Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Internet is 2 Damn Highic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of free internet, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
I. Free internet is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.
II. It is high time that Internet is 2 Damn Highs should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of free internet with a manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Internet is 2 Damn Highs of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.
Chapter I. Medeois and Interwebbers(1)
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of information control.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern medeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the medeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Medeoisie and Interwebberiat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the medeoisie were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising medeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to information, to navigation, to higher learning, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of higher learning, in which industrial distribution was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even distributer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial distribution. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern medeois.
Modern higher learning has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to information, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of higher learning; and in proportion as higher learning, information, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the medeoisie developed, increased its information control, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern medeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of distribution and of exchange.
Each step in the development of the medeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune: here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the medeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole medeoisie.
The medeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
The medeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The medeoisie has stripped of its halo every document hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage students.
The medeoisie has torn away from the intellect its sentimental veil, and has reduced the information to a mere money relation.
The medeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.
The medeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of distribution, and thereby the relations of distribution, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of distribution in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of distribution, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the medeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the medeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
The medeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to distribution and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of higher learning the national ground on which it stood. All old-established cultural institutions have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new institutions, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by institutions that no longer create cultural value, but draw culture from the remotest zones; institutions whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the distribution of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in intellectual distribution, so also in material. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common information. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
The medeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of distribution, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of ideas are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the medeois mode of distribution; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become medeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
The medeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of medeois, the East on the West.
The medeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of distribution, and of information. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of distribution, and has concentrated information in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.
The medeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal distribution forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to higher learning and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such distributive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
We see then: the means of distribution and of exchange, on whose foundation the medeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of distribution and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of information and higher learning, in one word, the feudal relations of information became no longer compatible with the already developed distributive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the medeois class.
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern medeois society, with its relations of distribution, of exchange and of information, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of distribution and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powersof the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decadepast the history of higher learning and information is but the history of the revolt of modern distributive forces against modern conditions of distribution, against the information relations that are the conditions for the existence of the medeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the informational crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire medeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created distributive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-distribution. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; higher learning and information seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much higher learning, too much information. The distributive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of medeois information; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of medeois society, endanger the existence of medeois information. The conditions of medeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the medeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of distributive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
The weapons with which the medeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the medeoisie itself.
But not only has the medeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern thinking class — the Interwebbers.
In proportion as the medeoisie, i.e., information control, is developed, in the same proportion is the interwebberiat, the modern thinking class, developed — a class of students, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases information control. These students, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of information, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the Interwebbers has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of distribution of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of distribution. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of machinery, etc.
Modern Technology has converted the little library of the patriarchal master into the great university of the industrial information controller. Masses of students, crowded into the university, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the medeois class, and of the medeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual medeois distributer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.
The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern higher learning becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the thinking class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the distributer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the medeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.
The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually into the interwebberiat, partly because their diminutive information control does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large information controllers, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of distribution. Thus the interwebberiat is recruited from all classes of the population.
The interwebberiat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the medeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual students, then by the student body of a university, then by the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual medeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the medeois conditions of distribution, but against the instruments of distribution themselves; they destroy foreign ideas that compete with their thoughts, they smash to pieces machinery, they set books ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the intellectual of the Middle Ages.
At this stage, the students still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the medeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole interwebberiat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the Interwebbers do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the bookowners, the non-industrial medeois, the petty medeois. Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the medeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the medeoisie.
But with the development of higher learning, the interwebberiat not only increasesin number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the interwebberiat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the medeois, and the resulting informational crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual medeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (Trades’ Unions) against the medeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern higher learning, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle betweenclasses. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern Interwebber, thanks to interwebs, achievein a few years.
This organisation of the Interwebbers into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the medeoisie itself. Thus, the ten-hours’ bill in England was carried.
Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of the interwebberiat. The medeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the medeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of higher learning; at all time with the medeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the interwebberiat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The medeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the interwebberiat with its own elements of political and general information, in other words, it furnishes the interwebberiat with weapons for fighting the medeoisie.
Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of higher learning, precipitated into the interwebberiat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the interwebberiat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the medeoisie, so now a portion of the medeoisie goes over to the interwebberiat, and in particular, a portion of the medeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the medeoisie today, the interwebberiat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the interwebberiat is its special and essential product.
The lower middle class, the small distributer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the medeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the interwebberiat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the interwebberiat.
The “dangerous class”, [/b/interwebberiat]
the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a Interwebber revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.
In the condition of the interwebberiat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The Interwebber has only information; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the medeois family relations; modern higher learning labour, modern subjection to information control, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many medeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many medeois interests.
All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The Interwebbers cannot become masters of the distributive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, protected information.
All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The Interwebber movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The interwebberiat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.
Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the interwebberiat with the medeoisie is at first a national struggle. The interwebberiat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own medeoisie.
In depicting the most general phases of the development of the interwebberiat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the medeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the interwebberiat.
Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty medeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a medeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of higher learning, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the medeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this medeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.
The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the medeois class is the formation and augmentation of information control; the condition for information control is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the students. The advance of higher learning, whose involuntary promoter is the medeoisie, replaces the isolation of the students, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the medeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the medeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the interwebberiat are equally inevitable.
1.
By medeoisie is meant the class of modern controllers of media, owners of the means of media distribution and employers of information monetization.
By interwebberiat, the class of modern information users who, having no means of information dissemination of their own, are reduced to labouring in order to consume or disseminate information.
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