The Pirate Organization: Lessons From the Fringes of Capitalism (9 page)

Furthermore, if universal economic principles were dictating how pirates organize themselves and act, we should observe quite a homogeneous pirate organization across the globe. However, although the pirate organization publicly contests everywhere the appropriation of gray areas, it takes on different forms in different parts of the world. For instance, a pirate fleet could range from a dozen ships in the Caribbean islands to hundreds of ships in Asia. Also, codes differ from one region to another. Hence, absent some other political and institutional motivations, it is hard to understand why the same universal economic rationality would yield different outcomes in different seas.

Despite its flaws, an economic analysis can help to explain the existence and operations of the pirate organization. Analyzing the relations between means, chain of command, and rules for distributing booty is indispensable and very instructive. The pirate organization needs ships to sail along the gray areas of an expanding world. It needs men and resources to continue its activities. It has to broadcast the public cause it defends, which is that of a legitimate expropriation of the sovereign and its allied corporations, rendered necessary, according to pirates, when the latter ignore the broader interests of the community.

In spite of it all, we think that a complete analysis of the pirate organization needs to go beyond a purely economic perspective because it is economic logic that the pirate organization fights against. We need other explanations. Because the pirate organization thrives on the fringes of partially uncharted territories, it participates in their normalization, albeit indirectly. The pirate organization does not hide within the interworking of the system. It stands on the surface, flies a recognizable flag, catches people’s attention, and arouses the fury of sovereign-protected owners. It meddles in the gray areas and keeps on countering organizations of the milieu at every turn. The pirate organization is truly a force that acts out against capitalistic overcoding. It tries to clear the paths of incessantly repeated normalization but keeps advocating publicly for changes in perspective.

Chapter Eight

THE PIRATE ORGANIZATION ON THE AIRWAVES

Piracy on the airwaves is a form of anarchy
.

—Hugh Jenkins, president of the Labour Communications Committee (UK), 1966

The BBC: now enjoying an international reputation, the British Broadcasting Corporation has long been the sworn enemy of a series of illegal companies previously known as “pirate radio stations.”
¹
The first radio broadcasts created a new, uncharted territory for capitalism to expand into. While in the aftermath of World War I, “the media experienced immense popularity, … most of its basic principles—its technical characteristics, its daily use, its standards, its regulations and perhaps, above all, its entire economy—remained to be determined.”
²

The Fight Against Pirate Radio

The BBC was founded in 1922 as a government monopoly. But Britain’s grip on this partially uncharted territory did not please everyone. Starting in 1928, pirate radio stations transmitted radio broadcasts from makeshift ships. They made sure to moor their ships far enough from the British coast to elude legal prosecution. Most pirate radio stations believed that radio broadcasting as imposed by the monopolistic BBC was unacceptable. Why not allow several stations to broadcast on different wavelengths so that people could choose their own program? Why impose an educational goal when radio could be highly entertaining, make people think, allow listeners to express themselves, to dance with friends in the middle of the living room? Why only broadcast classical music when you could also offer bebop, swing, and later rock and roll? The BBC would come up against hordes of pirate radio stations, which continued to push the limits of radio broadcasting for another forty years.

In 1930, pirates created the International Broadcasting Corporation (IBC) to contest the BBC’s model. The IBC forged partnerships with many pirate radio stations throughout Europe in order to propose alternative programming rights under the noses of BBC representatives. The IBC proposed a radically different model that favored varied programming and contemporary music. In this model, the best programs on sister pirate radio stations were compiled and rebroadcast. They were tailored to a specific audience using relay antennas. The programs were picked based on location and adapted to the sociological traits of each city and suburb. In contrast with the BBC, which was always live, the IBC prerecorded parts of programs, which were combined and rebroadcast in a number of geographic markets. The IBC was funded by advertising, and it enabled its founder, Leonard Plugge, to get rich quick given the success of its programs.

Pirate radio stations that popped up after World War II fine-tuned their methods for evading standards and regulations. For example, Radio Mercur, founded in the 1950s, broadcast from a ship located in international waters, but the ship itself was registered in Panama, was funded with Swiss money, and was rented to a company established in Liechtenstein. It was almost impossible for authorities to take legal action against radio pirates of this type.

The BBC and its defenders were adamant in their belief that broadcasting beyond the borders of the sovereign state should be banned. Such a ban eliminated any possibility of broadcasting a program outside the country in which it was produced. Obviously, this prohibition made no sense, since radio waves, by their very nature, cross the physical boundaries of countries and technically cannot be stopped by force. Moreover, the British Crown, famously, bent its own rule when it ordered pirate stations to broadcast anti-Nazi propaganda outside the United Kingdom at the outset of World War II. This is how the IBC was recruited by the BBC in the 1940s, when British secret services were discretely buying up airtime on Radio Luxembourg, the main pirate radio station in the mid-twentieth century to broadcast Chamberlain’s speech on the German airwaves. This kind of practice did not occur only during wartime: in 1962, Radio Mercur was dissolved by the Danish government, which at the same time had recruited a large number of its speakers to host programs within the national broadcasting association. Therefore, radio also had its corsairs.

