We live in a time of terminal crisis for centralized institutions of all kinds, including the two most notable members of the genus: states and large corporations. Both a major cause and major symptom of this transition is the steady reduction in the amount of labor needed to produce a given level of output, and… Continue reading
In case you didn’t catch the original, published last week in Commons Transition, here is our 2016 review: Welcome to our annual overview! 2016 has been widely acknowledged as a difficult year, and although we’ve had our share of hardship, it turned to be a very productive period for the P2P Foundation and the wider… Continue reading
How we are organizing our node of what will be a phyle, and how you can become a member, depending on your needs, preferences, and commitment. At the end of last year, we began the fusion of Enkidu and Las Indias. Not only was it the logical conclusion of the logic of integration, but also… Continue reading
Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real by Kevin Carson. Read the full series here or scroll down for the PDF. As I noted at the outset of this study, there are two broad groups — sometimes using superficially similar rhetoric but in fact fundamentally opposed — that celebrate the emergence of a new kind of society based… Continue reading
Political action may be necessary. As Aronoff suggested, it is indeed a mistake to create a false dichotomy with counter-institution building. But framing “political action” as primarily state action, rather than a component of the counter-institution building movements themselves, is precisely the kind of false dichotomy we need to avoid. Political models centered on the… Continue reading
Increasingly the capitalists’ profits do not depend on ownership of the means of production, but control of the right to use them – the ownership of patents rather than machines. This intermediate stage, capitalism’s last desperate attempt to snatch scarcity from the jaws of abundance, is doomed to failure. Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real by Kevin… Continue reading
Whenever you read the words “our free market system,” it should raise a red flag. See, for example an article titled “Nobel Prize Economists Say Free Market Competition Rewards Deception and Manipulation,” by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller (Evonomics, Jan. 6). Now, if “free market” means anything, it means an economy where all market exchange… Continue reading
So compared to that of Bauwens and the Monthly Review Group, Mason’s analysis of the crisis tendencies of late capitalism falls a bit flat. Nevertheless, his general framing has a familiar Marxian ring to it, in the same general tradition we’ve been considering: and become the basis for a fundamentally new system.. Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real by Kevin Carson…. Continue reading
So technological progress is radically deflationary, and causes more and more areas of economic life to vanish from the cash nexus into the social or p2p economy. Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real by Kevin Carson. Read the full series here or scroll down for the PDF. My comments on the counterfeit nature of neoliberal techno-utopianism are… Continue reading
So if networked communication and cybernetic technologies are so potentially liberating, why are they so authoritarian in the forms they currently take? The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who died in Mussolini’s prisons in the 1930s, once wrote that “the old world is dying, and the new one struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”. Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit… Continue reading
The claim that “techno-utopians” believe technological advances “will automatically overcome social conflict” — as opposed to the Accelerationist view of new technology as a weapon “to win social conflicts” — is particularly disingenuous. It conflates left-wing techno-utopianism with the technocratic managerialism of the Tofflers, Newt Gingrich and Jack Kemp. It also conflates “political action” as such with an insurrectionist or parliamentary… Continue reading
Today, the new ethic says that ‘to resist is in the first place to create’. The world we want is the world we are creating through our cooperative P2P ethos, it is visible in what we do today, not an utopian creation for the future. Building the commons has a crucial ingredient: the building of a dense alternative media… Continue reading
Holloway sees socialist models based on taking state power as reproducing rather than abolishing the capital-labor relationship in many ways. It takes for granted the existence of alienated wage labor under capitalism, set over against institutional structures like corporate management and the state which are separate from and above labor. The traditional Left aims at capturing these structures and using… Continue reading
For the autonomists and like-minded thinkers, the goal is Exodus rather than taking power. Since the means of production are increasingly coextensive with our relationships in civil society, we no longer need the obsolescent institutions of state and capital. We just need to tear down their enclosures of the social economy we’ve already built — and that can be done,… Continue reading
So rather than asking “What happened to Occupy?” or “What happened to 15-M?” as though they were discrete entities with a beginning and an end, it makes more sense to think of the whole trajectory of movements including the Arab Spring, M15 and Syntagma, Madison, Occupy, Quebec, the N14 General Strike, and so on, as one loose global… Continue reading
According to Carson, the problem with the theory of catabolic collapse is that it ignores what he calls “one of the most central distinguishing characteristics of our technology: ephemerality.” The classic example from Buckminster Fuller, he writes, is the replacing of “a transoceanic cable system embodying God only knows how many thousand tons of metal… Continue reading