[p2p-research] Prospect Magazine: After Capitalism

[Ryan Lanham]

I suppose I need some sort of systematic comparison of authoritarian and
neo-authoritarian or totalitarian versus neo-totalitarian.

I wonder if the choice of linkage is blinding.

I would just add, as an aside, that I am reading Dan Ariely's Predictably
Irrational and can highly recommend it through Chapter 3.  The idea of
anchoring of price views I've long known but his explanation is crystal
clear.   People who find supply and demand outrageous would like
Ariely...who has himself an extremely compelling personal story related to
extremely bad burns suffered as an Israeli soldier in a training accident.
He began his journey into behaviorial economics based on analyzing his own
pain and who paid for it when he endured treatments.

It is one of those books that is simple, almost simplistic, but extremely
enlightening.  I will try to write a coherent review for Michel at some
point, but it is a slow read despite the easy text--so much to think about!

Ryan Lanham



On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 3:06 AM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Oops, sent to sender not list...
> Trying again:
>
> Hi again,
>>
>> The state mobilisation through social movements, again was typical of
>> "high" Stalinism and Nazism, but not so much of the "post-totalitarian"
>> regimes; what the latter have (and the former also) is mobilisation through
>> incorporated agencies and services, which I think is paralleled in "Third
>> Way" uses of ex-welfare-state agencies, private partnerships and quangos
>> (e.g. purging teachers and replacing them with Blairite clones).
>>
>> Corporations and governments have been around for a long time, but until
>> quite recently have never been dominant in the SOCIAL space (as distinct
>> from claiming such dominance in law), because there are usually dense webs
>> of social networks and movements which are more horizontal (c.f. Colin
>> Ward's work).
>>
>> Also Marc's point "The governments that we have today are just a kind of
>> business entity that gets to operate above both the domestic and
>> international law", seems to me to be saying a little more than just
>> "governments and corporations are dominant and dysfunctional" - he's saying
>> firstly that governments are now defined on the corporate model, and
>> secondly that these corporate governments are (or try to be) above the law,
>> indeed, above all laws (I would extend, above all constraints whether legal,
>> customary, relational, ideological or material).  It is here that they would
>> take on totalitarian or extreme authoritarian attributes.  Neither the
>> Keynesian state nor the classical authoritarian (Establishment) state would
>> either model itself on a corporation or claim/aspire to be above all laws.
>> The classic authoritarian state would be constrained by the rest of the
>> Establishment (extra-state, extra-corporate elites) and had to operate
>> within limits set by the latter and enshrined in its laws, while the
>> Keynesian state was more of an arbitration than a corporate role, and had to
>> guarantee its trustworthiness with predictability.
>>
>> Marc is reminding me a lot of Negri's early (autonomist) stuff where he
>> views the boundary between state and capital disappearing entirely, the
>> state becoming an unmediated part or agent of capital and the disappearance
>> of mediations leading to a replacement of foundation on externality (the law
>> of value) with the arbitrariness of command.  Negri also uses the term
>> "totalitarian" for this regime, while insisting on its sharp differentiation
>> from "fascism" specifically.
>>
>> Where does competency fit in? - well, I think Ryan and Marc are right that
>> creative vitality is only possible in networks, that hierarchies are
>> ineffective, almost a kind of social death in terms of vital energies
>> (Kropotkin already theorised this when he discussed the rise and fall of
>> "civilisations").  This is ultimately what finished off the Soviet Union and
>> its satellites - it could implement the technologies of its day, but it
>> couldn't achieve anything very effectively, the system was too rigid, and it
>> couldn't keep up with the flows elsewhere, let alone compete in releasing
>> its own flows.  Capitalism in contrast was able at this point to draw to
>> some extent on flows, even while exploiting them.  But the closure of
>> certain regimes today, seems to reproduce the problems of the Soviet model.
>> Which would suggest that, assuming there isn't a social transformation
>> first, there will be a process of long, slow decline ending in collapse.
>> Suppose for instance that file sharing and infinite reproducibility of data
>> are shut down or held back in these regimes, while flourishing elsewhere
>> where controls don't exist or are harder to enforce.  But there's a problem
>> that it's a delayed effect - it isn't visible yet, because countries like
>> Britain can keep living off past accumulation and remain "richer", more
>> popular as targets of migration, etc.  And another problem that the
>> up-and-coming regimes seem to be adopting the same model.
>>
>> bw
>> Andy
>>
>
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