Metal-free state-of-the-art catalysts. Nitrogen/carbon-

In April 2000, Microsoft was found guilty by a US court, in first instance, to offend the trust right and to try to secure itself a monopoly in the operating-system and the Web-browser market by distributing Windows in combina-tion with Internet Explorer. The decision was that the enterprise should be separated into two parts. It was reverted in 2001 by an appeal court. The encryption of the source code of software makes possible a control by license rights. Users can’t adapt the software further to their own needs; this pos-sibility is reserved for the software company. Since the middle of the 1980s, the operating system Linux and corresponding application programs have been distributed as free software, that is, the source code is accessible and the programs can be developed further by users. Hence, it will be difficult or even impossible to obtain profit with such software. Special licenses (copy left) for free software, for example, the GNU (GNU is not Linux) general public license and the open source license, were developed. The open-source principle was expanded to other knowledge forms; the result are coopera-tive, global, networked knowledge production projects like the encyclope-dia Wikipeencyclope-dia or open theory projects, creative commons licenses, that is, standard license agreements with which authors can grant rights for usage and differentiation of their works (texts, books, music pieces, etc.). The con-sumer becomes thereby the producer (procon-sumer), the reader the writer. Open source promises the participatory grassroots production of knowledge.

In July 2000, a guideline for the introduction of software patents was rejected by the European Parliament. It was argued that such patents could result in monopolies, quality loss, increasing prices of software, and the end of free software. ATTAC (Association Pour Une Taxation Des Transactions Financières Pour L’Aide Aux Citoyens) Germany and Campact organized an online demonstration against the introduction of software patents. Pat-ents protect the economic use of new ideas and guarantee to the paten-tee a monopoly for use. People who infringe patent laws or refuse to pay royalty fees for the use of an idea can be prosecuted. An example: Adobe holds a patent for special dialogue menus since 1995 in the United States and since 2001 in Europe. The software enterprise Macromedia had to pay 2.8 billion euro to Adobe because it violated this patent. Certain types of software applications, algorithms, and input dialogues are standardized and widespread; they are used globally and hence can be considered as com-mon knowledge of informatics. All object-oriented software engineering tools allow the usage of very similar input dialogues. If such an element is patented and I use it in my software application, I can be sued due to the violation of patent rights.

The TRIPS agreement (Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellec-tual Property Rights) regulates that the World Trade Organization’s member states must issue laws that secure intellectual property and that the penalties

must be severe enough in order to avoid violations. It specifies, among other things, that there must be a copyright on computer programs, films, and live performances. By such means the unauthorized copying, diffusion, and transfer of digital contents shall be avoided.

Since the beginning of the millennium, file-sharing Internet applications, which work with the peer-to-peer technology (P2P) and allow the direct exchange of data between computers, have become ever more popular. They permit the free distribution of digital knowledge (music, pictures, video, films, software, etc.). Altogether the total amount of users of file-sharing systems exceeds 100 million. The music and film industry sees file sharing as an economic threat and hence files legal suits against operators of such ser-vices. Due to a complaint of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against Napster, the latter organization had to go offline in July 2000. In September 2002, after a complaint of the RIAA, the file-sharing system Audiogalaxy was transformed into a proprietary service. In March 2002, a Dutch appeal court ruled that the provider of Kazaa is not respon-sible for copyright infringements by its users. The verdict from November 2001 against Kazaa, that it must prevent copyright infringements, was reverted. During past years there has been a boom of file-sharing systems such as KaZaA Lite, LimeWire, Morpheus, Edonkey, WinMX, iMesh, Bear-share, Blubster, SoulSeek, BitTorrent, Overnet, Toadnode, and Grokster. The knowledge industry now also sues users of P2P networks in order to create precedents and deterring examples. In the year 2004, the Virgin Megastore, Vienna’s largest retailer of music, went bankrupt. The management indi-cated that apart from heavy competition, file-sharing systems also would have led to strong losses in turnover.

