Property is theft!” as Proudhon says.¹P. J. Proudhon, What Is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government, http://dhm.best.vwh.net/archives/proudhon-property-is-theft.html. As Lautreamont says, Proudhon’s text, … Continue reading It is theft abstracted, the theft of nature from itself, by collective social labor, constrained within the property form. Property is not naturally occurring. It is not a natural right but an historical product, product of a powerful hack of ambivalent consequences. To make something property is to separate it from a continuum, to mark it or bound it, to represent it as something finite. At the same time, making something as property connects it, via a representation of it as a separate and finite object, to the subject who owns it. What is cut from one process joins another process, what was nature becomes second nature.

Property founds bourgeois subjectivity, the subjectivity of the owner. But it also founds subaltern subjectivity, the subjectivity of the non-owner. Property founds subjectivity as the relation between possession and nonpossession. Property forms the logic of self-interest within the envelope of the subject just as it forms the logic of class interest within the envelope of the state.

When a relation is produced as a relation of property, then the things designated within that relation become comparable as if in the same terms and on the same plane. Property is the syntax of an abstract plane upon which all things may be things with one quality in common, the quality of property. This abstraction, in which things are detached from their expression, represented as objects, and attached via their representations to a new expression, makes the world over in its image, as a world made for and by property It appears as if property forms the ways and means of nature itself, when it is merely the ways and means of the second nature of class rule.

Traditional property forms are local and contingent. Modern, or vectoral property is abstract and universal. With the demise of feudalism property becomes an abstract relation, and the conflict property generates also becomes abstract. It becomes class conflict. Owners of property arise, and range their interests against non-owners. As the abstract property form evolves to incorporate first land, then capital, then information, both owners and non-owners are brought face to face with the possibilities of class alliance as well as conflict. But just as property cuts through other stakes in conflict, so too does ownership or non-ownership of private property abstract and simplify the grounds of conflict, in the form of the contention between the owning and non-owning classes.

The conflicts upon which the development of the vectoral world hinges become conflicts over property, and thus class conflict: Conflict over the form of property, the ownership of property, over the surplus produced via property, over the limits to the property relation per se. The division of property, the abstraction of things as property, produces conflict by producing the separation of subjects and objects, and assigning objects to some subjects over others, and hence the separation of one expression of subjectivity from another. Identity is the subject representing itself to itself as the properties it desires but lacks.

Property comes in many forms, and there are antagonisms between these forms, and yet one form of property may be exchanged for another, as all forms of property belong to the same abstract plane. Vectoral property is a plane on which the object confronts those subjects either belonging to, or excluded from, its possession. Conflict between classes becomes the struggle to transform one form of property into another. The ruling classes fight to turn all property from which they might extract a surplus into private property. The productive classes struggle to collectivize the property upon which the reproduction of their existence depends, via the state. The ruling classes then struggle again to privatize this social component of property. “Liberty” and “Efficiency” versus “Justice” and “Security” becomes the form in which the class struggle represents itself as a struggle over the merits of rival kinds of property Only in vectoral society are there riots over pension plans.

The conflict between private and public property advances into each domain that property claims as its own. As property claims more and more of the world, more and more of the world construes its interests and being in terms of property. The struggle over property goes to first one class or class alliance then the other, but property is only entrenched as the form in which the struggle is conducted. As property itself becomes more and more abstract, so too does the embedding of history in the property form and of the property form in history

Land is the primary form of property The privatization of land that is a productive asset as property gives rise to a class of interest among its owners. These owners are the pastoralist class. Pastoralists acquire land as private property through the forced dispossession of peasants who traditionally share a portion of the commons. These peasants, who once enjoyed reciprocal rights with their feudal lords, find themselves “free”—from any right at all. They are free to be exploited as farmers, but also find themselves in many parts of the world violently expropriated, enslaved, indentured— exploited.

