Free and open-source software (henceforth foss) has long captured the attention of social scientists and advocates of social change. Blending highly skilled expertise, voluntarism and gratuity, through hybrid organisational features, it has puzzled academics across the social sciences, while constituting fertile ground for political interpretation. Among a growing number of contributions on the topic, Söderberg’s Hacking Capitalism stands out as an attempt to renew Marxism through foss, firmly located within recent Autonomist Marxist debates on the nature of contemporary capitalism.
The thesis is easily stated: emerging from the ‘contested terrain … of technological development’ (p. 2), hackers differ from traditional labour forces for having ‘a technology of their own to draw upon’, which, ‘through the global communication network’, matches the ‘coordinating and logistic capabilities of state and capital’ (p. 2). Depriving the latter of control over research and development, foss represents an ‘alternative model for organising labour relations’ and ‘arranging labour power’ (p. 2) promising to undermine ‘the social division of labour as the regulating principle for technological development’ (p. 4). Governed by political, aesthetic and technical considerations, and elusive in facing capital and the state, hacking is understood through the category of ‘play struggle’. Consonant with labour struggle, it stresses the voluntary, self-determined, and non-instrumental nature of hacking (as opposed to labour), its politics consisting in distancing ‘doing’ from ‘the wage relation’, with play as labour’s self-organisation of ‘constituent power outside the confines of market exchange’ (p. 3). Thus, hacking and foss subject technology, the archetype of instrumentality, to ‘a model determined by the play-drive’ (p. 10), simultaneously continuing and transcending ‘the tradition of labour struggle’ (p. 192).
Used as a magnifying glass to investigate capitalism’s restructuring and the potential for resistance, hacking and foss’s emancipatory potential is taken as departure point to review Marxism ‘in relation to networked capitalism’ (p. 6). With its focus on class composition and cycles of struggle, as well as its claims of a fading distinction between production and reproduction, work and leisure, and of the confines of the production process, Autonomist Marxism is the privileged analytical standpoint. Within this perspective, foss and hacking represent a challenge for conventional Marxist treatments of labour and class composition, exemplifying a labour process ‘diffused to the whole of society’ (p. 6), whereby ‘audiences and users are “put to work”’ for capital (p. 8). Therefore, ‘software code is interesting’ to examine exclusively ‘as a cursor of the general intellect’, illustrating ‘how the mind has grown into a productive force in its own right’ (p. 184). Thus, inspecting the multifaceted reality of foss, the argument stresses the tension characterising hacking and foss, accounting for factors suggesting their transcendental nature with respect to capitalism, as well as those aligning them with the logic of a post-Fordist, networked capitalism.
Through analysis of its history and internal politics (Chapter 1), hacking is identified as living labour reappropriating the means of production, driven by workers’ refusal of work in response to factory despotism, Taylorism, and black-box technology designs. On the other hand, the mitigation of egalitarianism through voluntarism, the reproduction of hierarchy, power and exclusion along the lines of skill and merit, and the ambivalence of the foss business model are seen as factors fostering compliance with capitalism. Located within the broader Marxist debate concerning the information age and post-Fordism (Chapter 2), hacking and foss are understood as confirming the centrality of audiences and users in value production. The commodification of information (Chapter 3) is also analysed through the contradictory role of cultural workers with respect to authorship and intellectual property, as well as the capacity of technology designs to enshrine, and de facto enforce, legal architectures. Open access to technology is, therefore, read as a form of resistance, weakening Taylorism and spreading skills and know-how beyond professional boundaries, thus destabilising authorship, the intellectual property regime, and the informational commodity.
Moving on to discuss consumption and the satisfaction of needs (Chapter 4), the emergence of hacking is attributed to the saturation of immediate material human needs in mature capitalism, and the boredom resulting from alienated mass consumption, rather than to inherent features of information technology. Thus, the rise of the prosumer (producer-consumer – the consumer participating, through user-generated content and information, in valorisation) is understood as capital’s counter-resistance to conflicts in the labour process and the refusal of and to work. Given its origin as departure from market and mass-produced consumption, user-centred production may be potentially superior to markets in satisfying social needs. When it comes to production (Chapter 5), the success of FOSS is read as evidence of the ‘inadequacy of capitalist social relations in organising labour in the information sector’ (p. 9). The spread of the production process outside the factory walls to society as a whole having re-skilled and empowered users/consumers, capital loses monopoly over the production process (of software) and has to reassert control through a balanced mix of responsible autonomy and legal architecture. Revisiting the age-old question of planning versus market exchange as the most efficient resource allocation mechanism through foss, hacking and peer-to-peer networks (Chapter 6), ‘a third path between market exchange and state planning’ (p. 155) is identified emerging from the combination of elements of archaic gift economies and market exchange. Finally, the practice of hacking is compared and contrasted with definitions of play, and the category of ‘play struggle’ refined drawing on Schiller and Marcuse (Chapter 7).
Although firmly rooted in Autonomist Marxism, Söderberg’s argument and method differ from traditional autonomist accounts on three important grounds. First, and opposed to the high level of abstraction typical of Hardt and Negri, a concrete, although theoretical, case study is chosen to sustain the argument. Second, the technological determinism, fetishism of technology, and informational exceptionalism often permeating hacking and foss as well as much recent Autonomist Marxist writing is carefully avoided. Third, a great deal of effort is spent to highlight tendencies and countertendencies affecting foss’s emancipatory potential. All of these contribute to the book’s not lapsing into wishful thinking; an attitude attributed by the author to Negri and Holloway (p. 7). While these elements are to be welcomed, important issues remain pending: what is the scale of hacking and to what extent can it be considered an activity independent from the pre-existing division of labour and skills? Why has the foss model not spread significantly to sectors other than software? Although the latter is hinted to at times through suggesting that the model is spreading to hardware and other sectors, both questions remain unresolved. Addressing them would clarify the usefulness of the category of play struggle, as well as both the claims of hacking’s transcendental potential versus hacking as exploitation of free labour within networked capitalism.
Marco Boffo is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, working on the political economy of software.
