Format: HardcoverChange
Price:£13.99+ Free shipping with Amazon Prime
-
PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
- ›
-
Customer Reviews
- PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
- ›
- Customer Reviews
Top positive review
79 people found this helpful
4.0 out of 5 starsVery stimulating and mainly great, with a bit of a let down at the end
ByJezzaon 22 October 2015
This is simultaneously an important book and a somewhat disappointing one. Here, as with his other book ‘Why it’s still kicking off everywhere’, he’s taken a really important topic and written about it with great clarity and a style that makes quite difficult stuff rather accessible. The disappointment (which also applied to the other book) is that the analysis is great but the prescription falls rather flat.
Here he’s writing about the way in which the present model of capitalism, and by extension the capitalist system itself, has reached a critical point. The old model is coming off the rails, sinking under the weight of the massive debts that it has created as a result of financialization and downright fraud, and finding that its very success in transferring wealth upwards leaves it short of the demand that it needs to keep the wheels turning. It’s not suited to a world in which the marginal cost of the stuff that people want to buy is approaching zero. It is in any case ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of climate change, an ageing population and instability-induced mass migrations.
What’s really great about this book is the way it synthesises some of the best writing about the transformative potential of the internet and the web with a non-dogmatic perspective from the Marxist tradition. So on the one had we get Yochai Benkler, who I think is rather brilliant but have never seen anyone on the left even notice, and on the other hand we get Kondratieff, and also Preobrazhensky and Hildferding on the transition from capitalism to socialism. There’s an account of the difficulties that the Soviets had in running a planned economy, and no concessions to the notion that the USSR was in any sense ‘actually existing socialism’ or even ‘a degenerated workers’ state’. And some interesting observations about mainstream economic and management theory that I didn't know about.
There’s a critical account of how the Marxist tradition has been wrong about the politics of skilled workers, and of the working class as a whole – how it has historically sought to build institutions and mechanisms of solidarity within capitalism, rather than simply set its face against it because it had nothing to lose but its chains. There’s a great discussion of the role of skill in the labour process under capitalism, and the extent to which capitalism in its Taylorist and Fordist modes needed to expunge skill from work.
There are sections that made me smile, and others that made me want to punch the air in gratitude that someone else had ‘got it’ and expressed it better than I could.
I learned lots – not least about Bogdanov, a sometime ex-Bolshevik and early Soviet sci-fi writer with a powerful view of a post-capitalist society (among lots of other things). But I was also struck by some omissions. There’s no mention of Harry Braverman, whose ‘Labour and Monopoly Capital’ is all about Taylorism and capitalism’s relationship to skill; or to Mike Cooley, whose ‘Architect or Bee’ addressed the same issues – rather prophetically, I’d say – in relation to the automatization of white collar work. Stafford Beer, who tried to deploy early computers in support of Allende’s socialist planning, doesn’t get a mention.
And since he makes much of the idea that the left can and should learn from the transition from feudalism to capitalism, it’s a surprise to find no mention of E P Thompson, who explored the same idea at length in ‘The Poverty of Theory’. And I’d like to have seen at least a nod to Karl Polanyi, who wrote about the cruelty explicit in the emergence of the market economy, and about the first wave of globalisation and its collapse, in ‘The Great Transformation’. Polanyi’s important, too, in that he writes about how the rise of capitalism created capitalist people, and how by implication another society would bring about different people – it’s a rather strong rebuttal of the ‘human nature’ argument for capitalism and greed.
It’s a book, not a three-year university course, so all of these omissions can be forgiven. So, ultimately, can the fact that ‘what is to be done’ section is a bit thin and a bit lame. Some of it reads like a lefty version of the ‘Californian ideology’ – technology is great and it will enable super new stuff that makes things better. I don’t think he gives sufficient weight to the way in which new communications technologies do allow the marketization of things that have hitherto not been susceptible – I’m thinking of ‘task-sharing’ websites like TaskRabbit, which are the 21st century equivalent of the hiring fair for domestic servants. Trebor Scholz has written some good stuff about ‘platform capitalism’, and it also doesn’t get a mention here.
I’m aware too, that the internet has rubbed away some of the scraps of autonomy and economic independence that were – precariously – available to some self-employed ‘creative’ artisans. CD sales at the end of a gig helped some independent musicians to make a living, but no-one buys them any more except as a way of making a donation. Writers might expect to get paid for freelance contributions; now they are offered ‘guest blogs’ to which they are expected to contribute for free.
But I don’t want this to come over as a sustained whine. I really liked this book, and my disappointment with the end is in proportion to my exultation at the strength of the analysis. I hope that Paul Mason find a way to build on it, and to provide concrete examples of successful prefigurative projects. I don’t have any problem with the idea of building a new world within the shell of the old one; there are many variants of this strategy, and they’re not all utopian or apolitical or reformist. We just need to find the right ways to do it.
Here he’s writing about the way in which the present model of capitalism, and by extension the capitalist system itself, has reached a critical point. The old model is coming off the rails, sinking under the weight of the massive debts that it has created as a result of financialization and downright fraud, and finding that its very success in transferring wealth upwards leaves it short of the demand that it needs to keep the wheels turning. It’s not suited to a world in which the marginal cost of the stuff that people want to buy is approaching zero. It is in any case ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of climate change, an ageing population and instability-induced mass migrations.
What’s really great about this book is the way it synthesises some of the best writing about the transformative potential of the internet and the web with a non-dogmatic perspective from the Marxist tradition. So on the one had we get Yochai Benkler, who I think is rather brilliant but have never seen anyone on the left even notice, and on the other hand we get Kondratieff, and also Preobrazhensky and Hildferding on the transition from capitalism to socialism. There’s an account of the difficulties that the Soviets had in running a planned economy, and no concessions to the notion that the USSR was in any sense ‘actually existing socialism’ or even ‘a degenerated workers’ state’. And some interesting observations about mainstream economic and management theory that I didn't know about.
There’s a critical account of how the Marxist tradition has been wrong about the politics of skilled workers, and of the working class as a whole – how it has historically sought to build institutions and mechanisms of solidarity within capitalism, rather than simply set its face against it because it had nothing to lose but its chains. There’s a great discussion of the role of skill in the labour process under capitalism, and the extent to which capitalism in its Taylorist and Fordist modes needed to expunge skill from work.
There are sections that made me smile, and others that made me want to punch the air in gratitude that someone else had ‘got it’ and expressed it better than I could.
I learned lots – not least about Bogdanov, a sometime ex-Bolshevik and early Soviet sci-fi writer with a powerful view of a post-capitalist society (among lots of other things). But I was also struck by some omissions. There’s no mention of Harry Braverman, whose ‘Labour and Monopoly Capital’ is all about Taylorism and capitalism’s relationship to skill; or to Mike Cooley, whose ‘Architect or Bee’ addressed the same issues – rather prophetically, I’d say – in relation to the automatization of white collar work. Stafford Beer, who tried to deploy early computers in support of Allende’s socialist planning, doesn’t get a mention.
And since he makes much of the idea that the left can and should learn from the transition from feudalism to capitalism, it’s a surprise to find no mention of E P Thompson, who explored the same idea at length in ‘The Poverty of Theory’. And I’d like to have seen at least a nod to Karl Polanyi, who wrote about the cruelty explicit in the emergence of the market economy, and about the first wave of globalisation and its collapse, in ‘The Great Transformation’. Polanyi’s important, too, in that he writes about how the rise of capitalism created capitalist people, and how by implication another society would bring about different people – it’s a rather strong rebuttal of the ‘human nature’ argument for capitalism and greed.
It’s a book, not a three-year university course, so all of these omissions can be forgiven. So, ultimately, can the fact that ‘what is to be done’ section is a bit thin and a bit lame. Some of it reads like a lefty version of the ‘Californian ideology’ – technology is great and it will enable super new stuff that makes things better. I don’t think he gives sufficient weight to the way in which new communications technologies do allow the marketization of things that have hitherto not been susceptible – I’m thinking of ‘task-sharing’ websites like TaskRabbit, which are the 21st century equivalent of the hiring fair for domestic servants. Trebor Scholz has written some good stuff about ‘platform capitalism’, and it also doesn’t get a mention here.