The exploitation of the landless farmer is a crude, violent and wasteful business, when the farmer is not given incentive to work land efficiently. But when the farmer has an interest in productivity, necessitated by one property relation or another, but most usually as a freeholder who must pay the pastoralist rent, then the increasing extraction of a surplus is possible. This is the surplus on the back of which the history of all other productions takes place.

The instrument of rent puts land into play as a form of property that has a degree of abstraction inherent in it. All land becomes comparable on the basis of this abstract plane of property However, land is in more or less fixed supply and by definition is fixed in place, so the abstracting of land as property is limited. Land is a form of property particularly subject to the formation of monopoly. The owners of the best lands face no effective competition, land being ultimately in fixed supply. They gradually extend their ownership, and thus their ability to monopolize the surplus through the extraction of rents, if not held in check by resort to the powers of the state by other classes.

Capital is the secondary form of property The privatization of productive assets in the form of tools and machines and also of working materials gives rise to a class of interest among its owners, the capitalist class. Dispossessed peasants, with nothing to sell but their capacity to work, create this vast stock of capital as private property for the capitalist class, and in so doing create a power over and against themselves. They are paid in wages, but the return that accrues to the owners of capital as property is called profit.

The instrument of profit puts capital into play as a form of property that has a greater degree of abstraction inherent in it than that of land. All physical resources now become comparable on the basis of this abstract plane of property. However, capital, unlike land, is not in fixed supply or disposition. It can be made and remade, moved, aggregated, dispersed. A much greater degree of potential can be released from the world as a productive resource once the abstract plane of property includes both land and capital. Where the value of land arises in part out of natural scarcity, the scarcity of things made by productive industry requires the abstraction of property as an artifice to maintain and reproduce scarcity The possibility of revolt against scarcity arises for the first time at this point in the abstraction of property

Capital as property also gives rise to a class interest among its owners, sometimes opposed, sometimes allied, to that of pastoralists. Capital threw its political energies into the overthrow of the patchwork feudal class relations, but also found itself sometimes opposed to the pastoralist class that consolidated the feudal property system into the abstraction of land. What capital opposed was the pastoralist ability to exploit its monopoly over land rent to secure the lion’s share of the surplus. Capitalist and pastoralist interests struggle over the partition of the surplus between rent and profit. The pastoralist has the natural monopoly of land, but capital usually prevails, as it has a greater capacity for abstraction.

History makes a qualitative leap when the capitalist class liberates itself from the fetter of the pastoralist interest. The capitalist class recognizes the value of the hack in the abstract, whereas the pastoralists were slow to appreciate the productivity that can flow from the application of abstraction to the production process. Under the influence of capital, the state sanctions nascent forms of intellectual property, such as patents and copyrights, that secure an independent existence for hackers as a class, and a flow of innovations in culture and science from which history issues. Capital represents private property to itself as if it is natural, but comes to appreciate the artificial extension of property into new, productive forms under the impact of the hack.

Information, once it becomes a form of property, develops beyond a mere support for capital and for a pastoralist class belatedly aware of the value of increased productivity for its rent rolls. It becomes the basis of a form of accumulation in its own right. Just as farmers and workers find themselves confronting a class owning the means of production, so too hackers find themselves confronting a new class of owners, in this case of the means of producing, storing and distributing information — the vectoralist class. The vectoralist class struggles first to establish its monopoly over information — a far more abstract form of property than land or capital— and then to establish its power over the other ruling classes. It secures as much of the surplus as it can as margin — the return on ownership of information — at the expense of profit and rent.

Viewed from the current stage of historical development, each of these ruling classes appears to develop out of the productivity of the hack. The pastoralist class develops out of the productivity of private land ownership, a legal hack. The capitalist class develops out of the productivity, not just of private property, but of technical innovations in power and machinery. The vectoralist class develops out of further technical innovations in communication and control. Each in turn competes with its predecessor. Each competes for the capacity to extract as much of the surplus of total productivity as possible for its own accumulation. Each struggles with the productive classes over the disposition of the surplus. But that there is an ever-expanding surplus to struggle over is the product of the application of the hacker’s abstraction to the invention of new forms of production, or new desires for consumption, all within the framework of property.

