Moglen DotCom Manifesto

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The dotCommunist Manifesto

Eben Moglen

January 2003

ASPECTRE is haunting multinational capital-ismthe spectre of free information. Allthe powers of globalism have entered intoan unholy alliance to exorcize this spectre: Mi-crosoft and Disney, the World Trade Organiza-tion, the United States Congress and the Euro-pean Commission.

Where are the advocates of freedom in thenew digital society who have not been decriedas pirates, anarchists, communists? Have wenot seen that many of those hurling the epithetswere merely thieves in power, whose talk of in-tellectual property was nothing more than an

attempt to retain unjustifiable privileges in a so-ciety irrevocably changing? But it is acknowl-edged by all the Powers of Globalism that themovement for freedom is itself a Power, and itis high time that we should publish our views inthe face of the whole world, to meet this nurs-ery tale of the Spectre of Free Information witha Manifesto of our own.

I Owners and Creators

Throughout the world the movement for freeinformation announces the arrival of a new so-cial structure, born of the transformation of

Professor of Law, Columbia University Law School.

bourgeois industrial society by the digital tech-nology of its own invention.

The history of all hitherto existing societiesreveals a history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian,lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman,

bourgeois and proletarian, imperialist and sub-altern, in a word, oppressor and oppressed,stood in constant opposition to one another, car-ried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, nowopen fight, a fight that has often ended, eitherin a revolutionary re-constitution of society atlarge, or in the common ruin of the contending

classes.The industrial society that sprouted from the

worldwide expansion of European power ush-ering in modernity did not do away with classantagonisms. It but established new classes,new conditions of oppression, new forms ofstruggle in place of the old ones. But the epochof the bourgeoisie simplified the class antago-nisms. Society as a whole seemed divided intotwo great hostile camps, into two great classes,directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Pro-

letariat.

But revolution did not by and large occur, andthe dictatorship of the proletariat, where itarose or claimed to arise, proved incapable ofinstituting freedom. Instead, capitalism was en-abled by technology to secure for itself a mea-

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MOGLEN : DO TCOMMUNIST MANIFESTO 2

sure of consent. The modern laborer in the ad-

vanced societies rose with the progress of in-dustry, rather than sinking deeper and deeper

below the conditions of existence of his ownclass. Pauperism did not develop more rapidlythan population and wealth. Rationalized in-dustry in the Fordist style turned industrialworkers not into a pauperized proletariat, butrather into mass consumers of mass produc-tion. Civilizing the proletariat became part ofthe self-protective program of the bourgeoisie.

In this way, universal education and an endto the industrial exploitation of children becameno longer the despised program of the prole-tarian revolutionary, but the standard of bour-geois social morality. With universal educa-tion, workers became literate in the media thatcould stimulate them to additional consump-tion. The development of sound recording, tele-phony, moving pictures, and radio and televi-sion broadcasting changed the workers rela-tionship to bourgeois culture, even as it pro-foundly altered the culture itself.

Music, for example, throughout previous hu-man history was an acutely perishable non-commodity, a social process, occurring in aplace and at a time, consumed where it wasmade, by people who were indistinctly differ-entiated as consumers and as makers. Afterthe adoption of recording, music was a non-persishable commodity that could be movedlong distances and was necessarily alienatedfrom those who made it. Music became, asan article of consumption, an opportunity forits new owners to direct additional consump-tion, to create wants on the part of the new massconsuming class, and to drive its demand in di-rections profitable to ownership. So too withthe entirely new medium of the moving pic-ture, which within decades reoriented the na-

ture of human cognition, capturing a substan-

tial fraction of every workers day for the recep-tion of messages ordering additional consump-tion. Tens of thousands of such advertisementspassed before the eyes of each child every year,reducing to a new form of serfdom the childrenliberated from tending a productive machine:they were now compulsorily enlisted in tendingthe machinery of consumption.

Thus the conditions of bourgeois society weremade less narrow, better able to comprise thewealth created by them. Thus was cured theabsurd epidemic of recurrent over-production.No longer was there too much civilisation, toomuch means of subsistence, too much industry,too much commerce.

But the bourgeoisie cannot exist without con-stantly revolutionising the instruments of pro-duction, and thereby the relations of produc-tion, and with them the whole relations of so-ciety. Constant revolutionising of production,uninterrupted disturbance of all social condi-tions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation dis-tinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlierones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with theirtrain of ancient and venerable prejudices andopinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones

become antiquated before they can ossify. Allthat is solid melts into air.

