Pirate Effect Rolls Through Nordrhein-Westfalen

This post will be updated as more statistics become available. Otherwise I want to ignore the PP for a while, although it’s difficult being currently in Germany.

As predicted the Pirate Party surpassed the 5% hurdle yesterday in Nordrhein-Westfalen (NRW), winning an estimated 7.8% of the vote. This is their fourth successful election since the breakthrough in Berlin last September. That boost entirely changed their fortunes; just two weeks beforehand they had scored under 2% in the regional elections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, a figure around which they orbited in polls in Bremen, Rheinland-Pflaz and Hamburg earlier in 2011. But since Berlin they have entered regional Parliaments in Saarland and Schleswig-Holstein, and the NRW result is of particular significance due to its size – with 18 million inhabitants it is Germany’s most populous region by far, and has a greater population than all the former GDR regions combined.

Foreign media coverage understandably focuses on the scale of the CDU’s defeat and its consequences for Angela Merkel – its 26% represents its worst result in NRW ever – and the attainment of an absolute majority by an SPD-led coalition with the Greens. Once again, however,  the Greens have failed to capitalise on the weakness of the government and the return to prominence of environmentalist themes after Fukujima. Once the voter analysis comes in the reasons for this will be clearer, but it is certain that the alternate pole of attraction constituted by the Pirates is in part responsible.

Analysis of the PP Vote in Schleswig Holstein

Research produced after last week’s election in Schleswig-Holstein sourced the PP votes as follows:

CDU 14,000

FDP 14,000

Green: 13,000

SPD 10,000

Left 6,000

Others 6,000

Non-voters 11,000

First-Time Voters 6,000

Source: Infratest-dimap.

An analysis of voter choices correlated to social position suggested that the Pirates strongest constituencies are amongst workers and the unemployed, where they took 14% and 15% of the vote respectively. Interestingly the two parties most likely to lose votes to the PP were the Greens and the FDP (liberals), but the basic lesson of this research is the capacity of the PP so far to gather voters from across the ideological spectrum.

Copyright Bunfight

In response to the electoral emergence of the PP the debate around copyright in Germany has restarted in earnest. On Thursday the weekly newspaper Die Zeit published a letter titled “We are the Creators” where they condemned the ‘profane theft’ of intellectual property – characterised as a ‘great achievement of bourgeois freedom against the dependency of feudalism’ – defended the role of the publishers and other intermediaries commercially exploiting copyrights, and decried those who would use the net as an excuse for ‘stinginess and malice’. The coordinator of the letter campaign is himself not a ‘creator’ but rather a literary agent, suggesting a simple, albeit cynical, explanation for the vehement justification of the publisher’s function. In any case more than 3000 ‘creators’ signed up to the cause.

How such generalised reprimand of the public will be digested amongst the hoi polloi remains to be seen. History may have created a class of authors and publishers with the coming of bourgeois society, but it might be that in the digital era the masses have decided that they themselves are creators, and that the time for a further alteration of property and power relations has arrived …

For the moment however the talk is not of a revolution in property rights,  but rather copyright reform: ‘We are the Citizens‘. Likewise the PP’s current copyright policy is distinctly moderate:

• shorten the term of protection from the (current) life of the author plus seventy years to life plus ten;
• terminate all  transfers to an intermediary for exploitation after 25 years, returning the rights to the author;
• make any licensing assignment valid for those media known at the time
• stop prosecuting/pursuit of filesharers on the basis that it is merely reflects the current industry’s incapacity to satisfy demand.

Henceforth the policies of all political parties as regards the internet and communications will be a matter of public scrutiny, and irrespective of how one may feel about the Pirates in a more general sense, for this at least we have them to thank. Effectively they have attached a cost to coziness between political parties and the vested interests who would seek to have the net regulated for their profit. Last autumn members of the CDU were still floating proposals for a local version of the Hadopi/3 Strikes regime, but in the light of the election results, and the scale of the protests against ACTA, such a proposal is now clearly toxic and can be excluded.

While the political strategies of the copyright lobby find themselves blocked, the situation in the courts remains a concern. In April, for example, the regional court in Hamburg found in favour of the German rightsholders organisation GEMA, imposed a form of secondary liability (Störerhaftung) on Google  for works posted on Youtube without authorisation. The court required that they institute measures in addition their existing content-id system to keep works off the site, specifically a word filter which would block other versions of songs for which GEMA hold the rights, and that GEMA are not obliged to use content-id as a means of controlling infringing uses. The continuing failure of GEMA and Google to reach an agreement on royalties means that pop music available on the platform elsewhere in the world remains blocked on the German site. Other authorised services such as Hulu and Netflix are not available either.

Domestic Trifles Over: Please Return to the Economic Meltdown

With the elections are over discussion will return to the Eurozone clusterf*ck, a matter to which most Germans seem to pay little heed at least while the economy remains strong. This week however the matter may receive some attention as social movements mobilise for demonstrations against the European Central Bank and financial sector in Frankfurt, protests already forbidden by the city…

More Booty for the Pirate Party in Germany

Last Sunday state elections took place in Schleswig-Holstein (SH) in Northern Germany. When the votes were counted the Pirate Party had taken 8.2 % of the vote, thus entering its third State Parliament after earlier successes in Berlin (8.9%, September 2011) and the Saarland (7.4%, March 2012). Next weekend is the turn of the biggest German region to vote, Nordrhein Westfalien, current polls put the PP at around 9%. On this form they will easily surpass the German electoral threshold of 5% and enter the federal parliament in 2013.

