The Pirate Organization: Lessons From the Fringes of Capitalism (4 page)

Capitalism, the State, and the Invisible Hand of Classical Liberalism

Capitalism is not liberalism. Liberalism refers to a philosophical movement and the political system that derived from it.
⁴
Originally, eighteenth-century liberalists defended individual freedom against the absolutism of European sovereigns—the very ones who laid the stones of capitalism.
⁵
Free trade is one of several possible transpositions of liberal thought onto the market sphere, but we should not see any necessity in the cohabitation of liberalist economics and capitalism. Free market economics promotes individual interest and market allocation as the two pillars of production, exchange, and wealth creation, a movement that has gained momentum since the 1980s. However, the first two centuries of European capitalism or its recent transfiguration in post-Communist China serve as two glaring examples of nonliberalist capitalistic societies. Conversely, models of noncapitalistic liberalism exist in most government-free societies or utopias, be they seventeenth-century pirates of yore or Vietnam-era hippies.

Coincidentally, it is while living in these antiestablishment, peace-and-love communities in the early 1970s that the first cyberpirates honed their craft. Within technophile circles, activists such as Abbie Hoffman or John Perry Barlow organized movements to gain technical prowess through hacking in an effort to free new digital spaces from state-controlled normalization. And John Perry Barlow, the former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, later became the author of “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Capitalism and liberalism are not synonymous, and neither are anticapitalism and antiliberalism.

Capitalism and the sovereign state are consubstantially linked, not opposed. The idea of capitalism without government is a quasi-perfect oxymoron, and so is the anarcho-capitalist pipe dream of a stateless capitalism. What is more, the idea that there should be “more government” to fight against the excesses of capitalism verges on a theoretical power grab. What matters most is not the size of government but the nature of the normalization process.

Examining the pirate organization allows us to delve into the historically contested process of imposing norms on new, uncharted territories. The pirate organization is the missing link between the state and capital in all its forms. The pirate organization tramples on all that is lawful and legal, without in any way relinquishing the appropriation of surpluses generated by the capitalistic machine.

Chapter Four

PIRATE OR CORSAIR?

Of course, the line that separates robbery from piracy organized by respectable and legitimate governments has always been a very fine one
.

—Chaudhuri,
Reflections

The dispute about whether someone should be called a pirate or not is really about who has the power
.

—Pérotin-Dumon,
The Pirate and the Emperor

During the classical period, there was no linguistic distinction between pirates and looters (
corsairs
) who acted on behalf of a town or an empire.
¹
Yet, the state was already hiring mercenaries to carry out compensatory legal seizures. These types of assaults, carried out as a way to redress past wrongs, were so common that kings and emperors signed treaties that defined the areas in which these retaliations (
sulan
) were outlawed, calling these zones “asylum” (
asulia
). It was only with the emergence of the sovereign state and the discovery of lands outside of any preexisting sovereignty that it made sense to use two different terms when discussing the subject of pirates and corsairs. This linguistic nuance is not well understood or interpreted. The two pitfalls we should try to avoid are (1) lumping pirates and corsairs into the same group, or (2) contrasting them as if they were antagonistic.

A Story of Good and Evil

The corsair as the antithesis of the pirate is an oversimplification that evokes wrongly the simple separation between police and criminals. If this relationship were true, it would mean that corsairs were mandated by authorities to hunt down pirates. This is inaccurate, and it prevents us from understanding the connection between piracy and capitalistic expansion in general.

