For the forces of information freedom, and other movements associated with the successor economy, to attempt to fight the established interests of the existing system for control of the state, is like an army trying to capture control of an entire infrastructure mile-by-mile – and to do so when, far from possessing material superiority, it is outnumbered ten – or a hundred-to-one by the defending enemy. It’s utterly stupid.

Lawrence & Wishart’s views of revolutionary praxis, as evidenced in the website’s official statement and in public remarks by managing editor Sally Davison, are a virtual parody of the most authoritarian and bureaucratic aspects of Old Left culture. As far as their worldview is concerned, the most innovative and interesting theoretical currents in Marxism, and the Left in general, the past few decades might never have happened.

The Old Left of the mid-20th century conceptualized revolution within a mass-production age framework, as the political seizure of all the commanding heights of the political and economic system, like the state and large corporations.

The best strands of recent Marxist thought, on the other hand — like for example autonomism — all involve the idea of prefigurative politics and “exodus.” That is, they see the transition to a post-capitalist society not as some sudden and large-scale event in which all the powerful institutions are captured and put under new management. They see it as a prolonged transition from one historical epoch to another like that from feudalism to capitalism, in which the successor society grows out of a whole host of seeds within the old system. Marxists like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, or the German Oekonux group, see network forms of organization like commons-oriented peer production as the seeds of the future society within the present one. The latter group sees free and open-source software, and the p2p groups that develop it, as prefiguring a future post-scarcity society of abundance.

This is an approach that coincides in many ways with that of the free market Left. Like libertarian communists, we envision a society in which new technologies of abundance and liberation render state’s artificial property rights and artificial scarcities — and the capitalist rents on them — unenforceable. And we envision a society in which the radical downscaling, distribution and cheapening of the means of production (cheap, open-source micro-manufacturing hardware, permaculture, desktop information production, etc.) bring production outside the control of large bureaucratic institutions like corporations, and integrate it instead into the economies of households, neighborhoods and local communities. This means a large and increasing share of our production to meet our daily needs will be shifted outside the wage system, and even outside the cash nexus altogether and into the sharing economy. Like libertarian communists, we of the free market left see many areas of life as ideally managed as social commons rather than by states or corporations. In virtually every area of life, horizontal networks of equals replace the old bureaucratic hierarchies.

At the same time, the interesting and truly progressive forms of Marxism are centered on the idea of exodus. Exodus was at the center of Hardt and Negri’s analysis in Commonwealth. Rather than storming the Bastille or the Winter Palace, the working classes treat the existing system of power, as much as possible, as irrelevant. We evade it. We bypass it. We secede from the state-corporate economy and build our own counter-economy within it. We shift as much of our production and consumption into the social realm as possible, cooperatively producing and sharing or exchanging with each other, taking advantage of new communication and production technologies that render the old institutions irrelevant and free us from dependency on them. This, too, is an idea that the free market left shares with libertarian communists.

Put the two principles together, and you get a model of “revolution” based on starting from the myriad seeds of the future society within the present system, growing and nourishing them, and building the new system within the shell of the old. Meanwhile, we starve the old system by shifting increasing amounts of our labor, money and resources out of it and into the new one of our own making. Eventually the growing seeds will coalesce into a full-blown system that supplants the old one, and the old system will survive only as shrinking islands of authority and exploitation within a fundamentally different society based on freedom and abundance.

The combination of prefigurative politics and exodus is in many ways similar to Gramsci’s “war of position,” in which the workers’ movement achieves victory not by storming the ramparts of the old system (a “war of maneuver” in his terminology), but within the larger culture and economy itself. Only after we have shifted the overall correlation of forces in society at large can we launch the final assault on the institutional commanding heights of the old system. But our approach differs from Gramsci’s in one important respect: we don’t ever need to launch that final assault.

The conventional Marxists of the mid-20th century saw large-scale, capital-intensive production as inherently more efficient. Indeed, progress itself was practically defined by the accumulation of capital. So it followed that the most efficient and productive society would continue to be one in which functions were carried out by large, hierarchical institutions. They would just be placed under working class management.

We, on the other hand, see small-scale, distributed, low-overhead production technology as the wave of the future. We believe horizontal networks and small cooperative shops can do everything that the old bureaucratic dinosaurs used to do, only better. So we don’t want to storm those old institutions. They have nothing we need.

So for us, the revolution is in the here and now, starting with the many ways that people are already creating the kind of society, work, lives and institutions we want to live in. The ends we are struggling for are embodied in the very means we use.

