[p2p-research] Another take on being a contemporary revolutionary...

[Ryan Lanham]

On Sat, Jun 6, 2009 at 12:38 PM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 5/30/09, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > http://efssociety.blogspot.com/2009/05/civic-unreasonableness.html
>
> That certainly carries more than a little vibe of paternalistic social
> engineering.  But it would probably come across better if the the
> author were politic enough to mention that the present system of
> corporate capitalism, rather than being the spontaneous outgrowth of a
> free market, is the result of a top-down social engineering experiment
> at least as enormous and authoritarian as anything he has in mind.  It
> would also be nice if he showed some awareness that most of what he
> desires could be achieved, not by new restrictions and/or subsidies,
> but by removing *existing* subsidies and protections from corporate
> capitalism.
>
>
It is a grand leap in the Age of Climate Change to suggest that
paternalistic social engineering isn't a necessity.  I think that argument
would have to sell first given any level of collective responsibility.
Liberty is great so long as it doesn't mean collective disaster.
Liberty+responsibility is key.  One doesn't outweigh.  When the two are
added, I get social engineering as a sum.

Paternalism is, to me, too little emphasis on responsibility in the other
direction.  Negotiating the balance between collective responsibility and
liberty has, so far, only been achieved reasonably in social democracies.
Those democracies where the corporation is king (Germany, US, France,
Britain, Mexico, etc.) tend to subsidize continuity and stability of
imperial models where labor mattered and capital is king.

Overall, corporate capitalism, as you call it, is mostly a form of
collective action by nations, cities, towns, etc. to keep stability.  It is
very expensive, as you have also pointed out, and will thus eventually die
of its own weight...as the very expensive authoritarian socialist projects
have.  Expensive, we now know, means high social costs as well as individual
ones...lost happiness, lost liberty, lost productivity, more death and
illness, etc.

I think social engineering is a process of having social aims and then
designing approaches to realize them.  Tell me any two of three variables, a
group's true intentions, it's progress toward achieving those intentions,
and its power to implement things democratically, and I'll tell you the
missing one.  If that's social engineering, then I am for it.  The question
is, how much information is lost through representative models in the hope
of achieving efficacy.  Grass-roots, local, P2P, etc. all work to make
representation moot.  We are learning slowly that efficacy through vanguards
and leaders is not that efficient.  In short, elites of any sort are
socially expensive.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20090606/cfa3b24e/attachment.html>