neonkhanate:

I would never speak of “power” in general, or of “the State” in general, but only of specific “institutional ecologies” comprising a heterogenous mixture of bureaucracies, markets, antimarkets, prisons, schools, factories, hospitals etc., and of specific exercises of power within and between these organizations. In a sense, the most important contribution of my book may one day be that it gets rid of abstract notions of power (such as “the capitalist system”, and of “capitalist power”) and replaces it with a more concrete analysis of institutional dynamics (e.g. replacing “the capitalist system” with a mixture of markets and antimarkets, in which only the latter are seen as a source of exploitation and oppression, and both in very concrete, strategic terms.) In a way this is an attempt to cut the enemy “down to size”, to avoid talking of the “power of the State” (or of “Global Capitalism”) and instead focus on specific bureaucracies and economic institutions with both weaknesses and strengths.

[…]

We have extremely naive views about the economy, for example. We feel happy to simply speak about the “capitalist system” or “commodification”, when the reality of economic history (as uncovered by Fernand Braudel, for example) is much more complex and full of opportunities. There are alternatives to the corporate model, such as a region of contemporary Italy called Emilia-Romagna, dominated by small businesses competing against each other not in terms of costs and reaping economies of scale, but in terms of product design and a concentration of creative people in a region (a model known as “economies of agglomeration”). Now, this region of Italy was put together over the last thirty or so years on the basis of experimentation: it was not planned from above (though local governments did play catalytic roles) and it was not guided by theory. Yet, our obsolete economic ideas prevent us from seeing how innovative this region is, and bias us to see in Emilia-Romagna just another form of “capitalism”, or to dismiss it as a short-lived utopia. But a deeper understanding of economics has the opposite effect: it shows that past history is full of “Emilia-Romagnas”, that our economic choices were never between “capitalism” and “socialism”, but were more open than that.