Dmytri Kleiner: The Telekommunist Manifesto (2010)

“In the age of international telecommunications, global migration and the emergence of the information economy, how can class conflict and property be understood? Drawing from political economy and concepts related to intellectual property, The Telekommunist Manifesto is a key contribution to commons-based, collaborative and shared forms of cultural production and economic distribution.

Proposing ‘venture communism’ as a new model for workers’ self-organization, Kleiner spins Marx and Engels’ seminal Manifesto of the Communist Party into the age of the internet. As a peer-to-peer model, venture communism allocates capital that is critically needed to accomplish what capitalism cannot: the ongoing proliferation of free culture and free networks.

In developing the concept of venture communism, Kleiner provides a critique of copyright regimes, and current liberal views of free software and free culture which seek to trap culture within capitalism. Kleiner proposes copyfarleft, and provides a usable model of a Peer Production License.

Encouraging hackers and artists to embrace the revolutionary potential of the internet for a truly free society, The Telekommunist Manifesto is a political-conceptual call to arms in the fight against capitalism.”

The Telekommunist Manifesto is composed of texts that have been extended and reworked by Dmytri Kleiner, from texts by Joanne Richardson, Brian Wyrick and Dmytri Kleiner, 2004–2008.

Publisher Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, October 2010
Network Notebooks series, 3
Peer Production License. Commercial use encouraged for Independent and Collective/Commons-based users.
ISBN 9789081602129

Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2022-11-12)

Geert Lovink, Ned Rossiter (eds.): MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries (2007)

“The MyCreativity Reader is a collection of critical research into the creative industries. The material develops out of the MyCreativity Convention on International Creative Industries Research held in Amsterdam, November 2006. This two-day conference sought to bring the trends and tendencies around the creative industries into critical question.

The “creative industries” concept was initiated by the UK Blair government in 1997 to revitalise de-industrialised urban zones. Gathering momentum after being celebrated in Richard Florida’s best-seller The Creative Class (2002), the concept mobilised around the world as the zeitgeist of creative entrepreneurs and policy-makers. Despite the euphoria surrounding the creative industries, there has been very little critical research that pays attention to local and national and variations, working conditions, the impact of restrictive intellectual property regimes and questions of economic sustainability. The reader presents academic research alongside activist reports that aim to dismantle the buzz-machine.”

Editorial assistance: Sabine Niederer
Publisher Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2007
Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works 2.5 Netherlands License
ISBN: 9879078146049
274 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF

Nina Power: One Dimensional Woman (2009–) [EN, SK]

“Where have all the interesting women gone? If the contemporary portrayal of womankind were to be believed, contemporary female achievement would culminate in the ownership of expensive handbags, a vibrator, a job, a flat and a man. Of course, no one has to believe the TV shows, the magazines and adverts, and many don’t. But how has it come to this? Did the desires of twentieth-century women’s liberation achieve their fulfilment in the shopper’s paradise of ‘naughty’ self-pampering, playboy bunny pendants and bikini waxes? That the height of supposed female emancipation coincides so perfectly with consumerism is a miserable index of a politically desolate time. Much contemporary feminism, particularly in its American formulation, doesn’t seem too concerned about this coincidence.

This short book is partly an attack on the apparent abdication of any systematic political thought on the part of today’s positive, up-beat feminists. It suggests alternative ways of thinking about transformations in work, sexuality and culture that, while seemingly far-fetched in the current ideological climate, may provide more serious material for future feminism.”

Publisher Zero Books, 2009
ISBN 1846942411, 9781846942419
74 pages

Reviews: Natalie Hanman (The Guardian, 2010), Debbie Ging (Irish Left Review, 2010), Jacqui Freeman
(Socialist Review, 2010), Disquiet (The Sunday Star, 2010), Sian Norris (The F-Word, 2011), Selma Haupt (Jahrbuch Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, 2012, DE).

Publisher

One Dimensional Woman (English, 2009, updated on 2018-10-13)
Jednorozmerná žena (Slovak, trans. Miroslava Mišičková, 2014-2015, added on 2018-10-13)