Re: <nettime> The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value ab...

[mp <mp@aktivix.org>]

On 06/03/12 16:56, Newmedia@aol.com wrote:
> If you don't mind, could you consider the possibility that INDUSTRIALISM is 
>  really what happened in the "developed" economies -- both those we call  
> "Capitalist" and those we call "Communist" -- and, indeed, is what is still  
> happening in the BRICS + TEN?

That is even more narrow, if by "industrialism" you intend to refer to
the post-steam, electric age. Maybe my view of insutrialism is too
narrow and I am merely taking this opportunity to distribute it.

However, if you read The Magna Carta Manifesto (Peter Linebaugh), for
example, you will encounter a narrative that, to my mind convincingly,
stretches the current era - which may or may not be coming to an end -
back into the late 12th and early 13th centuries, incidentally around
the time that the master of algorithms, al-Jazari, translated Greek
myths into the mechanical age by producing drum machines, automatic soap
dispensers and other material conveniences. Linebaugh speaks of the
metrics associated with the rise of the trading classes - who carved out
a niche, now called capitalism, between the nobility/aristocracy and the
commoners - while a reading of the history of the Islamic Golden Age
suggests that a mechanical age commenced alongside it.

On the other hand, McLuhan mentions somewhere that the village
formations occurring around 800CE in what were to become perhaps the
most significant  colonising force and which were pre-requisite for all
of this (metrics, trading, mechanics and later steam and electricity)
were results of royal decrees that commoners regionally must produce a
knight in shining armour. That, of course, requires an "industrial
effort" - you have to live close together to process the materials - and
if that is what you mean by the term, then I tend to agree as far as
language facilitates such potential at all.

Conversely, what words can really signify the shit we're in?

mp




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