Those dispossessed by the capture of a resource by property come to conceive of their interests in terms of property. They may struggle individually to become owners of it, or they may struggle collectively to reappropriate a portion of it. Either way, property becomes the stake in the struggle for the producing classes as much as for the property owning classes.

Land, capital and information all appear as domains of struggle between possessors defending or extending the claim of private property, and the dispossessed, who struggle to extend or defend public property Farmers struggle against their landlessness. Workers struggle against their dispossession, to claim a social wage. Hackers struggle to socialize a portion of the information stocks, flows and vectors on which the hack depends.

The hacker class, which has some sliver of ownership conferred on it by the instrument of intellectual property, finds its rights challenged again and again by vectoralist interests. Hackers, like farmers and workers before them, find that their ownership of the immediate tools of production is compromised both by the market power of the possessing class confronting them, but also by the influence that class can have over the state’s definition of the representations of property. Thus hackers as individuals are obliged to sell out their interests, and hackers as a class find their property rights diminished.

Hackers must calculate their interests not as owners, but as producers, for this is what distinguishes them from the vectoralist class. Hackers do not merely own, and profit by owning information. They produce new information, and as producers need access to it free from the absolute domination of the commodity form. If what defines the activity of hacking is that it is a free productivity, an expression of the virtuality of nature, then its subjection to private property and the commodity form is a fetter upon it. “When the meaning of a string of characters can be bought and locked into place this is the thermodynamics of language reduced to a single cryogenic chamber.”²Matthew Fuller, Behind the Blip: Essays in the Culture of Software (New York: Autonomedia, 2003). Drawing on his collaborations with Nettime, Mongrel and I/O/D that attempt to hack contemporary … Continue reading

That hackers as a class have an interest in information as private property can blind the hacker class to the dangers of too strong an insistence on the protection of that property. Any small gain the hacker gets from the privatization of information is compromised by the steady accumulation of the means of realizing its value in the hands of the vectoralist class. Since information is crucial to the hack itself, the privatization of information is not in the interests of the hacker class. To maintain their autonomy, hackers need some means of extracting an income from the hack, and thus from some limited protection of their rights. Since information is an input as well as an output of the hack, this interest has to be balanced against a larger interest in the free distribution of all information. In the short term, some form of intellectual property may secure some autonomy for the hacker class from the vectoralist class, but in the long term, the hacker class realizes its virtuality through the abolition of intellectual property as a fetter on the hack itself. The hacker class frees the hack by hacking class itself, realizing itself by abolishing itself.

Where the farmer suffered the enclosure of the pastoral commons, the hacker must resist the enclosure of the information commons. Where workers struggled to make public some portion of the surplus as social security, so too hackers must define a portion of the surplus as cultural and scientific security. Hacking as a pure, free experimental activity must be free from any constraint that is not self imposed. Only out of its liberty will it hack the means of producing a surplus of liberty and liberty as a surplus. But like the farmers’ and workers’ movements, hackers may decide to pursue a radical or reformist politics, and will redefine what is radical and what is reformist as it reclaims the common interest in what in the jargon of the vectoralist class is merely “intellectual property.”

Without an information commons, all classes become captives of the vectoralist privatization of education. This is an interest the hacker shares with farmers and workers, who demand the public provision of education. Hackers, farmers and workers also have a common interest in an information commons with which to maintain a vigilant eye on the state, which is all too often subject to ruling class capture. Even the pastoralist and capitalist classes can sometimes be allies in limiting the subjection of information by the vectoralist class to commodification. The vectoralist interest grasps at a monopoly power over information, and puts monopolizing the surplus ahead of the expansion of the surplus. What is “efficient” for the vectoralist class may impede the development of the surplus, and thus the virtuality of history.

