Book Review: The Pirate Organization – Lessons from the Fringes of Capitalism

What do the following have in common: the pirates of the high seas, the pirates of the radio airwaves in post-World War II’s Britain, as well as modern day internet cyberpirates and DNA bio-pirates? and how do they affect capitalism?

In “The Pirate Organization – Lessons from the Fringes of Capitalism”, Rodolphe Durand and Jean-Philippe Vergne take us beyond the traditional idea of pirate as solitary anarchists hunting down capitalism and argue that they all share a consistent series of traits, roles, tactics and goals which bring them to organize into groups, ad hoc communities where “alternative norms of social interaction and economic exchange are designed” and ultimately spread across a broader social realm. More importantly, despite their shorter life-expectancy, these “pirate organizations” manage to profoundly alter our society, particularly through their impact on today’s capitalism, driving its growth and evolution.

“The pirate organization is a social group that controls people, resources, channels of communication, and modes of transportation (for people, goods, capitals, or just information). It maintains trade relations with other communities, other groups, sometimes other states, and often legitimate companies. To reach its goals, it develops new strategies that favor speed and surprise. Its goal is to adapt and improvise, to develop the appropriate means to deal with its enemy. In order to protect itself, it operates from hidden locales outside a sovereign territory. To grow, it appeals to a desire for discovery; it seeks to control parts of a territory and claims certain rights to it. To attract recruits, it plays up its outsider status, and it makes change seem possible.  As long as the state strengthens its hold on norms, the pirate organization is ensured a flood of new members who feel marginalized by society.”

The Pirate Organization explores the quasi-symbiotic, often conflicting relationship between the pirate organization and capitalism. It takes us on a journey through unchartered territories, be it the high seas, the radio waves or internet and DNA. From the advent of the sovereign state to globalism, piracy has proven to be a transcendent force and the pirate organization has thus become a necessary counterpart to capitalism.

“Are pirates simple bandits or counterfeiters? Enemies of humanity? Defenders of a public cause? Agents of capitalist normalization? Oftentimes, they are all those things together.”

The Pirate Organization does not attempt to trivialize piracy or portrait pirates as heroes of our society acting as seeming iconoclasts of the wrongs of capitalism. It focuses on those pirate organizations pursuing novel, at times radical, values which impact on the norms of a society. Thus, it excludes modern day Somali pirates, in light of their violent banditry and merely profit oriented business model. The opposite interpretation, however, could also be true. Albeit unwittingly, pirates in Somalia exposed a lacuna in the implementation of the Convention on the Law of the Sea and in the framework for the prosecution of piracy at the national level. They drove the international community, in attempting to mitigate piracy impact on global trade, to initiate a comprehensive process of judicial reform and inter-state cooperation.  They also confirmed the frailties of failed States and their effect on local communities which will hopefully encompass more inclusive social and economic reform at both the national and international level. In the words of the authors, “piracy is not random. It is predictable. And it cannot be separated from capitalism”.