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
1. Ann Pettifor:
"This book is an intellectually exhilarating read. While I have reservations about Mason’s thesis, I would recommend Post Capitalism to anyone interested in history, political thought, the past, present and future of info-tech, and above all, the future of capitalism. Mason draws on thinkers as diverse as Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse and the management guru, Peter Drucker. In searching for an understanding of how capitalism may progress from here, his book draws on, and spans, a range of disciplines – history, physics (the wave form) engineering (of aircraft turbofans), computer science, economics, and political and social theory.
All this, added to his skill as a writer and his knack of drawing on his own (and his grandmother’s) lived experience in northern working class Britain, results in a book that is passionate, rigorous and challenging. Regrettably he has not included a bibliography. That would have taken up many pages, as the breadth of his sources is remarkable. As a result he has added many volumes to my reading list.
Finally Mason outlines a vision that is not entirely improbable, but could also be defined as utopian. In this unequal and divided world, we need more utopians. So despite my own pessimism about his thesis, I do recommend that you read Mason’s book. " (http://static1.squarespace.com/static/541ff5f5e4b02b7c37f31ed6/t/56388c1fe4b07bcac2c7eb0e/1446546463276/Ann+Pettifor+-+Paul+Mason+Review.pdf)
2. 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)
Discussion
On the illusory naturalism of Kondratieff cycles
Ann Pettifor:
"My main beef with Mason’s book is that rather than define this period as one that was man-made – designed largely by the genius John Maynard Keynes and his Cambridge colleagues – Mason defines this period as a “Kondratieff upswing on steroids”.
Once again the implication is that this period of full employment, of science-led innovation, high productivity…high wages, consumption keeping pace with production, benign inflation and marginal speculative finance (p 86-7) is described as something beyond human agency – akin to the cycles of the moon.
Neoliberals too like to dismiss this age as beyond our present-day ken. Neoliberals too would like us to feel impotent in the face of day’s rapacious financial capitalism. But as the Golden Age proved, we are not impotent. And we are not the subjects of periodic, abstract cycles. The Golden Age was constructed, designed and implemented by a group of economists who congregated at Bretton Woods in 1944 and that were led by John Maynard Keynes and his American competitor, Harry Dexter White. (The striking thing about the conference was that only one banker was allowed to attend – and only because President Roosevelt regarded him as tame enough not to present a threat to the proceedings.)
Keynes and colleagues were confronted by a form of capitalism that had wrought massive destruction of lives, livelihoods and nations. They were surrounded by the wreckage of war, but were not intimidated by the scale of the challenge they faced in confronting, subordinating and managing global finance capitalism.
Nor should we be. We are not, as Mason suggests, the passive subjects of inexorable and inevitable cycles or Kondratieff waves of capitalism. We are masters of our own destiny – if only we (and professional economists) had the courage to identify, name, subordinate and manage the global finance sector – as Keynes and others have shown we can. " (http://static1.squarespace.com/static/541ff5f5e4b02b7c37f31ed6/t/56388c1fe4b07bcac2c7eb0e/1446546463276/Ann+Pettifor+-+Paul+Mason+Review.pdf)
Mason is over-emphasizing infotech and underestimating the role of finance
Ann Pettifor:
"While Mason does of course discuss the finance sector, he makes infotech the main driver of the changes we are witnessing today.
I beg to disagree. Far from ‘mutating’ in cycles of 50 to 500 years, the finance sector is today growing exponentially before our very eyes, with only the occasional financial crisis to arrest that growth. This is partly thanks to the rise of infotech, but infotech in the service of finance, not as its driver.
The last financial crisis (2007-9) turbo-blasted the sector into a new fantastic growth phase. Not only was Haute Finance bailed out, it also insidiously attached itself more fully to states – and wrested guarantees and protection from these governments, their taxpayers and their central banks.
And while this particular group of capitalists may worship at the shrine of Adam Smith and Ayn Rand, they nevertheless demand and expect taxpayer-funded guarantees and protection from the discipline and losses imposed by market forces.
