Mostly my day-to-day tasks revolve around keeping the Columbia University Financial Front-end System up and running. This involves keeping my nose buried in the technical minutiae of Sybase and Unix and away from users or other human beings. Sort of like a post-Fordist version of the coal shoveller who works in the engine room of Eugene O'Neill's "Hairy Ape". But today as a change of pace I sat in on a presentation by Chemdex corporation in order to help evaluate their product. Chemdex is a 2 1/2 year old company that provides a web-based solution to purchasers of what are called "reagants". These are the thousands of chemical and biological commodities used by scientific researchers at places like Columbia and major pharmaceutical corporations. A lot of these researchers operate on the premises of the converted Audubon Ballroom uptown where Malcolm X was killed. Community protest was defused through funding of local projects and provision of space for a Malcolm X exhibit in the lobby of the refurbished building. Most of the reagant vendors are very small operations, who can not provide timely pricing or product information. Chemdex expects to make its money by charging both the purchaser and the seller a fee on each transaction. It is what as known in E-Commerce parlance as a B2B outfit, or business to business. Most of you are probably familiar with so-called B2C's--business to consumer--like amazon.com. Although nearly all of these outfits are highly capitalized through the IPO's that mutual funds and wealthy investors are anxious to gobble up, they are also not making profits in most instances. The problem with such companies is that they do not produce anything. They are middle-men who seek the slimmest of profits through heavy volumes at pricing just above cost. Not only is their own survival questionable, they also put pressure on suppliers who are forced to compete with each other as to who can offer the lowest price. When a purchaser can cut through the bullshit of salesmen and advertising in cold pursuit of the best price on the Internet, there will be inevitable motion in the direction of creating just a few mega-suppliers offering an optimized price. Oddly enough, large scale automation seems poised to solve the "transformation problem" once and for all. The E-Commerce revolution not only will have destablizing effects on the capitalist economy in the course of making it more rational and competitive, it will also suggest ways in which alternative systems can make the best use of modern technology while dispensing with the profit motive. In a sense E-Commerce belongs to the world of Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward", which revels in the notion that technology under social control will make life more livable. Although William Morris, the socialist with romantic if not medieval sensibilities, lambasted Bellamy, it should be obvious that socialism will require both of their visions integrated into a whole. Electronic purchases done on the Internet will make possible the free time necessary to learn how to write illuminated manuscripts by hand. The utopian schemas of both Bellamy and Morris are a far cry from those of today that if anything are not utopian enough. John Roemer's coupon-based market socialism and the Hahnel-Albert networked computers participatory economics schema seem far too practical and at the same time far too visionary. Their practicality is meant to address the concerns about whether socialism can work, so they offer blueprints that it can. It is far too visionary since it fails to address the question of how social change takes place, namely out of the barrel of a gun. I actually saw the first hint of E-Commerce back in war-torn Nicaragua in the late 1980s, when a Tecnica volunteer created a database of all the spare parts in private and state-owned industry that could be used in a common pool. All that was required was a telecommunications interface to make it available across the country. That initiative and hundreds of others were destroyed in an anticommunist crusade. In the final analysis, it will only be a social transformation such as the kind that ousted Somoza that can make the full promise of E-Commerce possible. Or perhaps we should call it E-Communism. Louis Proyect (The Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org)
