History is itself an abstraction, hacked out of the recalcitrant information thrown off by the productive altercations of presents meshing with pasts. Out of the information expressed by events, history forms orders of objective and subjective representation.

The representation of history dominant in any era is the product of the educational apparatus established by its ruling powers. Even dissenting history takes form within institutions not of its making. While not all history represents the interests of the ruling classes, the institution of history exists as something other than what it can become when free of class constraint, namely, the abstract guide to transformation of the ruling order in the interests of the producing classes, whose collective action expresses the events history merely represents.

History is not necessity. “History today still designates only the set of conditions, however recent they may be, from which one turns away in order to become.”¹Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 1994), p. 96. Among other things, philosophy is a tool to be used to escape from the commodification of information as … Continue reading For history to be something more than a representation, it must seek something more than its perfection as representation, as an image faithful to but apart from what it represents. It can express rather its difference from the state of affairs that present themselves under the authorship of the ruling class. It can be a history not just of what the world is, but what it can become.

This other history, this hacker history, brings together the record of events as an object apart from collective action with the action of the subjective force that struggles to free itself from its own objectification. Hacker history introduces the productive classes to the product of their own action, which is otherwise presented — not just by the ruling version of history but by the ruling class itself in all its actions — as a thing apart.

Hacker history hacks out of appearances, and returns to the productive classes, their own experience of the containment of their free productive energy in successive property forms. From the direct subjection to an individual owner that is slavery, to the patchwork of local lordships and spiritualized subjection that is feudalism, to the abstract and universalizing private property of the commodified economy, in every era hitherto, a ruling class extracts a surplus from the free capacity of the productive classes. Hacker history not only represents to the productive classes what they have lost, it expresses what they may yet gain — the return of their own productive capacity in and for itself.

The history produced in the institutions of the ruling classes makes history itself into a form of property To hacker history, the dominant history is but a visible instance of the containment of productive power within representation by the dominant form of property. Even the would-be “radical” histories, the social histories, the history from below, end up as forms of property, traded according to their representational value, in an emerging market for commodified communication. Critical history only breaks with dominant history when it advances to a critique of its own property form, and beyond, to the expression of a new productive history and history of the productive.

A hacker history challenges not just the content of history, but its form. Adding yet more representations to the heap of history’s goods, even representations of the oppressed and excluded, does nothing if it does not challenge the separation of history as representation from the great productive forces that make history in the first place. The educational apparatus of the overdeveloped world would make even the unscripted voice of the subaltern peasant part of its property, but the productive classes have need only of the speech of their own productivity to recover the productivity of speech.

What matters in the struggle for history is to express its potential to be otherwise, and to make it a part of the productive resources for the self-awareness of the productive classes themselves, including the hacker class. The hacker class, like productive labor everywhere, can become a class for itself when equipped with a history that expresses its potential in terms of the potential of the whole of the dispossessed classes.

Hacker history does not need to be invented from scratch, as a fresh hack expressed out of nothing. It quite freely plagiarizes from the historical awareness of all the productive classes of past and present. The history of the free is a free history It is the gift of past struggles to the present, which carries with it no obligation other than its implementation. It requires no elaborate study It need be known only in the abstract to be practiced in the particular.

One thing is already known, as part of this gift. The containment of free productivity within the representation of property, as managed by the state in the interests of the ruling class, may accelerate development for a time, but inevitably retards and distorts it in the end. Far from being the perfect form for all time, property is always contingent, and awaits the exceeding of its fetters by some fresh hack. The past weighs like insomnia upon the consciousness of the present.

Production bursts free from the fetters of property, from its local and contingent representations of right and appropriation, and eventually gives rise to an abstract and universalizing form of property, private property Private property encompasses land, capital, and eventually information, bringing each under its abstract form and making of each a commodity. It cuts land from the continuum of nature and makes of it a thing. It cuts the products made out of nature into objects to be bought and sold and makes of them things also. Finally, private property makes of information, that immaterial potential, a thing. And out of this triple objectification property produces, among other things, its objectified and lifeless brand of history.

The progress of the privatization of property creates at each stage a class who own the means of producing a surplus from it, and a producing class dispossessed of it. This process develops unevenly, but it is possible to abstract from the vicissitudes of events an abstract account of the progress of abstraction, starting with the abstraction of nature that is landed property.

As land becomes the object of a universalizing law of abstracted private property, a class arises who profit from its ownership. The pastoralist class, through its domination of the organs of the state, produces the legal fictions that would legitimate this theft of nature from traditional forms of life.

Secure in its ownership of land, the pastoralist class imposes upon the dispossessed whatever form of exploitative relation it can get away with, and get the state to back with force—tenancy, slavery, sharecropping. Each is only the measure of the tolerance of the state for the prerogative of pastoral power. In its thirst for labor that would make land actually productive, and yield a surplus, no indignity is too great, no corner of the world exempt from the claims of property and the uprooting of its custodians.

