[p2p-research] Prospect Magazine: After Capitalism

[Ryan Lanham]

You make a number of interesting points, Andy.  Very provocative.

It seems to me that three issues drive the future of the world, some of
which you address a lot, and some less so.

1. The diffusion of p2p technologies unfettered by institutionalized
censorship.
2. The costs and feasibility of large-scale transportation-based living in
developed and developing worlds.
3. The future of debt.

Under point 1 I would put the future of religious faith (which will
naturally decline as people interact and gain access to information).  I'd
also put the question of institutionalization through education systems,
which will also decline accordingly.

Under point 2 I'd put most aspects of climate change.  How suburban the
world becomes will depend on the feasibility of the private auto or
similar.  Moving freight globally also requires large air and sea fleets
that cannot maintain speed without significant carbon expenditure (for the
foreseeable future).  Power consumption will be driven by transportation
related economies and work one place, live another arrangements.

Under point 3, I'd put the prospect of long-term business institutions of
large scale.

Architects have long said look at the skyline to determine a time's values.
Churches once ruled.  Then the institutions of the state grabbed the sky.
Then those of the service economy--eventually mostly banks and lawyers who
task banks--took over.  Now I see a future where the skyline will be filled
with green apartments linked to mass transit nodes.  I suppose that suggests
a future with fewer institutions--at least in the brick and mortar
sense--and more small-scale p2p type functions.

I agree with Andy's point that skill wins, but I see little evidence that
Asia isn't advancing skills at a rate quite a bit faster than anyone else.
My own experience with Chinese technologists suggest they are leaping
generations every few years.  Singapore is relentless--yes there are
sweatshops, but the real growth is in technology--electronics, pharma,
materials, even R&D.  I look at the US and see it surrounded by Canada,
Mexico, Cuba, the Caribbean, and South America.  China is surrounding by
Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Russia... Sounds
like a better neighborhood for innovation to me.  Europe also has a good
neighborhood.

I differ with Andy in seeing long-term stability to the current scenarios of
nation strategy he underscores.  I think these modes are sickly and weak.
I'd say the same thing about the world Saskia Sassen has described (and
keeps describing...)  She strikes me as sort of an academic Faith
Popcorn...one good idea played out over and over ad nauseum.  Yes, cities
are linked and, to a degree, autonomous, but so what?  And where does that
lead?  And what does it mean?  And why did it happen?  The Marxian
geographers had a big idea of core/periphery, but that doesn't seem to hold
much either.  Everyone I talk to thinks the future is as much Africa as
Asia.  It all feels too macro and too falsifiable.

I'd argue that skills and R&D transfer are moving rapidly, IMO, from
institutions to p2p.  Points 2 & 3 above also facilitate this
transformation.  So the question I keep asking myself is, what forms of
governance derive from rapid evolution toward high p2p reliance?  What
happens as BitTorrent destroys Blockbuster and the college library?  What is
a university if classes become less important?  What is a company when, like
Apple, the iPhone is designed and constructed across a range of global
partners and designers?  Who governs those things and by what rules?

I may be wrong but I think capitalism just died to a large extent in this
bank bailout.  The question now is how can people mobilize assets
through p2p to deal with large scale actions (or small scale ones...)
Picking up the pieces of capitalism is a Gone With the Wind sort of exercise
in my view.  Figuring out what's next is what interests me.  What's next
certainly isn't some warmed over socialism from the 1930s any more than it
is the world as Scandanavia.