I’m aware too, that the internet has rubbed away some of the scraps of autonomy and economic independence that were – precariously – available to some self-employed ‘creative’ artisans. CD sales at the end of a gig helped some independent musicians to make a living, but no-one buys them any more except as a way of making a donation. Writers might expect to get paid for freelance contributions; now they are offered ‘guest blogs’ to which they are expected to contribute for free.
But I don’t want this to come over as a sustained whine. I really liked this book, and my disappointment with the end is in proportion to my exultation at the strength of the analysis. I hope that Paul Mason find a way to build on it, and to provide concrete examples of successful prefigurative projects. I don’t have any problem with the idea of building a new world within the shell of the old one; there are many variants of this strategy, and they’re not all utopian or apolitical or reformist. We just need to find the right ways to do it.
Top critical review
71 people found this helpful
3.0 out of 5 starsRevolution IRL
ByBreakingviewson 11 September 2015
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.
- Kate Duguid
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.
- Kate Duguid
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
ByJezzaon 22 October 2015
This is simultaneously an important book and a somewhat disappointing one. Here, as with his other book ‘Why it’s still kicking off everywhere’, he’s taken a really important topic and written about it with great clarity and a style that makes quite difficult stuff rather accessible. The disappointment (which also applied to the other book) is that the analysis is great but the prescription falls rather flat.
Here he’s writing about the way in which the present model of capitalism, and by extension the capitalist system itself, has reached a critical point. The old model is coming off the rails, sinking under the weight of the massive debts that it has created as a result of financialization and downright fraud, and finding that its very success in transferring wealth upwards leaves it short of the demand that it needs to keep the wheels turning. It’s not suited to a world in which the marginal cost of the stuff that people want to buy is approaching zero. It is in any case ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of climate change, an ageing population and instability-induced mass migrations.
What’s really great about this book is the way it synthesises some of the best writing about the transformative potential of the internet and the web with a non-dogmatic perspective from the Marxist tradition. So on the one had we get Yochai Benkler, who I think is rather brilliant but have never seen anyone on the left even notice, and on the other hand we get Kondratieff, and also Preobrazhensky and Hildferding on the transition from capitalism to socialism. There’s an account of the difficulties that the Soviets had in running a planned economy, and no concessions to the notion that the USSR was in any sense ‘actually existing socialism’ or even ‘a degenerated workers’ state’. And some interesting observations about mainstream economic and management theory that I didn't know about.
There’s a critical account of how the Marxist tradition has been wrong about the politics of skilled workers, and of the working class as a whole – how it has historically sought to build institutions and mechanisms of solidarity within capitalism, rather than simply set its face against it because it had nothing to lose but its chains. There’s a great discussion of the role of skill in the labour process under capitalism, and the extent to which capitalism in its Taylorist and Fordist modes needed to expunge skill from work.
There are sections that made me smile, and others that made me want to punch the air in gratitude that someone else had ‘got it’ and expressed it better than I could.
I learned lots – not least about Bogdanov, a sometime ex-Bolshevik and early Soviet sci-fi writer with a powerful view of a post-capitalist society (among lots of other things). But I was also struck by some omissions. There’s no mention of Harry Braverman, whose ‘Labour and Monopoly Capital’ is all about Taylorism and capitalism’s relationship to skill; or to Mike Cooley, whose ‘Architect or Bee’ addressed the same issues – rather prophetically, I’d say – in relation to the automatization of white collar work. Stafford Beer, who tried to deploy early computers in support of Allende’s socialist planning, doesn’t get a mention.
And since he makes much of the idea that the left can and should learn from the transition from feudalism to capitalism, it’s a surprise to find no mention of E P Thompson, who explored the same idea at length in ‘The Poverty of Theory’. And I’d like to have seen at least a nod to Karl Polanyi, who wrote about the cruelty explicit in the emergence of the market economy, and about the first wave of globalisation and its collapse, in ‘The Great Transformation’. Polanyi’s important, too, in that he writes about how the rise of capitalism created capitalist people, and how by implication another society would bring about different people – it’s a rather strong rebuttal of the ‘human nature’ argument for capitalism and greed.
It’s a book, not a three-year university course, so all of these omissions can be forgiven. So, ultimately, can the fact that ‘what is to be done’ section is a bit thin and a bit lame. Some of it reads like a lefty version of the ‘Californian ideology’ – technology is great and it will enable super new stuff that makes things better. I don’t think he gives sufficient weight to the way in which new communications technologies do allow the marketization of things that have hitherto not been susceptible – I’m thinking of ‘task-sharing’ websites like TaskRabbit, which are the 21st century equivalent of the hiring fair for domestic servants. Trebor Scholz has written some good stuff about ‘platform capitalism’, and it also doesn’t get a mention here.
I’m aware too, that the internet has rubbed away some of the scraps of autonomy and economic independence that were – precariously – available to some self-employed ‘creative’ artisans. CD sales at the end of a gig helped some independent musicians to make a living, but no-one buys them any more except as a way of making a donation. Writers might expect to get paid for freelance contributions; now they are offered ‘guest blogs’ to which they are expected to contribute for free.
But I don’t want this to come over as a sustained whine. I really liked this book, and my disappointment with the end is in proportion to my exultation at the strength of the analysis. I hope that Paul Mason find a way to build on it, and to provide concrete examples of successful prefigurative projects. I don’t have any problem with the idea of building a new world within the shell of the old one; there are many variants of this strategy, and they’re not all utopian or apolitical or reformist. We just need to find the right ways to do it.
Here he’s writing about the way in which the present model of capitalism, and by extension the capitalist system itself, has reached a critical point. The old model is coming off the rails, sinking under the weight of the massive debts that it has created as a result of financialization and downright fraud, and finding that its very success in transferring wealth upwards leaves it short of the demand that it needs to keep the wheels turning. It’s not suited to a world in which the marginal cost of the stuff that people want to buy is approaching zero. It is in any case ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of climate change, an ageing population and instability-induced mass migrations.
What’s really great about this book is the way it synthesises some of the best writing about the transformative potential of the internet and the web with a non-dogmatic perspective from the Marxist tradition. So on the one had we get Yochai Benkler, who I think is rather brilliant but have never seen anyone on the left even notice, and on the other hand we get Kondratieff, and also Preobrazhensky and Hildferding on the transition from capitalism to socialism. There’s an account of the difficulties that the Soviets had in running a planned economy, and no concessions to the notion that the USSR was in any sense ‘actually existing socialism’ or even ‘a degenerated workers’ state’. And some interesting observations about mainstream economic and management theory that I didn't know about.
There’s a critical account of how the Marxist tradition has been wrong about the politics of skilled workers, and of the working class as a whole – how it has historically sought to build institutions and mechanisms of solidarity within capitalism, rather than simply set its face against it because it had nothing to lose but its chains. There’s a great discussion of the role of skill in the labour process under capitalism, and the extent to which capitalism in its Taylorist and Fordist modes needed to expunge skill from work.
There are sections that made me smile, and others that made me want to punch the air in gratitude that someone else had ‘got it’ and expressed it better than I could.
I learned lots – not least about Bogdanov, a sometime ex-Bolshevik and early Soviet sci-fi writer with a powerful view of a post-capitalist society (among lots of other things). But I was also struck by some omissions. There’s no mention of Harry Braverman, whose ‘Labour and Monopoly Capital’ is all about Taylorism and capitalism’s relationship to skill; or to Mike Cooley, whose ‘Architect or Bee’ addressed the same issues – rather prophetically, I’d say – in relation to the automatization of white collar work. Stafford Beer, who tried to deploy early computers in support of Allende’s socialist planning, doesn’t get a mention.
