markets and antimarkets
marie milling
markets and anti-markets. Could you explain that a little bit?
Manuel de Landa: The reason why the concept of self-organization is not very well known is because it is only about 30 or so years old. It caused a great revolution in science in very different disciplines like physics, chemistry and the dust is just starting to sell and so we are starting to see what the consequences of this revelation will be for human societies. One of the areas that will be influenced, in fact, that is already being influenced is economics because what we are talking about is here is order that has come out not because someone planned it, because someone commanded it to its existence. We tend to think that everything about human society which has a certain amount of order as being the result of someone planning it. For instance, the city of Versailles was perfectly planned up to the last little detail by Louis XIV and his ministers, and that is our image of what human society is. That everything is on purpose. There are collective actions and consequences which are unintended, and whatever order there is in those collective consequences that no one planned is self-organizing. The clearest example of that is markets. Let’s understand them to have a very concrete image: peasant or small-town markets, a place in town where everybody goes and brings their stuff to sell or goes there to buy something, and it meets every week in a certain part of a town and it comes apart and then meets again the following week. In those very specific places, everybody shows up and everybody shows up with their intentions: I go there with the intention to buy, or I go there with the intention to sell. So a lot of what happens is planned, is intentional, but the overall effect, for instance the prices that every particular commodity happens to go by is unintended. In a real market, no one actually sets the price. There is no one buyer or seller who says, „I want this to be the price of this." No one commands the price, prices set themselves. That’s what’s interesting about markets, that they indeed provide you with a coordination mechanism with coordinating demand and supply that does not need a central decider, does not need a centralized agency that does decision-making. Out of this centralized decision making order comes out.
This is not a new idea, of course. Adam Smith, at the end of the eighteenth century, came up with the idea of „The Invisible Hand" which was supposed to explain how markets are organized. My point of view is those theories are obsolete, that indeed, only with the new conceptual technology, that the new concepts of self-organization that have developed in the last thirty years can we understand how markets actually work. So that is one way in which these new theories will affect our lives, allowing us to understand better how economies work. On the other hand, another problem with original Adam Smith idea was not so much that it was too simple, but that it applied the term „markets, to things that were not self-organized. All the way back to Venice in the fourteenth century, Florence in the fifteenth, Amsterdam in the eighteenth, London in the nineteenth, in other words, throughout European history, beside these spontaneously coordinated markets, there have been large wholesalers, large banks or foreign trade companies or stock markets that are not self-regulated, these are organizations in which instead of prices self-regulating it, they had commands. Everything is planned from the top and more or less executed according to planned, everything is more or less intended. There is very little self-organization going on at all. And indeed, these large wholesalers, these large merchants, large bankers and so on, made the gigantic profits they made and they became capitalist thanks to the fact that they were not obeying obeying demand and supply, they were manipulating demand and supply. For example, instead of the peasant that shows up to the market to sell a certain amount of corn, here you have a wholesaler with a huge warehouse where he stores all the corn he can. If the prices are too low, he can always with drawn certain amounts from the market, put them in the warehouse, and artificially make the prices go up. When the prices go up, he then sells the rest of the corn at these high prices and he makes a lot of money. But, of course, he is manipulating demand and supply. He is not being governed by these anonymous forces. He is not being subject to self-organization; he is organizing everything in a planned cunning way. And so, because economists use the word „market" to describe both, that is one of the main confusions I see in contemporary thought.
We need another word to describe these organizations that are large enough to manipulate markets. A word has been suggested by historian Fernand Braudel and it is a very simple one: „anti-market." Why? Because they manipulate markets. And so today, in the United States, there is a very strong political movement, mostly by the right wing, and Newt Gingrich is perhaps the most well known politician in this regards, who are trying, as they say, shrink the size of the government, let market forces have more room to operate. But, of course, translated into the terms we’ve just introduced, what they really want to do is let anti-market forces run wild. They don’t really want small producers and small manufacturers and bakers and printers and mom-and-pop shops to have more room to manoeuver and make money. They want national and international corporations to have more room to manoeuver. They want to shrink government so that there are less regulations to keep international and national corporations from doing what they want. But if you go and study one of these corporations, rather than looking like a market, they are like mini-Soviet Unions. I mean, everything is planned in these corporations. The managerial hierarchies are exactly like the hierarchies in the Soviet Union: they planned everything, prices play a very small role and most of the organization is done via command.
Now, we used to call the Soviet Union a „command economy," we still call China a command economy. Well, international corporations and national corporations are indeed command economies. They have very little to do with prices. In the past they did have something to do with prices, because either their suppliers or distributors were little guys. They had to deal with prices one way or another. But since the nineteenth century, at least in the United States and I’m sure in Europe, a lot of organizations had been internalizing: buying their suppliers and their distributors and making them part of themselves, kind of eating them and digesting them and incorporating them into their own tissue. The more they do that, the more they internalize these little markets, the less will prices play a role in their coordination, the more the commands play a role. I guess a good image for this that the United States is far from being a free enterprise economy, it is an economy run by multiplicities of little Soviet Unions ..."Hej Christer,
Som jag många gånger har skrivit är Sörlins iakttagelse en psykologisk/existentiell realitet, men vad hjälper det om ingen vill läsa ens berättelser, eller finner dem "trovärdiga"? (Se länkarna nedan.)
