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Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
'The most important book about our economy and society to be published in my lifetime' Irvine Welsh
From Paul Mason, the award-winning Channel 4 presenter, Postcapitalism is a guide to our era of seismic economic change, and how we can build a more equal society.
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.
In this groundbreaking, Sunday Times top ten 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.
From Paul Mason, the award-winning Channel 4 presenter, Postcapitalism is a guide to our era of seismic economic change, and how we can build a more equal society.
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.
In this groundbreaking, Sunday Times top ten 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.
368 pages, Paperback
First published July 30, 2015
About the author
Paul Mason
67 books233 followersNote: Paul^^Mason
Paul Mason is an English journalist and broadcaster. He is economics editor of the BBC's Newsnight television programme and the author of several books.
Paul Mason is an English journalist and broadcaster. He is economics editor of the BBC's Newsnight television programme and the author of several books.
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November 30, 2016
I deliberately read ‘Postcapitalism’ quite slowly, as it deserves considerable thought. I find it striking that such a book was written by a journalist, in an engagingly journalistic style, rather than an academic or that ambiguous figure in between, a public intellectual. Although perhaps Paul Mason falls into the latter category? I’m not sure. Anyway, he isn’t an economist, and I think this book demonstrates quite clearly why that enables him to think beyond neoliberalism. As an aside, a few days ago I was asked about my disciplinary background in a job interview. I answered that I’d studied economics and had a grounding in micro and macro, but hastened to add that I was not an economist. As Mason points out, to be an economist, or even a student of economics, today is to be an evangelist of neoliberal ideology.
Rather to my amusement, I found that Mason’s approach to explaining his notion of postcapitalism reminded me a little of Slavoj Žižek, except with a diametrically opposite prose style. Like Žižek, Mason has picked through various theorists and writers of the last 200 years, extracted what he found most convincing, and stitched it together loosely. He takes the reader through Kondratieff cycles (which I vaguely remember from my undergraduate days), elements of Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (which I found fascinating), and a Soviet economist called Bogdanov (whose novel, Red Star, I’ve been meaning to read for years). From these building blocks, he constructs a loose theory of capitalism’s collapse in the face of the information economy, recounting the history of industrialisation in the process.
Probably the most critical observation to this theory is that information now forms a huge and growing proportion of the goods and services that make up GDP. Yet it is cannot be priced using standard economic theory, which states that a market is in equilibrium when marginal cost equals marginal benefit. Information has zero marginal cost, as it can be copied infinitely, the only cost involved being the electricity this requires. Moreover, the category of information keeps expanding, to include music, books, films, TV shows, patterns and designs to make or do just about any other thing. Whilst there is obviously a cost to producing this information, that is generally also falling. Only legal structures prevent everyone with an internet connection being able to listen to practically every song, watch practically every film, and read practically every book ever created. Realistically, everyone willing to pirate already does. Business models based on defending copyright are fighting a losing battle, as internet connections get faster, storage cheaper, and files quality better. I have long blamed my comfort with media piracy on A-level economics, which helpfully taught me that a good with zero marginal cost should also be priced at zero. Mason notes that the so-called ‘Internet of Things’ (a concept I am admittedly somewhat dubious of) will expand both the volume and proportion of information in our goods and services. At the moment, the information that we passively create by browsing the web (which certainly feels like a passive activity much of the time) is controlled by state and private monopolies; google and the NSA, broadly. The argument here is all such information should be made more public, in order that it can be used to drive innovation.
I think there is a lot more to be written just on that one point, never mind the many others this book makes, however Mason makes a strong start. The question he is really posing, it seems to me, is whether technology breaking neoliberalism will result in technology breaking capitalism entirely. Postcapitalism strikes me as somewhat like postmodernism - highly contingent, depending on the commentator and discipline under discussion. By this I mean that Mason is advocating a sort of mixed economy, in which information is set free to encourage innovation and the productivity gains of automation are used to provide a basic income for all, yet markets and governments still fit together somewhere. In some ways such proposals aren’t novel, as many have advocated similar things before. Yet this is the first book that I’ve read to propose that a new, albeit vague, kind of capitalism is not only possible but inevitable, as neoliberalism’s contradictions are consuming it. Moreover, it deploys Marx effectively to support the central thesis.
In a 400 page book one cannot expect to find the answer to every question, however there was one relative omission that really struck me: democracy. This makes ‘Postcapitalism’ a striking mirror to The End of History and the Last Man, which it is essentially refuting. Fukuyama spends most of his book on arguments for democracy’s lasting survival, apparently thinking that free market capitalism more or less justifies its own immortality. Mason, meanwhile, spends considerable time on the structural weaknesses of free market capitalism, only occasionally touching on the role of the state and governance. Indeed, towards the end of the book the ‘withering away’ of the state, after Marx, is envisaged. I think there is a lot more to be said here, although it’s fair enough that there wasn’t space in the book. Most notably, I wonder about the ways in which an information-based economy facilitates and obscures democratic decision-making. At present, the 24-hour news cycle and culture of social media outrage creates an instantaneity that is also intensely volatile. How can a democratic process adequately respond to a constant stream of conflicting, changing information? At present a great deal of this responsiveness is entrusted to markets and citizens are told that their power lies in consumption choices. Postcapitalism envisages a much smaller role for markets and a greater role for collaboration. Whilst evidently this would redistribute power very significantly, the role of the state would become much more important, at least initially. Mason strongly argues that natural monopolies such as utilities should be nationalised, although presumably the rise of information could also improve their productivity.
I am meandering here, as this book is extremely thought-provoking. The question I’m trying to articulate is something like: is access to information sufficient for transparency and accountability? Can it create parallel means of governance (as Mason seems to envisage) that reduces the need for a centralised state as currently exists? Personally I rather doubt it, as information is no more neutral as a means of production than labour or capital. Whilst access to it is a form of power, wider access doesn't remove the power of those who process the information and write the algorithms that determine what action is taken in response to it. Moreover, it is incredibly difficult to say these days what is personal data and what isn’t. ‘Big data’ is surely just millions of pieces of personal information aggregated together. Thus, freeing some forms of information intended to be public (music, films, books) is a very different matter to freeing information that those creating it are barely aware of (medical data, shopping habits, how an office printer is used). There is the obvious response of anonymising the data, then the equally obvious rejoinder of whether that is ever truly possible when every detail of life is recorded in some device. The thought experiment of what if all information really was freely available, somehow, really makes you aware of how many monopolies defend it at present (amazon, google, facebook, et al). Quite apart from the resistance such companies would put up to transparency, the implications are dizzying. Increasing technological innovation is the very least of them. Do you want to know the number of times you have bought the same sandwich from Tesco? How would you feel about the knowledge of how much Tesco profited over years from just those sandwich purchases? If you could know the exact supply chain that produced your sandwich, indeed all your purchases, could you cope with all that information? Or is it easier to proceed on the basis of habit, given the exhaustion of information overload? If you could find information on everything, how would you prioritise? How would you find the energy to care about anything if you knew everything? Yet I agree with Mason that the current monopolistic situation is fragile and unsustainable.
I should try and get to the point here. I don’t agree with the subtitle of this book, ‘A guide to our future’. Rather, it is an original analysis of our present and its instabilities. Mason is trying to provide a positive, albeit vague, vision for the future (although I note he uses the term ‘utopian’ in an inconsistent and ambivalent fashion), to inspire something beyond the fatalism of There Is No Alternative. In my view, though, the value of the book is its original critique of neoliberal economic theory and attempt to posit new theories. Moreover, it spends quite a lot of time on history. As such, it reads well with The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which critiques neoliberalism on a very practical, international basis.
I hope that ‘Postcapitalism’ is widely read, as it raises vitally important issues (international debt, demographic timebombs, and climate change, amongst others). Also, I want to discuss it with people. I agree with Mason’s economic arguments as to why neoliberal capitalism is doomed, however a lot more thought is required to come up with a replacement for it. Mason doesn’t claim to have the answers, but he is definitely asking the right questions.
Rather to my amusement, I found that Mason’s approach to explaining his notion of postcapitalism reminded me a little of Slavoj Žižek, except with a diametrically opposite prose style. Like Žižek, Mason has picked through various theorists and writers of the last 200 years, extracted what he found most convincing, and stitched it together loosely. He takes the reader through Kondratieff cycles (which I vaguely remember from my undergraduate days), elements of Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (which I found fascinating), and a Soviet economist called Bogdanov (whose novel, Red Star, I’ve been meaning to read for years). From these building blocks, he constructs a loose theory of capitalism’s collapse in the face of the information economy, recounting the history of industrialisation in the process.
Probably the most critical observation to this theory is that information now forms a huge and growing proportion of the goods and services that make up GDP. Yet it is cannot be priced using standard economic theory, which states that a market is in equilibrium when marginal cost equals marginal benefit. Information has zero marginal cost, as it can be copied infinitely, the only cost involved being the electricity this requires. Moreover, the category of information keeps expanding, to include music, books, films, TV shows, patterns and designs to make or do just about any other thing. Whilst there is obviously a cost to producing this information, that is generally also falling. Only legal structures prevent everyone with an internet connection being able to listen to practically every song, watch practically every film, and read practically every book ever created. Realistically, everyone willing to pirate already does. Business models based on defending copyright are fighting a losing battle, as internet connections get faster, storage cheaper, and files quality better. I have long blamed my comfort with media piracy on A-level economics, which helpfully taught me that a good with zero marginal cost should also be priced at zero. Mason notes that the so-called ‘Internet of Things’ (a concept I am admittedly somewhat dubious of) will expand both the volume and proportion of information in our goods and services. At the moment, the information that we passively create by browsing the web (which certainly feels like a passive activity much of the time) is controlled by state and private monopolies; google and the NSA, broadly. The argument here is all such information should be made more public, in order that it can be used to drive innovation.
I think there is a lot more to be written just on that one point, never mind the many others this book makes, however Mason makes a strong start. The question he is really posing, it seems to me, is whether technology breaking neoliberalism will result in technology breaking capitalism entirely. Postcapitalism strikes me as somewhat like postmodernism - highly contingent, depending on the commentator and discipline under discussion. By this I mean that Mason is advocating a sort of mixed economy, in which information is set free to encourage innovation and the productivity gains of automation are used to provide a basic income for all, yet markets and governments still fit together somewhere. In some ways such proposals aren’t novel, as many have advocated similar things before. Yet this is the first book that I’ve read to propose that a new, albeit vague, kind of capitalism is not only possible but inevitable, as neoliberalism’s contradictions are consuming it. Moreover, it deploys Marx effectively to support the central thesis.
In a 400 page book one cannot expect to find the answer to every question, however there was one relative omission that really struck me: democracy. This makes ‘Postcapitalism’ a striking mirror to The End of History and the Last Man, which it is essentially refuting. Fukuyama spends most of his book on arguments for democracy’s lasting survival, apparently thinking that free market capitalism more or less justifies its own immortality. Mason, meanwhile, spends considerable time on the structural weaknesses of free market capitalism, only occasionally touching on the role of the state and governance. Indeed, towards the end of the book the ‘withering away’ of the state, after Marx, is envisaged. I think there is a lot more to be said here, although it’s fair enough that there wasn’t space in the book. Most notably, I wonder about the ways in which an information-based economy facilitates and obscures democratic decision-making. At present, the 24-hour news cycle and culture of social media outrage creates an instantaneity that is also intensely volatile. How can a democratic process adequately respond to a constant stream of conflicting, changing information? At present a great deal of this responsiveness is entrusted to markets and citizens are told that their power lies in consumption choices. Postcapitalism envisages a much smaller role for markets and a greater role for collaboration. Whilst evidently this would redistribute power very significantly, the role of the state would become much more important, at least initially. Mason strongly argues that natural monopolies such as utilities should be nationalised, although presumably the rise of information could also improve their productivity.
I am meandering here, as this book is extremely thought-provoking. The question I’m trying to articulate is something like: is access to information sufficient for transparency and accountability? Can it create parallel means of governance (as Mason seems to envisage) that reduces the need for a centralised state as currently exists? Personally I rather doubt it, as information is no more neutral as a means of production than labour or capital. Whilst access to it is a form of power, wider access doesn't remove the power of those who process the information and write the algorithms that determine what action is taken in response to it. Moreover, it is incredibly difficult to say these days what is personal data and what isn’t. ‘Big data’ is surely just millions of pieces of personal information aggregated together. Thus, freeing some forms of information intended to be public (music, films, books) is a very different matter to freeing information that those creating it are barely aware of (medical data, shopping habits, how an office printer is used). There is the obvious response of anonymising the data, then the equally obvious rejoinder of whether that is ever truly possible when every detail of life is recorded in some device. The thought experiment of what if all information really was freely available, somehow, really makes you aware of how many monopolies defend it at present (amazon, google, facebook, et al). Quite apart from the resistance such companies would put up to transparency, the implications are dizzying. Increasing technological innovation is the very least of them. Do you want to know the number of times you have bought the same sandwich from Tesco? How would you feel about the knowledge of how much Tesco profited over years from just those sandwich purchases? If you could know the exact supply chain that produced your sandwich, indeed all your purchases, could you cope with all that information? Or is it easier to proceed on the basis of habit, given the exhaustion of information overload? If you could find information on everything, how would you prioritise? How would you find the energy to care about anything if you knew everything? Yet I agree with Mason that the current monopolistic situation is fragile and unsustainable.
I should try and get to the point here. I don’t agree with the subtitle of this book, ‘A guide to our future’. Rather, it is an original analysis of our present and its instabilities. Mason is trying to provide a positive, albeit vague, vision for the future (although I note he uses the term ‘utopian’ in an inconsistent and ambivalent fashion), to inspire something beyond the fatalism of There Is No Alternative. In my view, though, the value of the book is its original critique of neoliberal economic theory and attempt to posit new theories. Moreover, it spends quite a lot of time on history. As such, it reads well with The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which critiques neoliberalism on a very practical, international basis.
I hope that ‘Postcapitalism’ is widely read, as it raises vitally important issues (international debt, demographic timebombs, and climate change, amongst others). Also, I want to discuss it with people. I agree with Mason’s economic arguments as to why neoliberal capitalism is doomed, however a lot more thought is required to come up with a replacement for it. Mason doesn’t claim to have the answers, but he is definitely asking the right questions.
October 18, 2024
Western Socdem "Postcapitalism"?
The Bad/Missing:
1) In Theory: Journalistic Zeal minus Academic Rigour:
--On the topic of "Postcapitalism", you'll be much better off with Varoufakis' Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present, which combines accessible writing-style with rigorous substance.
--Grand assertions come with political economy (Marx's crisis theory, Wallerstein’s World-Systems Analysis), but require so much context and unpacking to avoid miscommunication. Mason's whirlwind delivery leaves many leaps-of-faith for the eager, and cliff-hangers for the cautious.
2) In Practice: Normalizing Western Imperialism?
--I should have known by the silence on Western foreign policy in this book (and the British mainstream media presence of Mason) that something was off, as I had not followed Mason previously. Similar works include:
-The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
-Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism
...Alarms sounded after reading Mason's reflections of Jeremy Corbyn's electoral defeat and what the Bernie Sanders campaign can learn from it, targeting Corbyn's anti-imperialism as a key weakness:
...How can we imagine a "Postcapitalism" worth supporting without prioritizing the abolition of imperialist militarism/economic terror front-and-center? Normalized aggression ironically legitimizes authoritarian leaders in rival "rogue states", including nuclear weapons proliferation (when rivals downscale on "weapons of mass destruction", the US invades directly: Libya, Iraq, etc.).
-Prashad on imperialist ideological censorship; also: Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations
-Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner
-Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance
...No wonder this book felt disconnected from the real world. How can we consider "Postcapitalism" without considering capitalism/imperialism's global division of labour/resources/finance?
-Intro: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
-Dive: Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
-The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South
...The climate/ecological crises are also missing; our digital changes still require an (expanding) material footprint:
-Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
-The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions
-Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe
...I have a softer stance on the Brexit debate since ultimately Brexit was a major political theatre distraction from much clearer issues to prioritize. For more analysis on Corbyn's defeat (where Part 2 mentions Mason): Part 1, Part 2
Highlights:
1) The virus of Information Technology?:
--This is supposed to be the heart of the book, to expose the challenges (crisis?) that information technology (IT) presents to real-world capitalism in hopes of spurring action to create a post-capitalist society that is better, not worse:
i) Labour market: mass automation; changes to wages in relation to work time vs. free time.
ii) Market pricing/profitability: Information’s abundance (zero marginal cost, i.e. free copying) vs. market pricing/profit-seeking based on scarcity.
iii) Private property of production: collaborative network/non-market production vs. traditional hierarchical production.
--A topic like this could easily derail into technocratic fantasies, but fortunately Mason is steeped in real-world history/theory of social movements, so much so that the technical explanations seem the least-developed (in particular: explanatory examples). Perhaps Mason is at his best writing labour history? (Live Working or Die Fighting: How The Working Class Went Global). I'll have to reassess these points elsewhere, perhaps in The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism.
2) On “Neoliberalism”:
--Mason starts by summarizing “Neoliberalism”, a useful litmus test for today's thinkers of (geo)political economy. Questions of causation require many layers of evidence and theory; let's review the levels of analyses:
i) Symptoms:
--Even mainstream "heterodox" economists like Ha-Joon Chang (Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism) and Joseph E. Stiglitz can observe the glaring effects of financialization/dismantling of the welfare state.
--More critical theorists like Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism) and Donald Gutstein (Harperism: How Stephen Harper and his think tank colleagues have transformed Canada) trace the spread of Neoliberalism's ideology from corporate think tanks (Mont Pelerin Society: Hayek, Friedman, Mises, etc).
