[p2p-research] Post-Capitalism

[Kevin Carson]

On 7/12/10, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Arguing with Marxists is very similar to arguing with anyone who believes
> strongly in their point of view.  Personally, I see little evidence to
> support Marxism any time I've made admittedly minimal efforts to understand
> it.  As I am inclined to work with and use things that are evidential, I
> have never seen any reason to seriously engage Marxism any more than I do
> have reason to engage others systems or beliefs that are minimally
> evidential.  That said, some very smart people have used Marxism as a basis
> of analysis particularly in sociology and history.  I don't diss it as a
> sort of theory of how the world works much from those academic traditions.
> It isn't useful as economics or social policy so far as I can tell.

I don't really even think any form of Marxist state practice can be
straightforwardly drawn from Marx himself, because Marx was so vague
about his ideas of a post-capitalist society.

I do find Marxist ideas useful as a tool of analysis.  I think Marx
and the Marxists got it wrong on the root cause of economic
exploitation.  But given that it does in fact occur, and that things
like maldistribution of purchasing power, overaccumulation and
underconsumption are all real, Marx's theory of late capitalism in
Capital vol. III  and the analysis of assorted neo-Marxists in the
Monthly Review group is pretty much spot-on.  Particularly useful has
been that group's analysis of financialization, jobless recoveries,
etc., from the 1980s on.

It's also interesting how Marxist theories of overaccumulation
dovetail to a considerable extent with Austrian theories of
malinvestment.

-- 
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