> A reply from David Graeber...
> an appropriation of new "post-Fordist", "silicon valley"
> capitalist ones (the other fellow was much more aggressive
> about this.) Personally, I think this is a lot of nonsense.
> The only similarity I can find is that they are both
> decentralized. Otherwise, zip.
Consensus processes do exist in any number of corporations -- high tech firms have tons of workplace management stuff, the emphasis now is all on communication, team-building, empowering local groups. That's not simply ideology; there are major changes underway in the new service economy, which are tied to powerfully subversive undercurrents of cooperation, sustainability and social justice, in the belly of the beast.
> not to my knowledge any capitalist corporation. I guess I hadn't
> realized the degree to which people working in the Marxist
> tradition are so obsessed with capitalism that they really
> can't imagine anything could really emerge from outside it.
It's important to stress, though, that we're all of us *inside* the system, otherwise we wouldn't be on listservs and email and have the capacity to throw around complex concepts. Thus the necessity of Theodor Adorno's negative dialectics -- concepts capable of turning the energies of the total system against itself, of searching for non-identities amidst the (false) identity of the total system.
-- Dennis