In December 1999, the European Patent Office granted a patent to the University of Edinburgh for the extraction of embryonic stem cells from ani-mals and humans. This patent on genetic information also included the right for breeding stem cells. After protests and objections, the patent was limited in July 2002. In 1990, the Human Genome Project started trying to decode the genetic information stored in the human genome. From 1981–1995, approximately 1,200 patents were granted on human DNA sections.

In the Internet there are databases in which lyrics of popular songs are stored and can be browsed. The Berlin-based law firm Wollmann und Part-ner sent over 200 warnings in the name of music publishers to over 40 operators of such Web pages in April 2005. The operators were requested to sign omission explanations and to pay 1,600 euro in lawyer fees per song.

The operators concerned were to a large extent pupils and young people who were plunged into debt. The databases were freely accessible and not commercially oriented; the operators understand the publication of lyrics as advertisement for and support of artists.

These examples are characteristic for the Internet economy and show that the latter shows aspects of both a commodity and a gift economy. In the twenty-first century, knowledge is a hard-fought resource. The new property

and class struggles are conflicts on the collective or private ownership of resources.

The dialectical antagonistic character of social and technical networks as motor of competition and cooperation in informational capitalism reflects Marx’s idea that the productive forces of capitalism are at the same time means of exploitation and domination and produce potentials that go beyond actuality, point towards a radically transformed society, and antici-pate a fully cooperative design of the means of production. The productive forces of contemporary capitalism are organized around informational net-works. It is due to three specific characteristics of such structures that they come in contradiction with the capitalist relations of production and are a germ form (keimform) of a society that is based on fully cooperative and socialized means of production:

Information as a strategic economic resource is globally produced and r

diffused by networks. It is a good that is hard to control in single places or by single owners.

Information is intangible. It can easily be copied, which results in mul-r

tiple ownerships and hence undermines individual private property.

The Essence of networks is that they strive for establishing connec-r

tions. Networks are in Essence a negation of individual ownership and the atomism of capitalism.

It certainly is right that in network capitalism surplus extraction reaches all aspects of society, both production and consumption. But this is not its central characteristic (as argued by Shaviro 2003, 249) because this leaves out the antagonistic dialectical movement in which informational networks both extend and undermine capital accumulation.

Informational networks aggravate the capitalist contradiction between the collective production and the individual appropriation of goods. “The contradiction between the general social power into which capital develops, on the one hand, and the private power of the individual capitalists over these social conditions of production, on the other, becomes ever more irrec-oncilable, and yet contains the solution of the problem, because it implies at the same time the transformation of the conditions of production into general, common, social, conditions” (Marx 1894, 274).

In one of the most well-known, but also most misunderstood, passages of Karl Marx’s works he says that the “material conditions for the exis-tence” of “new superior relations of production” mature “within the frame-work of the old society” and that the “productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism” (Marx 1857/58, 9).¹ The informational networks that form the major productive forces of informational capitalism have turned into fet-ters of the relations of production. The misinterpretation of Marx is that he argued that the development of the productive forces automatically results

in revolution and a free society. But Marx always spoke of material condi-tions of a new society. If productive forces are tied up by existing relacondi-tions, there is in no way assured that they can be freed; they can remain enchained and will remain enchained as long as individuals let enchain themselves.

Networks are a material condition of a free association, but the cooperative networking of the relations of production is not an automatic result of net-worked productive forces, a network society—in the sense of a distinctive sublation of network capitalism that constitutes itself as “associations of free and equal producers” (Marx 1869, 62) and an “association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (and vice versa!, Marx and Engels 1848, 482) and that is self-organiz-ing accordself-organiz-ing to the principle “From each accordself-organiz-ing to his ability, to each according to his needs” (Marx 1875, 21)—is something that people must struggle for and that they can achieve under the given conditions but that could very well also never emerge if the dominant regime will be successful in continuing its reign. Networks anticipate a society in which “the antithe-sis between mental and physical labor has vanished”, “the productive forces have also increased with the all-around-development of the individual”, and

“the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly” (Marx 1875, 21).

