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PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
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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
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1.0 out of 5 starsPossibly a good book, but the audiobook edition is a travesty. Avoid the audio version!
ByR. I. Armstrongon 7 September 2016
My review is based entirely on the unabridged audiobook version of this text, as bought from Audible - the book may well be excellent, but the audio is one of the shoddiest products I have encountered.
When someone is 'narrating' an audiobook, they make errors, mangle words or get the emphasis wrong - not surprising, as us humans make mistakes - and usual practice is they repeat the mangled phrase in it's proper form, because then an editor or producer, who has the job of making as good a final product as they can, will cut the mistakes out and make a seamless reading of the text. It appears in this case though, Penguin either forgot to hire someone for this job, or whoever they did hire slept through the playback of the recording.
I gave up after the eleventh duplicated line, which was less than half way through the book - the reader clearly knew he's made a mistake, as he repeated the words or phrases so the correct version could be edited in, Shamefully, Penguin failed to do this, and clearly 'quality control' did not include the most basic step of listening to the version they then released and took money for. It was impossible for me to follow the thread of the argument, as the constant mistakes left me waiting for the next error rather than concentrating on the content. The author (who also was the narrator of the book) should feel deeply let down by their publisher over this audibook - I know as a customer my opinion of Penguin is much lower than it had been prior to this mess..
When someone is 'narrating' an audiobook, they make errors, mangle words or get the emphasis wrong - not surprising, as us humans make mistakes - and usual practice is they repeat the mangled phrase in it's proper form, because then an editor or producer, who has the job of making as good a final product as they can, will cut the mistakes out and make a seamless reading of the text. It appears in this case though, Penguin either forgot to hire someone for this job, or whoever they did hire slept through the playback of the recording.
I gave up after the eleventh duplicated line, which was less than half way through the book - the reader clearly knew he's made a mistake, as he repeated the words or phrases so the correct version could be edited in, Shamefully, Penguin failed to do this, and clearly 'quality control' did not include the most basic step of listening to the version they then released and took money for. It was impossible for me to follow the thread of the argument, as the constant mistakes left me waiting for the next error rather than concentrating on the content. The author (who also was the narrator of the book) should feel deeply let down by their publisher over this audibook - I know as a customer my opinion of Penguin is much lower than it had been prior to this mess..
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1.0 out of 5 starsso I suppose the second half may be brilliant. But the first half is poorly written
Bydcw803on 12 August 2016
I'm still reading this, so I suppose the second half may be brilliant. But the first half is poorly written, hard to read, hard to understand, and woefully badly argued. I almost gave up - like others here - but am ploughing through. His analysis seems to rely on the mysterious theory of repeating 50-60 year K-waves in the world economy (K sanding for Nikolai Kondratiev or Kondratieff, an obscure soviet era economist). However, there are two critical flaws: First, Mason didn't bother to demonstrate that the world economy clearly, unambiguously, shows 50-60 year waves - was a graph of world GDP over the last N-hundred years too much to ask, so that we could all see the evidence for K-waves ourselves? Second, he didn't say a single word about what is significant about 50 years, or 55 years, or 60 years: i.e. if K-waves really exist, why do they exist? why should the world economy, changing all the time, exhibit regular 50-year cycles? Third, he didn't bother to ask any current historians or economists whether they think there's strong evidence for K-waves (the Wikipedia article suggests that many economists think there's no solid evidence that they are a real thing.
Instead, he simply assumes that K-waves exist and uses them to try to explain stuff. That's a shoddy basis for any argument. Next, he acknowleges that Marxist beliefs about capitalism dying were simply wrong, that capitalism didn't die as he predicted, instead capitalism adapted, and then went on from strength to strength in the last 80 years (despite it's recent problems). Mason still tries to mine Marx's more obscure writings (and similar beliefs from minority social thinkers) for any random thoughts that might apply today. This implies a desperate need inside Mason not to give up on Marx, but why should we assume Marx has any better ideas than thinkers today?
I could go on (into the digital medium, zero-cost-reproduction, open source) areas, which are of more interest to me, but I'll finish by noting that he doesn't give a compelling reason of why these fringe activities are so important, let alone how they might scale into "post-capitalism", if that's even a thing. I was hoping for a clear analysis of how historical trends (eg. towards automation) are likely to make inroads on work in society, and see how to make interesting ideas like a universal basic income system actually work, numerically. But instead I'm ploughing through Marxist claptrap.