Lawrence and Wishart has no use for this model of revolutionary transition. In their official statement (“Lawrence & Wishart statement on the Collected Works of Marx and Engels,” April 25), they dismiss the whole free and open-source movement, and the idea of information freedom, as

a consumer culture which expects cultural content to be delivered free to consumers, leaving cultural workers such as publishers, editors and writers unpaid, while the large publishing and other media conglomerates and aggregators continue to enrich themselves through advertising and data-mining revenues and through their far greater institutional weight compared to small independent publishers.

The open-source and free culture movements are at war with the single monopoly — “intellectual property” — which is structurally most central to corporate capitalism as we know it. And yet Lawrence and Wishart equate it — in language that might have come from managerialist liberals like Andrew Keen or Thomas Frank — to the dotcom capitalism of the nineties.

Their managing editor, Sally Davison, dismissed the very idea of prefigurative politics (Noam Cohen, “Claiming a Copyright on Marx? How Uncomradely,” New York Times, April 30), coming just short of quoting Lenin’s dismissal of left-wing communism as an “infantile disorder”:

We don’t live in a world of everybody sharing everything. As Marx said, and I may be paraphrasing, “We make our own history, but not in the conditions of our own choosing.”

In other words, never mind all that stuff about building the kind of stuff we want here and now. That’s something we can worry about after the revolution is over. Post-capitalist society as something that will be officially put together by competent authorities after the revolution has been safely fought and won (under the leadership of those same competent authorities, of course).

Far from building a post-capitalist society within the interstices of the old, dying system, Davison and her comrades favor accepting the domination of our lives by the exploitative nature of the present system until it officially comes to an end. Far from building alternatives to the institutional monopolies and rents of capitalism, Davison wants to accept them as inevitable — to embrace them — so long as the present system survives.

Lawrence & Wishart, in pursuing a business model based on the most central monopoly of capitalism, and treating it as just and right, remind me of Hardt and Negri’s statement in Commonwealth that the Social Democratic agenda is basically “to reintegrate the working class within capital.”

It would mean, on the one hand, re-creating the mechanisms by which capital can engage, manage, and organize productive forces and, on the other, resurrecting the welfare structures and social mechanisms necessary for capital to guarantee the social reproduction of the working class.

Lawrence & Wishart, despite their proclaimed stance of revolutionary socialism and enmity toward capitalism, find themselves perversely not only rejecting the seeds of post-capitalist society within the present system, but actively embracing and trying to strengthen the monopolies the present system depends on.

This is why it’s such a waste of time to devote serious effort and resources to working within the system to affect the form the law takes. Doing so amounts to fighting the enemy by the enemy’s own rules, on ground favorable to the enemy, where the enemy has the advantage of a prepared defense.

German Blitzkrieg war theorists had a term, Schwerpunkt, for the decisive point at which an armored formation penetrated the enemy forces front lines, and then immediately bypassed the main body of the enemy’s forces and cut them off and encircled them from the rear. John Robb, a leading theorist of networked “Fourth Generation Warfare” models, has coined the term “Systempunkt” for the analogous phenomenon in networked conflict.

In World War II, Allied strategic bombing campaigns over Germany destroyed entire infrastructures, one power station, power line, bridge, road, railroad, etc., at a time. They were able to undertake the enormously costly task of destroying an entire physical infrastructure, mile by mile, because of their overwhelming air superiority and much larger industrial output. The concept of Systempunkt, on the other hand, is illustrated by Al Qaeda Iraq’s practice of attacking only a few key nodes in an infrastructure, which – although amounting to one percent or less of the total physical infrastructure – disables and renders non-operational the other 99 percent left untouched. That’s a great deal more cost-effective.

For the forces of information freedom, and other movements associated with the successor economy, to attempt to fight the established interests of the existing system for control of the state, is like an army trying to capture control of an entire infrastructure mile-by-mile – and to do so when, far from possessing material superiority, it is outnumbered ten – or a hundred-to-one by the defending enemy. It’s utterly stupid.

We can render the corporate state inoperative, using maybe one percent of the resources required to actually capture the state through the political process, by attacking its ability to enforce the subsidies, privileges and legal monopolies of big business. Enforcement capability is the Systempunkt of the state capitalist economy.

