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The Berlin Pirates‘ manifesto as Thought and Discussion Paper for the IT Movement The Berlin Manifesto
The Berlin Pirates‘ Manifesto as a thought and discussion paper for the IT Movement
It is well understood that the more clearly a party programme is laid out, the fewer members get behind it to represent it. So it is about fundamental values.
I.
No freedom for the enemies of freedom
II.
Anything that happens, is my business
III.
The Berlin manifesto in ten cornerstone points
IV.
The subject tree
V.
Consensus points
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Copyright: Dietmar Moews‘ Mobile Office for the Speed of Light 2009
III.
The Berlin Manifesto
World history integrates a miracle – with or without us humans. There is a new sensuality as a consequence of the sexual and digital communications revolution. The bonds of our individual and social traditions are weakened, and are now in a process of change. Human reproduction is no longer bound to the mating of men and women in traditional families. Virtual socio-culture, supported by IT, is creating forms of interaction of constantly changing collectives, which have no perceptible links to place and thereby loosen reciprocal social controls. Between the old physicality and virtual presence / absence, the new formulations of vitalisation, paralysis, irritation, the new bonds and anomies arise. This Manifesto is oriented towards the current statutes of the Pirates Party of Germany, and safeguards its norms and values.
1) Pirates require love of life, nostalgia, dynamism, and being different as human rights.
2) Pirates love self-determination which is oriented towards political self-sufficiency and personal responsibility at the local level, even against virtual majorities. Freedom, access, and an open, social view of humanity, along with tolerance and solidarity towards all other self-determined social formations in the world, define the Pirates‘ view of themselves against the background of UN human rights.
3) The Pirates believe in their societal power in the subjects, media and values of the enlightenment as seen today while looking toward the future, in unison with Immanuel Kant who asked, „What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope for? What is humankind? – Even when the know-how is right, human beings are inconstant.
4) Pirates believe in open, social human beings capable of self-enlightenment.
Pirate policy pursues emancipation for each person and sets itself the goal of an emancipative social game.
The Pirates see in the four societal areas of organisation in Germany – state, market, intermediaries, the Civil Code (private law) – the necessity for unfolding and spreading our own Pirate style of action within the various areas of organisation, with our own standards of compliance and adherence to rules. Permeability of strata is required and virtual or class-based power cliques are unpiratical.
Crippling of society by the budget-oriented serving class tradition in Germany is to be healed with emancipation and care born of maturity, with liberal Pirate policies, all the way to the western enlightenment model of the European citizen.
5) Each Pirate should be able to play along at Pirate politics and claim his or her ambitions. For Pirates, constitutional ties to the Fundamental Law (Grundgesetz, GG) are valid. From the Pirate point of view, this includes pluralist protection of minorities, and protection from discrimination.
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6) Pirates reserve forms of civil disobedience for cases in which norms of law and order are weakened by the state itself or by other protagonists, whether directly or indirectly.
7) All Pirates examine their political impulses for compatibility with society, sustainability and party rules.
Pirates try to raise their political intentions to the building up of the will within the party, majority opinions and personal decisions, all the way up to political decisions, in grassroots democratic updates, which are always welcome. The breadth of the whole of society, openness of discussion and rational conflict culture guarantee the processes of accumulation of value without hierarchy. They should be bound only to the hierarchy of thought and regulated ballots within the party. Articulation seeks majorities through integration of the mind, all the way to political transformation. Pirates test pictures on spirit and function.
8) A Pirate’s duty is education law – the Pirates‘ Party has imposed on itself the duty to look after the education of pirates. Pirates reject the training of people who think and believe differently, while the right to change ourselves rests on the original meaning of habeas corpus: everyone has the right to his or her body.
9) The Pirates stand within the communication revolution, sexual and digital. While old bonds are loosening with „dehumanised reproduction“, the new, virtual bonds/anomies are arising, supported by IT. Pirates understand our own political situation in a relationship constantly full of tension between out own local socio-cultural location and virtual (placeless and ephemeral) web collectives. The unique feature of the Pirates vis-à-vis traditional parties lies in these revolutionary facts of the sexual and digital revolution. The new sensuality integrates the grassroots democratic ideal. A new sensuality must be cultivated as the social basis of politics, between the local place and the ephemeral, virtual „places“. It arises out of the everyday experience of chance and necessity, irrationality and instrumental rationality. Pirates see the political task in sexual de-coupling and digital emergences, and the opportunities for the unfolding of a new liberal understanding of democracy, and onwards to a liberal socialism. We must constantly warn that democracy is only possible,if our technologically reshaped and saturated life is accessible to all the people, and is set out comprehensibly. Our warning leads to the question we must ask ourselves: what does it mean that the rules of The game (our constitution) are good, but fewer and fewer people want to take an active part?
10) The Pirates understand politics according to the following four fundamental points, always from value-oriented dynamic change, to variabilities, dependencies, resistances and traditions, the complex traditions of the citizens‘ rights movements in the whole world – this is worth the Pirates‘ support
1. Liberal citizenship (anti-authoritarian liberalism)
- Culture of rational conflict (freedom is conflict, but the absence of compulsion)
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3. Finding liberal elites in the multiplicity (meritocracy in the process of the division of labour),
4. Taking care of public virtues (social and political).
(fundamental points „on liberty“ by Ralf Dahrendorf)
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Copyright: Dietmar Moews‘ Mobile Office for the Speed of Light 2009
IV.
