anti-Ralph petition

Lisa & Ian Murray seamus at accessone.com
Mon Nov 6 14:12:12 PST 2000


CB>>((((((((((((((

CB: Yea, again.

Recall that Marx and Lenin thought of the big factory and proletarian ghettos as giving workers a feeling of the power in their mass numbers. The revolution in transportation and communication allows the capitalists circa 1980 to scatter geographically the points of production, while retaining high enough profits. These developments in mechanization allow negation of what Marx called cooperation. Mechanization and cooperation were the twin pillars of the industrial phase of capitalism. Now mechanization has developed so much as to allow negation of cooperation (big factories)

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I don't know about this. For instance, global logistics firms like UPS, FedEx and DHL exhibit very high degrees of both co-ordination and co-operation within their networks, and this despite plenty of adversarial dynamics between bosses and everyone else. Similarly, Boeing has lots of co-operation within various aspects of it's production teams and the usual amount of contentiousness due to the cost-cutting fascism of the bosses [so much so that they have the FAA breathing down their necks]. So co-operation and co-ordination have a fractal like dynamics depending on which observation scale you choose. The negation of co-operation that you speak of may have it's uses up to a point of diminishing returns that is always changing due to the uncertainties of market dynamics; uncertainty beyond the firm's boundaries leading to changes in the co-operative dynamics within it.

Ian



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