I coined the term "Venture Communism" in 2001 to promote the ideal of workers self-organization of production as a way of addressing class conflict. Telekommunisten is a collective based in Berlin, Germany, where I have lived since 2003. I first encountered the term "Telekommunisten" (which became the name of the collective) in 2005, while visiting the apartment of a friend. He and his roommate had given the name "Telekommunisten" to the local area network used in their apartment to share Internet access. Telekommunisten had been used as a derogatory term for Germany's former state telephone company, Deutsch Telekomm, which is now a private transnational corporation whose "T-Mobile" brand is known worldwide. The usage of communist here is intended to cast the Telephone company as a monolithic, authoritarian, and bureaucratic behemoth. This is a completely different sense than the one in which I use the term as a positive one for engagement in class conflict towards the goal of a free society without economic classes, one where people produce and share as equals, a society that has no property and no State, and produces not for profit, but for social value. We are not simply a collective of worker-agitators working in the sphere of telecommunications, Telekommunisten promote the notion of a distributed communism; a communism at a distance; a Tele-communism. A venture commune is not bound to one physical location where it can be issolated and confined. Simular in topology to a peer-to-peer network, Telekommunisten is intended to be decentralized, with only minimal co-ordination required among it's international community of producer-owners.
My background is in the hacker and art communities, in which I have been active since the early 90s. My views have been developed and expressed in on-line and off-line correspondence in the course of my involvement in software development, activism and cultural production. Although I have written a few essays over the years, those who know my work generally know me personally through encounters in electronic and physical social spaces. The present work is a "Manifesto," not in the sense that it outlines a complete theoretical system, a dogmatic set of beliefs or the platform of a political movement, but in the spirit of the meaning of manifesto as a beginning or introduction. Matteo Pasquinelli, who pushed me to undertake this "Manifesto," felt that my role as a background voice in our community was too underground and declared it was "Time to come out" with a published text. He connected me with Geert Lovink, who suggested the structure and approach of the text and offered to serve as editor and, through the Institute of Network Cultures, as its publisher.
The Telekommunist Manifesto is largely a cut-up and reworking of texts I've produced and co-produced over the last few years. It incorporates significant passages from "Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative Anti-Commons" produced in co-operation with Joanne Richardson and originally published under "Anna Nimmus" on the subsol website. Much of the text regarding the commercialization of the Internet is taken from "Infoenclosure 2.0," co-written with Brian Wyrick originally published in Mute Magazine. Credit is also due to Mute Magazine editors Josephine Berry Slater and Anthony Iles, for their work on "Infoenclure 2.0" and "Copyjustright, Copyfarfleft,", much of which is reused here.
This publication is intended as summary of the positions that motivate the Telekommunisten project, based as it is in an exploration of class conflict in the age of international telecommunications, global migration, and the emergence of the information economy. The goal of this text is to introduce the political motivations of Telekommunisten, including a sketch of the basic theoretical framework in which it is rooted, covering views on political economy and intellectual property. The text also covers some broader topics, such as workers self-organization of production, anti-copyright/copy-left dissent against intellectual property, and peer to peer as a networked application topography, as well as a set of relations with growing social implications as networks become more central to how we produce and share. The Telekommunist manifesto is also intended to introduce the reader to some the specific theoretical components of the project, such as Venture Communism and Copyfarleft, and to explain why we have chosen to struggle against capitalism by way of the international telephone system.
The economic analytical models employed in this text are heterodox, based in the ubiquitous terms of classical political economy and borrowing from its diverse theorists and critics. This text is especially addressed to politically motivated artists, hackers and activists, not to evangelize a fixed position, but to contribute to an ongoing critical dialogue.
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