> Excellent questions. I think we should try to speak of markets, rather
> than 'the market', because we get into the one/many problem in the
> realm of political economy and that presents problems of motivating
> collective action.
One has to speak of both. Individual markets don't make any sense without the larger metric of global accumulation; the global doesn't have any content outside of the particularity of the specific market. Each needs to be set in motion towards the other.
> Diane Elson suggests that we should socialize markets via knowledge
> practices that make 'firms' more porous, that citizens have greater
> voice in markets rather than mere exit from one type of dog food or
> can of chicken soup to another. A certain Doug Henwood suggests
> something along the same lines, if I recall. This means hyper-educated
> consumers that are as finicky as cats with regards to how stuff is
> made and how the makers treat one another and the non-human realm that
> is transformed in production. It also means more 'rights' for workers
> in enterprises to speak up without fear of reprisal when hierarchical
Well, there's a politics of consumption (consumer protection), as well as distribution (the welfare state), production (trade unions), and investment (the developmental state). Each struggle needs to somehow solidarize with all the other struggles, simultaneously, to "fill in" the market-space of Capital with the struggles of labor-time.
> question that should be addressed. Organization theory as democratic
> practice is an enormous challenge and trying to understand how the
> American Management Association, the International Standards
> Organization and all those other corporate acronyms create the
> parameters of markets is every bit as important as watching how States
> continuously construct and shape markets with laws.
I always tell my students that global management is best understood by (1) taking all the American books ever written on the subject (you'll need a truck, lemme tell you), (2) stuffing them in the recycle bin, and (3) reading Taichi Ohno's "The Toyota Production System" in detail. Great stuff every radical should know -- production cells, line smoothing, balancing of demand, pull-systems, etc. It's the way supermarkets are run, incidentally; it's just that Japan and Central Europe were the first to apply the principle to factories.
-- Dennis