The proprietary content industry, and all the other businesses that make money by extracting rents from patents, copyrights and trademarks, will always control the “intellectual property” policy of the state. I mean, that’s what the state exists for. Attempting to fight their money and political influence by the rules of the system would just be pouring resources down a rathole. But for a tiny fraction of the same money and effort, we can turn patents and copyrights into a dead letter through strong encryption, proxy servers, torrent downloads and moving webhosting to servers in countries that don’t take orders from the MPAA and RIAA (that’s why Center for a Stateless Society, the outfit I’m writing this for, is moving our site to servers in Iceland).

When the US government seized Wikileaks’ domain name, thousands of hosts around the world (C4SS among them) responded by mirroring the site. And many thousands of people blogged and tweeted the numeric IP address of Wikileaks sites in various countries so people could look it up directly by IP address rather than using the domain name. Then when the government carried out mass seizures of domain names of alleged “infringing sites” on behalf of the music and movie industries, the Mozilla Foundation came up with Firefox browser extensions that would bypass the domain name blocks by automatically going straight to the numeric IP address. As Bruce Sterling put it, “treating the law of the land as damage and routing around it.”

Now there’s Bit Torrent Sync, a utility which enables any two people who’ve installed it and know a common password to transfer torrents directly from one computer to another, with secure end-to-end encryption. It’s kind of like what happens when you use your cursor to move a file to the Dropbox icon – only the information’s not stored at a permanent location in the Cloud, and it’s encrypted. It’s a totally desktop-to-desktop, p2p file-sharing system. So it doesn’t matter if the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or any other draconian copyright legislation, passes. Any two people with Bit Torrent Sync who want to share a file can do so. Big Content has lost the war, once and for all. They’re dead – they just don’t know it yet.

Which leads me to the latest interesting development: Lawrence and Wishart, a Leftist publisher who owns the rights to the English language edition of the enormous (over fifty volumes) Marx and Engels Collected Works, has demanded that that the Marxist Internet Archive – an amazing online library that includes not only the Collected Works but an astonishing collection of other writers ranging from Luxemburg and Gramsci to C.L.R. James and Walter Rodney – take down Marx and Engels’ Collected Works by April 30. Happy May Day, Comrades!

As anyone at all familiar with the Web could have predicted, this led to a massive backlash of outrage from the Left that Lawrence and Wishart were – naturally – unprepared for. On Friday April 21 their website published an utterly whiny complaint (“Lawrence & Wishart statement on the Collected Works of Marx and Engels“) that they’d been subjected to a “campaign of online abuse” because they “asked for [their] copyright” (sniff) “to be respected.”

Aside from the rather contemptible display of self-pity and entitlement, the statement reflects more than anything else an utter lack of business sense. “Ultimately, in asking L&W to surrender copyrights in this particular edition of the works of Marx & Engels, [Marxist Internet Archive] and their supporters are asking that L&W, one of the few remaining independent radical publishers in the UK, should commit institutional suicide.” This is nonsense on stilts. The hard copy set of the Collected Works, if bought as a complete set instead of one volume at a time, sells for 1500 British Pounds, which is somewhere well north of $2000. If Lawrence and Wishart can show one person, anywhere in the world, who put off shelling out over two thousand bucks for a set of the dead tree edition of Marx and Engels’ Collected Works because a digital online edition was available, I will eat my own left hand – raw, and without salt. The Marxist Internet Archive’s online edition of the Collected Works is not costing Lawrence and Wishart a single solitary sale. The only thing the online edition is competing against is a trip to a university library. If anything, the online edition is free advertising for the dead tree edition. In other words, Lawrence and Wishart is governed by the same abject stupidity as the music and movie industries – the dying music and movie industries.

Not only is Lawrence and Wishart as stupid as the music and movie industries, its attempt to suppress free, infinitely replicable digital information is turning out to be just as big a failure as those industries’ attempt to do so. No doubt the Archive will be mirrored, with its existing contents, at plenty of sites around the world. But in the meantime, the entire English language contents of the Marxist Internet Archive – including the disputed edition of Marx and Engels’ Collected Works – is available for torrent download at The Pirate Bay <https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6231000/Marxists.org_-_full_English_language_archive>. And the Collected Works by themselves are available as a .zip file at Sendspace <http://www.sendspace.com/file/l7wx0o>. I’ve got a copy of the latter on my hard drive, and it works just fine – the individual files open up in a browser tab and look exactly like the online version. I recommend anyone who expects to be at all interested in accessing the Collected Works online at any point in the future to download one of these files ASAP – and share them with your friends, far and wide, via Bit Torrent Sync!

Enjoy your copyright, Lawrence and Wishart, for all the good it may do you. I love the smell of burning capitalists in the morning.