What makes this dispossession possible is the private property hack, by which land emerges as a legal fiction, guaranteeing access to the productivity of nature for the pastoralist class. What accelerates the dispossession of the peasantry is successive agricultural hacks, which increase the productive power of agricultural labor, creating a vast surplus of wealth.

The peasantry, who once held traditional rights in land, find themselves denied those rights, by a state apparatus in the control of the pastoralist class. The agricultural hack sets flows of dispossessed peasants in motion, and they become, at best, workers, selling their labor to an emerging capitalist class. Thus pastoralism begets capitalism. The pastoral class produces “a social form with distinctive ‘laws of motion’ that would eventually give rise to capitalism in its mature, industrial form.”²Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002), p. 125. Here Wood shows how what she calls “agrarian capitalism” preceded the rise of industrial capitalism. … Continue reading

Just as the pastoralists use the state to secure land as private property, so too the capitalists use their power over the state to secure the legal and administrative conditions for the privatization of flows of raw materials and tools of production in the form of capital. The capitalist class acquires the means to employ labor through the investment of the surplus wealth generated by agriculture and trade in yet more productive abstractions, the product of yet other hacks, which yields the division of labor, the factory system, the engineering of production. The abstractions that are private property, the wage relation and commodity exchange provide a plane upon which the brutal but efficient extraction of a surplus can proceed apace. But without the toil of the great multitude of farmers and workers, and without the ever more inventive hacking of new abstractions, private property alone does not change the world.

Land and capital for a time represent conflicting interests, struggling against each other through the state for domination. Landed interests try to achieve a monopoly on the sale of foodstuffs within the space of the nation through the state, while capital struggles to open the market and thus push down the price of food. Likewise, pastoralists try to open the national market to flows of manufactured goods, while capital in its infancy sought to protect its monopoly within the national envelope. This conflict arises out of the difference in the property form based on land as opposed to capital, which are qualitatively different kinds of abstractions.

Capital, the more abstract property form, usually gets the upper hand in its struggle with the pastoral interest and opens the national envelope to cheap primary produce imports. It reduces the amount of the surplus going to the pastoralist class and secures for itself lower costs of production, thus making its goods more competitive internationally Struggles of this kind are not uncommon among the otherwise allied ruling classes, and are always worth studying in hacker history with an eye for opportunities presented in these moments of transition that the productive classes may turn to their advantage.

The classes that own the means of production, be they a pastoralist class in possession of pastures or farmlands, a capitalist class in possession of factories and forges, or a vectoralist class in possession of stocks, flows and vectors of information, everywhere extract a surplus from the productive classes. The extraction of the surplus is the key to the continuity of class society, but the form of the surplus, and the form of the ruling class itself, passes through three historical phases: pastoralist, capitalist, vectoralist; with their corresponding forms of surplus: rent, profit, margin. As each is based on a more abstract form of property, less and less tied to a particular aspect of the materiality of nature, each is less and less easy to monopolize and secure. Thus each ruling class depends more and more on the force of law to secure its property, making law the dominant superstructural form for preserving an infrastructural power.

Through ownership of the means of production, the ruling classes limit that proportion of the surplus returned to the producing classes, over and above bare subsistence, and return that subsistence in a commodified form. But this does not suffice to dispose of a mounting surplus. The ruling classes must find a market for their produce somewhere. The colonies, where the agricultural surplus is produced, are obliged to buy back their own surplus in the form of manufactured goods.

Capital soon colonizes the culture of its own working class at home, who, struggling to gain some of the surplus they themselves produce, find that they can only cash it in for yet more commodities. The working class of the overdeveloped world becomes the market for what they themselves produce. They find their interests divided from those of the producing classes of the colonies and former colonies. The overdeveloped world becomes overdeveloped by limiting the ability of the underdeveloped world to sell its produce into it, while maintaining its prerogatives over the markets of the underdeveloped world. The overdeveloped world uses the vector at one and the same time to preserve the envelopes of its own states while breaching those of the underdeveloped world. The vector secures the identity of those who shelter within the envelope it maintains by simultaneously puncturing the identity of those subjected to its dislocating effects outside.

In both the developed and the underdeveloped world, the productive classes are induced into identifying their interests with those of the ruling classes, within the envelope of the state.

In the overdeveloped world, the capitalist class and its junior partner, the pastoralist class, secure the consent of the working class through the partial sharing of the surplus, which then gives the working class an interest in preserving the discriminatory vectoral relations that maintain this privilege.

In the underdeveloped world, the pastoralist class and nascent capitalist class secure the support of the predominantly farming producers through the demand for a sovereign state free from colonial rule that can develop autonomously, and for justice in trade with the overdeveloped world. Sovereignty, whether conceded or seized from the overdeveloped world, is not, as the underdeveloped world discovers, enough to secure development. Unequal vectors of trade were and remain the principal cause of exploitation in the underdeveloped world.