With the adoption of digital technology, thesystem of mass consumer production sup-ported by mass consumer culture gave birth tonew social conditions out of which a new struc-ture of class antagonism precipitates.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvementof all instruments of production, by the im-mensely facilitated means of communication,draws all, even the most barbarian, nations intocivilisation. The cheap prices of its commodi-ties are the heavy artillery with which it bat-


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ters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces

the barbarians intensely obstinate hatred of for-eigners to capitulate. It compels all nations,on pain of extinction, to adopt its culture andits principles of intellectual ownership; it com-pels them to introduce what it calls civilisationinto their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois them-selves. In one word, it creates a world afterits own image. But the very instruments of itscommunication and acculturation establish themodes of resistance which are turned against it-self.

Digital technology transforms the bourgeoiseconomy. The dominant goods in the system ofproductionthe articles of cultural consump-tion that are both commodities sold and instruc-tions to the worker on what and how to buyalong with all other forms of culture and knowl-edge now have zero marginal cost. Anyone andeveryone may have the benefit of all works ofculture: music, art, literature, technical informa-tion, science, and every other form of knowl-edge. Barriers of social inequality and geo-graphic isolation dissolve. In place of the oldlocal and national seclusion and self-sufficiency,we have intercourse in every direction, univer-sal inter-dependence of people. And as in ma-terial, so also in intellectual production. The in-tellectual creations of individual people becomecommon property. Modern bourgeois societywith its relations of production, of exchangeand of property, a society that has conjured upsuch gigantic means of production and of ex-change, is like the sorcerers apprentice, whois no longer able to control the powers of thenether world whom he has called up by hisspells.

With this change, man is at last compelled toface with sober senses his real conditions of life,and his relations with his kind. Society con-

fronts the simple fact that when everyone can

possess every intellectual work of beauty andutilityreaping all the human value of everyincrease of knowledgeat the same cost thatany one person can possess them, it is no longermoral to exclude. If Rome possessed the powerto feed everyone amply at no greater cost thanthat of Caesars own table, the people wouldsweep Caesar violently away if anyone were leftto starve. But the bourgeois system of owner-ship demands that knowledge and culture berationed by the ability to pay. Alternative tradi-tional forms, made newly viable by the technol-ogy of interconnection, comprising voluntaryassociations of those who create and those whosupport, must be forced into unequal compe-tition with ownerships overwhelmingly pow-erful systems of mass communication. Thosesystems of mass communication are in turn

based on the appropriation of the peoples com-mon rights in the electromagnetic spectrum.Throughout the digital society the classes ofknowledge workersartists, musicians, writ-ers, students, technologists and others tryingto gain in their conditions of life by copyingand modifying informationare radicalized bythe conflict between what they know is possibleand what the ideology of the bourgeois compelsthem to accept. Out of that discordance arisesthe consciousness of a new class, and with itsrise to self-consciousness the fall of ownership

begins.The advance of digital society, whose invol-

untary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces theisolation of the creators, due to competition,

by their revolutionary combination, due to as-sociation. Creators of knowledge, technology,and culture discover that they no longer requirethe structure of production based on ownershipand the structure of distribution based on co-


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ercion of payment. Association, and its anar-

chist model of propertyless production, makespossible the creation of free software, throughwhich creators gain control of the technology offurther production.1 The network itself, freedof the control of broadcasters and other band-width owners, becomes the locus of a new sys-tem of distribution, based on association amongpeers without hierarchical control, which re-places the coercive system of distribution for allmusic, video, and other soft goods. Universi-ties, libraries, and related institutions becomeallies of the new class, interpreting their historicrole as distributors of knowledge to requirethem to offer increasingly complete access tothe knowledge in their stewardship to all peo-ple, freely. The liberation of information fromthe control of ownership liberates the workerfrom his imposed role as custodian of the ma-chine. Free information allows the worker toinvest her time not in the consumption of bour-geois culture, with its increasingly urgent invi-tations to sterile consumption, but in the culti-vation of her mind and her skills. Increasinglyaware of her powers of creation, she ceases to bea passive participant in the systems of produc-

1The free software movement has used programmersthroughout the worldpaid and unpaidsince the early1980s to create the GNU/Linux operating system and re-lated software that can be copied, modified and redis-tributed by all its users. This technical environment, nowubiquitous and competitively superior to the proprietarysoftware industrys products, frees computer users fromthe monopolistic form of technological control that was

to have dominated the personal computer revolution ascapitalism envisioned it. By displacing the proprietaryproduction of the most powerful monopoly on earth, thefree software movement shows that associations of digitalworkers are capable of producing better goods, for dis-tribution at nominal cost, than capitalist production canachieve despite the vaunted incentives created by own-ership and exclusionary intellectual property law.

