great question

marco:

Which is why I am intrigued by the buzz phrase "peer-to-peer" as a potential paradigm for social organization on a massive scale.  Is it coherent?  Is it feasible?  Only time will tell.  But so far, I don't see any previous or existing systems that successfully address the power concentration problem.

i get it (i think) by looking at it through the energy lens.

we all need energy, first of all our own life force, and the wherewithal to maximise its successful longevity.

that wherewithal consists primarily of clean air, water and food, then shelter, heat, enough (but not too much) comfort. all else is vanity, frankly.

sooo...we want to ensure the most reliable systems are put into place to sustain our existences, with the accent on reliable, so we can live serenely, and just have to deal with extrinsic threats, the intrinsic ones well-covered.

so where is my energy going to come from? the air i choose to live with and in, the water i choose to drink, the food from my trees and garden, all fine...

but the gas for my chainsaw so i can stay warm in winter, some transport so i can stay in touch physically with the world around, yet beyond easy walking distance, some electricity to power a few toys/tools, and of these electricity and transport are the hardest to imagine efficiently working once the fossil fool party winds down, so where is that juice going to come from?

i can try and lower my needs as much as possible, which definitely helps, put solar panels on my roof for some electricity, ride my horse instead of going for a drive etc etc, but i still will not be able to create everything i want out of whole cloth, (or bubblegum, string and woodashes!), so i need a network that will supply me.

researching this, it became quickly clear that centralised energy systems are less robust than decentralised ones, and from then on i started reading about how this works across the board, decentralised intelligence is more robust than locking it all in libraries which can burn down etc.

then the napster thingy happened, and i grocked another level of the principle, namely if we all help out in a positive direction, we can make the individual loads very light, yet have a lot of lifting power.

i learn a lot from sven and chris about this stuff, and am ever more convinced that this is the real reason for the internet, empowering individuals to bypass inefficient middlemen tollbooth topdown power, and tailor systems to dovetail more exactly with our needs.

this will work much better once we consign the idea of consumerism to the pyre of history, a revelation that is coming perilously late to humanity, but it would grow anyway even in the present reality, if it is as sound as it seems.

so why not extend the principle across the political gameboard too?

maybe/surely a one world government as brain, like brussels to europe, but with as much devolution of centralised power as possible, as much 'think global, act local, small is beautiful' as possible.

nature works like this...

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do." Jim Hightower

Post-revolution constitutions have to address and fix the power concentration directly, in the media, industry, and political parties. All three have been a catastrophe here in the States.

I don't think concentration of power is an inevitability. For example, politically it's not difficult to assure a 4 strong parties political system, simply by assuring the three parties in a 'congressional district' with the most votes get seats in parliament/congress. Boom, you've got a 4 or 5 party political system, and 2-party concentration of power of the sort we have in the U.S. is impossible.

Media ownership could be diversified by simply requiring, for example, one owner per media entity. You could diversify local media by, for example, sharing ownership of one tv station or newspaper among several owners, each of which would get, say 25% of 'airtime'. Industry concentration could be assured by writing very aggressive anti-trust laws into your constitution and even providing for 'private enforcement' through lawsuits.

None of this is hard to think up (or re-think up), the hard part is getting 'there'.

fairleft

The problem for the left and the right has been to see capitalism and communism as opposites. In reality they're almost identical - both assume that industry is good, collective work is good, increased living standards are the best possible good, and that if this means that an aristocracy develops - the aristocracy will always tell you that's good too.

Precisely.

Consider the implications of that.

If the problem is a shared belief in growth, then an effective new synthesis is going to have to tackle that.  It's going to have to challenge the idea that growth is always a good thing.  Think about energy debates.

So much of policy is directed towards increasing supply, instead of reducing demand.

As I remember Colman commenting in a threat about the import of roses for Valentine's Day to the UK producing less carbon than greenhouse production:

What if we just decide that we don't need roses for Valentine's day?

