From a Kevin Carson comment on his own blog, Mutualist.org:
“So long as an industry is controlled by a handful of firms with the same organizational culture, using some form of oligopoly pricing, colluding to spoon out incremental improvements, and using push distribution methods for whatever crap they agree is the “new thing” this year, calculational chaos doesn’t cause much of a competitive penalty for any particular firm.
The main thing that will cause them real harm, IMO, that will cause the “walls to come tumbling down” for American state capitalism the same as for the old Soviet system, is the looming singularity in small-scale production technology that will enable much of the population to meet a large share of its needs through direct subsistence production for use in the household/informal/barter economy. (That’s the theme of one of the sections in forthcoming Ch. 15)”
My Comment
Carson is always an interesting and productive thinker, and this snippet is from commentary on a blog post of his about the seizure of some of his writings by the police. The commentary goes from this incident to discuss various other things, including whether big business is really no different from the state, and if it is, how that fact can be squared with the wealth it produces.
Carson argues that its wealth is produced despite the existence of the same “computational chaos” suffered by states, because big business enjoys subsidies, cost-externalizations, and benefits deriving from its size and privileged relationship to the state. That means its wealth isn’t really “its” wealth but the appropriation of wealth actually created by others. (I’ve made much the same argument myself).
Small-scale production and barter withdraw the life-blood of the huge corporations – which is the consumer. The direction of consumption away from the corporate economy is thus an effective form of direct revolutionary action against the corporate state.
Now, one man’s revolutionary struggle is another man’s budget shopping. but why quibble? The main thing is to reclaim the human being as the focus of economic theory, rather than any spurious “economic man,” “factor of production,” or “felicific calculus”…
“Small-scale production and barter withdraw the life-blood of the huge corporations – which is the consumer. The direction of consumption away from the corporate economy is thus an effective form of direct revolutionary action against the corporate state.”
I am doubtful. The state can and does change the rules of the game to make small scale production uneconomic, either through excise increases or price controls. I wrote to you a few months ago about such in the milk industry.
Then there is the global market, where the future for consumerism lies (the reason the US economy is being monkeywrenched). Consumer behavior in developing nations can be manipulated by clever marketing to make consumption of certain items symbols of success, the success of which has been on display in the US for many years (is a mercedes really that much better than a buick?)
The mega corporation both controls and receives it’s life blood from the state, and the key to state power are the central banks.
Always aim for the head.
🙂
You make good points, Jeff, and I do remember what you wrote about milk production.
Here’s my thought though. You’re assuming libertarians are acting alone in the US.
There is a global libertarian movement and then there is the libertarian left, which is growing too.
They would operate to create enough people in foreign markets who would be able buy small-scale production and who wouldn’t necessarily all be affected by the same restrictions/taxes, whatever’s the case on the US end of things..
Not all governments would be controlling small producers in exactly the same way, at the same time, so there’ll be small producers somewhere who will elude the system..that creates the opening for big business and the state in those countries to become hemmed in..which againg increases the strength of the small producers..
That could, over time and with more activism, create pressure on the controlling countries to lighten up on their own restrictions..
That sounds a bit sketchy, but I think these small gaps and discrepancies between countries are where the fissures will begin to open that rupture the entire system or make it operate world-wide..
Thanks much, Lila.
Jeff, I agree that governments would love to do these things, and up to the present have been able to do so to a considerable extent (via the regulatory state at the national level, and via the effect of local zoning, licensing, “safety” codes, etc., in imposing minimum overhead levels on small-scale production and criminalizing small-batch production).
The problem is, it’s becoming a lot harder. In the information industries, as the cost of physical capital is almost completely supplanted by human capital as the primary source of value, it’s becoming harder and harder to prop up the old corporate boundaries via IP law. The combination of Peak Oil, the crisis of overaccumulation, and the fiscal crisis of a state nearly broken by the cost of subsidies, mean that states are being increasingly “hollowed out” and unable to do what’s necessary to stamp out the alternative economy. At the same time, the growth of the latter’s productivity is approaching a singularity, and it is becoming too diffused to show up on the regulatory state’s radar screen.