The common rebuke from "independent"/"alternative" (dominant) culture against piracy is that the consumption of the product at hand without the (naturalized) transaction of money robs the value from the artist who produces the product. This is both the claim of the RIAA and the artists it "represents" (the RIAA here is perhaps a metonymy for corporate music culture). The only source of value that can be transferred from the consumer to the "producer" is money: a sort of naive capitalist realism.
But piracy's counterargument (if it is univocal) is no less problematic. Circumventing the monetary transaction as a supposedly anti-capitalist gesture nonetheless results in consumption, and does nothing to undermine money as a single value. "If you won't give us our Kings of Leon, we'll just take it." This is precisely the supposed dead end of capitalist realism: consumption is fine, even a goal, but it must be obtained through a nominally anti-capitalist gesture. Indeed, the survival of corporate music depends on its activation of the principles of those who claim to oppose it: music must be decentralized from the exchange structure of Fordist commodities for music as an industry to continue. And it will.
The cease and desist letter that Verso (and other publishers) sent to a.aaaarg.org also makes a fine point: a well-known publisher of seminal left texts threatening a P2P(-ish) site which is hosting exactly some of the same content would seem to be an absurd contradiction. Verso establishes a market for the gesture of buying (and reading) left books, while aaaarg.org hosts the same content, activating its principles on the level of distribution itself. (Defending Verso with "Naturally; there is no other way to make money." is exactly the naturalization I'm arguing against.) What connects the two (terrifyingly) is that the texts "themselves" cannot be disconnected from the very gesture of their acquisition: that aaaarg.org reproduces the form of this gesture on the level of distribution is no solution to Verso's "cynicism." Rather, it pursues the postmodern logic of consumption, a characteristic feature of which is the very disavowal of this logic, over Verso's more obviously contradictory arrangement.
The questions which seem obvious are the wrong ones: "Given all this, does the content survive?" "Can the reader still get what's intended from the texts?" We're lead back to the atomized individual whose contemporary is this very act of reading, this possibility of "personal" politicization.
In the end, pirating music or books reinforces the logic of consumption; the "old" model however, is no solution itself. The fact that making a choice between them can have no political clout is precisely the problem, yet again.
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