And since he makes much of the idea that the left can and should learn from the transition from feudalism to capitalism, it’s a surprise to find no mention of E P Thompson, who explored the same idea at length in ‘The Poverty of Theory’. And I’d like to have seen at least a nod to Karl Polanyi, who wrote about the cruelty explicit in the emergence of the market economy, and about the first wave of globalisation and its collapse, in ‘The Great Transformation’. Polanyi’s important, too, in that he writes about how the rise of capitalism created capitalist people, and how by implication another society would bring about different people – it’s a rather strong rebuttal of the ‘human nature’ argument for capitalism and greed.
It’s a book, not a three-year university course, so all of these omissions can be forgiven. So, ultimately, can the fact that ‘what is to be done’ section is a bit thin and a bit lame. Some of it reads like a lefty version of the ‘Californian ideology’ – technology is great and it will enable super new stuff that makes things better. I don’t think he gives sufficient weight to the way in which new communications technologies do allow the marketization of things that have hitherto not been susceptible – I’m thinking of ‘task-sharing’ websites like TaskRabbit, which are the 21st century equivalent of the hiring fair for domestic servants. Trebor Scholz has written some good stuff about ‘platform capitalism’, and it also doesn’t get a mention here.
I’m aware too, that the internet has rubbed away some of the scraps of autonomy and economic independence that were – precariously – available to some self-employed ‘creative’ artisans. CD sales at the end of a gig helped some independent musicians to make a living, but no-one buys them any more except as a way of making a donation. Writers might expect to get paid for freelance contributions; now they are offered ‘guest blogs’ to which they are expected to contribute for free.
But I don’t want this to come over as a sustained whine. I really liked this book, and my disappointment with the end is in proportion to my exultation at the strength of the analysis. I hope that Paul Mason find a way to build on it, and to provide concrete examples of successful prefigurative projects. I don’t have any problem with the idea of building a new world within the shell of the old one; there are many variants of this strategy, and they’re not all utopian or apolitical or reformist. We just need to find the right ways to do it.
44 comments|
79 people found this helpful.
Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse
ByColin Dixonon 21 August 2015
The world is going through a bad patch, but if we tighten our belts and cut our spending then we'll get back to the good times. This is now the prevailing political orthodoxy everywhere. But the bad patch is deepening, and becoming more confusing. Whether or not you subscribe to the idea of the Kondratieff cycle, an underlying 50-year economic wave strongly associated with technological innovation which has manifested itself within global capitalism for the last centuries, something very clearly went wrong around the time of the dotcom bubble at the turn of the millennium. The new technologies that were supposed to fire us into a prosperous future arrived, but aside from a very small number of notable beneficiaries, left most of us behind. For more and more people, the result is scramble for low-skill, low-paid precarious work and a lifetime of debt. Even previously unassailable jobs, like medical and legal, are being wiped out by new technologies. We are told that we must cut our way back to prosperity, and in this race to the bottom there's a rising feeling of apprehension about the sustainability of our economies, compounded by growing social concerns about migration, demographic disaster and the disappearance of democracy.
For Mason, the failure of the dotcom upswing of the Kondratieff Cycle, like the failure of a great harvest, lies behind all of this. But this time the failure is permanent. For centuries, capitalism has been about the use of labour, capital and land as factors of production. Each is limited, and using a quantity of each means it can't be used elsewhere. Producers effectively have to bid for those units, and that results in a price. For most of us, the price of labour is the important number. It's our income. But the information revolution has introduced a fourth key factor - information products. And they are effectively free. For example, it costs Apple almost nothing to produce and sell another album on iTunes, so the price we pay is almost pure profit. Clearly this is too good to be true, and under normal circumstances Apple would have more and more competitors, each undercutting the last until the price of albums fell to just above the cost of producing them - i.e. one cent. So Apple has gone out of its way to build an ecosystem of goods and services that creates a monopoly, a pattern we see more and more, to keep its profits. Like on the site you're looking at now, this is the prevailing IT business model. Where IT can substitute for labour, labour will always lose, so workers are driven out of production wherever possible. And that's the new world. As the footprint of IT grows, profits come from establishing highly-automated monopolies. Humans are left fighting for lower and lower skill jobs, the ones which are still too difficult to automate - for the present. The great paradox is that we now have the means to produce a superabundance of products, but the money to buy them is getting tighter and tighter. The world is full of people useless save for their debt-fuelled purchasing power. Something must give. And, compounding all of this, Mason points to climate change as an impending catastrophe which is only going to hasten the crash.
Interestingly. Paul Mason takes a swing a Jeremy Rifkin's book 'The Zero Marginal Cost Society' ("destined for the business shelves at airports") which comes to a broadly similar conclusion about the very urgent need to de-link wealth, income and human potential from an obsolete valuation built on the amount of money that can be earned from our failing economies. There is still abundance, but its distribution is based on a value system which is now in terminal crisis. Mason is the more rigorous in his economic analysis, however. The most authoritative, and arguably the slowest portion of the book is the middle, where he makes a survey of the various schools of economics and their responses to the apparent failure of the capitalist harvest. It's no surprise to see reviews of this book casting his analysis as Marxist - the blanket response to any challenge to neoliberal economics - but even though he clearly knows his Marx (and his Keynes, Friedman and the rest) this is much more than the standard narrative of capitalism's predictable collapse. It's a picture recognisable to anyone struggling in a hateful job, anyone struggling to get on the housing ladder, or those with smart, debt-burdened children who, as graduates, are looking less and less likely to repay their student loans. To any smart programmer, whose choice is to earn a fortune writing high-speed trading software, or to write opensource for nothing.
If it's easy to pick holes anywhere, and these are the holes that have been picked by the mainstream press, it's in Mason's optimism that we can collectively bring about the metamorphosis of society to a new order where work is almost optional, and where, recognising the abundance in which we live, old notions of 'deserving' based on competition for scarce resources simply disappear. Like Rifkin, he has a broad view that we are on the threshold of a metamorphosis which can be brought about by reason and peaceful activism. In a species which is still capable of barbaric atrocities, where millions of people can be whipped up into a murderous frenzy over a few thousand desperate refugees, it's much more likely that we'll fight it out down to the last low-paid, zero-hours contract job, believing that if we just keep running, we'll somehow make it. Maybe we'll make the change only after an enormous conflagration or, as Elon Musk fears, we'll fulfil our human destiny as a biological boot-loader for artificial intelligence, and disappear.
For Mason, the failure of the dotcom upswing of the Kondratieff Cycle, like the failure of a great harvest, lies behind all of this. But this time the failure is permanent. For centuries, capitalism has been about the use of labour, capital and land as factors of production. Each is limited, and using a quantity of each means it can't be used elsewhere. Producers effectively have to bid for those units, and that results in a price. For most of us, the price of labour is the important number. It's our income. But the information revolution has introduced a fourth key factor - information products. And they are effectively free. For example, it costs Apple almost nothing to produce and sell another album on iTunes, so the price we pay is almost pure profit. Clearly this is too good to be true, and under normal circumstances Apple would have more and more competitors, each undercutting the last until the price of albums fell to just above the cost of producing them - i.e. one cent. So Apple has gone out of its way to build an ecosystem of goods and services that creates a monopoly, a pattern we see more and more, to keep its profits. Like on the site you're looking at now, this is the prevailing IT business model. Where IT can substitute for labour, labour will always lose, so workers are driven out of production wherever possible. And that's the new world. As the footprint of IT grows, profits come from establishing highly-automated monopolies. Humans are left fighting for lower and lower skill jobs, the ones which are still too difficult to automate - for the present. The great paradox is that we now have the means to produce a superabundance of products, but the money to buy them is getting tighter and tighter. The world is full of people useless save for their debt-fuelled purchasing power. Something must give. And, compounding all of this, Mason points to climate change as an impending catastrophe which is only going to hasten the crash.
