by Ahmed » 20/10/17, 22:23
I reread the previous posts and especially those of Did. This inspires me the following thoughts ...
Our society is complex and its analysis rather confusing since apparently contradictory aspects can coexist ...
Two of these opposing tendencies are observed and yet are coherent from a systemic point of view (sorry if it's too conceptual, but how do concepts go?).
On the one hand, repair by the users themselves (through, sometimes, collaborative workshops) and self-production of food or tools adapted to self-use, on the other, colossal efforts to introduce and even impose (via state aid => subsidies and regulations) new products intended to make entire sections of existing equipment obsolete. This last aspect is part of what is sold under the name "energy transition".
This reflects two consequences of the same phenomenon: the saturation of the market no longer allows the widening of the base of the accumulation of value, the obsolescence decided of old equipment (but often rather, the addition of new equipment to the old) in the historic centers of capitalism is an ultimate attempt to expand the market, the only possibility of recovering profit opportunities in the long term (at least that is what many believe, especially Keynesians). The move towards greater individual autonomy (even when practiced collectively) results, in part, from the awareness of a gradual break with mechanical reciprocity linking employment and means of subsistence, not only because it is become more random, but also because it does not fulfill the expectations it had raised.
The common denominator of these two phenomena is the progressive eviction of human labor: the tricks of the big industrialists are no longer sufficient to seduce the buyers to the level of what would be necessary, new biases through the public authorities are requisitioned. The declining purchasing power of a middle class threatened in its very existence is the cause, just as this observation arouses the interest for a personal investment in the direct satisfaction of its needs.
This contradiction will be much more difficult and probably impossible to overcome, unlike what may have happened previously (where we have seen each crisis be overcome by a new phase of expansion), because we are in a historically unprecedented configuration. Indeed, formerly, with each contraction of the economy, a concomitant expansion of the market and of the quantity of human labor employed was observed. Currently and because of the third industrial revolution (that of the microcomputer), the functional basis of capitalism is disappearing in the ignorance of analysts, too busy to boast of "the crisis", while the simple operation "on the day the day "can no longer be achieved except through increasingly improbable financial devices.
In very old posts, I sketched the outline of the current evolution, in particular its tropism towards authoritarianism, which we unfortunately see today and which is only the consequence of austerity. The "democratic" consensus is only possible when the false abundance is credible for all (and this period can only be a simple phase corresponding to nothing of what the invention of the concept of "progress" translates) .
Warning! What I write is an analysis, not a value judgment; I limit myself to notice and I do not endorse in any way this evolution ...
PS: I refer you to Roddier for the thermodynamic reading grid, at least in terms of the principal aspect, since I am more than dubious on many points of its precise interpretation of the present period.
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