Re: nettime joxe's empire of disorder (etc)
Kermit Snelson wrote: I disagree with Ken here. Knowledge-based parts of the economy (aerospace, pharmaceuticals, software, telecoms, etc.) are characterized by increasing returns on the margin, not by the decreasing returns characteristic of resource-based industries (agriculture, mining, etc.) [1]. Yeah that was the line during the boom, but how true is it? Boeing has a profit margin of 3%, which is five times better than GM's, but only a fifth Merck's, and not all that great. (And Boeing gets subsidies from the Pentagon, which never hurts.) Pharmaceuticals have long been the most profitable industry. Software isn't immensely lucrative, either; sure Microsoft is vastly profitable, but we learned the other week that it loses money on everything it sells but Windows. The rest of the software industry isn't gushingly profitable. Telecoms is the scene of one of the biggest disasters of modern times. So this general principle is looking empirically rocky - though as David Laibman once told me, you can't refute a theory with empirical evidence, but only with another theory. -- Doug Henwood Left Business Observer Village Station - PO Box 953 New York NY 10014-0704 USA voice +1-212-741-9852 fax+1-212-807-9152 cell +1-917-865-2813 email mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] webhttp://www.leftbusinessobserver.com # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime joxe's empire of disorder
[Thought this was a nice deconstruction of the current maps of Empire that are floating around and also good footnote to the Joxe discussion - r] The decline and fall of the American empire An expert on geopolitics says forget Islamic terrorism -- the real future threat to America's supremacy will come from Europe. http://www.salon.com/books/int/2002/12/02/kupchan/index.html There is a nice response on that on: http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/kolumnen/mar/13692/1.html It is written in German so that can be a problem... It says that allthough the facts stated are true, the biggest problem Europe has and will have is its indecisiveness. Which is true I think. On the other hand the European Union is still in 'progress' and one of its characteristics has always its 'consensus solutions'. So when the needs are the biggest the solutions tend to come. However on this subject it may yake years. Arie van Schutterhoef ^ Arie van Schutterhoef | [EMAIL PROTECTED] ^_±±±__ # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime joxe's empire of disorder
Keith's Hart's answer to Ken Wark is brilliant writing, because it takes all the terms of the arguments seriously enough, and historically enough, that a next step can then be envisaged. Keith recounts the formation [in the 1860s-70s] of new industrial states by means of national revolutions from above, all in the name of democracy and science. I'd say the next step or the next scale of that kind of argument begins right here In 1973, an increase in oil prices plunged the world economy into a depression from which it has still not recovered. The 1973 depression was caused by the increased oil prices; but behind them was the larger issue of an inability of the capitalist states to go on extracting resources, under the conditions of their own choosing, from the formerly colonized countries. The increase in the raw materials bill coincided with a resurgence of class conflict in the core countries, with steep increases in the working hours lost to strikes (the highest levels were reached in Britain in the early 70s). Neoliberalism emerged, in Britain and the US, as what now appears an ultimately untenable solution to this double crisis, both of imperialism and of the capital-labor compromise. The solution was fiscal, geographic, and financial. Cut taxes on corporations; negotiate traties making it possible to produce wherever labor is cheapest, and to sell products wherever there is money to buy; and create a world financial market that could gather capital for the creation of productive plant and infrastructure. This was sold on the rhetorical level as being an extension of liberal thinking, i.e. free market plus democracy. What's neo about it is what really sold it: the impossibility for countries to compete if they don't join free-trade zones; the unrefusable offer of foreign investment capital once the free trade zone is installed. The positive effect was to reimpose an economic discipline both on the working class in the advanced countries (through fear of losing jobs to the south), and on the formerly colonized countries (through debt and dependency on investment). Call it globalization. I think that what we are seeing now is that the disciplinary mechanism of financially regulated globalization doesn't work. Subjugated economies collapse (Argentina); fractions of the world population revolt (terrorism); the US cannot maintain its lucrative position as the banker/coordinator of world industrial development (stock market crash). Under these conditions, the fragility of the nation-state as the political form of a compromise imposed by capital