Lecture
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the formation of "rules of the game" favorable to particular corporations (or their alliances), both formal (the legal field, etc.) and informal, is one of the most important channels of the "field of dependency" formed by the corporation; (2) privatize a number of state functions in carrying out legitimate violence, forming their own systems of "security," secret and "overt" police, intelligence and counterintelligence, and/or resort to methods of shadow (illegitimate) violence, and/or use the state apparatus of violence for their own narrow-clan or general corporate purposes, employing a wide range of methods of coercion and/or direct violence ("private" or with the assistance of the state) toward "disobedient" objects¹ (up to and including the "asphalting" of entire states, the methodology of which has long since been described³); (3) form a system of ideological influence and manipulation, the objects of which become both the corporations' own employees and (which is especially important for this section) their clients; this is a diverse spectrum of traditional and new methods of socio-psychological pressure through the mass media and the like, aimed at creating a social atmosphere in which the "field" of their power spreads as easily and effectively as possible (the formation of utilitarian-conformist attitudes of socially passive behavior in the consumer, client, "professional"), a broad spectrum of PR methods and the like. As a result, a powerful field of economic, institutional, and other forms of dependency takes shape.
This is further reinforced on the basis of new forms of fictitious virtual capital, and of the subordination to capital not merely of labor power but also of the personal qualities of the human being (in particular, his innovative potential), and so on. Thus, each "spider" cultivates its own "web": in some cases coddling, nurturing, and cherishing its clients through marketing policy and personal union, the weaving of networks of financial dependence, and corruption; in others using direct violence (if, for example, clients "rebel" in the Third World) — the range of methods is broad, and we have, to the best of our ability, characterized them above. The question is how these "spider–web" systems interact with one another.
1 The quotation from T. Friedman is widely known: "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the maker of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps." — Translated by the authors. (Friedman T. A Manifesto for the Fast World // N. Y. Times Magazine. 1999, March 28). 2 This methodology of speculative attacks on national economies through massive inflows and outflows of short-term financial capital investments has been described in the works of a number of foreign and domestic authors (see, e.g.: Glazyev S. Yu. Is a new financial crisis coming in Russia? // Voprosy Ekonomiki. 2000. No. 6).
It is evident that the TNC-"spider" in the narrow sense of the word (what is usually meant by a corporation, be it General Motors, IBM, or Microsoft) finds itself in a complex system of relations with other "spiders" and their "webs" (consumer-clients, subcontractor-clients, the "clientele"-lobby in state structures, the mass media, and so on). The most important feature of this interaction, under the conditions of the genesis of the "market of webs," as we have already noted, is the dialectical sublation of oligopolistic competition and social-reformist regulation. Today's market is not so much the anarchy of monopolistic collusions and battles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (a kind of game without rules), nor a market rigidly regulated (by the social state) (a game played by rules established with the participation of citizens and, at least in part, in their interests), but rather a "new order." These are contractual relations, taking the form of a "freer" competition than before, regulated on a local scale, subordinated to rules that are established in the course of the struggle among the most powerful players — network corporate structures. These players (at any rate, their "centers" in the economies of the "First" world) are increasingly abandoning the spontaneous struggle to redivide spheres of influence by absolutely any means (as was done by the monopolies of the early 20th century). They choose a different strategy. Corporate capitals not only consciously regulate market parameters on a local scale (performing the role of a kind of "privatized" quasi-states), but, what is fundamentally important, also influence the key parameters of the contemporary market. They exert influence on:
(1) the formation and dynamics of networks, and hence the structure of the economy, proportions, the division of labor, the needs of clients, and so on;
(2) the formation of the "framework" of the market and the "rules of the game" on the market;
(3) the regulatory actions of the state.