tion and consumption in which bourgeois soci-

ety entrapped her.But the bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the

upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, pa-triarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly tornasunder the motley feudal ties that bound manto his natural superiors, and has left remain-ing no other nexus between man and manthan naked self-interest, than callous cash pay-ment. It has drowned the most heavenly ec-stasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthu-siasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icywater of egotistical calculation. It has resolvedpersonal worth into exchange value. And inplace of the numberless and feasible charteredfreedoms, has set up that single, unconscionablefreedomFree Trade. In one word, for exploita-tion, veiled by religious and political illusions,naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

Against this profound liberation of the work-ing classes, whose access to knowledge and in-formation power now transcends their previousnarrow role as consumers of mass culture, thesystem of bourgeois ownership therefore nec-essarily contends to its very last. With its pre-ferred instrument of Free Trade, ownership at-tempts to bring about the very crisis of over-production it once feared. Desperate to entrapthe creators in their role as waged consumers,

bourgeois ownership attempts to turn materialdeprivation in some parts of the globe into asource of cheap goods with which to bribe backinto cultural passivity not the barbarians, butits own most prized possessionthe educatedtechnological laborers of the most advanced so-cieties.

At this stage the workers and creators stillform an incoherent mass scattered over thewhole globe, and remain broken up by theirmutual competition. Now and then the creators


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are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit

of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union. This unionis helped on by the improved means of com-munication that are created by modern indus-try and that place the workers and creators ofdifferent localities in contact with one another.It was just this contact that was needed to cen-tralise the numerous local struggles, all of thesame character, into one national struggle be-tween classes. But every class struggle is a po-litical struggle. And that union, to attain whichthe burghers of the Middle Ages, with their mis-erable highways, required centuries, the mod-ern knowledge workers, thanks to the network,achieve in a few years.

II Freedom and Creation

Not only has the bourgeoisie forged theweapons that bring death to itself; it has alsocalled into existence the men who are to wieldthose weaponsthe digital working classthecreators. Possessed of skills and knowledgesthat create both social and exchange value,resisting reduction to the status of commod-ity, capable collectively of producing all thetechnologies of freedom, such workmen can-not be reduced to appendages of the machine.Where once bonds of ignorance and geograph-ical isolation tied the proletarian to the indus-trial army in which he formed an indistinguish-able and disposable component, creators collec-tively wielding control over the network of hu-man communications retain their individuality,and offer the value of their intellectual laborthrough a variety of arrangements more favor-able to their welfare, and to their freedom, than

the system of bourgeois ownership ever con-

ceded them.But in precise proportion to the success of

the creators in establishing the genuinely freeeconomy, the bourgeoisie must reinforce thestructure of coercive production and distribu-tion concealed within its supposed preferencefor free markets and free trade. Though ul-timately prepared to defend by force arrange-ments that depend on force, however masked,the bourgeoisie at first attempts the reimposi-tion of coercion through its preferred instru-ment of compulsion, the institutions of its law.Like the ancien regime in France, which believedthat feudal property could be maintained byconservative force of law despite the modern-ization of society, the owners of bourgeois cul-ture expect their law of property to providea magic bulwark against the forces they havethemselves released.

At a certain stage in the development of themeans of production and of exchange, the con-ditions under which feudal society producedand exchanged, the feudal organisation of agri-culture and manufacturing industry, in oneword, the feudal relations of property becameno longer compatible with the already devel-oped productive forces; they became so manyfetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were

burst asunder.Into their place stepped free competition, ac-

companied by a social and political constitu-tion adapted to it, and by the economic and po-litical sway of the bourgeois class. But freecompetition was never more than an aspira-tion of bourgeois society, which constantly ex-perienced the capitalists intrinsic preference formonopoly. Bourgeois property exemplified theconcept of monopoly, denying at the level ofpractical arrangements the dogma of freedom


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bourgeois law inconsistently proclaimed. As,

in the new digital society, creators establishgenuinely free forms of economic activity, thedogma of bourgeois property comes into activeconflict with the dogma of bourgeois freedom.Protecting the ownership of ideas requires thesuppression of free technology, which meansthe suppression of free speech. The power ofthe State is employed to prohibit free creation.Scientists, artists, engineers and students areprevented from creating or sharing knowledge,on the ground that their ideas imperil the own-ers property in the system of cultural produc-tion and distribution. It is in the courts of theowners that the creators find their class identitymost clearly, and it is there, accordingly, that theconflict begins.