In addition to the protection of the sovereignty of the national territory, the BBC used another argument to justify its fight against pirate radio: the defense of intellectual property. It’s true that pirate radio stations broadcast music without paying all record company royalties. But for most innovative record companies that invested in rock and roll, pirate radio was the only means to reach a larger audience, since the BBC categorically refused to broadcast what it considered to be anarchistic music. Even as they complained about not receiving royalties, record companies still managed to send out previews of their new records so that listeners could get to know them. These companies were the unofficial instigators of a vast pirate enterprise that boosted both their reputation and sales, even as they fought alongside the government and the BBC. The BBC also found itself caught in the web of its own antipirate talk: in order to protect their sales, the record companies authorized the BBC to broadcast only twenty-two hours of musical programming per week, while the majority of pirate stations were playing upwards of ten hours of rock and roll each day.

Successive waves of capitalist expansion into new territories create a series of gray areas from where pirate organizations can diffuse and defend their public cause. In their own quest for political or economic advantage, organizations of the milieu sometimes compromise by adopting the pirate way behind the scenes while publicly opposing it (e.g., think of record labels siding with the BBC regarding copyright issues while making sure that their latest releases are broadcast on pirate radio stations). Record labels put the BBC in a corner and participated in its commoditization, ending its monopoly and the direct control of the sovereign over its programs. Absent pirate radio, the entertainment and media industries could have taken a very different path, which ironically could have prevented them from dominating the sphere of cultural production throughout the twentieth century—at least until the rise of cyberspace in the late 1990s.

Chapter Nine

THE PIRATE ORGANIZATION AND THE MONOPOLIST

Traditionally, the granting of a trade monopoly … is a power that the sovereign exercises over his territory, its citizens, a power that is then extended to the territory and the colonized people. The very concept of law is closely linked to that of territoriality
.

—Soderberg,
Hacking Capitalism

To eliminate piracy on a larger scale, however, trade monopoly had to be given up altogether
.

—Pérotin-Dumon,
The Pirate and the Emperor

To exploit the resources of a new territory, states define which organizations can operate, embody, and convey the norms of exchange as well as determine property rights, the nature of risks, and the sharing of returns on investment. Historically, monopolies bring together capitalist territorialization with the normalization of trade. Often, monopolistic organizations are granted sovereign charters by the state in order to make normalization possible. The East India Companies, for example, were chartered companies, and so was the BBC. Both helped sovereigns to normalize partially uncharted territories.

On the other hand, the pirate organization champions a public cause in opposition to the sovereign’s norms. It is a renegade form of economic action from within the limits of capitalism itself. It disputes the basic assumptions of capitalism—levying of tax and capturing of profits—the tenets that characterize the monopoly state and its offshoot, the oligopoly state. The pirate organization claims other rights for economic exploitation, without “legally” defining a territory or establishing property rights.

Route to the Indies, Commercial Monopoly, and the Birth of Capitalism

In 1498, Vasco da Gama sailed from Portugal around the Cape of Good Hope and opened the route to the East Indies. Over the next fifteen years, the Portuguese court sent a series of armed armadas to the Indies in order to eliminate Muslim trade throughout the area and prepare the ground for the Portuguese arrival. This period marked the beginning of the reign of a new form of economic organization: between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the modern European state established the trade monopoly as a fulcrum for capitalistic expansion. In particular, the Portuguese Crown wanted to capitalize on new trade opportunities that were opened up to the east by Vasco da Gama. To do this, the Portuguese Crown granted a royal charter to Carreira da India, a trade organization, giving it the exclusive right to import spices into Europe.
¹

It was only at the beginning of the seventeenth century that other European powers entered into the race to set up a monopoly with the support of the Indies companies. This is how, in 1602, the United Provinces granted the VOC a twenty-one-year monopoly on trade with the regions lying east of the Cape of Good Hope. For many historians, the VOC remains the archetype for the “merging of sovereignty and trade monopoly—that is to say the strict integration of the political, military and market sectors.”
²
Monopolies are a very powerful force of normalization in the modern age. These large corporations employ tens of thousands of employees whose mission is to conquer new territories. Historically, the flow of people—soldiers and merchants—who came out of this new form of organization were controlled through a series of norms of unprecedented complexity: international laws for managing trade conflicts, fiscal treatises for charging a surplus, administrative norms for company governance, accounting standards for circulating assets, rules for training troops and guidelines for combat, rules of behavior for encounters with aboriginal populations, stock market directives for financing the development of large corporations, and even rules for recruiting sailors.

Most of the norms governing monopolistic trade were a novelty at the time, as were most of the institutions that facilitated their use. The opening of the Amsterdam Stock Market in 1611, the founding of the Siegen military academy in 1616, and the use of risk calculations by insurance companies are just a few obvious examples. For almost two hundred years, large European monopolies would continue to dominate international trade by following these same principles.

The common view of capitalism now is that it is essentially based on free competition. But is it? From the seventeenth century on, monopolies have been the rule, and free trade has usually been the exception. When historians analyze the modern era in comparison with other eras, they conclude that the (relative) freedom of trade has had a long history, and that trade regulations established by the modern state were the true innovation.
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In any event, at the beginning of the capitalist era, monopolies and other sovereign privileges spearheaded the globalization of flows. They constitute the terrain from which capitalism evolves.

Christopher Hill rightly observes that “pirates exterminate those who bought privileges from a State.”
⁴
In fact, pirates seem to defend the right to venture off on their own, to follow their own standards, and to benefit from the profits. In the modern age, the monopoly was a privilege that excluded private initiatives. This led to the quick ruin of well-established merchants and consequently gave rise to two phenomena: some companies stood up against monopolies by establishing a parallel and illicit trade route, and some tried to violently take over part of the flows from a monopoly. From the perspective of the sovereign state, both types of response were considered piracy. The growth of the pirate organization in the seventeenth century therefore cannot be separated from the normalization process of world trade carried out by the sovereign states.