The Pirate Organization: Lessons From the Fringes of Capitalism (2 page)

Chapter 5
will give the reader a flavor of the bigger picture—that is, of how different forms of piracy (on the seas, on the airwaves, in cyberspace, or at the heart of DNA) relate to each other and keep telling us a very consistent story on the nature of capitalism. After we have justified our perspective about the need to study piracy as consistently organized action rather than as a series of heroic individual achievements,
chapter 6
will go back in time to investigate the roots of sea pirates’ activism against the state’s self-granted monopoly on economic and social norms definition. Pirate organizations, across time and space, have often taken a stance against the state to defend what we term a
public cause
. So in
chapter 7
we bolster our claim that an interdisciplinary approach to piracy is required to avoid the damaging reductionism of a purely economic examination of the phenomenon, which intends to rationalize everything based on the holy trinity of cost-risk-benefit analysis.

Chapter 8
makes a jump in time and space to the early-twentieth-century United Kingdom, where pirate radio stations started waging a war against the state-sponsored monopoly of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). As we will see, the pirates played a key role in defining the norms of radio broadcasting that most of us have known between the mid-1960s and the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Chapter 9
reflects upon this struggle and outlines a few reasons why the pirate organization, no matter where and when, usually engages in an outright struggle against different forms of monopolistic organization. In that chapter, we also draw an essential distinction between capitalism and free markets as we are forced to recognize, based on our review of modern history, that capitalism always expands into new territories using monopolies as conveyor belts, such as the East India Companies on the high seas or the BBC on the airwaves. This, we believe, has tremendous political implications that many loud activists of today should keep in mind as they blame, helter-skelter, both free markets
and
big-business capitalism for all the evils in the world.

Chapter 10
will get us closer to the present time by deciphering the inner workings of pirate organizations in cyberspace. Recent events, such as the repeated assaults of WikiLeaks against various corporations and governments or Obama’s buildup of cyberwar capabilities, will help us illustrate vividly how mythical tales of sea piracy are likely to travel from the high seas into cyberspace in the coming years. But one should not feel uncomfortable because of the ghostliness of the twenty-first-century cyberpirates. In fact, we will maintain that they are not that different from the seventeenth-century sea pirates.
Chapter 11
gives some important background information on our system of intellectual property rights and, without going into the technicalities, draws the portrait of a new type of pirate organization called
troll
, which thrives on exploiting the system’s internal contradictions. This leads us to discuss, in
chapter 12
, how pirate organizations manage to compete with what we call the legitimate
organizations of the milieu
, which operate with the benediction and support of the state. True, the survival chances of pirate organizations are pretty low compared with those of large listed corporations—but despite a shorter life expectancy, pirates manage to profoundly alter our societies. More precisely, pirate organizations are communities where alternative norms of social interaction and economic exchange are designed, before they start diffusing throughout the broader social fabric.

Chapter 13
takes us a step further by looking at biopiracy, whose ultimate consequences could entail the redefinition of life forms at a deeper, biogenetic level—together with the granting of the right to make a profit out of it. Biopiracy is still nascent, but it will certainly be one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century, affecting many industries, such as agriculture and biotech, but also mankind as a whole. In
chapter 14
, we take a step back and critically assess the current sovereign state system’s ability to deal with the increasing power and legitimacy that reside with pirate organizations, especially those operating in cyberspace and manipulating DNA. Put simply, we speculate about the end of a world that was born in 1492 and became adult in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia—a world guided by the now ailing nation-state system for the last four centuries. How much longer can it last? In the future, which organizations will be best positioned to legitimize economic exchanges in territories such as cyberspace? Nation-states, organizations of the milieu, or pirate organizations?
Chapter 15
, the conclusion, wraps up the argument and suggests paying more attention to the lessons we can learn from the fringes of capitalism. The last pages also set the stage for an
orgology of capitalism
—namely, an interdisciplinary study of capitalism from the viewpoint of the organizations that wrote its history, and will continue to do so in the future.

Chapter Two

WHAT IS PIRACY?

Piracy may be a blot on civilization and its practitioners criminals whom it is a duty to extirpate. Yet there will always be a sympathetic response in the human heart to the appeal of the adventurer who dares go to far and dangerous places and in defiance of all organized respectability take his courage in both hands to carve out his fortune
.

—Philip Gosse,
History of Pirates

The word
pirate
comes from the ancient Greek word
peirao
, which means “to put to the test.” Analysis of ancient texts reveals that
pirate
had a broader application beyond a few notorious rebels who gained fame through their crimes. Entire villages, even small societies, were considered piratical if they refused to submit to local authorities. If they did refuse, Greek city-states or Roman towns would use force to persuade them. Piracy, in this form, occurred in many different places. Pirates acted on both land and sea. They occupied small patches of land, or they spread out across the country, in small or large groups. But they had one thing in common: they crossed all established limits of order.
¹

Piracy in Ancient Times

Although Cicero declared pirates to be the “common enemies of all man” (
communis hostis omnium
), they weren’t local criminals or intruders from far-off lands. The foundations of piracy are the result of many factors. All towns and cities, as they do today, had norms, laws, and trade practices. Pirates broke away from these. What makes a pirate is what he sets his sights on, what he seeks to change, what he proposes as an opponent of a particular society. Pirates obeyed neither the laws of the land nor any other identifiable law. As a result, one could not negotiate with them. You couldn’t trust them. To even talk to a pirate was a fundamental violation of the law. The pirate could corrupt law-abiding citizens by opening their eyes to a parallel world where the concept of territory and property did not exist. For Cicero, like many of his successors, doing business with a pirate was to venture to the other side of the mirror.