Interestingly. Paul Mason takes a swing a Jeremy Rifkin's book 'The Zero Marginal Cost Society' ("destined for the business shelves at airports") which comes to a broadly similar conclusion about the very urgent need to de-link wealth, income and human potential from an obsolete valuation built on the amount of money that can be earned from our failing economies. There is still abundance, but its distribution is based on a value system which is now in terminal crisis. Mason is the more rigorous in his economic analysis, however. The most authoritative, and arguably the slowest portion of the book is the middle, where he makes a survey of the various schools of economics and their responses to the apparent failure of the capitalist harvest. It's no surprise to see reviews of this book casting his analysis as Marxist - the blanket response to any challenge to neoliberal economics - but even though he clearly knows his Marx (and his Keynes, Friedman and the rest) this is much more than the standard narrative of capitalism's predictable collapse. It's a picture recognisable to anyone struggling in a hateful job, anyone struggling to get on the housing ladder, or those with smart, debt-burdened children who, as graduates, are looking less and less likely to repay their student loans. To any smart programmer, whose choice is to earn a fortune writing high-speed trading software, or to write opensource for nothing.
If it's easy to pick holes anywhere, and these are the holes that have been picked by the mainstream press, it's in Mason's optimism that we can collectively bring about the metamorphosis of society to a new order where work is almost optional, and where, recognising the abundance in which we live, old notions of 'deserving' based on competition for scarce resources simply disappear. Like Rifkin, he has a broad view that we are on the threshold of a metamorphosis which can be brought about by reason and peaceful activism. In a species which is still capable of barbaric atrocities, where millions of people can be whipped up into a murderous frenzy over a few thousand desperate refugees, it's much more likely that we'll fight it out down to the last low-paid, zero-hours contract job, believing that if we just keep running, we'll somehow make it. Maybe we'll make the change only after an enormous conflagration or, as Elon Musk fears, we'll fulfil our human destiny as a biological boot-loader for artificial intelligence, and disappear.
33 comments|
64 people found this helpful.
Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse
Please write at least one word
You must purchase at least one item from Amazon to post a comment
A problem occurred while submitting your comment. Please try again later.
There was a problem loading the comments at the moment. Please try again later.
ByBreakingviewson 11 September 2015
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.
- Kate Duguid
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.
- Kate Duguid
11 comment|
71 people found this helpful.
Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse
Please write at least one word
You must purchase at least one item from Amazon to post a comment
A problem occurred while submitting your comment. Please try again later.
There was a problem loading the comments at the moment. Please try again later.
Quite fittingly, as I completed my reading of John Plender’s book Capitalism, the next one on the pile was Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism. Plender’s had concluded with the gloomy pronouncement that there was little likelihood that its eponymous economic system was in danger of being replaced in the near future. Mason begins with the premise that the conditions are already ripe for the opposite proposition, that something will come along that is better.
Where Plender tended to tread fairly familiar ground in his survey, Mason explores more unusual ground in drawing his conclusions, although the villains are much the same: the champions of neoliberalism and its principal beneficiaries, who continue to hold their Get Out Of Jail Free cards protecting them from the excesses leading to the 2007-8 crash. What it lacks in that respect, though, is Plender’s Panglossian apologies for a temporary hiccup. Capitalism, Mason believes, is terminally dysfunctional. And, he points out, even Classical economists, including Adam Smith, questioned the system’s sustainability.
One of the realms Mason explores is Marxist economic theory. There are, Mason concedes, some areas where Marx’s predictions failed, as in the notion that mechanisation would de-skill the proletariat. To the contrary, they became more skilled and more educated, and as they did so they developed a new culture accompanied by class consciousness, organisational prowess and solidarity, leading to the formation of powerful trades unions and political parties. During the twenties and thirties this produced a capitalist-backed backlash in the form of fascism, the principal aim of which was to mercilessly destroy the mass workers’ movements. Whilst that attempt largely failed, the progenitors of neoliberalism – most notably Thatcher and Reagan – succeeded in weakening the labour movement, exploiting the consequences of the recession brought on by the oil shock resulting from the 1979 Iranian revolution, to the extent that what differentiates the present wave of capitalist development from those of the past is the lack of a viable countervailing power able to compel government intervention.
But Marx was successful in reconstructing the labour theory of value, something that in my experience, regrettably, is not taught in economics courses (and I stress that that is only my own experience). Furthermore, in the work known as Grundrisse, a set of notebooks only published in the 1960s, a section known as the Fragment on Machines predicted the possibility of machines ultimately relieving people of the need to labour at all, a notion that in its day must have seemed like science fiction but which now, Mason maintains, is not only conceivable but also provides one of the material conditions for postcapitalism, potentially changing the relationship between worker and machine and rendering the knowledge incorporated in the machines as social.
“Knowledge”, and the increasingly free flow of information facilitated by the Internet are, indeed, the key to Mason’s new economic order. He deploys an impressive array of the learned to support his idea that “free stuff” can change the world including Peter Drucker, Paul Romer and Herbert Simon. Mason takes Simon’s 1991 model of the world with its component organisations, markets and hierarchies and adds to it peer-to-peer networks, mediated by the Internet and peer-to-peer free stuff greased with information as his own foundational model. He then advances a To-Do List for postcapitalism which addresses not only the flawed market fundamentalism which continues to run riot throughout the world economy but also some of its fallout, such as unabated environmental despoliation, and its concomitant climate change, and the demographic time bomb in which people essential to the health of the world economy are confined to the places where they can least fulfil their historic role.
I’ll admit that I remain somewhat sceptical. I remain unconvinced by the idea that the networked individual, a character I’ve encountered before in the work of Manuel Castells and other Twenty-first Century soothsayers, is the new gravedigger of capitalism. Instead of “Aux barricades!” will they be shouting “To the firewalls!”? I’m sure that Mason himself does not take seriously the idea that the 1% will be able to take comfort in the knowledge that at least they will be less stressed in the future. In fact, the big omission from my point of view was the lack of concern for the lengths to which the 1% and their agents will go in order to avoid the loss of their private jets, gated communities and island-sized yachts. I suspect that some measure of violence on their part should be anticipated in that respect.
That does not, however, mean I don’t like the idea of a benign postcapitalist order along the lines Mason sketches, and he at least made me feel a little more optimistic for the future than did Plender. Many of his arguments are compelling, his critique of the present state of affairs spot on, and he displays an admirable erudition which in itself makes this book worth the read.
Where Plender tended to tread fairly familiar ground in his survey, Mason explores more unusual ground in drawing his conclusions, although the villains are much the same: the champions of neoliberalism and its principal beneficiaries, who continue to hold their Get Out Of Jail Free cards protecting them from the excesses leading to the 2007-8 crash. What it lacks in that respect, though, is Plender’s Panglossian apologies for a temporary hiccup. Capitalism, Mason believes, is terminally dysfunctional. And, he points out, even Classical economists, including Adam Smith, questioned the system’s sustainability.
One of the realms Mason explores is Marxist economic theory. There are, Mason concedes, some areas where Marx’s predictions failed, as in the notion that mechanisation would de-skill the proletariat. To the contrary, they became more skilled and more educated, and as they did so they developed a new culture accompanied by class consciousness, organisational prowess and solidarity, leading to the formation of powerful trades unions and political parties. During the twenties and thirties this produced a capitalist-backed backlash in the form of fascism, the principal aim of which was to mercilessly destroy the mass workers’ movements. Whilst that attempt largely failed, the progenitors of neoliberalism – most notably Thatcher and Reagan – succeeded in weakening the labour movement, exploiting the consequences of the recession brought on by the oil shock resulting from the 1979 Iranian revolution, to the extent that what differentiates the present wave of capitalist development from those of the past is the lack of a viable countervailing power able to compel government intervention.
But Marx was successful in reconstructing the labour theory of value, something that in my experience, regrettably, is not taught in economics courses (and I stress that that is only my own experience). Furthermore, in the work known as Grundrisse, a set of notebooks only published in the 1960s, a section known as the Fragment on Machines predicted the possibility of machines ultimately relieving people of the need to labour at all, a notion that in its day must have seemed like science fiction but which now, Mason maintains, is not only conceivable but also provides one of the material conditions for postcapitalism, potentially changing the relationship between worker and machine and rendering the knowledge incorporated in the machines as social.