And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg

Utopias are utopias because they make unrealistic assumptions about people. So a viable alternative must be based on a good understanding of human nature and its complexity. Too many social theories are built on cartoon descriptions of what "people" are or behave like.

One example of making realistic assumptions about people is by James Madison in Federalist 51 as a justification for the US' system of "checks and balances":

But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma

ThatBritGuy:

I don't think it's possible to imagine post-capitalism from this starting point.

well, it is a moving starting collection of points, but i agree fundamentally.

there are times when closing apps, (or opening new ones) will not suffice, a reboot is what's needed.

ever use disc warrior?

there's an app worth opening, perhaps there is a socio-techno-political equivalent event/person/group that will shoehorn us to the next level without the blue screen, but but but....

something like what chris espouses and expounds might work, but things will have to get a lot worse before serious people in serious numbers begin to want to upgrade capitalism, which is basically what 'his' system would do, without a lot of muss, at least in theory. everything has some shadow. or am i trapped in zero-sum thinking, bullshit bingo?

could there be a 'system' where everybody wins, or if we got that far as to be able to (re?)create that, would we transcend needing a strong cohesive system?

maybe a multiplicity of co-existing new-but-reminiscent 'systems' would be more robust anyway, since concentrated power leads to concentrated corruption...

it may be the type of phenomenon that only functions if not too many people use it, permitted to 99 monkeys but not the hundreth.

like a picturesque side road, that if discovered by too many, would become just another boring, toll-heavy turnpike.

or it may serve as a speed bump, lasting as long as it takes for the graders from coldman-sacks-and-plunders to arrive and shave it down. hard to say...

the intellectual challenge is to find a new system that partakes of the old, (less intrinsic shock, to balance the increasing extrinsic ones), yet sets off in a radical enough new direction to guarantee that if we make more mistakes, at least they will be different ones from the same rotten old chestnuts we have had the ill chance to be hitherto attracted to.

ThatBritGuy:

But that doesn't deal with the psychological and social reality of exploitation, and dominance-based relationships.

power-over instead of power-with. the love of power, or the power of love.

have to raise (yes we)-cannier future generations!

completely original, or a great remix that feels and acts like one, does it matter? how many would know it's instant?

live, or memorex?

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do." Jim Hightower

What makes capitalism distinct is that it places that principle that workers should have no say in the workplace on liberal footing by saying that while all are equal, people who have the money to purchase the labor of others are more equal.

The US Constitution did not deal AT ALL with employment or how businesses operate. The discourse at that time did not have a proper vocabulary for that discussion. It was focused on generalizing political equality amongst a gentry and on pushing along the devolution of power from traditional feudal organizations based on birth to the emerging system of opportunity based on individual initiative and merit within the gentry. The one employment issue that was on everyone's mind was slavery, and they could not come to terms with that issue effectively and I am not aware of any other considerations of employment issues.

At the time of the writing of the US Constitution plantation agriculture was a slave based capitalist enterprise where planters made money off of self replicating workers by selling slaves born and raised on their plantation as a crop. That is what "I'm goin' down the river in the mornin'", as heard and included in his Florida Suite by Fredrick Delius was all about. In addition, of course, planters made money by selling the cash crops raised by slave labor. In the period before the Civil War Virginia planters made more money off of selling slaves than they did off of selling crops.

The other most notable large scale economic activity at the time of the Constitution was ship building, which was concentrated in the north and was partly organized along the lines of artisan guilds or groups with specialized skills some of whom had arrived soon after the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, although employment situations may have varied in other colonies, especially New York, which had the largest population of slaves in the north, many of whom were engaged in artisan activities, but also had the tradition of "half free" slaves.

The result of this is that when cloth manufacturing based on water powered spinning and looms emerged in 1814 in New England employers were at liberty to devise employment practices that best suited themselves and so they did--to their profit and convenience. In addition to the mill they would build a store, some tenements and a dormitory or boarding house, as the mill would be located acording to the availability of water power and might be distant from existing villages. They would also contribute one way or another to the support of the local school and a church of their choosing.

