[p2p-research] post-scarcity critique of marxism

[Michel Bauwens]

Hi Kevin,

I personally think this is a fair statement of what marxism was about in the
context of its time, and how the new situation offers a new vision and
possible reality,

Michel

On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 3:16 AM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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