...The question then becomes 'why?'... why did power shift to Neoliberalism in the 1970s and not prior? What structural changes (materialism) facilitated the shift in ideas (idealism)?
ii) Structures: Post-WWII Geopolitical Economy:
--David Harvey (A Brief History of Neoliberalism) starts off with capitalism's crises in profitability: the post-WWII's boom (which itself was the "creative destruction" of WWII rescuing global capitalism from the Great Depression) ran into a profit squeeze by the 1970s (stagflation).
--Yanis Varoufakis (The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy) unpacks the contradictions of the post-WWII boom further: US aided Western Europe (Marshall Plan)/Japan’s recovery to absorb ("recycle", to prevent blockages that lead to crashes like heart attacks) US surplus production (with WWII over, the booming US war factories needed to keep finding buyers or risk crashing into another Depression) and create strong regional currencies for further surplus recycling abroad (lessons from the Great Depression regarding crashes spreading globally without regional buffers), using the post-WWII Bretton Woods system/US dollar as international reserve currency.
...By the 1970’s, this arrangement was no longer advantageous for the US; some point to Germany/Japan catching up in industrial competitiveness (most visibly automobiles), but Michael Hudson (Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance) stresses the US losing their surplus was due to US military spending from bombing Korea and especially Vietnam. US allies received US dollars to aid the US in these foreign genocides; US allies (infamously France) would exchange these dollars for US gold reserves, until the US became alarmed by the drain.
...So, the US adopted Volcker's "Controlled Disintegration" of the post-WWII global economy:
a) stamp down on competition (thus, the Nixon Shock to severe the US-dollar-to-gold exchange, and the Volker Shock)
b) maintain US financial domination by ensuring US control of the recycling of (now others') surpluses (thus, the need to deregulate Wall Street, leading to "Financialization" to attract foreign capital, including petrodollars; this was significant because Wall Street was actually regulated under post-WWII Bretton Woods, i.e. "financial repression").
...US deficits now fueled the recycling of global surpluses. The "Controlled Disintegration" also derailed another major competitor: Third World industrial revolution (The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South).
iii) Structures: Kondratiev waves?
--Instead of focusing on the post-WWII period, Mason expands the time frame in a World-Systems manner (see Wallerstein's World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction). Mason tries to adapt Kondratiev wave theory (50-year up-down economic swings driven by investment) with social struggle and technological change, illustrating 5 waves from 1760s to today.
--Mason takes another chapter to argue that the 4th wave (1940s-2008) is unique in that its downswing did not lead to enough class struggle (instead, Neoliberalism dominated) to force capitalism to innovate stabilizing reforms (technology for higher productivity, higher real wages). So, the next wave (5th) of Network IT is stalled.
--In my current understanding, this entire section is an interesting thought-experiment trying to connect histories of technology, labour, and political economy. If I try to make too much out of it, I worry some of the tenuous connections may evaporate…
iv) Structures: Labour Theory of Value and Marx's Crisis Theory?
--Mason furthers the dive into abstract theory; on this topic, I've been chipping away for ages in hopes of learning some tools to share:
-Marxist/Post-Keynesian Varoufakis' Modern Political Economics: Making Sense of the Post-2008 World
-Marxist/Post-Keynesian Michael Hudson's The Bubble and Beyond and Trade, Development and Foreign Debt
-Marxist/Post-Keynesian Prabhat Patnaik/Utsa Patnaik's Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
-Classical/Marxist Anwar Shaikh's Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises
-Marxist Robert Brenner's The Economics of Global Turbulence
-Post-Keynesian Steve Keen's Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor Dethroned?
--Now, Mason tries to adapt Marx’s theory of capitalist crisis to the 20th-21st century. Mason focuses on capitalism as an open system that requires external systems to allow it to adapt during crises (curiously, this is an important foundation for theories of imperialism, ex. the Patnaiks'): the major mutation: 1920s State Capitalism (especially the Military Industrial Complex).
--Mason combines Marx’s crisis of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) with Kondratiev wave theory, where such crisis leads capital retreating into Finance, which triggers search for new markets + roll-out of new technologies.
--Next, Mason tries to revive the "Labour Theory of Value" as an economic signal, given the challenges IT is presenting for market signals: re-focus economics towards the workplace instead of the market; automation, where machines add zero new (labour) value to its products.
--Better go to the source and read Marx's Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, which goes over Marx's value theory (which differs from prior variants of "Labour Theory of Value") and Marx's crisis theories (Volume 3). I'll have to revisit Mason's attempt, but I can at least appreciate Mason dissing mainstream economics' (i.e. "Neoclassical") Marginal Utility/Market equilibrium/ideology of managerialism.
3) Transition during Shocks:
--I was surprised Mason left analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism until the final quarter of his book, since the books title "Postcapitalism" made me think instantly of the genre on economic "transitions", including the one between feudalism-to-capitalism (Dobb-Sweezy debate, (Robert) Brenner debate, etc., as critiqued by Wallerstein in World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction).
--Useful themes here: Black Death's labour shortage leading to wage spike and rent fall, high wool price leading to landowner switching production from consumption to market exchange, labour shortage promoting machinery, social change from printing press, colonialism of Americas bringing power to non-aristocrats, etc.
--Mason identifies key conditions of transition to post-capitalism:
i) Information as the new printing press
ii) Long economic stagnation
iii) Shocks: climate, energy, demography (aging, migration)
iv) Transition can come from within: diverse experiments, networks
--Mason only brushes over top-level aims. His push for computer modeling of economics is vague. I agree follow-up studies on policies is neglected. “Socializing finance” deserves much more attention (Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present).
--As always, there are a plethora of great ideas to experiment with. But how do we anticipate and address reactionary violence during crises (Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism)?
The Bad/Missing:
1) In Theory: Journalistic Zeal minus Academic Rigour:
--On the topic of "Postcapitalism", you'll be much better off with Varoufakis' Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present, which combines accessible writing-style with rigorous substance.
--Grand assertions come with political economy (Marx's crisis theory, Wallerstein’s World-Systems Analysis), but require so much context and unpacking to avoid miscommunication. Mason's whirlwind delivery leaves many leaps-of-faith for the eager, and cliff-hangers for the cautious.
2) In Practice: Normalizing Western Imperialism?
--I should have known by the silence on Western foreign policy in this book (and the British mainstream media presence of Mason) that something was off, as I had not followed Mason previously. Similar works include:
-The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
-Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism
...Alarms sounded after reading Mason's reflections of Jeremy Corbyn's electoral defeat and what the Bernie Sanders campaign can learn from it, targeting Corbyn's anti-imperialism as a key weakness:
Unfortunately, for a large part of Corbyn’s followers, taking toys away from British imperialists and disrupting the global order became, together with Lexit, their defining project. Sanders needs to outline a relatively orthodox and prudent foreign policy, which is tough on the human rights abuses of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and which recognises the possibility of the US playing a role in stabilising the multilateral order, while simultaneously pursuing its own foreign policy goals. It means brokering peace in Libya, pursuing democratisation in Venezuela, and seeking to bring Turkey out of the orbit of Putin’s Russia....How is this not satire? This is the last advice a Leftist with any sense of international solidarity should give to US progressives/"socdem" (social democrats) like Bernie, whose biggest flaw is their timidity towards challenging the US military industrial complex (even self-described "democratic socialists", regurgitating propaganda like "Maduro is a dictator!" in the context of promoting Western interventions).
...How can we imagine a "Postcapitalism" worth supporting without prioritizing the abolition of imperialist militarism/economic terror front-and-center? Normalized aggression ironically legitimizes authoritarian leaders in rival "rogue states", including nuclear weapons proliferation (when rivals downscale on "weapons of mass destruction", the US invades directly: Libya, Iraq, etc.).
-Prashad on imperialist ideological censorship; also: Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations
-Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner
-Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance
...No wonder this book felt disconnected from the real world. How can we consider "Postcapitalism" without considering capitalism/imperialism's global division of labour/resources/finance?
-Intro: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
-Dive: Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
-The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South
...The climate/ecological crises are also missing; our digital changes still require an (expanding) material footprint:
-Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
-The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions
-Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe
...I have a softer stance on the Brexit debate since ultimately Brexit was a major political theatre distraction from much clearer issues to prioritize. For more analysis on Corbyn's defeat (where Part 2 mentions Mason): Part 1, Part 2
Highlights:
1) The virus of Information Technology?:
--This is supposed to be the heart of the book, to expose the challenges (crisis?) that information technology (IT) presents to real-world capitalism in hopes of spurring action to create a post-capitalist society that is better, not worse:
i) Labour market: mass automation; changes to wages in relation to work time vs. free time.
ii) Market pricing/profitability: Information’s abundance (zero marginal cost, i.e. free copying) vs. market pricing/profit-seeking based on scarcity.
iii) Private property of production: collaborative network/non-market production vs. traditional hierarchical production.
--A topic like this could easily derail into technocratic fantasies, but fortunately Mason is steeped in real-world history/theory of social movements, so much so that the technical explanations seem the least-developed (in particular: explanatory examples). Perhaps Mason is at his best writing labour history? (Live Working or Die Fighting: How The Working Class Went Global). I'll have to reassess these points elsewhere, perhaps in The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism.
2) On “Neoliberalism”:
--Mason starts by summarizing “Neoliberalism”, a useful litmus test for today's thinkers of (geo)political economy. Questions of causation require many layers of evidence and theory; let's review the levels of analyses:
i) Symptoms:
--Even mainstream "heterodox" economists like Ha-Joon Chang (Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism) and Joseph E. Stiglitz can observe the glaring effects of financialization/dismantling of the welfare state.
--More critical theorists like Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism) and Donald Gutstein (Harperism: How Stephen Harper and his think tank colleagues have transformed Canada) trace the spread of Neoliberalism's ideology from corporate think tanks (Mont Pelerin Society: Hayek, Friedman, Mises, etc).
...The question then becomes 'why?'... why did power shift to Neoliberalism in the 1970s and not prior? What structural changes (materialism) facilitated the shift in ideas (idealism)?
ii) Structures: Post-WWII Geopolitical Economy:
--David Harvey (A Brief History of Neoliberalism) starts off with capitalism's crises in profitability: the post-WWII's boom (which itself was the "creative destruction" of WWII rescuing global capitalism from the Great Depression) ran into a profit squeeze by the 1970s (stagflation).
--Yanis Varoufakis (The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy) unpacks the contradictions of the post-WWII boom further: US aided Western Europe (Marshall Plan)/Japan’s recovery to absorb ("recycle", to prevent blockages that lead to crashes like heart attacks) US surplus production (with WWII over, the booming US war factories needed to keep finding buyers or risk crashing into another Depression) and create strong regional currencies for further surplus recycling abroad (lessons from the Great Depression regarding crashes spreading globally without regional buffers), using the post-WWII Bretton Woods system/US dollar as international reserve currency.
...By the 1970’s, this arrangement was no longer advantageous for the US; some point to Germany/Japan catching up in industrial competitiveness (most visibly automobiles), but Michael Hudson (Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance) stresses the US losing their surplus was due to US military spending from bombing Korea and especially Vietnam. US allies received US dollars to aid the US in these foreign genocides; US allies (infamously France) would exchange these dollars for US gold reserves, until the US became alarmed by the drain.
...So, the US adopted Volcker's "Controlled Disintegration" of the post-WWII global economy:
a) stamp down on competition (thus, the Nixon Shock to severe the US-dollar-to-gold exchange, and the Volker Shock)
b) maintain US financial domination by ensuring US control of the recycling of (now others') surpluses (thus, the need to deregulate Wall Street, leading to "Financialization" to attract foreign capital, including petrodollars; this was significant because Wall Street was actually regulated under post-WWII Bretton Woods, i.e. "financial repression").
...US deficits now fueled the recycling of global surpluses. The "Controlled Disintegration" also derailed another major competitor: Third World industrial revolution (The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South).
iii) Structures: Kondratiev waves?
--Instead of focusing on the post-WWII period, Mason expands the time frame in a World-Systems manner (see Wallerstein's World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction). Mason tries to adapt Kondratiev wave theory (50-year up-down economic swings driven by investment) with social struggle and technological change, illustrating 5 waves from 1760s to today.
--Mason takes another chapter to argue that the 4th wave (1940s-2008) is unique in that its downswing did not lead to enough class struggle (instead, Neoliberalism dominated) to force capitalism to innovate stabilizing reforms (technology for higher productivity, higher real wages). So, the next wave (5th) of Network IT is stalled.
--In my current understanding, this entire section is an interesting thought-experiment trying to connect histories of technology, labour, and political economy. If I try to make too much out of it, I worry some of the tenuous connections may evaporate…
iv) Structures: Labour Theory of Value and Marx's Crisis Theory?
--Mason furthers the dive into abstract theory; on this topic, I've been chipping away for ages in hopes of learning some tools to share:
-Marxist/Post-Keynesian Varoufakis' Modern Political Economics: Making Sense of the Post-2008 World
-Marxist/Post-Keynesian Michael Hudson's The Bubble and Beyond and Trade, Development and Foreign Debt
-Marxist/Post-Keynesian Prabhat Patnaik/Utsa Patnaik's Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
-Classical/Marxist Anwar Shaikh's Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises
-Marxist Robert Brenner's The Economics of Global Turbulence
-Post-Keynesian Steve Keen's Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor Dethroned?
--Now, Mason tries to adapt Marx’s theory of capitalist crisis to the 20th-21st century. Mason focuses on capitalism as an open system that requires external systems to allow it to adapt during crises (curiously, this is an important foundation for theories of imperialism, ex. the Patnaiks'): the major mutation: 1920s State Capitalism (especially the Military Industrial Complex).
--Mason combines Marx’s crisis of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) with Kondratiev wave theory, where such crisis leads capital retreating into Finance, which triggers search for new markets + roll-out of new technologies.
--Next, Mason tries to revive the "Labour Theory of Value" as an economic signal, given the challenges IT is presenting for market signals: re-focus economics towards the workplace instead of the market; automation, where machines add zero new (labour) value to its products.
--Better go to the source and read Marx's Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, which goes over Marx's value theory (which differs from prior variants of "Labour Theory of Value") and Marx's crisis theories (Volume 3). I'll have to revisit Mason's attempt, but I can at least appreciate Mason dissing mainstream economics' (i.e. "Neoclassical") Marginal Utility/Market equilibrium/ideology of managerialism.
3) Transition during Shocks:
--I was surprised Mason left analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism until the final quarter of his book, since the books title "Postcapitalism" made me think instantly of the genre on economic "transitions", including the one between feudalism-to-capitalism (Dobb-Sweezy debate, (Robert) Brenner debate, etc., as critiqued by Wallerstein in World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction).
--Useful themes here: Black Death's labour shortage leading to wage spike and rent fall, high wool price leading to landowner switching production from consumption to market exchange, labour shortage promoting machinery, social change from printing press, colonialism of Americas bringing power to non-aristocrats, etc.
--Mason identifies key conditions of transition to post-capitalism:
i) Information as the new printing press
ii) Long economic stagnation
iii) Shocks: climate, energy, demography (aging, migration)
iv) Transition can come from within: diverse experiments, networks
--Mason only brushes over top-level aims. His push for computer modeling of economics is vague. I agree follow-up studies on policies is neglected. “Socializing finance” deserves much more attention (Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present).
--As always, there are a plethora of great ideas to experiment with. But how do we anticipate and address reactionary violence during crises (Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism)?
September 11, 2015
By Kate Duguid
Paul Mason is that rare creature: a left-wing optimist. He isn’t mourning the death of labor power or the rise of machines. That’s because the two have converged to kill off capitalism. Well, nearly. The British journalist reckons we are close enough to a new order that he has eschewed the hyphen in the title of his new book, “Postcapitalism.”
Mason is right to question whether our current system can handle the looming prospects of climate change, long-term wage stagnation and sovereign debt crises. But his argument that information technology has halted the march of global capital is less convincing.
The self-described “Guide to Our Future” has a clear destination: 21st-century socialism. The prescription is partly heterodox - free public goods and a guaranteed basic income – and partly open-source evangelism. But Mason won’t say exactly how to get there, who’s taking us or how we’ll pay for all the free stuff.
Ever since Karl Marx first spelled out the inherent contradictions he believed would lead to capitalism’s inexorable demise, the system has defied predictions of imminent collapse. It has adapted to downturns and demographic shifts. Companies have leveraged technology to create new markets even as other industries dissolved. But Mason argues that this chaotic process of constant renewal is now at an end because of two factors: the near-obliteration of labor power and the nature of the information economy.
His labor argument is fairly straightforward. When workers had bargaining power, workplace innovations created growth. If owners of capital tried to cut costs by exploiting employees, resistance to wage suppression forced them to pioneer new business models instead. But the decline of workers’ power since the 1980s has led to wage stagnation and low-value production in the developed world, stalling capitalist ingenuity.
It’s a stretch to state that the era which gave us the iPhone hasn’t been innovative. But making machines doesn’t matter so much to Mason. In the information technology economy, the real value isn’t in the device but in the knowledge it collects. Though Google’s main product is its search engine, the company derives its worth from the data that users provide when searching for stuff online.
The marginal cost of these digital packets is close to zero. But Google can profit off that information because intellectual property laws allow the company to own it and not share it publicly. The same goes for Apple and its 99 cent digital music downloads.
In other words, capitalist ownership makes information - the basic resource of our current economy - artificially scarce even though it is infinitely reproducible. The contradiction of attempting to control resources that are abundant and created by input from the public is one that capitalism can’t solve. For Mason, this threatens the whole system.
