This is the first of a two volume Special Issue. Both volumes will have a focus on commoning and property. The essay in this first volume - divided into three main parts, which can be read separately - is based on an inter-disciplinary PhD thesis titled “Property, Commoning and the Politics of Free Software” completed February 2010, by J. Martin Pedersen. Volume 2 will further combine practical insights with theoretical perspectives.
In legal and philosophical terms, property relations are relations between people with regard to things. In this way, the organisation of a commons is encoded in its property rules, which structure its use, access and decision-making rights and responsibilities accordingly. Property, then, is central to debates about commons and commoning: how do commoners relate to each other with regard to a given resource (land, code, rivers, forests, hills, cars) and how is a commons defined vis-a-vis the rest of the world? Questions such as class, gender and other hierarchies, environmental justice, sustainability and spirituality are relevant here. Most of these social dynamics – most of the time, even on the “outside of capital”– turn on property relations: who has access to what (tools, resources, land), when and under what conditions, who gets to decide and how are decisions made?
Often, however, property is juxtaposed to commons – as if commoning was a negation of property. Unfortunately, this view presupposes and consolidates a very narrow understanding of property, where the general is conflated with the particular. Property relations are not only exclusive, private property rights as instantiated within capitalist democracy (that is, a particular conception of property). As a jurisprudential concept, property can be used to understand, analyse, reflect upon and organise social relations with regard to things in any context (this is the general conception of property). The conflation of the general with the particular, which conceals the historical and anthropological fact that property can be and is understood (very) differently, takes on a further dimension in colloquial talk. We have come to accept that property is stuff: things that we own, and that we own exclusively. As a rhetorical device in privatisation arguments it is very powerful because it invokes feelings that are close to home, literally. We say things like “this house is my property”.
Similarly, privatisation arguments in the context of immaterial goods and resources invoke the same passions and feelings: this text or this source code “is the property of Microsoft”. Such a conception of property is not only a conflation, but furthermore hides the complexity of the social relations that property arrangements circumscribe and give rise to.
It is obvious that social, cultural and political practices define any given property regime, hence analytically exploring property relations gives us an insight into the relation between the socio-cultural and the law. It is precisely at this level that commons are created and organised - and through the language of property we can articulate practices of commoning into property protocols (rules and agreements) that can provide stability of the commons on the inside and protection against threats of capital’s enclosure from the outside. Self-determination and autonomy begins by taking the law into your own hands.
The purpose of this Special Issue is to instigate further debate about property, commoning and commons. In this first volume, the Free Software movement, which has autonomously constituted itself by articulating their social values in the GNU General Public License, is presented as an example of a commons, a commoning community, and critically analysed through the lens of property.
Doing so reveals that philosophical and political principles underlying the Free Software and the wider Free Culture movements fail to address the threat of enclosure at the most fundamental level, namely in the material realm. Without confronting ownership of land, its resources, and the means of production, the Free Software and Free Culture movements remain liable to the threat of enclosure.
After all, all immaterial things have a material base (space, energy, labour, resources, distribution) and exclusive control over these material underpinnings is de facto control over the immaterial goods that may spring from their potential.
Acho que faltou ler o resto do artigo, ele mesmo critica pra caramba o NYT depois, e o aponta principalmente pra contradição sobre a construção de informação, conhecimento e cultura como "propriedade" a ser protegida de réplica e redistribuição. E apesar de 5 pessoas poderem fazer um ótimo trabalho, a estrutura de publicação na internet no capitalismo é inerentemente contra a propagação em massa desse trabalho.
Trecho sobre o NYT:
Now, crucially, I do not mean to imply here that reading the New York Times gives you a sound grasp of reality. I have documented many times how the Times misleads people, for instance by repeating the dubious idea that we have a “border crisis” of migrants “pouring into” the country or that Russia is trying to “steal” life-saving vaccine research that should be free anyway. But it’s important to understand the problem with the Times: it is not that the facts it reports tend to be inaccurate—though sometimes they are—but that the facts are presented in a way that misleads. There is no single “fact” in the migrant story or the Russia story that I take issue with, what I take issue with is the conclusions that are being drawn from the facts. (Likewise, the headline “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest For A-Bomb Parts” is technically accurate: the U.S. government did, in fact, say that. It was just not true.) The New York Times is, in fact, extremely valuable, if you read it critically and look past the headlines. Usually the truth is in there somewhere, as there is a great deal of excellent reporting, and one could almost construct a serious newspaper purely from material culled from the New York Times. I’ve written before about the Times’ reporting on Hitler and the Holocaust: it wasn’t that the grim facts of the situation were left out of the paper, but that they were buried at the back and treated as unimportant. It was changes in emphasis that were needed, because the facts were there in black and white.
Trechos sobre a dificuldade de publicação independente:
It’s not easy or cheap to be an “independent researcher.” When I was writing my first book, Superpredator, I wanted to look through newspaper, magazine, and journal archives to find everything I could about Bill Clinton’s record on race. I was lucky I had a university affiliation, because this gave me access to databases like LexisNexis. If I hadn’t, the cost of finding out what I wanted to find out would likely have run into the thousands of dollars.
[...] I admit I bristle when I see people share PDFs of full issues of Current Affairs, because if this happened a lot, we could sell exactly 1 subscription and then the issue could just be copied indefinitely. Current Affairs would collapse completely if everyone tried to get our content for free rather than paying for it. (This is why you should subscribe! Or donate! Independent media needs your support!)
Bom de mais! Vou aproveitar pra postar uns textos legais que eu acho nas minhas pesquisas pro TCC.