Habrich Atwell's Reviews > Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

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.