The Pirate Organization: Lessons From the Fringes of Capitalism Read Online Free PDF

would willingly dispatch themselves to the moon if the capitalist State were not there to bring them back to earth .
     
—Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
     
Expansion is everything … the world is nearly all parcelled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered, and colonized. To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds, which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could .
     
—Cecil Rhodes, founder of the chartered British South Africa Company (1889–1965), in charge of administrating Rhodesia 1
     
    The advances made in the sixteenth century in cartography, topography, and geodesics allowed emerging European states to mark their geographic borders and draw boundaries. This allowed states to apply norms across an entire territory. When “new” territories are explored, they are partially uncharted. Laws are in the process of being established, and the social norms applicable to them are still in dispute. Typically, societies ask the following questions about a partially uncharted territory: Can the territory be owned? If so, by whom? By the discoverer? By the investors who funded the discovery? By the sovereign whom the discoverer is dependent upon. By those who seek to exploit the territory? Or by everyone? How can we exploit the new territory to gain legitimate profit, and how can we share it? In a nutshell, it all comes down to the creation of acceptable social norms regarding control, value creation, and value distribution.
    These same questions were asked about the sea routes between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries and about the airwaves during the twentieth century. We are asking them now in order to define the status of cyberspace and DNA, both of which are today’s versions of partially uncharted territories. In the near future, we will ask the same questions regarding the status of space. Underground resources on the Moon or Mars are likely to provide enough of an incentive to trigger a discussion. Until we have come to a consensus, the new territories of capitalism will remain partially uncharted. They will stay legal, political, social, and economic gray areas where pirate organizations thrive.
    From the birth of capitalism, the state has always been the most legitimate source of normalization. Penal standards, for example, define who a criminal is; fiscal standards define who a defrauder is; and business standards define who a smuggler is. This power allowed the sovereign state to normalize and direct the flows—goods, money, soldiers, people—running through the social system. From that point on, capitalism became a matter of conquest as states sought to expand and bring new territories under their control. And with expansion came the idea of an “outside” and a “beyond,” of new idealized places where new societies could be invented from scratch. This was the era of utopia, when everything was within reach, as long as you were willing to fight against the sovereignty of the state and its desires to normalize every corner of the planet. 2 The great discoveries created a rift between a territory and what lay outside it, and this rift is one of the factors that led to the emergence of the pirate organization.
    Concrete Geography: Normalizing Natural Spaces
     
    By the end of the nineteenth century, colonization brought most of the world’s land mass, including the Americas and the Indies, under European control. 3 But, occasionally, organized bands would refuse to obey the sovereign. Antonio Conselheiro, a preacher, was the prototype of a renegade. At the end of the nineteenth century, he, along with his followers, rejected the rules of the Old Brazilian Republic and founded the city of Canudos in northeastern Brazil, which grew to a population of thirty thousand strong. The city took in people from all over the province of Bahia, including landless farmers, runaway slaves, prostitutes, criminals, indigenous peoples, and