He points to open-source projects like Wikipedia or Linux as alternatives to corporate control. The dream is that these projects are the vanguards for a whole system of collaborative projects, powered by the voluntary labor of the revolutionary class. Yet such examples of online altruism are vastly outnumbered by hyper-capitalist Silicon Valley startups that have sucked up billions of dollars of investment by promising to disrupt industries from taxi-hailing to hotels.
Mason’s agents of change, the digitally networked and highly educated, may be creating value for free every time they share a video on Facebook or perform a Google search. But that loosening of the relationship between wages and labor looks like an adaptation rather than a subversion of capitalism. Claims that the influx of technology into the workplace has decreased the need for human labor also don’t stand up to scrutiny. U.S. labor productivity hasn’t spiked in the past two decades, perhaps because offshore workers are still cheaper than some machines, or because corporate earnings are returned to shareholders rather than reinvested.
Truly cooperative alternatives to corporate distribution may remain sparse until robots really do begin to save us some labor time. Even then, it’s an open question whether our connectedness and high levels of education will provoke public intolerance for stagnation, exploitation and climate destruction. And if they do, the path from online solidarity doesn’t lead straight to open-source sharing. In the era of Edward Snowden, widespread publication of personal data may be a hard sell.
“Postcapitalism” doesn’t look like the blueprint for whatever follows the current phase of capitalism, but its urgency in the face of potentially apocalyptic change is important in itself.
Paul Mason is that rare creature: a left-wing optimist. He isn’t mourning the death of labor power or the rise of machines. That’s because the two have converged to kill off capitalism. Well, nearly. The British journalist reckons we are close enough to a new order that he has eschewed the hyphen in the title of his new book, “Postcapitalism.”
Mason is right to question whether our current system can handle the looming prospects of climate change, long-term wage stagnation and sovereign debt crises. But his argument that information technology has halted the march of global capital is less convincing.
The self-described “Guide to Our Future” has a clear destination: 21st-century socialism. The prescription is partly heterodox - free public goods and a guaranteed basic income – and partly open-source evangelism. But Mason won’t say exactly how to get there, who’s taking us or how we’ll pay for all the free stuff.
Ever since Karl Marx first spelled out the inherent contradictions he believed would lead to capitalism’s inexorable demise, the system has defied predictions of imminent collapse. It has adapted to downturns and demographic shifts. Companies have leveraged technology to create new markets even as other industries dissolved. But Mason argues that this chaotic process of constant renewal is now at an end because of two factors: the near-obliteration of labor power and the nature of the information economy.
His labor argument is fairly straightforward. When workers had bargaining power, workplace innovations created growth. If owners of capital tried to cut costs by exploiting employees, resistance to wage suppression forced them to pioneer new business models instead. But the decline of workers’ power since the 1980s has led to wage stagnation and low-value production in the developed world, stalling capitalist ingenuity.
It’s a stretch to state that the era which gave us the iPhone hasn’t been innovative. But making machines doesn’t matter so much to Mason. In the information technology economy, the real value isn’t in the device but in the knowledge it collects. Though Google’s main product is its search engine, the company derives its worth from the data that users provide when searching for stuff online.
The marginal cost of these digital packets is close to zero. But Google can profit off that information because intellectual property laws allow the company to own it and not share it publicly. The same goes for Apple and its 99 cent digital music downloads.
In other words, capitalist ownership makes information - the basic resource of our current economy - artificially scarce even though it is infinitely reproducible. The contradiction of attempting to control resources that are abundant and created by input from the public is one that capitalism can’t solve. For Mason, this threatens the whole system.
He points to open-source projects like Wikipedia or Linux as alternatives to corporate control. The dream is that these projects are the vanguards for a whole system of collaborative projects, powered by the voluntary labor of the revolutionary class. Yet such examples of online altruism are vastly outnumbered by hyper-capitalist Silicon Valley startups that have sucked up billions of dollars of investment by promising to disrupt industries from taxi-hailing to hotels.
Mason’s agents of change, the digitally networked and highly educated, may be creating value for free every time they share a video on Facebook or perform a Google search. But that loosening of the relationship between wages and labor looks like an adaptation rather than a subversion of capitalism. Claims that the influx of technology into the workplace has decreased the need for human labor also don’t stand up to scrutiny. U.S. labor productivity hasn’t spiked in the past two decades, perhaps because offshore workers are still cheaper than some machines, or because corporate earnings are returned to shareholders rather than reinvested.
Truly cooperative alternatives to corporate distribution may remain sparse until robots really do begin to save us some labor time. Even then, it’s an open question whether our connectedness and high levels of education will provoke public intolerance for stagnation, exploitation and climate destruction. And if they do, the path from online solidarity doesn’t lead straight to open-source sharing. In the era of Edward Snowden, widespread publication of personal data may be a hard sell.
“Postcapitalism” doesn’t look like the blueprint for whatever follows the current phase of capitalism, but its urgency in the face of potentially apocalyptic change is important in itself.
June 5, 2021
Perskaičiau jau prieš kurį laiką, bet nežinojau, nei kaip pakomentuoti, nei kaip įvertinti. "Postkapitalizmas" - žurnalisto parašytas kairuoliškas nonfictionas, pristatantis įvairias kapitalizmo ir kapitalizmo kritikos sąvokas bei idėjas. Čia (savaime aišku?) atsispiriama nuo Marxo, bet, užuot kritikavęs šiandieninę santvarką kaip mašinizuotą ir nužmogintą, Masonas mano, jog mašinos-->technologijos gali padėt pakeisti kapitalistinius santykius į postkapitalistinius.
Kaip vieną iš išlaisvinančių technologijų pavyzdžių Masonas pasitelkia Vikipediją - projektą, kuris neneša pelno, bet gyvuoja labai sėkmingai, palaikomas vien kolektyvinio darbo ir kolektyvinio entuziazmo. Vikipedija išties dėkingas pavyzdys. Bet kas dar galėtų būti toks išsilaisvinimas, apmokestintų santykių pakeitimas? Vinted - ir tai yra biznio vieta, feisbuko "turgavietė" ir zero waste atiduotuvės - ar jos tikrai tokios populiarios ir revoliucingos? Įsikvėpusi Masono, vieną sykį vietoj tarpmiestinio autobuso nuvažiavau su "piratininkais" (atsiminiau, kaip studijų metais intensyviai rėmiau šį versliuką), bet buvo tik nyku, nesaugu, 0 pasitikėjimo tuo "bendradarbiavimu", ir tie 2 sutaupyti eurai neatrodė labai revoliucingi.
Ar visa kapitalizmo kritika turi turėti vizijos / utopijos formą? Aš nežinau, o ir šiaip nesu daug apsiskaičius apie kapitalizmo kritiką (nors norėčiau būti). Masono piešiamas paveiksliukas tokią formą įgyja. Čia technologijos išlaisvina žmones nuo nereikalingo darbo, tad jie gali kurti geresnę visuomenę, negrįstą išnaudojimu (sounds like Atėnai); čia intelektinė nuosavybė priklauso visiems, menas priklauso visiems (smells like spells). O už jo kūrimą apmokama bazinėmis pajamomis. Samprata man buvo nauja, nors, pasirodo, tokia praktika jau net buvo pritaikyta Skandinavijoje; aišku, ji neapsaugo ir neišlaisvina nuo išnaudojimo, - bet ar ne jos savitas, protingas variantas yra Estijos eksperimentas mokėti algas rašytojams? Aišku, ne visiems, aišku, ne visą laiką, bet - kaupiant stažą, suteikiant soc. garantijas, prilyginant meno kūrimą "normaliam" darbui, o ne prekiavimui rankdarbiais prie -5 'C per vietinę mugę. (Ir tai tie prekiautojai turbūt uždirba daugiau, nei rašytojos ir rašytojai gauna honoraro iš leidyklų.)
Man pačiai buvo labai sveika - ir baisu - iš knygos suprasti, kaip susiformuoja finansinė krizė ir kuo pavojingos paskolos, kaip bankai iš esmės gali veikt kaip medžiotojų būrelis - susitardami, jei kam nors blogiau, patys pasirinkti iš savo klientų, jei ko trūksta. Toje šviesoje taip baugiai atrodo visos LRS pastangos apmokestinti bankus... šiaip prie šitos šviesos itin daug kas baugiai atrodo. Ne Masono, o LRS šviesą turiu omeny.
Apskritai skaitydama galvojau: nu įdomu, gal aš dar pamatysiu, kaip kapitalizmas pasikeičia, kaip atsiranda įvairesnių ekonominių santykių. Kol kas tai atrodo - kaip utopija. Ypač LT. Nes visi Masono minimi sprendimai, galimybės atsiremia į viena - ar tai kas nors leis? Nes be leidimo, be patvarkymo iš viršaus, atrodo, niekas nevyksta, kad ir kaip viltingai atrodytų jaunimo protestai. Gal "Gyvenimas per brangus" įsteigs partiją ir nueis į valdžią? Balsuočiau, - bet ar "eiti į valdžią" šitam kontekste jau nėra pasidavimas (tai gal neis)? Ar įmanomos kitos žmonių susibūrimo / bendradarbiavimo formos, negrįstos "leido / liepė"? Masonas tuo tiki, o aš, sėdėdama savo burbule, kurį vargais negalais bandau išlaikyti tyrą nuo bookstagramo nuotraukų su sudžiovinta gėle vazoje, dekoruojančia knygą apie Aušvicą*, - taip, first world problems, - nežinau. Gal ir nepamatysiu. Gal ir ne visos idėjos sklando ore, o jei sklando, gal aš sėdžiu vakuume. So many questions, so little I read.
* Pavyzdys fikcinis, sutapimas su realiais asmenimis yra grynai atsitiktinis.
Kaip vieną iš išlaisvinančių technologijų pavyzdžių Masonas pasitelkia Vikipediją - projektą, kuris neneša pelno, bet gyvuoja labai sėkmingai, palaikomas vien kolektyvinio darbo ir kolektyvinio entuziazmo. Vikipedija išties dėkingas pavyzdys. Bet kas dar galėtų būti toks išsilaisvinimas, apmokestintų santykių pakeitimas? Vinted - ir tai yra biznio vieta, feisbuko "turgavietė" ir zero waste atiduotuvės - ar jos tikrai tokios populiarios ir revoliucingos? Įsikvėpusi Masono, vieną sykį vietoj tarpmiestinio autobuso nuvažiavau su "piratininkais" (atsiminiau, kaip studijų metais intensyviai rėmiau šį versliuką), bet buvo tik nyku, nesaugu, 0 pasitikėjimo tuo "bendradarbiavimu", ir tie 2 sutaupyti eurai neatrodė labai revoliucingi.
Ar visa kapitalizmo kritika turi turėti vizijos / utopijos formą? Aš nežinau, o ir šiaip nesu daug apsiskaičius apie kapitalizmo kritiką (nors norėčiau būti). Masono piešiamas paveiksliukas tokią formą įgyja. Čia technologijos išlaisvina žmones nuo nereikalingo darbo, tad jie gali kurti geresnę visuomenę, negrįstą išnaudojimu (sounds like Atėnai); čia intelektinė nuosavybė priklauso visiems, menas priklauso visiems (smells like spells). O už jo kūrimą apmokama bazinėmis pajamomis. Samprata man buvo nauja, nors, pasirodo, tokia praktika jau net buvo pritaikyta Skandinavijoje; aišku, ji neapsaugo ir neišlaisvina nuo išnaudojimo, - bet ar ne jos savitas, protingas variantas yra Estijos eksperimentas mokėti algas rašytojams? Aišku, ne visiems, aišku, ne visą laiką, bet - kaupiant stažą, suteikiant soc. garantijas, prilyginant meno kūrimą "normaliam" darbui, o ne prekiavimui rankdarbiais prie -5 'C per vietinę mugę. (Ir tai tie prekiautojai turbūt uždirba daugiau, nei rašytojos ir rašytojai gauna honoraro iš leidyklų.)
Man pačiai buvo labai sveika - ir baisu - iš knygos suprasti, kaip susiformuoja finansinė krizė ir kuo pavojingos paskolos, kaip bankai iš esmės gali veikt kaip medžiotojų būrelis - susitardami, jei kam nors blogiau, patys pasirinkti iš savo klientų, jei ko trūksta. Toje šviesoje taip baugiai atrodo visos LRS pastangos apmokestinti bankus... šiaip prie šitos šviesos itin daug kas baugiai atrodo. Ne Masono, o LRS šviesą turiu omeny.
Apskritai skaitydama galvojau: nu įdomu, gal aš dar pamatysiu, kaip kapitalizmas pasikeičia, kaip atsiranda įvairesnių ekonominių santykių. Kol kas tai atrodo - kaip utopija. Ypač LT. Nes visi Masono minimi sprendimai, galimybės atsiremia į viena - ar tai kas nors leis? Nes be leidimo, be patvarkymo iš viršaus, atrodo, niekas nevyksta, kad ir kaip viltingai atrodytų jaunimo protestai. Gal "Gyvenimas per brangus" įsteigs partiją ir nueis į valdžią? Balsuočiau, - bet ar "eiti į valdžią" šitam kontekste jau nėra pasidavimas (tai gal neis)? Ar įmanomos kitos žmonių susibūrimo / bendradarbiavimo formos, negrįstos "leido / liepė"? Masonas tuo tiki, o aš, sėdėdama savo burbule, kurį vargais negalais bandau išlaikyti tyrą nuo bookstagramo nuotraukų su sudžiovinta gėle vazoje, dekoruojančia knygą apie Aušvicą*, - taip, first world problems, - nežinau. Gal ir nepamatysiu. Gal ir ne visos idėjos sklando ore, o jei sklando, gal aš sėdžiu vakuume. So many questions, so little I read.
* Pavyzdys fikcinis, sutapimas su realiais asmenimis yra grynai atsitiktinis.
September 30, 2015
There are books we want to read, books we think we ought to read, and books we need to read. This one falls in the latter category, along with Naomi Klein's 'This Changes Everything' and George Monbiot's 'Rewilding' - actually, anything by either of these authors.
Paul Mason is a man for our time. He has reported from all the major political events of the past years and can tell us what was happening behind the scenes - from the ECB's annihilation of Greece for having the temerity to vote in an anti-austerity government to the left-wing plebian upsurge in Scotland that very nearly broke away from the austerity model.
Reading this in the week of the Labour conference with Jeremy Corbyn facing the tide of right wing hysteria and the frantic machinations of the neoliberals is fascinating. What Mason has done is put modern economic systems into perspective in a human way, so that we can see why the current system is failing and what *might* come after it. If you're not ready to opt out of capitalism by the end, you haven't been paying attention.
But his ideas of how we might structure a sustainable future require all of us working together - which is why it's a must-read. Go for it.
Paul Mason is a man for our time. He has reported from all the major political events of the past years and can tell us what was happening behind the scenes - from the ECB's annihilation of Greece for having the temerity to vote in an anti-austerity government to the left-wing plebian upsurge in Scotland that very nearly broke away from the austerity model.
Reading this in the week of the Labour conference with Jeremy Corbyn facing the tide of right wing hysteria and the frantic machinations of the neoliberals is fascinating. What Mason has done is put modern economic systems into perspective in a human way, so that we can see why the current system is failing and what *might* come after it. If you're not ready to opt out of capitalism by the end, you haven't been paying attention.
But his ideas of how we might structure a sustainable future require all of us working together - which is why it's a must-read. Go for it.
October 21, 2016
Very good effort by the author to recap our modern history and how neoliberalism came into play.
However, I wouldn't call it a Guide to Our Future as he barely ever says HOW we could do it, but merely mentions the obvious.
I gave it 2 stars as its title was very misleading.
I'd start by reading the last chapter first to see the author's point of view, but the first chapters are very interesting economic history.
However, I wouldn't call it a Guide to Our Future as he barely ever says HOW we could do it, but merely mentions the obvious.
I gave it 2 stars as its title was very misleading.
I'd start by reading the last chapter first to see the author's point of view, but the first chapters are very interesting economic history.
July 21, 2021
Watching Bezos's wealth represented as a mountain of rice compared to the few grains representing your common-or-garden millionaire or his puerile dick-swinging space race with Branson I struggle to believe there are many who would disagree with the notion that capitalism has gone too far. Those who don't I suspect are those who believe in the less than winning the lottery odds of becoming the next Jeff.
So it was with interest that I picked up Mason's book hoping for some optimistic vision of a future where long queues for food banks are no longer a feature on my way to the library while billionaires fritter their wealth adding to the world's pollution. Disappointingly, but not unexpectedly, the shortest section is devoted to how a post-capitalist world might work. The first section is interesting, if not the easiest read despite Mason doing his best to explain them in a way accessible to the non-economist, detailing the history of capitalism and how we got here.
There were some interesting insights – that capitalism has only been around in its current form for around 200 years and yet we are so fully enslaved to the system we cannot comprehend any other way of living but in general I found a lot of his theories and proposals lacked the cohesive thinking that he claims prevent the anti-capitalist movements from gaining traction.
For example he says that capitalism is naturally on the wane – that growth is stagnant and will remain so yet doesn't really make explicit that this is patently obvious. There cannot be unending growth on a finite planet. Examples of this are the big companies running out of countries to offshore work to in order to cut workplace costs. As the workers in each place demand and gain wages equivalent to those of domestic workers the companies move to a new area of the world where the process is repeated and for a short while profits increase but quickly tail off and as we know there are only limited countries in the world. (Although this may explain the Billionaire's club of space exploration).
He discusses how the precariousness of the planet in terms of environmental destruction will propel us to a more economically balanced future, citing that the oil companies are sitting on huge reserves that they cannot release without breaking the agreements to reduce the use of fossil fuels and failing to meet the targets of restricting global temperature increase. All well and good but this is as he discusses China's increased pollution as they become increasingly industrialized and if other nations follow that lead is he really naïve enough to believe they won't be dealt oil? His theory is assuming that we don't see another Trump who walks out and withdraws membership of these agreements.