Let’s take an example to illustrate our point. On June 25, 1603, Dutch Admiral Van Heemskerk seized the
Santa Catarina
, a Portuguese ship, in the Strait of Malacca. In those times, the sovereign state was growing, but nowhere in the world had it taken complete control of the ocean trade. Conflicts between European sovereigns were common, and quite often they were caused by maritime dispute. Van Heemskerk had returned a national hero after an expedition in the Arctic seas, and when he seized the
Santa Catarina
, he was working on behalf of the VOC—the East India Company for the United Provinces (now the Netherlands). The company was funded by private capital from rich Dutch merchants who also held most of the political power within the Dutch Republic. The previous year, the United Provinces had granted the VOC an exclusive monopoly over the spice trade east of the Cape of Good Hope. The VOC was one of the first multinational companies. It was government controlled, and during its two centuries in existence, it permanently employed between ten thousand and forty thousand people. Moreover, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Amsterdam Stock Market was created by the rulers to facilitate the trading of securities for VOC shareholders (which, unlike today’s shareholders, did not have any major decision-making power within the company). Interestingly, the first multinational company issuing tradable shares and the first stock exchange ever created came from the same roots: the sovereign state of the United Provinces.

But let’s go back to what happened in the Strait of Malacca in June 1603. On behalf of the Republic of the United Provinces, Van Heemskerk attacked the
Santa Catarina
, took its cargo, and avenged his fellow countrymen who had been mistreated by the Portuguese along the spice routes. The Spanish, allies of the Portuguese, contested the legitimacy of the seizure. In their view—also shared by the church at the time—Van Heemskerk was a pirate who had pillaged a merchant ship along a route that was discovered by the Spanish, who claimed exclusive rights to the route. To the Dutch, Van Heemskerk was a valiant corsair who defended the trade interests of the republic and enforced law and order on the seas. Other nations were free to interpret the situation in their own way. In more geopolitical terms, they could choose to become allies of Portugal or of the United Provinces.

Adopting the Flemish Perspective

In the eyes of the Spanish, all Europeans with whom they had entered into conflict between 1520 and 1650 were “pirates” in regions where the Spaniards had claimed a trade monopoly.
²
From this perspective, the English and the French who did not respect Spanish control of the route to the Americas were pirates. The issue was a legal one: on what basis can one determine whether actions are the result of piracy? At the time, international law was, at best, in an embryonic stage. It was hard for states to agree on a definition of piracy as they were still seeking recognition of their own sovereignty.
³
From the sovereign’s point of view, pirates were those who did not respect the specific standards set forth by the ruler. When the Spanish and Portuguese created a trade monopoly in the West Indies, they considered any indigenous trade networks to be pirate networks. And they applied the same rationale to Europeans as well. Anyone looking to take over part of the trade market was considered a pirate.

In 1523 Captain Florin, from Normandy, captured two Spanish ships on their way back from Mexico. To the Spanish, Florin was undeniably a pirate. But to the Normans, Florin was a hero who dared to challenge Spanish supremacy, and his exploits were worth being re-created on the stained-glass windows of the Norman church of Villequier.

Pirate
, then, is a relative term. Everyone had their pirates and at the same time could be a pirate in the eyes of others. So everyone was calling everyone a pirate. So, is the use of
pirate
and
corsair
simply a matter of perspective? That depends on what is understood by
perspective
. Let us consider the Italian perspective, à la Masaccio, the famous Florentine painter (1400–1428). Imagine you are placed before a painting, in front of the sole point where the vanishing lines meet. From the point where these lines converge, there is only one reality. You see the painting in whole. The painting offers only one interpretation according to this perspective: only one right view, other interpretations being erroneous—and any social phenomenon analyzed accordingly falls into such a Manichaeism.

If we want to increase the number of points of view, we must then turn to the Flemish perspective, à la Van Eyck (1395–1441). In one of his small paintings, titled
Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata
, you have to stand in two different places to see Saint Francis receiving the stigmata in the foreground and then, using a magnifying glass, the view—invisible to the naked eye—of a city growing in the background.
⁴
With the Flemish perspective, you cannot see everything at the same time, so you must make a choice. The Flemish perspective represents a reality that superimposes landscapes at different and incompatible points of view. To see it all, to move from one layer to the next, the observer must be constantly moving.

