Paradigm Changes: The Grid and the Fork by Alex Foti

This is an extremely interesting piece of work, thank you Armin. I admire your discipline, it's the only way to advance, by getting things down on paper (or in a file at least! But I printed it out on paper). I think the analysis of Alex's 7 categories into 11 is a very useful way to begin getting to the nitty-gritty of our research. I am gonna give it the most serious read I can.

--The first question to ask is, are all these categories necessary? Are additional categories necessary?

It looks as though Accumulation and Business Process are close to redundant in the way they are described here (sometimes they have the same contents). Could it be that Accumulation is a more inclusive category, a meta-category and not a primary one, including Lead Technology and Business Process (i.e division of labor and management)? Similarly, is Regulation not a more inclusive meta-category, englobing Labour Organization and State Redistribution?

Is there a need for a Transportation category? It could be taken as a subset of technology, but I think it might be illuminating to divide them or at least to speak of Lead Technology and Transport. How about Legal Framework? The hardcore Marxist in me is not sure if that would be simply redundant with Business Process, except for cases like anti-trust legislation, environomental legislation, length of the working day, etc; these things have always failed in the end (capital gets around them by spatial shifts) but they do have some signficance. Finally, how about Migratory Currents? Could be interesting as another grassroots factor....

I am also wondering whether a separate category should be added to describe what I think the Marxists call the "realization of value," ie sales, commerce, profit-taking. This would be interesting with respect to "Business Process" which seems to be a mix between Production Process (division of labor and management) and Business Model (how the value is realized, how the shit gets sold and at what price, which includes a competition strategy). Veblen's whole idea was that these two are entirely different: what he called "business enterprise" is inherently predatory; what he calls "the machine process" necessarily involves constructive cooperation. There is real food for thought here.... Would finance go entirely into this Business Model category? I gues it would have to. That would be very revealing in the present, where so much of the Lead Technology and also the Media is developed for the purposes of finance.

--Next question is, how to organize the categories? One way to go is to make a series where each category has the highest possible degree of overlap or interdependency with its neighbor. Interestingly, if this is conceived as a circle, such that the last category should be most related to the first, I think you would almost have to begin with Regulation (that is, leaving the categories unchanged for the moment). It would look like this:

Regulation; Labour Organization; Lead Technology; Business Process; Mode of Accumulation; Media and Communication; Art; Intellectual Currents; Ideologies; Geopolitics and Balance of Power; Monetary Regime

Some argue in that sense, saying that organization of labour is the primary dimension; but I am not convinced. Rather, I think crisis and the breakdown of harmonious or self-reinforcing relations between the categories give a chance to specific new technologies, which then develop via unsaturated markets and become attractors for finance. So, another route would be to divide the categories into four more inclusive blocs, each with its own meta-category. Well, that was my idea with the four fields, for whatever it's worth. This time I will change the category names and add a few new ones. The first two meta-categories come from the Regulation School; and the second are my additions:

REGIME OF ACCUMULATION
Lead Technologies and Transportion; Major Media; Production Process; Business Model

MODE OF REGULATION
Legal Framework; Redistribution Mechanisms; Self-Organization of Labour

CULTURAL HORIZONS
Artistic Movements; Most Conflictive Intellectual Disciplines; Major Ideologies

GEOPOLITICS
Monetary Dis/order; Regional Im/balance of Power; Migratory Currents

The reasoning behind this is that the establishment and subsequent breakdown of harmonious relations is easier to see when you have the meta-categories. at the same time, it is much easier to check the larger structure against the historical facts when you have the smaller, more analytic primary categories. Let's have some discussion on this issue....

--Following that, a BIG question are the periodizations themselves. Actually, all I can really do is follow Perez, see the table below, snagged off Google Books. You will find some discrepancy with what's indicated on your timeline, I am curious about it....

For Perez, the long wave follows the development of the paradigm; it does not just go up and down but rather vacillates in the middle, then goes up again at the end before subsiding in some kind of stagnation or saturation (what the Marxists call overaccumulation). What does this look like if you consider, say, stock-market values? A table by Bichler and Nitzan showing bear markets in the US corresponds about perfectly with Perez's "ages" _during the period of US hegemony_ at least.

You have a bear market beginning around 1905: just when Ford introduces the assembly line. It continues through WWI. Then a short boom in the 20s, and bear market throughout the thirties, all the way to '47 (though one could argue, the real economy was growing tremendously from 38 on through wartime mobilization). Then, of course, long boom in 50s and 60s, bear from 68-79, boom again from 80 to 2000 and bear since then. It would be interesting to find a similar table covring the London stock market and see if it corresponds to the earlier ages, I guess it probably does.

The idea that there was no expansion in the 80s-90s ought to be called Brenner's Fallacy. As though the doubling of the capitalist labor force under globalization had produced nothing! No no no no. It is true that the core countries shifted to the management of capital in those times and produced less fixed capital and less goods. Instead they produced tremendous human capital: the managers and the technicians who went out and developed the rest of the world!

It's interesting how Alex uses "bifurcation" to talk about the regulation crises, that is, the moments in the middle of a technological paradigm, when the ordering of it all comes up for grabs and politics comes into play. To the opposite of that, Piore and Sabel locate "industrial divides" as the moments when a new technological toolkit (paradigm if you will) comes into existence. In short, two different types of crucial moment, two different types of bifurcation, the first one occuring always at the start of one of Perez's "ages" or paradigms, and the second one occuring after the bursting of a financial bubble. Maybe we could say, a paradigm shift and a regulation crisis; however, they both appear as crises... Theoretically, we should only see a really strong political paradigm during maturity phase of the technology paradigm. That needs discussion. It is clearly true for the age of the assembly line, the social order kicks in after the crisis of the 30s, before that it's pretty damn chaotic. But can anything similar be seen under British hegemony in the 19th century? I really have no clue. This is where we could really use a good historian...

--The next question would concern what's in each of the boxes... but it's too much for one go.

I wonder if some kind of Mind-Map type program would be a good way to set up subcategories and boxes and so forth? Do you know what I am talking about? Are any of those things readable by browser?

This is incredibly interesting to get into. Thanks again for taking this first step.