Hacking the Economy and the State: Towards An

1 Toni Prug Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. 2013 2 Abstract This research starts with hackers’ communities, focusing on open processes as the key to volunteer driven cooperation. While theoretically hackers’ communities allow contributions “from each according to their ability”, I argue the inequalities continuously reproduced by capitalism hinder developments towards such production by placing socially created limits on allocation, understood as “to everyone according to their needs”. My thesis is the following: workers’ struggles and political organizations have made decisive contributions to the construction of another form of wealth creation. We can see examples of this in socialist states and in the public sector in capitalist states, where production and allocated occurs primarily to meet needs. I call this the egalitarian mode of production. Two modes, two standpoints – the capitalist and the egalitarian one – struggle to expand against each other: while the public sector introduces products to meet needs directly, capital strives to privatize everything it can – using commodities and markets. For capital, commodities are necessary for the realization of surplus value. For workers, it is provision according to needs, the outcomes, and the growth of equality, where wealth is realized. Aiming towards the full development of human capacities of all, from this developmental-egalitarian perspective, I propose to broaden the category of those who work to include: future workers (children, youth, students), former workers (pensioners, the elderly), the informal (household labourers, care workers), formal unwaged workers (interns, volunteers) and those deprived of an opportunity to work (the disabled, unemployed, and undocumented migrants). Building on the work of Michael Lebowitz and engaging with national accounting, instead of a narrow focus on commodities allocated via markets and according to an individual’s ability to pay, my field of study includes a wide variety of products that workers consume. 3 Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... 2 * * * * * * .............................................................................................. 8 List of tables, graphs and figures .................................................................................................... 9 Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 11 PART I – HACKING & OPEN PROCESS ............................................................................................ 20 1. Towards open processes: what’s hacking got to do with it ................................................. 21 1.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 21 1.1.1 Hacker ethic .................................................................................................................. 22 1.1.2 Free software ................................................................................................................ 24 1.1.3 Open source .................................................................................................................. 26 1.1.4 IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) .......................................................................... 28 1.2 Open Process, lost in translation ..................................................................................... 30 1.2.1 Table 1. Comparison of cooperation: capitalism - hackers ............................................. 32 1.2.2 Table 2 Comparison: free software - open source ......................................................... 34 1.3 Back to the roots: no hidden status, open process computing and politics ...................... 35 1.4 Volunteer cooperation and communities for all .............................................................. 38 1.4.1 Technological advances & freedom to self-organized for all .......................................... 40 1.4.2 The key attributes of the founding communities ........................................................... 43 2. Tracing open source revolution and its deficiencies ............................................................ 45 2.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 45 2.2 Stolen methods enabled false claims of uniqueness ........................................................ 46 2.2.1 Appropriation of the critique through selective inclusion .............................................. 46 2.2.2 Unique contributions of Richard Stallman and free software ........................................ 47 4 2.3 On practice and ideology ................................................................................................. 51 2.4 Splitting the community: top-down, corporate exclusion of free software hackers and their ideals ............................................................................................................................... 54 2.4.1 Tim O’Reilly: commodities and capitalism versus free software .................................... 54 2.4.2 On Raymond as a capable capitalist ideologue and monetary rewards.......................... 56 2.5 Engineering the privatization of the egalitarian objects and the help of the state ........... 58 2.6 Wealth beyond capitalism and commodities: direct satisfaction of needs ....................... 60 2.6.1 Hackers: software “to everyone according to their needs”, contributions “from everyone according to their abilities” .................................................................................................... 61 2.6.2 Methodological notes ................................................................................................... 63 2.6.3 Reading GNU manifesto: implicit anti-capitalism ........................................................... 64 2.6.4 Free software hackers and labour movements .............................................................. 68 2.7 Towards open-process academic publishing .................................................................... 70 2.7.1 Open-process publishing and reviewing advantages ..................................................... 73 2.7.2 The history of the peer review and its problems ........................................................... 75 2.7.3 Internal benefits for journals ......................................................................................... 81 2.7.4 Modular process: workflows, states, actions and transitions ......................................... 82 2.8 What can we gain from open process .............................................................................. 84 2.9 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 86 Intermezzo: hackers and the egalitarian mode of production ....................................................... 88 PART II – WORKFORCE, STATE & ECONOMICS .............................................................................. 95 3. The problems with economics ............................................................................................ 99 3.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 99 3.2 Hack one, outright class war: from “to each according to needs” to “to each what he creates”, interchangeable factors of production ..................................................................... 100 5 3.3 Hack two, “welfare”: closures of interpersonal comparisons against the allocation of wealth .................................................................................................................................... 104 3.4 Hack three, Robbins and the history of economics: From material wealth to allocation of scarce means? ........................................................................................................................ 108 3.5 Policy and state lead development behind the veil of science ....................................... 115 3.6 What is economics, after 2008: broken ideology, lacking scientific-theoretical foundations, based on fictions? .............................................................................................. 118 3.7 Hack four: Samuelson’s neoclassical Keynes .................................................................. 121 3.8 Hack five: renaming, dropping ‘political’ ........................................................................ 124 3.9 Hack six: value as absolute but subjective marginal utility ............................................. 126 3.10 Open markets, the solution for the global inequalities? ............................................. 128 3.11 Hack seven: an inside job, Sen-Stiglitz ........................................................................ 132 3.11.1 Sen’s capabilities: a non-fetishist extension of Rawls’ primary goods ........................ 133 3.11.2 The hack and the relevance to our thesis .................................................................. 134 3.11.3 Work with Stiglitz .....................................................................................................

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