The Pirates‘ subject tree
The worldwide IT movement needs a theory of society and an integral style of action towards it. For every Pirate Party, self-knowledge of our own political position is a part of this. Consciousness of our own societal totality is horizontal, in all fields of work and sub-areas of production, consumption, information and distribution, and vertical, from local characteristics all the way to regional and world cultural differences in which Pirate voters always live, to integrate with the present condition of empirical-scientific research. Originating with the self-imposed values of the Pirates in the party rules currently in force, the socio-political situation in Germany is valid from the IT-sociological point of view. The structural building sites of the Pirates are to be found in the subject tree.
Motto
„[…] Whence it follows that such things as no rewards or threats can induce one to do do not fall within the right of the state.“ Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza 1663/1871 Treatise on the State, p. 197:
Of the Right of the State, Ch. 3, § 8.
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Copyright: Dietmar Moews‘ Mobile Office for the Speed of Light 2009
SUBJECT TREE
Pirate Party – Pirate Movement – IT Movement – Societal Total – World Politics
Subjects Media Values
Subjects
Theme Dynamics: Variabilities, Dependencies, Resistances, Traditions
Full Pirate programme vs. Policy for the present moment
Reform politics in democratic federalism
Secular religious freedom and tolerance towards other religions
Spirit of the Times – Balancing the Books: variabilities, dependencies, traditions
Bonds and anomie as a theme of educational ideals and education
Value change and the setting of values
Party structure and the style of action
Politico-strategic internal organisation
Politico-strategic external organisation
Politico-strategic professionalism
Liberal market and the market in ideas
Production and the division of labour, accessible consumption and distribution,
Policy on management and self-determined communication
Policy on alliances and the world’s domestic policy
Media
The individual playing multiple roles
Operating constitutionally in the federal state according to party law
Sensually socio-cultural
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Organisational intermediarity
Technical mediality
Virtuality
Values
View of humankind: tolerance, no discrimination, openness, transparently socially democratic, liberal, self-determination within the rule of law, irrational
Efficiency and contingency/ inconstancy
Pragmatism, idealism, Utopia
Irrationalism
Philosophy of nature or what?
Emancipated balance between dynamising, paralysis, and rest
Freedom, necessity and the culture of conflict
Local politics and world politics
Remembering and forgetting
Perfection of technique, robotics and old sensuality
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Copyright: Dietmar Moews‘ Mobile Office for the Speed of Light 2009
V.
Consensus Points
No freedom for the enemies of freedom
Dolf Sternberger
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Whatever is happening, is my business
Walter Bauer
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Social matters are founded on social matters and must be understood as such
Emile Durckheim
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I want to defend the view which so often encounters hostility from historians for being old fashioned, that the science of history is characterised by its interest in factual, singular, specific events as opposed to laws or generalities
Karl R. Popper
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Bit by bit the machine will become part of humankind
Antoine de Saint Exupery
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Democracy is not a doctrine of salvation, but only one of the necessary conditions which make it possible for us to know what we are doing. Of course we should forgive those who do not know what they are doing, but it is our duty to do everything in order to know
Karl Popper
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We must not fail to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of technical progress as broadly as possible, so that the direction which we finally take will be founded on social consensus and not on the decision of a few technologists
Bill Gates
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The need of organisations towards co-ordinating a multiplicity of social processes within the effective interests of social entities, must be put out of the question
Alphons Silbermann
Knowledge is power and countervailing power. We can acquire the second nature while our needs become sociocultural practice through user culture, usufruct, different usufruct and sneezing powder.
Dietmar Moews
The Citizen as general purpose citizen, intellectually and politically open, participating in and contributing to local bodies, with political education to a competent level, belongs at the centre of organised education
Dietmar Moews
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Anyone who wants to make education real as a basis for reaction to historical
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Copyright: Dietmar Moews‘ Mobile Office for the Speed of Light 2009
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charge, of use in life, must make feeling into a function of need-oriented leadership and nostalgia into a stimulant of the intellectual climate
Dietmar Moews
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We do not get the chance to deselect the future. No-one can decide whether the future course of our lives should change or not. No-one can stop changes in productivity in the long term, for the market implacably demands them. States can try to put the brakes on change within their boundaries by limiting the use of certain technologies, but with this policy they run the risk of uncoupling themselves from the world economy, having an adverse effect on the competitiveness of their national businesses and hinder their consumers in obtaining the newest products at the lowest prices
Bill Gates
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It needs to be clarified what the freedom of the inconstant individual and his immediate, sensual experience of life should be attributed to and what is to be laid at the door of clarified, controlled and directed organisation in the field of uncoupled ways of being
Dietmar Moews
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Art is a key to culture, i.e. to learn and foster social forms foundational to connections between ourselves and among others. It comes down to cohesion and the balancing nature of togetherness, based on reciprocity
Alphons Silbermann
It is a good thing when there is theorising and speculation on the contrast between elite and mass culture. Culture should not be controlled. Culture remains an integral component of the social scene. Knowledge, ideas, beliefs, values, standards, feelings, social inheritance, life style, learned behaviours, tradition, changes, dependencies, resistances
Alphons Silbermann
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Society is a conflict centred around humanity’s collective opportunity to live its life. Free society is more allowed, more settled, regulated conflict, which by these features sets the level of life opportunities higher than all the game-types of unfreedom can.
Ralf Dahrendorf
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THE END of BERLIN MANIFESTO
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