We are publishing an article from last June’s 6th issue of the Bulletin of the Biblioteca Spazio Anarchico [anarchist library]“Lunanera” in Cosenza. The article was discussed in its time with comrades editors of the anarchist paper Vetriolo during the initiative “Science and the State” of 27th July 2021. Concerning the ongoing pandemic, everybody can see that the rapidity of contrasting information and the senseless measures that characterize the current governments’ dramas, are no longer the result of opportunistic choices made by those who exploit us, but they now have the pathetic taste of “repetition compulsion”. It is therefore appropriate to reaffirm some of the fundamental points of our analyses, the result of critical thinking and not cold algorithms.
Politicians, scientists and pharmaceutical entrepreneurs
will be no longer able to leave their homes tranquilly.
There will be another Nuremberg and it will
involve the whole of the system from left to right.
I want a new world and we’ll have it.
(Miguel Bosé, Mexico 20th April 2021)
This paper is intended to be an in-depth analysis of what has already been discussed in previous issues of the Bulletin. The tools we equip ourselves with to analyze what is happening around us are not the result of a specialization in the field or a sectoralization of our struggles, but are built day by day in the exploitation that we suffer on our skin and in the self-determination that distinguishes our experience. The considerations raised by many parties in interpreting the events that have been taking place for more than a year, dwell on the dynamics of screwing up the repressive machine: loss of freedom, autonomy, fundamental rights.
They criticize the work of governments, States, pharmaceutical companies that did not respond adequately to the pandemic crisis and everything that derives from it. Starting from a historical reconstruction of the pandemic, it is possible to note that governments, States, pharmaceutical companies are groping in the dark with respect to the “unexpected guest” who knocked on doors, and are unable to act effectively on the consequences deriving from it; moreover, they are unable to effectively appease the protests which, albeit intermittently, are arising from many sides.
By no means do we think that these democratic and inter-class protests are an integral part of our tensions, but we absolutely shy away from the guilt of professional militantism that makes presenzialism a duty and active participation the necessary step to have the right to speak. We leave the “political” weight built up with reformism, shared with small shopkeepers and bosses, to the lords of the assemblies, to their well-calibrated strategy. To date the most intransigent politicians, as well as intellectuals, bosses, the exploited themselves are giving lectures on any subject. They report documents, studies, scientific and philosophical analyses on what is going on. Everyone is informed, everyone is channelled into the flows of connections and data waiting to transform from “open field” into varied enclosures for the new capitalisms. We will come back to this point shortly. Public or private health, distant or face-to-face schooling, vaccinations, restrictions and prohibitions, openings and closures, go to replenish the “sincerely democratic” debate on which to measure politics, while those who can, are profitably taking advantage of the speeding-up to which the new structures are leading. Public health? This is a burden from the point of view of capitalism, an investment which can only bring loss. Why should those who have always exploited us show a human face right now, if they have never done so in the past?
What should move them to pity, they who have always profited from injustice? For the bosses and governments it is better to show a human face over the most strategic sides: aid to companies, investment in new energy sources, campaigns of sensibilization on positive behaviours to be adopted, joining radical protests centred on how to exploit the historical obviousness of liberal thought. As a matter of fact, between digitalization and illegal recruitment, between IT capitalism and daily murder which the bosses and those who protect them subject us to, there is no difference but a firm correlation. Well, in recent years many collective claims born in full conflict with the institutional set-up have become elements to make sustainable both the State’s military and repressive machine and environmental devastation: a form of collaboration with their own gradual annihilation, a reduction of the distance between those who govern and those who are governed, obviously not from an economic point of view but mostly as concerns the sphere of so called “shared values”: the “common good”, to put it simply.
Among the factors that characterize the struggle for the common good, one that influences the choices of capitalism most involves “open science”. This is a method to produce scientific knowledge sharing results and opening them to scientific revision, removing the obstacles to the circulation and exchange of information. A recent change, but a very quick one in the re-modulation of its own basic principles. This happened for each “common good” cause supported by so-called partial struggles. Let’s be specific. Digital technologies have widened the possibilities to produce, share and use scientific information and knowledge in an open way, i.e. accessible to anyone who has a computer connected to the web, without access barriers. Open access scientific magazines and archives have challenged traditional magazines run by commercial editors and accessible only to those who pay costly subscriptions. Free platforms, changeable and open, are to constitute a new innovative frontier in the relation between open science and closed science. In any case, open and closed models of data management exist together in both public and private sectors. Briefly, as already happened for so the called green-economy, open science is also based on shared “common good” causes. Business open source models are by now widespread thanks to the convergence of commercial enterprises, public companies and no-profit institutions that participate in the use of open science systems.
In fact, private enterprises based on open methods have emerged: DNANEXUS, NEXTBIO which in their time made all produced data available on the web and which collaborate with great conglomerates of bio-medical and pharmaceutical enterprises. Like many others, these practices guarantee both media exposure and accumulation of capital.
The open source model of innovation has stabilized itself for years in the software industry and has reached many sectors of information and knowledge. But even this modern model is based on competition. This induces us to develop what we had anticipated before in respect to the transformations of today’s capitalisms. Let’s start from simple factors. Primitive accumulation is a process whereby the producer is separated from the means of production typical of capitalism. This accumulation, however, is not a given fact for ever but needs restructuring every time capitalism needs to get out of a crisis. The new enclosures of IT capitalism don’t aim at preventing information from spreading but at controlling it in order to make it valuable. This is the explanation for the current implausible quantity of data and information. The contradictory character of what is being affirmed or how long a concept or reflection last in the communication vortex in perennial twisting don’t count; what is important is what one can gain from the new propriety in phase of accumulation. A final reflection. We don’t think we have brought up anything new with these considerations that we have taken from a study carried out ten years ago; but it is important to remember that the new property, i.e. data put in the web, is not a material commodity which could possibly be redistributed, it is not a means of production that needs to be appropriated.
It is a commodity provided by technologies and capitalisms. It is the financial product of imperialistic wars, exploitation, environmental devastation; it is what is gained from these injustices, recycled in the refineries of digitalization and the green economy. This should make reflect even those who are more sceptical of the discriminating factors which are often brought about in reference to the techno-scientific discourse. Techno-sciences are not something neutral to be possibly shared or made better, they are among the many instruments that limit our lives. It is not the use we make of them that is right or wrong. The new face of capitalism doesn’t contradict those which preceded it throughout time; however it is giving itself a more incisive necrotizing horizon, but not one which for this reason is less prone to being attacked. The entire discourse on automatization and freedom which a certain “libertarian” literature undertook in the 1980s should be a warning, more than Orwellian dystopias. Both radical environmentalism and computerisation have found large applications in the new fields of capitalism. Those who exploit us have already understood what their new role is; certainly the role of the exploited is not that of specializing in protests, gatherings or counter-information “from below”.
The interpenetration between capitalisms and techno-sciences is a decisive element to be taken into account and to attack unconditionally: the former can’t exist without the latter. They nourish each other, they don’t cure or save and they are in the hands of death cells, the governments, which by now wouldn’t be anything without the techno-scientific apparatuses that keep them alive.
