. Like Abraham Lincoln put it, 
'each time there is a conflict between the rights of man and the rights of 
property, the rights of man must prevail.' Property rights were conceived in 
order to advance the well-being of mankind and not as an excuse to scorn 
them.? Stallman effectively defends property rights, but on the condition 
that they do not hurt ?the rights of man?... which is not very simple: If the 
right not to starve, for example, is a right of man, the right of property 
over the means of production must be abolished. In another more well-known 
text by Stallman, The GNU Manifesto, he writes: ?Extraction of money from the 
users of a program by restraining their use of the program is destructive, 
because, for the sake of cash, it reduces the amount of wealth humanity can 
draw from the program. When choice is deliberately restrained, the harmful 
consequences are a deliberate destruction.? 2Scroll downwards

The defense of the use and generalization of free software leads logically to 
the defense of non-market, thus non-capitalist principles, such principles as 
gratuiticity, non-property. But this does not imply that one would 
obligatorily deny the validity of market principles in all domains. The 
founders of free software do not pretend to destroy the capitalist world. 
They want to create, in the world of communications and information, a ? 
cyberspace...a community of liberty,? to use Stallman's words, on the side, 
outside, ?the world of proprietary software, in which each program has its 
master.?

From this inevitably flow contradictions, like when Stallman demands 
simultaneously capitalist free enterprise and a community of liberty with 
neither masters nor market exchange. That expresses a contradictory reality 
which already exists and develops itself within society because of the 
coexistence and interpenetration of the world of free software with modern 
capitalism. The Internet is a striking illustration. The principal software 
on which it depends for functioning is free software. Without it, the 
?network of networks? could not function. However, the Internet has not 
ceased to become an indispensable instrument for capitalist, commercial, 
financial, administrative, police, etc., transactions, and that on a 
planetary level.

The question of the relation to capitalism is at the heart of the divisions 
that split the world of the defenders of free software. 3Scroll downwards For 
some of them, like the partisans of the Open Source Initiative, founded in 
1998 by Eric Raymond, free software could be one of the instruments for 
ameliorating and reinforcing capitalism. Stefan Merten, of Oekonux, says that 
he would have called it ? 'Free Software for Business'-or something like 
that.? 4Scroll downwards Bernard Lang, one of the authors of the book Free 
Software, cited many times by JC, is part of this tendency. He goes up to the 
point of defending recourse to free software as a means of reinforcing and 
defending European capital confronted with American competition. The frame of 
spirit of the partisans of Stallman's FSF is quite different. Even if one 
found a number of differences according to their degree of opposition to the 
market world, there are general approaches more interested in developing a 
?space of liberty ? than in cooperating with market enterprises. It is true 
that opposition to Microsoft, which has become a diabolical symbol of the 
will to monopoly, attacked even by the justice of the American state, plays a 
very important role and sustain the illusion of the defense of a market world 
without trusts. But there are also tendencies that go much further. Marx said 
that Protestantism could not make a radical critique of Catholicism without 
making a self-critique. It is the same with the critique of Microsoft : It 
cannot be radical without a critique of capitalism itself.

In a book prefaced by Linus Torvalds, the creator of the famous program Linux, 
the Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen attempts to define an ethic of the 
hacker community, of which the most elementary definition is of a ?passion 
for programming?. The book is titled The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the 
Information Era [in English it is published as The Hacker Ethic and the 
Spirit of the New Economy -Translator] 5Scroll downwards, in reference to Max 
Weber's book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, written at 
the beginning of the century, which developed the Marxist thesis according to 
which Protestantism is a product of and a factor in the development of 
capitalism. For Pekka Himanen, hackers, even if generally they do not claim 
to destroy capitalism, are leading to the development of a series of general 
conceptions which are the opposite of the Protestant ethic and thus that of 
capitalism. In this manner, he writes: ?The radical nature of hackerism 
consists in proposing an alternative spirit for networked society, a spirit 
that puts the dominant Protestant ethic in question. In this context, it is 
the only time when all hackers are crackers [programmers who introduce 
themselves into big corporate sites and institutions to cause trouble, often 
improperly called hackers]. They attempt to crack the steel safe. (...) There 
is an inherent contradiction in the cohabitation of hackerism with a very 
traditional capitalism. To begin with, the terms capitalist and hacker are of 
very different senses. In harmony with the hankering of the Protestant ethic 
after money, the supreme goal of capitalism is the accumulation of capital. 
The hacker ethic of work, for its part, puts the accent on the activity, 
centered around a passion and the free management of time.... The hacker work 
ethic is a melange of passion and liberty. It is this aspect of the hacker 
ethic that has had the most influence.? Or again: ?We have explained that 
hackers oppose themselves to hierarchical management for ethical reasons, 
because that could lead to a culture in which people are humiliated, but also 
because they think that a nonhierarchical model is more effective.?

