[P2P-F] Fwd: End or no end to capitalism?

Michel Bauwens michelsub2004 at gmail.com
Sun Mar 31 16:39:55 CEST 2019


https://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/755

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Bob Haugen <bob.haugen at gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Mar 31, 2019 at 3:26 PM
Subject: End or no end to capitalism?
To: Michel Visioning Bauwens <visioning at p2pfoundation.net>


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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ourproject.org/pipermail/p2p-foundation/attachments/20190331/257ab083/attachment.html>


More information about the P2P-Foundation mailing list