Contested Reproduction & Copyleft

I recently had a discussion at the London Permacomputing Club about copyright, copyleft and the implications of IP. This was inspired by reading The Telekommunist Manifesto (TKM), a text referenced in Mckenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead. I’ll probably post my notes for and from that conversation alongside this. That conversation helped me realise that TKM’s criticism of the (lack of) revolutionary potential of copyleft is very related to the idea of “contested reproduction” that Heron, Milburn and Russell discuss in Radical Abundance¹. Is it acceptable for open source and free culture to exist in parallel with capital? If not, then it is valid to critique systems for these based on whether they can provide a sufficient ecosystem for material reproduction for those who participate. Then, what systems or strategies might be able to provide this?

Contested Reproduction

What the TKM and Radical Abundance have in common is a strong pragmatism about the phase of transition that will be needed to reach any better future. TKM repeatedly emphasises that its concepts of “venture communism” and “copyfarleft” are not its vision of an ideal society, but rather “organizational form[s] with which to engage in social struggle” in the here and now. They reference the historic goal of the Industrial Workers of the World, of “organising industrially [and] forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old”.

Radical Abundance gives a deeper theoretical exploration of this requirement for successful revolutionary transition, which they call “contested reproduction”. They argue that to properly theorise the path to “a self-sustaining alternative social metabolic order”,

the idea of revolution as rupture must take a backseat to the notion of transition as an enduring period of struggle for supremacy between two metabolic systems

It’s important to distinguish this from a gradualist or reformist idea of change. The authors don’t dismiss the necessity of rupture to theories of transition, but seem to argue that the period preceding that rupture will necessarily be one where the new, “incompatible and antagonistic” social metabolisms have co-existed. I’m sure there’s dialectical terminology for this period of tension, but I’m deliberately avoiding the pedantry invited by learning it!

I find this conception of how a new social order can emerge and propagate within our current one powerful, in that it is grounded and practical. By proliferating spaces in which the logic of capital is ousted and replaced with experimental systems for more communal living, we start to actively weaken the control of capital over us. If our material needs for collective reproduction can be met through these spheres, we are “more capable of sustaining the fight” against capital. Moreover, we begin to test and develop proven alternatives to that system, whose successes can be used to expand these spheres.

Since capital is so fundamentally and successfully self-expansionary (so far!), it cannot be contested by an alternative system that is not capable of self-expansion. If we are to take serious the project of building a commons-based future, in software or elsewhere, we must think about mechanisms to create what these authors call a “self-expansion of the commons”. Without this, any proposed alternative is “simply a super-structural phenomenon that has another mode of production as its base, capitalism”, in the words of the TKM.

A Political Wager

There is another concept from this book that feels resonant with the TKM. In their introduction, the authors describe Public-Commons Partnerships (PCPs, the concrete proposal the book advocates for) as “a political wager”, “following the Brazilian philosopher Rodrigo Nunes”, whose work I’m not familiar with outside of this. They acknowledge that there are many other instituitional forms which might achieve the overall vision they advocate, “each appropriate to different contexts”.

Our hope is that the institutional form we present in this book adds to our collective repertoire of possible institutional wagers.

The book then proceeds in two parts: first deriving the theoretical case for the PCP as a useful strategic wager; and then describing its concrete aspects, and exploring a series of case studies of its application.

I love the humility of this approach, which seems fundamentally in line with the communal values of the book’s vision. The book doesn’t lay claim to a totalising theory of the way forward. It sets out some necessary conditions for a solution, but doesn’t assert that these are sufficient in all contexts. I would like more revolutionary arguments to engage like this, as contributions to a commons of collective strategy.

Copyleft

immaterial, non-reciprocal production is no more a mode of production than a charity soup kitchen or socialized medicine. It is simply a super-structural phenomenon that has another mode of production as its base, capitalism. telekommunist

What does better look like?