| david teh on 17 Sep 2000 23:27:00 -0000 |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
| Re: <nettime> draft article on WTO |
Quoting Craig Brozefsky <[email protected]>: > Nothing can be done "all at once", especially since it is not just corporations that would need to be removed, but the system which exploits the worker to extract profit from the surplus value the laborers produce, capitalist appropriation of social production. > Global production is already socialized, so there is no need to re-socialize it. > > I can understand how one would expect mayhem if corporations, which presently manage the socialized production process, were to vanish. However, there is nothing in the corporation itself which has a monopoly on the ability to manage these processes. >>>>>>> don't want to be a pedant, but your language is revealing: i, like you, don't believe there is any universal law that says we NEED corporations to manage these processes. but au contraire, corporations in the so-called global economy DO have a monopoly on them, especially if you're willing to grant that 'government' in the west has become largely subordinated to the will of corporations. >>>>>>>>>>> Removing the present management of these production process without a suitable replacement would indeed be ridiculous. > > . . . enough for us to talk about its total removal with a straight face. > > Why not? I am presently reliant upon alot of things which I can imagine doing away with, so what is it about corporations that makes them a permenant fixture? They are relatively new legal entities. What is it in a corporation that other organizations cannot provide? >>>>>>>>>>> this is a very difficult thing to answer, but i think it deserves the attention of today's thinking/activist/academic/intellectual types. off the top of my head, i would say that the thing they offer that other org's can't is precisely what we (activists) presume we need to do away with: profit. i'm not necessarily saying that the profit motive is a good attribute for any soci0-economic apparatus to have - BUT, once we acknowledge that the corporation has a limited history, the next chapter back might be on its motive - profit itself, which has a considerably longer history. uprooting this will prove doubly difficult, some would say nigh-on impossible, others (tho not me) would say offensive to the notion of human endeavour. despite sharing your conviction - that we have taken a bogus path by letting this motive trump all others in our private and communal lives - i can't confidently say that it (profit) is an alien virtue implanted in society by past accumulation-of-capital / alienation of labour / perversion of incidental power. i think that is one of the things marxism failed to prove. i think we have to be realistic or pragmatic about what we expect from revolution or reform. what we do with surplus CAN be altered to make for a better distribution of our resources. "profit" is just one of the guises in which surplus appears (perhaps the one that is least human-friendly). but not only can i not conceive of a world without profit (and perhaps that's my Big Problem), but i'm not sure i find it a plausible prospect at all. the profit motive is just too deeply embedded in our consciousness, our social structures, our language, our libido, etc - there's no way forward if you try to disqualify it. why not figure out how better to employ it and its 'fruits'? after all, is it not likely that if accumulation was banished, destruction of surplus (by expenditure, conspicuous or otherwise) would figure alongside re- distribution as an option? further, i'm not prepared to accept that all the great feats of modern 'progress' (however nastily debunked they may be by the hip euro-left) would've occurred without some (perhaps collateral) impetus from profit- driven enterprise. obviously free enterprise is a very sharp double edged sword, but it would be naive to think of the spread of major technologies (however unequally OWNED they may still be) - such as telecommunications, combustion engines - to places like africa and asia, as things that would've just cropped up in those places eventually. colonialism, that great bastard child of western history, fallen angel excommunicado and universally disavowed, had some positive effects for lots of different peoples, as well as its better-documented disastrous ones. >>>>>>>>>>>>> > This is not a philosophical argument. If it was a philosophical argument than perhaps we could talk about capital as a permenant fixture, because it's only in philosophy that it is. >>>>>>>>>>>>>> i don't get this . . . >>>>>>>>>>>>>> You tell me that I should be political and except a purely ideological notion that capital is permanant, why is that? >>>>>>>>>>>>>> a) i'm not saying capital is 'permanent'; b) but even if i was, how would that be any more ideological than saying it isn't? all sounds like dogmatic dialectical bullshit to me. are these a system of necessary polar opposites of which one must be true and the other a false consciousness? come on. is it any less "ideological" to say that labour is the neglected origin of capital? >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> The last two decades seem to have been about forgetting the origin of capital, the contigencies of it's existence, and it's dynamism thru history. > > > hey, i'm no apologist for bourgeois rights discourses - i spend much of > my > > academic energy undermining them. > > Is not academic discourse itself a bourgeois discourse? >>>>>>>>>>>>>> no, not entirely. for many it no doubt still is, and for many of these it is nonetheless rewarding and useful. but i tend to think of academic discourse as a way of learning, and a mode of 'work', one that offers a peculiar and unique flexibility to those willing to stick to their guns. it's more a case of filtering out bogus and blindly inherited bourgeois ideas/ideals/language for me, i think. and i'd add that education has a pre-bourgeois past. perhaps you'd say proto-bourgeois, tho, i don't know.... regards, david teh > ----------------------------------------------------- This mail sent through the ArtsIT web email interface. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]