PostCapitalism

* Book: PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. By Paul Mason. Penguin, 2015

URL = http://www.penguin.co.uk/books/postcapitalism/9781846147388/

Description

1. Jonathan Derbyshire:

" It’s not a work of reportage, but of wide-ranging historical and economic analysis that is inspired by Marx’s analysis of capitalist social relations, but also goes some way beyond it (in ways, he acknowledges, that might not find favour with some of his friends on the far left). The book is both an analysis of the crisis of what Mason calls “neoliberalism”—his shorthand for the version of highly financialised capitalism that has operated in most of the developed world for the past 30 years—and an attempt to imagine what might replace it.

Capitalism, Mason writes, is a highly adaptive system: “At major turning points, it morphs and mutates in response to danger.” Its most basic survival instinct, he argues, “is to drive technological change.” But he believes that the information technologies that capitalism has developed in the past 20 years or so are not, despite apparently ample evidence to the contrary,”compatible with capitalism—not in its present form and maybe not in any form. Once capitalism can on longer adapt to technological change, postcapitalism becomes necessary.”

Mason is not alone in believing that humanity is on the cusp of a profound technological revolution, of course. We’ve heard a lot from other quarters, for instance, about the “Second Machine Age” and the promise (as well as the threat) of intelligent machines and the “internet of things”. What makes his analysis distinctive, however, is the way he fuses an account of the technological mutations of what used to be called “late capitalism” with an attempt to identify, as Engels put it in the late 19th century, the “midwife of the old society pregnant with a new one.” This won’t be the industrial working class, as Marx and Engels thought, but what Mason calls the “network.” By creating millions of networked people, Mason writes, “info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being.” (http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/blogs/jonathan-derbyshire/interview-paul-masons-guide-to-a-post-capitalist-future)

2. From the publisher:

"Over the past two centuries or so, capitalism has undergone continual change - economic cycles that lurch from boom to bust - and has always emerged transformed and strengthened. Surveying this turbulent history, Paul Mason wonders whether today we are on the brink of a change so big, so profound, that this time capitalism itself, the immensely complex system by which entire societies function, has reached its limits and is changing into something wholly new.

At the heart of this change is information technology: a revolution that, as Mason shows, has the potential to reshape utterly our familiar notions of work, production and value; and to destroy an economy based on markets and private ownership - in fact, he contends, it is already doing so. Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swathes of economic life are changing.. Goods and services that no longer respond to the dictates of neoliberalism are appearing, from parallel currencies and time banks, to cooperatives and self-managed online spaces. Vast numbers of people are changing their behaviour, discovering new forms of ownership, lending and doing business that are distinct from, and contrary to, the current system of state-backed corporate capitalism.

In this groundbreaking book Mason shows how, from the ashes of the recent financial crisis, we have the chance to create a more socially just and sustainable global economy. Moving beyond capitalism, he shows, is no longer a utopian dream. This is the first time in human history in which, equipped with an understanding of what is happening around us, we can predict and shape, rather than simply react to, seismic change." (http://www.penguin.co.uk/books/postcapitalism/9781846147388/)

Interview

Excerpted from an interview by Paul Mason conducted by Jonathan Derbyshire:

* Let’s turn to the economic aspect of your argument in this book. Your claim is that capitalism cannot “capture the ‘value’ generated by the new technology.” Can you unpack that a bit?

As soon as we knew we were in an information economy, it was obvious that the category of things called [by economists] “externalities” were going to be important. The cognitive capital theorist Yann Moulier-Boutang puts it this way (and I agree): the entire question of 21st-century capitalism is who captures the externalities. Shall it be the corporation, who’ll own them and utilise them, as Google does? The positive externality for Google is that it can see what we are searching for but we can’t see what each other are searching for. So it can now construct a monopolised business model on the basis of the secrets [revealed by] its data-mining.

* Are you saying that the only way, under the current arrangements, that capitalism can capture the value generated by the new technology is through monopoly? Google, Apple and others are making a pretty good fist of making money out of it.

They’re making money. They’ve created an information monopoly. And, especially in regard to information goods, they’ve been able to suppress the price mechanism, because the price mechanism would, naturally, reduce the price of the information they’re selling towards zero. I say in the book that Apple’s mission statement should really be: We exist to prevent the abundance of music! Or Google’s should be: We exist to prevent the abundance of people’s self-knowledge about what they do on the internet.

There are two problems with this. One is that it is logical to suggest that none of these monopolies can survive. Certainly, none of their share valuations reflect their ability to go on monopolising this stuff. Two, therefore you can’t have the full utilisation of information. The next question is: Is there a compromise? Is there a space between monopoly and freedom that we could explore? I actually think there is. I’m not saying that everything must become free. I’m saying there must be multiple business models between monopoly and freedom.

