Hi Rob,
>Just that most Marxists seem to agree that the development of a class for
>itself would have to occur outside extant institutions. The theory being
>that those extant institutions (including unions) are complicit in the
>perpetuation of capitalist hegemony, and that any policy to advance social
>revolution through such institutions would be led off the rails - a
>domestication of dissent, if you like. Organising through, say, soviets and
>the odd extra-parliamentary party would be an example of social rebellion
>institutionalising itself.
I guess the assumption is that dissenting movements (or is that effective
dissenting movements) must work within an institution of some sort, they
can't happen outside institutions.
>>>Because just maybe we're already undergoing that social revolution?
>>
>>"Because" -- ? Curious!
>
>Well, as Heilbroner said, capitalism is a hard beast to define. It's always
>in flux, and it ain't today what it was yesterday. I'm wondering, and I
>don't pretend to know, whether some of its defining relations are undergoing
>transformation so profound that we are entering a social phase worthy of
>altogether another moniker.
I suppose you mean a moniker other than "capitalist".
Informationalist, perhaps.
>What of a world in which employees become outnumbered by subcontractors
>and/or owners by managers? Where the bourgeoisie is transnanational and
>what's left of the proletariat is not? Where worker's do not bond on the
>shop-floor, but compete by tender? Where at least a tidy lump of workers
>have a direct interest in firms through stock-holding? Where the reserve
>army (decisively rendered invisible by geography) becomes the universalised
>other of the social order rather than the class of producers? Where the
>consolidation of capital is such that we have a de facto planning cartel?
>Where those planners need the share-holding and sub-contracting complicity
>of the class of producers to facilitate some business certainty in an
>otherwise volatile and contradictory condition of chaotic complexity? Where
>the expectations of first world populations can be met by utilising their
>own labour, but the physical resources of the third world? In other words,
>where what is currently the first-world proletariat is
>bought/appropriated/integrated/dissolved? And where the effectively
>jettisoned (but still disciplined) 'third world' is slowly exterminated by
>our corportate central planners and kept quiet by a military characterised
>by peerless remote technologies?
...a world in which information is the legal tender? As increasingly it
seems to be...perhaps a necessary aspect of the complicity in planning that
you speak of.
>All disgusting beyond the reach of adjectives, I admit. And maybe waaay
>far-fetched.
Doesn't sound wildly far fetched, to me.
But the seeds of each one of these circumstances can be
>gleaned from trends apparent today, don't you think? If you do, then I
>reckon you'd be agreeing that a social revolution is in train. Just not the
>one we had in mind - being as how it'd be constituted by elements of
>capitalism, socialism and barbarism all.
(interesting to consider barbarism as a form of political economy)
All very speculative, but
>suggestive of a need for rethinking our short-term political assumptions and
>strategies in light of an incipience political economy meaningfully
>different from the one Marx wrote about in 1859.
I see. So, in the following, "that" social revolution is not the one we
had in mind, but the Pandora's box you've just now cracked open.
>>>Maybe business's 'search for certainty' is going to have to create a system
>>>not a million miles from socialist planning - maybe it's already
>>>unconsciously doing it - maybe more along the lines of, say, a prosaic
>>>Schumpetarian/Galbraithian vision at first - where the tyranny of the
market
>>>might be giving way to that of the unaccountable technocrat - but that
>>>would, I think, ultimately be a moment necessitating merely a political
>>>revolution rather than a social one.
>>>
>>>
>>>Because just maybe we're already undergoing that social revolution?
...which is a system/revolution (now I see that "that...revolution"
referred to the "system" in the previous paragraph) not so different from
socialist planning, you say. I would guess that the similarity lies in part
in the requirement for certainty as a base of operations -- something
capitalism, come to think of it, was supposed to be able to get along
without. And perhaps it's because capitalism seems less and less tolerant
of uncertainty that you're inclined to call the new, the apparently
developing, system something else. Informationalism sounds way too tame.
>All speculative blather, as I said, and maybe entirely deserving of the wall
>of silence it elicited, but that lot is pretty well what I was getting at.
Yes, well, it may also be simply that your ellipses left your readers
gasping in your wake, comrade. Unless of course I'm the only one who was
confused.
cheers,
Joanna
www.overlookhouse.com