The hacker class must think tactically about property, balancing public and private property in the scales of class interest and class alliance, but in the knowledge that the privatization of information is not in its long term interest as a class. Part of its strategy may be the enlistment of other classes in an alliance for the public production of information. But another strategy may be to extend another kind of property altogether—the property that is the gift.

Both the private and public forms of property are property in which subjects confront objects as buyers and sellers, via the quantitative medium of money. Even public property does not alter this quantification. The commodity economy, be it public or private, commodifies its subjects as well as its objects and sets a limit on the virtuality of nature.

Private property arose in opposition not only to feudal property, but also to traditional forms of the gift economy, which are a fetter to the increased productivity of the commodity economy. Money is the medium through which land, capital, information and labor all confront each other as abstract entities, reduced to an abstract plane of measurement. Qualitative exchange is superseded by quantified, monetized exchange. The gift as property is pure qualitative exchange. The gift becomes a marginal form of property everywhere invaded by the commodity, and turned towards mere consumption. The gift is marginal, but nevertheless plays a vital role in cementing reciprocal and communal relations among people who otherwise can only confront each other as buyers and sellers of commodities.

As production develops into its vectoralized form, the means appear for the renewal of the gift economy. The vectoral form of relation allows for an abstraction of qualitative exchange that may become as vast and powerful as that of quantitative exchange. Everywhere that the vector reaches, it brings into the orbit of the commodity. But everywhere the vector reaches, it also brings with it the possibility of the “opening of the dimension of the gift, its grace or beauty, between the precious and the gratis, between the unique and the ordinary.”³Asger Jorn, The Natural Order and Other Texts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 171. This is an artist’s rather than a thinker’s book, by a sometime member of the Situationist International … Continue reading

The hacker class has a close affinity with the gift economy. The hacker struggles to produce a subjectivity that is qualitative and singular, in part through the act of the hack itself, but only in part. The hack reveals to the hacker the qualitative, open and virtual dimension of the hacker’s immersion in nature, but it does not reveal the hacker as hacker to other hackers, or to the world. The hack reveals the non-subjective surplus of subjectivity, just as it reveals the non- objective surplus of objectivity.

The gift, as a qualitative exchange, creates singular producers and production as singularity. The gift expresses the virtuality of the production of production, whereas commodified property represents the producer as an object, a quantifiable commodity like any other, of relative value only. The gift of information need not give rise to conflict over information as property, for information need not suffer the artifice of scarcity.

The gift relation of vectoralized information makes possible, for the first time since the dawn of the vectoral world, a new abstraction of nature. Nature need not be objectified. It need not appear as something separate from its subjects in a relationship of ownership or non-ownership. Nature appears in its qualitative, rather than quantitative aspect. The unsustainable paradox of limitless productivity based on scarcity, both natural and unnatural, need not run on and on to its seemingly inevitable fall. Within the gift relation, nature appears as endlessly productive in its differences, in its qualitative, not its quantitative aspect. The possibility emerges of putting nature’s finite resources to work for the virtuality of difference, rather than for objectification and quantification. The latter finally appear as partial abstractions, as falling short of the abstraction of abstraction. If property is theft, then it is theft, in the first instance, from nature. The gift has the capacity to return nature as itself to itself.

The vectoralist class contributes, unwittingly, to the development of the vectoral world within which the gift as the limit to property could return, but soon recognizes its error. As the vectoral economy develops, less and less of it takes the form of a public space of open and free gift exchange, and more and more of it takes the form of commodified production for private sale. The vectoralist class can grudgingly accommodate some margin of public information, as the price it pays to the state for the furtherance of its main interests. But the vectoralist class quite rightly sees in the gift a challenge not just to its profits but to its very existence. The gift economy is the virtual proof for the parasitic and superfluous nature of vectoralists as a class.