[p2p-research] open manufacturing, generalized exchange, and non-market functions

[Kevin Carson]

On 1/29/10, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I only have trouble accepting your third point, 'consumer demand will never
> fall' ... this seem to me about conflating a culturally engineered and
> structurally stimulated social fact, with some 'eternal' fact of human
> nature.

I think it also conflates two separate predictions:  that demand for
use-value will never fall, and that demand in the sense of monetized
demand for monetized prices will never fall.

I don't think that material demand for use-value is infinitely
upwardly elastic.   While it may not be fixed, it will probably not
expand sufficiently to compensate for the labor-power and capital
freed up by increased efficiency (Eric Reasons again).

But whatever the consumer demand for use-value, I don't think existing
models of capturing productivity increases in monetized form  as a
rent to those who own and control the industries are viable.

-- 
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