GIMME THE LOOT
FROM BLACKBEARD TO KIM DOTCOM,
by Gavin Mueller
HAS PIRACY BEEN A RADICAL FORCE?
In an honest service there is thin commons, low wages, and hard labor; in [piracy], plenty and satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power; and who would not balance creditor on this side, when all the hazard that is run for it, at worst, is only a sour look or two at choking. —Pirate captain Black Bart Roberts, circa 1720 The modern day pirates at issue in this litigation do not wear tricornes and extract their ill-gotten booty at cutlass point, but with a mouse and the internet. Nonetheless, their theft of property is every bit as lucrative as their brethren in the golden age of piracy. —US District Judge Mark Bennett, after awarding the maximum judgment of $4 million to pornography company Private Media Group in a “shot across the bow” of online piracy, 2012 Just pirate it. —Game designer Notch’s advice to Minecraft fans who can’t afford the full version, 2012
nce the heroes of nations,
exchanged as smoothly as possible. Pipirates went from being rates represented a dual threat to the state-sponsored champions Atlantic Ocean factory of early capitalto tolerated annoyances to ism. They were not only thieves; they the basest sort of criminals. Henry were also free. Morgan was knighted after plundering Being a sailor has never been easy, Panama in 1674; fifty years later hun- and it was particularly tough in the sevdreds of pirates were dangling from the enteenth and eighteenth centuries. To gibbet at remote trading posts along maximize profits, sailors were forced to Africa’s Gold Coast. eat rotten food and bunk in cramped What changed? quarters, and were paid on credit – you The change wasn’t so much what didn’t collect until you had completed pirates did as the context in which your one-, two-, or three-year bid. And they found themselves: a global mar- even then, you might not collect. You ket economy with England at its head. could die, of course. Or you might be England went from a plucky backwater pressed into military service, or forced to a capitalist empire in a century, and to work an extra few years on another as its fortunes changed – or more spe- ship, or forfeit your wages as a punishcifically, as the way it made its fortunes ment for insolence. It wasn’t uncomchanged – so, too, did the way the state mon for sailors to go a decade without treated piracy. seeing a shilling. Ship captains had It was one thing when looted Span- absolute authority over their crews in ish gold filled the Queen’s meager order to enforce discipline. Any comtreasury; it was quite another when pi- plaining or shirking could be deemed rates threatened to disrupt the increas- “mutinous,” and punishment could ingly disciplined circulatory system of range from whipping to hanging to bethe Atlantic Ocean, which had be- ing dangled over the side of the ship to come the center of the British econ- have your brains bashed in. omy. Sugar, tobacco, slaves – these Pirate ships were different – they commodities needed to move and be were under democratic worker control.
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S U M M E R 2012 • J A C O B I N
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