Networks are forms of development as well as fetters of capitalism; para-phrasing Marx one can say that informational capitalism is a point where the means of production have become “incompatible with their capitalist integument” (Marx 1867, 791).

Manuel Castells (2006, 20) argues that Marx’s insight of the antagonism of the productive forces and the relations of production is important in the network society as rentier capitalism of the Microsoft type blocks in con-trast to other models (such as open source) the expansion of innovation.

This antagonism would be “the only lasting contribution from the classical Marxist theory” (Castells 2006, 20). This antagonism is the most important insight of Marx and it subsumes many important Marxian ideas such as the crisis-ridden nature of capitalism, social relations as class relations and potentially resulting class struggles, potentials of cooperation, the simulta-neously productive and destructive role of technology in capitalism, and the material foundations of an alternative society. Hence, the antagonism is not the only lasting contribution of Marxian thinking but an indication for the importance of many Marxian categories for the analysis and practical critique of contemporary society.

For Slavoj Žižek (2001), the advancement of the antagonism between the productive forces and the relations of production shows the topicality of Leninism because Lenin would have seen elements of capitalism such as central banks as anticipations of communism. I agree with Žižek that the Internet has an explosive potential for capitalism and that elements of the new develop within the old. But the idea of Lenin was that capitalism cre-ates monopolies that anticipate the state ownership of private property. The Internet economy, on the one hand, has monopolistic tendencies, which are,

on the other hand, permanently questioned by the free sharing and coopera-tive production of digital knowledge with the help of a global decentralized network. The Internet doesn’t anticipate a state-oriented centralized own-ership of the digital means of production but grassroots cooperation and decentralized free access. This is not a Leninist form of socialism but a form of grassroots socialism. The comparison of the WWW to central banks by Žižek is inappropriate; not Lenin but Marx was “developing the theory of a role of World Wide Web” (Žižek 2001).

The antagonistic economic character of network capitalism has two col-liding sides, the cooperative one of the informational gift economy and the competitive one of the informational commodity economy. The two sides and their antagonism will be analyzed in the next two subsections.

Cooperation in the Internet Economy:

Open Source and the Informational Gift Economy

Knowledge is in global network capitalism a strategic economic resource;

property struggles in the information society take on the form of conflicts on the public or proprietary character of knowledge. Its production is inher-ently social, cooperative, and historical. Knowledge is in many cases pro-duced by individuals in a joint effort. New knowledge incorporates earlier forms of knowledge; it is coined by the whole history of knowledge. Hence, it is a public good and it is difficult to argue that there is an individual authorship that grounds individual property rights and copyrights. Global economic networks and cyberspace today function as channels of produc-tion and diffusion of knowledge commodities; the accumulaproduc-tion of profit by selling knowledge is legally guaranteed by intellectual property rights. Rich-ard Stallman (2005) argues that the practice of persecuting the unauthorized redistribution of knowledge by robot guards, harsh punishments, informa-tion ads, legal responsibility of Internet service providers, and propaganda reminds him of Soviet totalitarianism in which the unauthorized copying and redistribution known as samizdat was prohibited.

In cyberspace, an alternative production model has been developed that sees economic goods not as property that should be individually possessed but as common goods to which all people should have access and from which all should benefit. This model stresses open knowledge, open access, and cooperative production forms; it can, for example, be found in virtual communities like the open-source community that produces the Linux oper-ating system, which is freely accessible and to which, due to the free access to the source code of its software applications, people can easily contribute.

