Pirate parties against private property and surveillance

Every so often, political movements seem to sweep across Europe that cause people in different countries to form parties of a similar hue, pursuing programmes of an identical (or closely related) nature. The first such movement, in recent times, may have been liberalism, followed by the labour movement and the Greens, among others.

All of a sudden, we see "pirate parties" spring up all over Europe (and, indeed, the world). With the information and communication technologies at their disposal, the spread of this movement is even faster than on previous occasions.

Founded only in 2006, the Swedish Pirate Party already won a seat in the recent elections to the European Parliament – receiving 7.13% of the votes –, after having become the third largest national party in terms of membership (before the Green Party, Left Party, Liberal Party, Christian Democrats, and Centre Party). In Germany, albeit shortly before the end of term, a member of parliament last week switched allegiance from the Social Democrats to the German Pirate Party, becoming the pirates' first representative in a national legislature.

Pirate parties everywhere seek a reform of their countries' and international laws regarding copyright and patents. They fight against the surveillance state and for a strengthening of the right to privacy, on the Internet as well as in everyday life. They seek full transparency of state actions, government and administration. For now, they abstain from positioning themselves on the left-right political spectrum, in favour of forging alliances with all parties that are willing to support their goals.

There is no reason for pirate parties to remain single topic, though. Concerns with the coming (European) surveillance state encompass all spheres of life, wherever databases are kept to store information about us and infringe on our privacy. Informatics and the Internet permeate leisure and work alike and the state pries on us in private and in public. Labour – the Social Democrats – also started out as a single-topic movement, seeking the improvement of labour conditions, but swiftly transformed itself into a political force to be reckoned with more broadly.

The true significance of pirate parties is under-analyzed and under-theorized, not least due to the fact that they are run mostly by technologists (programmers, developers, IT entrepreneurs, etc.) with little background in social and political thought. Outside Sweden, they are often led by very young people (digital natives who do not remember a time before private computing) with no political experience at all. They are a reaction to real-life problems perceived first by people at the forefront of technological developments, but bound to become of ever greater importance to all of us.

The silly name, Pirate Party, proudly betrays the semi-criminal (at least, not law-abiding) background of this political movement. It has its roots in the Wild West anarchism of the early Internet and (illegal) file-sharing communities that are now being criminalized in most jurisdictions. The German member of parliament accepted into the folds of the Pirate Party is being investigated by the authorities for possession of child pornography (which, as he says, he obtained in the exercise of his duties as his former party's parliamentary spokesperson for Education and Research and New Media).

Whether known or unknown to them (and all their members), pirate parties fight the logic of capitalist market economy, and the laws protecting it, by supporting the pirating of goods (such as music and films), informational self-determination on the net, and open-access policies for scientific research findings. While pirate parties propose to abandon private property in the form of copyright and patents, it will, consequently, be necessary to abandon property at a more fundamental level, in all its forms.

Here the question arises whether the foundation of a political party is the right way – and a traditional party is the right form – to fight surveillance and property. After all – and hardly considered by the technologists behind these parties –, it is democracies that protect private property and, through security scares and fears of crime, give rise to the police or surveillance state (even though the latter may yet prove to be democracy's downfall).

I hold that it won't be possible to fight property and surveillance by democratic means. If pirate parties, in the course of time, grow less radical and become satisfied with introducing safeguards to surveillance and exceptions to property they may be accommodated within the democratic and capitalist system (just as Labour and the Greens were).

Ultimately, however, something more basic is beginning to take shape. The opposition against property and the police/surveillance state will form outside of parliaments and the fight will be fought against democracy and the indifference of the majority.

If the pirates make it their fight they will play a role of utmost historical significance. Otherwise, they will (have to) be superseded.