The author outlines in this manner, across a number of examples, the tableau 
of a conception of development leading by its own logic-altruistic and eager 
for effectiveness-to the direct detriment of the dominant, Protestant, 
capitalist ideology. Himanen recognizes at the end of his essay that not all 
hackers recognize themselves in his portrait. But he is certain that many 
would.

As we have already said, this thinking inevitably contains contradictions, 
product of the relations with the market world in which it germinates. And 
few are the hackers who push the logic of this thinking to its final 
subversive conclusions. But it is false to say, like JC claims, that this 
logic places itself "entirely in the context of market capital." The critique 
of market exchange and of money, the rejection of hierarchy and borders, the 
critique of contemporary work and the revindication of passion and freedom as 
primary motivations, of cooperation and of sharing as the foundations of new 
relations, all this is found, to a degree more or less elaborated and 
coherent, in the "hacker ethic." Now these are elements that form part of the 
foundation of the communist project.

The idea of such a statement shocks many "Marxists," wrongly. The fact that 
communist principles (even if incomplete) can be rediscovered from a 
scientific approach confronted with the possibilities of new technologies, 
without any explicit reference to Marxism and to communist theories of the 
past, constitutes a spectacular verification of the Marxist idea according to 
which communist ideas are not the product of the benevolent brains of certain 
thinkers, but the fruit of the development of capitalist society itself.

Instead of them enclosing themselves in scornful ignorance of this reality, 
consistent Marxists should get excited and encourage the tendencies that lead 
hackerism to a radical critique of capital. Rosa Luxemburg said "the 
objective logic of the historical process precedes the subjective logic of 
the protagonists." It is urgent that coherent Marxists take note of the real 
historical process which unfolds under their eyes, and that they assume their 
responsibility of accelerating the subjective logic of the protagonists.

Before concluding this part on "the ideology of the founders of free 
software," I want to say a word on a remark by JC, who wrote: "These 
proclamations [of Raoul] are very close to those of certain free-software 
activists. Like the members of Oekonux." 6Scroll downwards

I have not had the occasion to read all the documents on this site, 
unfortunately because most of them are in German. I do not know up to what 
point Stefan Merten, the most well-known of the members of Oekonux, could be 
considered on the same level as most of the "free-software activists," as JC 
says, in the measure in which he situates himself in an explicitly Marxist 
optic. But, as far as I know,, it is certain that I share certain important 
points of view with them, like the context of Marxist theory and the idea 
that free software constitutes a germ of a new society: "In Oekonux there is 
the idea that free software could be exactly that: an embryonic form of a new 
society materialized in the midst of the old." 7Scroll downwards

But that leads into the second part of JC's critique and questions.
Germs of Non-market Relations

In the last part of his text, "by way of conclusion", JC poses "a general 
question": "I wonder about the idea that, in the midst of capitalism, by way 
of new technological developments, 'the germs of non-market relations' could 
be born." And he responds in the negative. His argument is the following:

This idea that the economic (thus social) form of the future society could 
develop itself in the interior of capitalist society is given by Raoul with 
reference to Marx: ?new superior relations of production never replace older 
ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within 
the framework of the old society.? I understand this phrase in the following 
sense: The experience of forms of self-organization of the proletariat 
(workers' councils) is the anticipation of the forms of organization of the 
future society; and it is in the class struggle that the material conditions 
of ?superior relations of production? will constitute themselves, blossoming 
?within the framework of the old society.? As for that, we have learned 
through experience that these forms cannot be permanent in the midst of 
capitalist society; they are, if they do not win, only transitory and 
fleeting.