Let us emphasize: these three parameters represent yet another clarification of the socioeconomic nature of the "fields of dependency," but ones now formed "cooperatively" ("contractually") by networks of networks. Moreover, one may conclude that to the extent that a total corporate-network market is developed, the largest capitalist network corporations, as it were, "fall out" from under social constraints, escape the control of the state, trade unions, and other associations of working people, and the institutions of civil society. TNCs go beyond the framework established by society and the state, violating the social "rules of the game" that were previously at least partially observed, thereby destroying the achievements of the social-democratic period. The reasons for this have already been shown above: TNCs "privatize" certain regulatory functions of the state. Important additional grounds for this are created by globalization (and TNCs are precisely global players), which, as everyone knows, undermines the regulatory role of national states (more on this below) ... — the list is easily continued. As a result, a system of relations takes shape that has been called in the West "cooperative" (we would say "partnership") capitalism.¹
Moreover, in different countries to varying degrees, but on the whole and virtually everywhere, there is developing such an Alter Ego of "cooperative" capitalism permeated by corporate hierarchies as "crony capitalism" (crony capitalism²). As an information-based, professionalized society dependent on "human qualities" develops, "partnership," a kind of "friendship" — what in recent decades has come to be called "social capital" — all this becomes a form of interaction among relatively equal partners, whose struggle acquires a new basis, hidden behind the distorted form of "partnership." And this basis — a new type of competitive struggle among network-capitals — represents no small theoretical problem, which we shall examine below.
1 W. Greider, for example, emphasizes that most of the world's leading multinational corporations have moved toward pragmatic partnership with competitors, or are actively seeking opportunities to form alliances of cooperating firms. These corporations jointly allocate funds, invest capital, develop technological innovations, and so on (see: Greider W. One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism. N. Y., 1997. P. 171). Even if this author somewhat exaggerates the degree of cooperation among TNCs, the trend toward contractual interaction is, we believe, correctly noted. What is different is that these "cooperative" efforts are in fact merely a new form of struggle among corporations that sublates the mechanisms of competition. Characteristic in this respect is also the already-mentioned work of F. Fukuyama, "Trust," in which precisely this factor is put forward as the key one in relations, and the crisis of trust in the U.S. is regarded as one of the most important problems (see: Fukuyama F. Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. L.: Hamish Hamilton, 1995. P. 269–307. Note: this well-known author, in this case, merely "rediscovered" the phenomenon of "trust," on which virtually all liberals since the 17th–19th centuries had placed emphasis).
2 This problem is discussed both in serious economic research and in popular commentary. See, for example: Wei Sh.-J. Domestic Crony Capitalism and International Fickle Capital: Is There a Connection? // International Finance. 2001. No. 4. P. 15-45; Singh A., Zammit A. Corporate Governance, Crony Capitalism and Economic Crises: Should the US business model replace the Asian way of "doing business"? // Corporate Governance: an International Review. 2006. Vol. 14. No. 4. P. 220-233; Stiglitz J. Crony capitalism American-style // Project Syndicate, February 2002 (available at: http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stiglitz11/English); Kristof N. Crony Capitalism Comes Home // The N. Y. Times. October 27, 2011 (available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/opinion/kristof-crony-capitalismcomes-homes.html?.r-l).
Let us begin by turning to the historical-dialectical method. In this case we can easily notice that in this sphere capitalism traces a kind of spiral of the "negation of the negation" — from the "cronyistic," corruption-and-violence relations of early capitalism (in post-Soviet Russia, having set out on the West's centuries-old path, we observe these phenomena in their full, pristine glory), barely emerging from feudal forms of personal dependency, through the juridically formal capitalism of the "classical" era, to a new type of "crony capitalism" of the era of collusion and "partnership" among corporations. The essence of this new type of interaction of "spiders" and their "webs" with one another consists in the contradiction between, on the one hand, the increasingly consciously regulated, "cooperative" (i.e., independent of the external objective laws of the market, of its "invisible hand") interaction of corporate networks with one another at the level of horizontal ties, and, on the other hand, the increasingly spontaneous development of the world capitalist economy (and, even more broadly, of the system of all the increasingly "marketized" social relations of capitalism), uncontrolled by any social force. Both of these processes are as objectively fused as they are opposed to one another, antinomically opposed. And this deserves closer examination. As for the "partnership-cooperative" interaction of corporate capitals, it continues the "tradition" of market competition in an extremely specific form, one that in many respects negates its own qualitative foundations. The activity of the contemporary "core" of TNCs is not so much an attempt to adapt their production and sales to a spontaneously forming market situation independent of individual economic agents, as it is a consciously organized struggle among a limited circle of well-known-to-each-other "enemy-partners" over:
(1) the establishment of "rules of the game," permissible forms and methods of struggle, that are more or less favorable to the participants in the battle but relatively stable;
(2) the determination of the spatiotemporal boundaries ("fields") of competition (predominantly at the periphery) and of partnership (in the sphere of strategic large-scale projects falling within the circle of interests of the "core"), with the identification, as especially significant, of strategic long-term projects in the field of high technology and development in general (here it is especially significant to determine a strategy of partnership or of war);
(3) the distribution of spheres of influence over third parties (above all, the state);
(4) "spaces of war" and "neutral territories," and much else.
