Re: <nettime> Nobel laureate in economics aged 102 endorses the human economy...

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

[This was written several days ago, but seems to have gotten lost in a 
Martian time-slip.]

On 01/23/2013 09:05 AM, Newmedia@aol.com 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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