Now, that which Raoul affirms seems to me to resemble the following: the 
creation, not of forms of self-organization spawned by the class struggle, 
but of non-market economic (thus social) forms in the midst of capitalism, 
which, furthermore, tend to eternalize themselves. I think that what 
characterizes the proletariat in comparison to the insurgent classes of 
pre-capitalist periods, is precisely its extreme weakness, the fact that it 
cannot support itself in the midst of capitalist society (contrary to the 
bourgeoisie under feudalism) by its own economic forces.

If I respond negatively to this possibility of ?germs of non-market relations 
in the midst of advanced capitalism,? via the particular example of free 
software, I would tend to give a negative response, in general, to all 
analogous possibilities of finding non-market (even as germs) relations in 
capitalism.
What Marx and History Say

We begin by examining JC's interpretation of the famous citation in Marx's 
preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political EconomyRemote link, 
before attempting to see what history itself says about the passage from one 
social system to another.

JC thinks, when Marx speaks of "material conditions" that begin to "mature 
within the old society" to permit the existence of "superior relations of 
production," that it has to do with the more advanced social practice of the 
proletariat in struggle in the midst of capitalism: the workers' councils. We 
remark, first of all, that when Marx wrote these lines, neither workers' 
councils - appearing for the first time in 1905 in Russia - nor even the 
first form of that type of organization, such as that which surged forth 
during the Paris Commune in 1871, existed. Of what "forms of 
self-organization spawned by the class struggle" had Marx spoken? Note that 
Marx did not seek to define a law concerning the passage from capitalism to 
communism. He treated the succession of different modes of production, 
"Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and bourgeois-modern," of which he said, "reduced 
to their broad outlines," they "appear as progressive epochs of the economic 
formation of society." What, for JC, are the "material conditions" in the 
case of the other historical transitions?

When Marx, in the same text, treated the "disruptions" which characterized 
these transitions, he wrote: "In studying such transformations it is always 
necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic 
conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of 
natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic 
- in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict 
and fight it out."

Without wanting to lose ourselves in exegetical exercises, one could, if need 
be, say that JC's interpretation of the "material conditions" as the practice 
of the struggle in "workers' councils," could be linked to the need to 
"become conscious of this conflict" that must "be fought out". But, besides 
the fact that this would mean a reduction of the "ideological" dimension of 
reality, this interpretation ignores its economic dimension, "the material 
transformation of the conditions of production." For Marx, as he explained 
it, some lines before, in the same text, "the anatomy of civil society is to 
be sought in political economy."

JC's interpretation of Marx's thinking on this question is, at the least, very 
narrow. It is clear that when Marx spoke of the necessity that the "material 
conditions" begin to mature in the midst of the old society, it had to do 
essentially with the development of the material conditions of production, in 
particular, the productive forces.

If one observes the history of two transitions in mode of production that one 
knows the best: from ancient slavery to feudalism, and from feudalism to 
capitalism, it appears clearly that the material conditions had unfolded in 
the midst of the old society. What is more, this development permitted that 
the new relations of production appeared, although in an embryonic form, by 
taking their place in the midst and at the side of the old dominant relations 
of production.

The development of the colonat, had under the Roman empire, in the 2d century, 
an important acceleration, but it had to do with an already-ancient 
phenomenon. In the 3d century, this mode of production, which established the 
economic basis of feudal relations between exploiters and exploited, had 
become a normal form of production on the great properties. The growth of 
capitalism in the midst of feudalism also took place during centuries. Since 
the 11th century, through the development of commerce, in particular in the 
north of Western Europe and in the Mediterranean, capitalism had become an 
economic reality in Flanders and in certain Italian cities. It took, however, 
above all, a mercantile form, but not uniquely: By the 12th century, "the 
arsenals of Venice constructed ships at a pace unknown till then." It was, 
nevertheless, not until the 16th and 17th century, in England and France, 
that the bourgeois, new masters of the economy, had the power to sever the 
feudal kings' heads, allowing them to expand their affairs more freely. When 
the bourgeoisie definitively conquered political power, it had for a long 
time already had the power to economically dominate society. The political 
revolution came at the end of the process of implantation of the economic 
base of a new system in the midst of the old society.

In the case of past transitions, Marx's theory is easily verified and 
comprehensible: Before the new society affirms its definitive domination, it 
has already effectively affirmed that of its material base, economic in the 
first place; this has blossomed in the midst of the old society.