Despite its detachment from the “real” economy of production, the global finance sector has succeeded in capturing, effectively looting and then subordinating governments and their taxpayers to the interests of financiers. Bankers and financiers now effectively control the public utility that is our monetary system. They can gamble and speculate on global markets without fear of losses or the fear of being disciplined by ‘the invisible hand’. They know their institutions are Too Systemic, or Too Big To Fail.
They are today’s Masters of the Universe – and they do not feature largely in this book.
Like so many others Mason takes the structure of the internet as a model for the evolution of capitalism and speculates that capitalism will evolve into a system in which hierarchies are flattened, machines are free and we’re all far more collaborative.
But Mason’s techno-utopianism is fundamentally about the production side of the economy. Yet, as he well knows, there is more to the economy than production. There is consumption – and Mason’s view of today’s sharing, networked and connected world may just as well be defined as collaborative consumption.
And then there’s the rentier sector of the economy – earning rent from assets (particularly financial assets like debt) effortlessly.
The last two sectors are not fully addressed in the wide sweep of this book." (http://static1.squarespace.com/static/541ff5f5e4b02b7c37f31ed6/t/56388c1fe4b07bcac2c7eb0e/1446546463276/Ann+Pettifor+-+Paul+Mason+Review.pdf)
Mason is overemphasizing the positivity of networks
David Beer:
"I think there are some good reasons for us to hesitate before placing networks at the epicentre of any postcapitalist future.
One potential problem we might have is with Mason’s attempts to differentiate between networks and hierarchies. This is something he does frequently in his book. As a result, networks’ disruptive capacities take on an important and functional role in Mason’s vision. In many ways, networks, as a central part of a range of technological shifts, become the key mechanism for the transformations central to postcapitalism. What is crucial here is that networks are seen as providing an alternative to hierarchies.
Mason (212) suggests, for example, that ‘the main faultline in the modern world is between networks and hierarchies’. He adds that ‘everything is pervaded by a fight between network and hierarchy’ (144) and that ‘everything comes down to the struggle between the network and the hierarchy’ (xix). This somehow suggests that either networks can exist in a form that is not hierarchical or, perhaps, that they are by their very nature non-hierarchical. The question is whether either of these is actually the case.
Despite their appearance, networks often contain hierarchies. Despite their appearance, networks often contain hierarchies. Much of what we know about contemporary decentralised networks would suggest that they are not free from hierarchies. Just to pick one quite superficial example, if we look at something obvious like social media then Klout scores and other means of measuring influence and amplification are designed to reveal those very hierarchies. Networks are not flat, they are 3 dimensional, they have a z axis. Decentralization, then, is not necessarily equivalent to empowerment or democratisation. It may not even give people the voice that it appears to give them. Instead we are all left howling into the wind, with a few select voices getting heard above the din. We should instantly wonder why it is that those few voices get heard, is it something about what is being said or is it potentially a product of the particular hierarchies afforded by these media infrastructures and their apparently equally distributed chances of communication.
Jodi Dean is even more negative in her understanding of these decentralised networks. Her argument is that the there is a lot of noise and very little listening going on within social media. She calls this ‘communicative capitalism’. Her point is that the communications we engage with in these networks are all part of the capitalist system of which those networks are a key component. Even where we appear to be resisting, questioning or, as Mason suggests, ‘rebelling’, Dean’s point is that we are merely contributing to the maintenance of communicative capitalism. What we say has little value other than to the system to which we are contributing content. Here the network is not seen to offer any alternatives, it merely serves to reinforce neoliberal capitalism. And then we can add to this David Hill’s recent observation that such communicative capitalism promotes precarity, fragility and exacerbates individualism.
