[p2p-research] the most important article of the year so far ...

[Michel Bauwens]

I'm urging everyone to read, not skim for quick predictable reactions, the
following article:

- http://www.newleftreview.org/A2799

It is a serious challenge to the optimistic scenario from carlota perez (I"m
reading this quite fantastic book right now, thanks Nathan for having sent
it!), which I'm also using in my own lectures recently ...

quick recall: the p2p seed form can reach parity form within the next growth
cycle which should occur from  2020 to 2050, given expectations based on the
four previous cycles ..

the problem of course is that the short term Kondratieff cycles are now
coinciding with the creation of the internet (at least as important as
printing was in the 15th cy), but even more seriously, with a terminal (if
we continue on the same road), biospheric crisis ...

so we have at least 3 temporalities coinciding

- a 60-year phase of capitalism (kondratieff 5 is coming)

- a 700-year civilisational shift

- a 5,000 year crisis of the civilisational model itself ...

my take is that we have another 30 years, but I'm not saying these will be
easy ones, to prepare for the big shift, as we are simply not ready ...

but what if what is coming is the five-century 'stagnation' which occured
between the fall of the roman empire (slavery-based), to the new
consolidation (after the first european revolution of 975) in the 10th
century, of a robust feudalism ..?

Michel





**
 New Left Review 59, September-October 2009
<http://www.newleftreview.org/?issue=293>

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gopal balakrishnan SPECULATIONS ON 
THE STATIONARY STATE

A crisis occurs sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration
means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves and
that despite this the political forces which are struggling to conserve and
defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them
within certain limits and to overcome them. These incessant and persistent
efforts (since no social formation will concede that it has been superseded)
form the terrain of the conjunctural, and it is upon this terrain that the
opposition organizes.

Antonio Gramsci, *Prison Notebooks*

What is the historical significance of the implosion of neo-liberalism,
coming less than twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union? A
disconcerting thought experiment suggests itself. The ussr, it might be
recalled, had reached the summit of its power in the 70s, shortly before
stumbling downward into a spiral of retrenchment, drift and collapse. Could
a comparable reversal of fortune now be in store for the superpower of the
West, one of those old-fashioned ‘ironies of history’? After all, a certain
unity of opposites can be traced between an unbridled late capitalism and
the centrally planned rust belts of the former Comecon—and precisely in the
economic sphere, where they were diametrically counterposed. During the
heyday of Reaganism, official Western opinion had rallied to the view that
the bureaucratic administration of things was doomed to stagnation and
decline because it lacked the *ratio* of market forces, coordinating
transactions through the discipline of competition. Yet it was not too long
after the final years of what was once called socialism that an increasingly
debt- and speculation-driven capitalism began to go down the path of
accounting and allocating wealth in reckless disregard of any notionally
objective measure of value. The balance sheets of the world’s greatest banks
are an imposing testimony to the breakdown of standards by which the wealth
of nations was once judged.

In their own ways, both bureaucratic socialism and its vastly more affluent
neo-liberal conqueror concealed their failures with increasingly
arbitrary *tableaux
économiques.* By the 80s the gdr’s reported national income was revealed to
be a statistical artifact that grossly inflated its cramped standards of
living. But in the same decade, an emerging circuit of global imbalances was
beginning to generate considerable problems for the measurement of
capitalist wealth. The coming depression may reveal that the national
economic statistics of the period of bubble economics were fictions, not
wholly unlike those operative in the old Soviet system.

Of course, the recurring crises of capitalism are supposed to be different
from the terminal stages of non-capitalist civilizations and modes of
production. Such social orders seem to have lacked capitalism’s distinctive
capacity for creative destruction, for periodic renewal through downturns
that liquidate inefficient conditions of production and life forms, opening
up frontiers for the next round of expansion. In accordance with this
pattern, nearly all commentators on today’s economic meltdown have assumed
that this Schumpeterian tale of crisis and renovation will repeat itself in
one form or another. But is it, in fact, inevitable that new phases of
accumulation will emerge from the aftermath of what now promises to be an
enormous and protracted shake-out? I would like to propose that this
scenario of capitalist renewal is distinctly less likely than a long-term
drift towards what the classical political economists used to call ‘the
stationary state’ of civilization.

-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Research:
http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
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