He also doesn't explore the way that green energy rather than democratize energy has (in the UK at least) just reinforced the old capitalist values. Why are wind farms the go to green energy source here? Because they need a lot of land and serendipitously a lot of land is owned by the wealthy and /or aristocracy and so they reap the benefits and subsidies, no departure from the rich get richer status quo.
Finally his belief that the information revolution will set us free while being persuasive and tantalisingly possible ignores the inherent issues with all that information that we are grappling with today and the link between this revolution and the increasing chasm between rich and poor. To take the second point, he posits the idea that we are starting to see a society that trades services and skills and that we are getting used to getting things for free, yay. But what he doesn't seem to make the link between is that the rise in everyone being a writer, a photographer, a musician, reviewer means that these once paid careers are no longer paying the rent. Even established photographers struggle to make any liveable income from their art/career and this has in turn led to the rise in shit jobs; low-paid, high intensity, zero-hour contracted jobs that benefit, guess who? Oh yeah the rich!
All that has happened is that in careers where it was already difficult to make a decent income it has now become almost impossible.
His vision of a future where machines and computers make work unnecessary (beautifully skirting over the fact that with every labour saving device that was intended to free up our leisure time it just gave us more hours which were spent at work lining big companies pockets) is reliant on data being collected on everything from each individual so that there is never surplus, always enough and everything runs smoothly. Maybe this is utopian, but how many of us are willing to swap a few billionaires for what essentially is a surveillance state. Pre-covid I would have said not many but looking at the way the world has been compliant maybe Mason is on to something.
Perhaps I am one of those people he bemoans that cannot imagine a world other than in its destructive capitalistic glory, but I can be converted and despite all my criticisms here I think Mason has helped me along the path to a new possibility.
So it was with interest that I picked up Mason's book hoping for some optimistic vision of a future where long queues for food banks are no longer a feature on my way to the library while billionaires fritter their wealth adding to the world's pollution. Disappointingly, but not unexpectedly, the shortest section is devoted to how a post-capitalist world might work. The first section is interesting, if not the easiest read despite Mason doing his best to explain them in a way accessible to the non-economist, detailing the history of capitalism and how we got here.
There were some interesting insights – that capitalism has only been around in its current form for around 200 years and yet we are so fully enslaved to the system we cannot comprehend any other way of living but in general I found a lot of his theories and proposals lacked the cohesive thinking that he claims prevent the anti-capitalist movements from gaining traction.
For example he says that capitalism is naturally on the wane – that growth is stagnant and will remain so yet doesn't really make explicit that this is patently obvious. There cannot be unending growth on a finite planet. Examples of this are the big companies running out of countries to offshore work to in order to cut workplace costs. As the workers in each place demand and gain wages equivalent to those of domestic workers the companies move to a new area of the world where the process is repeated and for a short while profits increase but quickly tail off and as we know there are only limited countries in the world. (Although this may explain the Billionaire's club of space exploration).
He discusses how the precariousness of the planet in terms of environmental destruction will propel us to a more economically balanced future, citing that the oil companies are sitting on huge reserves that they cannot release without breaking the agreements to reduce the use of fossil fuels and failing to meet the targets of restricting global temperature increase. All well and good but this is as he discusses China's increased pollution as they become increasingly industrialized and if other nations follow that lead is he really naïve enough to believe they won't be dealt oil? His theory is assuming that we don't see another Trump who walks out and withdraws membership of these agreements.
He also doesn't explore the way that green energy rather than democratize energy has (in the UK at least) just reinforced the old capitalist values. Why are wind farms the go to green energy source here? Because they need a lot of land and serendipitously a lot of land is owned by the wealthy and /or aristocracy and so they reap the benefits and subsidies, no departure from the rich get richer status quo.
Finally his belief that the information revolution will set us free while being persuasive and tantalisingly possible ignores the inherent issues with all that information that we are grappling with today and the link between this revolution and the increasing chasm between rich and poor. To take the second point, he posits the idea that we are starting to see a society that trades services and skills and that we are getting used to getting things for free, yay. But what he doesn't seem to make the link between is that the rise in everyone being a writer, a photographer, a musician, reviewer means that these once paid careers are no longer paying the rent. Even established photographers struggle to make any liveable income from their art/career and this has in turn led to the rise in shit jobs; low-paid, high intensity, zero-hour contracted jobs that benefit, guess who? Oh yeah the rich!
All that has happened is that in careers where it was already difficult to make a decent income it has now become almost impossible.
His vision of a future where machines and computers make work unnecessary (beautifully skirting over the fact that with every labour saving device that was intended to free up our leisure time it just gave us more hours which were spent at work lining big companies pockets) is reliant on data being collected on everything from each individual so that there is never surplus, always enough and everything runs smoothly. Maybe this is utopian, but how many of us are willing to swap a few billionaires for what essentially is a surveillance state. Pre-covid I would have said not many but looking at the way the world has been compliant maybe Mason is on to something.
Perhaps I am one of those people he bemoans that cannot imagine a world other than in its destructive capitalistic glory, but I can be converted and despite all my criticisms here I think Mason has helped me along the path to a new possibility.
August 12, 2023
Wonderful book - there is so much I don't know...some wonderful ideas but will anyone have the courage to implement them? Probably the countries of Scandinavia will be the first to try. I hope so because otherwise these ideas will never be given the chance to flower in the real world.
September 22, 2021
3.5 Stars!
“In Gaza, in August 2014, I spent ten days in a community being systematically destroyed by drone strikes, shelling and sniper fire. Fifteen hundred civilians were killed, one third of them children. In February 2015, I saw the US Congress give twenty five standing ovations to the man who ordered the attacks.”
“Banks turned to consumers as a new source of profit, and to a set of high-risk, complex activities that we call investment banking…Consumers became direct participants in the financial markets: credit cards, overdrafts, mortgages, student loans and motor car loans became part of everyday life. A growing proportion of profit in the economy is now being made not by employing workers, or providing goods and services that they buy with their wages, but by lending to them.”
“The urban landscape of today-outlets providing expensive money, cheap labour and free food-is the visual symbol of what neo-liberalism has achieved. Stagnant wages were replaced by borrowing: our lives were financialized.”
“For the developed world the best of capitalism is behind us, and for the rest it will be over in our lifetime.”
“So I want to propose an alternative: first, we save globalization by ditching neo-liberalism; then we save the planet-and rescue ourselves from turmoil and inequality-by moving beyond capitalism itself.”
“Nazism was German capitalism’s final solution to the power of organized labour: in 1933, unions were outlawed and socialist parties destroyed.”
“The Allies actually imposed welfare states, trade unions rights and democratic constitutions on Italy, Germany and Japan, as punishment for their elites and as an obstacle to their re-emergence as fascist powers.”
April 25, 2024
Review coming soon
February 11, 2018
An alright book. One weird thing is despite the title, most of the book is actually about the history of capitalism (and a highly selective one) than about a blueprint for a new economic system. The blueprint part is probably just the last chapter, and even then it's just a series of prescriptions without solid justification. Sure there are parallels between the trends highlighted in the previous chapter and the prescriptions, but it's not very convincing to me. Plus, many of the prescriptions are just like "X should be discouraged, Y should be encouraged," etc. and unclear how that can be implemented without convincing a very large number of legislators and elected officials. It's not all bad, the history part is sometimes informative, but IMO too unsystematic to be super useful.
August 11, 2015
This really was a positive external shock to my thinking, reviving my once lost interest in socioeconomical litterature by building a well-thought-out (and credibly materialitsic) bridge between historical Marxism and ahistorical ���mainstream” economics. True to the spirit of the classical critics of capitalism, the book does not just describe the world as it is and has been, but also outlines a transitional program of action out of current crises looming above humanity. Much to think of for a long time.
April 17, 2016
This book was utter drivel. The author has no understanding of Marxism and incredibly premises much of his theory on a notion of "long-term" economic cycles; a fit-the-regression approach that offers no insight to understanding the complex relationships embodied in economies. I'm surprised he didn't commence his cyclical approach with the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. It's fascinating that bogus scholars such as Mr. Mason fit their own analyses to the brief data sets that they cite. Don't waste your precious time.
August 29, 2020
Reading this book made me keenly aware of one thing: I don't have a nearly good enough understanding of how the economy works. The author presents a lot of interesting arguments about how the economy got to be the way it is, how capitalism is likely to collapse, and a proposal for an alternative, and I realized I lack the tools and mental model to fully understand or debate these topics. The book is reasonably well-written, so I still got something out of it, but I think I'm going to have to do a bunch of more basic reading on economics and come back to this one :) Recommendations welcome!
Below are some of the notes I got out of the book, though these are far more sparse than I'd normally have for a book of this density and importance. Apologies if there are inaccuracies or misunderstandings here; as I said, I'm still trying to wrap my head around some of these ideas, so corrections are welcome too.
- The core argument of the book is that (neoliberal) capitalism is on the verge of collapse. Capitalist economies go through crises on a roughly 50 year cycle, and while the economy has recovered in the past, there have been a number of critical changes in the modern world that will require a fundamental rethinking of how the economy works.
- What are those changes? The main ones discussed in the book are: (a) climate change, (b) an aging population, (c) globalism petering out and wages equalizing, (d) economic inequality, (e) finance becoming larger and larger part of the economy, accounting for something like 40% of corporate profits these days, so we're making more and more money from credit, interest, speculation, and other "fictional value" rather than on actual labor or goods or "real value", and (f) most importantly, the rise of the information economy.
- The information economy is the most important factor because it completely changes the mechanics of supply and demand. In traditional economics, supply and demand is based on scarcity, as the supply of any product is limited: there is a cost to creating each "widget" and if one person owns the widget, another person doesn't. In the information economy, there is no more scarcity, as supply is virtually infinite: the cost to copy information (e.g., an iTunes track or a piece of software) is virtually zero and 1 person can use it just as easily as 1 million. The only limit to the supply is artificial: e.g., licensing and IP laws. When cost is 0 and supply is infinite, supply and demand is no longer relevant.
- Moreover, a greater and greater part of the value of even physical products is now in their information. For example, the materials it takes to create a modern jet engine are negligible in cost compared to the value of the information about how to create one. The vast majority of the work to create a jet engine these days happens on computers—3D software, calculations, simulations, and so on—and compared to that, turning the information into a physical product is just a final, small, relatively inexpensive step. So the real value is in the information, but once again, the supply here is effectively infinite, as that information can be easily copied and shared.
- And a great deal of this valuable information is now created for free! The rise of open source and open collaborative projects such as Wikipedia is a major shift. We've found that once we have the technology for people to do "non market" work, they are more than happy to do so. There are massive armies of volunteers who are now creating, completely for free, a huge amount of value which can be copied infinitely. Traditional businesses can't compete with this sort of thing; and perhaps the traditional capitalist economy can't survive in such an environment.
- Over the centuries, we have transformed from an economy where the main actor was man, to one where it was man doing all the work with tools, to one where it was man doing the work with the help of a machine, to one where the machine does most of the work and man supervises, and now to one where the machine does all the work, and man's role is to manage the knowledge that goes into the machine. Of course, machines have an up-front cost and wear down over time, but what if we had machines that cost essentially nothing and never wore down? It turns out we do! We call these machines "software." Software can effectively run forever, does not wear down, and can be copied at no cost; the real value in software is in the knowledge that goes into it. So whereas the value used to be in owning the materials and doing labor, nowadays, the vast majority of the value is in knowledge.
- But knowledge can't truly be owned. Every bit of knowledge is inseparably intertwined with all other knowledge. For example, even if I'm writing proprietary code for some company, the code I write uses libraries and frameworks (often open source) written by someone else, runs on top an operating system written by someone else (e.g., the open source Linux), sends information over a network (the Internet) written and maintained by someone else, and so on. The reality is that most of the value of my "proprietary" product is actually outside that product, my contribution is only a tiny part, and therefore, I can't really say I own that product. In other words, our notion of ownership is collapsing, as all knowledge is fundamentally socially owned.
- Socially owned knowledge is apparently something Marx wrote about in a set of unpublished notes. He talks about the idea of "general intelligence" and how workers are able to deploy the knowledge of all of society. This is a zero marginal cost society—products cost nothing, supply is infinite, people work for free—where the boundaries between work and play melt away. Marx ended up abandoning this set of thoughts, as they weren't quite relevant in the 19th century, but it seems fairly prescient now.
- So where we are today is that we need to transition from a world of hierarchies to a world of networks. We need to move from the old model of ownership, monopolies, and IP to a new world where we socially create goods with nearly zero cost, using different models of value and exchange (e.g., gifts, brand, reputation, etc). We need to replace capitalism with something new. Replacing capitalism may feel impossible or utopian, but the reality is that capitalism itself is only about 200 years old—there was a world before capitalism and there will be a world after it. The question is, what do we replace it with and how do we make the transition?
- The final part of the book talks tries to answer these questions. Mason presents a lot of lofty goals—e.g., fight global warming, stabilize the global finance system, and improve technology to the point where work is purely voluntary—but the concrete details on how to accomplish these are somewhat lacking. The means Mason mentions are: (a) using our massive quantities of data to model and test policies on computers before implementing them in the real world, (b) tackling public debt by closing down offshore banking and holding interest rates below inflation rates, (c) promoting cooperative and non-profit forms of work and creative commons production through state support/regulations, (d) breaking up or socializing monopolies, (e) socializing the finance system, and (f) paying everyone a universal basic income. Some of these ideas make sense and some sound impractical, but to be honest, I don't have a good mental model of how all these items come together, how this new world is "post capitalist" (as a lot of it sounds the same as today?), and whether this world really solves all the challenges Mason brought up earlier in the book. So while the book does a good job of highlighting the problems with capitalism and modern society, I found the solutions it proposes to be lacking and unsatisfying.
Below are some of the notes I got out of the book, though these are far more sparse than I'd normally have for a book of this density and importance. Apologies if there are inaccuracies or misunderstandings here; as I said, I'm still trying to wrap my head around some of these ideas, so corrections are welcome too.
- The core argument of the book is that (neoliberal) capitalism is on the verge of collapse. Capitalist economies go through crises on a roughly 50 year cycle, and while the economy has recovered in the past, there have been a number of critical changes in the modern world that will require a fundamental rethinking of how the economy works.
- What are those changes? The main ones discussed in the book are: (a) climate change, (b) an aging population, (c) globalism petering out and wages equalizing, (d) economic inequality, (e) finance becoming larger and larger part of the economy, accounting for something like 40% of corporate profits these days, so we're making more and more money from credit, interest, speculation, and other "fictional value" rather than on actual labor or goods or "real value", and (f) most importantly, the rise of the information economy.
- The information economy is the most important factor because it completely changes the mechanics of supply and demand. In traditional economics, supply and demand is based on scarcity, as the supply of any product is limited: there is a cost to creating each "widget" and if one person owns the widget, another person doesn't. In the information economy, there is no more scarcity, as supply is virtually infinite: the cost to copy information (e.g., an iTunes track or a piece of software) is virtually zero and 1 person can use it just as easily as 1 million. The only limit to the supply is artificial: e.g., licensing and IP laws. When cost is 0 and supply is infinite, supply and demand is no longer relevant.
- Moreover, a greater and greater part of the value of even physical products is now in their information. For example, the materials it takes to create a modern jet engine are negligible in cost compared to the value of the information about how to create one. The vast majority of the work to create a jet engine these days happens on computers—3D software, calculations, simulations, and so on—and compared to that, turning the information into a physical product is just a final, small, relatively inexpensive step. So the real value is in the information, but once again, the supply here is effectively infinite, as that information can be easily copied and shared.
- And a great deal of this valuable information is now created for free! The rise of open source and open collaborative projects such as Wikipedia is a major shift. We've found that once we have the technology for people to do "non market" work, they are more than happy to do so. There are massive armies of volunteers who are now creating, completely for free, a huge amount of value which can be copied infinitely. Traditional businesses can't compete with this sort of thing; and perhaps the traditional capitalist economy can't survive in such an environment.
- Over the centuries, we have transformed from an economy where the main actor was man, to one where it was man doing all the work with tools, to one where it was man doing the work with the help of a machine, to one where the machine does most of the work and man supervises, and now to one where the machine does all the work, and man's role is to manage the knowledge that goes into the machine. Of course, machines have an up-front cost and wear down over time, but what if we had machines that cost essentially nothing and never wore down? It turns out we do! We call these machines "software." Software can effectively run forever, does not wear down, and can be copied at no cost; the real value in software is in the knowledge that goes into it. So whereas the value used to be in owning the materials and doing labor, nowadays, the vast majority of the value is in knowledge.
- But knowledge can't truly be owned. Every bit of knowledge is inseparably intertwined with all other knowledge. For example, even if I'm writing proprietary code for some company, the code I write uses libraries and frameworks (often open source) written by someone else, runs on top an operating system written by someone else (e.g., the open source Linux), sends information over a network (the Internet) written and maintained by someone else, and so on. The reality is that most of the value of my "proprietary" product is actually outside that product, my contribution is only a tiny part, and therefore, I can't really say I own that product. In other words, our notion of ownership is collapsing, as all knowledge is fundamentally socially owned.
- Socially owned knowledge is apparently something Marx wrote about in a set of unpublished notes. He talks about the idea of "general intelligence" and how workers are able to deploy the knowledge of all of society. This is a zero marginal cost society—products cost nothing, supply is infinite, people work for free—where the boundaries between work and play melt away. Marx ended up abandoning this set of thoughts, as they weren't quite relevant in the 19th century, but it seems fairly prescient now.
