Daisy's Reviews > Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

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.