The parameters traditionally the main objects of competition — quality and price for various types of products¹ — as well as the non-price competition parameters characteristic of later stages, become relatively less significant, matters resolved at the level of the corporations' "periphery" in the skirmish-partnerships between TNCs. The content of this struggle-partnership becomes a constant comparison of the power, intensity, and effectiveness of the channels of power (the power and structure of the "fields of dependency") possessed by each of the corporations. The weakening of one of the parameters of this "field," or an untimely failure to update its "technical characteristics," leads to a revision of the boundaries of spheres of influence in favor of competitors; the strengthening and advance updating of certain parameters leads to expansion at the expense of competitors. All this resembles the struggle between huge armies, possessing something close to weapons of mass destruction and roughly equal in strength, against one another: a constant arms race amid a mass of local wars, but on the whole with observance of the rules of "peaceful coexistence."
1 Let us give just one example: the quality and price of passenger cars of a given (say, business) class produced by the largest corporations are practically indistinguishable. For the ordinary user, the actual difference between a BMW, a Mercedes, or a Toyota is practically unknown (all the more so since a significant part of their components may be produced through cooperation, adapted for the convenience of assembly and sale in one or another region of the globe).
However, what matters to us is not images but the theoretical political-economic characterization of the new quality of interaction among network corporations in the market. The latter was given above, when we identified the strategically important objects — the points (1)-(4) listed above — and the means (the power of the "weapons" — the channels of corporate power, the parameters of "webs," of "fields of dependency," described by us in political-economic terms) of the struggle-partnership among TNCs. As for the goals of this interaction (incidentally, it is precisely these that determine the boundaries of partnership-struggle), they are set, again, by the nature of contemporary global corporate capital characterized above. This is long-term hegemony in all its components, and not simply an increase in profit. Nevertheless, the latter, as before, remains the genetically universal basis of any subsequent objective intentions of any capital. The forms of these interactions can be diverse: from partnership and "friendship" (cooperation) among top managers of different corporations to open wars employing methods of ideological and military violence (the latter, as centuries ago, being especially characteristic of the division of sources of raw materials, particularly in the countries of the "Third" world); from absolutely legitimate legal wars to the shadow methods of "crony capitalism," characteristic by no means only of the post-Soviet space. The content of these relations presents much greater difficulty for analysis, since here we are dealing with a relatively new transitional relation, combining the "old" oligopolistic competition of capitals in the market with the "new" beginnings of consciously established horizontal cooperative ties. The latter is a capitalistically deformed sprout of horizontal, planned (directly social) interaction among economic agents. This is — let us deliberately repeat — one of the components of the nascent planned organization of production of the future post-market socioeconomic system, one that as yet has a capitalistically deformed (transitional) form. The struggle-partnership of corporate capitals as a mode of their conscious horizontal interaction has been characterized by us as merely one side of the contemporary total-network market. At the same time (and here we approach an understanding of the second side of the internal contradiction of the total market, though we shall formulate it later), the struggle and interaction of corporate structures as a whole is a spontaneous process, uncontrolled by anyone (neither by corporations nor by states).¹ The parameters of the total market, as will be shown below, are determined above all by the spontaneously forming financial market and by global processes. The latter recreates, at a new level, the objective appearance of a restoration of a free, equal-rights market, an appearance concealing a fundamentally different essence — the formation of a contractual-cronyistic (in form), totalitarian, corporate-network (in content) market, where the winner takes all (winner-takes-all market).²
1 It is characteristic, for example, that Z. Brzezinski concludes one of his last works of the late 20th century by posing two problems that, in his view, are key for the contemporary world: global disorder and the illusion of control (see: Brzezinski Z. Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century. N. Y., 1993. P. 201).