Ryan Lanham



On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 6:48 AM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> The Chinese political model is very close to fascism (nominally Stalinist
> but pretty much contentless in that regard) - bear in mind the
> state-controlled media, world's biggest firewall, one-party state, vicious
> policing of dissent, bans on opponents and minorities (Falun Gong, Tibet,
> Xinjiang, Tiananmen Square), "biopolitical" practices such as organ
> harvesting, literally massive use of the death penalty after unfair trials,
> everyday control such as street wardens, etc.  Worryingly, David Harvey
> argues that China's success has led to the corrosion of liberal democracy in
> America, Britain, Europe etc - once capitalists realise they don't need
> liberal democracy, they dispense with it.  The summit "red zone" model is
> partly developed from Chinese practices (keeping protests out of view of
> leaders - a practice demanded by the Chinese during state visits) and so are
> some of the neo-totalitarian practices elsewhere (e.g. Britain now has
> Chinese-style police wardens).  This said, China's regime is also suffering
> from the impact of technologies which make censorship difficult - they've
> had to liberalise both their protest control model and their media
> censorship model recently, and are facing a wave of protests and unrest each
> year - given the lack of formal channels, protests in China nearly always
> turn into mass revolt with police routed and official buildings/vehicles
> torched or trashed, and with tools like proxies in widespread use, the
> regime is finding it impossible to suppress public knowledge of events (in
> contrast to Tiananmen, which I gather from word of mouth is still not public
> knowledge in China).
>
> I also suspect the Chinese economic / development model is short-lived -
> it's a rehashing of the Korean-Taiwanese-Indonesian-Malaysian-Singaporean
> models, cheap sweatshop production for export, which went into crisis in
> these other countries and is vulnerable to undercutting the moment standards
> of living or currency values start to rise.  The (relative) stability of the
> regime is mainly based on its economic (relative) success, and will collapse
> the moment some of the longer-term effects of its development trajectory
> manifest themselves - notably massive urbanisation due to land grabs, mass
> unemployment and shortages - all of which have been deferred by slowing the
> process of dispossession of the peasantry (and by other means such as
> population "control"), but which are manifest in most of the instances of
> revolt (often in rural areas and focused on land grabs, pollution,
> corruption, brutality and mistreatment).
>
> The Finnish model would seem to be rather different - a niche model based
> on high-value-added skilled production and rents on resource extraction -
> and while I'd be delighted to see the rest of Europe become more like
> Finland, I wonder if this isn't a continuation of the German and Japanese
> economic model of the 80s and early 90s.  For a long time this model was
> posited as the main alternative to neoliberal capitalism because Germany and
> Japan were outshining America and Britain, but it disappeared from the
> discourse on economic models when both countries went into crisis in the 90s
> (Germany largely because of reunification, Japan along with Korea etc,
> because of punishment of East Asia by neoliberal stock-marketeers).
> Germany, Japan, Korea, even Denmark and Sweden have since moved towards more
> neoliberal models, though none of them are anywhere near as neoliberal as
> Britain or America.
>
> I think something akin to fascism (at least to the "normalised" kind of
> fascism or Stalinism which existed, say, in Spain or Czechoslovakia in the
> 70s), which I term neo-totalitarianism, is coming into existence, indeed
> already exists, in Britain, and possibly also America, Australia etc, and is
> sadly rather expansive at the moment (countries like Holland, Greece,
> France, Denmark are moving in the same direction albeit from further away to
> begin with).  I think it's similar to totalitarianism because of the
> micro-regulation of everyday life, the impossibility of "legal and tolerated
> opposition" beyond a very limited sphere (dissent automatically renders one
> a "dissident" and at risk), the promotion of a near-monolithic public
> discourse, the unshackling of various state agencies to operate with
> impunity and without effective limits, the rejection of limits to state
> power in relation to various professions and groups (lawyers, journalists,
> academics, doctors, etc), the creation of agencies of political and
> microsocial policing/control, extremely harsh surveillance and punishment
> practices, requirements to adopt a model of the subject (neoliberal
> "employable" citizen) as a condition of social inclusion, and the systematic
> denial of liberal and democratic values (albeit disguised as affirmation of
> these values - one might speak of de jure democracy alongside de facto
> totalitarianism).  There are only three ways in which Britain today differs
> from classical totalitarianisms of this kind: it still has a nominally
> multi-party system, it still has a nominally free press, and it still has
> some judicial limits in terms of human rights.  I suspect these are all due
> to insertion in the EU system and especially the ECHR, and further, that
> only the third is really disruptive at all - the main parties are now really
> sub-factions of a ruling party (similar to the electoral factions in Iran),
> and the media is so successfully integrated that direct media control is not
> needed, being replaced by subtle media control (it is the case that minor