But the law of bourgeois property is not amagic amulet against the consequences of bour-geois technology: the broom of the sorcerersapprentice will keep sweeping, and the watercontinues to rise. It is in the domain of technol-ogy that the defeat of ownership finally occurs,as the new modes of production and distribu-tion burst the fetters of the outmoded law.

All the preceding classes that got the upperhand, sought to fortify their already acquiredstatus by subjecting society at large to their con-ditions of appropriation. Knowledge workerscannot become masters of the productive forcesof society, except by abolishing their own pre-vious mode of appropriation, and thereby alsoevery other previous mode of appropriation.Theirs is the revolutionary dedication to free-dom: to the abolition of the ownership of ideas,to the free circulation of knowledge, and therestoration of culture as the symbolic commonsthat all human beings share.

To the owners of culture, we say: You arehorrified at our intending to do away with

private property in ideas. But in your exist-

ing society, private property is already doneaway with for nine-tenths of the population.What they create is immediately appropriated

by their employers, who claim the fruit of theirintellect through the law of patent, copyright,trade secret and other forms of intellectualproperty. Their birthright in the electromag-netic spectrum, which can allow all people tocommunicate with and learn from one another,freely, at almost inexhaustible capacity for nom-inal cost, has been taken from them by the

bourgeoisie, and is returned to them as arti-cles of consumptionbroadcast culture, andtelecommunications servicesfor which theypay dearly. Their creativity finds no outlet: theirmusic, their art, their storytelling is drownedout by the commodities of capitalist culture,amplified by all the power of the oligopolyof broadcasting, before which they are sup-posed to remain passive, consuming rather thancreating. In short, the property you lament isthe proceeds of theft: its existence for the few issolely due to its non-existence in the hands ofeveryone else. You reproach us, therefore, withintending to do away with a form of property,the necessary condition for whose existence isthe non-existence of any such property for theimmense majority of society.

It has been objected that upon the abolition ofprivate property in ideas and culture all creativework will cease, for lack of incentive, and uni-versal laziness will overtake us.

According to this, there ought to have beenno music, art, technology, or learning beforethe advent of the bourgeoisie, which alone con-ceived of subjecting the entirety of knowledgeand culture to the cash nexus. Faced with theadvent of free production and free technology,with free software, and with the resulting de-


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velopment of free distribution technology, this

argument simply denies the visible and unan-swerable facts. Fact is subordinated to dogma,in which the arrangements that briefly charac-terized intellectual production and cultural dis-tribution during the short heyday of the bour-geoisie are said, despite the evidence of bothpast and present, to be the only structures pos-sible.

Thus we say to the owners: The misconcep-tion that induces you to transform into eter-nal laws of nature and of reason, the socialforms springing from your present mode of pro-duction and form of propertyhistorical rela-tions that rise and disappear in the progress ofproductionthis misconception you share withevery ruling class that has preceded you. Whatyou see clearly in the case of ancient property,what you admit in the case of feudal property,you are of course forbidden to admit in the caseof your own bourgeois form of property.

Our theoretical conclusions are in no waybased on ideas or principles that have been in-vented, or discovered, by this or that would-

be universal reformer. They merely express, ingeneral terms, actual relations springing froman existing class struggle, from a historicalmovement going on under our very eyes.

When people speak of ideas that revolu-tionise society, they do but express the fact, thatwithin the old society, the elements of a new onehave been created, and that the dissolution ofthe old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolu-tion of the old conditions of existence.

We, the creators of the free information so-ciety, mean to wrest from the bourgeoisie, bydegrees, the shared patrimony of humankind.We intend the resumption of the cultural inher-itance stolen from us under the guise of intel-lectual property, as well as the medium of elec-

tromagnetic transportation. We are committed

to the struggle for free speech, free knowledge,and free technology. The measures by which weadvance that struggle will of course be differentin different countries, but the following will bepretty generally applicable:

1. Abolition of all forms of private property inideas.

2. Withdrawal of all exclusive licenses, priv-ileges and rights to use of electromagnetic

spectrum. Nullification of all conveyancesof permanent title to electromagnetic fre-quencies.

3. Development of electromagnetic spectruminfrastructure that implements every per-sons equal right to communicate.

4. Common social development of computerprograms and all other forms of software,including genetic information, as publicgoods.

5. Full respect for freedom of speech, includ-ing all forms of technical speech.

6. Protection for the integrity of creativeworks.

7. Free and equal access to all publicly-produced information and all educationalmaterial used in all branches of the publiceducation system.

By these and other means, we commit our-selves to the revolution that liberates the humanmind. In overthrowing the system of privateproperty in ideas, we bring into existence a truly

just society, in which the free development ofeach is the condition for the free developmentof all.

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