Losers in this election were the liberals (FDP) and the Left (Die Linke). The Green Party increased its vote only marginally, haemorrhaging support to the PP – amongst the six Pirate representatives elected in SH is Angelika Beer, a former national chairperson of the Greens. Given the latter’s intention to form a coalition government with the SPD in 2013, the continuance of this slippage to the Pirates is the most significant fallout of the election. In the case of SH, the SPD & Greens will now only have a majority with a third coalition partner, the Danish minority party, SSW.

Who Are the Pirates Anyway?

So far the actual political character of the PP has remained unexplored. In the first place because media attention has focussed on their novelty, a sort of ‘party of the internet’, and predictable jokes about, well…. pirates. Secondly, their development of a full electoral programme is recent and their membership is increasing rapidly, so it’s difficult to anticipate where things will settle. Thirdly  they have not been cónfronted with the dilemmas of power such as to force them to reveal what unnegotiable convictions, if any, they hold. As the current beneficiaries of the floating vote, this enigmatic aspect is undoubtedly useful.

The strange alchemy of the organisation is indicated by the composition of its new national leadership. Bernd Schlömer, the new party chairperson, studied criminology and is now employed at the Department of Defence, responsible for academic training at the University of the Federal Armed Forces. Meanwhile Johannes Ponader was elected as political secretary, an unemployed actor who has a past in the Basic Income Network and was a prominent representative at the Occupy Berlin! encampment last winter.

Buzzwords: ‘Participation’,'Feedback’, ‘Transparency’.

What binds together the disparate elements seems to be an enthusiasm for process, modernising zeal, and a jejeune conviction in the possibility of rational solutions to social problems. And of course affection for machines.

This process enthusiasm is materialised in Liquid Feedback, a software tool for grassroots policy formation and debate. The system enables a multi-level delegation of one’s vote to others whose opinion one trusts. This is understood as an instrument of internal democracy and a channel for ‘feedback’ – a term rooted in cybernetics where information outputs are recycled for purposes of system self-correction.

‘Engineering culture’ is also visible in the party’s emphatic attachment to evidence-based positions; against drug prohibition; secular; in favour of markets where they work; open to alternatives where they don’t. Questions cannot be answered in the absence of data, consultation and logic. Such a mode of discourse allows a form of self-presentation as pragmatic and beyond left/right – a profitable attitude for a group currently taking voters from all parts of the political spectrum.

Paradoxically, for a party nominally identified with pirates, its members express great enthusiasm for citizenship, ethics and reason in a period where such traits seem a bit quaint and certainly in decline. It will be thus interesting to observe how the PP deals with the irrational, shady, treacherous reality of Politics, where being just piratical is common coin.

Debugging Democracy?

So what of this cybernetic rhetoric of deliberative democracy?

Critics of cybernetics have argued that taking the machinic as the metaphor for the social leads its adherents to relegate agonistic politics to an anachronism, capable of being transcended or side-stepped via technical refinements and better information. Fred Turner has offered a critical history of the utopian rhetoric of ‘cyberculture’, tracing its rhetoric of participation, frictionless markets and self-organization to the encounter of one part of the sixties counterculture with the post-war scientific community, an encounter enabled by the universalizing metaphor of systems analysis and the language of cybernetics.

In “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”, filmmaker Adam Curtis takes Turner’s narrative and extends it to critique the claimed political potential of network orchestrated action, taking the failed uprisings (?) in the Ukraine & Kyrgyzstan in 2004/5 as emblematic. In his view, the weak structures of technologically enabled self-organisation form an inadequate counterweight to the power  of the vested interests who currently dominate decision-making.

What this analysis elides is that self-organization need not be limited to online ‘movements of opinion’ and occasional mass theatre. Digital tools are, and will be, central to any  mobilization which entails the formation of real-world social bonds. Recent social movements such as M15 in Spain and Occupy Wall Street prefigure this, as does the PP in the realm of classical politics. Whether either can be effective in achieving their ends is another matter.

Reality is not a Perfectible Machine

Any temptation towards cybernetics in the PP is leavened by the desire for a new public sphere – the net as the new coffee-house of bourgeois democracy – and experience of political institutions and processes which have impeded or warped the potentials enabled by technology and networks.

Nine pieces of European legislation have extended the scope and duration of copyright in the last twenty years, fruit of private sector lobbying. Their beneficiaries, owners of the media platforms which have dominated public imagination (and politicians’ careers) since the war, are understandably unreceptive to arguments as to their own obsolescence. In Germany copyright enforcement has become a veritable industry of ‘notice and shake-down’. Elsewhere, the PP are deeply opposed to the collection of personal data by state and private parties, and to the extension of surveillance culture.

These issues are enough to provide a thorough lesson in the dynamics of politics and the non-neutrality of state action. Should the PP hold the balance of power in 2013 I would expect these two themes to be the ones on which they refuse to budge, and if they play hard they could achieve a result. But the limits to their oppositional nature are illustrated in Schleswig-Holstein where they have offered limited support to the new coalition provided neither increased state surveillance or data retention are part of the programme for government. Some of those who voted for them as a protest may be disappointed, ultimately the PP are more pragmatic than refusenik.