At this stage the workers and creators still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole globe, and remain broken up by their mutual competition. Now and then the creators are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry and that place the workers and creators of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern knowledge workers, thanks to the network, achieve in a few years.

2. Freedom and Creation

Not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the digital working class—the creators. Possessed of skills and knowledges that create both social and exchange value, resisting reduction to the status of commodity, capable collectively of producing all the technologies of freedom, such workmen cannot be reduced to appendages of the machine. Where once bonds of ignorance and geographical isolation tied the proletarian to the industrial army in which he formed an indistinguishable and disposable component, creators collectively wielding control over the network of human communications retain their individuality, and offer the value of their intellectual labor through a variety of arrangements more favorable to their welfare, and to their freedom, than the system of bourgeois ownership ever conceded them.

But in precise proportion to the success of the creators in establishing the genuinely free economy, the bourgeoisie must reinforce the structure of coercive production and distribution concealed within its supposed preference for “free markets” and “free trade.” Though ultimately prepared to defend by force arrangements that depend on force, however masked, the bourgeoisie at first attempts the reimposition of coercion through its preferred instrument of compulsion, the institutions of its law. Like the ancien régime in France, which believed that feudal property could be maintained by conservative force of law despite the modernization of society, the owners of bourgeois culture expect their law of property to provide a magic bulwark against the forces they have themselves released.