2 Frank R., Cook P. The Winner-Takes-All Society. N. Y., 1995. P. 1-13. E. Luttwak proposed another name for this phenomenon, advancing the idea of "turbo-capitalism." Describing, in essence, the same process of struggle among network corporations, which determines proportions, the direction of investment, and even lifestyle, he concludes that it is precisely this minority (somewhat idealized by the author and not directly linked to network corporations) that is the architect and implementer of the greater part of economic and technological innovations, that it is they who almost always come out ahead, while the majority loses out (Luttwak E. Turbo Capitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy. N. Y.: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999).
Moreover, since the objects of corporate domination (as we showed above) become not merely the spheres of production and exchange of goods and services, but practically all spheres of social (and not only economic) life, and since the mechanisms for exercising this domination also presuppose the broad use of non-economic means as well, the newest stage in the development of capitalism is accordingly characterized by "neo-marketization," the "marketizing" of all spheres of social life. This has found reflection in the categories that we used at the beginning of this section: the totalitarianism of the market, i.e., the universal, total domination of market principles, or "market fundamentalism." This total expansion of the market both must and can only proceed in an atmosphere of universal restoration (in a new form, naturally) of the appearance of the separateness of commodity producers, of their independence (a formal independence, one concealing a powerful technological, financial, informational, and other dependence on TNCs), and of equal-rights competition. As a result, neo-marketization gives rise to a "renaissance" both of market illusions and of real small-scale commodity production.¹ For this purpose, adequate technological prerequisites have also been forming since the end of the 20th century (predominantly in developed countries). This is the displacement of industrial material production by the service sector, the development of flexible and information technologies, the growing role of small creative collectives, and so on.² Moreover, the genesis of creative activity creates new prerequisites for this renaissance, creating the appearance of the independence of individualized creative personalities, acting entirely at their own risk and producing incommensurable (in terms of labor expended) goods, which supposedly only the market, with its spontaneous fluctuations of supply and demand, can evaluate. However, this is merely an appearance, one that conceals, beneath the distorted form of a market renaissance, the development of the highest form of socialization — general labor.
1 An unending controversy continues in the domestic and foreign literature regarding the degree of independence of small business under conditions of late capitalism. Among Russian authors who have set out the main arguments of the debate, let us point to a series of works by V. Rube (see: Rube V. A. Small and Medium Entrepreneurship under the Domination of Monopolies (the Case of France). Moscow: Moscow State University Press, 1978; idem, Cooperation or Exploitation. (Small Business through the Eyes of Bourgeois Economists). Moscow: Mysl, 1986; idem, Small Business: History, Theory, Practice. Moscow: TEIS, 2000; idem, Institutional Aspects of the Organization of Small Business in Developed Countries and in Russia. Moscow: Infra-M, 2004). As for the authors of the present work, we consider well-founded the conclusion of those foreign researchers (Castells, Korten, and others) who, drawing on the analysis of a mass of data in the USA, Japan, and other countries, conclude that, despite all the arguments in favor of small business as better adapted to the flexible, miniaturized technologies of post-industrial society, the largest corporations remain the masters of the world economy (see in more detail: Castells M. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford, 1997. P. 155-157; Korten D. When Corporations Rule the World. West Hartford, 1995. P. 221. The latter author, in particular, showed that just 500 of the largest TNCs account for about 25% of world production).