“Knowledge”, and the increasingly free flow of information facilitated by the Internet are, indeed, the key to Mason’s new economic order. He deploys an impressive array of the learned to support his idea that “free stuff” can change the world including Peter Drucker, Paul Romer and Herbert Simon. Mason takes Simon’s 1991 model of the world with its component organisations, markets and hierarchies and adds to it peer-to-peer networks, mediated by the Internet and peer-to-peer free stuff greased with information as his own foundational model. He then advances a To-Do List for postcapitalism which addresses not only the flawed market fundamentalism which continues to run riot throughout the world economy but also some of its fallout, such as unabated environmental despoliation, and its concomitant climate change, and the demographic time bomb in which people essential to the health of the world economy are confined to the places where they can least fulfil their historic role.
I’ll admit that I remain somewhat sceptical. I remain unconvinced by the idea that the networked individual, a character I’ve encountered before in the work of Manuel Castells and other Twenty-first Century soothsayers, is the new gravedigger of capitalism. Instead of “Aux barricades!” will they be shouting “To the firewalls!”? I’m sure that Mason himself does not take seriously the idea that the 1% will be able to take comfort in the knowledge that at least they will be less stressed in the future. In fact, the big omission from my point of view was the lack of concern for the lengths to which the 1% and their agents will go in order to avoid the loss of their private jets, gated communities and island-sized yachts. I suspect that some measure of violence on their part should be anticipated in that respect.
That does not, however, mean I don’t like the idea of a benign postcapitalist order along the lines Mason sketches, and he at least made me feel a little more optimistic for the future than did Plender. Many of his arguments are compelling, his critique of the present state of affairs spot on, and he displays an admirable erudition which in itself makes this book worth the read.
0Comment|
8 people found this helpful.
Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse
Please write at least one word
You must purchase at least one item from Amazon to post a comment
A problem occurred while submitting your comment. Please try again later.
There was a problem loading the comments at the moment. Please try again later.
Mason’s ‘Postcapitalism’ is one of only three books I have ever read that represent a serious attempt to reimagine the global economy. The other two were written about a hundred years ago by a man who is deeply academically unfashionable, at least in this country, despite his extensive and rigorous academic credentials, namely Rudolf Steiner. I refer to ‘The Threefold Social Order’ and ‘World Economy’.
Like Steiner, Mason draws heavily on Marxist traditions. Steiner was far from being a Marxist, but shared Marx’s analysis of the problems capitalism presented. He differed with him on the solution.
Mason has read widely in Marxist economic theory, including Marx, Engels, Lenin, Bukharin and a number of others. He shows how the evolution of capitalism surprised almost all of these thinkers: they didn’t expect it to survive so long and in particular underestimated its adaptive power.
Mason argues that capitalism survived initially by turning into a form of state capitalism which largely controlled the market and socialised and protected the workforce. This started to break down when Nixon took the dollar out of the Bretton Woods agreement and all currencies then became flexible. From around that time it gradually became open season on irresponsible financial speculation, eventually to the extent that the global economy became a tissue of lies and guesswork.
Mason’s analysis of Marxism is presented alongside a look at Kondratieff who postulates fifty year cycles of growth and decline, which are to do with cycles of types of means of production which gradually run out of steam.
All this gradually culminates in the sterility of neoliberalism which Mason contrasts with a labour theory of value. Neoliberalism is basically interested in making money. It is interested in the market but not in the human lives that lay behind it, and it tells us that if we trust the market everything else will sort itself out. A theory of value based on labour suggests that the value of things should be based not on scarcity or manipulation but on the amount of money it costs to keep a family alive and in health, and how many hours a worker needs to put in to create something. In other words this theory of value starts with the human being.
If you look at the world today it is obvious the free market ideology is bankrupt but even those in public life who realise and perhaps acknowledge this are reluctant to disown it because they can’t conceive of an alternative.
Mason, having analysed socialism closely, postulates that human values can only be maintained by a system he calls postcapitalism, which can grow out of the development of the internet which offers the potential to reduce demands on labour because of the ways in which it can revolutionise design and production (the ‘Internet of Things’), and the development of the free economy as instanced by Open Source agreements and non-profit concerns like Wikipedia.
The last chapter or two look in some detail at the problems the world faces – migration, climate change and an ageing population – and suggest that there are ways of stimulating the cooperative economy but that also governments need to throw their weight around when it comes to regulating the financial world.
Many of Mason’s ideas echo Steiner’s, particularly his theory of value, his views about regulation of capital, and his critique of Marxism. Steiner of course is hard to take for many because of his spiritual views. However I would suggest a spirituality as hardheaded, rigorous and grounded in concrete reality as Steiner’s perhaps deserves further consideration, a hundred years old or not.
Finally Mason’s book is easy to read in one sense, ie in the language he uses, which is totally jargon free. Of course some of the concepts need some effort to grasp.
Like Steiner, Mason draws heavily on Marxist traditions. Steiner was far from being a Marxist, but shared Marx’s analysis of the problems capitalism presented. He differed with him on the solution.
Mason has read widely in Marxist economic theory, including Marx, Engels, Lenin, Bukharin and a number of others. He shows how the evolution of capitalism surprised almost all of these thinkers: they didn’t expect it to survive so long and in particular underestimated its adaptive power.
Mason argues that capitalism survived initially by turning into a form of state capitalism which largely controlled the market and socialised and protected the workforce. This started to break down when Nixon took the dollar out of the Bretton Woods agreement and all currencies then became flexible. From around that time it gradually became open season on irresponsible financial speculation, eventually to the extent that the global economy became a tissue of lies and guesswork.
Mason’s analysis of Marxism is presented alongside a look at Kondratieff who postulates fifty year cycles of growth and decline, which are to do with cycles of types of means of production which gradually run out of steam.
All this gradually culminates in the sterility of neoliberalism which Mason contrasts with a labour theory of value. Neoliberalism is basically interested in making money. It is interested in the market but not in the human lives that lay behind it, and it tells us that if we trust the market everything else will sort itself out. A theory of value based on labour suggests that the value of things should be based not on scarcity or manipulation but on the amount of money it costs to keep a family alive and in health, and how many hours a worker needs to put in to create something. In other words this theory of value starts with the human being.
If you look at the world today it is obvious the free market ideology is bankrupt but even those in public life who realise and perhaps acknowledge this are reluctant to disown it because they can’t conceive of an alternative.
Mason, having analysed socialism closely, postulates that human values can only be maintained by a system he calls postcapitalism, which can grow out of the development of the internet which offers the potential to reduce demands on labour because of the ways in which it can revolutionise design and production (the ‘Internet of Things’), and the development of the free economy as instanced by Open Source agreements and non-profit concerns like Wikipedia.
The last chapter or two look in some detail at the problems the world faces – migration, climate change and an ageing population – and suggest that there are ways of stimulating the cooperative economy but that also governments need to throw their weight around when it comes to regulating the financial world.
Many of Mason’s ideas echo Steiner’s, particularly his theory of value, his views about regulation of capital, and his critique of Marxism. Steiner of course is hard to take for many because of his spiritual views. However I would suggest a spirituality as hardheaded, rigorous and grounded in concrete reality as Steiner’s perhaps deserves further consideration, a hundred years old or not.
Finally Mason’s book is easy to read in one sense, ie in the language he uses, which is totally jargon free. Of course some of the concepts need some effort to grasp.
0Comment|
12 people found this helpful.
Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse
Please write at least one word
You must purchase at least one item from Amazon to post a comment
A problem occurred while submitting your comment. Please try again later.
There was a problem loading the comments at the moment. Please try again later.
ByPaul Halsallon 30 July 2015
I am reading Paul Mason's book at the moment. He is correct, I think, in pointing to rapid technological innovation and adaptation as the core of the success of "capitalism."
I suggest that a problem here is that at some point if enough "adaptations" have occurred one is faced with the evolution of a new entity. It might still be called "capitalism" but it is only genealogically connected to "capitalism" as understood by Adam Smith, or Karl Marx or even Ayn Rand, or as practised in the real economies around those figures. Only by extreme reification or naive terminological essentialism can continue that some stable entity called "capitalism" has existed over the past 200+ years and will continue to exist.