Instead, he simply assumes that K-waves exist and uses them to try to explain stuff. That's a shoddy basis for any argument. Next, he acknowleges that Marxist beliefs about capitalism dying were simply wrong, that capitalism didn't die as he predicted, instead capitalism adapted, and then went on from strength to strength in the last 80 years (despite it's recent problems). Mason still tries to mine Marx's more obscure writings (and similar beliefs from minority social thinkers) for any random thoughts that might apply today. This implies a desperate need inside Mason not to give up on Marx, but why should we assume Marx has any better ideas than thinkers today?
I could go on (into the digital medium, zero-cost-reproduction, open source) areas, which are of more interest to me, but I'll finish by noting that he doesn't give a compelling reason of why these fringe activities are so important, let alone how they might scale into "post-capitalism", if that's even a thing. I was hoping for a clear analysis of how historical trends (eg. towards automation) are likely to make inroads on work in society, and see how to make interesting ideas like a universal basic income system actually work, numerically. But instead I'm ploughing through Marxist claptrap.
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ByAmazon Customeron 19 February 2016
Paul Mason is not an economist, He is a journalist with an agenda. Nevertheless I tried to read this diatribe objectively because it was given to me by a colleague. Mr Mason knows enough to pen a readable text but his relentless polemic got the better of me whilst I still had nearly half the book to read. Friedrich Hayek was one of the few people not quoted in Postcapitalism but he might have pointed out to Mr Mason that all his arguments are about the the evils of control and intervention. Hayek had already concluded that these are bad things that inevitably screw up self-correcting market mechanisms. Mr Mason however concludes that politicians and those they connive with have simply failed find the right, interventionist model. Quite why this particular hack should come up with a model that has eluded everyone else was not clear to me by the time I gave up reading. If anything, he drove me to conclude that capitalism, having survived these controlling intrusions longer than any alternative system and in the process lifted much of the world out of poverty, must have a lot going for it.
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Byfredon 20 September 2015
He is in too much of a hurry to pronounce the death of a system on anecdotal hearsay; there is little by way of anchors in phylosophy or in economics. The book is without substance! I laid it down after 100 or so pages.
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In his youth Mason was a hardline Marxist. In his own words ' a raging Leftie'. It shows. He has told us in the Independent newspaper that he entered journalism because ' I could write polemical propaganda leaflets'. This book shows he still can. He is a big fan of Nikolai Kondratieff, a Marxist economist who was executed by Stalin. in the Gulag he spent his time on his theory of long run economic cycles or waves, lasting 50-60 years. According to Mason we are now in the fifth and final wave. He is wrong. The theory was shot to pieces five years ago by Professor Jean Built. Also as Mark Black has said, ' What a wonderful story is the history of Marxism, refuted again and again, and revised again and again, not by its enemies but by its friends '.
According to Mason the end of the world is nigh. No it isn't Paul but the end of the Labour Party is irrespective of who wins the farcical leadership elelection. The parable of the Gaderine Swine keeps coming to mind also the behaviour of Lemmings. If throughback Corbyn wins , which is likely given the weakness of the other candidates, then heaven help us for this is a man who has never held office, hates many of our traditions, is triendly with terrorists, compares the army with the IRA, and is ignorant about economics and nuclear weapons. His sidekick, McDonnell, is every bit as bad. He wanted to assassinate Margaret Thatcher and sided with the IRA and the Adams gang. Mason will get on very will with these dropouts. They will be different, and how!
Mason left left-wing BBC to join even more to the left Channel 4 News dominated by a rampant left-winger, John Snow. He is now free to express his Marxist views freely, as he does in the Guardian. No wonder Alex Salmond took this book on his summer holiday.
This book by Paul Mason is a polemic riddled with and obsessed with Marxist thinking. Every chapter is full of his or other equally deluded left-wing thinking. The failure of every attempt to impose this sloppy economic paradise on the unsuspecting is given little space. One doesn't have to wonder why. Comrades should remember that Marx said: ' History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce'. This or the reverse fits this book as well as the current Labour leadership election.
