[p2p-research] after america, china, after china, the empire

[Kevin Carson]

On 9/25/08, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> First of all, please see this wonderful clear exposition of the issues
> around peer production,
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2008/09/chapter-fifteen-excerpts-peer.html
>

Thanks, Michel.

> but this book on china is really hyper-important,
> http://www.econ.utah.edu/~mli/index.htm (SEE THE TOC link,
> or video at
> http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=33&Itemid=74&jumival=188)
>
> it's basic thesis is that the world system cannot survive the rise of china,
> I see it as crucial support for my own thesis here at
> http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/peer-to-peer-and-the-feudal-transition/2007/09/10
>

>From reading the Preface, he seems to be starting mainly from the
argument in vol. 3 of Capital, on the expansion of capital into new
frontiers of low cost and underaccumulation as a counteracting
tendency to the falling direct rate of profit.  Li argues that China
was the last such large-scale outlet (the last frontier), and is
unable to continue to absorb capital investment on a scale sufficient
to serve as an outlet for Western surplus capital.

IMO this parallels the collapse of the tech bubble (the tech industry
being another example of a new field of investment of the sort Marx
discussed as a relief for surplus capital), and the housing bubble
(which was really associated with further mass-suburbanization, in the
ways discussed by Kunstler, as a new field for surplus capital).
Starting ca. 1940 with large-scale rearmament, the problem of
overaccumulation has been remedied by one government effort after
another, both through large-scale armament production and the direct
creation of one new industry after another (the expansion of the car
culture, suburbanization, and the trucking industry after WWII; the
direct outgrowth of the miniaturized electronics industry from the
military economy; the desktop revolution from the '80s on; the new
wave of suburbanization and the SUV culture; etc.).

As you suggest, Michel, capitalism is running out of such outlets
because the unenforceability of IP is resulting in a crisis of
realization.  And as Li suggests, there's a limit to how far the
problem can be circumvented by exporting capital, because there's only
one Earth.

IMO there's another way in which China is about to hit the wall.
China's economic process to date has relied on enormous, extensive
addition of energy inputs, enabled through artificially low pricing of
energy within the Chinese state capitalist economy (around a third of
the world price, I believe).  Now, China can price energy inputs
internally in whatever Alice in Wonderland way it wants.  But it
relies heavily on outside energy markets, and the petroleum-exporting
countries won't sell it for the imaginary prices China uses
internally.  So China is headed for the same kind of input and
resource crises as the West:  its industry will gobble up energy as
inefficiently and wastefully as can be imagined, since it's "free,"
even as the state bankrupts itself attempting to obtain more from
outside.

Just from reading the Preface, the book seems to include a
rehabilitation of Maoism as a libertarian/egalitarian/decentralist
ideology.  I've got to say, the idea doesn't appeal to me.  He appears
to treat egalitarian Maoism and the Singaporean model of authoritarian
hypercapitalism pursued by the current regime as the two polar
alternatives.  IMO this is a mistake.

Suppose, instead, China in the '70s had pursued market reform on the
same basis that Gorbachev was feeling his way toward before the coup:
a land reform based on the recognition of village communal rights,
privatization of factories as worker cooperatives, etc.  This would
also have included the actual cost pricing of inputs (which would have
encouraged small-scale production and decentralism, and likely
resulted in a continuation of small-industry at the level of commune
and brigade developed earlier), the free organization of labor (which
coupled with free access to the land would have made China far less
attractive as a haven for sweatshops), and complete repudiation of the
concept of "intellectual property."  China might have developed,
instead, a decentralized market economy of the cooperatively organized
working class and self-employed petty bourgeoisie, oriented mainly
toward mobilization of local capital to produce for local consumption.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Anarchist Organization Theory Project
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html