[p2p-research] Prospect Magazine: After Capitalism

[Kevin Carson]

On 4/7/09, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Prospect Magazine out of the UK has an interesting current article
> discussing the financial system demise and its implications.  The article is
> by Geoff Mulgan.
>
> http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10680
>
> I've long wondered how organizations can develop and maintain the
> sustainable cashflows necessary to support a LT debt-based economy.  It
> seems a lot of people are starting to think this way or to give voice to
> doubts long held.  I understand creative destruction and all that, but
> velocity is such that creative destruction happens now in months not
> decades.  Can the system support the investment and capital necessary to
> cycle at such accelerated rates?  Globalization feeds the acceleration
> because it isn't a company down the street alone one faces but one in
> Shanghai, one in Singapore, one in Ankara, and two in Finland as well as one
> in Eugene, Oregon and one in Pittsburgh.
>
> State-sponsored capitalism a la China (or even Finland) seems to be the
> emerging model for coping.  Isn't that what Geithner is running?  State
> sponsored capitalism in the financial sector?  Ironically, it is the alleged
> socialist countries in Europe that seem to be willing to let manufacturing
> institutions die--like the auto industry.

I don't think the Chinese model of state-sponsored capitalism is
sustainable.  China heavily subsidizes energy and transportation
inputs, pricing them at artificially low levels to domestic industrial
consumers, just as did the USSR.  This accounting gimmick won't work
externally--the Saudis want cash on the barrelhead, at the price they
set for crude petroleum--and the increased demand for subsidized
energy inputs by wasteful domestic Chinese producers will just cause
China to bankrupt itself buying oil abroad.

As for a globalized economy with local producers in one place
competing with others all around the world, that is heavily dependent
on a warehouses-in-container-ships model of distribution, which won't
do very well when oil goes back to $150 a barrel--or higher.

If anything, all these things will just hasten the arrival of an
industrial model that *reduces* the capital outlays needed to enter
the market, and makes more efficient use of smaller inputs.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
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