on populations becomes too great. The crisis of the 1970s returns. But the real solution being proposed is obvious, and has been under preparation all along. The nation state consolidated in the late nineteenth century will be abandoned for regional blocs: NAFTA/FTAA, the enlarged EU, and an enlarged ASEAN including and dominated by China (for which the treaties now exist). These blocs would allow direct administration of labor and markets over large and very unequally developed areas, without all the pseudo-liberal complexities of the financially governed borderless world. And the blocs would also fight to exploit what they don't directly control (Mideast oil, anyone?). But to achieve that solution means abandoning some of the post-89 rhetoric of liberalism and democracy - and for that, you'd need serious reasons. If we're unlucky, it may be that in retrospect a world civil war whose beginning is marked by September 11 will be seen to have played the same kind of role in cementing the unequal class relations of the new regional blocs as the conflicts of the 1860s and 70s did in establishing the capitalist-dominated democracies of the industrialized nation-states. Had Engels lived in the globalizing 1990s he would never have feared that society was being coordinated faster at the top than at the bottom: because it was painfully obvious. Only since 1994 and above all since 1999 have people even begun to imagine that alternative forms of coordination from the bottom up might be possible on the regional-bloc and world scales. One of the things that has pushed me to collaborate on the mapping work I've been doing with Bureau d'Etudes (more on that sometime later) is the desire to contribute to the very possibility of conceiving those scales in some kind of detail. As for the step after that, what I see, darkly, are efforts to make uuniversal rights substantial by constructing and defending commons where free access does not equal destruction of resources: this, from natural resources like water to social ones like housing, energy, mobility and communication. I think the coming battle with capital will have to take place in these areas, and not only over the terms of waged labor. Now, to get back to Keith Hart, I don't know if liberalism in the manner of John Locke can really help in this process
Re: nettime joxe's empire of disorder
What is living and what is dead in liberalism? (Neo or otherwise). What is living and what is dead in leftism? (new or old style) These are good 'Hegelian' questions, and while as Brian says, they have been raised on nettime before, the discussion was far from comprehensive or conclusive. I don't much dissent from Keith Hart's excellent primer on the political economy of the 19th century. However, it seems to me to be the kind of explanation one might describe as late 20th century orthodoxy. I'm not sure we are still living in the world for which that was the relevant history. Everyone to his taste, however. It seems to me to under estimate the role of communication vectors and the abstraction of information, and to be far from precise and clear in following this aspect of the transformation of material reality. One has to rethink what is base and what is 'superstructure.' On information as property: Yes, obviously, patent and copyright exist since the 18th century. But they are *not* intellectual property -- a term not much used before the late 60s. They were the 'commons' on which the progressive privatisation of information in law and policy has been built. Copyright was not a form of property at all. The change in terminology is significant. Information itself arises at the nexus of technical, economic and legal determinants. Technically, its roots are in the telegraph, first technology to separate the speed of movement of information from the movement of people or goods. Thus making possible the coordination of the movement of people and goods by the movement of information. Marx was already onto this in the Grundrisse. There is no such thing as the 'world market' without a space of communication wherein values can be identified and transmitted. The great weakness of Marx's otherwise seminal discussions of exchange value is that when he compares, say, 5 coats to 4 bales of linen as euivalents, he speaks as if there were a purely ideal space where these exchange values met. He doesn't address the materiality of exchange value, which rests on the capacity to transmit information about use values -- prices -- across space and time independently of the ability to move the thing itself. Echange value only emerges in a space of communication. This space grows in radius as communication develops. First within the space of the nation, then without. But it is the same process. The interaction of the technical and legal creation of information as an autonomous, abstract value creates a whole new sphere of economic valuation and exploitation. As Keith suggests, it is always useful to look at scale. Look at the proportion of the assets that make up the market value of corporations. The intellectual property portfolio occupies an