> On Mon, 13 Aug 2001, Ian Murray wrote:
>
> > 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.
=========
This is like those Kanisza squares and triangles and the god is not a
being but the ground of being debates. The mereology problematic
applied to political economy. It is too abtract for mobilizing
citizens.
>
> > 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.
>
> 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
========
Ok and then what? If all the US management texts are garbage then how
is the US the most powerful [yes, and fucked up] economy on the
planet? How many Harvard MBA's Wharton MBA's, lawyers and Wall street
trader's have read Ohno's work? Would US workers revolt if they knew
that Ohno's work was the source of their drudgery and exploitation? We
still need to come to terms with Adam Przeworski's problematic, imo,
and that means speaking concretely with people who aren't likely to
have read that stuff. Now people are starting to ask where there food
and clothes come from and that's great for building on but how to make
the complex user friendly and digestible? Anti-capitalist comic books
anyone?
Ian