Mason suggests, without resorting to any claims of certainty about what will in fact occur, that the capitalism has reached the limits of adaptability. He discusses specific problems: national and international debt levels that have no connection with the real economy; already reached limits to growth in the West and rapidly approaching limits in China, India, etc; the suppression of popular democracy where populations object to corporate and central bank policies designed to preserve the current structure. He suggests that the international financial system now does not the resources to deal with another shock on the scale of 2008. And he argues that the current system will be unable to deal with future foreseeable problems such as a rapidly ageing worldwide population (including China, India, Mexico, etc), climate change, and the problems of pollution.
I don't that he is wrong in all this. His error, if it is there, will be if capitalism does indeed prove to be more adaptable than he thinks.
I suggest that a problem here is that at some point if enough "adaptations" have occurred one is faced with the evolution of a new entity. It might still be called "capitalism" but it is only genealogically connected to "capitalism" as understood by Adam Smith, or Karl Marx or even Ayn Rand, or as practised in the real economies around those figures. Only by extreme reification or naive terminological essentialism can continue that some stable entity called "capitalism" has existed over the past 200+ years and will continue to exist.
Mason suggests, without resorting to any claims of certainty about what will in fact occur, that the capitalism has reached the limits of adaptability. He discusses specific problems: national and international debt levels that have no connection with the real economy; already reached limits to growth in the West and rapidly approaching limits in China, India, etc; the suppression of popular democracy where populations object to corporate and central bank policies designed to preserve the current structure. He suggests that the international financial system now does not the resources to deal with another shock on the scale of 2008. And he argues that the current system will be unable to deal with future foreseeable problems such as a rapidly ageing worldwide population (including China, India, Mexico, etc), climate change, and the problems of pollution.
I don't that he is wrong in all this. His error, if it is there, will be if capitalism does indeed prove to be more adaptable than he thinks.
11 comment|
21 people found this helpful.
Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse
Please write at least one word
You must purchase at least one item from Amazon to post a comment
A problem occurred while submitting your comment. Please try again later.
There was a problem loading the comments at the moment. Please try again later.
ByFredon 29 September 2015
While this was an interesting read, I found myself tiring a bit half way through. The analysis of our economic/social problems rang a lot of bells, but after a while, I wanted to see more robust challenges to the underlying enabler of a post capitalist system of "information is free". Nothing is free. Its just hard to identify where the costs are sometimes. I applaud the research, thought and hard work to come up with an alternative to our current economic system, ideas from the left have been sparse in the last 30 years. I was incredibly impressed at Paul Mason's knowledge and experience that this book exhibited. But in truth the detailed arguments lost me at times, and haven't convinced me its the answer and/or it will happen.
0Comment|
6 people found this helpful.
Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse
Please write at least one word
You must purchase at least one item from Amazon to post a comment
A problem occurred while submitting your comment. Please try again later.
There was a problem loading the comments at the moment. Please try again later.
ByStephenon 5 August 2016
The themes of this book are important and timely; however, whilst I grasped the basic ideas fairly easily, sections of the book are challenging; so a great read it may be, but not at every point a page turner.
Before summarising and commenting on some of the main ideas it is important to point out that the book offers an optimistic vision of a post capitalist future but one which is based on a gloomy, even apocalyptic analysis of the current state of the capitalist economy. Without this analysis the subsequent discussion of transition to post capitalism makes little sense and so it is necessarily the starting point of this summary.
Capitalism has, since its beginnings, followed 50 year cycles of growth and decline, each cycle of decline being associated with a systemic crisis which has threatened to fulfil the Marxist prophecy of a new and more enlightened system delivering fairness to all.
Contrary, however, to the Marxist view, capitalism has proven protean in its ability, following one of its recurrent crises, to reinvent itself with a plausible offer of prosperity that can reach all parts of society. Neoliberal economists have increasingly come to believe in their ability to manage the system and to bring it out of recession by the application of monetary policies. The fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin wall, from this perspective, signalled an apparently decisive blow to the Marxist view of historical change; as the Berlin Wall fell, the capitalist economies were demonstrating an astonishing capacity for productivity and innovation.
Paul Mason associates each 50 year cycle of capitalism with the emergence of a new technological paradigm. So, from 1798 to 1848 we see “The first long cycle….The factory system, steam powered machinery and canals; from 1848 to the mid 1890s is the second long cycle with “Railways, the telegraph, ocean-going steamers, stable currencies and machine produced machinery.” The third long cycle is from 1890s to 1945 and is driven by “heavy industry, electrical engineering, the telephone, scientific management and mass production.” The fourth cycle runs from the 1940s to 2008 and is driven by the development of transistors, synthetic materials, mass consumer goods, factory automation, nuclear power and automatic calculation.” Overlapping the conclusion of this fourth cycle of capitalism “the basic elements of the fifth long cycle appear…..network technology, mobile communications, a truly global marketplace and information goods.” Mason concludes however that this cycle has stalled and attributes this stalling to “neoliberalism and something to do with the technology itself.”
In the first part of each cycle, wages have typically been relatively high and the employment offer good. However as the development of the technology matures, so competition increases, and for businesses to survive they are obliged to increase pressures on their workforce, demanding increased productivity, squeezing wages, introducing more mechanised production, or outsourcing production to places where employment costs are lower. The result: lower wages and higher unemployment.
So what of our current situation? Why is the emergence of “network technology, mobile communications, a truly global marketplace and information goods” unable to supercharge the 5th cycle of capitalism. Paul Mason argues that the impact of these technologies has been exactly opposite; information has become the most important commodity and to a large extent this is being exchanged and shared free of charge. This information has released an enormous productive potential but one which capitalism is struggling to exploit in that it tends towards goods which are free of charge or can be produced very cheaply and with very little labour. The consequence is a production process which shows no potential to develop and sustain large numbers of well paid jobs even at the dawn of this fifth cycle, the very stage at which previous experience suggests this should be happening. The world economy consequently is failing to grow its way out of the financial crisis of 2008 and we are faced with enormous and developing challenges on a number of fronts, without the evident willingness in many cases to even accept that these challenges exist or are imminent.
Apart from the challenges presented by a stagnating economy Paul Mason also addresses the challenge of climate change, accepted by many as a future threat, though not always understood as an important current factor behind the migration with which the developed world is currently struggling to come to terms.
Similarly Mason identifies a “demographic time bomb” as a factor which will inevitably lead to further movements of people on a massive scale unless there is constructive political and economic change within those parts of the world where the population is growing most rapidly.
Mason’s further predictions in relation to our own financial system are equally apocalyptic. Anyone who has savings will be aware that zero interest rates, and quantitative easing are eroding the value of such assets. Pension funds are, for those nearing retirement, in a particularly concerning state. Mason writes: “In the aftermath of the crash, the typical big pension fund .... lends more than 55% of it money to governments in the form of bonds, which under quantitative easing pay zero or negative interest….Though the picture varies from one country to the next - with some smaller developed countries such as Norway extremely well provided for - the global situation is bleak; either the retired elderly must live on much less, or the financial system must deliver spectacular returns.”
According to this extremely persuasive analysis, capitalism is on borrowed time. This is not a denial of the enormous achievement of the capitalist system in creating the phenomenal productive resources which are now available to humankind; however if capitalism needs to grow economically in order to survive and shows no capacity to do so, then it can no longer sustain the illusion that it will be able to provide for the needs of an entire society.
As someone said on the radio only this morning: “every crisis is also an opportunity”, and Paul Mason offers us the opportunity of transitioning to a post-capitalist society which is better and fairer than capitalism. There is no seizure of power required for this transition; rather, the instruments created by the capitalist system are already beginning to develop the structures which will form the basis of this new society. The prime examples offered by Paul Mason are Wikipedia and Linux. These are indeed extraordinary collaborative achievements; but can this model of internet based cooperation successfully be the basis of an entire new society?
Marx, in a well known paragraph from his preface to the Critique of Political Economy says something which resonates with this possibility:
“No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.”
