[p2p-research] post-scarcity critique of marxism

[Kevin Carson]

On 8/8/10, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> via paul fernhout,
>
> this critique is from the opposite point of the view as that of james
> quilligan we forwarded yesterday,

As I understand it, Marxism presupposes a model of "abundance" based
on the high productivity of capital-intensive machinery.  The great
expense of the means of production, coupled with tendencies toward
underconsumption in the economy, lead to the periodic destruction of
large amounts of capital.  The solution is to nationalize the
factories and investment, with the giant product-specific machines
churning out shoes or sausages or cars by the tens of millions and
workers picking them up in the people's dispensaries.

Contemporary decentralized models of post-scarcity, OTOH, see the main
destabilizing force as the fact that an economic model based on
investing large amoungs of capital is becoming irrelevant.  Rather
than capital being expensive and inaccessible, and hence a source of
rents, it is cheap and ubiquitous.  Rather than production requiring
enormous capital-intensive machines, the shift is back toward
affordable, high-tech craftsman's tools.

So conventional Marxism takes the logic of mass-production capitalism
to its logical conclusion, with production by One Giant Trust and its
standardized output too cheap to meter.  Modern p2p ideas, OTOH,
undermine the basic logic of mass-production capitalism.


-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html