The question this poses is that if networks are indeed both hierarchical and central to contemporary capitalism, then how do they fit into a vision of postcapitalism? What if, rather than offering opportunities for alternatives to be fostered, these networks are in fact cementing existing social hierarchies? If we are to engage in imagining the future of postcapitalism, as Mason suggests we should, then we will need to reassess the role of networks within that future. Seeing networks as somehow offering a space outside of existing power dynamics rather than as a central part of them is something that needs to be questioned. If we look at it in this way, then perhaps capitalism has not, as Mason (xiii) claims, ‘reached the limits of its capacity to adapt’. If capitalism is embedded so deeply within the structure of these networks, then I wonder how easy it will be to rely upon them to engineer or enact postcapitalism.
What if, rather than offering opportunities for alternatives to be fostered, these networks are in fact cementing existing social hierarchies?To add a further dimension to these arguments, we might also reflect on the power of the infrastructures of these networks. We need to think about the way that these infrastructures shape the circulation of data and information, we need to consider the politics of circulation that is at play. Algorithms – the decision making parts of software code – now play an important role in the formation of networks and in the flow of information around those networks. Algorithms order, rank and recommend. They decide what is visible to us amongst the unfathomable masses of information. Think here about how Twitter’s recommendations of who to follow might shape the network itself. We are more likely to encounter and perhaps connect with those who are recommended to us, simply because they are more visible to us. Then last year’s stories about the manipulation of Facebook news feeds also revealed how algorithms are responsible for the things we discover or know about. So we need to think of how the networks and the flows of information around them might be products of the infrastructures that afford and intervene in those flows.
Mason sees the openness of information as being important in a postcapitalist world. Which makes good sense. But what we have said already would suggest that contemporary networks might well be the source of what he calls the ‘asymmetry of information’ – with companies using what they know about us to pursue value. Mason understandably suggests that postcapitalism would require us to stand against such asymmetry in information access, but we have to wonder if the networks that are now in place are more likely to preserve and even exacerbate this problem. Social media networks, for instance, are designed to extract information about us for commercial ends. This would suggest that decentralised networks don’t necessarily provide an alternative to this asymmetry of information, in fact they may frequently be the very means by which this asymmetry is achieved. This would make them an unlikely antidote to the protectionism that surrounds information and data.
We can extend this politics of circulation to Mason’s (269) suggestion that in planning for a postcapitalist future ‘we should use the new breed of simulation tools to model every proposal virtually before we enact it for real’. Here we can imagine how certain types of accumulated data will be drawn into certain types of software based systems and the algorithms will then enact certain types of models in simulating the future of the social world. In other words, the very act of modelling the future is itself performative – it will bring about the futures that are modelled into the coding of the software, which will in turn be informed by the type of data that has been selected from the archive. There is the potential for powerful and obdurate social norms and inequalities to be modelled into these simulations.
So not only will this politics of data circulation shape the interactions and communications within networks, it may also then come to determine our imagined futures. This is what Louise Amoore calls the ‘politics of possibility’. Amoore’s work in this area is concerned with understanding the way that data and algorithmic processes are used to imagine futures. These imagined possible scenarios are then used to determine current decision making. Walter Benjamin once wrote of the way that history is filled with ‘the presence of the now’, in this case our futures will be imagined through our understanding of the present. Simulations are not neutral imaginings of outcomes.
All of this is not to suggest that Mason’s vision of postcapitalism is somehow faulty, rather it is to argue that we need to reflect further on the role of networks within that vision. Rather than providing answers, networks present something of a foreboding obstacle for postcapitalism. Some tricky navigation is required. Without this, a focus on networks might lead us towards something that looks like postcapitalism but which actually conceals the same old power dynamics, hierarchies and inequalities. I just wonder if this focus on the promise of decentralized networks will actually mean that we are unable to escape the logic of capitalism, particularly as the very processes of power distribution, information asymmetry and hierarchy are frequently realised and maintained through these networks. As we are at the point that Mason calls the ‘design stage’ of postcapitalism, it may be a good moment to revisit the potential role of the network." (https://opendemocracy.net/uk/david-beer/masons-postcapitalism-are-networks-actually-part-of-problem)