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

[Kevin Carson]

On 10/8/09, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm urging everyone to read, not skim for quick predictable reactions, the following article:
>
> - http://www.newleftreview.org/A2799

A few points:

I dispute Balakrishnan's framing of the issue, in taking the postwar
expansion of capitalism as proving the resilience of the system, and
casting doubt on Marx's theory of mature capitalism.  Sure, capitalism
can recover--as long as some superpower destroys most of the plant and
equipment outside its own borders in order to give its capital and
goods a wide-open and uncontested field for thirty years, and diverts
almost its entire production for four years into military hardware
that (in Emmanuel Goldstein's words) is sunk to the bottom of the sea
or blown into the stratosphere.  Nothing that happened in WWII and
after disproved Marxist theories of overaccumulation, any more than
the other counteracting tendencies to the falling direct rate of
profit Marx listed in vol. 3 of Capital "contradicted" his theory of
the crises of late capitalism.  His only failing was to list "blowing
up all the plant and equipment and starting over" as one of the
counteracting tendencies.

The chronic crisis tendency came back, with a vengeance, when the
world capital markets were once again saturated around 1970.  And
pushing the reset button with a world war, in order to start again
with a clean slate, may be a bit  more costly in an age of nuclear
weapons.

I'm a bit skeptical of Marxist speculations on a new "social structure
of accumulation," on the same pattern as the Second Industrial
Revolution and the postwar Fordist SSA.  One thing that's hard to get
around is the lack of plausible "epoch-making industries" as new
sponges for surplus capital, when the new technological developments
are actually reducing needs for capital outlay by an order of
magnitude or two.  Balakrishnan is correct to express skepticism about
increased productiivity from a new technological revolution leading to
massive new investment and "growth," and to say that we're at a
"structural impasse."  But he got things backward, confusing "growth"
in econometric terms with increase in physical productivity.  The
problem is that increase in physical productivity is rendering most
finance capital superfluous, thus exacerbating capitalism's chronic
overaccumulation tendency.

And even if we're in for a long stagnation of several centuries
comparable to the Dark Ages, in terms of traditional econometric
statistics, I think the technological genies coming out of the bottle
will be intensifying economic production coextensively with that
official stagnation.  Micromanufacturing is already in the process of
introducing the modern analogues of horse collar, crop rotation and
clockwork machinery even as we're retiring to the villas.

It's entirely correct that we're not heading for a new, vigorous phase
of accumulation, because we're entering a phase of what Robb calls
"STEMI compression" that's so intensive as to render the whole link
between accumulation and productivity obsolete.  That's why IMO the
whole "social structure of accumulation" paradigm is obsolete:  its
focus on new engines of accumulation, as sponges for enormous
quantities of investment capital, is no longer relevant.

Two opposing themes in the SSA theory, mentioned by B., are at odds
with each other.  The first is the rising set of costs, and the need
to reduce them to restore the rate of profit.  But lowering costs and
increasing profit directly creates an internal contradiction:   a
surplus of investment capital without a productive outlet.

The probem is not that there's technological stagnation, so that no
technological advance exists to increase productivity and create a new
outlet for investment capital.  The problem is that rapid
technological advances are increasing productivity in ways that render
investment capital useless (as described by Rushkoff).

I'm utterly floored by B's references to "technological stagnation."
What planet is he living on?

The problem with these Marxist theories of social structures  of
accumulation is that they tacitly assume a paleotechnic,
mass-production technological paradigm in which massive capital
investment is needed to increase productivity.


-- 
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