Mason appears obsessed also with 'neoliberalism' which he claims believes in a system in which the state plays a small part apart from secret police and riot squads. He clearly dislikes these states but never identifies one of them. I find it impossible to name a single senior politician who subscribes to what he describes.
Mason claims Western societies are 'phony and fragile'. Despite this he is happy to make a very good living from working in one. In a ludicrous chapter he argues that the West can be compared with the Stasi-controlled East Germany. Clearly he never lived there , I wonder why, and equally clearly his knowledge of that concrete hell is decidedly flimsy.
Mason is also ignorant of the benefits resulting from the current technological revolution, a capitalist inspired one that is bringing huge improvements in the welfare of millions in Africa and other poverty stricken countries. He like many are obviously unaware of what progress has been made in eradicating disease and providing clean energy. It is free market capitalism that is driving this not some moribund marxist utopia. Unfortunately, we are so emeshed in, thanks to a left-wing group of dinosaurs who ruled for over 15 years, our fixation on austerity problems that most people are ignorant about the revolution taking place. In the media, I have yet to hear or read one left-winger define austerity correctly.
As the former economics editor of Channel Four News, Mason's views cause little surprise He wants, for example, to reverse trade union reforms and he prays for inflation! This he says is the only way to reduce huge debt burdens.My old Economics Professor would have crucified me if I had argued this in an essay. Mason would have been lucky to have been awarded a poor third at my university. Mason says in order to bring in his Garden of Eden we will need a world government that will not have to be very democratic! Of course, we know the kind he means, a mix of Stalin and North Korean will do nicely, no doubt. As for the unions he avoids reminding readers of the damage they did to the economy until they were brought to heel. I see that the bosses of two of our biggest moribund unions have recently been sunning themselves in Bermuda. On their salary and perks, why not. The author avoids telling readers that the union bosses who love the 'lads' and hate the rich elite all get around £ 135,000 a year plus perks. For doing what? Causing mayhem by calling unjustified strikes. One recently deceased boss had the nerve to live ifor years in a council house at subsidised rent. The lads adored him.
Of course, capitalism isn't without its faults. Of course, it faces challenges. Of course, there are serious debt issues to be tackled. But this marxist fails to note that capitalism has always been subjected to challenges, some of them worse than those around today. It has survived and overcome these challenges by adapting. It will continue to do so.
What is alarming about this parade of ignorance is that Mason says his desired world will need 'a new kind of human being' to drive his Wikipedia economy. This plus, of course, massive interventionism. His post capitalism state makes even the Gulag look appealing.
Mason like so many others of his kind never grasps the single biggest flaw in Marxist arguments, namely you cannot have both equality and liberty. Have the former then forget the latter and vice versa. He never grasps Shumpeter's point that the heart of capitalism is innovation. This has resulted in huge increases in living standards, and it will continue to do so in all countries where capitalism is the mode of production. The long run benefits of innovation are what matters not the short run benefits of static efficiency. What matters today and this is what Mason ought to be writing about is what kind of capitalism best promotes innovation. Of course, some are much better off than others but this is by no means always the fault of the system it is quite often down to pure luck and/ or hard work., or idleness.
A central weakness of marxism is that it has become for its followers a religion, a system of ultimate ends that are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions. It has become a guide to those ends and implies a plan of salvation for a chosen section of mankind. It promises paradise this side of the grave. To do so it uses and deploys a bag of party slogans that employ white hot phrases full of passion. Marx the prophet preached in the garb of analysis with a view to heartfelt needs. He claimed the inevitably of socialism. In so doing he falsified history and the psychology of the workman. He pretended to speak the logic of the dialectic process of history. It would do his followers good if they were to ignore slogans and read the Communist Manifesto, and his many other writings. They would be amazed to find that in one part of this book Marx gave a glowing account of the achievements of capitalism.
