Re: [ox-en] Labor contradictions
- From: Michael Bauwens <michelsub2003 yahoo.com>
- Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2007 02:11:33 -0800 (PST)
I think there are some concurring developments making that likely:
1) the shift to postmaterial identities for large fractions of the western population, I temporarily forget the references to this, but it seems well documented. It is undoubtedly one of the key drivers of free software/peer production, not the need for a livelyhood, which it explicitely doesn't cover well
2) the ecological impossibility for the non-western world to achieve 'development' on our terms and therefore the need to shift to a logic of sufficiency and to replace material growth with immaterial growth ... Chinese/Indian models will very soon hit their material limits (we don't have the four planets to sustain their arrival in the high consumption club). In fact, despite the ostentious drive for material growth, there are many forces striving for different logics, it may even be the most important political alternative being developed in many countries of the South (neotraditional economics, suffiency economics, buddhist economics ...)
So the shift from material to immaterial has both positive and negative drivers.
Again I think there is a similarity with the slavery to feudal transition, from a system where 'might is largely right', and the focus is on creating large material surpluses for the comfort of the ruling classes; to a situation where might is 'in theory' subsumed to spiritual logic, and the main focus of the civilization is spiritual development ...
Michel
That was really convincing. The remaining question is what is the
intensive immaterial development that is posed to be the next stage?
I mean the transition from slavery to feudalism was about material
production - it only changed the means of it - and here you propose
that what will happen is a change in what is being produced - but why
should that happen? Why people should prefer more or better
immaterial products to more or better material ones? This is not a
trivial change - now what constitutes a 'success' in the minds of
peoples is a good car and a nice house - this is what people dream
about - and this is where the real change will happen in peoples
aspirations, in their imagination.
--
Zbigniew Lukasiak
http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/
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