* So you’re not saying, then, that markets will disappear in a post-capitalist future? After all, markets and capitalism are not the same thing. Markets are just mechanisms for allocating resources.

It is natural, and it’s happening, that the social nature of information is leading to non-market forms of activity. Wikipedia is a non-market form of activity—it’s a $3bn hole in the advertising world.

You write at one point that the “more far-sighted” members of the global elite have displayed exceptional lucidity in addressing some of the questions you deal with in the book; issues such as inequality and the impact that it has on growth, “secular stagnation” and the role that collective bargaining plays in pushing up wages. Former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, for instance, has written extensively on all three of these issues, offering diagnoses not at all dissimilar to yours.

There are people in the global elite who’ve given themselves permission to understand what we’re going through. One of the things they get is that inequality is going to be dysfunctional. Not only do they not want to be lynched in their beds, they also understand that the dynamism [of capitalist economies] [will] come back from a rise in the wage share. Another thing they’ve understood is the zero-bound issue—the idea that in an economy where you’re constantly bumping against zero, you’re constantly having to use unorthodox monetary policy. Unorthodox monetary policy is lumpy. Anybody who has understood Keynes’s critique of the 1920 and early ‘30s will understand the problem of “stickiness”. In the Thirties, it was wages that were sticky—they wouldn’t fall far enough. Now it’s monetary policy that’s sticky. The problem is: where’s the dynamism going to come from? Larry gets that. And people in the bond markets get that.

The final bit is that they look at the exogenous shocks and it terrifies them. It terrifies me, too. People in power, in state treasuries, won’t allow themselves to quantify the levels of shock that are on the way. If 60 per cent of sovereigns become insolvent because of ageing costs, which S&P says is likely, if migration happens at the scale that it’s likely to, and we get nine billion people clamouring to get into the developed world… If neoliberalism were a functioning system, as it was around 2001, and it hadn’t moved on from there, you could probably say: “Shit, this is going to be really difficult but we can probably do it.” But with the sclerotic, stagnant, defibrillating capitalism we’ve had post-2008, there’s not a chance on earth that it’ll survive the shocks. Even if I’m wrong about the transition I both see and desire, they have to come forward and say what a dynamic info-capitalism, what the third industrial revolution could be.

* But it seems to me that Summers or someone like the economist Robert Gordon would have to accept the diagnostic part of your analysis…

Right. But the reason I haven’t gone all the way into Robert Gordon territory is that the potential productivity is there. His view of the potential productivity inherent in info-tech spilling over into the real world… I think it’s bigger than he accepts.

* Why do you think he underestimates it?

It’s because people [like Gordon] are not prepared to enter this nether world between use-value and exchange-value that the externalities represent. I don’t think most people reading my book will accept that the transition, potentially, is towards a non-market, information-centred, low-labour, post-capitalist world. But if they think we’re headed towards a form of info-capitalism with a third industrial revolution, they need to tell us what the high-value synthesis is. What is the Edwardian era of this third industrial revolution going to look like?

* Do we see intimations of such a future in the so-called sharing economy? In ventures like Airbnb and Uber?

My hunch is that they are the AltaVista of the sharing economy. The French social theorist Andé Gorz explored this. He said it’s entirely possible to imagine capitalism colonising inter-personal relationships. Uber is that—it’s not about taxi drivers, it’s about people giving each other lifts. Gorz envisaged that we would become mutual providers of micro-services. But he said: “That can’t be a high-value economy.” That’s the problem. You can’t build a business out of mining the spare bits out of everybody’s car capacity, their capacity to do Reiki massage, every electrician’s spare half hour. You can do it, and the sharing economy is the perfect way to do it, but it just doesn’t give the Edwardian era, the Belle Epoque. The Belle Epoque is going to be gene sequencing and spending half your day playing squash.

Most Marxists will hate this. It’s saying, contra Marx, that humanity can liberate itself, that people can find, within capitalism, the mental means to imagine a new future and go straight for it in a way that, from 1844 onwards, Marx thought was impossible.

You borrow the idea of the “long cycle” from the Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratieff. He argued that the history of capitalism can be understood as a succession of cycles, each of which has an upswing fuelled by technological innovation lasting abut 25 years, followed by a downswing of about the same length that usually ends in a depression. These long cycles are much longer than the business cycles identified by mainstream economics. Why do you find Kondratieff’s approach helpful?