> parties and media are periodically persecuted and even shut down, as with
> al-Muhajiroun, the Indymedia server raids etc; street activities of small
> parties have been viciously attacked, so small parties and media have mainly
> survived via the Internet - which of course, is notoriously hard to
> control).  Neo-totalitarianism does practice very effective media control in
> terms of how the regime's frame infiltrates and spreads to the population
> through the media - acceptance of categories such as extremism, security
> concerns, a constant terrorist threat, various feared Others, "preachers of
> hate", "Osama bin Laden's right-hand man in Europe" and tropes of this
> kind...  through the way repression is used by the media as proof of a
> problem needing repression (3000 under-fives excluded for offences such as
> "threatening behaviour" and "sexual misconduct" is universally taken as
> proof of growing indiscipline rather than ridiculous repressiveness)...
> granted they cannot control the Internet or samizdat media, but nor could
> the classical totalitarianisms control the media of their day - nearly
> everyone in Nazi Germany listened to BBC World Service radio broadcasts for
> instance.
>
> The model seems to be spreading, though not from efficiency (it has been
> economically disastrous for all the countries which have tried it) - more
> because neo-totalitarian regimes act as a focus of attraction for
> authoritarians and "deep states" elsewhere, and because they viciously
> promote their own regime-type through international institutions.
> Ultimately I think it has the same flaws in economic terms as classical
> totalitarianism - it can make very systematic, programmed use of the latest
> economic forms for awhile, but it is unable to pioneer new models or forms
> due to its social closure, and has difficulties adapting to new models or
> forms from elsewhere (look at the fear instilled in such regimes by the
> Internet for instance), plus it is horribly corrupt (out-of-control
> individual power-holders and institutionalised quasi-corporations can
> extract resources with impunity), and it is unable to produce effective
> commitment, only a kind of grudging conformity out of fear (of the regime or
> of its others), which hits its ability to perform in sectors requiring
> active worker commitment (I've witnessed first-hand the horrible decline of
> British academia and earlier of schooling along these lines, the replacement
> of self-motivation with kafkaesque standards and procedures which homogenise
> at a very low level the process of intellectual production) - but it will
> seek, and is seeking, to prolong a kind of decadent primacy in spite of its
> lack of economic vigour, by means of military control, blackmail,
> imperialism, etc.  Capitalism relies on addition as well as subtraction of
> axioms - it depends on life-flows for its force, even though it also has to
> contain and exploit these flows - and neo-totalitarianism cuts off or
> decomposes flows to such a degree as to take away the life-force (it grows,
> I think, from the statist as much as the capitalist logic).  I also suspect
> that, while in the short-term it has drastically decomposed movements of
> protest and resistance, in the long-term it will lead to the emergence of
> more militant autonomous movements, from a generation growing up with the
> regime and fed up of it.  (I say this because early types of similar regimes
> can be detected in the emergence of autonomous movements in Italy, Germany,
> Japan, Greece, Latin America and eastern Europe in earlier periods -
> sometimes inducing liberalisations of these societies).
>
> The model you're discussing, Ryan, sounds to me very similar to the idea of
> the "global city" in Sassen (to a lesser degree also the diffuse smoothed
> capitalism of Hardt/Negri and William Robinson).  Where I think it differs
> is that the "global city" model is actually very exclusionary - a few nodes
> become very dense sites of capitalist intersections while most others are
> marginalised; so one ends up with a dense web of small local sites drawing
> in resources from a massive, geographically proximate periphery.  Since the
> periphery gains little from this, and since neoliberalism undermines the old
> mechanisms of integration (patronage, buy-offs, developmental nationalism,
> etc), the centrifugal forces of the periphery are pulling away from the
> global cities, resisting the extraction of resources for use in these core
> nodes (think of MEND, Tata Nano, Chiapas, Bougainville, Papua, Manipur, the
> piqueteros, Niger's Tuareg, NWFP, etc etc).  Rural China already has a
> similar status, and I would not rule out the margins of Europe (semi-core
> sites such as Finland) or margins within European countries (such as the
> British North) and within America (such as Michigan, Illinois, and the west
> and south) developing along the same lines.  I see the space of alternatives
> emerging in this periphery through delinking and relinking (transversality),
> the assertion or re-emergence of indigenous and ecological forms of life
> combined with the creation of new kinds of transversal connection between
> otherwise disconnected localities by means of tool-like technologies such as
> the Internet.  What I'd hope to see is a kind of network of affinities and
> resonances where an attack by the system (the global cities and their
> military allies) at any one point produces negative effects throughout the
> entire web of delinked and partially delinked sites.  Also hopefully a
> reconfiguration of technologies to disempower the core sites (negation of
> the advantages of air power is crucial - this is currently the core's one
> form of reach into marginal areas).
>
> bw
> Andy
>
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