PIRATES REPRESENTED A DUAL THREAT TO THE ATLANTIC OCEAN FACTORY OF EARLY CAPITALISM.
Captains weren’t absolute rulers, but elected leaders who commanded only during battle. Day-to-day operations were handled democratically by the entire crew. Loot was divided equally and immediately, and pirates ate – and drank – better than their law-abiding contemporaries. This was the major reason pirates were feared: it was easy to convince exploited sailors to join up with them. And join up they did. Pirate crews were a polyglot, multiracial multitude (this isn’t Hardt and Negri; this was the word used at the time) that included oppressed Irishmen, escaped slaves, French heretics, and members of Caribbean indigenous groups. Pirates hailed from all over the Atlantic and Mediterranean, and included a high proportion of blacks and mulattos, who often had leadership roles. Marcus Rediker notes in Villains of All Nations that sixty members of Blackbeard’s crew of one hundred were black. Pirates didn’t just plunder ships; they enforced their own brand of justice across the Atlantic. Upon boarding a ship, pirates interviewed the crew to determine how their captain commanded. If he were said by his crew to be cruel, the pirates might beat or execute him; if he were fair, they treated him well and sometimes they sent him off with a bit of money of his own. Sometimes their justice was poetic,
9
J A C O B I N • S U M M E R 2012
such as when pirates commandeered a slaver, armed the captured Africans with knives, then sent the hapless captain back on his merry way. Pirates also held grudges, assaulting trading posts and towns where authorities had executed their comrades. After a fellow pirate captain was executed at a Portuguese slave fortress, Walter Kennedy stormed the castle, captured it, and burned it to the ground. Not for nothing did so many pirate vessels contain the word “Revenge” in their names.
M
edia piracy , the now-mundane practice of streaming a tv show or downloading an mp 3,
seems a far cry from the life-or-death struggles of buccaneers on the high seas. But the history of media piracy in the US is similar to that of seafaring pirates. In the early days of the republic, lacking international copyright treaties, the US government encouraged pirating of British literary classics in order to promote literacy. Authors like Charles Dickens complained to no avail; not until American literature caught up in quality and appeal could authors like Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe persuade the US government to enforce copyright. By their time the US had become a scientific and cultural powerhouse in its own right, and it sought to protect its advantage by enforcing property rights more strictly than it had
before. The book publishers who once flooded the continent with cheap copies of the great works of literature had to go legit. A similar change has happened in our own era. Patents, copyrights, and trademarks are the legal apparatuses that turn music, movies, and medicines into “intellectual property.” Infringements were once tolerated, or at least compromises were worked out. A small surcharge built into the price of every cassette was the tribute thousands of homemade mixtapes paid to the record industry cartel. But in the internet age, no quarter has been given. Fan remixes are summarily removed from the web, even if they fall under legally protected fair use. A grandmother displaced by Hurricane Rita and a disabled single mother have been terrorized with lawsuits; the young operators of NinjaVideo were prosecuted and given prison sentences merely for linking to – not hosting – copyrighted material. Just as the demonization and eventual destruction of the Atlantic pirates stemmed from the growing importance of maritime trade, the crackdown on piracy is linked not just to the fortunes of any one industry such as music or film, but to the fate of the economic system as a whole. Intellectual property makes up 80 percent of the net worth of US corporations and 60 percent of their exports. These rights secure streams