Multitudes
Eurozine
Multitudes
2010-04-13
Abstracts for Multitudes 41 (2010)
Philippe Aigrain
The reinvention of the commons in the information age
When corporations attempted to expand their control over the spaces newly opened by the Information and Communication Technologies, the construction of common goods became an alternative model of production, closely linked to environmental research. But global governance in these fields remains wishful thinking. A new way of evaluating economic realities in terms of human development has emerged, raising hopes of inventing models of management in agreement with these emerging practices.
Mikhaïl Xifaras
Copyleft and the theory of property
The principle of property, i.e. the (temporary) right for authors and producers to exclude others from the use of their product, seems to have succeeded in imposing itself on immaterial goods. However, creators and users of free software challenge this apparent success: while creators remain free to regulate the use of their creations, users are not in a position to exclude other users. Thus appears a multi-layered network of owners-users, a common territory, maintained through licences modulated by Creative Commons. The author is turned into a hacker, a member of a quasi-artistic community admiring the elegance of his programmes. The privately owned and the common are no longer antinomic, as properties become plural and inclusive.
Yann Moulier Boutang
Intellectual Property Rights, terra nullius and cognitive capitalism
Cognitive capitalism presents two main characteristics, collective intelligence and intensive use of the new technologies of information based on digitalization of contents and procedures. This creates an enormous challenge to the enforcement of intellectual property rights and produces a global crisis for the economic models of cultural industries. The open source movement is closer to the terra nullius principle, which is now rebuked by constitutional law, while Copyleft and Creative Commons stand for a new system of appropriation rules, which will efficiently protect the biosphere against biopiracy and the noosphere against predation of positive externalities by cognitive capitalism.
Birgit Müller
The intellectual property rights on "nature"
The Convention on Biodiversity (1992) instituted property rights on nature in order to protect it. The agreement promoted by the WTO about Intellectual Property (1994) called for the enforcement of patents on genetic components in plants and animals. Such components are isolated in the ex-colonising countries on the basis of samples, while the daily use of these plants and animals in the ex-colonized countries has no legal status. The new rights in intellectual property generate conflicts and negotiations between corporations and indigenous communities. The proposal for instituting global genetic Commons, under the stewardship of local communities, resists against the privatization of nature, but the first step would consist in learning to see ourselves as parts of nature, rather than as its masters.
Martin Préaud
Indigenous territorialities and Australian legal determinations
In Australia, the British Crown appropriated land without buying it from the aboriginal populations, whose forms of property were not recognized. In contrast with British private and individualized property, theirs is based on common property: numerous people are in charge of a particular territory and circulate from place to place, occupying various hierarchical positions in each of them. Legal actions have been engaged against mining corporations from the 1970, and a beginning of judicial recognition has emerged for aborigines' rights in 1976, but the exteriority of the two conceptions of property generates countless conflicts. Aboriginal groups prefer negotiating partial and localized solutions rather than engaging in debates about their relation to property and identity.
Pierre-Yves Le Meur
Pollution, belonging and intellectual property in New Caledonia
In Kanak culture, belonging to a social group entitles an individual to use its commons and obliges him to renew them. Outsiders can be assimilated in the community, as long as they play by its rules of common management. Hostility towards mining corporations does not result from a priori postures, but from the fact that these companies fail to understand and respect the fact that property issues concern all of the groups concerned in the myths related to the land, and that exploitation could only be acceptable if it left no trace. When the UN attempts to protect a portion of land by declaring it a common treasure for mankind, aboriginal rights are not respected and conflicts with the State are reactivated. When they accept to share their land with outsiders, Kanak populations expect government and corporations alike to preserve the constant recreation of this land, which they have the duty to steward.
Antonio Azuela
National patrimony in Mexico
Mexican national identity was founded upon the common property of a wide range of goods, going from arable land to banks, including archaeological sites and mining resources (oil). This national myth, summarized in article 27 of the Constitution which defines national patrimony as well as the rights which are related to it, is now corroded by globalization, migrations, urbanization, and claims of indigenous people over their own land.
Jon Solomon
Financialisation of knowledge
How the language and culture are transformed into private property in the transition from industrial capitalism to cognitive capitalism. Universities have recently been transformed by the practice of evaluation and ranking on a global scale.This allows to control the fluctuations in the value of their products. While the University of industrial capitalism was a great national institute of translation to and from a national language, publications on the net giving the right to intellectual property are in global English.This language allows a maximum pollination of knowledge but it leads to privatization and the limitation of national cultural production.
McKenzie Wark
New Babylon or the world of common
In Constant's unusual objects or in Aldo Van Eyck's architectural works, Modernity consisted in riding the borderline between the public and the private, in multiplying thresholds and spaces for wandering. The world could be inhabited by a homo ludens, exploring every square foot of the city and transforming it according to his creative power. Direct action by the movements of the 1960s has put an end to this dream of a New Babylon by practicing immediate appropriation. New Moloch reproduces capitalism all over the planet, reproducing everywhere its hierarchy of commercial outlets. New Babylon articulated physical spaces with communicative spaces, in a centerless multiplication of lines of flight, along its situationist drifts, producing beautiful objects.
Ricardo Dominguez
The electronic civil disobedience
This text sketches the history of the creation of electronic civil disobedience, and more specifically the Electronic Disturbance Theatre, founded by Ricardo Dominguez, in the context of Late Capitalism, the alter-globalization Movements and inflation of anti-terrorist legislation.
Mathilde Girard
Civil disobedience: from inside to outside of the democratic space
This text proposes to question the use of civil disobedience as a discourse in order to show the singularity of its political position at home, outside, or on the borders of the democratic sphere.
Frédéric Neyrat & Isabelle Stengers
Dreaming the Dark is just undo his opposition to the Light
This interview attempts to place the practice of civil disobedience in the context of the "barbarism to come" related to the state and the notion of progress, and taking into account policy of "invasion of Gaia."
Albert Ogien
Opponents, " désobéisseurs " and disobedients
The first objective of this paper is to recall that in a representative democracy, the challenge of power is expressed by three figures: the opponent, the"disobedient" and the " désobéisseur ".The second objective of this paper is to describe acts of civil disobedience, which proliferate in France today.
Estelle Ferrarese
Civil disobedience. The political conflict by Habermas
Civil disobedience is the preferred form of political conflict in Jürgen Habermas thought. This figure of social clash represents the intersection of legitimacy, civil society, political culture and living together, which are the cardinal points of the deliberation policy established by Habermas.
Irène Bellier
Indigenous peoples and the global crisis
In this article, the author points out the contradictions affecting the fight and the place of indigenous peoples within the frame of international law. Irène Bellier points out the violence of neoliberal projects supported by states and the world organization that still refer to typical schemes of the Occident.