PERFORMANCE: COPIES & CONTEXTS IN THE AGE OF CULTURAL ABUNDANCE

Magnus Eriksson and Rasmus Fleischer

We are both co-founders of Piratbyrån, a Swedish group that has been
around for four years. Piratbyrån explores how file-sharing and other
copying technologies interact with creativity and change how people
relate to everyday culture. We analyze tendencies and cases and
discuss possible future scenarios and opportunities.

Internationally we are mostly known for starting up the The Pirate
Bay, which we no longer run but are in close contact with. By this
and many other projects, campaigns, performances, talks and media
appearances, we have intervened in the discussion known as "the file-
sharing debate".

Almost exactly a year ago, at the time of the last Reboot conference,
The Pirate Bay was taken down in a controversial raid that involved
about 180 confiscated servers and pressure on the Swedish government
from US officials and lobby groups. Still today, over 100 servers
remain in custody and the prosecution is just about to be delayed for
several months more.

The raid was followed by demonstrations just three days after co-
hosted by Piratbyrån and other piracy organisations as well as
political parties from different sides of the Swedish political
spectrum. At the very same day, The Pirate Bay came back online.

Since then, a lot of light has been put on the alleged Swedish
"pirate safe haven" and we have had an extensive public debate in
Sweden on file-sharing issues. Although it's great that we have this
debate, it is often stuck in pre-internet frameworks, copyright
abstractions and outdated perspectives.

Piratbyrån is often perceived as being primarily anti-copyright and
we often have to answer questions on how artists should make a living
if there was no copyright. On this topic we have very little to say
for several reasons: Talking about that implicates that we have (at
least until now) a perfectly working copyright economy that has
somehow provided wages for artists, an economy that would be
nullified by a future removal of copyright laws.

What we instead prefer to talk about is the present: The concrete and
complex workings of cultural economies, the cracks and grey zones in
contemporary copyright, and the massive sharing of files that is
already going on.

At The Borders Of Europe

Etienne Balibar

[Lecture delivered October 4, 1999, on the invitation of the Institut francais de Thessalonique and the Department of Philosophy of Aristotle University of Thessaloni­ki. French text first published in Transeuropennes 17 (1999–2000): 9-17. This translation of this essay, by Erin M. Williams, originally appeared under the title "World Borders, Political Borders," in PMLA 117 (2002): 71–78.]

I am speaking of the "Borders of Europe" in Greece, one of the "peripheral" countries of Europe in its traditional configuration — a configuration that reflects powerful myths and a long-lived series of historical events. Thessaloni­ki is itself at the edge of this border country, one of those places where the dialectic between confrontation with the foreigner (transformed into a hereditary enemy) and communication between civilizations (without which humanity cannot progress) is periodically played out. I thus find myself, it seems, right in the middle of my object of study, with all the resultant difficulties.

The term border is extremely rich in significations. One of my hypotheses is that it is undergoing a profound change in meaning. The borders of new sociopolitical entities, in which an attempt is being made to preserve all the functions of the sovereignty of the state, are no longer entirely situated at the outer limit of territories; they are dispersed a little everywhere, wherever the movement of information, people, and things is happening and is controlled — for example, in cosmopolitan cities. But it is also one of my hypotheses that the zones called peripheral, where secular and religious cultures confront one another, where differences in economic prosperity become more pronounced and strained, constitute the melting pot for the formation of a people (demos), without which there is no citizenship (politeia) in the sense that this term has acquired since antiquity in the democratic tradition.

Peter Waterman writes:

Labour After the World Social Forum, Nairobi, January 20-25, 2007
Can the Unions Become Again a Sword of Justice?
Peter Waterman

"It seems clear that in many countries, unions have lately come to be widely perceived as conservative institutions, primarily concerned to defend the relative advantages of a minority of the working population. One of the challenges which confront trade unionism in the twenty-first century is therefore to revive, and to redefine, the role as sword of justice." — Richard Hyman, UK (1999)

"Transformative politics needs to be firmly anchored in ethics. We need to rethink our strategy, our structures of organisation, our goals… everything, in relation to a radical ethics of equality. This means an ethics of care for the other. This is important because so much left politics has traditionally rejected the relevance of ethics. In the past, dominant traditions of left politics were more about organising and struggling for the sake of a Truth, than for the sake of myself and my equals. Left politics was – and still often is – more inclined to be faithful to an Idea (or to a programme or party) than to the people around us…For obvious reasons, this faithfulness to ideas and not to other people creates serious problems when it comes to co-operation for shared political goals." — Ezequiel Adamovsky, Argentina (2007)

"Reality is for people who lack imagination." — http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/2052/grafitti.h tml

Abstract:

The increasing participation of the ‘old, institutionalised, inter/national trade union organisations’ within the ‘new, networked, World Social Forum’ raises problems for the latter as well as the former. This report and reflection on the Nairobi WSF, January 2007, argues the existence two trends in labour’s participation. The major and dominant one comes from the traditional international unions, promoting ‘Decent Work’. The other comes from new unions, base organisations, labour networks, or other left bodies, for which the name proposed is the ‘Emancipation of Labour’. It is not difficult to trace the dependence of Decent Work on the hegemonic International Labour Organisation, on 20thC West-European notions of social (i.e. capitalist) partnership, on Keynesianism and collective-bargaining unionism. But the relationship of the Emancipation of Labour concept to a few recent, marginal and minor projects at Nairobi remains speculative. It is proposed that any EofL project would need to advance not simply new policies and a networked form but a new ethic. Whilst considering such elements to be present within the WSF, it is argued that these and other necessary elements are here only ambiguously present. There is also a certain complicity between the traditional unions, mediating between workers and inter/national hegemons, and a WSF dominated by non-government organisations (NGOs) of a mixed and often ambiguous nature. Whilst placing hopes on the WSF and on the emerging labour projects, the paper ends with reference to a Global Labour Charter Movement of a radically-democratic and utopian nature.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

Gasping From Out the Shallows:
Reflections on Revolution in the Early Twenty-First Century
Wayne Spencer

"Human beings are not fully conscious of their real lives. Groping in the dark, overwhelmed by the consequences of their acts, at every moment groups and individuals find themselves faced with outcomes they had not intended […] What should be abolished continues, and we continue to wear away with it. We are engulfed. Separated from each other. The years pass and we haven’t changed anything." — Guy Debord, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time, 1959

"We have invented nothing. We adapt ourselves, with a few variations, into the network of possible itineraries. We get used to it, it seems." — Guy Debord, "Critique of Separation," 1961

"If it seems somewhat absurd to talk of revolution, this is obviously because the organized revolutionary movement has long since disappeared from the modern countries where the possibilities of a decisive social transformation are concentrated. But all the alternatives are even more absurd, since they imply accepting the existing order in one way or another." — Internationale Situationniste #6, 1961

"Many people are sceptical about the possibility of a new revolutionary movement, continually repeating that the proletariat has been integrated or that the workers are now satisfied, etc. This means one of two things: either they are declaring themselves satisfied (in which case we will fight them without any equivocation); or they are identifying themselves with some category separate from the workers, such as artists (in which case we will fight this illusion by showing them that the new proletariat is tending to encompass virtually everybody)." — Internationale Situationniste #7, 1962

"The worst of misery
Is when a nature framed for noblest things
Condemns itself in youth to petty joys,
And, sore athirst for air, breathes scanty life
Gasping from out the shallows." — George Eliot, "The Spanish Gypsy," 1868

INTRODUCTION

1

“In the context of the reality presently beginning to take shape, we may consider as proletarians all people who have no possibility of altering the social space-time that the society allots to them (regardless of variations in their degree of affluence or chances for promotion)” (Situationist International, Ideologies, Classes, and the Domination of Nature, Internationale Situationniste #8, 1963)

2

The first movement of the revolutionary proletariat against the alienation of capitalism, a movement exemplified by the great waves of workers’ struggles and revolutions that convulsed the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was destroyed by the machinations, mystifications and munitions of social democracy, fascism and Bolshevism.

With the defeat in the mid-1930s of the attempts by the revolutionary workers and peasants of Spain to establish a self-managed society, the century chimed midnight. In the course of the 1950s, a second movement of proletarian contestation began to grow restless under the new conditions of alienation erected out of the partial successes and ultimate failure of the earlier expressions of proletarian dissatisfaction. This contestation affected both poles of the apparently divided but actually united system of global capitalism: the state capitalism of the societies expropriated by Bolshevism and the affluent consumer capitalism of the West.

In the Soviet bloc, the uprisings in East Berlin in 1953, Poznań in Poland in 1956 and across Hungary in 1956, along with innumerable other acts of defiance both large and small, expressed the proletariat’s rejection of the pseudo-communist bureaucracies that reigned in the proletariat’s name yet subjected every aspect of society to an authoritarian domination for its own interests as a ruling class. In the West, wildcat strikes defied the unions, and sabotage, absenteeism, shoddy work and an avowed contempt for work revealed that sections of the proletariat were dissatisfied with the well-paid alienated labour on which the post-war consumer societies were based; so too there was a more sporadic and confused refusal of the machinery of permitted consumption.

In May 1968 in France and during the 1969 ‘Hot Autumn’ in Italy, proletarian discontent coalesced into vast movements and refused quietly to subside afterwards; so much so that these two countries were singled out as objects of particular horror by an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development meeting of employment experts convened in 1971 out of fearful apprehension that “the industrial countries…are undergoing a revolution” whose first principle is the “challenge to authority”. According to this collection of specialists in workers submission, the perspective of a society “without classes, hierarchy, authority and regulations” was abroad in “industrial France”, while in Italy “the effects of industrial conflicts and social malaise are constantly combined” and “minor details of technical progress in workplaces…provoke conflicts whose violence is out of all proportion to their causes”.

They were right to be alarmed. In their study of 123 industrial conflicts in France in 1971, for example, Claude Durand and Pierre Dubois found that “significant illegalities”, such as occupations of premises or physical violence against employers, cadres, supervisors or police, had occurred in half of all disputes. And high levels of conflict persisted in many other regions of the advanced capitalist societies. However, by the end of the following decade, the second upsurge of the proletariat had been defeated. The state capitalist societies of Eastern Europe had all been overthrown, but they have been succeeded not by the management by proletarians themselves of all aspects of their individual and collective lives, but rather by the forms of representative democracy, alienated production and commodified everyday life characteristic of western liberal capitalism. In the west itself, the society of the abundant commodity continued to dominate every aspect of social life.