2 See: Castells M. Op. Cit. P. 151-201.
General labor is labor under conditions in which the technological application of knowledge becomes a direct productive force, and which therefore proceeds under conditions of universal interdependence of an indefinite circle of its participants, since its performance requires the involvement of a beforehand-unknown range of knowledge acquired by both predecessors and contemporaries,
The separateness and independence of such small producers, as a rule, is relative or even entirely fictitious (we shall return to this question in Part II of the volume). Moreover, these small producers function within the shared space of today's "contractual" market, whose rules are set by the leading "players." What is more, in this market the processes of production (including in the sphere of services, information technology, and so on) are on the whole subordinated to the transactional (and above all financial) sphere, dominated by corporate "virtual" capital. Finally, let us stress the main point: it is precisely as a result of the progress of miniaturization, flexibility, and network methods of organizing technological processes that those very "webs" discussed above take shape. On the surface they appear translucent, thin, mobile, and amorphous. It seems that you can enter and leave these networks with absolute ease. But this is an objective illusion, as is generally the case with perverted (inverted) forms, where "things seem to be exactly what they actually are." It seems that these networks do not negate the freedom of market agents, and indeed, you can at any moment refuse ties with the spider-firms. You can refrain from working for them (either directly or indirectly — as an employee or as a user of grants allocated by foundations they have created, as a subcontractor or a distributor of their products…), refrain from using their financial networks (give up banking services, loans, savings, credit cards…), refrain from buying their products, refrain from watching, listening to, or reading the output of their mass media — all this is very simple to do. It is just as simple as it is for a drug addict, raised in a family of addicts, to "kick the habit." However, let us not be pessimists, and, as a brief digression, let us note: in today's capitalist world there are quite a few people who fully recognize the problems of Man's subordination to the forces of alienation in general, and to the global hegemony of capital in particular — people who (at best) fight against the forces of alienation, or (at the very least) do not use the "hard drugs" of capitalist hegemony (are not slaves to the endless race for ever-new symbols of prosperity imposed by corporate capital), limiting themselves — and even then only in rare cases — to the "light stuff" of dependence on contemporary mechanisms of market transactions and forms of automobile civilization. These positive tendencies are, to one degree or another, characteristic of every person, and the authors have more than once addressed the problem of the conformist petty bourgeois rising to socially creative activity1, but the dominant intentions of a socially creative, non-conformist life are, for now, characteristic only of a minority. For the majority, the dominant form remains submission to the prevailing system of relations of alienation.
1 On this in more detail, see in particular the collective monograph "Who Makes History…"; see also: Benedetti C. Europe: Practices of Renewal // Alternatives. 2011. No. 2.
This is why we consider it justified to draw the conclusion made above: the total corporate-network market, in essence, saturates its agents with a special drug of all-round dependence — dependence not so much directly on the "spiders" as on the "webs," not so much on capital-corporations as on the rules they create, the "fields of dependence." And this concerns not only economic life (production, consumption, accumulation…) but all other spheres of human existence as well. Most actors in today's capitalist world — from the individual (as an employee of firms, a customer of firms, a consumer of firms' cultural chewing gum) to the "independent" small-business owner — now live by rules formed, we repeat, not so much by the free market as by the "fields of dependence" of corporate networks. It is precisely these "fields" that determine the models and frameworks of behavior, the motives and goals of activity, the values and principles of decision-making, and so on. And all this occurs to the extent that the total market is developed (which is, a propos, precisely the basis of the market fundamentalism discovered by G.
Soros). Here it will be useful to draw on a conclusion the authors reached in their earlier works: the progress of the creatosphere (in the terminology used by most authors — the post-industrial society, the knowledge society) turns the spheres of producing information goods, mass culture, and mass media — spheres lying outside material production proper — into the principal spheres of development of today's market, spheres in which contemporary homo economicus mainly lives, and in which, above all, the total network market develops. In this way a total suppression of non-market forms of social life is generated, both in the economy and outside it, giving rise to a new wave of expansion of commodity fetishism and the philistinization of society, restoring in a new form the dominance of homo economicus with its characteristic domination of narrowly economic, market values, incentives, and motives of activity. At the same time, this new expansion of commodity fetishism and neo-materialism runs up against a powerful countervailing tendency, evident both at the level of material-technical factors of production (above all, the statistically documented rapid growth of non-market forms of labor activity — employment in the so-called "third" sector, volunteer labor, and so on1) and in the sphere of alternative forms of social organization (the phenomena of the growing role of social movements, non-governmental organizations, etc.). Moreover, the "sublated" (but not fully destroyed) achievements of the social-reformist period still preserve, for most of the population2 in the countries of the "First" world, the standard of the "consumer society." However, unlike the guaranteed standard of the mid-twentieth century, which rested on associated social struggle (trade unions, the left, etc.), today, in order to preserve it, the typical representative of the "middle class" of a developed country must wage a constant and increasingly active private struggle for existence as a petty private owner — even if the only commodity he owns is his labor power, or so-called "human capital."
1 We wrote in more detail about these tendencies, as sprouts of the future, back in the late 1990s, in the collection "Society of the 21st Century."
2 Neoliberalism has intensified both the internal differentiation within the formerly relatively homogeneous "middle class" and the gap between the richest and poorest strata in the developed countries and the world as a whole.
