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

[Michel Bauwens]

Dear Kevin,

thanks for those interesting comments, which I'm publishing on oct 2 ...

I agree that it is unfortunate that he goes back to Maoist totalitarianism
as an alternative to the present system ...

I was not aware that Gorbachev was contemplating such reforms, do you have
any pointers on that?

Michel

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 12:52 AM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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<http://www.econ.utah.edu/%7Emli/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
>
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