[p2p-research] Abundance Destroys Profit [was: Tick, tock, tick, tock… BING]

[Andy Robinson]

What perhaps needs to be realised in this discussion is that patronage, and
complex intersections between the state and local forces, are the normal
form of political power (including electoral power and state power) in most
of the world.  America and the North in general are usually viewed as an
exception to this rule.  Actually, if anything, only the urban centres are
an exception.  The integration of peripheral and semi-peripheral areas into
the world-system happens mainly through patronage, and this includes
peripheral areas within core states.  It is best known in international
terms, as comprador capitalism, the 'imported state' and so on - basically a
core country either bribes an elite to support its agenda, or bribes the
whole country on condition the pro-core elite remains in power.  The form of
the state which results is quite predictably extractive - the elite buys off
support from regional groups using the money it's getting from the core,
uses more of the money to suppress anyone who can't be incorporated, and
enriches itself at the same time.  But we're used to thinking of it in
international terms.  Increasingly today, and to some extent always, parts
of mega-states like the US, and even of smaller states, are also peripheral
and are governed in a similar way (in Britain I'd point to the flow of
resources to local councils in the abandoned North through various
centrally-funded Blairite hobby-horse programmes such as the various
anti-crime initiatives, and the cultivation and financing of an entire
swathe of 'community leaders' in various ethnic minority communities, all on
large government or council salaries).

It sounds like Nevada is an even stranger case though - almost a little USSR
inside America?  How does the economy function - mainly federal jobs?  There
were a lot of artificial cities fuelled by state investment in Russia
(Magnitogorsk and the like) and most of them held up for as long as the
regime did.  They're rapidly depopulating today.  They're also the main
electoral base, along with similar rural areas, of the Communist Party
(which in Russia means the nostalgic paleoconservatives).

What's strange is that in electoral terms, neoliberalism often becomes
dependent on anti-cosmopolitan peripheral forces to sustain dominance
exercised primarily in, and for classes and elites based in, the cities.
All the global cities have a left-of-centre electorate (probably due to
their pulling power for the poor).  Hence, all the global cities are managed
more-or-less undemocratically - either as dictatorial city-states
(Singapore, Dubai) or based on the overriding of the local electorate by a
rural electorate in a bigger nation-state.  But of course, the rural
electorate has neither an economic interest in nor a political affinity with
neoliberalism and the primacy of global cities.  Hence, neoliberals dress up
as conservatives or communitarians to articulate voters whose attachments
are to resisting neoliberalism.
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