- So where we are today is that we need to transition from a world of hierarchies to a world of networks. We need to move from the old model of ownership, monopolies, and IP to a new world where we socially create goods with nearly zero cost, using different models of value and exchange (e.g., gifts, brand, reputation, etc). We need to replace capitalism with something new. Replacing capitalism may feel impossible or utopian, but the reality is that capitalism itself is only about 200 years old—there was a world before capitalism and there will be a world after it. The question is, what do we replace it with and how do we make the transition?
- The final part of the book talks tries to answer these questions. Mason presents a lot of lofty goals—e.g., fight global warming, stabilize the global finance system, and improve technology to the point where work is purely voluntary—but the concrete details on how to accomplish these are somewhat lacking. The means Mason mentions are: (a) using our massive quantities of data to model and test policies on computers before implementing them in the real world, (b) tackling public debt by closing down offshore banking and holding interest rates below inflation rates, (c) promoting cooperative and non-profit forms of work and creative commons production through state support/regulations, (d) breaking up or socializing monopolies, (e) socializing the finance system, and (f) paying everyone a universal basic income. Some of these ideas make sense and some sound impractical, but to be honest, I don't have a good mental model of how all these items come together, how this new world is "post capitalist" (as a lot of it sounds the same as today?), and whether this world really solves all the challenges Mason brought up earlier in the book. So while the book does a good job of highlighting the problems with capitalism and modern society, I found the solutions it proposes to be lacking and unsatisfying.
February 1, 2019
I was really excited about the promise of this book after reading the first 3rd. It seemed to be a big idea book weaving in Marxism, capitalism, and the new information age. In the end, it was not that. The theoretical chapters were followed up with a catalog of how things have changed and then overly simplistic proposals for the future. He also was not right on the money issues--he talks about reckless spending and seems to be pushing for austerity, but then talks about UBI without connecting it to the monetary issues. There's a lot of good stuff in here, but I don't think it comes together into a coherent narrative.
April 11, 2017
Paul Mason’s 2015 book, Postcapitalism A Guide to Our Future, provides a striking visualization of a possible exit from the disasters of our current capitalist world system to something else: a more life-affirming, empathetic, creativity-fostering and fun world of cooperative progress. But before we get there, we need to manage a couple of problems that capitalism has created for us which present, as the title to Mason’s penultimate chapter suggests, a rational case for panic. And mind you, this book was published before the United States elected a mentally disordered narcissist with the vocabulary of a 4-year old as its President. These problems are, of course: climate change, debt overhang, demographic dynamics and automation.
The picture that Mason paints is starkly visible at the beginning of the twenty-first century. How will we possibly exit from an apparently inevitable conveyor belt to carbon pollution oblivion? How will an aging population maintain social peace? How will the reign of fiat money end? How will we “earn a living” when information and the products made from information have “zero marginal cost?” For me Mason's book is marred by a really irrelevant homage to Marx’s labour theory of value. Irrelevant because what Mason visualizes is closer to the end visualized in Keynes’s “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” than that in Capital. It is actually closer to the picture that a young Marx painted in the Grundrisse in the famous “Fragment on Capital” and then ignored or abandoned in Capital. This is the problem that if machines become fully implemented in our economy there becomes less and less need for the labour that Marx and Mason imagine is the source of value. But let’s get to those problems that capitalism has thrown at us first.
Climate Change
The scariest problem is clearly climate change. According to the International Panel on Climate Change, our climate has warmed by approximately one degree Centigrade since the beginning of the twentieth century. That is nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit. The World Resources Institute projects that 90% of coral reefs will be in danger by 2030 and all of them by 2050, due to ocean warming and acidification. Sea level rise is has recently been projected at over 8 feet by 2100 resulting from melting of land ice in the polar regions. These changes will clearly have devastating effects the lives of those that follow us. The oceans provide livelihood for tens of millions of us. Our coastal cities will need total rebuilding or abandonment as sea levels rise. These problems are already happening. What can be done to prevent them from doing the most damage?
The average carbon dioxide concentration in our planet’s atmosphere just reached 400 parts per million (See here.) US Department of Energy measurements of ice cores have shown that Earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration had not been greater than 300 parts per million for 800,000 years prior to 1950. Almost all climate scientists that are not working for the fossil fuel industry understand that global warming, sea level rise and ocean acidification are due to burning of fossil fuels which transform reduced carbon buried millions of years ago into carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas. It is the burning of fossil fuel that causes global warming, sea level rise and ocean acidification. There is no other cause that accounts for the effects that we have seen. (See the IPCC reports, for example, or US EPA pages put together before they are deleted by the Trump administration.)
This is a really scary prospect and it is clear that capitalism is the reason it is so difficult to manage. Why? Simply because capitalism is based on a system of "free trade" and "free enterprise" that ignores "externalities." In a pure capitalist state, there is no penalty for dumping pollution into the commons. In such a world, the capitalist makes a rational case that the long-term damage done to others will not come back to harm him, leaving him free to enjoy the profits from his investments in the short term. Of course, as Karl Polanyi made clear, such pure capitalism could not long exist. The horrors of Dickens's Victorian Age for the poor have since his time been ameliorated to some extent by countervailing actions in the public interest by governments. The problem with climate change is that the interventions required to curb it are staunchly resisted by the owners of fossil fuel companies who have in the past been subsidized by these same governments and have sufficient power to influence these governments to not take actions that clearly are needed to avert catastrophe.
Mason has a clear vision of the problem. He references the International Energy Administration, which writes,
The same IEA document estimates that world-wide fossil fuel subsidies in 2014 were $550 billion, four times more than subsidies for renewable energy sources.
So how will this possibly not end badly? Well, Mason is not convinced that "market solutions" like carbon taxes will be effective in ameliorating the worst consequences of climate change. What then? He writes,
To this I say, "Here, here!," but based on personal experience, trying to convince a status quo clinging community to purchase its own electrical distribution infrastructure from a fossil fuel giant is a daunting task, and this much less than trying to socialize the failing energy companies themselves.
Demographics and Government Debt
Mason points out that the world's populations are aging fast.
The problem that Mason sees is that debt overhang caused, he thinks, by replacement of the gold standard by fiat money, has been part of a run-up in stock market pricing that cannot continue, resulting in great threat to pension funds. With an aging population and slower growth and a smaller workforce, this seems a spiral to impoverishment. With more than 50 percent of all private pension money invested in government debt, 40 percent of this foreign owned, "No matter how safe a company pension fund looks now, if 60 percent of all countries' bonds become junk - so that to lend to them becomes a crazy proposition - the private pension system will not survive." He says, "Are you panicking rationally, yet?"
The Four Waves and Wayward Bolsheviks
Mason is very fond of the Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratieff, executed by firing squad in his cell in a Stalinist prison in 1938. Kondradieff's
Mason sees four major waves in modern capitalism up to our current (fifth) era:
1) 1790-1848: The rise of the factory system with steam-powered machinery and canals. Peaking and then leading to the depression of the 1820s.
2) 1848-1890s: Railways, the telegraph, ocean-going steamers, stable currencies and machine-produced machinery set the cycle into upwards motion. The wave peaks in the 1870s with financial crisis in the United States and a Long Depression (1873 - 96) in Europe.
3) 1890s-1945: Heavy industry electrical engineering, scientific management and mass production start a new wave upwards. The break occurs at the end of the first world war leading to hyperinflation in Germany and the Great Depression.
4) Late-1940s - 2008. Synthetic materials, mass consumer goods, factory automation, nuclear power and computing start les trente glorieuses. The peak is the oil shock of 1973 leading to a period of instability.
5) Late 1990s to present: Overlapping with the previous wave, network technology, mobile communications, truly global marketplace and information goods start a new wave upwards. But it this cycle has stalled, according to Mason, who thinks it will not lead to a new wave without a structural change to capitalism.
Mason is well schooled on Kondradieff and clearly admires him, along with other wayward Bolsheviks like Trotsky and Alexander Bogdanov. Bogdanov was the author of the "vintage sci-fi novel", Red Star, about a world on Mars where there are no labor shortages and no money, an early visualization of a postcapitalist world. He was a founding member of the Bolshevik party who was ousted after a disagreement with Lenin. Mason says of him, "Though he could not imagine a computer, he had imagined the kind of communism that society based on mental labor, sustainability and networked thought might produce." What a thought!
The Robots
A good part of Mason's book (in especially the important 5th chapter, "The Prophets of Postcapitalism") is devoted to visualizing what happens in our societies as machines become smarter and more capable to the extent that livelihoods based on unskilled human labor become untenable. Mason discusses important contributors to analysis of this subject by Peter Drucker, Schumpter, Paul Romer and Marx; especially an apparently anachronistic work of his youth, from the Grundrisse, "The Fragment on Machines." I will just discuss the latter. In this fragment, contained in the collection of notes for a future work, Marx addresses the question of what would happen if the tendency of machines to replace manual labour were extended to its logical conclusion: a world without labour.
This fragment starts out mixed up in Marx's current version of the labour theory of value, roughly that Ricardo's three factors of production, land, labour and capital, really boiled down to just labour (neglecting land, given by nature, the story goes) since it takes labour to make machines and build capital. But then Marx says,
So what happens when information ("general progress") is free and machines can make themselves as well as all of the products that you may want? He says, "Capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production." What replaces capital (and remember Marx still sees fixed capital as consisting of labour) is information, the general progress of science which can be owned by no one.
Mason sees this as somehow explained by the labour theory of value. I will address my puzzlement (and appreciation) at this in what follows.
The Labour Theory
Chapter 6 of Mason's book presents his extended remarks on the labour theory of value (LTV). In the words of Adam Smith,
Mason admits that Smith assumes that this labour-only theory of value applied to primitive societies and that in the newly industrializing world of Smith's late 18th century it was rather a combination of land, labour and capital that produced things of value. But he insists that Smith was rather being inconsistent. He gives the standard paragraph on Ricardo's theory saying that "Ricardo, who had witnessed the great upsurge of the factory system, ridiculed the idea that machines were the source of increased wealth. Machines merely transfer their value to the product; only labour adds new value."
Walras, who strongly contradicted Ricardo's LTV, is mentioned, not for his insistence on scarcity as the source of value which he (and I) think was his major contribution, but as one of the founders of the marginal utility school, which is the basis for most all of the economics that followed. Actually, Walras pointed out that Ricardo had admitted that scarcity had an impact on the value of certain types of products like works of art and fine wines. His critique of Ricardo was not that he was wrong for these types of products, but that he failed to see that scarcity is involved in the valuation of ALL products.
I have discussed the LTV in another post. The figure above comes from that post. The figure derives from Alfred Marshall's famous economics textbook. The various elements of the chart are explained in that prior post. I want to point out just one thing about this here. The chart shows a demand curve and supply curves assuming different types of return on scale. The important thing to note is that the pure LTV has a horizontal supply curve: the quantity of labour is the only thing that determines the cost of production, according to this pure theory. So the price that would be commanded in the market is indifferent to demand. If we were producing a product that no one wanted, the value of that product by the pure LTV would be the same as if it were in great demand. Clearly we know that this is not the case. A product that no one wants has no value, no matter how much labour went into making it. Marx, of course, was also aware of this objection. To get around it he developed an ingenious ruse (in my view), the concept of "socially necessary labour time." The basic idea is that the value of a product is the cost of labour to produce it only for products that have social value and includes all of the other things that went into its production. Except that Marx assumes that land has not value and that capital is only stored labour. So he gets back to labour as the source of all value. And a demand curve is smuggled in by the back door.
Mason explains socially necessary labour time by example:
Again, the assumption here is that land, raw materials, energy and capital have no value since they are all assumed to be the product of labour alone. A brilliant idea, except that it seems to me to be a simple example of petitio principii, the fallacy of assuming as a premise a statement which has the same meaning as the conclusion. Labour is the source of all value, because labour is the source of all value. This apparent fallacy becomes all the more striking since elsewhere in Mason's book he uses the vocabulary of the marginal revolution in making his case that information processing presents us with the prospect of machines that last forever, as had been anticipated by Marx in the "Fragment on Machines." A result of that would be that more stuff created by those machines would have "zero marginal cost." Let's forget the irony, for the moment, of using insights from the marginal cost revolution of the late nineteenth century to defend a theory of value from the 18th century. But this is the crux of Mason's argument.
For the rest of the review see my blog: https://notesfrommylibrary.com/2017/0... or the comment below.
The picture that Mason paints is starkly visible at the beginning of the twenty-first century. How will we possibly exit from an apparently inevitable conveyor belt to carbon pollution oblivion? How will an aging population maintain social peace? How will the reign of fiat money end? How will we “earn a living” when information and the products made from information have “zero marginal cost?” For me Mason's book is marred by a really irrelevant homage to Marx’s labour theory of value. Irrelevant because what Mason visualizes is closer to the end visualized in Keynes’s “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” than that in Capital. It is actually closer to the picture that a young Marx painted in the Grundrisse in the famous “Fragment on Capital” and then ignored or abandoned in Capital. This is the problem that if machines become fully implemented in our economy there becomes less and less need for the labour that Marx and Mason imagine is the source of value. But let’s get to those problems that capitalism has thrown at us first.
Climate Change
The scariest problem is clearly climate change. According to the International Panel on Climate Change, our climate has warmed by approximately one degree Centigrade since the beginning of the twentieth century. That is nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit. The World Resources Institute projects that 90% of coral reefs will be in danger by 2030 and all of them by 2050, due to ocean warming and acidification. Sea level rise is has recently been projected at over 8 feet by 2100 resulting from melting of land ice in the polar regions. These changes will clearly have devastating effects the lives of those that follow us. The oceans provide livelihood for tens of millions of us. Our coastal cities will need total rebuilding or abandonment as sea levels rise. These problems are already happening. What can be done to prevent them from doing the most damage?
The average carbon dioxide concentration in our planet’s atmosphere just reached 400 parts per million (See here.) US Department of Energy measurements of ice cores have shown that Earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration had not been greater than 300 parts per million for 800,000 years prior to 1950. Almost all climate scientists that are not working for the fossil fuel industry understand that global warming, sea level rise and ocean acidification are due to burning of fossil fuels which transform reduced carbon buried millions of years ago into carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas. It is the burning of fossil fuel that causes global warming, sea level rise and ocean acidification. There is no other cause that accounts for the effects that we have seen. (See the IPCC reports, for example, or US EPA pages put together before they are deleted by the Trump administration.)
This is a really scary prospect and it is clear that capitalism is the reason it is so difficult to manage. Why? Simply because capitalism is based on a system of "free trade" and "free enterprise" that ignores "externalities." In a pure capitalist state, there is no penalty for dumping pollution into the commons. In such a world, the capitalist makes a rational case that the long-term damage done to others will not come back to harm him, leaving him free to enjoy the profits from his investments in the short term. Of course, as Karl Polanyi made clear, such pure capitalism could not long exist. The horrors of Dickens's Victorian Age for the poor have since his time been ameliorated to some extent by countervailing actions in the public interest by governments. The problem with climate change is that the interventions required to curb it are staunchly resisted by the owners of fossil fuel companies who have in the past been subsidized by these same governments and have sufficient power to influence these governments to not take actions that clearly are needed to avert catastrophe.
Mason has a clear vision of the problem. He references the International Energy Administration, which writes,
"Policy choices and market developments that bring the share of fossil fuels in primary energy demand down to just under three-quarters in 2040 are not enough to stem the rise in energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, which grow by one-fifth. This puts the world on a path consistent with a long-term global average temperature increase of 3.6°C. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that in order to limit this temperature increase to 2°C – the internationally agreed goal to avert the most severe and widespread implications of climate change – the world cannot emit more than around 1000 gigatonnes of CO2 from 2014 onwards. This entire budget will be used up by 2040 in our central scenario. Since emissions are not going to drop suddenly to zero once this point is reached, it is clear that the 2°C objective requires urgent action to steer the energy system on to a safer path."
The same IEA document estimates that world-wide fossil fuel subsidies in 2014 were $550 billion, four times more than subsidies for renewable energy sources.
So how will this possibly not end badly? Well, Mason is not convinced that "market solutions" like carbon taxes will be effective in ameliorating the worst consequences of climate change. What then? He writes,
"However, to meet the critical emissions targets we are going to have to use some centralized control. Governments - at state and regional level - will need to take control, and probably ownership, of all big carbon producers. As the energy distribution grid becomes 'smart', using technology to predict and balance supply with demand, it makes sense for the grid to be a public resource."
To this I say, "Here, here!," but based on personal experience, trying to convince a status quo clinging community to purchase its own electrical distribution infrastructure from a fossil fuel giant is a daunting task, and this much less than trying to socialize the failing energy companies themselves.
Demographics and Government Debt
Mason points out that the world's populations are aging fast.
"Globally, the population of older people to those of working age will increase. In 1950, 5 percent of the world's population was over sixty-five; by mid-twenty-first century it will be 17 percent. . . . the crucial problem is the age dependency ratio: the number of retired people compared to the number of those of working age. In Europe and Japan, there are currently three workers for every one retired person. By 2050 the ratio will be one-for-one. And though most developing countries will continue to have mainly young populations, China bucks the trend due to its one-child policy. By 2015 China will be the 'oldest' of the big economies in the world, with a projected median age of fifty-three."
The problem that Mason sees is that debt overhang caused, he thinks, by replacement of the gold standard by fiat money, has been part of a run-up in stock market pricing that cannot continue, resulting in great threat to pension funds. With an aging population and slower growth and a smaller workforce, this seems a spiral to impoverishment. With more than 50 percent of all private pension money invested in government debt, 40 percent of this foreign owned, "No matter how safe a company pension fund looks now, if 60 percent of all countries' bonds become junk - so that to lend to them becomes a crazy proposition - the private pension system will not survive." He says, "Are you panicking rationally, yet?"
