An interesting mail just in from my mate Ed, talking about a book called An Anglosphere Primer, by James Bennett:
Read an interesting point in the Anglosphere book yesterday: Bennett doesn't use the word "capitalism" but uses "market economy" instead. He made the point that not only is "capitalism" a term created by Marx but that "the term capitalism effectively became meaningless in the 1990s when the average person could afford to buy a PC with a high-speed connection to the Internet and hence has all the capital he needs to sell his skills on the information economy market (I have to think of asking Pete* the other day where he has his office now and he said that all his employees work at home from their PCs -- there is no 'capitalist exploitation' going on here, just people who own their own capital organizing themselves loosely and efficiently). Bennett says this development is as significant as workers in an automobile manufacturing plant all suddenly being able to afford their own blast furnaces. As robots replace people in the manufacturing industry, the information industry becomes more signifcant which makes the term "capitalism" less meaningful in describing the forces that be in our economy.
*Pete is Ed's brother
1 comment:
V. interesting point. I'm sure Al & Joe would concur. Of course not everything can be done with a PC and the internet, so I'm not sure if the blast furnace analogy quite holds - at least not in all cases. My own situation is that computers and internet allow us to create and submit 'ideas' which in turn might allow us to raise the capital to create the actual 'product'. However, the companies with deep pockets are still at an advantage because they can actually go ahead and make a product without the interim stage.
Still an interesting observation though.
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