Industrial Policy: New Wine in Old Bottles - Kevin Carson

international | anti-capitalism | other press Saturday February 21, 2009 22:35 by Saoirsí - Alliance of the Libertarian Left (Ireland) saoirsi at libertarian dot ie http://www.libertarian.ie

The Unsustainability of the Existing System; The Seeds of the New; What Stands in the Way.

We live in a time of Crisis, and a time of Opportunity. In a time of crisis, the opportunity for radical change exists; what is critical is the ideas that shape the change.

Kevin Carson (Studies in Mutualist Political Economy; Organization Theory - A Libertarian Perspective) - Research Associate for the Center for a Stateless Society - has just published "Industrial Policy: New Wine in Old Bottles", a short fully-referenced paper outlining some practical mutualist and libertarian alternatives, as well as existing challenges to the present system.

Here are a few tasters of Kevin Carson's work in "Industrial Policy: New Wine in Old Bottles" --

On the Unsustainability of the Existing System:

'The political and economic establishments tasked to deal with problems, unfortunately, do so by intensifying the very forces that led to the crisis; as Ivan Illich put it, they "attempt to solve a crisis by escalation." They do so because the current problems are a byproduct of the pursuit of institutional self-interest by the people who direct this society. So any "responsible" and "moderate" solution will, by definition, be one that can be implemented through the institutions those people run, without any fundamental structural changes; and any solution that directly addresses the structural causes of the problem will, by definition, be "extremist." Sociologist C. Wright Mills' memorable term for that mindset was "crackpot realism."'

On the Seeds of the New System:

'So long as the state successfully manages to prop up the centralized corporate economic order, libertarian and decentralist technologies and organizational forms will be incorporated into the old corporate framework. As the system approaches its limits of sustainability, those elements become increasingly destabilizing forces within the present system, and prefigure the successor system. When the system finally reaches that limit, those elements will (to paraphrase Marx) break out of their state capitalist integument and become the building blocks of a fundamentally different free market society.'

On What Stands in the Way:

'The central point is that the industrial economy that emerges on the other side of these systemic crises will be almost unrecognizable. The transition will occur. But it can be either comparatively smooth or extremely rough, depending on whether our "leaders" choose to ease the transition by removing the barriers that stand in the way, or choose instead to divert the resources at their disposal to prop up the current system until it's too late to avert catastrophe.'