Internet based collaboration, however, serves the interests of those who wish to sustain the capitalist system as well as those who may wish to supersede capitalism, or indeed those, such as Isis, who may wish to destroy it; the benign post capitalist future envisioned by Paul Mason is by no means a forgone conclusion and dis-topic outcomes seem every bit as possible, perhaps indeed more possible. And yet I think it reasonable to suggest that all this collaborative activity, whether for good or ill, by its very nature, bends towards a fairer and more inclusive society. In small ways millions of us are experiencing the manner in which the Internet frees our productive capacity. Whatever fix we may have got into there is almost certainly a you-tube video, created by an enthusiastic amateur, showing the way to solve the problem. E-bay offers an economic model of which even those in depressed circumstances may take advantage. These may be small examples, but if we multiply them many times, and if they continue to develop, then they are significant.
Paul Mason acknowledges that the process of change will be complex and impossible to predict in every detail. “What happens to the state?” he asks, for example. His answer is wide open with possibility:
“It probably gets less powerful over time - and in the end its functions are assumed by society. I’ve tried to make this a project usable both by people who see states as useful and those who don’t; you could model an anarchist version and a statist version and try them out. There is probably even a conservative version of post-capitalism, and good luck to it.”
Questions flood in at this point. What about law and order? How is justice to be dispensed? What will be the status of the armed forces? The anarchist notion of a fundamentally benign and spontaneous polity might just develop from an ordered and stable society; but the post capitalist project must be carried forward amidst war and competition for scarce resources and within this context states would appear to offer a necessary framework for stability.
For people to move forward with the optimism necessary for success, they surely need some sense of how such systems as education and healthcare will be made available; it is very hard to imagine that in this post capitalist future, the current state sponsored models of delivery can survive. Ivan Illich developed striking critiques of these institutions, which were a fashionable accessory of the left during the 1970’s, but then fell out of favour; they may be worth revisiting in this new context. Illich also had some interesting things to say about transportation. Ivan Illich
But this is a diversion from the main event. Irvine Welsh has said Paul Mason has written: “the most important book about our economy and society to be published in my lifetime.” My literary diet to date has not included a great deal of economics so I am unable to comment with authority on this, but what I can say is that the ideas in Post Capitalism - a Guide to our Future, are more important than Brexit; more important than keeping the Union together or fighting for Independence for your own corner of it; whatever your great political passion may be, the themes of this book are almost certainly more important.
Before summarising and commenting on some of the main ideas it is important to point out that the book offers an optimistic vision of a post capitalist future but one which is based on a gloomy, even apocalyptic analysis of the current state of the capitalist economy. Without this analysis the subsequent discussion of transition to post capitalism makes little sense and so it is necessarily the starting point of this summary.
Capitalism has, since its beginnings, followed 50 year cycles of growth and decline, each cycle of decline being associated with a systemic crisis which has threatened to fulfil the Marxist prophecy of a new and more enlightened system delivering fairness to all.
Contrary, however, to the Marxist view, capitalism has proven protean in its ability, following one of its recurrent crises, to reinvent itself with a plausible offer of prosperity that can reach all parts of society. Neoliberal economists have increasingly come to believe in their ability to manage the system and to bring it out of recession by the application of monetary policies. The fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin wall, from this perspective, signalled an apparently decisive blow to the Marxist view of historical change; as the Berlin Wall fell, the capitalist economies were demonstrating an astonishing capacity for productivity and innovation.
Paul Mason associates each 50 year cycle of capitalism with the emergence of a new technological paradigm. So, from 1798 to 1848 we see “The first long cycle….The factory system, steam powered machinery and canals; from 1848 to the mid 1890s is the second long cycle with “Railways, the telegraph, ocean-going steamers, stable currencies and machine produced machinery.” The third long cycle is from 1890s to 1945 and is driven by “heavy industry, electrical engineering, the telephone, scientific management and mass production.” The fourth cycle runs from the 1940s to 2008 and is driven by the development of transistors, synthetic materials, mass consumer goods, factory automation, nuclear power and automatic calculation.” Overlapping the conclusion of this fourth cycle of capitalism “the basic elements of the fifth long cycle appear…..network technology, mobile communications, a truly global marketplace and information goods.” Mason concludes however that this cycle has stalled and attributes this stalling to “neoliberalism and something to do with the technology itself.”
In the first part of each cycle, wages have typically been relatively high and the employment offer good. However as the development of the technology matures, so competition increases, and for businesses to survive they are obliged to increase pressures on their workforce, demanding increased productivity, squeezing wages, introducing more mechanised production, or outsourcing production to places where employment costs are lower. The result: lower wages and higher unemployment.
So what of our current situation? Why is the emergence of “network technology, mobile communications, a truly global marketplace and information goods” unable to supercharge the 5th cycle of capitalism. Paul Mason argues that the impact of these technologies has been exactly opposite; information has become the most important commodity and to a large extent this is being exchanged and shared free of charge. This information has released an enormous productive potential but one which capitalism is struggling to exploit in that it tends towards goods which are free of charge or can be produced very cheaply and with very little labour. The consequence is a production process which shows no potential to develop and sustain large numbers of well paid jobs even at the dawn of this fifth cycle, the very stage at which previous experience suggests this should be happening. The world economy consequently is failing to grow its way out of the financial crisis of 2008 and we are faced with enormous and developing challenges on a number of fronts, without the evident willingness in many cases to even accept that these challenges exist or are imminent.
Apart from the challenges presented by a stagnating economy Paul Mason also addresses the challenge of climate change, accepted by many as a future threat, though not always understood as an important current factor behind the migration with which the developed world is currently struggling to come to terms.
Similarly Mason identifies a “demographic time bomb” as a factor which will inevitably lead to further movements of people on a massive scale unless there is constructive political and economic change within those parts of the world where the population is growing most rapidly.
Mason’s further predictions in relation to our own financial system are equally apocalyptic. Anyone who has savings will be aware that zero interest rates, and quantitative easing are eroding the value of such assets. Pension funds are, for those nearing retirement, in a particularly concerning state. Mason writes: “In the aftermath of the crash, the typical big pension fund .... lends more than 55% of it money to governments in the form of bonds, which under quantitative easing pay zero or negative interest….Though the picture varies from one country to the next - with some smaller developed countries such as Norway extremely well provided for - the global situation is bleak; either the retired elderly must live on much less, or the financial system must deliver spectacular returns.”
According to this extremely persuasive analysis, capitalism is on borrowed time. This is not a denial of the enormous achievement of the capitalist system in creating the phenomenal productive resources which are now available to humankind; however if capitalism needs to grow economically in order to survive and shows no capacity to do so, then it can no longer sustain the illusion that it will be able to provide for the needs of an entire society.
As someone said on the radio only this morning: “every crisis is also an opportunity”, and Paul Mason offers us the opportunity of transitioning to a post-capitalist society which is better and fairer than capitalism. There is no seizure of power required for this transition; rather, the instruments created by the capitalist system are already beginning to develop the structures which will form the basis of this new society. The prime examples offered by Paul Mason are Wikipedia and Linux. These are indeed extraordinary collaborative achievements; but can this model of internet based cooperation successfully be the basis of an entire new society?
Marx, in a well known paragraph from his preface to the Critique of Political Economy says something which resonates with this possibility:
“No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.”
Internet based collaboration, however, serves the interests of those who wish to sustain the capitalist system as well as those who may wish to supersede capitalism, or indeed those, such as Isis, who may wish to destroy it; the benign post capitalist future envisioned by Paul Mason is by no means a forgone conclusion and dis-topic outcomes seem every bit as possible, perhaps indeed more possible. And yet I think it reasonable to suggest that all this collaborative activity, whether for good or ill, by its very nature, bends towards a fairer and more inclusive society. In small ways millions of us are experiencing the manner in which the Internet frees our productive capacity. Whatever fix we may have got into there is almost certainly a you-tube video, created by an enthusiastic amateur, showing the way to solve the problem. E-bay offers an economic model of which even those in depressed circumstances may take advantage. These may be small examples, but if we multiply them many times, and if they continue to develop, then they are significant.
