[p2p-research] Why Post-Capitalism is Rubbish

[Chris Watkins]

On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 11:17, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> > It doesn't look like that's true. Wikipedia again:
> > Arthur Young[45] first used the term capitalist in his work Travels in
> > France (1792).[46] Samuel Taylor Coleridge,[45] an English poet, used
> > capitalist in his work Table Talk (1823).[47] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon used
> > capitalist in his first work What is Property? (1840) to refer to the
> owners
> > of capital. Benjamin Disraeli[45] used capitalist in the 1845 work Sybil.
> > Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels also used capitalist (Kapitalist) as a
> > private owner of capital in The Communist Manifesto (1848).
>
> But all those references are to the use of "capital-IST" as someone
> performing a particular economic function, whereas Dmytri's claim is
> for the use of "capital-ISM" as a social system.  I was vaguely aware
> that the "capitalist" usage predated "capitalism";  but I still think
> "capitalism" came into widespread use by radical critics of the
> system, and initially carried a largely pejorative connotation.  I get
> the impression that both Mises' and Rand's preference for "capitalism"
> over "free enterprise" reflected a deliberate intention to scandalize
> by reclaiming what had been a slur (much like gay rights activists
> using the term "queer," etc.).


Yes, I realized after posting that I'd copied the wrong bit. The etymology
of "Capitalism" in Wikipedia is more ambiguous. It still doesn't seem to be
owned or innovated by socialist commentators, though.

Michel:

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.


Not having read Marx, I probably can't comment intelligently, but I don't
think that's how things played out in the 20th century. While divisions of
wealth remained large, a middle-class formed which was able to engage in
business to a significant degree. Small businesses didn't come to dominate
the economy (probably for a range of reasons including economies of scale
and the design of business regulations) though some became big businesses -
it would be interesting to see statistics on these things.



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.
>

I'm not sure of the significance of "If there were no workers to sell their
labour, the system would instantly collapse." If there are no sellers in a
market, then there is no market, but I'm not sure whether that demonstrates
anything.


> 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.
>

I agree, that looks like a fundamental shift in work & employment.

-- 
Chris Watkins

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I like this: five.sentenc.es
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