thanks Kevin, makes perfect sense .. Michel On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 5:58 AM, Kevin Carson < [email protected]> wrote:

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 11:26 PM, Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> wrote:

...

As I see it there are two options here,

- 'reform' or 'transform' economics, even though it is rotten to the core and the core ideology of oppression and destruction of the biosphere

- do away with it altogether and start anew

This would IMO be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

We need a body of thought for dealing with goods that are naturally scarce and take effort to produce, and things like supply schedules and demand curves are suited to the task. What we need is a meta-paradigm that treats scarcity as one special case and serves as a general theory incorporating both scarcity and abundance. And we need a more rigorous analysis when it comes to distinguishing natural from artificial scarcity, and examining the causes and effects of the latter.

It's not so much that the principles of economics are rotten to the core as the power interests by which they are currently being interpreted and used. The basic concepts are contested terrain that can be recuperated and turned against the neoliberals.

-- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html

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