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”…