People who want to share music or videos or want to reform copyright are often accused of practicing piracy, but the question asked by David Bollier is: where pirates really so bad?
Excerpt:
“As the “piracy” metaphor has gained currency, its literal history has all but disappeared from memory. But it’s worthy revisiting that history because it reveals a great deal.
I’ve gained an eye-opening perspective on piracy in recent days from reading The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. The book brings to mind Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. It’s a history of ordinary people as capitalism became a global force in the 17th and 18th Centuries. The book is not about piracy as a metaphor, but about the literal pirates of history. (Thanks to Lawrence Liang and Prashant Iyengar for the tip!)
The Many-Headed Hydra is the story about how slaves, soldiers, sailors, factory workers, laborers and other commoners from dozens of countries were pressed into the service of global capitalism on ships and plantations, and in factories and distant colonies. Proto-capitalists eager to accumulate wealth from global trade and conquest quickly realized that their work required the enclosure of the commons. They also needed to devise new types of servitude — wage slavery, indentured servitude, impressment onto ships, and outright capture and slavery. The maritime state arose to facilitate these needs. And so, through the dispossession of the commoners and their forced servitude, England came to dominate the early slave trade and became a great power.
The “pirates” were renegade populations of former slaves who had managed to escape their captors. Reconstituting themselves on pirate ships, they showed that cooperation and resistance were not only a useful way to escape slavery, but an attractive alternative to the brutish, ruthless norms of the commercial world. From the 1670s to 1730s, write Linebaugh and Rediker, “The ship became both an engine of capitalism in the wake of the bourgeois revolution in England and a setting of resistance.” As working conditions on ships deteriorated – too little food, rampant disease, involuntary servitude for years, withheld payment, etc. – sailors often mutinied.
Ships became “a breeding ground of rebels,” because of the harsh conditions and the lack of recourse to law. They also became “a forcing house of internationalism” that brought together Africans, Britons, Irish, Dutch, Porguguese, quashee and countless other races and cultural traditions. Soon the “hewers of wood and drawers of water” of diverse cultures and ethnicities – the outcasts of all nations – developed their own subterranean cultures of cooperation, egalitarianism and democracy. As Linebaugh and Rediker write:
The early-eighteenth-century pirate ship was a “world turned upside down,” made so by the articles of agreement that established the rules and customs of the pirates’ social order, hydrarchy from below. Pirates distributed justice, elected officers, divided loot equally, and established a different discipline. They limited the authority of the captain, resisted many of the practices of the capitalist merchant shipping industry, and maintained a multicultural, multiracial, multinational social order. They sought to prove that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal Navy…. The pirate ship was democratic in an undemocratic age.
Piracy was reviled because it broke the law – but more to the point, because it disrupted the slave trade. Pirates would often raid English and Dutch ships carrying full loads of African slaves and slave-made goods and gold to market. Piracy was not good for business because it introduced new costs, uncertainties and losses to commerce. It didn’t help that many pirates were former slaves and involuntary laborers who had escaped from servitude. In this sense, the mere existence of pirates set a “bad example” because they flouted the majesty of the law, which dictated that some people be treated as private property. Today’s pirates are making a similar statement against commodification – in this case, of creativity and culture.
Pirates were a dangerous lot not just because they could be quite violent, but because they demonstrated alternative forms of work, community and authority. They demonstrated viable alternatives to the brutalities of commerce and the maritime state.”