[p2p-research] Why Post-Capitalism is Rubbish

[Michel Bauwens]

Hi Chris,

I think the central claim of Marx in terms of defining capitalism is the
insistence that it can only exist after divorcing producers from the means
of production, giving rise to a specialized class that owns those means. The
forms of this 'ownership' have changed quite a bit, they have become almost
exclusively financial, but the basic expropriation remains. If there were no
workers to sell their labour, the system would instantly collapse.

However, there is one big change, and this is what we address at the p2p
foundation, which is that knowledge workers now own the means of immaterial
production, that represents a real shift.

Marx's understanding was to see communal shareholding emerge 'at the end of
history' when the issue of material scarcity would have gradually been
solved through socialism (the intermediary stage between the two).

What we have instead is that communal shareholding has already been
established within capitalism, and that is a really unexpected development.

Michel

On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 10:09 AM, Chris Watkins <
chriswaterguy at appropedia.org> wrote:

> Dmytri Kleiner wrote (re the term "capitalism"):
>
> The term originates in Socialist critiques of the emerging social
>> relations of the industrial revolution.
>>
>
> It doesn't look like that's true. Wikipedia again:
> Arthur Young <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Young_%28writer%29>[45]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#cite_note-OED-44>first used the term
> *capitalist* in his work *Travels in France* (1792).[46]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#cite_note-45> Samuel
> Taylor Coleridge <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Taylor_Coleridge>,[
> 45] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#cite_note-OED-44> an English
> poet <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poet>, used *capitalist* in his work *Table
> Talk* (1823).[47] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#cite_note-46> Pierre-Joseph
> Proudhon <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Joseph_Proudhon> used *
> capitalist* in his first work *What is Property?<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_is_Property%3F>
> * (1840) to refer to the owners of capital. Benjamin Disraeli<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Disraeli>
> [45] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#cite_note-OED-44> used *
> capitalist* in the 1845 work *Sybil<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_%28novel%29>
> *. Karl Marx <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx> and Friedrich Engels<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Engels>also used
> *capitalist* (*Kapitalist*) as a private owner of capital in *The
> Communist Manifesto <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Manifesto>
> * (1848).
>
> Also, I'm not sure how well Marx's description of the economy applies now,
> 161 years after he wrote, even ignoring any issues with Marx's own writings.
> And I don't see why the socialist definition of Marxism should be normative
> any more than a capitalist definition of socialism should be.)
>
> Anyway, even where terms are distorted by popular use, it's not always
> helpful to cling to one's own preferred definition (just as Hayek
> reluctantly gave up what he thought was the best use of the word "liberal").
>
> I'd see a lot of value in a non-partisan economics wiki, but I'm not aware
> of any active ones apart from Wikipedia. Googling didn't yield anything
> much; neither did a look through WikiIndex. economics.wikia.com and
> www.teralaser.net/economics/w are the most promising that I found.
>
> Obviously p2pfoundation.net and Wikipedia have a lot of info, but
> p2pfoundation is from a certain angle, not aiming to be all about economics;
> Wikipedia is the wiki with the broadest collection of economics info I know
> of, and its resistance to particular POV (insofar as it succeeds) is both
> its greatest strength and a guarantee to annoy many with a strong POV. Its
> main drawbacks are that it doesn't allow for analysis and non-"notable"
> views (notable under Wikipedia's definition). (These are both important to
> Wikipedia, but there's room for a more ambitious economics wiki. I'm not
> sure how the analysis would work without becoming unconstructive, but the
> wiki would have to find its own equivalent guidelines..)
>
> --
> Chris Watkins
>
> Appropedia.org - Sharing knowledge to build rich, sustainable lives.
>
> identi.ca/appropedia / twitter.com/appropedia
> blogs.appropedia.org
>
> I like this: five.sentenc.es
>
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