But it's much more complex when it has to do with envisioning the transition 
from capitalism to communism. For the past, at least in the cases we have 
seen, the coexistence of the two modes of production is facilitated by the 
fact that they both have to do with systems based on the exploitation of one 
part of society by another. In the late Roman empire, the slave-masters and 
the masters of the coloni were often the same people. In feudalism, the 
relations between the seigniors (nobles, ecclesiasticals) and the bourgeoisie 
were often bloody. The wars of religion - which, behind the confrontation 
between the new Protestant "ethic" and Catholicism, set tendencies favorable 
to the new capitalist-market values in opposition to old feudal structures - 
were a murderous and dramatic instance. In spite of that, the coexistence 
between the new system and the old was facilitated by the fact that it 
concerned modes of exploitation, with the dominant classes always ready to 
get along on the backs of the exploited. In numerous cases, the aristocratic 
powers of the old regime would easily metamorphosize themselves into rich 
capitalists, not even losing any of their old [feudal] privileges. The 
political revolutions that marked the accession of the bourgeoisie to state 
power did not always and everywhere have to take the radical forms they did 
in England and France.

But, in the case of the accession to communism, it has to do with passing from 
a system of exploitation to a new society without classes or exploitation. 
For Marxists, the class that bears the new society, the proletariat, is the 
class that produces most of economic wealth, but it produces them according 
to relations of production that subordinate it. This class cannot engender 
new social relations of production in accord with its essential interests, 
the elimination of all exploitation, without destroying the political 
framework that reduces it to impotence. Contrary to revolutionary classes of 
the past, its political revolution does not come at the end of a process of 
economic implantation, but must, on the contrary, constitute the initial act 
permitting the transformation of the material conditions of production. When 
Marx spoke of the material conditions that have to mature under capitalism to 
permit the proletariat to introduce communist relations, it's not about the 
germs of these relations but fundamentally about a sufficient degree of 
development and deployment of the productive forces under capitalist 
relations of production.

That is, or has generally been, up to the present, the Marxist view of the 
question. On that level, it's also what JC reproduces in his text, at least 
when he writes: "I think that what characterizes the proletariat in 
comparison to the insurgent classes of pre-capitalist periods, is precisely 
its extreme weakness, the fact that it cannot support itself in the midst of 
capitalist society (contrary to the bourgeoisie under feudalism) by its own 
economic forces." I myself have always defended this position in the past. 
However, the new technological reality and the appearance of the world of 
free software, which was driven by it, weaken, in my opinion, this point of 
view. It is certain that the idea that germs of new relations of production 
of a non-market type, containing communist elements, could arise and 
"eternalize themselves," to use JC's term, in the midst of capitalism, 
contradicts a part, an aspect, of Marxist theory.
"Germs"?

But, before going further, it is indispensable to explain what one means by 
"relations of production" and by "germs" of relations of production. Because 
one could object that the relations that link the creators of free software 
to one another and then them to the users - who participate or not in its 
creation - cannot be considered true social relations of production, that is 
to say, relations that could be generalized to the whole of productive social 
activity, as was the case for feudalism or capitalism in the past. The 
material capacity of being freely reproduced is possible only for goods that 
are digitizable, transformable into a line of numbers and characters. We have 
seen already how that is the case for a number of means of production, like 
software to run machines, or consumption goods, like films, games or music. 
But, for the moment, we don't know how to digitize alimentary goods, nor raw 
materials, for example. How can such relations, which touch only a very 
narrow part of society and materially concern only a very specific category 
of goods in means of production and consumption, be considered social 
relations, or even germs of social relations? The creators of free software 
cannot nourish themselves with software, nor turn them into products for 
sale, because by definition it is free. How to socialize relations that don't 
nourish their people?

If one looks at past history, though, in particular the birth of capitalist 
relations during feudalism, or if one attempts to project history into the 
future, and, more specifically, the place that digitizable goods could be 
called to take in the process of social production, two conclusions impose 
themselves, which permit a glimpse of how relations introduced by free 
software could become socially dominant relations of production.