By narrowing the spheres of collective social protection, corporate capital thereby compels the citizen to intensify his activity as a small commodity owner and private proprietor, acting without guarantees, at his own risk, but within the framework and according to the rules of a world dominated by corporate capital. Thus market fundamentalism and the totality of the market give rise to an equally total philistinization of the population. As a result there forms (in a certain sense — is "restored") a social, human atmosphere adequate to late capitalism, one of universal, total market dominance in the era of the hegemony of corporate capital. However, this "renaissance" of market principles and of private life, of "free" competition, turns out to be nothing more than the objective appearance of the total power of the networks created by corporate capital.
"Neo-marketization" is the appearance of a restoration of the free market under conditions of the dominance of large corporate capital and the total network market; its real side is the penetration of market relations into all spheres of social life, the "atomization" and "privatization" of the individual in the face of organized
Summing up what has been said, we can formulate the most important point: "neo-marketization" thereby raises to a new level the basic features of the market — the separateness of commodity producers and its dialectical opposite, the social division of labor — both in their intensive form (the contradiction of the total market: on the one hand, the omnipotence of corporate capitals, which shape on a "partnership" basis the rules of struggle on today's world market; on the other, the spontaneity and unregulated character of global socio-economic processes, generating the appearance of a restoration of free competition and a "renaissance" of the market, so to speak "in depth," entrenching the power of corporate capitals) and in their extensive form (so to speak "in breadth," beyond the economy). Moreover, "neo-marketization" (the development of the total corporate-network market) in the era of the global hegemony of capital regularly gives rise also to neo-privatization — a wave of the "restoration" of private property, but on the basis of the hegemony of corporate capital.
Neo-privatization likewise unfolds both intensively and extensively, being a result of the development of the total market while at the same time reproducing this totality as a precondition for its own expansion, and generating significant tensions in the system of property rights, giving rise to a mass of contradictions in this sphere1. On the surface of phenomena, "neo-privatization" is characterized by a reduction of state and various forms of social property, together with a growing role for small private production and small private property. Underlying this process is the concentration of real property rights in the hands of corporate capital, and, within the latter, in the hands of a narrow layer of the corporate oligarchy (the "corporate nomenklatura"). The intensive expansion of neo-privatization implies, in particular, that:
(1) real property rights in the economy are increasingly concentrated in the hands of gigantic non-state and non-social corporate capitals;
(2) within these complexly organized corporate structures (transnational corporations and others), real property rights2 increasingly pass into the hands of a limited circle of private individuals standing at the top of the pyramid of corporate power3 — the "corporate nomenklatura," the oligarchs of the Western world — more "civilized" and less conspicuous, but more powerful, than, say, their Russian counterparts. Both these processes are accompanied by extensive neo-privatization, examples of which are more readily visible: the expansion of the scope of corporate capital through the attraction of funds from small owners, including workers; the transformation of part of public-group capital into private-group capital; the sell-off of state property; the reduction of other property rights held by the state and social structures; the halting of progress of cooperatives and employee ownership, and so on. All these processes are not simply a restoration of "ordinary" (small-scale or capitalist) private property. The present stage of late capitalism is characterized (as noted above) by the advance of "new private property." Having traveled a complex path of development (the small private property of the worker => the property of the individual capitalist => joint-stock capitalist property => …), private property as an economic-volitional form of capital1 has given rise to an extremely complex system of property rights2. The expansion of "new private property" (as a "negation of the negation" of this evolution) is a process of privatizing not so much new objects as new key property rights, both within complex corporate structures and in society as a whole3.
1 See: DeLong J. Property Matters. N. Y., 1996.
2 Let us stress again: control over the principal property rights and a controlling block of shares are by no means one and the same thing.
3 In this material these theses are only put forward as a theoretical hypothesis and are not proven; this thesis is partly substantiated in the above-mentioned work by Frank and Cook, "The Winner-Take-All Society." A distinctive confirmation of the propositions stated here is also provided by the experience of post-Soviet Russia — a harsh, caricatured parody of world capitalism.
