[p2p-research] The Great Domain of Cost-Plus: The Waste Production Economy

[Michel Bauwens]

 Kevin Carson <free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> Dec 29 04:52PM
-0600 ^<?ui=2&view=bsp&ver=ohhl4rw8mbn4#12d371894f2db8ed_digest_top>

My latest research paper at Center for a Stateless Society
http://c4ss.org/content/5580

The press release is here:
http://c4ss.org/content/5585

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
12/29/10
POC Thomas L. Knapp
media at c4ss.org
530-618-C4SS

WASTED: CARSON ON THE POLITICAL CLASS VERSUS LEISURE

Per the conventional wisdom, big government and high tax rates reduce
the incentive to work. And that may be true — to a degree. But, shows
Center for a Stateless Society Research Associate Kevin Carson in a
new research study, the modern corporate capitalist economic paradigm
utilizes an ethos of waste to enrich the privileged by artificially
promoting work over leisure.

“The historical evidence,” writes Carson in “The Great Domain of
Cost-Plus: The Waste Production Economy,” “is that people do indeed
prefer, on the whole, to work less when their wages increase.
Therefore it makes perfect sense from the employer’s standpoint to
extract more labor from people by reducing the share of their output
that they keep, and by compelling them to support idle rentiers in
addition to themselves.”

Carson traces overt political class propaganda on the need to increase
the portion of labor earnings extracted as rent to at least as far
back as Bernard Mandeville’s 18th-century _Fable of the Bees_. Wrote
Mandeville:

“[I]t is the interest of all rich nations, that the greatest part of
the poor should almost never be idle, and yet continually spend what
they get …. Those that get their living by their daily labour … have
nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their wants which it is
prudence to relieve, but folly to cure …”

Or, as the anonymous author of 1770s “Essay on Trade and Commerce” put it:

“[O]ur manufacturing populace … do not labour, upon an average, above
four days in a week, unless provisions happen to be very dear. … The
labouring people should never think themselves independent of their
superiors …. The cure will not be perfect, till our manufacturing poor
are contented to labour six days for the same sum which they now earn
in four days.”

But, writes Carson, there’s good news for today’s workers: “[T]he
ability to manufacture scarcity does not follow from the need. The
rentiers and managers are confronting the harsh reality of their
increasing inability to manufacture scarcity. The productivity of new
technologies of abundance is outstripping their ability to suppress
them.”

By reducing scarcities long artificially maintained through political
force, the new economic paradigm — horizontally networked distribution
and what Carson calls “the Homebrew Industrial Revolution” in
production in a book so named — is pushing the political class into
obsolescence.

--
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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