On 01/04/2012 13:47, Michel Bauwens wrote:
I think the question is whether the nation-state is still the dominant
force, or has it become a globally distributed system of power, as argued
in Empire, which thwarts any attempt by nation-states to control it
Although at the time Empire was a timely and inspiring book, i believe
that there is so much evidence that nation-states have enormous (but far
from total) control over own destinies, that it is the wrong question to
ask. Yes, productivity of external production and external capital
seeking profit significantly limits what economic units within national
economies can produce and at which price. Yes, the list of limits is
long (rating agencies, individual states, groups of states,
supra-state/national organizations, funding bodies like Paris Club,
IMF). Regardless of all that, i believe that the right question is: what
kind of international competition and international interaction and
power struggle exist that limit the nation-state power, and how do those
limits operate in practice.
For p2p production to develop widely, we have to account for it. Whether
the accounting occurs through use of money, or through other means, it
has to be done, and it has to be made commensurable with commodities
whose value is determined through monetary exchange and as such
accounted for in GDP and in other upcoming measures of national
economies (new indexes created by sustainable and green economists -
ISEW/GPI, A.Sen's capabilities approach, EU's Beyond GDP project).
P2p production is not alone in facing this problem. State services and
goods which do not take the form of commodity (education, health,
housing, infrastructure, institutions necessary for complex societies to
operate) face the same problem. Pro-capitalist efforts, like Atkins
report in UK (2005), are an attempt to account for state production
within the logic of capitalist for profit production. The task of us
believing in post-capitalist, egalitarian and directly democratic (both
in "real" production and in political work as another site of
production) is to come up with alternative measures, both on micro
(money/price) and macro (regional, national accounting, and beyond) levels.
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