For a family the wages from the mill might be barely sufficient to subsistence, but to many farmers' daughters the mills offered a welcome alternative to the previous choices of marriage or domestic service, even if only to temporize the necessity of choosing. If they could still live at home they had the possibility of saving their earnings so as to open other opportunities. Throughout the 19th century the frontier remained available as a pressure valve.


As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

The most important examples of how the EU is working today can be found in the intentional imposition of austerity on Greece, Ireland and other formerly sovereign states, which have no alternative economic course within the Eurozone. I don't deny the EU has done some good things, the obvious important question is what is its overall impact on the average working person? Crappy.

fairleft

I was simply pointing out that the democratic Italian state operated very effectively on the economic front for a couple of decades or more after WWII. That's important. Up against that you put the decades' of short-lived governments and how excellent growth and widespread prosperity really wasn't so great since it also involved crappy housing, an abused environment, and had something to do with creating young Italian racists. I see anti-populism but not much credibility or rationality in your new complaints.

fairleft

The EU has existed since 1993. I do think the EC -- which existed before the EU and respected national sovereignty -- was a fine institution. I suppose you'll have to give credit to the EC for bringing peace to Western Europe in the years 1945-1993, while the EU should get credit for the years 1993 to 2010.

Looking at the history, all was well on the peace front and I don't see what was gained by pushing from an EC to an EU.

fairleft

fairleft: How could the lira lose value against the euro when the lira's value would not exist until the moment of transfer?

Imagine the value of the lira/drachma/peseta/escudo is set at 100 to the euro at the moment of its reintroduction.  Now imagine that it drops to 70 or 20 by the end of the month of its existence.  It is an imagined scenario, but it is a plausible one.  Obviously, whether something like this would happen is an empirical question.

If you read Eichengreen's more "academic" version of his argument (PDF) on this matter, it is striking, perplexing and somewhat annoying to realize how much more binary, dramatic and even polemical he is in the (presumably) more widely circulated popular version, than in this decidedly more nuanced and ambivalent academic version. e.g.

First an argument explaining the "Economic Barriers to Exit":

... would reintroducing the national currency and following with a sharp depreciation against the euro in fact help to solve these countries competitiveness and debt problems? The presumption in much of the literature is negative.12 A country like Italy where slow growth combined with high inherited debt/GDP ratios to raise the specter of debt unsustainability (that it would become necessary to restructure the debt or for taxpayers and transfer recipients to make inconceivable sacrifices) might be tempted to reintroduce the lira as a way of securing a more inflationary monetary policy and depreciating away the value of the debt; but doing so would result in credit-rating downgrades, higher sovereign spreads and an increase in interest costs, as investors anticipate and react to the government's actions. A country like Portugal where high real wages combine with the absence of exchange rate independence to produce chronic high unemployment might be tempted to reintroduce the escudo as a way of securing a more expansionary monetary policy and pushing down labor costs; but doing so will only result in higher wage inflation, as workers anticipate and react to the government's actions. Estimates in Blanchard (2006) suggest that Portugal would require a 25 per cent real depreciation in order to restore its competitiveness.13 It is not clear if the government sought to engineer this through a substantial nominal depreciation that workers would look the other way. Observers pointing to these effects conclude that exiting might not be especially beneficial for a country with high debts or high unemployment. To the contrary, the principal obstacle to exiting the euro area in this view is that doing so may have significant economic costs.

Yet one can also imagine circumstances in which reintroducing the national currency might constitute a useful treatment. Assume that Portuguese workers are prepared to accept a reduction in their real wages but confront a coordination problem:  they are willing to accept a reduction only if other workers or unions accept a reduction, perhaps because they care about relative wages.14 Under these circumstances there will be a reluctance to move first, and wage adjustment will be suboptimally slow. Then a monetary-cum-exchange-rate policy that jumps up the price level, reducing real wages across the board, may be welfare enhancing; this is the so-called "daylight savings time" argument for a flexible exchange rate. Importantly, in the circumstances described here there will be no incentive for individual workers or unions to push for higher wages to offset the increase in prices. The lower real wages obtained as a result of depreciating the newly-reintroduced currency deliver the economy to the same full employment equilibrium that would have resulted from years of grinding deflation, only faster.