Venetian merchants, who had made their fortunes in the midst of feudalism by 
selling arms or luxury goods from Asia to European feudal seigniors, did not 
constitute the heart of social production. Even if they brought to the 
narrowness of feudal life - centered around the fief and its village church - 
an opening to world commerce (the courtesans of the European courts could 
wear robes made of Oriental products), the relations among the merchants and 
between them and the rest of the feudal world remained marginal, and would 
appear to be purely subsidiary. The production of essential, indispensable 
goods for the subsistence of men (agricultural goods and artisan ones, 
principally), was performed under feudal relations. This marginal, secondary 
aspect of capitalist relations in the midst of feudal society was so 
self-evident that even in the 18th century, the first bourgeois economists, 
the French Physiocrats, could, without laughing, pretend that merchants and 
manufacturers should not pay taxes because they do not create any true "net 
product": They do nothing but transport it or modify its form.

What do we want to deduce? That from their birth, in the midst of the old 
society, the superior relations of production, were not obligatorily born 
with a complete form, capable of managing the totality of social production, 
nor even its most vital part. The fact that, today, free software and, more 
generally, digitizable goods concern no more than a part, again, marginal, of 
social production and consumption, does not constitute any argument showing 
the impossibility that the economic relations that they induce will not one 
day become the dominant social relations.

That which has permitted capitalist relations to become dominant after 
centuries of existence is not only the ideological, military, and political 
victory of the bearers of the new capitalist values against the old feudal 
regime, even if they have played a determining role, but the material, 
concrete fact - which demonstrates daily and by methods more and more evident 
- that the new relations were the only ones that could permit the use of new 
productive forces engendered by the opening of commerce and the development 
of production techniques. "In the last instance," it is the economic 
imperative, the irreversible historical tendency to the development of labor 
productivity, that finishes by imposing its own law.

That which today permits one to envision the possibility that relations of 
production founded on the principles of free software (production with a view 
toward satisfying the needs of the community, sharing, cooperation, the 
elimination of market exchange) could become socially dominant is the fact 
that these relations are the most able to employ the new techniques of 
information and communication, and that the recourse to these techniques, 
their place in the social process of production, can only grow, ineluctably.

The world of free software does not constitute a microcosm of truly complete 
new social relations. Certain of its products begin to take a significant 
place in the social process of production: the informatics infrastructure of 
the Internet, recourse by the most important producers of computers and state 
institutions to Linux, etc. However, the producers of free software are not 
nourished by their own product. The "gratuitistic" logic is not generalized 
yet to the goods that assure the material subsistence of the producers. Those 
who work for free or are paid by an enterprise to create free software remain 
dependent on the revenues provided by the market world. In this sense, just 
like the capitalist relations in in their time, the relations induced by the 
logic of free software can be nothing but the "germs" of social relations.
Insufficiency and Validity of Marxism

Marx and Engels could not have foreseen such a reality. Even under the form of 
"germs", they would have dismissed all possibility of the appearance of new 
economic relations in the midst of capitalism without a revolutionary 
transformation. At most, to temper this statement, one could cite Marx's 
considerations in the International Workingmen's Association, ? propos the 
cooperatives that expressed the spirit of a great majority of the workers' 
movement regrouped within the First International. In a resolution adopted by 
the first congress in Geneva in 1866, edited by Marx, it is written: "(a) We 
recognize the cooperative movement as a transformative force of the present 
society, founded on the antagonism of classes. Its great merit is to show 
practically that the current system of subordination of labor to capital, 
despotic and pauperizing, could be supplanted by the republican system of the 
free and equal association of the producers." However, the same resolution, 
against all illusions, questioned that: "(b) But the cooperative system, 
limited to the form of minuscule results of the individual efforts of wage 
slaves, is impotent to transform capitalist society on its own. To convert 
social production into a large and harmonious system of cooperative labor, 
general changes are indispensable." 8Scroll downwards One knows that Marx did 
not entertain any illusions about the future of cooperatives as a passage to 
new social relations, as this resolution itself shows, or his Inaugural 
Address of the International Workingmen's Association, in which he states 
that "this cooperation will never be able to stop the monopolies that grow in 
geometrical progression." History gives good reason. Just like it condemns 
theories of the possibility of "socialism in one country," the mainstay of 
Stalinist lies.

The reality of free software situates itself on another terrain, or in another 
dimension. It is not a geographically circumscribed reality. It cannot be 
reduced to a change in the relations in the midst of or within a given 
community, since its principal characteristic, the gratuiticity of its 
products, concerns the entirety of society. Contrary to cooperatives, which 
must sell their products on the market, and thus sooner or later submit to 
the imperatives of the market, free software is freely accessible to all. The 
original character of the relations free software induces are caused 
fundamentally by the unusual nature of the informatics and informational 
goods that permit the creation of means of production and consumption freely 
reproducible on a planetary level. It's about a new reality that neither Marx 
nor Engels, nor any of the Marxists of most of the 20th century, either 
recognized or foresaw.