The open access principle has resulted in global open-source production models where people cooperatively and voluntarily produce digital knowl-edge that undermines the proprietary character of knowlknowl-edge (if knowlknowl-edge is free and of good quality, why should one choose other knowledge that is expensive?). The open-source principle has also been applied to other

areas, such as online encyclopedias (Wikipedia) and online journalism (Indymedia).

Open-source software or free software is software that provides four kinds of freedom for the user (Free Software Foundation 1996):

The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.

r

The freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to specific r

needs. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

The freedom to redistribute copies so that someone can help his r

neighbor.

The freedom to improve the program and release these improvements r

to the public, so that the whole community benefits. Again, access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Open-source software has been realized mainly within projects such as the Linux operating system. Special licenses (termed copy-left) such as the GNU public license have been developed for assuring that free software has an open access to its source code. Free software hardly yields economic profit;

it is freely available on the Internet and constitutes an alternative model of production that questions proprietary production models. Eric S. Raymond (1998b) argues that proprietary software is like a quiet, reverent, hierarchic cathedral, whereas the Linux community resembles “a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches”. I agree that the Linux community rep-resents a grassroots model, but I wouldn’t compare this to a bazaar because bazaars are markets and the market mechanism and competition form ciples of the commodity economy, whereas gifts and cooperation are prin-ciples of the gift economy. In a gift economy, property is freely given away, there is no accumulation, no money or other medium of exchange, and no exchange value. The idea can in philosophy be traced back to nineteenth cen-tury social anarchist thinkers like Peter Kropotkin (1902), who argued that a free economy should be organized as free association of humans who engage in free agreements, cooperation, and voluntary mutual aid. In the twentieth century, anthropologists like Marcel Mauss used the term for describing eco-nomic phenomena in traditional societies like the Kuala ring and for distin-guishing gifts from commodity economies (Cheal 1988; Hyde 1983; Mauss 1954; Titmuss 1970). There is no agreement in the anthropological literature whether in traditional societies gifts can be free or are always based on the obligation for reciprocal exchange. With the rise of free software and the free sharing of digital information on the Internet, the notion of the free gift economy has been revived (e.g., Barbrook 1998; Veale 2003).

Lawrence Lessig employs the term free culture for the idea that tech-nology “could enable a whole generation to create . . . and then, through the infrastructure of the Internet, share that creativity with others” (Les-sig 2002, 9). For Les(Les-sig, as for Richard Stallman, freedom in this context doesn’t mean that digital knowledge should be provided at no costs but that

users should be allowed to reuse and change knowledge. Marx considered freedom as a gift economy, a realm of freedom that is characterized by well-rounded individuality, pluralistic activities, abundance, the abolition of hard work and wage labor due to technological productivity, the disappearance of the performance principle and exchange, the free production and distri-bution of goods (“from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”), and free time for idle and higher activity. The concept of free-dom that Marx and Engels put forward questions freefree-dom as the freefree-dom of private property in means of production and understands it as freedom from scarcity and domination and as a community of associated individu-als that provides wealth, self-ownership, self-realization of human faculties, and self-determination for all. Based on such a concept of freedom, a free culture doesn’t only mean that digital knowledge can be freely used but that it also isn’t exchanged for money as a commodity but provided for free. The exchange economy is sublated by the gift economy. A free culture is based on a broad concept of freedom; it is a noncapitalist culture.

Garrett Hardin (1968) argues that the commons are facing a tragedy: If they are freely available to all, the problem could arise that public resources are depleted. A feedlot available to all would be attractive for herdsmen because they could let their cattle graze for free. But if many would do so the feedlot would become bald and no one would any longer be able to ben-efit. Freedom in a commons would bring ruin to all. The problem with this

Garrett Hardin (1968) argues that the commons are facing a tragedy: If they are freely available to all, the problem could arise that public resources are depleted. A feedlot available to all would be attractive for herdsmen because they could let their cattle graze for free. But if many would do so the feedlot would become bald and no one would any longer be able to ben-efit. Freedom in a commons would bring ruin to all. The problem with this