From Platform Capitalism to Digital Commons: The Socialization of the Means of Production in Publishing

Hello Comrades,

Today, writers, researchers, translators, and digital content producers in Türkiye and across the world stand at the heart of a deep existential and material crisis. On one side are the paltry 8–10% royalty rates of traditional publishing houses, payments delayed for months, and bureaucratic elites who sit back and recite the mantra of “market realities.” On the other is platform capitalism, polished up in the name of digitalization and turning producers into mere “content miners.”

When we raised the idea of a public digital library and a direct royalty model at the Ministry of Culture conference in Ankara, the “What nonsense is this man talking about?” look that rose from the room was not merely the personal ignorance of a few bureaucrats. That look is the historical reflex of a bourgeois mentality that believes knowledge and art can exist only as a commodity.

Today, many writers and content producers are understandably confused:

• “How will I protect my work from piracy?”

• “Should I publish my own book on Amazon and become ‘independent’?”

• “Will the NFT jargon of the crypto world solve my fourth-degree exploitation?”

This text was not written to throw an ideological smoke bomb at this confusion or to tell fairy tales about adapting to market conditions. It was written to demonstrate, through a dialectical understanding, that we are neither dependent on the bourgeois publishing order nor condemned to an insecure system in which knowledge is plundered without restraint.

Our aim is to strip capital from the technological possibilities and roadmap of an open-source, transparent, and dialectical digital publishing ecosystem that will take ownership of the means of production from capital and place it in the hands of producers and society, using the example of the Türkiye Yazarlar Sendikası (TYS) and the Sosyal Araştırmalar Vakfı (SAV).

A Critique of Illusions: Market Capitalism, Piracy, and Crypto-Speculation

To grasp the contradictions in the publishing world correctly, we must first decipher the current illusions.

1. The Illusion of Traditional Publishing: Publishing and distribution monopolies claim to be the filter of intellectual labor. Yet all they do is appropriate the greater part of the value created by intellectual labor and reduce the book to a “saleable commodity.”

2. The Illusion of “Free Piracy”: Uncontrolled digital distribution that advocates freeing knowledge but has no idea how the writer will sustain a life. Knowledge is set free, while the producer is abandoned to hunger and insecurity.

3. The Web3 / NFT Illusion: Capital’s latest digital masquerade. Digitally enclosing a painting or text and selling it at auction is the hyper-commodified form of the bourgeois conception of property. Art is not liberated; it is instead turned into a speculative casino chip.

The Marxist method teaches us to distinguish, in our approach to technology, between the ideological form capital imposes upon it and technology’s underlying material potential. What we need is to wrest technology from capital’s hands and transform it into a social use value.

An Economy-Political Transformation in the Publishing Ecosystem

The differences between the order of capital and the public/collective model we propose can be summarized through a dialectical process analysis as follows:

Parameter	Capitalist Publishing (Thesis)	Crypto-Capitalist Web3 (Antithesis)	TYS / SAV Digital Cooperative (Synthesis)
Form of Ownership	Closed ownership under publisher and distributor monopolies.	NFT-based financialized digital ownership.	Public and collective ownership (Shared Digital Archive).
Distribution of Value	The intermediary distributor appropriates surplus value.	Surplus value goes to speculators and platform owners.	All collected resources are transferred directly to the writer and server maintenance.
Payment Process	Opaque 8–10% royalties paid months later.	Speculative income through volatile tokens.	Instant, transparent, direct micropayments through smart contracts.
Philosophy of Access	Readers who can pay (Market Scarcity).	An elite mass that possesses crypto assets.	Public access open to everyone (Use Value).
Governance	Owners and Board of Directors.	A capital oligarchy weighted by tokens.	Labor-centered governance (1 Member = 1 Vote).

Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) Infrastructure in the Technological Architecture

The first step in transferring ownership is liberating software tools. We cannot entrust our production process to proprietary software (Adobe, Amazon, Microsoft).

1. Production and Typesetting Stage

• Pressbooks: An open-source infrastructure enabling writers and editors to produce works in open standards (ePub, PDF, HTML5). The work is born directly in a free format.

