Kleiner, Dmytri. 2010. The Telekommunist Manifesto. Network Notebooks 03, Geert Lovink & Sabine Niederer, eds.. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. 


'Venture communism' is a term intended to evoke workers' self-organisation, to address the way that class conflict is conceived across telecommunications networks where monoliths have privatizing communication and reap surplus profit (2010: 5). As the terms suggest, the manifesto explores class conflict and property relations in an unreconstructed manner of the political economy critique for informational conditions. Although rooted in free software development, Kleiner maintains: "The communization of immaterial property alone cannot change the distribution of material productive assets, and therefore cannot eliminate exploitation; only the self-organization of production by workers can." (2010: 7) 

A critique of the claims of free culture is developed and so too the analogies between technical and social systems of organization in a section called "Peer-to-Peer Communism vs The Client-Server Capitalist State". This maybe a familiar characterization of social-technical dynamics but the (over) simplicity of the formulation is a powerful critique rooted in an understanding of the political economy and the ways that social relations are determined. (It is parody, but as with all parody, serious too.) 

Class in this sense can be seen to be engineered partly through network topologies of centralised Statist forms, and distributed forms like the commons that is equated to worker self-organisation and the central importance of property. One of the central issues here is the contradiction at the core of the term 'free market', that is clearly not free but a description of the market economy that in itself follows 'unfree' principles of 'economic rent' (2010: 10-12). Referring to David Ricardo's writing (_On Principles of Political Economy and Taxation_, of 1817), the concept rent is used here to indicate the income that owners earn simply from the act of ownership itself, like the earnings derived by letting private property by landlords (named literally after the enclosure of common land). Both capitalist and landlord expropriate. Property remains a core issue and it is enshrined in the legal apparatus to protect class divisions (it protects bourgeois property in other words). It is in this sense that Pierre-Joseph Proudhon famously stated that "all property is theft" (in Kleiner 2010: 30). 

(see Wark also, and 'rent' in Pasquinelli).  

This theoretical foundation is useful for Kleiner as he wishes to develop a critique of the rise of social media as a project of venture capitalism, that expropriates developments in the free software movement and the radical potential of peer to peer technologies (2010: 15). His example of the ways that the Internet has always been social is UseNet, the distributed messaging system, operating ing since 1979 (although now subsumed by the Google monopoly). The point is that ownership and property are core issues in these platforms and they are organized in ways that follow the logic of rent. The owners derive profit even as they lie idle, through effective marketing and the generation of hype, through 'venture capital' investment and centralized control. Whereas P2P systems are owned by commons. "From this perspective, it can be said that Web 2.0 is capitalism's pre-emptive attack against peer-to-peer systems." (2010: 19)

The Thimbl project is a socio-technical critique rooted in this principle. The distinctiveness of peer production lies in the relative independence of workers to control common productive assets and share the benefits. This is 'venture communism' to Kleiner, opposed to capitalist and socialist Statist forms where the control over immaterial assets extends to the whole of society (2010: 23-25). Under venture communism, ownership applies to labour not property, property is held in common and labour guarantees a share of the rent so to speak. It is taking control of the productive process.  

Copyleft:
Copyleft is not the answer at all. It is a mechanism for critique of copyright but following the logic of negation of negation, it the whole system of property that is the problem. 
"While copyleft is very effective in creating a commons of software, to achieve a commons of cultural works requires copyfarleft, a form of free licensing that denies free to organizations that hold their own assets outside the commons." (2010: 28) The radical position around copyright is to reject it altogether. Any forms of property rights over the commons is unethical. In this sense the 'creative commons' project is ill-named. copyleft may go further but still holds reinforces the system of copyright through its critique in the way that all critique is also productive for the thing it critiques. This is the position of Piratbyran for instance, the founders of the P2P bittorrent site Pirate Bay, rejecting copyright in its entirety: "No copyright. No license" (in Kleiner 2010: 43, whereas Kleiners position is this is only possible once a class-less society has been achieved).    





       

(where does anarchism fit?).