I make no apologies in reviewing this book for mentioning the current circus that is demeaning the Labour Party. Sadly, current events regarding the election of a new leader for the badly mauled British Labour Party , a party that has no longer any rational or realistic strategy to run this country, demonstrate there are plenty of gullible people who are ready to swallow any tosh and elect J. Corbyn who no doubt has a copy of this book in his pocket along with Das Capital which, of course, he will not have read. To be fair to those who support Mr Negativity, they have an astonishingly weak pool of candidates to pick from . If all were melted down the resultant mass wouldn't provide a decent deputy let alone a leader. I cannot recall a poorer, less competent batch of contenders for political leadership. Long gone are the days of Bevin, Bevan, Gaitskill, Healey and Wilson. We won't see their like again.
A liberal democracy needs an effective opposition. Labour is moving rapidly to the edge of a precipice. Like Lemmings over they will go and not be missed because the truth is that Labour no longer has any reason to exist. Blair won only because his policies were not socialist. They were light blue Tory. Now the ghastly ignorant Corbyn wants to turn the clock back to the stone age. As Labour leader no PM could possibly share security matters with him.
At the moment Corbyn and his supporters are hell bent on destroying the only party that can provide that opposition. Labour is marching into an ideological wilderness. It is rapidly descending into electoral oblivion. Street politics are replacing reason. Corbyn has described terrorists like Hamas as 'friends'. He is even elusive about the Holocaust. There is something particularly unpleasant about those who, living in a political democracy, happily condone terror elsewhere. These terrorists, of course, treat him and those like him as useful idiots. He and those of similar ilk will get succor from this lightweight account by Mason. Take its recommendations on board Labour and sink into political irrelevance and extinction. Corbyn has recently publicly compared the British army to IRA terrorists. He and his like have no place in our political life, even as leader of the Labour Party. The election is a farce. The hopeless and cowardly Ed has fled the country on yet another holiday. The current farce will end in disaster.
The adaptability and flexibility of capitalism will always see off the dead weight of marxism and communism. This badly argued book demonstrates that marxist solutions to serious economic problems are still fantasy, a dangerous fantasy. This book is based on faulty economics and riddled with an outdated ideology. It should never have found a publisher. The ultra left-wing still believe that political infantiliism can win power. When unexpectedly it does as in Greece look what happens! Another journalistic account that sits alonside the author's 'Live Working', and attacks on globalisation. The Militant Tendency and communists will love it. They have always sat in awe when fed tripe.
The dreary ultra- lefties that support Corbyn, who is still living in the seventies, at times the 1870's, will love this morass of outmoded ideas: Comrades like the hypocrite Abbott, she hates private scbools so she sent her brood to a very expensive one, Livingstone, ghastly, Galloway who loves Arab tyrants and Palestinian terrorists, Charlotte Church who went into a fantasy wonderland years ago, the ridiculous and ignorant Brand who no sane person could take seriously, lovers of the Daily Mirror that fountain of culture, and all those other envious class warriors, will all have this on their bedside table. Of course, like most posters they will not read it. Like the dreadful Piketty book that is riddled with grossly misguidlng statistics and warped economic theory, you don't read books like this, you use them to spout class envy. The majority of those who do read them will not have the required knowledge to detect the many flaws and the so obvious bias.Those who read French will know that in that country his marxist work is regarded as highly suspect. 'Mindsets set in ideological concrete rule the day', as Gaitskill once said. How true.
This is a book of utopian guesswork. Mason's prescriptions are very thin and very confused. He takes over 200 pages to get to his point. In those pages he tries to examine several major economic theories and in the process gets most wrong by distorting what they actually state. Yet another example of his sloppy research. Mason even thinks, as did Marx, that one day machines will do all the work while humans bask in the sun. It is a book replete with guff of this kind. Although come to think of it it is a pity robots don't drive our tube trains thereby avoiding gross disruption to our transport system and stress to thousands of commuters. They would also be cheaper than the £60,000 p.a. paid to newly qualified drivers. The union has made sure that the general public cannot apply for these jobs only carefully vetted underground workers can. You don't have to wonder why.
Many of us would not trust this author's predictions of the present let alone the future. He has Utopia on the brain. His recent rants while enjoying the Greek sunshine were deplorable but typical of a former member of the Trotskyist Workers Power Group. One day he and his followers will wake up to the fact that ever since 1789 the search for Eden has led to tyrannical repression. A diatribe of no merit whatsoever. The parable of the Gaderene Swine comes to mind.