The Four Waves and Wayward Bolsheviks
Mason is very fond of the Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratieff, executed by firing squad in his cell in a Stalinist prison in 1938. Kondradieff's
"real crime, in the eyes of his persecutors, was to think the unthinkable about capitalism: that instead of collapsing under crisis, capitalism generally adopts and mutates. In two pioneering works of data-mining he showed that, beyond short-term business cycles, there is evidence of a longer, fifty-year pattern whose turning points coincide with major structural changes within capitalism and major conflicts. Thus, these moments of extreme crisis and survival were not evidence of chaos but of order. Kondratieff was the first person to show the existence of long waves in economic history."
Mason sees four major waves in modern capitalism up to our current (fifth) era:
1) 1790-1848: The rise of the factory system with steam-powered machinery and canals. Peaking and then leading to the depression of the 1820s.
2) 1848-1890s: Railways, the telegraph, ocean-going steamers, stable currencies and machine-produced machinery set the cycle into upwards motion. The wave peaks in the 1870s with financial crisis in the United States and a Long Depression (1873 - 96) in Europe.
3) 1890s-1945: Heavy industry electrical engineering, scientific management and mass production start a new wave upwards. The break occurs at the end of the first world war leading to hyperinflation in Germany and the Great Depression.
4) Late-1940s - 2008. Synthetic materials, mass consumer goods, factory automation, nuclear power and computing start les trente glorieuses. The peak is the oil shock of 1973 leading to a period of instability.
5) Late 1990s to present: Overlapping with the previous wave, network technology, mobile communications, truly global marketplace and information goods start a new wave upwards. But it this cycle has stalled, according to Mason, who thinks it will not lead to a new wave without a structural change to capitalism.
Mason is well schooled on Kondradieff and clearly admires him, along with other wayward Bolsheviks like Trotsky and Alexander Bogdanov. Bogdanov was the author of the "vintage sci-fi novel", Red Star, about a world on Mars where there are no labor shortages and no money, an early visualization of a postcapitalist world. He was a founding member of the Bolshevik party who was ousted after a disagreement with Lenin. Mason says of him, "Though he could not imagine a computer, he had imagined the kind of communism that society based on mental labor, sustainability and networked thought might produce." What a thought!
The Robots
A good part of Mason's book (in especially the important 5th chapter, "The Prophets of Postcapitalism") is devoted to visualizing what happens in our societies as machines become smarter and more capable to the extent that livelihoods based on unskilled human labor become untenable. Mason discusses important contributors to analysis of this subject by Peter Drucker, Schumpter, Paul Romer and Marx; especially an apparently anachronistic work of his youth, from the Grundrisse, "The Fragment on Machines." I will just discuss the latter. In this fragment, contained in the collection of notes for a future work, Marx addresses the question of what would happen if the tendency of machines to replace manual labour were extended to its logical conclusion: a world without labour.
This fragment starts out mixed up in Marx's current version of the labour theory of value, roughly that Ricardo's three factors of production, land, labour and capital, really boiled down to just labour (neglecting land, given by nature, the story goes) since it takes labour to make machines and build capital. But then Marx says,
"Further, in so far as machinery develops with the accumulation of society's science, of productive force generally, general social labour presents itself not in labour but in capital. The productive force of society is measured in fixed capital, exists there in its objective form; and, inversely, the productive force of capital grows with this general progress, which capital appropriates free of charge."
So what happens when information ("general progress") is free and machines can make themselves as well as all of the products that you may want? He says, "Capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production." What replaces capital (and remember Marx still sees fixed capital as consisting of labour) is information, the general progress of science which can be owned by no one.
Mason sees this as somehow explained by the labour theory of value. I will address my puzzlement (and appreciation) at this in what follows.
The Labour Theory
Chapter 6 of Mason's book presents his extended remarks on the labour theory of value (LTV). In the words of Adam Smith,
"It was not by gold or by silver but by labour that all of the wealth of the world was originally purchased and its value, to those who possess it, and who want to exchange it for some new productions, is precisely equal to the quantity of labour which it can enable them to purchase or command."
Mason admits that Smith assumes that this labour-only theory of value applied to primitive societies and that in the newly industrializing world of Smith's late 18th century it was rather a combination of land, labour and capital that produced things of value. But he insists that Smith was rather being inconsistent. He gives the standard paragraph on Ricardo's theory saying that "Ricardo, who had witnessed the great upsurge of the factory system, ridiculed the idea that machines were the source of increased wealth. Machines merely transfer their value to the product; only labour adds new value."
Walras, who strongly contradicted Ricardo's LTV, is mentioned, not for his insistence on scarcity as the source of value which he (and I) think was his major contribution, but as one of the founders of the marginal utility school, which is the basis for most all of the economics that followed. Actually, Walras pointed out that Ricardo had admitted that scarcity had an impact on the value of certain types of products like works of art and fine wines. His critique of Ricardo was not that he was wrong for these types of products, but that he failed to see that scarcity is involved in the valuation of ALL products.
I have discussed the LTV in another post. The figure above comes from that post. The figure derives from Alfred Marshall's famous economics textbook. The various elements of the chart are explained in that prior post. I want to point out just one thing about this here. The chart shows a demand curve and supply curves assuming different types of return on scale. The important thing to note is that the pure LTV has a horizontal supply curve: the quantity of labour is the only thing that determines the cost of production, according to this pure theory. So the price that would be commanded in the market is indifferent to demand. If we were producing a product that no one wanted, the value of that product by the pure LTV would be the same as if it were in great demand. Clearly we know that this is not the case. A product that no one wants has no value, no matter how much labour went into making it. Marx, of course, was also aware of this objection. To get around it he developed an ingenious ruse (in my view), the concept of "socially necessary labour time." The basic idea is that the value of a product is the cost of labour to produce it only for products that have social value and includes all of the other things that went into its production. Except that Marx assumes that land has not value and that capital is only stored labour. So he gets back to labour as the source of all value. And a demand curve is smuggled in by the back door.
Mason explains socially necessary labour time by example:
"If we know what an hour of basic labour costs - in Bangladesh the minimum wage pays about 28 US cents an hour - we can express it in money. Here I will just stick to hours. Two things contribute to the value of a commodity: (a) the work done in the production process (which includes marketing, research, design, etc.) and (b) everything else (machinery, plant, raw materials, etc.) Both can be measured in terms of the amount of labour time they contain."
Again, the assumption here is that land, raw materials, energy and capital have no value since they are all assumed to be the product of labour alone. A brilliant idea, except that it seems to me to be a simple example of petitio principii, the fallacy of assuming as a premise a statement which has the same meaning as the conclusion. Labour is the source of all value, because labour is the source of all value. This apparent fallacy becomes all the more striking since elsewhere in Mason's book he uses the vocabulary of the marginal revolution in making his case that information processing presents us with the prospect of machines that last forever, as had been anticipated by Marx in the "Fragment on Machines." A result of that would be that more stuff created by those machines would have "zero marginal cost." Let's forget the irony, for the moment, of using insights from the marginal cost revolution of the late nineteenth century to defend a theory of value from the 18th century. But this is the crux of Mason's argument.
For the rest of the review see my blog: https://notesfrommylibrary.com/2017/0... or the comment below.
December 15, 2017
The central problem with this worthless book is that Paul Mason doesn't understand economics. He clusters concepts together with as much coherence as a toddler trying to build the Millenium Falcon from a random pile of Lego; much as you might expect from someone who graduated in music and politics, then climbed the greasy pole into television punditry.
Unsurprisingly, as a TV entertainer, what he does grasp well is how to inflame the muddle-headed. Almost every page of Postcapitalism drips bile about the free market system on which his ingrate readers' pampered middle-class lives rely. References to Pinochet's Chile, a sacred totem of leftist indignation, are everywhere. In contrast there is no honest appraisal of the great failed experiment of the 20th century: the utopian communism that gave the world Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, led to the slaughter of tens of millions and the effective enslavement of hundreds of millions more. The chapter entitled "was Marx right?" skips lightly over that uncomfortable reality, focusing instead on how some of the innovation, like the transistor, that helped the free west to its overwhelming economic triumph over collectivism emerged - shock horror - from government military spending. Well, yes, Paul, but it took red-blooded venture capitalism of Silicon Valley to take the transistor to the semiconductor and beyond.
Data is necessarily almost wholly absent from the book, lest it might dawn on the reader just how far living standards have risen, and continue to rise, in the system they protest. On a handful of pages, about one-third of the way in, there a few token charts, apparently to support Paul's rambling thesis. Most people of a sceptical nature will look immediately to the time axes for signs of manipulation; naturally Postcapitalism doesn't disappoint. A chart of world GDP growth ends at the downturn of 2009, ignoring the sharp reversion to normal growth rates that has occurred subsequently. Similarly, a chart of financial sector profits (like every good lefty, Paul hates banks) is cut short at a high-level in 2006, removing the awkward truth that they had large losses in the financial crisis and are still nowhere close to reverting to peak levels. Worst of all, Branko Milanovic's much-reproduced chart of rising income levels globally over the last quarter-century is selectively misinterpreted for a boring well-worn diatribe against the relative success of the top 10% (which, by the way, means you, me and Paul too - go hang your heads in shame). It obfuscates the astonishing statistic in the left side of the chart - the rising out of poverty of hundreds of millions in the developing world; the endlessly-maligned globalisation achieving what Bono-Geldofist aid programs or Naomi-Klein-handwringing never could.
The last chapter "Project Zero" is apparently the clever bit of this book. What we are actually given is a few anecdotes about the emerging free economy. Yup, Wikipedia, Linux and, er, some other thing. The Occam's Razor explanation as to why people devote time to uncommercial activity is of course that rising living standards across the global economy have given more and more people leisure time to fill. Instead Mason extrapolates wildly to a neo-Marxist-buzzword-intensive future in which the networked world will somehow be both "decentralised" with "micro-level participation" yet embrace a massive renationalisation of the economy as prescribed in detail by Comrade Paul.
In summary: total bollocks. If you have read this book, are feeling queasy and need an empirically-based antidote, go read Johan Norberg's wonderful "Progress". Meanwhile pray that Paul Mason never has any influence beyond Channel 4.
Unsurprisingly, as a TV entertainer, what he does grasp well is how to inflame the muddle-headed. Almost every page of Postcapitalism drips bile about the free market system on which his ingrate readers' pampered middle-class lives rely. References to Pinochet's Chile, a sacred totem of leftist indignation, are everywhere. In contrast there is no honest appraisal of the great failed experiment of the 20th century: the utopian communism that gave the world Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, led to the slaughter of tens of millions and the effective enslavement of hundreds of millions more. The chapter entitled "was Marx right?" skips lightly over that uncomfortable reality, focusing instead on how some of the innovation, like the transistor, that helped the free west to its overwhelming economic triumph over collectivism emerged - shock horror - from government military spending. Well, yes, Paul, but it took red-blooded venture capitalism of Silicon Valley to take the transistor to the semiconductor and beyond.
Data is necessarily almost wholly absent from the book, lest it might dawn on the reader just how far living standards have risen, and continue to rise, in the system they protest. On a handful of pages, about one-third of the way in, there a few token charts, apparently to support Paul's rambling thesis. Most people of a sceptical nature will look immediately to the time axes for signs of manipulation; naturally Postcapitalism doesn't disappoint. A chart of world GDP growth ends at the downturn of 2009, ignoring the sharp reversion to normal growth rates that has occurred subsequently. Similarly, a chart of financial sector profits (like every good lefty, Paul hates banks) is cut short at a high-level in 2006, removing the awkward truth that they had large losses in the financial crisis and are still nowhere close to reverting to peak levels. Worst of all, Branko Milanovic's much-reproduced chart of rising income levels globally over the last quarter-century is selectively misinterpreted for a boring well-worn diatribe against the relative success of the top 10% (which, by the way, means you, me and Paul too - go hang your heads in shame). It obfuscates the astonishing statistic in the left side of the chart - the rising out of poverty of hundreds of millions in the developing world; the endlessly-maligned globalisation achieving what Bono-Geldofist aid programs or Naomi-Klein-handwringing never could.
The last chapter "Project Zero" is apparently the clever bit of this book. What we are actually given is a few anecdotes about the emerging free economy. Yup, Wikipedia, Linux and, er, some other thing. The Occam's Razor explanation as to why people devote time to uncommercial activity is of course that rising living standards across the global economy have given more and more people leisure time to fill. Instead Mason extrapolates wildly to a neo-Marxist-buzzword-intensive future in which the networked world will somehow be both "decentralised" with "micro-level participation" yet embrace a massive renationalisation of the economy as prescribed in detail by Comrade Paul.
In summary: total bollocks. If you have read this book, are feeling queasy and need an empirically-based antidote, go read Johan Norberg's wonderful "Progress". Meanwhile pray that Paul Mason never has any influence beyond Channel 4.
January 16, 2022
Суперечливо
May 6, 2016
“It hooked me at the first page!” “Ripped from the headlines!” “I couldn’t put it down!”
Hey wait a minute. Isn’t this supposed to be a review of an economics book? It is, and for me all those exclamations are true. In spite of the fact that I usually think economics is opaque and boring, I found this book to be positively riveting.
Like a lot of people, I’m worried about what’s going on in today’s world. The Arab Spring never bloomed; Occupy Wall Street petered out; the upcoming US election seems mired in chaos. We’re supposed to have recovered from the 2008 recession, but most new jobs can’t pay the bills. Every year breaks a record for world’s hottest, but certain political and corporate leaders still deny the existence of man-made climate change. Our population is getting older, poorer, and deeper in debt. What to do about the rising number of immigrants threatens many nations. So when Diane Rehm interviewed Paul Mason about his book, I decided to buy it. I wanted to hear more about his take on why we’re in this situation and what we can do about it.
Mason begins by reviewing humankind’s turbulent economic history: feudalism, industrial capitalism, the rise and destruction of the labor movement, the booms and busts of neoliberalism, the phenomenon of today’s “precariat.” These are the stressed-out people forced to work two jobs, who have lost or will never get a pension, who are acutely aware of how monopolies, outsourcing, or their company moving overseas make his or her job extremely precarious. Many workers are expected to be “at work” on their smartphones even when traveling or at home, and—even worse—are forced to “live the dream of the firm they work for.” In spite of our rising productivity, it’s now clear that actual wages are in decline, except for the 1%.
Mason then takes a look at how capitalism evolved in the last 200 years. It was mind-expanding for me to see how economic systems evolve and change just like human beings do. Today’s capitalism, the author points out, is in its fifth great wave. It’s trembling on the edge of becoming something new: postcapitalism.
Why is this happening? The answer, basically, is because our planet has to meet several great challenges it never faced before: climate change, ageing, the information network, and massive immigration. Business as usual won’t be able to meet these challenges.
So what will? What does this new mutation of capitalism look like? Mason says we’re already seeing it through models like the non-profit Wikipedia, Creative Commons, and Open Source. These share a communal nature, “free to use, but impossible to grab, own, and exploit.” Because of the unprecedented availability of free information on the internet, people are able to form artisanal local businesses, publish e-books, join global communities, share videos, get the equivalent of a free college degree. Information, one of the most valuable commodities available to human beings, isn’t scare anymore, but free to all.
Like any great novel, this book builds and builds into an explosive climax. Using the nitty-gritty facts of history and economics, Mason reveals what postcapitalism can mean to us and our future.
There’s tons more in in this book that I can’t even begin to deal with here. Whenever I read a book I think I’m going to review, I jot down notes: what grabs me, what new thing I learn, how it coincides with what I’ve noticed in the world and why it bothers me or gives me hope. For this book, I took six pages of notes. It’s hard to review a book in which you struggle to assimilate a new idea when, on the next page, the author is already using the new idea as the foundation for yet another new idea.
This book isn’t an easy read, but boy is it an exhilarating ride! At the end—when we finally get the answer to the question “who’s going to save us?”—I actually yelled Yay!
----review by Veronica "Vernie' Dale Blood Seed, Night Cruiser: Short Stories about Creepy, Amusing or Spiritual Encounters with the Shadow
Hey wait a minute. Isn’t this supposed to be a review of an economics book? It is, and for me all those exclamations are true. In spite of the fact that I usually think economics is opaque and boring, I found this book to be positively riveting.
Like a lot of people, I’m worried about what’s going on in today’s world. The Arab Spring never bloomed; Occupy Wall Street petered out; the upcoming US election seems mired in chaos. We’re supposed to have recovered from the 2008 recession, but most new jobs can’t pay the bills. Every year breaks a record for world’s hottest, but certain political and corporate leaders still deny the existence of man-made climate change. Our population is getting older, poorer, and deeper in debt. What to do about the rising number of immigrants threatens many nations. So when Diane Rehm interviewed Paul Mason about his book, I decided to buy it. I wanted to hear more about his take on why we’re in this situation and what we can do about it.
Mason begins by reviewing humankind’s turbulent economic history: feudalism, industrial capitalism, the rise and destruction of the labor movement, the booms and busts of neoliberalism, the phenomenon of today’s “precariat.” These are the stressed-out people forced to work two jobs, who have lost or will never get a pension, who are acutely aware of how monopolies, outsourcing, or their company moving overseas make his or her job extremely precarious. Many workers are expected to be “at work” on their smartphones even when traveling or at home, and—even worse—are forced to “live the dream of the firm they work for.” In spite of our rising productivity, it’s now clear that actual wages are in decline, except for the 1%.
Mason then takes a look at how capitalism evolved in the last 200 years. It was mind-expanding for me to see how economic systems evolve and change just like human beings do. Today’s capitalism, the author points out, is in its fifth great wave. It’s trembling on the edge of becoming something new: postcapitalism.