http://www.naturvardsverket.se/Documents/publikationer/978-91-620-8498-1.pdf
http://partiprogram.mpbloggar.se/2011/11/21/alf-hornborgs-inlagg-till-miljoveckan
Hälsningar,
Alf
Från: forskare_k...@googlegroups.com [forskare_k...@googlegroups.com] för Christer Sanne [christe...@glocalnet.net]
Skickat: den 29 december 2011 13:05
Till: christe...@glocalnet.net
Ämne: [Forskarnätverk] Honung för de få
Det är svårt att hålla kursen när det blåser från alla håll. Det finns en skara människor – dit jag räknar mig och de flesta som får detta brev – som är allvarligt oroade för vår framtid därför att jordens resurser inte räcker för alla. Varför är inte alla lika oroade när tecknen är så tydliga? Är det fel på vårt sätt att föra fram budskapet? Sverker Sörlin menar att miljöns företrädare måste kunna erbjuda en ny "trovärdig berättelse om ett framtida och bättre tillstånd" (här i Sveriges Natur 5/2010).
Det må vara önskvärt men det är också att ställa höga krav. Jag har försökt räkna mig fram till ett hållbart samhälle om några decennier, förbi alla drömmar om att det skulle finnas en "technical fix" för resursproblemen. Om man ska vara konkret och tala sanning måste den berättelsen handla om en del materiella uppoffringar och om ett stark stat som förmår hävda gemensamma och långsiktiga intressen. Den beskriver också ett annorlunda liv där konsumtion bytts mot fritid.
Det är inte lätt att sälja in en sådan berättelse när andra lovar både guld och gröna skogar. Jag tror, som Sörlin, att "miljörörelsen" måste in på den politiska arenan och debattera välfärdspolitik och skatter och annat som står på dagordningen där. Men då måste man också kunna kräva att de folkvalda och deras utredare redovisar hur de ska lösa miljö- och resursproblemen. Det är inte rimligt att Långtidsutredningen 2008 – som räknar med en nästan fördubblad privat konsumtion de närmaste tjugo åren – bara nämner ordet "hållbarhet" i förbindelsen "finansiell hållbarhet".
Riktigt skrämmande blir detta när man förstår att finanskrisen 2008, enligt de senaste rapporterna, inte alls var någon kris för de närmast berörda, alltså finansinstituten. Tvärtom mörkade de situationen, gjorde stora förtjänster på de statliga stödpengarna och har bara gått ut ännu starkare efteråt (http://blog.svd.se/wallstreet/2011/11/28/fed-undanholl-lan-pa-tusentals-miljarder-dollar-under-krisen/). Nu händer nästan samma sak i Europa: ett stöd till bankerna som beskrivits som "den största presenten i mänsklighetens historia" – från Europas skattebetalare (http://blog.svd.se/bors/2011/12/23/klart-idag-bankraddningarna-onodiga/).
I stället för att ställa om till hållbarhet tvingas nu staterna skuldsätta sig. Följden blir inte bara social nedrustning utan också ett tvång att hålla tillväxten igång för överskådlig tid. Först lånar konsumenterna till sin konsumtion. Sedan räddar staten bankerna – bankirerna? aktieägarna? – och skattebetalarna får stå för notan. Inkomstklyftorna bara ökar. Allt hänger ihop.
Låt mig citera Tranströmer:
Kapitalets byggnader, mördarbinas kupor, honung för de få.
Där tjänade han. Men i en mörk tunnel vecklade han ut sina vingar och flög när ingen såg. Han måste leva om sitt liv.
(Epigram ur samlingen För levande och döda)
Hoppas ljuset kommer igen snart!
Christer
PS: min "berättelse" väntar på publicering men innehållet har jag kommit igång att debattera i olika sammanhang, närmast på vänsterpartiets kongress nästa vecka.
------
Christer Sanne
Tel +46 (0)8 30 47 38 mobil 0739/22 17 33
http://goto.glocalnet.net/christersanne/
”I framtiden kommer människan kanske att visa sin storhet inte genom vad hon gör, utan genom vad hon avstår från att göra.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
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marie milling
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Nabil Mikati
Hej Marie, nedan följer en kommentar om anti-market. Jag har inte läst Braudels stora verk så det jag skriver baseras delvis på Arrighis arbete
Braudel anser att
kapitalismen behöver för dess uppkomst och expansion en statsmakt, detta utgör
en antites till marknaden en antimarket (contre-marché). Han beskriver
kapitalismen som det högsta skiktet av ett hierarkiskt system bestående av tre
lager. 1-Bottenskiktet (självförsörjande ekonomi), 2- marknads ekonomi och
3-anti-market. Med Braudels egna ord
”..Above
this lowest layer comes the favored terrain of the market economy, with its many
horizontal communications between the different markets: here the degree of
automatic coordination usually links supply, demand, and prices. Then alongside
or rather above this layer comes the zone of the anti-market where the great
predators roam and the low of jungle operates. This today as in the past, before
and after the industrial revolution is the real home of capitalism.”
citerad
i (The long twentieth Century av Giovanni Arrighi).
Jag tolkar de
olika räddningspaket som bankerna får i samband med finanskriserna som ett
exempel på denna allians mellan staten och stor (finans) kapitalet ”too big to
fail”var på alla makthavares läppar. Detta perspektiv leder till intressanta
politiska tolkningar, men det är en annan femma.
Ha det gott
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