Now the counterarguments, qualifications, and nuances:

Note the assumption here: that whatever caused real wages to get out of line in the first place is not intrinsic to the economy, so that the problem will not recur. Thus, the Portuguese example contemplated here is described under the assumption that real wages have fallen out of line for reasons extrinsic to the operation of the economy -- for example, irrational exuberance on the part of workers in the run-up to Stage III of the Maastricht process, something that will not recur. If, on the other hand, real wages are too high because of the existence of domestic distortions, for example the presence of powerful trade unions that exclusively value the welfare of their employed members, then it is implausible that a different monetary-cum-exchange-rate policy will have an enduring impact.

There are similar counterarguments to the view that a country like Italy that reintroduced the lira in order to pursue a monetary-cum-exchange-rate policy that stepped down the value of the debt would necessarily be penalized with lower credit ratings and higher debt-servicing costs. Sovereign debt is a contingent claim; when debt is rendered unsustainable by shocks not of the government's own making and the source of those shocks can be verified independently, there are theoretical arguments for why investors will see a write-down as excusable.15 Even when the country's debt problem is of its own making, credible institutional and policy reforms -- strict legal or constitutional limits on future budget deficits, stronger independence to insulate the central bank from pressure to help finance future debts -- may reassure the markets that past losses will not recur. The fact that the debt burden has been lightened similarly makes it look less likely that prior problems will be repeated. There is ample evidence from history that governments that default, either explicitly by restructuring or implicitly by inflating, are able to regain market access following appropriate institutional and policy reforms. The mixed findings of studies seeking to identify a reputational penalty in the form of higher interest rates are consistent with the view that this penalty can be avoided by countries that follow up with institutional and policy reforms reassuring investors that the experience will not be repeated. The implication is that the cost in terms of reputation may not be a prohibitive barrier to exit.

How applicable is this scenario to countries like Italy? It is hard to argue that Italy's heavy debt burden is due to factors not of its own making. Italy does not have a reassuring history of guarding the central bank's independence or of adopting budgetary procedures and institutions that limit free-rider and common-pool problems. Whether exiting the euro area and reintroducing the lira would therefore result in credit-rating downgrades and increases in spreads sufficient to deter any such decision is an empirical question.16

In fact, his "Conclusion" starts as follows:

The possibility that an incumbent member of the euro area might reintroduce its national currency cannot be excluded.

and is frustratingly cagey:

How formidable are the obstacles to withdrawing? Economically, it is not clear which way the arguments cut.

<...>

Would defection by one country cause the general disintegration of the euro area?  The answer, as with many things economic, is "it depends."

<...>

The possibilities are endless. Forecasting the prospects for the euro area may be easier than forecasting the prospects for global warming, but only marginally.

(My bolds)

That's how it ends.

So at the end of this discussion, I am left very non-plussed.  Normally, I appreciate "hedging", "qualifications", "ambivalence", "nuance", etc. in the presentation of arguments, because it indicates a healthy awareness of the possibility that one's position, as certain as one may feel about it subjectively, may nevertheless overlook a point or piece of information that could reveal unseen contradictions or weaknesses.  So all things being equal, I would like how Eichengreen wrote this paper.  Unfortunately, what grates in this case is the one-sided presentation and deliberate exclusion of "complexities" in the companion essay he wrote for wider "popular" consumption.  There is almost something patronizing or condescending about it.

Lesson learned.

The march of civilizations is a series of defenses that man has put up against the dread of pure existence.

marco's robots, duh!

:)

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do." Jim Hightower

Food growing isn't a problem - some people enjoy farming. And some DIY might be useful.

Toilet cleaning (etc) would come under the heading of the one day a week or one week a month social benefit requirement.

