[Oe List ...] Gridding

[Steve Ediger via OE]

To dig deeper into the post-capitalism era, link to http://p2pfoundation.net
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Steve Ediger
773-920-7350 (google voice)
505-426-7088 (mobile)



On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 11:52 PM, H. A. Tillinghast via OE <
oe at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:

> Here is an article well worth reading. It seems to me that Paul Mason is a
> thinker of the likes of Thomas Pinkety and Naomi Klein.
>
> http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun
>
> Bud Tillinghast
>
>
> The End of Capitalism Has Begun
>
> T"he red flags and marching songs of Syriza
> <http://www.theguardian.com/world/syriza> during the Greek crisis
> <http://www.theguardian.com/business/debt-crisis>, plus the expectation
> that the banks would be nationalised, revived briefly a 20th-century dream:
> the forced destruction of the market from above. For much of the 20th
> century this was how the left conceived the first stage of an economy
> beyond capitalism. The force would be applied by the working class, either
> at the ballot box or on the barricades. The lever would be the state. The
> opportunity would come through frequent episodes of economic collapse.
>
> Instead over the past 25 years it has been the left’s project that has
> collapsed. The market destroyed the plan; individualism replaced
> collectivism and solidarity; the hugely expanded workforce of the world
> looks like a “proletariat”, but no longer thinks or behaves as it once did.
>
> If you lived through all this, and disliked capitalism, it was traumatic.
> But in the process technology has created a new route out, which the
> remnants of the old left – and all other forces influenced by it – have
> either to embrace or die. Capitalism, it turns out, will not be abolished
> by forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating something more
> dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but
> which will break through, reshaping the economy around new values and
> behaviours. I call this postcapitalism.
>
> As with the end of feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism’s replacement by
> postcapitalism will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the
> emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started.
>
> Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information
> technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced
> the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and
> loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of
> automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear
> the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just
> to subsist but to provide a decent life for all.
>
> Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices
> correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information
> is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the
> giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they
> cannot last. By building business models and share valuations based on the
> capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms
> are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic
> need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely.
> British capitalism is broken. Here’s how to fix it
>
> Read more
>
> <http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/feb/11/british-capitalism-broken-how-to-fix-it>
>
> Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production:
> goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to
> the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy. The biggest
> information product in the world – Wikipedia
> <http://www.theguardian.com/technology/wikipedia> – is made by volunteers
> for free, abolishing the encyclopedia business and depriving the
> advertising industry of an estimated $3bn a year in revenue.
>
> Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole
> swaths of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm.
> Parallel currencies, time banks, cooperatives and self-managed spaces have
> proliferated, barely noticed by the economics profession, and often as a
> direct result of the shattering of the old structures in the post-2008
> crisis.
>
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