By their actions, pirates sent both a criminal and a political message to the societies they were fighting against. They were not mere bandits, per se, so they did not fall under the orders and scales of legal justice. They fell between the cracks of law. To the state, they were not clear enemies, because they did not fly a national flag and they lacked an established government. The pirate eluded the friend/enemy dichotomy put forth by judges and legal scholars since, according to the law, piracy fell outside the realm of political influence. The pirate was considered “denationalized”: with pirates, neither war nor peace was possible.

Moreover, the Roman concept of piracy laid the foundation for legal property. The pirate steals something, or he appropriates the right to it. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of reducing piracy to a question of illegal property, since pirates also rejected the legitimacy of the “prize law” that the Romans had worked so hard to establish. This
sulan
, or law of reprisals, enabled the Roman legion to use violence to recoup damages. If the pirate was not the enemy of the people, he was at least the enemy of political and legal power, since he rejected the concept of “legitimate ownership” and efforts to compensate for damages without declaring war. Pirates did not declare conflicts or recognize the damages they inflicted on a city-state or empire. They used force without legal authority, unlike the political powers that confronted them.

Historians have long been interested in the characteristics that bring together and set apart kingdoms and pirates. Take Pompey, who in 67–66 BC negotiated with several bands of pirates to get them to settle down, to stop hindering commercial development. Ironically, the pirate and the emperor share a common characteristic: they both use power to appropriate and rule. The response of a convicted pirate to Alexander the Great, as reported by Saint Augustine in
De Civitate Dei
, is enlightening: “Because I only have one rickety ship, I’m called a bandit, and because you have a large fleet, you are called an emperor.” Saint Augustine then added a key nuance: “Without justice, in fact, are kingdoms nothing more than a large band of thieves? And what is a band of thieves if not a small kingdom? Because it is a gathering of men with a leader, in which a social covenant is recognized, and which has certain conventions governing the sharing of the spoils.” However, without sufficient power to allow them to go from unspeakable to unpunished, deprived of the attributes establishing legitimacy and justice, the pirates lack legal influence over their earthly possessions.

So here’s the twist: while depriving others of their goods and rights, pirates cannot claim to own anything. This is a considerable difference that sets them apart from kings and emperors.

The Eternal Return of Piracy

Piracy has experienced a few Golden Ages. The classical era Mediterranean abounds with accounts of high-seas bandits attacking Greek and Roman city-states. Until the nineteenth century, the Mediterranean continued to experience many acts of piracy, and pirates settled in major ports on the Moroccan (Salé) and Algerian (Algiers, Tangiers) coasts. In popular stories the Caribbean is often the epicenter of piracy. Buccaneers from the eighteenth century, who were former European infantry and marines sailing the Caribbean seas, set up camps on Tortoise Island and Santo Domingo, from which they would launch attacks. Together, they boarded Spanish and Portuguese vessels, flushing the sailors from their hideouts. A few decades later, the English allowed the pirates to start a settlement in Jamaica in order to mount a defense against a Spanish attempt to reconquer the islands.

In the United States, the last captain sentenced for piracy, Nathaniel Gordon, was executed in 1862, amid multiple protests, for a crime that sank into oblivion. Since then, piracy has had periods of growth and decline. Given the increased security deployed by coast guards, customs officers, and national naval forces, some predicted piracy’s extinction on the seas. Others see piracy as an adaptable phenomenon: pirates resemble counterfeiters, who embrace the most recent technological developments to produce increasingly realistic fakes. Like counterfeiters, today’s pirates reputedly adopt the most state-of-the-art means to cause states and firms the same problems as the sea rovers did, centuries ago.

Currently, there’s a surge of high-seas piracy, especially in the Gulf of Aden, located between Somalia and Yemen. The International Maritime Organization annually recorded fifty incidents of piracy in the mid-1980s, two hundred fifty a decade later, and more than five hundred in the mid-2000s. In 2006, fifteen crew members were killed and approximately two hundred were taken hostage. But are today’s Somali pirates akin to seventeenth-century freebooters? Tentatively, our answer is no. High-seas banditry is not tantamount to the type of organized piracy that seeks to reshuffle how capitalist economies work.

So who are the real contemporary pirates? The airwaves have their pirate radio stations; the web has its cyberpirates; and DNA, at the heart of living species, has become the locus of interest for biopirates. Governments and companies across the world take these new forms of piracy very seriously, and with good reason. In June 2011, a report published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) evaluated cyberpiracy as one of the five biggest threats to the global economy. In the last few months, several cyberattacks made news: pirates from Anonymous looted Sony’s online gaming databases, Lulz Security broke into CIA servers, and unidentified attackers stole Citigroup’s confidential customer data, to name a few.

But what is the common thread among these pirate phenomena? We have decided to not put everyone in the same basket. In fact, this decision was the main motive behind the writing of this book. Committing an illegal act at sea does not make one a pirate—if so, fishing for tuna off season would be an act of piracy, as would smoking pot on a yacht. Nor is it enough to steal something by force—otherwise, bank robbers would be considered pirates, too.

We maintain that the growth of capitalism into new, technology-driven areas (oceans, airwaves, the net, DNA) goes hand in hand with the emergence of new forms of piracy. Therefore, our theory of piracy shows that pirates, regardless of the time period, share the following features: they enter into a conflictive “relationship” with the state, especially when the state claims to be the sole source of sovereignty; they operate in an organized manner on uncharted territory, from a set of support bases located outside this territory, over which the state typically claims sovereign control; they develop, as alternative communities, a series of discordant norms that, according to them, should be used to regulate uncharted territory; and ultimately, they represent a threat to the state because they upset the very ideas of sovereignty and territory by contesting the state’s control and the activities of the legal entities that operate under its jurisdiction, such as for-profit corporations and monopolies.