I don't think either of those would be an issue. I'd be more concerned about industrialised factory work.

And possible accusations of utopianism aren't relevant when the alternative is the regular cycle of wars and depressions created by the current model.

Are a few days a month of relatively crap work too high a price for relatively stability which would create a huge peace dividend that could be used for scientific and cultural sponsorship?  

Who'd grow the food and clean the toilets, and why would they do it?

In addition to the pleasure some would find from the work itself, if one exerts substantially more effort than would be required for the minimum support one should receive commensurate compensation.

In the 60s I thought that a national minimum was inevitable due to increasing automation. How else could a consumer market be maintained? I think that question is again coming to the fore. Were the USA to stop attempting to dominate the world militarily, focus on building a sustainable infrastructure and institute tax policies that reverse existing wealth and income disparities I believe that we could build a society that is humane, satisfying and dynamic.

We could afford to spend more on agriculture, with the benefit of greater sector employment and vastly less contamination of our food supply and poisoning of our population. Likewise, we could pay more for clothing but get better value through longer lived higher quality clothes. With more stringent limitations on the competitive damage that corporations could inflict on competition, including reformed patent laws, we could have more start-ups and innovation.

The pay-offs from a national minimum income would be in reduced costs for maintenance of social order and increased creativity, at a minimum. Being able to earn ten times the national minimum would still be a strong incentive to the ambitious. They might have to give up dreams of world domination, but in return they would get a healthier, more secure and more supportive society.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

the ideal would be that work would be to a large degree optional, we can't be clogging up the labour market with a bunch of folks who'd really like to be far away and doing something very different.

pay them to stay away and putter, not enough for luxury or status positioning games, but enough to keep their bodies and souls together, enough so they could concentrate on their hobbies, of curing cancer, or writing the next symphony...

you'd certainly know that when you wanted a worker, you'd stand a better chance of finding a good one, instead of a surly drone.

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do." Jim Hightower

Ask your local Hypothalamus

The hypothalamus is sensitive to light cycles, the nucleus of the solitary tract, the locus coeruleus, and the ventrolateral medulla. And they are all "connected to the hipbone and the hipbone is connected to..." So, yes, one would assume that culture will produce some specific external input into these feedback systems. No stimulus - no response - no reward - no reinforcement. No behavioural change. And you'll just have to take my word for the fact that the secretion of oxytocin in response to suckling or vaginal stimulii is VERY 'rewarding' and thus 'reinforcing' i.e. new neuronal hardwiring takes place.

BTW Knowing the approx 30 day cycles of men - detectable by hormones in the urine - can be used for calculating best route and schedule for individual drivers (bus or train) during the low point of their hormonal cycles. Accidents have dropped a third using this method.

You can't be me, I'm taken

that thread focused more on the sexual exclusivity angle rather than on the notion of political tendencies being based in the brain.

The march of civilizations is a series of defenses that man has put up against the dread of pure existence.

Colman:

The idea of mommy staying at home to look after the kids is far from universal.

so is the strange concept of the 'nuclear family', with rows of houses and little community.

i think you may be misunderstanding my point.

creches are better than being left home alone, or bulgarian orphanages, doesn't mean they're all good...

some parenting is so bad the kid would be better off being raised by prussian nuns...

i'm not trying to make any absolute points here!

i do think that using 'professionals' to substitute for real parenting has its risks, and often does as much damage than good.

kids are an assault on reason in any culture, i think.

that's how they clear the way to impose their own 'reason' later on...

:)

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do." Jim Hightower

I was referencing recurrent collateral projections of come neurons that self-inhibit release of neurotransmitters into the synaptic cleft.  There's also lateral inhibition where a neuron 'turns-off' neurons to 'either side' to sharpen their signal in the Hubel and Wiesel processing layers.  

No one could have predicted

No idea.

I have enough on my plate trying to understand the neuro-anatomy, gross functioning, and interactions of the thalamus, limbic system, and frontal cortex without dragging the cerebellum into the picture.  

No one could have predicted