1 This interpretation of property as a unity of legal (volitional) and economic relations goes back to the work of the university school of political economy. See: A Course in Political Economy. In 2 vols. Vol. 2. Pre-Socialist Modes of Production / Ed. N. A. Tsagolov. 3rd ed., rev. and enl. Moscow: Ekonomika, 1973. P. 58 et al.
3 A partial description of this system can be found in the works of economists of the new institutional school (in Russian, they are reflected in the above-mentioned works of R. Kapelyushnikov, A. Shastitko, A. Oleinik, and others). One of the first works to examine the problems of the "diffusion of ownership" and the redistribution of ownership functions between owners and managers is: Berle A., Means G. The Modern Corporation and Private Property. Macmillan Publishing, N. Y., 1932 (compare with more modern treatments of similar processes — for instance, the "post-business" society, Drucker's "post-capitalist" society: Drucker P. Post-Capitalist Society. N. Y.: Harper Business, 1993). However, the process of concentration of property rights in the hands of a limited circle of private individuals has been and remains a reality (see, e.g., Domhoff G. Who Rules America. Prentice-Hall, 1967. P. 18, 19-20, et al.).
The first process is the already-noted growth of economic, social, and administrative power of private individuals within transnational corporations and other corporate structures. The second process is even more complex. In any economy there exists a powerful field, saturated with bundles (waves? — the authors find it difficult to settle on a felicitous physical analogy) of economic power — of property. This field, with its varying centers of attraction and radiation, forms a more or less specified (among various agents) system of property rights. The redistribution, across the economy as a whole, of the principal property rights into the hands of private individuals — who use the entire pyramid of corporate structures (transnational corporations, the state, etc.) and all the mechanisms of the total market to exercise their power — constitutes the essence of the dictatorship of new private property as the most important aspect of neo-privatization. Moreover, neo-privatization, generated by neo-marketization and in turn deepening it, extends beyond the bounds of the economy and gives rise to a process of a distinctive "privatization" (a term coined by L. Bulavka1) of all aspects of social life, right down to the spiritual sphere. Naturally, the process of neo-privatization (like other forms of the hegemony of capital) has encountered, and continues to encounter, powerful counter-tendencies. The most important of these are connected with:
(1) the progress of socialization (in the industrial sector) and of universal labor (in the post-industrial sector), both processes generating powerful impulses toward creating associated, social forms of organization not only of labor but also of disposal and appropriation;
(2) the objective growth, driven by the intensification of global problems, of the role of national (or even universal human) values and resources;
(3) the genesis of the creatosphere, whose "resources" (cultural goods, creative capacities, etc.) are by their very nature unsuited to private appropriation;
(4) the development of various forms of organization of anti-hegemonic forces, which have not by accident chosen as one of their principal slogans "The World Is Not for Sale!" ("World is not for sale!") In sum, the total market and "new private property" are becoming universal forms adequate to global capital's hegemony, permeating every pore of society with a market, private "spirit"2, clothing everything that exists in this society in the forms of the "network market" and of new private property1
1 One of the first works in which L. Bulavka introduces the concept of "privatization" is the article "The Paradoxes of Nikita Mikhalkov" (Nezavisimaya Gazeta. 1997. No. 30)
2 Let us stress that in the book by L. Boltanski and E. Chiapello, "The New Spirit of Capitalism," which has gained very wide circulation both in the West and here, a rather harsh critique of this "spirit" is given: according to these authors, it not only (1) generates an illusory existence of actual objects, persons, and even emotions, but also spreads an atmosphere of (2) oppression as the antithesis of human freedom, autonomy, and creativity (this theme is actively developed in the book, which shows the suppression of the individual by the market, of labor by capital, of the worker by the boss, etc.); (3) poverty and unprecedented inequality; (4) egoism and the dominance of private interest, which destroys social values (Boltanski L., Chiapello E. The New Spirit of Capitalism. L.-N. Y.: Verso, 2005. P. 37). One must admit: today few scholars are capable of characterizing the socio-spiritual and ethico-aesthetic atmosphere (the "spirit") of capitalism so frankly and clearly.
3 Getting somewhat ahead of ourselves, let us note: in an era of the "sunset" of the "realm of necessity" and of the intensification of the global problems this process provokes, neo-marketization cannot but lead to fundamental contradictions. The most important of these reproduces, at a new stage, the antagonism of the era of imperialism: the necessity of a conscious solution — proceeding from the interests of society as a whole (which means, also, of Nature and of Man as a generic being) — of the substantially deepened (compared with the beginning of the century) complex of global problems, on the one hand; and, on the other, the capacity of the "new private owners" and of the entire system as a whole, at best, only to temporarily freeze these problems, while in the long run only aggravating them.