increasingly large proportion. What comes together to create the economic value of 'intellectual property' is firstly is much more rigid legal protection, and secondly the communication vectors that make it so much easier to store or to transmit. When Brian speaks of efforts to make universal rights substantial by constructing and defending 'commons' where free access does not equal destruction of resources... he is talking about what will in the first and last instance be a commons constructed out of communciation vectors and in which information circulates, where both are outside the logic of commodification. The establishment and management of any other kind of commons depends on this. One has to confront the vctoral with its own tools, as Critical Art Ensemble remind us. I've always found it more useful to speak of a vectoralisation rather than a globalisation. The latter term is a bit too freighted with ideological baggage. And it misses the extent to which the becoming-abstract of space (what Felix, quoting Castells, called a 'space of flows') is a vectoral phenomenon before it is anything else. Putting places in touch with each other, which proceeds in a much more haphazzard way than 'globalisation' would lead one to suspect, and which does not produce the liberal-enlightened result of transparency of communication and rational coordination of wants and resources, has proceeded apace for century and a half since the creation of telegraphy. The internet revolution, after all, is really just telegraphy, on a vastly expanded scale, with bells and whistles. This historical movement -- the becoming vectoral of space -- has been going on for a while. But it comes to interact with the transformation of information into property only quite recently. One only has to look at the flurry of legislation -- the Communications Act and Digital Millenium Copyright Act in the US. Or the remarkable amount of GATT and then WTO time taken up with issues of patent and copyright protection. These are relatively new developments, and their significance is not really plumbed by the tools of historical materialism as we have them to hand. While there are aspects of 'neo'-liberalism that seem
Re: nettime joxe's empire of disorder
This sentence from Joxe is terribly intriguing: In the current disorder, it is preferable to organize a sphere of political fraternity with citizens and without states, rather than sitting back to watch the victory of the transnational wealthy classes and their smiling neofascism. Can you expand on what that means for him, MacKenzie? It's pretty enigmatic. I think it's correct to say that the reorganization of production has opened up a planetary division of labor and a new class conflict - and the notion of predatory capitalists looking for slave labor is hardly exaggerated, when wages suffice only to pay for minimal food. I also agree that sabre rattling is a distraction from this conflict, particularly at moments of economic crisis like right now. These analyses are broadly shared within the counter-globalization movement. The problem is, to what extent does a public sphere for discussion of such issues effectively exist, anywhere? In Italy, the US and France, electoral bids by parties that could potentially name the class conflict have resulted in a brutal shift from a complacent center left to an aggressive right. The class conflict, which is overdetermined by cultural and historical issues in any case, then gets blurred out of existence by security rhetoric. Meanwhile, the social forum movement in Europe and Latin America is courted by the same old center left, at the risk of extinguishing its basic messages. The humanitarian NGOs seem to respond best to the notion of a transnational fraternity (which is another name for solidarity); but they are persuasively critiqued as fig leafs covering up the withdrawal of more extensive social programs formerly run by state governments. I'm curious as to what Joxe is really suggesting. My personal opinion is that only coordinated transnational strikes, at the European level on a minimum, can bring an effective transnational civil society (if you want to call it that) into being. But such strikes cannot be mounted on the traditional union issues of wages-conditions-benefits, because they would not be inclusive enough. The best proposal I heard at the European Social Forum was for a general strike in the event of a US war on Irak. One can imagine the participation of a few large unions encouraging significantly larger numbers of non-unionized people to take the risk of stopping work, while every kind of association joins them out on the streets. This kind of action seems necessary, if we want to get beyond good cosmopolitan-idealist intentions, a la Habermas. Of course, one can argue that no structure exists to organize such a strike. But that is precisely the issue: achieving organizational power (or even disorganizational power) on a large enough scale to stand up to the liberal-fascism of the transnational wealthy classes. We're not there yet. - BH # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