Following this metaphor, we should not look at piracy from the Italian perspective, which would oversimplify our judgment. We should look at piracy from the Flemish perspective, which allows for different points of view and enables us to differentiate between a pirate and a corsair by running our magnifying glass over the battlefield, where multiple parties fight for territorial gain and legitimate expansion.

Letters of Marque and Reprisal and the Red Visitor

The idea that the corsair is the antithesis of the pirate is entrenched in the political history of modern European states. These states issued documents called letters of marque and reprisal, which authorized corsairs to correct past injustices by attacking the merchant ships of enemy nations. Letters of marque and reprisal were generally granted during wartimes, and they enabled corsairs to seize goods, to use force, and to take prisoners for a limited period of time. However, the near-permanent state of war in Europe made the use of these letters relatively flexible. Francis Drake, a British corsair, was far from being as quibbling as the system for letters of marque and reprisal would require it. In the 1570s, most of the raids he carried out against the Spanish were during an official period of peace. Despite formal complaints by the Spanish sovereigns, Drake’s controversial actions—to say the least—did not raise any major protests in England: Drake was knighted by the queen and promoted to admiral in the Royal Navy.

At the end of the seventeenth century, the Earl of Bellomont, then colonial governor of New York, wrote the following at battle’s end in a letter bound for London: “They say I have ruined the town by hindering the privateers (for so they called the pirates).”
⁵
Two things should surprise us in this short fragment. First, if the eradication of privateers (i.e., sea corsairs) could cause the ruin of a colonial trading post, they must have played an essential role in the economic circuit of the time. Second, it seems that the difference between pirates and corsairs was no clearer in the seventeenth century than it is today. There’s no doubt that the situation was confusing for the Count of Bellomont, a wealthy man who for years had funded Captain Kidd’s expeditions against French ships, before handing Kidd over to the British Crown in 1699, when Kidd was tried for piracy by a kangaroo court and hanged. Historian Violet Barbour was right to assert that “privateers were regarded as pirates, as in act they were.”
⁶
So, the letter of marque and reprisal is, in the end, just a document produced by the state to legitimize a pirate expedition in the name of a “corsair” mandate. But this “corsairization” only has meaning from the standpoint of the sovereign who issued the letter. To other nations, these corsairs were pirates painted with a thin and contestable legal veneer.

Today, geopolitical vanishing lines converge with difficulty into a single focal point, just as they did in the past. After an American drone collided with a Chinese fighter plane over the China Sea in 2001, American computer networks were hit hard by a wave of cyberattacks. Attributed to the Honker Union of China, a group of ten thousand cyberpirates, the attack took aim at several hundred websites and was considered “piracy” by most Western governments.

The term
honker
(in Mandarin,
hon ke
) is derived from the words
hei ke
, the Chinese translation of the word
hacker
.
Hei ke
means “black visitor,” an expression that refers explicitly to the color of the modern pirate symbol. As for the words
hon ke
, they mean “red visitor,” which introduces a key nuance: the Honker Union of China is acting on behalf of the post-Communist state. From the Chinese standpoint, red visitors are not computer “pirates” but computer “corsairs.” The cyberletter of marque and reprisal, reduced here to a simple semantic nuance disseminated by the Chinese government, holds no more value today in the eyes of the other nations than the letters of marque and reprisal did in Captain Kidd’s time. And just like Captain Kidd, the Honker Union of China was abandoned by its former protectors: following a cyberattack against the White House’s computer system, the Chinese, hemmed in by international pressure, publicly condemned the attack as an “unforgivable violation of the law.” As a result of this simple statement, ten thousand “red” visitors suddenly crossed back over to the dark side, but only in a symbolic sense: the reversal of the Chinese government silenced criticism for a time, just as the public hanging of Captain Kidd did. But since 2001, the Chinese government has been suspected of orchestrating many more attacks with the help of cybercorsairs against foreign powers. For instance, the wave of attacks targeting US agencies, such as NASA, and military contractors, such as Lockheed Martin, seems to be part of a long-term campaign that the US government has dubbed “Titan Rain.”