Why is this happening? The answer, basically, is because our planet has to meet several great challenges it never faced before: climate change, ageing, the information network, and massive immigration. Business as usual won’t be able to meet these challenges.
So what will? What does this new mutation of capitalism look like? Mason says we’re already seeing it through models like the non-profit Wikipedia, Creative Commons, and Open Source. These share a communal nature, “free to use, but impossible to grab, own, and exploit.” Because of the unprecedented availability of free information on the internet, people are able to form artisanal local businesses, publish e-books, join global communities, share videos, get the equivalent of a free college degree. Information, one of the most valuable commodities available to human beings, isn’t scare anymore, but free to all.
Like any great novel, this book builds and builds into an explosive climax. Using the nitty-gritty facts of history and economics, Mason reveals what postcapitalism can mean to us and our future.
There’s tons more in in this book that I can’t even begin to deal with here. Whenever I read a book I think I’m going to review, I jot down notes: what grabs me, what new thing I learn, how it coincides with what I’ve noticed in the world and why it bothers me or gives me hope. For this book, I took six pages of notes. It’s hard to review a book in which you struggle to assimilate a new idea when, on the next page, the author is already using the new idea as the foundation for yet another new idea.
This book isn’t an easy read, but boy is it an exhilarating ride! At the end—when we finally get the answer to the question “who’s going to save us?”—I actually yelled Yay!
----review by Veronica "Vernie' Dale Blood Seed, Night Cruiser: Short Stories about Creepy, Amusing or Spiritual Encounters with the Shadow
August 1, 2016
A must-read view of economic history and our economic future.
Though I have a lot of points of disagreement with the author, I still think this is an important book that will give any reader the impetus to question many of the assumptions that underlie the politics of the current model of economics - for economics is really just a branch of politics.
My background is in hard science. I did Astronomy for my first degree and Computing for my masters - so I find the 'hand-waving' pretend maths of economics a bit tiresome. And so it is with this book. Paul Mason seems to be from a Marxist background (nothing wrong with that!) and tries (unsuccessfully, in my opinion) to rehabilitate Marxism as a description for the current economic situation.
Part one of the book is economic history, Part two is mostly his treatment of technical and scientific progress and part three is about how a post-capitalist economy might work.
In many ways I disagree with the first two parts and agree with the third - but it is reading the first two parts that gives me the most fun - they are a great stimulus to thought.
His concept is that capitalism contains multiple 'cycles' of activity (the 'boom' and 'bust' we're so familiar with) and we are just about to hit the downturn of the latest one. Well I'm pretty sure that you can see cycles in any data at all - I've programmed forecasting system several times and I know you can find completely meaningless patterns in random data. Without an underlying theory that links properly with the outputs, it doesn't really mean much.
More interesting is his charting of the rise of the newer technologies which are mostly selling information or products which are mostly information. The 'profit margin' on many of these things (songs, books, photos, apps etc) is a meaningless concept because there is no marginal cost on creating them. The first one might cost £1,000 but every subsequent copy costs nothing. So how do you handle that in conventional economics? How do you price it? The answer seems to be that the price can only be maintained by the existence of copyright systems - and that there is a tendency for the price to go to zero.
His thesis is that material goods are going the same way - specifically that automation will reduce and reduce the price until it's effectively zero. This argument depends on the Marxist valuation of goods as being the amount of work taken to produce them, which I think is a bit questionable. What is more interesting is that if you automate everything that is currently called 'work', no-one will have any wages and therefore there won't be anyone to sell things to.
I agree, up to a point, but 'tending to zero' doesn't mean 'is zero'. I do agree that automation does imply we shall one day be free of work and on that day our current system of capitalism won't work (no-one in work = no-one to sell to = no market). How we manage the transition to that state will be an interesting journey.
Though I have a lot of points of disagreement with the author, I still think this is an important book that will give any reader the impetus to question many of the assumptions that underlie the politics of the current model of economics - for economics is really just a branch of politics.
My background is in hard science. I did Astronomy for my first degree and Computing for my masters - so I find the 'hand-waving' pretend maths of economics a bit tiresome. And so it is with this book. Paul Mason seems to be from a Marxist background (nothing wrong with that!) and tries (unsuccessfully, in my opinion) to rehabilitate Marxism as a description for the current economic situation.
Part one of the book is economic history, Part two is mostly his treatment of technical and scientific progress and part three is about how a post-capitalist economy might work.
In many ways I disagree with the first two parts and agree with the third - but it is reading the first two parts that gives me the most fun - they are a great stimulus to thought.
His concept is that capitalism contains multiple 'cycles' of activity (the 'boom' and 'bust' we're so familiar with) and we are just about to hit the downturn of the latest one. Well I'm pretty sure that you can see cycles in any data at all - I've programmed forecasting system several times and I know you can find completely meaningless patterns in random data. Without an underlying theory that links properly with the outputs, it doesn't really mean much.
More interesting is his charting of the rise of the newer technologies which are mostly selling information or products which are mostly information. The 'profit margin' on many of these things (songs, books, photos, apps etc) is a meaningless concept because there is no marginal cost on creating them. The first one might cost £1,000 but every subsequent copy costs nothing. So how do you handle that in conventional economics? How do you price it? The answer seems to be that the price can only be maintained by the existence of copyright systems - and that there is a tendency for the price to go to zero.
His thesis is that material goods are going the same way - specifically that automation will reduce and reduce the price until it's effectively zero. This argument depends on the Marxist valuation of goods as being the amount of work taken to produce them, which I think is a bit questionable. What is more interesting is that if you automate everything that is currently called 'work', no-one will have any wages and therefore there won't be anyone to sell things to.
I agree, up to a point, but 'tending to zero' doesn't mean 'is zero'. I do agree that automation does imply we shall one day be free of work and on that day our current system of capitalism won't work (no-one in work = no-one to sell to = no market). How we manage the transition to that state will be an interesting journey.
February 10, 2017
"It is absurd that we are capable of witnessing a 40,000-year-old system of gender oppression begin to dissolve before our eyes and yet still seeing the abolition of a 200-year-old economic system as an unrealistic utopia."
I rather enjoyed Postcapitalism for the potted history of left-wing thought, the use of "bullshit jobs" as a technical term, and the thought that if someone can find the political will we could find ourselves basically living in Star Trek. Viva la revolución.
I rather enjoyed Postcapitalism for the potted history of left-wing thought, the use of "bullshit jobs" as a technical term, and the thought that if someone can find the political will we could find ourselves basically living in Star Trek. Viva la revolución.
June 28, 2016
Not bad, but eventually overreaching. Feels a bit rushed. The main problem is that it totally and utterly fails to explain the lynchpin on which his argument rests. You can't just say "Wikipedia" and be done with it...
January 24, 2016
Mason's intriguing book sniffs through the chaos of a world capitalism racked by a succession of crises which have so badly damaged the project of globalisation.
Plenty of others have done this but most have assumed that somewhere just down the line the system will stabilise and something like the thing intended when Reagan and Thatcher put together their plans for a neoliberal world back in the 1980s will re-emerge.
Mason has something else in mind. He sets out the features which mark the distressed condition of contemporary capitalism – magic ‘fiat’ money, imbalances in trade, savings and investment, and the incompatibility of ‘information goods’ with market mechanisms. Things look bad, but so what? Capitalism has stumbled on hard times before, only for the system to repeat its very trick of reinventing itself and hitting the road for another generation or two of profitable accumulation.
Is it on the cards that this will happen again, and that after capitalism we simply get capitalism 2.0? The author suggests there are good reasons to believe that this might not be the case. To make this argument he calls on the work of Nikolai Kondratieff and his discovery of the 50 year long waves that reveal themselves in the movement of prices since the Middle Ages. For the Russian economist the waves were composed of sets of up- and down- swings in capitalist economies, with each swing being around 25 years in length. During upswings recession were rare; in the down, frequent. The real engine that moved the pendulum across it up- and down- phases was the deployment of new technologies and high capital investment.
According to this theory, the current wave commenced in the 1940s with the technologies and investment that allowed capitalism to recover from the deep depression of the previous decade. The 50 year duration of the Kondratievan long wave predicted another great recession in the 1990s. This didn’t happen.
Mason’s explanation as to why the deep recession predicted at the end of the 50 long wave begins at the halfway point, in 1973, when the upswing was converted into the downswing. High productivity, explicit global rules (based on the Bretton Woods agreement) and the repression of tendencies towards financialisation had provided the driving force for the long period of surging capitalist growth. But by the 1970s investment could no longer increase productivity at the post-war rate. The Bretton Woods arrangement came under attack as governments began to tackle the problem of the uncompetiveness of their economies by devaluing national currencies in order to increase their share of international markets. The relative strength of the working class, achieved through its strong trade unions, closed down the option of an ‘internal devaluation – cutting wages, reducing welfare – as another way of restoring competiveness and as a result a profit squeeze kicked in across the system. Nixon finally delivered the coup de grace to Bretton Woods in August 1971. The new system of floating exchange rates meant that banks were effectively able to generate money out of nothing, leading to a few years of ‘nervous euphoria.’ Reality reasserted itself in January 1973 with a Wall Street crash that saw the collapse of several investment banks. Then came the ‘final straw’ of the oil crisis later that year, in October.
This was the point at which the normal pattern of the long wave was badly disrupted. According to Kondratieff the downswing years are marked by working class resistance to the efforts of capitalists to recoup their losses by eating into the gains won in the form of high wages and social policies that provided for the welfare of citizens. The effect of this was to force capital to find a new model based on higher labour productivity and higher investment. This time round the chosen route was more-or-less the opposite: lower wages and low-value models of production. But this did not open the way to the new kind of capitalism that the right wing ideologues who were backing Thatcher and Reagan during the crucial years of the 1980s had hoped, but rather the mere extension of the old long wave on the basis of stagnant wage growth and the atomisation of the working class.
The ending of the dynamic phase of the long wage in the mid-1970s also ended the restraints that had been placed on the financial sector, which had required its interests to remain subordinate to those goods and services which were creating new value across the system. The new liberty enjoyed by the banks to create more money at will merged with the role that personal debt was playing under the new economic arrangements. The worst effects of the suppression of wage growth for the working class was offset by increased access to credit. For wage earners who owned their own homes this could be underwritten by the inflation of the value of these assets. Serving this volume of indebtedness and asset inflation created more business opportunities for the financial services industry, leading to a situation where, in the case of the United States, over 40 percent of corporate profit was generated by banks, hedge funds and insurance companies.
So, Mason sets out a picture in which capitalism sets out along a well-trodden path which will see it rewarded with 25 good years, 25 poor, and then opening up with a switch to a new higher road with more possibilities being opened up. But on this occasion the second portion of lean years for capital actually worked out quite well, with all the apparent benefits of prosperity still showing up, albeit arising from setbacks born more and more by the working class. The model expanded by pushing outwards into the developing world, creating new opportunities for low-cost, low-value production and services to become established in a workforce that more than doubled in size during this period. To achieve this level of global reach and coordination new technologies did emerge, but unlike those which led to a new phase of capitalist expansion on the orthodox model of past years, this time this were coming into existence which threatened a major disruption of accumulation.
What this new emergence consisted of is set out in a middle section of the book discussing the ‘prophets of post-capitalism’. The key idea is that of ‘infotech’, or information technology. Mason argues that in a highly technologized world infotech – the accumulation of all the technologies that are built into all the goods we consume – is the most value thing about the commodity. It has led to a new approach to manufacturing in which each good has to be intricately modelled before its production is commenced. The bulk of value is in the design segment is its production and only a small portion in what is assembled on the line.
But how much is this infotech stage of production actually worth? Mason introduces us to the work of management guru, Peter Drucker, who first draw attention to the fact that there is no economic theory which accounts for the value of information. This is important because, if the bulk of value is accounted for by information, then from a capitalist point of view growing prosperity must depend on increasing the productivity of the information process. This has to be about the interconnectivity of all the component parts of information. Yet this is something that is already happening but, in large and growing part, on the basis of decidedly non-capitalist principles.
This growing interconnectivity takes place through networks, nowadays facilitated by the effectively free medium of the world wide web. Then, rushing on to Paul Romer’s contribution to this discussion about the value of information, we get introduced to the idea that innovation in productive processes can be reduced to the simple idea of ‘mixing things together in a new way’.
Knowing how to do this involved writing what is effectively a recipe which, having once been written can be used over and over again at no extra cost. The radical idea here, which Mason argues threatens capitalism’s ability to reproduce itself across succeeding waves, is that the most valuable component in a modern good comes, to all intents and purposes, free of charge and downloadable in the internet.
Classical economic theory tells us that the value of a good is the sum total of the value of all the parts of which it is made, either in the form of the new value which emerges from the labour power of the worker, and also the transferred value of the machinery and the ingredients which were used in its making. But what is transferred from the value of the infotech component if this element itself has, being abundantly available, is effectively free?
The task of answering this question is really the core of Mason’s book. He sees the capitalist logic of production – accumulating in order to accumulate – as being threatened by new vitalities in which socially value stuff is offered up free of charge without any need or desire to accumulate further. The clearest example of this development is found in the ‘creative commons’ economy which throws sophisticated products into a pot which can then be picked up and used by anyone with the fancy to do so without paying a fee. Economies move and grow because this stuff is happening in ever large volume, but the evidence for all this creative activity is not to be found in the profits of business concerns. Without value showing up as profits you can’t have capitalism – or at least not indefinitely into the future.
This is not to say that efforts will not be made on the part of those who want to see the current system prevail into the future to restabilise capitalism with profit-making activity at its core. Mason suggests that this will look line the business model operated by companies like Amazon which aim to build up vast information networks of their own out of which profits can be extracted through specialised sales techniques – essentially selling stuff to us on the basis of information about things we have already bought.
Mason talks about the externalities which will work over time to disrupt this attempt to re-establish the stability of profits. Things like climate change and mass migration loom large on this agenda. But a book by an author so conversant with Marxism it seems strange that he glides over any important action on the part of the working class in his scenario for post capitalism. The defeats inflicted on it in the 1970s and after appear to have been final and from which there is no recovery. The proletariat he is interested in is the infotech producing kind, who will wield economic power as much through the creative commons as anything else.
There is a huge amount in thinking in this book which is bound to be of interest to anyone – and there a lot about – who think that the problem of our times is capitalism. He is surely right in his urging that radicals plan their anticapitalism as a project for generations rather than a Bolshevik coup. The new proletariat, labour in lofts and bedsits in creative isolation from others of their kind have to be found a place and a role in the ranks of the revolutionaries. But the picture he offers us is surely partial still, located in the dilemmas of mature capitalist economies that have long since passed into their years of dotage. But if the crisis of today’s capitalism goes to the heart of a globalised, neoliberal system that has drawn the entire planet’s population into its maw, then surely more needs to be said about the ways in which this impacts on the rest of the workers of the world, who are still shackled to production lines and work gangs, and still yearn for the sort of freedom that organised labour once promised them.
Plenty of others have done this but most have assumed that somewhere just down the line the system will stabilise and something like the thing intended when Reagan and Thatcher put together their plans for a neoliberal world back in the 1980s will re-emerge.
Mason has something else in mind. He sets out the features which mark the distressed condition of contemporary capitalism – magic ‘fiat’ money, imbalances in trade, savings and investment, and the incompatibility of ‘information goods’ with market mechanisms. Things look bad, but so what? Capitalism has stumbled on hard times before, only for the system to repeat its very trick of reinventing itself and hitting the road for another generation or two of profitable accumulation.
Is it on the cards that this will happen again, and that after capitalism we simply get capitalism 2.0? The author suggests there are good reasons to believe that this might not be the case. To make this argument he calls on the work of Nikolai Kondratieff and his discovery of the 50 year long waves that reveal themselves in the movement of prices since the Middle Ages. For the Russian economist the waves were composed of sets of up- and down- swings in capitalist economies, with each swing being around 25 years in length. During upswings recession were rare; in the down, frequent. The real engine that moved the pendulum across it up- and down- phases was the deployment of new technologies and high capital investment.
According to this theory, the current wave commenced in the 1940s with the technologies and investment that allowed capitalism to recover from the deep depression of the previous decade. The 50 year duration of the Kondratievan long wave predicted another great recession in the 1990s. This didn’t happen.
Mason’s explanation as to why the deep recession predicted at the end of the 50 long wave begins at the halfway point, in 1973, when the upswing was converted into the downswing. High productivity, explicit global rules (based on the Bretton Woods agreement) and the repression of tendencies towards financialisation had provided the driving force for the long period of surging capitalist growth. But by the 1970s investment could no longer increase productivity at the post-war rate. The Bretton Woods arrangement came under attack as governments began to tackle the problem of the uncompetiveness of their economies by devaluing national currencies in order to increase their share of international markets. The relative strength of the working class, achieved through its strong trade unions, closed down the option of an ‘internal devaluation – cutting wages, reducing welfare – as another way of restoring competiveness and as a result a profit squeeze kicked in across the system. Nixon finally delivered the coup de grace to Bretton Woods in August 1971. The new system of floating exchange rates meant that banks were effectively able to generate money out of nothing, leading to a few years of ‘nervous euphoria.’ Reality reasserted itself in January 1973 with a Wall Street crash that saw the collapse of several investment banks. Then came the ‘final straw’ of the oil crisis later that year, in October.
This was the point at which the normal pattern of the long wave was badly disrupted. According to Kondratieff the downswing years are marked by working class resistance to the efforts of capitalists to recoup their losses by eating into the gains won in the form of high wages and social policies that provided for the welfare of citizens. The effect of this was to force capital to find a new model based on higher labour productivity and higher investment. This time round the chosen route was more-or-less the opposite: lower wages and low-value models of production. But this did not open the way to the new kind of capitalism that the right wing ideologues who were backing Thatcher and Reagan during the crucial years of the 1980s had hoped, but rather the mere extension of the old long wave on the basis of stagnant wage growth and the atomisation of the working class.
