[p2p-research] what to think of the market

[Kevin Carson]

On 7/28/09, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was merely pionting out that people have been innovating in very different
> social models, way before the capitalist market became dominant, and often
> outside of market relations, think of patronage, gift economies, the
> invention of fire and the wheel etc..

True, and even in planned economies like the USSR where it was almost
impossible to value the productive resources going into an innovation
and rank the alternative uses of those resource, at least some
use-value was being created.  Refrigerators, microwaves, improved
vehicles, televisions, etc., were introduced over the years of Soviet
rule, and the general standard of living was surely better as a result
of the technical progress.

I've had some right-wing libertarians tell me the corporate economy
couldn't be as statist as I make it out to be, and that it must be
predominantly a market system even with the present degree of state
involvement, because otherwise calculational chaos would have rendered
it non-functional.

In response I point to the innovations that took place in feudal
Europe and under Soviet rule, and argue that by their standards it
would require a degree of statism greater than that of the Soviet
Union or feudal Europe to result in economic collapse.  Then I
cheerfully concede that American state capitalism is probably no more
statist than the USSR.

What we have, though, in both the US corporate economy and the old
USSR, is a lot of new technology and only the vaguest ideas of whether
it's something people actually wanted or just what the bureaucracy
wanted to design, and whether it is an efficient use of resources.

-- 
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
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html