What's so surprising about the fact that the Marx's and Engels's vision, 
defined in an epoch in which mail circulated in large part by means of 
horses, must be modified, adapted to the age of planetary e-mail? Marx and 
Engels, who followed, with passion, the very least development of the 
sciences and techniques of their time in order to research all that could 
possibly contribute to facilitating the introduction of communist society, 
certainly could not have acted otherwise, and would, correctly, have been 
enthusiastic about the development of the Internet and free software.

Contrary to the vision of an invariant Marxism that has already foreseen 
everything and contains no possible shortcoming, whatever the development of 
capitalism, Marx and Engels always stayed true to their critique of dogmatic 
religious thought: They knew that the role of theory is not to deny or to 
ignore facts that contradict it, but to enrich itself with these new 
elements, knowing to question itself, to better develop its explanatory and 
revolutionary power.

If Marxism has not specifically foreseen the possibility of the appearance of 
"germs" of non-market relations in the midst of capitalism, and thus finds 
itself contradicted in a particular aspect, the phenomenon of free software 
constitutes by that same token a screaming verification of the more general 
and fundamental aspects of Marxist theory.

As one has seen in the first part of this text, the principles that preside 
over the logic of free software contain important elements of communist 
theory. And as it has already been implied, the fact that these principles 
would be able to be rediscovered in the appearance of a new technology 
represents a confirmation of the Marxist idea that sees in communist 
principles, not an ideal invented by any big thinkers, but the product of the 
evolution of society itself. On a more general plane, at the level of the 
dynamic of history, the fact that the development of production technologies 
under capitalism has managed to engender an economic sector that 
intrinsically tends to escape the law of value and that develops itself in 
the very heart of the process of social production, gives a new material 
substance to the idea according to which capitalism could not be surpassed by 
anything but a social organization abolishing market exchange.
New Questions

Denying the existence of germs of new social relations in the midst of 
capitalism in the name of Marxism would be to betray the spirit of the same 
by upholding the letter. I, for one, believe that the Marxist theoretical 
framework constitutes the best tool to respond to the crucial questions that 
this new reality poses, and that research in this domain constitutes a 
priority, if not the priority, for the revolutionaries of our time.

The questions are numerous and important. They can be grouped into two, 
interdependent, dimensions: those of the relations between free software and 
the capitalist economy, in which it emerged, on the one hand; and those of 
its relation to the class struggle, on the other.

On the economic level: Up to what point could current cooperation between free 
software and the market economy go, without negative consequences at the 
level of the profitability and the realization of capital making themselves 
felt? Up to what point will go the antagonism between the growing desire of 
government to protect copyright for commercial software and the also-growing 
tendency toward "piratage" of digital goods? How long will it take before the 
share of the digitizable means necessary for the production of alimentary 
goods or raw materials is sufficiently important for the production cost of 
those goods to be almost completely eliminated by simple recourse to free 
software? On the level of class struggle, how long will it take for the 
reality of free software and its principles to be known by all the exploited? 
Would the defense of these principles end up being a direct object of 
confrontation with the state? What modifications in the daily class struggle 
would the knowledge of or participation in a practical model of a new type of 
social relations entail? The practical example of free software would have a 
power of conviction incomparably more important and effective than that, in 
their time, of the utopians of the 19th century, from Owens's New Harmony and 
Fourrier's phalansteries to the spirit of the cooperatives. 9Scroll downwards 
How, in these conditions, can "the period of transition" to communism be 
envisioned?

It took centuries for the germs of capitalist relations, in the 11th and 12th 
centuries, to become the socially dominant mode of production. The history of 
our time has not unfolded with the same speed, and the historical situations 
are very different. Barring the self-destruction of humanity (unfortunately, 
possible) by some sort of skidding out of control of capitalist barbarity, 
the generalization of the principles of free software to the whole of 
productive social processes (elimination of market exchange, production as a 
function of the good of the community, cooperation, and sharing) could take 
much less time. That depends on the speed and the intensity of an objective 
material historical process, but also on the consciousness that people have 
of the existent conflict and the necessity of "fighting it out."

