The Pirate Organization: Lessons From the Fringes of Capitalism (16 page)

In the capitalistic system, the states and firms operate in their respective territories by establishing codes that exclude a certain number of renegades who come together within the pirate organization. Courted and feared by states and organizations of the milieu alike, the pirate organization breaks the existing codes and creates new ones, which will later be reappropriated by legitimate governments and organizations. This explains why the Pentagon and Microsoft track hackers in cyberspace to offer them a job or why pirate Francis Drake became a corsair before being knighted by the Queen of England. Because of its sociopolitical makeup, the pirate organization has the best chance at changing the conventions of the time and at upsetting the structure of capitalism—for example, by accepting women for the first time as sailors on ships in the seventeenth century or by modifying copyrighted material.

The pirate phenomenon began at the advent of the sovereign state and continues with the rise of globalism. Pirates are off-limits, on the fringes of territories, cities, or states. They make use of the legal conflicts between states, at times attacked by them and at other times protected by them. The pirate organization blurs the lines by reshaping the normative agenda carried out by the sovereign state. In the era of the great discoveries, when the state expanded its geographical reach, the pirate organization challenged the codes that were being imposed on the new territories of capitalism. This struggle to define the norm has haunted the history of capitalist societies and has played out in different ages and territories.

The pirate organization outpaces our attempts at categorization. Are pirates simple bandits or counterfeiters? Enemies of humanity? Defenders of a public cause? Agents of capitalist normalization? Oftentimes, they are all of those things together. We must correct the vision of capitalism as a simple accelerator of economic transactions, which becomes uncontrollable, sagging under the growing weight of its own mass that transforms everything into an endlessly reconvertible unit of capital. We need to understand the relationship between the pirate organization and capitalism, both of which are inseparable from the sovereign state.

For many analysts of the current crisis, on the one hand there are the mechanisms that generate profit but become unstable without regulation, and on the other hand there are the social struggles that allow us to balance welfare distribution. Subprimes versus Occupy Wall Street. By switching perspectives, we can see that the pirate organization reveals the essence of cyclic capitalist crises. The pirate organization enables states and organizations of the milieu to redefine territories that are suitable for competition and to normalize exchange between parties. In a certain way, the archetype of the capitalist crisis is not so much a stock market crash as it is the geopolitical struggle forced upon the state by the pirate organization, which imposes a new pairing between partially uncharted territories and their normative fabric in the making.

The pirate organization is a counterpart to capitalism that shifts norms and redraws the boundaries imposed by the sovereign. Normalizing a territory means expanding the set spaces on which a code can be practiced, deterritorialized resources can be assembled, and flows of men, products, and capital can be circulated. However, moving into gray areas also contributes to the rapid development of the pirate organization, which in turn slows the advancement of the sovereign. Therefore, the pirate organization has the opportunity to overstep the boundaries and decide for itself whether or not goods should be exchanged or stolen. The pirate organization confronts organizations of the milieu in a partially uncharted territory that the state claims to be in control of, and wherein it defines property rights, monopoly, and profit. Moving away from a vision of capitalism in which money constantly privatizes the public domain, swallows it, and expands its reign, this essay conceives of the pirate organization as a provocative element that shifts the trajectory of capitalism.

Some see capitalist evolution as being based on decontextualized “laws of nature” (e.g., the fittest always survive as human societies move inevitably toward greater economic efficacy). Others conceive of societies as organizationless—they see heroic individuals, such as entrepreneurs, activists, or political leaders, as the only true force that can change the world. Some still believe in the pipe dream of united social classes bound to actualize a destiny that has already been written. By choosing to examine the intermediate level of the organization, we are hopeful that this analysis appears more realistic and perhaps sturdier. For example, the Dutch East India Company, year after year, accrued abysmal financial losses for decades before disappearing. Does the law of natural economic selection apply to its case? Not really. Was it “too big to fail,” as some current financial institutions have been said to be? What does the catchphrase
too big to fail
conceal? That principles of competition are not natural but contingent upon a struggle between sovereign states, organizations of the milieu, and pirate organizations.

We have also tried to avoid other simplifications, like heroism and post hoc explanations about macrotrends. The pirate organizations of the seventeenth century significantly modified the trade norms in effect and the rules of governance on board ships. It was not one person’s accomplishment. No heroic captain, no famous corsair could claim to have played any significant role in the century-long historical trend described above. Pirate organizations are a sociopolitical phenomenon, not a group of isolated adventurers. And they are not all unified. In the seventeenth century, some pirate organizations challenged the Portuguese monopoly in order to replace it with its own; others never swayed from their cause against monopolies, and they all confronted other pirate organizations at one time or another. Where is the unity of the pirate class? Where is its so-called unique destiny? Nowhere. At the intermediate organizational level, however, it becomes possible to examine how pirates set their objectives and defend a public cause against accepted codes.

The legal analysis of the pirate phenomenon does not do justice to its power of economic transformation. Historical analysis misses the symmetry among pirate organizations through the ages. Also, the internal economic analysis of the pirate organization fails to provide a consistent explanation for the pirate phenomena across time and space. At best, it helps us understand why certain control and governance mechanisms were used over others. Its rationalist take on individual choices fails to capture the fundamentally uneconomic raison d’être of the pirate organization.

