[This was written several days ago, but seems to have gotten lost in a
Martian time-slip.]
On 01/23/2013 09:05 AM, [email protected] wrote:
> There you go again! <g> You really can't put an "ideology" on these
> developments, since they are not being driven by the *ideas* so much as
> by the technology. Don't let your "morals" get in the way of your
> analysis. Follow the technology!
But when you follow the technology, Mark, it leads to the questions of
social reproduction and of government. These questions arise most
powerfully at the moment of major structural crises, like the one that's
happening today. That's what Carlota Perez thought:
“We propose that the capitalist system be seen as a single very complex
structure, the sub-systems of which have different rates of change. For
the sake of simplicity we can assume two main subsystems: on the one
hand a techno-economic, and on the other a social and institutional, the
first having a much faster rate of response... A structural crisis (ie
the depression in a long wave), as distinct from an economic recession,
would be the visible syndrome of a breakdown in the complementarity
between the dynamics of the economic subsystem and the related dynamics
of the socio-institutional framework."
http://carlotaperez.org/papers/scass_v04.pdf
According to Perez, it's only after the successful resolution of the
institutional questions - concerning wages and livelihood, money and
credit, government regulation and intervention, international trade
regimes, etc - that a "techno-economic paradigm" can reach its mature
phase and deploy all its potentials. Going further, one can say: the
form of the institutional solution to a major structural crisis will
determine how the potentials of a certain set of technologies will be
expressed in actuality.
The reference-point for that kind of thinking is the 1930s crisis of the
mass-production regime that had been emerging in the US and alos in
Europe since the early 1900s. There were different attempts to find a
"complementarity" between this production regime and the rest of social
life. Their names were Communism, Fascism and New-Deal Democracy.
Clearly the latter, which I think can properly be called an "ideology,"
was the most successful one. And so for better and worse, the
mass-production system that gradually spread across the planet in the
post-WWII period was articulated by variations on that ideology.
Today we have a new production regime, based on networked technologies.
Actually it's not just technologies but also organizational forms, those
business processes that Schumpeter was so interested in. In the wake of
Manuel Castells, people tend to call this new production regime
"informationalism." So far it has been "neoliberal informationalism"
because it has been articulated according to an ideology that exalts
competition, risk and individual excellence - an ideology that owes a
lot to Schumpeter, by the way. But that neoliberal ideology does not
work very well at all, it does not ensure health and prosperity, and so
the techno-economic paradigm of informationalism has never found any
sustainable "fit" with people's survival needs - neither in the US,
Europe, China or anywhere else. The supply of easy credit masked the
problem for a long time, but now that's over. So today there is a huge
crisis, and what's at stake in this crisis is precisely the missing
complementarity between technology and society that Perez has been
talking about since the early 1980s, when the quote above was written.
The future may not belong to the moralists, but it definitely belongs to
the ideologists!
best, Brian
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