For those, like JC, who want to be able to participate in the dynamic of this 
grasping for consciousness, the recognition of the new historical situation 
created by the development of "new technology" is an indispensable step. It 
is inevitable if we want to respond to the important and multiple questions 
that modern circumstances thrust upon us. 10Scroll downwards

Original version written October 2002

1Scroll upwards "The GNU GPL and the American Way," 2001.

2Scroll upwards One can find this text of the GNU Manifesto at 
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.htmlRemote link.

3Scroll upwards This reality explains in part the different forms of 
non-proprietary software that distinguish themselves by the degree of their 
gratuiticity, or liberty accorded to the user. In the strict sense, the term 
"free software" designates in reality only one specific type "protected" by 
the GNU GPL. One can find more details in the book JC cites, Logiciels libres 
(Free Software) (Edispher), by JP Smets-Solanes and Beno?t Frachon.

4Scroll upwards ?Free Software and the GPL Society,? interview with Stefan 
Merten, by Joanne Richardson, November 2001. 
http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/mertentext.htmlRemote link.

5Scroll upwards L'?thique hacker et l'esprit de l'?re de l'information; Exils 
Editeurs, 2001.

6Scroll upwards www.oekonux.orgLocal link

7Scroll upwards Interview with Stefan Merten, April 24, 2001.

8Scroll upwards Karl Marx, Oeuvres, volume I, p. 1469 (Editions La Pleiade, 
1963).

9Scroll upwards In the course of our conference on June 15, in discussion on 
the theme of technological revolution, Mazagan responded to me: "I think that 
Raoul, in the current situation of class struggle, seeks a deus ex machina 
that could bring us comfort". I often wonder about that myself. But this 
question only concerns an argument about the subjectivity that would form a 
thought. It has nothing to say about the objective content of the thought. 
Does an analysis have to be contrary to the subjectivity of whomever defends 
it in order to be correct? Would, then, the idea of a communist society be 
false because it "brings comfort" to those who live under capitalism? It is 
true that, for those who claimed to see the premises of a world communist 
revolution in the extraordinary development of proletarian class struggle in 
the course of the period from the end of the 1960s to the beginning of the 
1980s, the profound and general recoil of this combativity over the course of 
the following two decades has constituted an often devastating deception. But 
instead of lamenting over our situation, which would need of "comfort," it is 
much more useful to attempt to respond to the question of knowing why, in 
this struggle which, in certain cases, mobilized a near-totality of the 
proletariat of certain countries (France 1968, Poland 1980), often attaining 
a degree of confrontation with the state of a violence unknown for decades, 
the combatants never joined a movement giving itself, explicitly, the goal of 
the construction of a post-capitalist, communist society. Historical 
realities never have a single cause. But among the reasons that explain this 
"self-limitation" of the class movement must certainly be the difficulty of 
collectively perceiving what a post-capitalist society could be. The 
"revolutionary project," as it was discussed at the instigation of the more 
radical elements, was nebulous, opaque, and sometimes terrifying. The Soviet 
model, with all its variants, from the Chinese "Cultural Revolution" to the 
guerrilla centers of Latin America, by way of the sinister Albania, 
pronounced as a model by some Maoists, haunted all minds and paralyzed many. 
Even if these struggles marked a historical rupture vis-?-vis the enormous 
influence of the Stalinist currents on the wage workers in a number of 
countries, this distance was only the beginning. Inevitably, all discussion 
of the revolutionary project began with debates on the qualities, or not, of 
"communist" countries or those "on the way to communism," etc. And when one 
attempted to go beyond them, the impression that one was spouting pious and 
abstract dreams weighed on one as a source of doubt. It would be a mistake to 
underestimate the lack, the crying insufficiency of the revolutionary project 
to explain the weakness of past proletarian struggles. The new technologies 
and the logic of free software that they have engendered constitute 
determinant new elements on which to found this project much more concretely.

10Scroll upwards The question of knowing whether the material conditions of 
communism existed or not before the current technological revolution is an 
important question for the analysis of historical dynamics of the past. But 
whatever one's response to this question, it is a priority to confirm that 
contemporary technological transformations carry material conditions that 
facilitate, in a qualitatively new manner, the construction of a communist 
society.

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