• Sigil: A completely free ePub editor that enables independent e-book formatting.

2. Public Archive and Library

• InvenioRDM: An international librarianship standard developed by CERN, through which institutions such as SAV can freely store their academic and theoretical publications and research data.

• Koha: A full-featured, open-source library automation system.

• Calibre-Web: A lightweight interface through which readers can access the TYS digital library and read in their browser from any e-reader or mobile device.

3. Alternative Social Network and Interaction

• BookWyrm: A decentralized social reading network that breaks Amazon’s Goodreads monopoly and contains neither advertising nor data mining.

Blockchain and Decentralized Networks: From Property Fetishism to Public Safeguards

Blockchain technology is an instrument of speculation in the hands of finance capital; yet at its core, it is a decentralized, immutable, and transparent ledger. By cleansing this infrastructure of capital, we can put it to work for our collective interests.

Principle: Data is stored decentrally, royalties are paid instantly and without interruption through smart contracts, and governance is carried out through the equal voice of those who contribute their labor.

• Censorship-Resistant and Permanent Storage (IPFS and Arweave): SAV’s theoretical works or the texts of dissident TYS member writers are stored not on monopoly cloud servers (AWS, Google), but on distributed networks that cannot be censored or erased.

• Automatic Micropayments Through Smart Contracts: When a reader reads or downloads a book (from the public fund or an individual solidarity subscription), banks and intermediaries are completely removed from the process. Based on the reading/download rate, the contract instantly transfers the amount to the writer’s account.

• Interledger Protocol (ILP): An independent payment protocol through which micropayments flow to the writer’s account for as long as the reader reads the text on screen.

• Transparent Funding (Open Collective): All donations, public funds, and reader contributions collected are presented for public oversight in real time through an open ledger.

---

A Concrete Action Plan and Class Call for TYS and SAV: The Dialectical Leap from Idea to Action

It is not enough merely to interpret the world; the real issue is to change it. At the theoretical level, deciphering the exploitation of publishing monopolies, the artificial scarcity mechanism of copyright laws, or the digital enclosures of platform capitalism does not by itself bring liberation. Criticism must be transformed, through praxis (the unity of theory and practice), into a concrete material force, a functioning software infrastructure, and an organized institutional will.

The bureaucratic skepticism we encountered in that room in Ankara can be overcome with a revolutionary action plan. The Türkiye Yazarlar Sendikası (TYS) and the Sosyal Araştırmalar Vakfı (SAV) can set a historical precedent in Türkiye’s publishing ecosystem by turning the contradictions left idle by capital to their advantage.

Below is a four-phase concrete action plan for moving from idea to material reality, and a call for the class alliance that will bring this plan to life.

Four-Phase Implementation Roadmap

(Theoretical and Legal Preparation) ➔ (Technological Construction) ➔ (Pilot Testing and Validation) ➔ (Publicization)

Phase I: Organizational, Legal, and Ideological Preparation (Months 1–3)

Digitalizing without breaking the property codes of the order of capital merely hands new tools to platform capitalism. The first step is clarifying the ideological and legal framework.

• Establishing the “Digital Publishing and Public Access Working Group”: By joint decision of the TYS and SAV boards, an autonomous working group composed of writers, theorists, copyright lawyers, and IT workers must formally begin its work.

• Transformation of the Charter and Model: Works must cease to be defined as “individual property” and instead be defined as “social commons that secure the producer’s right to live.”

• Copyright Consent Forms and Participation Protocol: Open permission protocols must be collected from TYS member writers and researchers within SAV for classics whose copyright term has expired, works intended for public access, or digital editions whose royalties will return directly to the writer.

Phase II: Constructing the Technological Framework and Decentralized Infrastructure (Months 3–6)

In place of capitalist monopoly software (Adobe DRM, Amazon KDP, etc.), a fully free and open-source (FOSS) and distributed network architecture must be established.

• Establishing Server and Storage Infrastructure: Independent, isolated servers must be rented/established in the name of TYS and SAV. The primary copies of works must be uploaded to the IPFS and Arweave networks and sealed in an unerasable form against state censorship or corporate intervention.

