“What happens to (capitalism) when the internet permits what I have elsewhere called “primitive disaccumulation,” the conversion of basic commodities like information and music into goods that we can appropriate or distribute without the mediation of money and markets? What do we call the results? The decommodification of communication, the demise of “reification,” the socialization of the culture industry? Has the “self-?organization” of society now reached a point where the reproduction of capitalism requires ever greater doses of socialism, liberalism, and democracy? Is the transition from capitalism to socialism legible here, too, in the new battles over copyright and intellectual property in cyberspace?”

A through-provoking interpretation, excerpted from James Livingston:

He is “asking whether we are living through a new market revolution wrought by the internet, which, by changing the way we appropriate basic goods, is changing social relations of production. Marx famously wrote about “the so-called primitive accumulation” in Capital: Volume I, where he explained it as the conversion of natural resources, including land itself, into commodities that could be bought and sold in markets, which in turn allowed for the expulsion of peasants from enclosed commons and the creation of a propertyless proletariat. The social relation of capital and labor was born (not realized) in this moment.

As I’ve suggested, this social relation is already attenuated by the extrication of both capital and labor from the fabled “process of production.” What happens to it when the internet permits what I have elsewhere called “primitive disaccumulation,” the conversion of basic commodities like information and music into goods that we can appropriate or distribute without the mediation of money and markets? What do we call the results? The decommodification of communication, the demise of “reification,” the socialization of the culture industry? Has the “self-?organization” of society now reached a point where the reproduction of capitalism requires ever greater doses of socialism, liberalism, and democracy? Is the transition from capitalism to socialism legible here, too, in the new battles over copyright and intellectual property in cyberspace?

Quite possibly, I would say, because I think Brus was right to claim that an increase in the scope and importance of commodity relations can facilitate the development of socialism, and vice versa. I’m certain that the questions need asking, because they can help us take the long view on the transition from capitalism to socialism.

I do not mean that the transition is complete, or that it could be, or that we would want it to be. In my view, the continuing collaboration and interpenetration of the two modes of production?–?“the mix,” as Martin Sklar has called it?–?is better for all parties to the social bargain. I mean only that the transition has been underway for at least a century, and that even in the absence of a socialist movement or a labor party?–?perhaps because of the absence of either?–?there is still socialism in the United States.

But why is that simple historical fact important, or even interesting? Who cares whether or where socialism actually exists anymore? Or rather, what is the point of caring? A famous political philosopher put the question to me this way: “Why is socialism the name of our desire?”

In the American intellectual context, the answers are always framed by Sombart’s question: the name of our desire is the unobtainable. To say you’re a socialist is to place yourself at the margin, beyond the pale, on the run, off the reservation, or at sea: you’re a mariner, a renegade, a castaway, you march to a different drummer, you’re above all a dissenter from the political mainstream. You know that in these United States, socialism is a foreign import, branded as such by politicians and social scientists alike, and you want?–?no, you really need?–?to come from that world elsewhere. Europe will do but France would be better. The danger on the rocks has surely passed; still you remain tied to the mast.

You want?–?no, you really need?–?to believe that socialism can’t ever happen here, because that would mean heaven and earth had somehow intersected, that the revolution of the saints had been televised but you missed it. You have to believe that your political purpose is something like a sacred vow that exempts you from the corruptions of this world. Your dissent keeps you clean. But that cleanliness, next to godliness, makes you a holy fool who must abstain from the real world.

“Do you seek far off? Surely you come back at last.” That’s Walt Whitman singing the anti-metaphysical lullaby that made him a nineteenth-century scandal. In the spirit of that poem, I hereby invite you back to these United States, where socialism is a historical reality that saturates our time and place, regardless of ideological commitments, party labels, and political discourse. It’s not the name of an unobtainable desire?–?it’s all around us.

So conceived, socialism no longer functions as an ethical principle with no bearing on the historical circumstances of our time, which is about as useful as a crucifix when the real vampires approach. Instead of a pious wish that things should be better?–?an “ought” with no purchase on the “is”?–?it begins to feel like the fuller expression of an actually existing social reality, something we can live with, build on, and build out. It begins to look like a usable past.”