Paul Mason acknowledges that the process of change will be complex and impossible to predict in every detail. “What happens to the state?” he asks, for example. His answer is wide open with possibility:
“It probably gets less powerful over time - and in the end its functions are assumed by society. I’ve tried to make this a project usable both by people who see states as useful and those who don’t; you could model an anarchist version and a statist version and try them out. There is probably even a conservative version of post-capitalism, and good luck to it.”
Questions flood in at this point. What about law and order? How is justice to be dispensed? What will be the status of the armed forces? The anarchist notion of a fundamentally benign and spontaneous polity might just develop from an ordered and stable society; but the post capitalist project must be carried forward amidst war and competition for scarce resources and within this context states would appear to offer a necessary framework for stability.
For people to move forward with the optimism necessary for success, they surely need some sense of how such systems as education and healthcare will be made available; it is very hard to imagine that in this post capitalist future, the current state sponsored models of delivery can survive. Ivan Illich developed striking critiques of these institutions, which were a fashionable accessory of the left during the 1970’s, but then fell out of favour; they may be worth revisiting in this new context. Illich also had some interesting things to say about transportation. Ivan Illich
But this is a diversion from the main event. Irvine Welsh has said Paul Mason has written: “the most important book about our economy and society to be published in my lifetime.” My literary diet to date has not included a great deal of economics so I am unable to comment with authority on this, but what I can say is that the ideas in Post Capitalism - a Guide to our Future, are more important than Brexit; more important than keeping the Union together or fighting for Independence for your own corner of it; whatever your great political passion may be, the themes of this book are almost certainly more important.
0Comment|
3 people found this helpful.
Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse
Please write at least one word
You must purchase at least one item from Amazon to post a comment
A problem occurred while submitting your comment. Please try again later.
There was a problem loading the comments at the moment. Please try again later.
ByAggie S.on 2 August 2015
Confession, I've not finished it yet... so I'll probably come back to this review again.
This is a fantastic book. I'd expected it to be a thorough and intelligent critique of capitalism and neoliberalism - and it is. What I hadn't properly anticipated is how beautiful the prose would be. The introduction alone is worth the purchase, but who'd have guessed that wave theory could be rendered so poetically? It's engagingly written and with perfect clarity. This is a major achievement in a work that deals with such complex issues.
In Part One, Paul Mason sets about diagnosing the problem (one that's self-evident in effect - but not necessarily in cause - to anyone on the sharp end of austerity in the developed world). His account is wide-ranging but also detailed, urgent and full of conviction. I very much appreciate the fact that he leaves the reader room to form their own view. In other words, while polemical it's not didactic. Paul Mason has, I think, a gift for this: he never assumes that the reader will just know stuff, but finds a way to communicate facts and thoughts in a way that is always open and discursive. Probably a habit formed under the rigors of public service broadcasting. In Part Two he looks at the spadework for postcapitalism, again critiquing key thinkers, exploring promising steps and false starts. There's a lot of Marx there, or rather, lots of Marxes... A thoroughly fascinating discussion. Part Three (at which I've only glanced so far) is the most challenging because it's speculative and because it really does require the reader to complete it. Intuitively, since he argues that the future is to rest in sharing rather than ownership and exploitation, this is a clever move. This is probably the point I'll return to.
Highlights for me so far: the reevaluation of Marxist views of the working class, Kondratieff (of whom I knew but little), the references to Shakespeare, references to Mason's own life and experiences (did his grandmother really teach him how to put together a mortar when he was a kid?) and, of course, references to how the problems in Greece amplify the state of a world in thrall to finance. The sheer scope of the book across different thinkers, places, times and academic disciplines makes this an utterly fascinating synthesis.
Oh, the tech stuff! I hadn't expected to get this, particularly, and I'll happily declare myself still inexpert on the subject, but what I find heartening about Mason's analysis is his argument that the network restores agency to people, both the ordinary and the extraordinary. And in fact, because the information economy is to be shared and rooted in creativity, it's probably no longer possible or correct to draw that distinction.
I am really enjoying the read and recommend the book earnestly not just to those who situate themselves on the left of the political spectrum. It's as much a challenge to the lazy assumptions of many twentieth century lefties as it's a boot up the backside of the ruling elite or people who identify with the status quo. We've become passive and - worse - started to believe that's our place. 'Postcapitalism' challenges that.
This is a fantastic book. I'd expected it to be a thorough and intelligent critique of capitalism and neoliberalism - and it is. What I hadn't properly anticipated is how beautiful the prose would be. The introduction alone is worth the purchase, but who'd have guessed that wave theory could be rendered so poetically? It's engagingly written and with perfect clarity. This is a major achievement in a work that deals with such complex issues.
In Part One, Paul Mason sets about diagnosing the problem (one that's self-evident in effect - but not necessarily in cause - to anyone on the sharp end of austerity in the developed world). His account is wide-ranging but also detailed, urgent and full of conviction. I very much appreciate the fact that he leaves the reader room to form their own view. In other words, while polemical it's not didactic. Paul Mason has, I think, a gift for this: he never assumes that the reader will just know stuff, but finds a way to communicate facts and thoughts in a way that is always open and discursive. Probably a habit formed under the rigors of public service broadcasting. In Part Two he looks at the spadework for postcapitalism, again critiquing key thinkers, exploring promising steps and false starts. There's a lot of Marx there, or rather, lots of Marxes... A thoroughly fascinating discussion. Part Three (at which I've only glanced so far) is the most challenging because it's speculative and because it really does require the reader to complete it. Intuitively, since he argues that the future is to rest in sharing rather than ownership and exploitation, this is a clever move. This is probably the point I'll return to.
Highlights for me so far: the reevaluation of Marxist views of the working class, Kondratieff (of whom I knew but little), the references to Shakespeare, references to Mason's own life and experiences (did his grandmother really teach him how to put together a mortar when he was a kid?) and, of course, references to how the problems in Greece amplify the state of a world in thrall to finance. The sheer scope of the book across different thinkers, places, times and academic disciplines makes this an utterly fascinating synthesis.
Oh, the tech stuff! I hadn't expected to get this, particularly, and I'll happily declare myself still inexpert on the subject, but what I find heartening about Mason's analysis is his argument that the network restores agency to people, both the ordinary and the extraordinary. And in fact, because the information economy is to be shared and rooted in creativity, it's probably no longer possible or correct to draw that distinction.
I am really enjoying the read and recommend the book earnestly not just to those who situate themselves on the left of the political spectrum. It's as much a challenge to the lazy assumptions of many twentieth century lefties as it's a boot up the backside of the ruling elite or people who identify with the status quo. We've become passive and - worse - started to believe that's our place. 'Postcapitalism' challenges that.
1111 comments|
15 people found this helpful.
Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse
Please write at least one word
You must purchase at least one item from Amazon to post a comment
A problem occurred while submitting your comment. Please try again later.
There was a problem loading the comments at the moment. Please try again later.
ByMr. Martin J. Hugheson 6 October 2016
I am a socialist (or at least a believer that capitalism has run it's course) but I am not a trained economist. To fully appreciate 80% of this very "heavy" book I think I should have a degree in economics. Paul Mason spends most of the book covering economic history from 1700 to the present day and explains how capitalism has gone through several 50 to 70 year cycles and has always re-invented itself to survive and prosper. His main idea is that, with the development of the "networked society" capitalism has finally met it's match.
My main criticism of this book is that it is far too "dense" for the man-in-the-street. I had to Google many terms and make extensive notes to get the best out of this book.
My main criticism of this book is that it is far too "dense" for the man-in-the-street. I had to Google many terms and make extensive notes to get the best out of this book.
0Comment|
One person found this helpful.
Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse
Please write at least one word
You must purchase at least one item from Amazon to post a comment
A problem occurred while submitting your comment. Please try again later.
There was a problem loading the comments at the moment. Please try again later.
Unlimited One-Day Delivery and more
Prime members also enjoy exclusive access to movies and TV shows, two million songs and much more.
There's a problem loading this menu at the moment.
|
Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations
After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.
Back to top
Get to Know Us | Make Money with Us | Amazon Payment Methods | Let Us Help You |
- Conditions of Use & Sale
- Privacy Notice
- Cookies & Internet Advertising
- © 1996-2016, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates
