[P2P-F] Product Maximizing Corporations (was: "corporateperson")

Fri Nov 25 19:01:53 CET 2011

On 25/11/11 12:04, Michel Bauwens wrote:
> martin,
> 
> would you agree that there is a difference between profit making (i.e. an
> accidental or regular surplus in money after an exchange, which enables you
> to continue to operate  in a money system) and a system    based on profit
> maximisation (i.e.capitalism), i.e. between a mere market and capitalism
> ... this is a classic distinction made by marx (m-c-m vs c-m-c), polanyi,
> braudel, de landa, and even by anarchist anthropoligists like david graeber
> ...

Yes, this is a typical general/particular or type/token distinction. So,
when we speak of big pharma (AIDS drugs was the example), then we speak
of a very particular kind of profit. What you outline above as the
latter, while the former is a much more general kind of "profit".

While in the latter (capitalist) kind of profit making the problem is
very obvious and OWS and Tea Partiers and many mainstream commentators,
notably even conservative journalists and so on, can now agree on the
problem associated with extremeties of that system and the way in which
it is fused with the political system to become power over people, -- in
the former, however, more general idea of "profit", and in the absence
of maximisation, we would still have to consider the social relations
(all production is social) that make up the framework for that moment of
profit. Questions such as wage labour/slavery, the quality of the
product (here I a thinking environment and life span, for instance) and
the livelihoods of all the people involved would have to be addressed.

There is probabl no sensible and simple good/bad, right/wrong conclusion
that follows from a comparison of the general with the particular. False
exercise of the mind.

> pre-capitalist markets were always subsumed to broader economic and social
> goals (i.e. fixed price in Indian villages, 'just price', also pretty much
> fixed, in medieval europe, etc ...)

I wouldn't want to paint with such broad a brush. Even if I had a great
overview of what you call pre-capitalist markets, which I don't, I don't
think I would like to lump them together. It is too much us/now vs.
them/then to my mind, i.e Eurocentric. I see much more of continuity
between ages, which is eradicated in the minds of Marxists - indeed
Hegel, the forefather of the science of capital (i.e. Marx's work), and
Marx himself desired such a qualitative shift away from superstition and
whatever else the despised about the unenlightened past.

Along other threads of inquiry (such as, say, the scientifc method, the
history of programmable machines, patriarchy) things look different. I
am not a great fan of the the meta/master narrative of so clear
universal shifts and see much overlapping stuff going on.

> it seems to me that cartels/etc .. are a inevitable feature of capitalism,
> but are they a necessary feature of market systems in general, especially
> when the market dynamics are subsumed?

They are really just super-guilds, aren't they? What's new? People do
business with like people. These are human dynamics that are given a
particular framework in capitalism, indeed one might say that capitalism
is an outcome of such formations, much more so than the other way round.

> perhaps any class-based allocation system is marred by power law and
> concentration dynamics, since it was also certainly the case in feudal
> systems, where it is the land that was being concentrated,

.. and the imagination always was by the church and through laws.

> to me it seems logically that any competitive allocation system, where some
> players can win, immediately favours the winner, since they already obtain
> more resources in the second round

Well, this depends on what "win" entails.

> without counter-measures, are these not inevitable?

depending on what "win" means, yes.

> my understanding is that tribal societies had such active countermeasures?

what tribal societies? when? where? Again, a very broad brush, but more
importantly, I think, incommensurability is at play here: it is very
difficult to compare paradigms: which part of system X makes it
different to system Y with regard to abstract concept P, where -
crucially! - P is derived from a particular set of observations within
system X?

martin