The ending of the dynamic phase of the long wage in the mid-1970s also ended the restraints that had been placed on the financial sector, which had required its interests to remain subordinate to those goods and services which were creating new value across the system. The new liberty enjoyed by the banks to create more money at will merged with the role that personal debt was playing under the new economic arrangements. The worst effects of the suppression of wage growth for the working class was offset by increased access to credit. For wage earners who owned their own homes this could be underwritten by the inflation of the value of these assets. Serving this volume of indebtedness and asset inflation created more business opportunities for the financial services industry, leading to a situation where, in the case of the United States, over 40 percent of corporate profit was generated by banks, hedge funds and insurance companies.
So, Mason sets out a picture in which capitalism sets out along a well-trodden path which will see it rewarded with 25 good years, 25 poor, and then opening up with a switch to a new higher road with more possibilities being opened up. But on this occasion the second portion of lean years for capital actually worked out quite well, with all the apparent benefits of prosperity still showing up, albeit arising from setbacks born more and more by the working class. The model expanded by pushing outwards into the developing world, creating new opportunities for low-cost, low-value production and services to become established in a workforce that more than doubled in size during this period. To achieve this level of global reach and coordination new technologies did emerge, but unlike those which led to a new phase of capitalist expansion on the orthodox model of past years, this time this were coming into existence which threatened a major disruption of accumulation.
What this new emergence consisted of is set out in a middle section of the book discussing the ‘prophets of post-capitalism’. The key idea is that of ‘infotech’, or information technology. Mason argues that in a highly technologized world infotech – the accumulation of all the technologies that are built into all the goods we consume – is the most value thing about the commodity. It has led to a new approach to manufacturing in which each good has to be intricately modelled before its production is commenced. The bulk of value is in the design segment is its production and only a small portion in what is assembled on the line.
But how much is this infotech stage of production actually worth? Mason introduces us to the work of management guru, Peter Drucker, who first draw attention to the fact that there is no economic theory which accounts for the value of information. This is important because, if the bulk of value is accounted for by information, then from a capitalist point of view growing prosperity must depend on increasing the productivity of the information process. This has to be about the interconnectivity of all the component parts of information. Yet this is something that is already happening but, in large and growing part, on the basis of decidedly non-capitalist principles.
This growing interconnectivity takes place through networks, nowadays facilitated by the effectively free medium of the world wide web. Then, rushing on to Paul Romer’s contribution to this discussion about the value of information, we get introduced to the idea that innovation in productive processes can be reduced to the simple idea of ‘mixing things together in a new way’.
Knowing how to do this involved writing what is effectively a recipe which, having once been written can be used over and over again at no extra cost. The radical idea here, which Mason argues threatens capitalism’s ability to reproduce itself across succeeding waves, is that the most valuable component in a modern good comes, to all intents and purposes, free of charge and downloadable in the internet.
Classical economic theory tells us that the value of a good is the sum total of the value of all the parts of which it is made, either in the form of the new value which emerges from the labour power of the worker, and also the transferred value of the machinery and the ingredients which were used in its making. But what is transferred from the value of the infotech component if this element itself has, being abundantly available, is effectively free?
The task of answering this question is really the core of Mason’s book. He sees the capitalist logic of production – accumulating in order to accumulate – as being threatened by new vitalities in which socially value stuff is offered up free of charge without any need or desire to accumulate further. The clearest example of this development is found in the ‘creative commons’ economy which throws sophisticated products into a pot which can then be picked up and used by anyone with the fancy to do so without paying a fee. Economies move and grow because this stuff is happening in ever large volume, but the evidence for all this creative activity is not to be found in the profits of business concerns. Without value showing up as profits you can’t have capitalism – or at least not indefinitely into the future.
This is not to say that efforts will not be made on the part of those who want to see the current system prevail into the future to restabilise capitalism with profit-making activity at its core. Mason suggests that this will look line the business model operated by companies like Amazon which aim to build up vast information networks of their own out of which profits can be extracted through specialised sales techniques – essentially selling stuff to us on the basis of information about things we have already bought.
Mason talks about the externalities which will work over time to disrupt this attempt to re-establish the stability of profits. Things like climate change and mass migration loom large on this agenda. But a book by an author so conversant with Marxism it seems strange that he glides over any important action on the part of the working class in his scenario for post capitalism. The defeats inflicted on it in the 1970s and after appear to have been final and from which there is no recovery. The proletariat he is interested in is the infotech producing kind, who will wield economic power as much through the creative commons as anything else.
There is a huge amount in thinking in this book which is bound to be of interest to anyone – and there a lot about – who think that the problem of our times is capitalism. He is surely right in his urging that radicals plan their anticapitalism as a project for generations rather than a Bolshevik coup. The new proletariat, labour in lofts and bedsits in creative isolation from others of their kind have to be found a place and a role in the ranks of the revolutionaries. But the picture he offers us is surely partial still, located in the dilemmas of mature capitalist economies that have long since passed into their years of dotage. But if the crisis of today’s capitalism goes to the heart of a globalised, neoliberal system that has drawn the entire planet’s population into its maw, then surely more needs to be said about the ways in which this impacts on the rest of the workers of the world, who are still shackled to production lines and work gangs, and still yearn for the sort of freedom that organised labour once promised them.
July 27, 2018
Το βιβλίο του Μέισον είναι αρκετά ενδιαφέρον και αξίζει τον χρόνο που θα του δωθεί για το διαβάσει κάποιος. Όμως, παρόλο που είναι ένα καλό βιβλίο, δεν νομίζω ότι είναι το must-read μανιφέστο όπως λένε ορισμένοι.
Γενικώς θα έλεγα ότι η συγγραφή του από έναν δημοσιογράφο με χρόνια στα κινήματα έχει επηρεάσει αρκετά το αποτέλεσμα. Ενώ φαίνεται να έχει μεγάλο εύρος γνώσεων και αντλεί από εργαλία από διάφορους θεωρητικούς & οικονομολόγους (Μαρξ, Κοντράτιεφ, Ρίφκιν, Χίλφερντινγκ, Λούξενμπουργκ, Σουμπέτερ, Ρόμερ, Μπουχάριν) σε ορισμένα σημεία υπεραπλουστεύει τα πράγματα (ίσως και εν γνώση του) ή φαίνεται να χάνει λεπτές αποχρώσεις και να παρανοεί μερικά πράγματα.
Αρχικά αφιερώνει αρκετό κομμάτι στην οικονομική ιστορία και την ιστορία της οικονομικής σκέψης, όπου έχει σίγουρα ενδιαφέρον. Στην συνέχεια καταπιάνεται να αναδείξει της σύγχρονες τάσης του οικονομικού συστήματος και την δυναμική για την ανάδυση ενός μετακαπιταλιστικού συστήματος. Εκεί κάνει λογικά άλματα, αφήνει κεντρικά σημεία αστήρικτα και αναπόδεικτα, ενώ φαίνεται να παρανοεί ουσιώδεις λεπτές αποχρώσεις των θεωρητικών που χρησιμοποιεί. Αντίστοιχα και στο τελευταίο κομμάτι όπου στέκεται κυρίως στη δυναμική της μετάβασης αδυνατεί να κάνει μια συνολική και επισταμένη ανάλυση των τάσεων και των προτάσεων που κάνει.
Τέλος, θα έλεγα ότι το βιβλίο λόγω της υπεραπλούστευσης τείνει προς τον ντετερμινισμό (που τόσο ήθελε να αποφύγει) με έναν περίεργο τρόπο τόσο στο πρώτο μέρος, όσο και στο δεύτερο/τρίτο.
Συνοψίζοντας, το βιβλίο αξίζει να διαβαστεί, αλλά καλό θα ήταν ο αναγνώστης να μην ακολουθεί τον συγγραφέα στα λογικά άλματα που κάνει.
Γενικώς θα έλεγα ότι η συγγραφή του από έναν δημοσιογράφο με χρόνια στα κινήματα έχει επηρεάσει αρκετά το αποτέλεσμα. Ενώ φαίνεται να έχει μεγάλο εύρος γνώσεων και αντλεί από εργαλία από διάφορους θεωρητικούς & οικονομολόγους (Μαρξ, Κοντράτιεφ, Ρίφκιν, Χίλφερντινγκ, Λούξενμπουργκ, Σουμπέτερ, Ρόμερ, Μπουχάριν) σε ορισμένα σημεία υπεραπλουστεύει τα πράγματα (ίσως και εν γνώση του) ή φαίνεται να χάνει λεπτές αποχρώσεις και να παρανοεί μερικά πράγματα.
Αρχικά αφιερώνει αρκετό κομμάτι στην οικονομική ιστορία και την ιστορία της οικονομικής σκέψης, όπου έχει σίγουρα ενδιαφέρον. Στην συνέχεια καταπιάνεται να αναδείξει της σύγχρονες τάσης του οικονομικού συστήματος και την δυναμική για την ανάδυση ενός μετακαπιταλιστικού συστήματος. Εκεί κάνει λογικά άλματα, αφήνει κεντρικά σημεία αστήρικτα και αναπόδεικτα, ενώ φαίνεται να παρανοεί ουσιώδεις λεπτές αποχρώσεις των θεωρητικών που χρησιμοποιεί. Αντίστοιχα και στο τελευταίο κομμάτι όπου στέκεται κυρίως στη δυναμική της μετάβασης αδυνατεί να κάνει μια συνολική και επισταμένη ανάλυση των τάσεων και των προτάσεων που κάνει.
Τέλος, θα έλεγα ότι το βιβλίο λόγω της υπεραπλούστευσης τείνει προς τον ντετερμινισμό (που τόσο ήθελε να αποφύγει) με έναν περίεργο τρόπο τόσο στο πρώτο μέρος, όσο και στο δεύτερο/τρίτο.
Συνοψίζοντας, το βιβλίο αξίζει να διαβαστεί, αλλά καλό θα ήταν ο αναγνώστης να μην ακολουθεί τον συγγραφέα στα λογικά άλματα που κάνει.
November 3, 2020
Labai kairioji knyga apie kapitalizmo galą. Nors niekas labai viešai nekalba apie tai, bet ekonomistams žinoma, kaip vis auga pajamų nelygybė, kaip pasaulyje įsigali monopolijos. Vieša paslaptis, kad greitai susinaikinsime planetą keliant klimato atšilimą, išsivysčiusios šalys išnyks, nes sensta, ir pasaulyje dominuos nebe baltoji rasė. Knygoje keliama idėja kurti postkapitalizmą, kuriame, pasitelkiant informacines technologijas bus panaikinti bereikšmiai ir išnaudojantys darbai, prekės nebekainuos, nebus jų stygiaus, galiausiai sunyks valdžios vaidmuo, nebebus būtinojo darbo ir turėsime daug laisvalaikio.
Tekstas pagrinde remiasi Marxu, esą jis buvo labai pranašiškas ir jo idėjos pritaikomos postkapitalizme. Remiamasi darbo vertės teorija, ribiniu naudingumu. Man šioji knyga kelia skepsį, kadangi jau buvo bandoma įvesti komunizmą pasaulyje ir niekur tai nepavyko, tik iškėlė psichiškai nesveikus tironus, kurie žudė milijonus žmonių. Tačiau paskaityti verta, nes tekstas praplečia akiratį, pateikia įdomių idėjų, net jei esi skeptikas.
Tekstas pagrinde remiasi Marxu, esą jis buvo labai pranašiškas ir jo idėjos pritaikomos postkapitalizme. Remiamasi darbo vertės teorija, ribiniu naudingumu. Man šioji knyga kelia skepsį, kadangi jau buvo bandoma įvesti komunizmą pasaulyje ir niekur tai nepavyko, tik iškėlė psichiškai nesveikus tironus, kurie žudė milijonus žmonių. Tačiau paskaityti verta, nes tekstas praplečia akiratį, pateikia įdomių idėjų, net jei esi skeptikas.
May 5, 2021
Made some good points about the future of capitalism given the external and internal shocks facing our societies and economies. However it is incredibly frustrating to read with unnecessary jargon which was very distracting. For a book that claims to be about the future, it spends more time talking about the past, with the last chapter the only one vaguely discussing next steps. The author glosses over potential and present challenges which I found made his arguments weak and not entirely convincing.
February 16, 2017
A very interesting read! And my first non-fiction book of the year. I do think that this was kind of hard to get through at times (especially when it became very history-heavy) but it brought up so many interesting ideas. I know I'll be thinking about this for a while.
August 10, 2017
Paul Mason presents strong arguments for the coming slow demise of capitalism, and some good suggestions of what will happen next. I'm not sure of his suggested transition plan, but the face that we need a transition to lessen the harms make sense.
The Good: I found his summary of historic economic theory to be coherent and clear - showing connections among authors and books I had not previously seen, but make a lot of sense. The book was worth reading/listening to for that even if you don't agree with the central ideas. His descriptions of the dangers of the current system: financialization, personal and government debt crises, climate change, the 'precariat'(precarious/bullshit jobs), were all worth thinking about as well. Some of his solutions/transition methods - lowering the cost of the necessities of life, sustainability targets in central banks - are worth adopting immediately regardless of the rest of the state of capitalism.
The Bad: I thought the role of regulation in the transition was a bit too hopeful and unrealistic. Some of his economic solutions require adoption wholesale and don't allow for voluntary adoption by smaller movers or on individual scales. Also, he neglects individual contributions while basing much of his argument on individual contributor heavy projects like Wikipedia.
Overall, highly recommended because it inspires thought about how our system works, what its flaws are, and how we can improve and transition into better systems. I'm not sure his recipe is quite the right one, but his arguments are worth thinking about.
Listened to through Audible.
The Good: I found his summary of historic economic theory to be coherent and clear - showing connections among authors and books I had not previously seen, but make a lot of sense. The book was worth reading/listening to for that even if you don't agree with the central ideas. His descriptions of the dangers of the current system: financialization, personal and government debt crises, climate change, the 'precariat'(precarious/bullshit jobs), were all worth thinking about as well. Some of his solutions/transition methods - lowering the cost of the necessities of life, sustainability targets in central banks - are worth adopting immediately regardless of the rest of the state of capitalism.
The Bad: I thought the role of regulation in the transition was a bit too hopeful and unrealistic. Some of his economic solutions require adoption wholesale and don't allow for voluntary adoption by smaller movers or on individual scales. Also, he neglects individual contributions while basing much of his argument on individual contributor heavy projects like Wikipedia.
Overall, highly recommended because it inspires thought about how our system works, what its flaws are, and how we can improve and transition into better systems. I'm not sure his recipe is quite the right one, but his arguments are worth thinking about.
Listened to through Audible.
May 11, 2021
Vorrei lasciare 5 stelle, ma purtroppo non sono ottimista come l'autore. La crisi scatenata dal covid si è risolta in un ritorno alla situazione pre-pandemia, con buona pace dei proclami salvifici orientati al greenwashing momentaneo dell'economia; la gestione europea della pandemia, della crisi energetica che tra un po' busserà alle porte, del vaccino stesso lasciano poco spazio all'idea che il capitalismo stia per finire, sebbene il fatto che sia in crisi è palese. Le idee contenute nel saggio non sono nemmeno estreme, eppure nel dibattito italiano ed europeo non trovano spazio, non trovano nemmeno un partito di minoranza che le esprima. L'informazione, che secondo Mason avrebbe dovuto salvarci e darci più potere in virtù delle asimmetrie informative, ormai è asservita, almeno sui canali mainstream, alla logica del profitto. Insomma, questo libro è invecchiato male, nelle università italiane ormai si insegna sono la teoria del saggio di profitto e le questioni sociali è come se non facessero parte dell'economia, che prima di essere diventata una gara a chi esprimeva meglio una funzione quantitativa, era una scienza sociale e serviva a capire le interazioni tra gruppi sociali, e non solo a fabbricare ignoranti laureati in finanza.
Eppure una parte di me continua a credere che esista un sistema migliore.
Eppure una parte di me continua a credere che esista un sistema migliore.
March 13, 2016
I recommend this book, in spite of its one enormous shortcoming. It's called "a guide to our future," and the recommendations or predictions for the future constitute the written equivalent of vague handwaving. Mason seems to want to provide a positive vision of an alternative to the sure destruction we face from neoliberal economic policy, yet he only succeeds in persuading me that we are in really big trouble. His belief in new forms of sharing information is fuzzy, hard to summarize.
I'm also not sure that he understands that political elites won't spontaneously stop irrationally pouring public resources into privatization because it's bad for the economy and the environment. Even though this is the essence of neoliberalism, it's also the essence of corruption and graft--far older phenomena that are harder to uproot.
What's good about this book, then? Mason is a rare creature, a left-wing business reporter. He is great at summarizing economic theories in a way that an ordinary reader can understand, including a juxtaposition of the labor theory of value and marginal utility. I also liked reading his analysis of the 2008 crash. I didn't know the term "financialization" before, and it's elegant. I would love to talk about this book with other people.
I'm also not sure that he understands that political elites won't spontaneously stop irrationally pouring public resources into privatization because it's bad for the economy and the environment. Even though this is the essence of neoliberalism, it's also the essence of corruption and graft--far older phenomena that are harder to uproot.
What's good about this book, then? Mason is a rare creature, a left-wing business reporter. He is great at summarizing economic theories in a way that an ordinary reader can understand, including a juxtaposition of the labor theory of value and marginal utility. I also liked reading his analysis of the 2008 crash. I didn't know the term "financialization" before, and it's elegant. I would love to talk about this book with other people.
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