I think we need theories that are bigger than business cycles and smaller than the doom of the entire system. When you apply Kondratieff’s theory to the post-1945 period, you see the system working perfectly until 1973. And then it falls apart. Neoliberalism comes along and solves the problem by destroying the bargaining power of labour. Looking at things through Kondratieff’s spectacles forces you to ask the question: is neoliberalism the successful form of the new capitalism or a dead-end which has prolonged the old cycle for too long? I answer the latter.

* Where are we now in the cycle?

We are at the very end of an incredibly prolonged fourth long cycle. We are in the depression phase of the fourth long cycle which has coincided with the technological upswing of the fifth. So I believe that long cycles can overlap. I think we’re in an unusual position historically. Clearly, the information revolution is there and that the basis of completely new type of capitalism might be [emerging]. What’s happened is that the old social relations of the back half of the [previous] wave won’t go away. Whatever it is that’s going to happen, there’s one to represent it. There’s no Keynes, only the remnants of the old. If you look at [Amazon founder] Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg [the founder of Facebook]—these are people who are agnostic about the future of the whole system. They only have a view about the future of their own corporation.

My use of Kondratieff is to try to answer a question about where we are. The other periodicities—the ten-year business cycle and the 500-year epoch—are not enough. But this is a provisional explanation of what’s going on. And I offer it as such. There’s no chair of Post-Capitalist Studies at the University of Wolverhampton! It’s in its infancy.

* You mentioned André Gorz earlier. In the book, you quote him saying in 1980 that the working class is dead. If he was right, who is the agent of social change going to be?

The appalling and challenging fact may be that if capitalism has a beginning, a middle and an end, then does the labour movement. In other words, the decline of organised labour based on white, skilled, manual, male work, seems to me, as someone who lived through it and came from that background, to be a lawful part of what is happening to capitalism. I argue that the historical subject who will bring post-capitalism exists and is the networked individual. Antonio Negri’s notion of the “social factory” was bollocks in the 1970s, because it was too early. But it seems to me to be accurate now—we all participate in the creation of brands, in the creation of consumption choices, we are fuelling financial capitalism through our use of finance. So I buy the idea that there is a social factory. If you want to switch it off, you do it like William Benbow suggested in the 1820s by stopping—the “grand holiday”. Now, I doubt that’s going to happen. Therefore, the less utopian way of doing it is that you pursue the interests of those networked individuals, which is for their information not to be stolen from them, their information not to be arbitrarily accessed by the state, their lifestyles to be allowed to flourish, for them to have choices.

So many of the upsurges I’ve covered—Turkey, Brazil are good examples. These are networked salariats who cannot stand the levels of meddling and corruption in their lives—Islamism in Turkey, corruption in Brazil. What kind of revolution is it? There is a discussion that those who’ve so far engaged with my book have piled into: if this is the agent, is it “for itself” or “in itself” as Marx would say. Are these people capable of achieving a level of spontaneous understanding of the situation that leads them to grasp some of the policy measures hinted at in this book as a way forward for them? At the moment, clearly they are not there. What they are is very adept at constructing the personal space. We may scoff at it—it’s small scale. But with the carving out of space that is both economic and personal, I think this generation is doing something very significant.

Do I imbue them with the same inevitability, teleology that Marxism imbued the working class? No. In the book, I spend a long time disassembling Marxism’s understanding of the working class. I’ve always felt, as a person who came from that background, that the kit of parts Marxism had to describe the working class was one of its least convincing—above all, to working-class people.

* You write at one point that Marxism is a great “theory of history” but as “crisis theory” it’s flawed. What do you mean by that?

What I mean is that it’s a great theory for analysing class society. For example, during the Egyptian revolution in 2011, having read Marx’s The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, I could say to Egyptian radicals that what will happen is that a level of chaos will be created whereby the very people who are on your side now will come forward and welcome a dictatorship. It’s likely that capitalism will call forth a new thing that imposes order. The thing that imposed disorder was the Muslim Brotherhood. And then to see the same people who’d supported the revolution calling for Sisi to overthrow the Brotherhood made sense if you’d read The 18th Brumaire.

I said to Alexis Tsipras before Syriza was elected: “What would be the threats to a left government if you gained power?” I said to him: “You do remember that [Salvador] Allende appointed [Augusto] Pinochet [in Chile]?” Allende appointed Pinochet to stop a military coup. We laughed. The point is that that government in Greece, you could argue, is being colonised by the very forces it thought it was there to fight. Right now, the business elite is thinking: “Only Tsipras can govern Greece.” They would prefer that he governed Greece without the far left of his own party. I meet Greek capitalists all the time who say to me: “If only Tsipras would listen to us, Greece would be a great country.”