The productive classes are so called because they are the real producers of wealth, be they farmers and miners of land, workers of material or immaterial value, or hackers who produce new means of production itself. Their interests and desires do not always coincide of their own accord, which is why they are considered as separate classes, tied to different relations of property, and predominating in different parts of the world. Taken together they have in common their dispossession from the greater part of what they themselves produce. Their history is the history of the struggle to enjoy the fruits of their own labor.

The productive classes may struggle directly against their appropriators, over the terms of the exchange between them, or may struggle indirectly through the state. The state, which the pastoralist and capitalist classes used as an instrument for legitimizing their appropriation of property can also be the means by which the productive classes seek to resocialize part of the surplus, through the taxation and transfer of the surplus to the productive classes in the form of a social wage, such as health care, education or housing.

Taxation may distribute the surplus toward the producing classes, toward the ruling classes, or may be diverted for the expansion and armament of the state itself. While the ruling class seeks to limit the state’s interference in its activities, it also seeks to direct the surplus towards its own uses. Capital may encourage the state to arm itself, and profit by its arming. Here the producing classes end up subsidizing an arrangement between state and capital—the military industrial complex.

Capital usually cedes to the state the information intensive functions that were of benefit to the capitalist and pastoralist classes as a whole, or which are concessions won by the productive classes. The state becomes the manager of the representations through which class society as a whole comes to know and regulate itself. The rise of a vectoralist class put an end to this arrangement. The vectoral class uses the state to extend and defend the privatization of information. It attacks the socialized science, culture, communication and education that other ruling classes for the most part left in the hands of the state. “There is an intellectual land grab going on.”³James Boyle, Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 9. A major strength of Boyle’s book is to … Continue reading

Each ruling class shapes a military force in its own image. The vectoralist class supplants the military industrial complex with the military entertainment complex, where the surplus is directed to the development of vectors for command, control and communication. Where the military industrial complex had socialized part of the risks of new technology for capital and had formed a reliable source of demand for its productive capacity, the military entertainment complex provides these same services to the emergent vectoralist class. The new military ideologies—command and control, the information war, the revolution in military affairs—correspond to the needs and interests of the vectoral class.

At the same time as they privatize what was formerly socialized information, the vectoralist class attacks the ability of the hacker class to maintain some degree of autonomy over its working conditions. As the vectoral class comes to monopolize stocks, flows and vectors of information, the hacker class loses its control of its immediate working conditions. The hacker class finds its own ethic of labor compromised, and the agenda for the hack determined by necessities not of its making. The hacker class finds itself sucked into the matrix of the military entertainment complex, hacking out the ways and means of extending the vector as a weapon of mass destruction and a weapon of mass seduction.

Besides its struggle over the value of its labor, and its struggle through the state to reapportion the surplus, each productive class struggles over the autonomy of its working conditions. Farmers form associations, workers form unions. Many seek autonomy through the ownership of some productive tools. The hacker class likewise struggles for autonomy in a world in which the means of production are in the hands of the ruling classes. But the difference is that the hacker class is also a designer of the very tools of production. Hackers program the hardware, software and wetware, and can struggle for tools more amenable to autonomy and cooperation than monopoly and competition.

There is one other struggle that all the productive classes are always engaged in, whether they know it or not. They struggle to exceed the limits to the production of the surplus and its free appropriation imposed as a fetter by the commodity form in general, and by its most restrictive form — private property — in particular. All of the productive classes struggle fitfully to hack temporary zones of liberty out of commodified production and consumption. These struggles have never amounted to much until the development of the vector opened up the possibilities for the theft of information on a grand scale. The productive classes take advantage of the contradictions between the commodification of the vector and the commodification of stocks and flows of information by rival factions of the vectoral class. This is not really theft, but a reappropriation, returning some portion of the popular knowledge and culture of the productive classes to its collective producers.

The commodity form is an abstraction that releases an enormous amount of productive energy, but it does so by diverting production always toward the reproduction of the commodity form. That form becomes a fetter on the free productivity of production itself. The hack is then limited to the hacking of new forms of surplus extraction. This is the most salient point in any history that aims to become a part of the struggle to wrest freedom from necessity.

As land, capital and information are progressively abstracted as property, property itself becomes more abstract. Land has a finite and particular form, capital has finite but universal forms, information is both infinite and universal in its potential. The abstraction of property reaches the point where it calls for an abstraction from property History becomes hacker history when hackers realize that this moment has already arrived.

The class dynamic drives class society to the possibility of overcoming the property form itself, to the overcoming of scarcity and the release of the surplus potential of productivity back into the hands of its producers. What history expresses to the producing classes is this unrealized potential to wrest freedom from necessity as they experience it. Just as property led to the wresting of freedom from natural necessity, the overcoming of the limits to property offers the potential to wrest freedom from the necessities imposed on the productive classes by the constraint of private property, class exploitation and its domination of the state.

A hacker history knows only the present tense.