Newmedia on Wed, 7 Mar 2012 05:16:52 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value ab... |
Jon (Michael): > Let me ask a slightly different question, whether > capitalism can survive its necessary generation > of abundance? Two questions (implied by yours) -- what do you mean by "capitalism" and why do you presume that whatever-that-is has "survived"? Many have referred to the 1917-1989 Soviet economy (and now the Russian economy) as "state capitalism" -- not "Communism." Ditto for China's before-and-after economies. While this may make "communists" feel better about their favorite "utopia," it clearly raises questions about our terminology (as well as, why "grammar" matters, why "equations" don't work and why language is inherently *equivocal*!) If you don't mind, could you consider the possibility that INDUSTRIALISM is really what happened in the "developed" economies -- both those we call "Capitalist" and those we call "Communist" -- and, indeed, is what is still happening in the BRICS + TEN? In other words, can *industrialism* survive abundance? I don't think so. In fact, is has already "expired." Yes, the ideology of the US/EUROPE/JAPAN (aka the "Trilaterals") was that what they were doing involved "free-markets" and so on -- just as the ideology of the Cold War "opposition" was that they were "Communists" (or Stalinists or Maoists) -- but, stepping back from this elaborate ideological "cover-story," wasn't what *all* of these economic systems were really about was *industrial* development, For the TRILATERALS, this development *stopped* 20+ years ago. We are all comfortable saying that Russia is no longer "Communist" and that China is a "mixed" economy, so why do we persist in calling what we are living with as plain-old "Capitalism"? So that we can be righteously (and, therefore, ineffectively) *against* the current state-of-affairs? Or, so that we can ignore what has already happened? Is the stagnation of middle-class incomes and the rise of the 1% over the past decades *really* the result of "neo-liberalism" or "late-stage capitalism" . . . or something else -- like POST-INDUSTRIALISM or the DIGITAL/INFORMATION economy (which, incidentally, we have *very* little to say about)? > This issue may or may not be affected by the information society. Sorry -- but that's the key question we have to answer! Whether you are a *sociologist* (and therefore give "society" priority over economics) or a "technologist" (like myself) or even an old-fashioned "political-economist" in your sympathies, it should jump out from this thread (along with the parallel comments in the "desire" thread) that we are *not* living in KANSAS anymore. And that we really don't know what to say about it. M. Goldhaber (along with others) calls what we are now experiencing an ATTENTION economy. Really? He also asserts that "For the most part, within capitalism, advertising merely redistributes how consumption spending will occur; it adds little to the totals spent." Really? If MASS-MEDIA (driven by advertising) -- a phrase that, according to the OED is the origin of our current usage of the term "media," which originally named a kingdom "in-between" Persia and Assyria -- did NOT "take-over" Western society in the late 19th century, then what would have happened to the massive scaling of production/consumption that we today categorize as "Fordism" etc? Would it have been possible? Since Bernard de Mandeville specified that political-economy depended on the exploitation of PRIVATE VICE (i.e. *desire*) for PUBLICK BENEFIT (i.e. industrial-scale expansion) in the early 1700s, does the history of "capitalist" economics show any *breakthrough* in the required "consumption" (i.e. expression of that *desire*) that can be separated from ADVERTISING? And, what happens in "Kansas" when more-and-more people (like most on this list) ignore those ADS? What if people tend towards only buying what they need and not what they (have been told by psychology-primed advertising that they) want? What if GREED and the other VICES -- like Gluttony, Lust, Sloth, Envy, Rage and Pride -- go out of "fashion"? What if PSY-WAR on the "civilian" population doesn't really "work" anymore? Consumption slows (or even declines) and we enter what many economists have called the "nightmare scenario" . . . in which Mandeville's 300 year-old inspiration *stops* driving GDP growth. Maybe TUMULT also declines? Might that be exactly what has already happened? Perhaps "capitalism" has already stopped "surviving"? Your question about "abundance" is one way of asking "what happens to people when they have enough"? My questions about VIRTUE and VICE are, in fact, the way that (your) question was originally posed 300 years ago. Look around. We have indeed "met the enemy and it is us (i.e. our own "manufactured" *desires*)" . . . so what are we going to do about it? Stop "conspicuously" consuming -- obviously. My further suggestion is that figuring out what language we need to describe the world we already live in -- what McLuhan called "pattern recognition, under conditions of information speedup" -- would also be a good place to start. Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org