Since the dominant agents, the "masters"1 of such a market, are the largest corporate structures, the universal spread of the form of the "network market" (of "webs") makes everything and everyone a potential object not merely of purchase and sale, but of the hegemony of corporate capital, which determines (we repeat: this is not a matter of specific firms, but of corporate capital as a totality uniting the power of the market, of capital, and of corporate structures) ultimately who, what, to whom, at what price, and how will be handed over… Summing up the analysis of the totalitarian market, let us return to a characterization of its contradiction, in which, on the one hand, corporate networks form "fields of dependence," subordinating all those market agents who fall into this "field," and form on a "partnership" basis the rules of struggle, while on the other hand the spontaneity and unregulated character of global socio-economic processes grow, generating the appearance of a restoration of free competition and a "renaissance" of the market. This formulation of the contradiction, however, leaves the analysis somewhat "incomplete" unless we show how and why a mechanism of objective, spontaneous market determination arises for all these processes that are locally regulated both "vertically" (within the "web") and "horizontally" (in the "partner" interaction of the "spiders") — and why this spontaneity not only persists but, moreover, becomes total.
The cause of the latter is the new quality of money, which (like the total market as a whole) at the newest stage of late capitalism becomes a product of the hegemony of capital — in this case, of virtual, fictitious financial capital. It is precisely this that "resolves," while simultaneously reproducing in its most intensive form, the contradiction of the total market, generating both the strongest regulating influences and the greatest anarchy and imperviousness to regulating influence in the functioning of late capitalism as a whole. We shall begin our study of this phenomenon with an analysis of the preconditions for the development of virtual money as a product of global fictitious financial capital, prefacing this study with our reflections on the theme of the politico-economic nature of a new type of market, connected with the development of the material-technical, social, and cultural components of the postmodern era — the market of simulacra. In the following section, the reader is offered a theoretical and methodological analysis of the market of simulative goods.
1 Let us explain once more: by "masters" the authors mean agents who (1) concentrate the principal property rights in their hands; (2) form (in struggle with one another) the basic rules and constraints of the market; (3) are capable of locally regulating the market; and (4) purposefully "push forward" the extensive and intensive progress of the total market and of new private property.
THE TOTAL MARKET OF NETWORKS — a market resting not simply on the social division of labor, but on phenomena of dependence and subordination created by monopolistic tendencies and taking shape among different capitals. These bonds, based on dependence and subordination, take the form of flexible, changeable, loosely fixed, reconfigurable networks.
PERVERTED (INVERTED) ECONOMIC FORMS (UNDER CAPITALISM) — economic forms that perversely reflect the content of production relations, to the point of creating an appearance that is the opposite of their content; in other words, when the form of a phenomenon creates a distorted, or even directly opposite, impression of its actual content, it thereby functions as a perverted (inverted) form.
THE PERVERTED (USELESS) SECTOR — that part of capitalist production in which goods are created that are mainly not oriented toward the development or reproduction of human qualities, or toward the creation of corresponding intermediate goods. This sector is not only useless but also perverted, since it is based on perverted economic forms, and the useless goods created within it are, for the most part, not material goods (even ones possessing a fictitious usefulness) but rather such perverted economic forms themselves.
UNIVERSAL LABOR — labor under conditions in which the technological application of knowledge becomes a direct productive force, and which therefore proceeds under conditions of universal interdependence of an indeterminate circle of its participants, since its realization requires drawing on a body of knowledge, unknown in advance, acquired both by predecessors and by contemporaries.
"NEO-PRIVATIZATION" — on the surface of phenomena, is characterized by a reduction of state and various forms of social property, together with a growing role for small private production and small private property. Underlying this process is the concentration of real property rights in the hands of corporate capital, and, within the latter, in the hands of a narrow layer of the corporate oligarchy (the "corporate nomenklatura").
Часть 1 Chapter 1. The Total Market of Networks
Часть 2 1.3. Cooperation and struggle among corporate networks (the "market of
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