• Installing Open-Source Library Software:

  • InvenioRDM for the academic archive,

  • Calibre-Web and Koha must be integrated for the general literature catalogue and e-book reader.

• Smart Contract and Micropayment Integration: Smart contracts operating on Ethereum Layer 2 or low-cost blockchain networks, which instantly transfer the balance in the fund to the writer’s wallet based on reading/download data, must be deployed to a test network (Testnet).

Phase III: Pilot Testing and Verification of the Labor-Value Flow (Months 6–9)

This is the stage for demonstrating how the system works in practice and how the writer’s vital labor is funded without appropriating surplus value.

• Publishing the Pilot Catalogue: All theoretical/academic journals and books previously published by SAV, along with the works of 50 volunteer TYS member writers, must be uploaded to the system.

• Transparent Funding Portal (Open Collective): The platform’s server costs, developer expenses, and “Writer Royalty Pool” must be opened to community oversight. Local governments, unions, and readers must contribute to this pool through monthly solidarity dues.

• Operating Micropayments: As readers read or download works, a secure server-side counter must be triggered and direct royalty transfers to the writer’s account must begin.

Phase IV: Publicization, Growth, and Policy Advocacy (From Month 9 Onward)

It is time to confront the bourgeois bureaucracy and capital monopolies with the working concrete model as a truth.

• Announcing the Precedent Model: The functioning system must be announced to the public; the message must be delivered: “The model called ‘nonsense’ in Ankara is here, and it works without a hitch.”

• Pressure on the Ministry of Culture and Local Governments: Political and union struggle must be expanded so that public resources are transferred not to publishing gangs, but directly to this open-source digital library infrastructure and the royalty pool for its writers.

Implementation and Class Outcome Matrix

Phase	Objective	Open-Source Tools to Be Used	Class Outcome / Gain
I. Preparation	Drawing the legal and ideological framework	Open Licenses (Creative Commons, CC-BY-NC)	Breaking property consciousness; a will for collective production.
II. Construction	Decentralized, censorship-resistant server and library	IPFS, Arweave, InvenioRDM, Pressbooks	Ownership of the means of production passes to the collective.
III. Testing	Transparent royalty payment and direct distribution	Open Collective, Smart Contracts, ILP	Elimination of the intermediary capital share (90%); full return for labor.
IV. Expansion	Creating social use value	Fediverse, BookWyrm, Free Standards	Decommodifying and publicizing knowledge.

A Call for a Historical Alliance: IT Workers and Intellectual Workers, Unite!

Today, in the digital universe, the owner of the means of production is neither the programmer writing code alone nor the writer at the typewriter. Both are parts of the same collective working class (Gesamtarbeiter), exploited behind capital’s digital enclosures and deprived of their surplus value.

The fate of the IT proletariat, confined to office towers in the open offices of technology companies and adding to the wealth of the Jeff Bezoses and Elon Musks through the code it writes, is shared with that of intellectual workers whose thought and literature are plundered by publishing monopolies.

A Call to Developers, System Administrators, Blockchain Engineers, and Interface Designers:

Do not squander your labor in capital’s speculative casinos (crypto exchanges, advertising algorithms, data mining). In today’s world, writing code is building the new means of production.

We invite you to:

• Join the “Free Software and Decentralized Publishing Collective” to be established under the umbrella of TYS and SAV,

• Write code in the open-source repositories we will establish on GitHub/GitLab,

• Bring up uncensorable IPFS/Arweave nodes,

• Design smart contracts that transfer the writer’s labor directly to their account without expropriation,

• Become the architect of this Digital Publishing Cooperative, which will tear down capital’s walls around knowledge and literature!

Those who said “what nonsense is this man talking about” in that dark room in Ankara are the guardians of property who will be buried in history’s garbage heap. The future belongs to the collective will that believes in the freedom of code, the public character of knowledge, and the absolute sovereignty of labor.

In publishing, we have nothing to lose but our chains; we have an entire world of digital commons to win!