Marxism forces you to ask [questions] that mainstream journalists don’t ask. The most important question for the Greeks right now is: what is happening to the masses? The masses are not defeated. They don’t believe that Tsipras is Louis Napoleon. Many of them object to what he has done, but they don’t believe he’s a force of reaction. They believe what he’s telling them—that he’s doing something unwillingly and that he will compensate for it with an attack on the oligarchy. They expect that attack on the oligarchy to come. My observation is that there has been a big radicalisation of people in Greece. Once the summer’s over we’ll see a real renewal both of struggles below and of the radicalism of the government.

The focus on what people are saying in pubs is something that two sets of people are very interested in: secret police forces and Marxists! I spend as much time as I can listening to people." (http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/blogs/jonathan-derbyshire/interview-paul-masons-guide-to-a-post-capitalist-future)

Review

NIKI SETH-SMITH:

"This gets to the heart of my objection to Mason’s book. His economic analysis is sound. His projections for the future, were the world not to undergo a radical system change, are disturbingly plausible. My query is with his new political subject. In other words: who is our Furiosa?

Let’s look at the economics first. By applying Marx to Kondratieff’s long wave theory, Mason gives an answer to the ‘end of history’ question far more believable than the now ludicrous faith in the triumph of neoliberalism. We feel stuck, he says, because we are. In Kondratieff’s theory, capitalism has a rhythm: there are waves of upswings and downswings that should last approximately 50 years. In Mason’s theory, we are today stuck in the fourth wave, which should have ended with the economical upheaval and power struggles of the late ‘70s. Organised labour should have successfully resisted the lowering of wages, so forcing capitalists to innovate themselves out of the crisis: “working-class resistance can be technologically progressive… it forces the new paradigm to emerge on a higher plane of productivity and consumption”. But class struggle failed to fulfill that role. Instead, in the ‘80s, capitalists were able to slash wages in the centres of global capitalism like the UK and the US, go for low-value production, and mask the unsustainability of an undead economic model with a huge wave of financialisation. The long-wave pattern was disrupted. That’s because, Mason believes, we are now at the end of the capitalist era.

Whether or not we accept Mason’s interpretation of Kondratieff, the idea that we are in the midst of capitalism’s long goodbye, living under an incoherent system on constant life support, has understandably gained traction since the 2008 crash. Mason’s theory also makes sense of the peculiar feeling that ‘nothing feels new’ when it comes to anti-capitalist imaginaries. “Reappropriate free time!” “Never Work!” “Luxury is not a luxury!” “What do we want? Everything!” The slogans of the ‘70s – these are from the Situationist International and Italy’s Autonomia movement – still sound urgent and fresh today. Perhaps that’s because their vision of the future was left hanging, unfulfilled. Postcapitalism suggests that now, thirty years on, their time has finally come. Mason credits Aaron Bastani who, as co-founder of the left platform Novara media, has helped to popularize and theorize the idea of FALC, Fully Automated Luxury Communism. But the basic premise is not new and can be traced back, as Mason shows, to Marx and his obscure pamphlet, “Fragment on Machines”. By candlelight, in 1858, Marx imagined an economy where the main productive force is information, where this information is ‘social’, and that this would tend towards the unlimited creation of wealth.

Marx also predicted that the big question would change from ‘wages versus profits’ to the ‘power of knowledge.’ With the Internet of Things due to increase the informational component of even our remaining ‘concrete’ objects, we are living increasingly in this vision of a knowledge economy. And, as we all know, information wants to be free. Or does it? In his book “Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free”, Cory Doctorow argues that technology doesn’t want anything: it is people who are heading towards their own liberation. Mason, like Doctorow, is not a techno-determinist. His faith is not in technology. It is in people. Or more accurately, in ‘a new kind of person’.

So who is this new subjectivity? Talking about Fragment on Machines, Mason says: “This is possibly the most revolutionary idea he [Marx] ever had: that the reduction of labour to a minimum could produce a new kind of human being able to deploy the entire, accumulated knowledge of society…” This is not a claim about ‘access’. It seems obvious to us now that the internet is fast becoming a machine through which we can access the entire, accumulated knowledge of society. Mason, channeling Marx, uses the word ‘deploy’. ‘Deploy’ is about human capability.