Toward an Orgology of Capitalism

Positioning our analysis at the level of the organization demonstrates how the normative variations introduced by the pirate organization spread within the sovereign machine. These variations are combined within new sociotechnical arrangements, and pirates themselves become carriers of norms. The speed at which variations introduced by pirates spread within partially uncharted territory depends on several factors. When the pirate organization directly contributes to mapping out the territory—like the pirates of the seventeenth century who settled in the lands that they themselves discovered, or like Celera Genomics, which pioneered the deciphering of DNA—it can benefit from this good timing to take the initiative of normalization despite the protests of the sovereign. Also, when there is an easy path for the renegades to move freely between pirate and corsair organizations, one can also expect the changes to spread more quickly and easily, since they can directly infiltrate the code at the heart of the state. Lastly, when the mutations introduced tend to foster the survival and growth of the organizations adopting them, their presence becomes increasingly significant over time. For example, the democratic norm in effect on board pirate ships took on considerable evolutionary potential as it spread to mainland states.

We thus catch a glimpse of an evolutionary design of production systems. The states and organizations of the milieu continuously work to capture what has eluded them—namely, what pirate organizations take out or steal from gray areas. The sovereign redefines territory and overcodes norms of exchange and trade. The pirate organization decodes the evidence of capitalistic appropriation, penetrates its core, and introduces variations into the code itself. Changes in the definition of trade norms are most often the outcome of the upheavals in the capitalist economy, following crises that destroy masses of overvalued assets. These recodings prompt the capitalistic organizations to turn against themselves. New laws then come to delineate the contours of the banking, the insurance, or the production systems. It is now time to consider competition as a contingent structure whose code depends on whether and how legitimate and renegade organizations confront one another.

So many thinkers denounce capitalism for its hyperindividualism, its pervasive reliance on marketing, the totalitarianism of its production modes that foster the enslavement of man, and its hijacking of “good” initiatives by “the system.” These analyses oversimplify capitalism. They wrongly assume that a secret, hidden cause or coalition is running “the system.” They rely on the convenient cliché of a Manichaean opposition between the market and the individual, the individual and the state, and the state and the market. They conceive of the collective as being masses, classes, strong and lasting, or tribes and networks that are flexible and fragile. We must go back from these abusive simplifications and investigate capitalism at the level of organizations. Today, we must try to understand the relationships between the social and business realities, organizations, and their constituent members.

Thus, we are calling for the development of an “
orgology
” of capitalism. Orgology, as a science about organizations, would gather recent and multidisciplinary approaches from other social sciences, and investigate economic and societal issues, starting from the twofold observation that the world is increasingly complex in its organization, but also increasingly organizational in its structure—that is, dominated by organizations rather than individuals. Today, large multinational corporations, NGOs, private foundations, or industry associations have more power to influence the course of history than the European kings of the Middle Ages. But such organizations also face many more counterweights. An orgology of capitalism is thus required to understand how the world has changed and where it is heading. Borrowing from the methodologies of psychology, sociology, and economics, orgology as an organization science focuses on the emergence of organizations, their identity, their position in society, their growth strategies, and their evaluation by other societal actors. Instead of drawing an arbitrary line between the greedy businesspeople and the altruistic rebels, an orgology of capitalism seeks to explain how rebellious organizations can succeed in changing industry norms by having strategic leaders allocate resources cleverly. Instead of seeing corsairs as former pirates who are “selling out” (to the elites who run “the system”), an orgology of capitalism explains how and why corsair organizations actually help pirate organizations diffuse their social innovations at the heart of capitalism by creating a passage between the milieu and the fringes.

Leaving Utopia: Espousing the Continued Presence of Temporary Autonomous Organizations

Faced with the state that manufactures the reproduction of normative patterns within the sovereign territory, the pirate organization produces variations in every direction and tries to get out ahead of the sovereign. Ships with fewer weapons are faster, and surprise attacks catch the enemy unawares. A ship controlled directly by its crew does not need to wait for investors to collect enough capital to launch an expedition—and anything goes when it comes to gaining control of a ship without being accountable to the owners on land. By the same token, an organization that recopies a code already produced elsewhere, in order to outpace its rivals and design better software or a more complete map of the human genome, overtakes its direct competitors at a cost advantage.

The continuous and conflicting relationship between the state and the pirate organization means that capitalism never reproduces itself the same way twice. Moreover, capital does not grow in a homogeneous manner. It follows slopes and trajectories. It is guided from within territories by the relative power of the firms and organizations that foster its productiveness. Capitalist expansion is not unavoidable or directionless. Opening up the seas and space means entering into the unknown, yet it offers glimpses of the immense potential that lies out there. These horizons that the organizations step into are cleared by a series of technoscientific upheavals: printing, maritime transport, electricity, airwaves, molecular biology, space, or cyberspace, all of which foster the will to rewrite the capitalistic norm. The torchbearers of these idealized visions of sharing the new are the pirate organizations. We are not holding the merits of pirate ideas above those of more legitimate businesses. What we want to show is the very nature of the workings of the capitalism-coding machines, endlessly deterritorializing and normalizing economic exchanges and profit, searching out the unknown for new territories to code, recognize, subjugate, and value.

The pirate organization is the necessary counterpart to capitalism. The production system based on private property and the protection of the property rights can only pursue its expansion by nurturing the pirate organization from the fringes of capitalism. What determines the pace of capitalistic evolution and rival production systems is competition between organizations of the milieu and pirate organizations. The former normalize trade based on legitimate appropriation rights. The latter enact alternative principles of value creation and capture. They express different property norms, including what we could call
legitimate expropriation on behalf of a public cause
.