Any existing structures and all the conditions of doing business are always in a process of change. Every situation is being upset before it has had time to work itself out.

Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942, p. 31-32), obviously plagiarizing one of the early chapters of the Communist Manifesto, in which I believe the phrase was about relations that become “antiquated before they can ossify.”

4 months ago | 8 notes | Reblog |
marx, marxism, schumpeter, creative destruction, capitalism, socialism, democracy,

As a matter of fact, capitalist economy is not and cannot be stationary. Nor is it merely expanding in a steady manner. It is incessantly being revolutionized from within by new enterprise, i.e., by the intrusion of new commodities or new methods of production or new commercial opportunities into the industrial structure as it exists at any moment. Any existing structures and all the conditions of doing business are always in a process of change. Every situation is being upset before it has had time to work itself out. Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.

Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942, p. 31-32, emphasis included).

If I understand correctly, a good way to become a hugely influential economist is to plagiarize Marx while you repudiate Marx.

4 months ago | 16 notes | Reblog |
schumpeter, capitalism, socialism, democracy, marx, marxism, creative destruction,

To any mind not warped by the habit of fingering the Marxian rosary it should be obvious that…

Joseph Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942, p. 19).

Yep, still waiting on that nuanced, “neutral” (p.xxi) appraisal of Marxism that was promised in the book’s introduction.

4 months ago | 4 notes | Reblog |
marx, schumpeter, capitalism, socialism, democracy, marxism,

Crowdsourcing as a Declaration of Class War

So you’ve lost your job, maybe even your career or livelihood, and maybe even your home. But don’t fret: your suffering is helping to usher in the era of mass collaboration.

Jeff Howe, who coined the term and literally wrote the book on crowdsourcing, suggests we look toward Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s platform for unskilled, ill-paid labour:

In early 2007, Mechanical Turk’s success was anything but assured. Companies seemed unwilling to experiment with it, and the pool of ‘Turkers’ (the people who accept these menial assignments) looked to be a diminishing resource. Then a cottage industry of third-party firms sprung up specializing in helping companies exploit the service and filtering out the inevitable low-quality responses. Add in a recession, and the service has blossomed into a 200,000-person strong workforce.

His point is that “our current economic downturn plays a role” in the proliferation, or mainstreaming, of crowdsourcing. “If crowdsourcing runs on people’s ‘spare cycles’ — their downtime not claimed by work or family obligations — that quantity is now in surplus.”

You losing your job is great news for the proliferation of crowdsourcing. Now you have more time to perform “simple, rote tasks like tagging images, transcribing audio materials, or culling records from online databases.”

While accurate, only the most detached, morally-bankrupt apologist could view such a development as a ‘success.’ The ‘blossoming’ of Mechanical Turk, a platform that literally pays pennies for unskilled, repetitive labour, can provide no comfort and no consolation to those who lost their jobs, their homes, and their livelihoods to gambles taken by bankers, executives, and other inept, irresponsible casino-capitalists.

In this period of foreclosures, high unemployment rates, and unprecedented levels of wealth concentrated in so few hands, the proliferation of crowdsourcing should not be celebrated as the dawning of a new, post-industrial age, but condemned as a declaration of class war issued by the winning side.

Our misfitting is our overflowing, the overflowing of our creativity, our magnificent being-able-to. So get thee gone to the dustbin of history, capital, and let us get on with making the world anew

John Holloway, in Crack Capitalism (2010, p. 252)

1 year ago | 18 notes | Reblog |
holloway, crack capitalism, capital, creative, communism, socialism,

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or…with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.

Marx, cited in Holloway (2010, p. 245)

1 year ago | 4 notes | Reblog |
marx, john holloway, development, property, capitalism, communism, socialism, revolution, piracy, internet, gift economy, economy, crack capitalism,

Revolutionary strategy is not something extra. It is an essential part of the study of the class relation. Though this relation is constantly shifting, though the nineteenth century is long gone, the two-sided nature of capital remains. Its analysis is not simple, but at the same time we have no vested interest in revelling in the supposedly incomprehensible complexities by which ‘professional Marxists’ obscure the meaning of Capital.

Harry Cleaver, in ‘Reading Capital Politically’ (1979, p. 76)

1 year ago | 3 notes | Reblog |
harry cleaver, autonomist marxism, marx, marxism, communism, socialism, revolution, class conflict, class war, das kapital, capitalism, capital,

The argument is simple. We make capitalism: we must stop making it and do something else. This means setting doing against abstract labour: this we must, can and already do.

John Holloway, in Crack Capitalism (2010, p. 109)

LOLCats totally count.

1 year ago | 2 notes | Reblog |
john holloway, capitalism, communism, socialism, crack capitalism, marxism, autonomist marxism, web 2.0, crowdsourcing,

[T]he pejorative use of this epithet [Luddite] by information revolutionaries slanders the real nature of a movement that represented a coherent protest against destructive industrialization advanced under the banner of technological necessity. And, just as in the first industrial revolution capital accumulated itself through popular immiseration, so the computerized ‘second industrial revolution’ will expand corporate wealth and control by massive dislocation, deskilling, and unemployment. What is required to confront this prospect is a revival of the resistant spirit of General Ludd – a neo-Luddism for the information age.

Nick Dyer-Witheford, in Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism (1999, p. 52)