This book should have been entitled: ' POSTMORTEM '.
According to Mason the end of the world is nigh. No it isn't Paul but the end of the Labour Party is irrespective of who wins the farcical leadership elelection. The parable of the Gaderine Swine keeps coming to mind also the behaviour of Lemmings. If throughback Corbyn wins , which is likely given the weakness of the other candidates, then heaven help us for this is a man who has never held office, hates many of our traditions, is triendly with terrorists, compares the army with the IRA, and is ignorant about economics and nuclear weapons. His sidekick, McDonnell, is every bit as bad. He wanted to assassinate Margaret Thatcher and sided with the IRA and the Adams gang. Mason will get on very will with these dropouts. They will be different, and how!
Mason left left-wing BBC to join even more to the left Channel 4 News dominated by a rampant left-winger, John Snow. He is now free to express his Marxist views freely, as he does in the Guardian. No wonder Alex Salmond took this book on his summer holiday.
This book by Paul Mason is a polemic riddled with and obsessed with Marxist thinking. Every chapter is full of his or other equally deluded left-wing thinking. The failure of every attempt to impose this sloppy economic paradise on the unsuspecting is given little space. One doesn't have to wonder why. Comrades should remember that Marx said: ' History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce'. This or the reverse fits this book as well as the current Labour leadership election.
Mason appears obsessed also with 'neoliberalism' which he claims believes in a system in which the state plays a small part apart from secret police and riot squads. He clearly dislikes these states but never identifies one of them. I find it impossible to name a single senior politician who subscribes to what he describes.
Mason claims Western societies are 'phony and fragile'. Despite this he is happy to make a very good living from working in one. In a ludicrous chapter he argues that the West can be compared with the Stasi-controlled East Germany. Clearly he never lived there , I wonder why, and equally clearly his knowledge of that concrete hell is decidedly flimsy.
Mason is also ignorant of the benefits resulting from the current technological revolution, a capitalist inspired one that is bringing huge improvements in the welfare of millions in Africa and other poverty stricken countries. He like many are obviously unaware of what progress has been made in eradicating disease and providing clean energy. It is free market capitalism that is driving this not some moribund marxist utopia. Unfortunately, we are so emeshed in, thanks to a left-wing group of dinosaurs who ruled for over 15 years, our fixation on austerity problems that most people are ignorant about the revolution taking place. In the media, I have yet to hear or read one left-winger define austerity correctly.
As the former economics editor of Channel Four News, Mason's views cause little surprise He wants, for example, to reverse trade union reforms and he prays for inflation! This he says is the only way to reduce huge debt burdens.My old Economics Professor would have crucified me if I had argued this in an essay. Mason would have been lucky to have been awarded a poor third at my university. Mason says in order to bring in his Garden of Eden we will need a world government that will not have to be very democratic! Of course, we know the kind he means, a mix of Stalin and North Korean will do nicely, no doubt. As for the unions he avoids reminding readers of the damage they did to the economy until they were brought to heel. I see that the bosses of two of our biggest moribund unions have recently been sunning themselves in Bermuda. On their salary and perks, why not. The author avoids telling readers that the union bosses who love the 'lads' and hate the rich elite all get around £ 135,000 a year plus perks. For doing what? Causing mayhem by calling unjustified strikes. One recently deceased boss had the nerve to live ifor years in a council house at subsidised rent. The lads adored him.
Of course, capitalism isn't without its faults. Of course, it faces challenges. Of course, there are serious debt issues to be tackled. But this marxist fails to note that capitalism has always been subjected to challenges, some of them worse than those around today. It has survived and overcome these challenges by adapting. It will continue to do so.
What is alarming about this parade of ignorance is that Mason says his desired world will need 'a new kind of human being' to drive his Wikipedia economy. This plus, of course, massive interventionism. His post capitalism state makes even the Gulag look appealing.
Mason like so many others of his kind never grasps the single biggest flaw in Marxist arguments, namely you cannot have both equality and liberty. Have the former then forget the latter and vice versa. He never grasps Shumpeter's point that the heart of capitalism is innovation. This has resulted in huge increases in living standards, and it will continue to do so in all countries where capitalism is the mode of production. The long run benefits of innovation are what matters not the short run benefits of static efficiency. What matters today and this is what Mason ought to be writing about is what kind of capitalism best promotes innovation. Of course, some are much better off than others but this is by no means always the fault of the system it is quite often down to pure luck and/ or hard work., or idleness.
