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

[Michel Bauwens]

Hi Kevin,

could you reformulate these excellent comments so that I/we can publish them
as a separate blog entry ..

you may want to briefly describe robb's stemi for the uninitiated ...

my problem with the text in short: he sees the neoliberal crisis, and he
doesn't see a revival of the labour movement, ergo, nothing will happen ...
but he totally fails to see, as most of the left, the underlying open
everything revolution taking place under is nose,
°
that's why stagnation is almost inevitable a conclusion for them,

Michel

On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 11:19 PM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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