https://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/755 ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Bob Haugen <[email protected]> Date: Sun, Mar 31, 2019 at 3:26 PM Subject: End or no end to capitalism? To: Michel Visioning Bauwens <[email protected]> I'm reading two documents written by in part by Oliver Nachtwey 1. _Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe_ https://books.google.com/books?id=F6l2DwAAQBAJ I can't copy and paste from that, but the premise is the decline of human social life in Europe as capitalist growth and profits decline. This is one of several books and articles I've read lately about the decline and possible fall of capitalism due not to Jeremy Rifkin's theories but to other internal contradictions. 2. _Market and Labour Control in Digital Capitalism_ by Philip Staab and Nachtwey In this one, the authors say capitalism is not falling, but staging one of its periodic reconfigurations to escape from one of it's self-made traps. <excerpt from the latter> No End to Capitalism The empirical elaborations and tentative theoretical assumptions in this article aimed at challenging theories of post capitalism, which, in the context of this text, have been associated with current works of Jeremy Rifkin and Paul Mason. In their latest books, both authors argue for a more or less inevitable end to capitalism. They assume that private accumulation is systematically blocked by the inability of capitalist corporations to create revenues by setting prices as they lose control over the reproduction of their commodities in an economy where people have the power to make most things in non-capitalist production models themselves. Mason states, however, that, in building dominant monopolies, leading digital economy companies could retain the power of price setting while the products they deal with become increasingly cheaper in terms of production costs. Notwithstanding, he argues that these attempts will be failing in the end as such monopolies cannot stop the rise of open source and peer production. In order to challenge these ideas, we asked two questions, applied empirically mostly on the case of Amazon: Is the digital economy really moving towards a state in which corporations lose all control over markets, which then become increasingly decommodified? And second, is there really any end to capitalist labour or at least a reduction in capitalist modes of exploitation connected to the digitization trend? While we cannot give a definite answer to both questions, close analysis of Amazon and thoughts on the policies of other leading digital corporations bring us to conclusions which challenge the assumptions of post capitalist theories. First, key corporate players of digitization—in particular Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook—are indeed trying to become powerful monopolies and have partly succeeded in doing so, using network effects of digital platforms, the power of scaling routed in the zero marginal cost logic of digital goods and building socio-technical ecosystems in order to enforce customer retention. Second, it seems that leading digital economy companies tend to develop in part isomorphic structures on the supply side, hence creating a situation of oligopolistic market competition. We drew on basic assumptions of monopoly capital theory, which were elaborated empirically in 1960s to 1980s industrial sociology, to explain that in this situation of oligopolistic competition, cost cutting, achieved primarily via labour process rationalization, becomes key to the corporation’s competitive strategies. In our view, the case study of Amazon and our theoretical assumptions drawn from it offer evidence that strategies of cost cutting especially target the enhancement of digital labour control. Our conclusion is, therefore, that theorists like Mason might be right (although not for the right reasons) in arguing that large digital corporations fail in building stable monopolies. This, however, does not seem to imply any end to capitalist labour. Rather it seems to call for a tightening of the grip of labour control and new modes of exploitation of human labour—phenomena we have addressed with the terms digital Taylorism and digital contingent work. In our view, the current state of digital capitalism resembles a fight for supremacy between large digital corporations, which is based on the enforcement of extraction of value from human labour. Our assumption therefore is that we see nothing like the end of capitalism in the digital economy. Rather, capitalism is maturing in the usage of digital technologies following tracks well known from the history [of] industrial societies. </excerpt> -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens