[p2p-research] Berardi essay

[Kevin Carson]

On 5/22/09, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 1)  can we really be sure this is the final crisis?  Marxism seems to find a
> "final crisis" every few decades - capitalism wasn't supposed to survive the
> First World War, the Second World War, the 70s crash, and the current
> reference to ecological disaster was formerly focused on the threat of
> fascism, then the threat of nuclear war...  If the system is going to get
> out of the crisis, it would have to be by doing something as yet unknown,
> unpredictable and new.  Which is how it got out of the other crises (e.g.
> Keynesianisn after WW2).  But, by definition we cannot know if it is capable
> of doing something as yet unknown, unpredictable and new.  The thesis of
> final crisis is based on the observed capabilities and actions of the
> system, whereas the possibility of systemic survival is based on the
> unknown, as is the possibility of antisystemic transformation.

Keynesianism by itself wouldn't have been enough to pull capitalism
out of its last large-scale crisis, IMO, if WWII (and especially
American strategic bombing) hadn't solved the chronic tendency toward
overaccumulation/underconsumption by blowing up most of the plant and
equipment outside the U.S.  Or rather, postponed it for a generation.

Richard K. Moore, a left-wing conspiracy theorist, periodically
speculates that the corporate capitalists are planning some similar
Hail Mary pass through nuclear war with China, coupled with a mass
die-off.

Whether this is really "it"--i.e., the terminal crisis of
capitalism--depends mainly on what you mean by capitalism.  I believe
that corporate capitalism is doomed, but the system that emerges on
the other side of Peak Oil and the economic meltdown may be more
genuinely free market than the system we have now.  The state's fiscal
crisis, coupled with Peak Oil and corporate capital's exponentially
increasing demand for subsidized inputs, amount to the system hitting
a wall.  Ditto for Michel's past comments on the crisis of realization
in the cognitive realm.  All these crises together, working through
the market system, will exert pressure for radical decentralization
and an end to the old mass production model.

-- 
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