[p2p-research] Berardi essay

[Andy Robinson]

To an extent "the old mass production model" has already gone, at least as a
core part of the economy - the factories have been outsourced to peripheral
countries as "low-value-added", and integrated into production chains which
are leaner and more nodal.  If anything this has increased reliance on oil.


But I'm not sure the current crisis is actually the coming-home-to-roost of
the underlying systemic problems such as peak oil, climate change and
overproduction/underconsumption.  It's the latest in a series of "bubble
bursts" arising from financialisation in the 80s, which was itself a kind of
"crisis management" of the 70s crisis (which was more structural).  Granted
this is the biggest so far, but in the last fifteen years we've had the
Russian collapse, the Mexican crisis, the Argentine crisis, the East Asian
crisis, the dotcom bubble, the Enron crisis, the European ERM collapse, and
probably a few more besides.  The causes of these recurring crises are very
much conjunctural: massive American deficit spending based on abuse of the
dollar's position as world reserve currency, hugely increased speed of
financial flows leading to vulnerability to speculation, a huge excess of
"fictional" financial capital over productive capital, massive (and largely
unregulated) use of risky derivative investments by banks and governments
which is seen as safer than it is.

Net result:  everything becomes dependent on volatile financial markets
which go up and down drastically; when they go down drastically, core agents
in the economy such as banks, governments, blue chip companies are at risk.
Usual response: America wards off the collapse of the system by bailing out
the core sectors and letting the marginal sectors go down.

Hence, this is a crisis of the 80s patch-up, not the economy as such.
Whether it can be dealt with the same way as the other shocks remains to be
seen - but America is trying to do the same it always does, bail out the
core sectors and carry on with business as usual.  So, we'll see.

Now, if we go back a stage further and ask why the 80s patch-up was needed
in the first place, it becomes clear that the patch-up was a response to
deeper, more fundamental problems, including overproduction and oil price
rises (climate change doesn't enter until later).  Also a crisis of the role
of America as hegemon, and of the Bretton Woods system.  These crises were
never resolved, but simply postponed.  But the economy hasn't been in a
growth wave since the 70s; it's been warding off the crisis which was felt
then and is felt now.

But, to return to "old production" and restructuring.  I think part of the
crisis of the 70s has to do with networks and hierarchies.  The "old" system
was highly hierarchical, but was suffering problems from certain kinds of
structural weaknesses in relation to networks - the American defeat in
Vietnam being especially important, though one could also refer to
resistance through delinking and syncretism at the margins, Offe's
decommodification crisis in the welfare state (based on power of everyday
uses over systemic means) and the diffusion of popular cultures (importance
of niche over mass markets).  And ever since the 70s the system has been
trying to find hybrids of network and hierarchy which will harness and
capture the power of networks without leading to "chaos" or
system-breakdown.  We see this across a range of fields: just-in-time
production, outsourcing and downsizing, use of local subsidiaries,
contracting-out, Revolution in Military Affairs, full spectrum dominance,
indirect rule through multinational agencies, the Nixon Doctrine, joined-up
governance, the growing importance of groups such as the G8 and G20,
business networks, lifelong learning, global cities, and of course the
development of new technologies such as the Internet.

While networks on their own might be democratising, equalising, liberating -
the hybrid forms are not, because they inject aspects of command at key
points as substitutes for voluntary agency.

Very often, networking of capitalism involves a replacement of systematic
agencies which are flexible or universalistic on the side of the
institution, with arbitrary, commandist agencies making extreme demands on
participants.  By seeking to capture the WHOLE of networks, the distance
between power and everyday life is reduced or eliminated.  One thus ends up
with an extremely intrusive and cruel, "personalised" form of power which
attempts to draw on all aspects of the network by becoming identical with
it.  This is the type of hybrid I think is dominant today, definitive
especially of Third Way and neoliberal politics; it is associated with one
of Zuboff's two types of high-tech in the workplace, and with "New Age
policing" (CCTVs, ASBOs etc) and "welfare to work"/employability/flexibility
(of the worker).  In rendering the command apparatus (state/capital)
identical with society and with life, in denying life any space of its own,
this model is terrifyingly totalitarian.  It is really an attempt to ward
off the power of networks by decomposing, by substitutionism.

There is also a second type which lets networks do their own thing and seeks
to filter a surplus from them.  This is more sustainable, but at the moment
seems to be facing huge resistance from the status quo.

In the medium term, the loss of power to networks is probably irreversible,
and capital and the state will either go down fighting or create
more-or-less stable intermediary forms which allow them to persist for a
time.  We are already seeing the beginnings of the latter, but the former is
more predominant.  The way I see the crisis deepening is that large areas
will drift outside state and capitalist control, integrated marginally or
not at all (this is already happening at sites such as Afghanistan, NWFP,
the Andes, Somalia, etc., and in a local way in shanty-towns and autonomous
centres).  I also expect the deterritorialised areas to spread, as a result
of the concentration of resources in global cities, the ecological effects
of extraction, the neoliberal closing of mediations which formerly
integrated, and the growing stratum of people excluded either because of the
small number of jobs available or the growing set of requirements for
conformity. Eventually these marginal spaces will become sites of a
proliferation of new forms of living, and a pole of attraction compared to
the homogeneous, commandist, coercive core.  (This is slightly complicated
by the issue of reactive networks - the closure of networks in otherwise
non-hierarchical spaces by their coalescence around fixed identities and
exclusions, as "small-world networks".  This tendency is strong today,
partly because it is a major strategy of state and capitalist reintegration
of escaping areas, partly because of effects of hierarchy-induced scarcity -
and is the reason these areas have not gone further in becoming loci of
affirmative energy and forces of attraction).

At the moment, the state (backed by capital) tries to bring these areas back
in violently, but sooner or later, sectors of capital will realise they can
profit by working with forces on the ground in the deterritorialised areas.
Corporations which adapt to their loss of power at marginal points will
become more like merchants, or service providers; I see the likes of
PirateBay as forerunners in this regard.  States which adapt will become
"rhizome-states" linking to the locality only through intermediaries in the
local setting, and losing their control function - they might become a kind
of pure welfare-state or pure distributive state.  Or, states might try to
draw on the proliferating energies by creating concentrated open spaces
similar to the old city-states (there are already micro-states which do this
in relation to capital flows).  In all these cases, the flows will be so
uncontrollable and unpredictable that the hierarchies will not have
regulative force over them, will not be able to guarantee profit, but
rather, will be almost parasitic on abundance.  I suspect some will choose
this over disappearance, once the structural power of networks is sufficient
to overpower the violent response one currently sees.

bw
Andy
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20090525/a3cc9dae/attachment.html>