...

the driver of change is no longer the working class. There is a new political agent on the scene, one with ‘multiple economic selves’. Surely this is a description of the modern, precarious worker, the freelancer or struggling creative, juggling side projects with low-wage work? In “The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class”, Guy Standing describes this new class as wanting “control over life, a revival of social solidarity and a sustainable autonomy, while rejecting old labourist forms of security and state paternalism”. Surely we can place Jessica Riches and ‘Eleni Haifa’ in this group? Yet Mason suggests this as a more fundamental shift than that described by Standing. Even Standing’s ‘salariat’ can be ‘the new kind of person’. In fact, the final pages of ‘Postcapitalism’ suggest that it is only the uber-rich who are “excluded from this great experiment in social communication”. Don’t be distracted by the scathing descriptions of the anxious, body-guarded, lipo-suctioned rich, sporting their identikit Ivy League sweatshirts. Mason genuinely pities American CEOs, because they don’t have real Twitter accounts. Locked in the model of the tired old subjectivity, the 1 per cent lose their human right to be part of the future.

...

Mason may be onto something. But it should be acknowledged that his theory is predicated on a premise that is just as philosophical, psychological and bio-political as it is economic. These categories, as we’ve seen, have collapsed in on themselves. Yet that’s not how Postcapitalism, or the rest of Mason’s work, is framed. When you’re on this territory, it is not enough to point to what happened with the London riots, the Arab Spring, or the indignados. As Mason says himself, in the late ‘70s there was a problem of agency: organized labour wasn’t able to push us out of the fourth long cycle and into an adaptation phase. What’s to say the agency is there now? It’s true that the gap between humanity’s technological capabilities, and their fruits, is widening. It’s becoming ever harder to ignore that the ‘success stories’ of late capitalism, like Apple and Google, exist predominantly to restrict, not enable, the flow of goods. Google, through its carefully managed relationship to Open Source, is better at understanding the power dynamics of this gatekeeper role, but essentially it too is an Immortan Joe, profiting from control over a potentially abundant resource. Mason points out that the scale of the shifts due to hit in a matter of decades – ageing demographics and climate change being the most seismic and potentially catastrophic – will bring about, all too literally, a ‘do or die’ scenario for moving beyond capitalism. But we have seen humanity’s peculiar talent for failing to act in its own interests.

Perhaps it is not enough for ‘the new kind of person’ to be adaptable, creative, social, and possess multiple economic selves, in order for them to deploy “the entire accumulated knowledge of society” and thus act in the collective interest of humankind. It’s not enough to own two iPhones. When Marx imagined greater liberation due to more free time, he could not have conceived of the everyday reality of a zero contract barista, or a contracted PR rep, ready to slip on the work mask every hour of every day. It’s decades since Antonio Negri started writing about ‘cognitive capitalism’ and its means of control within the ‘social factory’. With Michael Hardt in their Empire series, Negri has carried on to develop the idea of the ‘multitude’ as the agency that will move us beyond capitalism. The idea has been critiqued for its vagueness. Alain Badiou called it “a dreamy hallucination”. Yet don’t their ideas map onto Mason’s when they say in Commonwealth: “‘Today time is split between a present that is already dead and a future that is already living” and that “there is a breach in the social relation of capital opening the possibility for biopolitical labour to claim its autonomy; the foundations of its exodus are given in the existence and constant creation of the common…”?

What Mason proposes in his Project Zero makes sense as steps towards a post-capitalist economy. Suppress monopolies and socialize the finance system, he says. Reward innovation not rent-seeking behaviour, and institute a basic income scheme. Do this by pressure from below, including the setting up of more collaborative business models, as well as an expansion of non-market networks of sharing and collaboration. At the same time, seize control of the state apparatus, and reshape it to nurture these new economic forms (eventually the state would make itself redundant). Use the immense amounts of data now available to do what the Soviet Union’s State Planning Committee could never do: reliably simulate the present and guide the future of a complex economy. There is not one answer, but many: use new forms of democracy to channel the wisdom of crowds, our ‘collective genius’.

Yet Mason accepts that the pathway to post-capitalism is not (only) an economic transition. It is a “human transition”. His first principle is telling, and not sufficiently thought through: “to recognize the limitations of human will-power in the face of a complex and fragile system”. Will. Motivation. Why did Furiosa go rogue? To chase a childhood memory, a “dreamy hallucination”. My objection then, is not to Mason’s propositions, but to Postcapitalism’s implicit claim to be based on economic theory, when it rests on something more like a leap of faith. Read the very beginning and very end of Postcapitalism and you’ll see what I mean. Chapter 1 begins as a classic analysis of contemporary political economy, “When Lehman Brothers collapsed, on 15 September 2008….” Yet it ends with a sentence that reveals that the book, at heart, is not analytical, nor even only propositional. It is something more like a spiritual call, less factual statement than prophetic utterance: “postcapitalism will set you free.”" (http://www.precariouseurope.com/power/postcapitalism-precariat)