A central weakness of marxism is that it has become for its followers a religion, a system of ultimate ends that are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions. It has become a guide to those ends and implies a plan of salvation for a chosen section of mankind. It promises paradise this side of the grave. To do so it uses and deploys a bag of party slogans that employ white hot phrases full of passion. Marx the prophet preached in the garb of analysis with a view to heartfelt needs. He claimed the inevitably of socialism. In so doing he falsified history and the psychology of the workman. He pretended to speak the logic of the dialectic process of history. It would do his followers good if they were to ignore slogans and read the Communist Manifesto, and his many other writings. They would be amazed to find that in one part of this book Marx gave a glowing account of the achievements of capitalism.
I make no apologies in reviewing this book for mentioning the current circus that is demeaning the Labour Party. Sadly, current events regarding the election of a new leader for the badly mauled British Labour Party , a party that has no longer any rational or realistic strategy to run this country, demonstrate there are plenty of gullible people who are ready to swallow any tosh and elect J. Corbyn who no doubt has a copy of this book in his pocket along with Das Capital which, of course, he will not have read. To be fair to those who support Mr Negativity, they have an astonishingly weak pool of candidates to pick from . If all were melted down the resultant mass wouldn't provide a decent deputy let alone a leader. I cannot recall a poorer, less competent batch of contenders for political leadership. Long gone are the days of Bevin, Bevan, Gaitskill, Healey and Wilson. We won't see their like again.
A liberal democracy needs an effective opposition. Labour is moving rapidly to the edge of a precipice. Like Lemmings over they will go and not be missed because the truth is that Labour no longer has any reason to exist. Blair won only because his policies were not socialist. They were light blue Tory. Now the ghastly ignorant Corbyn wants to turn the clock back to the stone age. As Labour leader no PM could possibly share security matters with him.
At the moment Corbyn and his supporters are hell bent on destroying the only party that can provide that opposition. Labour is marching into an ideological wilderness. It is rapidly descending into electoral oblivion. Street politics are replacing reason. Corbyn has described terrorists like Hamas as 'friends'. He is even elusive about the Holocaust. There is something particularly unpleasant about those who, living in a political democracy, happily condone terror elsewhere. These terrorists, of course, treat him and those like him as useful idiots. He and those of similar ilk will get succor from this lightweight account by Mason. Take its recommendations on board Labour and sink into political irrelevance and extinction. Corbyn has recently publicly compared the British army to IRA terrorists. He and his like have no place in our political life, even as leader of the Labour Party. The election is a farce. The hopeless and cowardly Ed has fled the country on yet another holiday. The current farce will end in disaster.
The adaptability and flexibility of capitalism will always see off the dead weight of marxism and communism. This badly argued book demonstrates that marxist solutions to serious economic problems are still fantasy, a dangerous fantasy. This book is based on faulty economics and riddled with an outdated ideology. It should never have found a publisher. The ultra left-wing still believe that political infantiliism can win power. When unexpectedly it does as in Greece look what happens! Another journalistic account that sits alonside the author's 'Live Working', and attacks on globalisation. The Militant Tendency and communists will love it. They have always sat in awe when fed tripe.
The dreary ultra- lefties that support Corbyn, who is still living in the seventies, at times the 1870's, will love this morass of outmoded ideas: Comrades like the hypocrite Abbott, she hates private scbools so she sent her brood to a very expensive one, Livingstone, ghastly, Galloway who loves Arab tyrants and Palestinian terrorists, Charlotte Church who went into a fantasy wonderland years ago, the ridiculous and ignorant Brand who no sane person could take seriously, lovers of the Daily Mirror that fountain of culture, and all those other envious class warriors, will all have this on their bedside table. Of course, like most posters they will not read it. Like the dreadful Piketty book that is riddled with grossly misguidlng statistics and warped economic theory, you don't read books like this, you use them to spout class envy. The majority of those who do read them will not have the required knowledge to detect the many flaws and the so obvious bias.Those who read French will know that in that country his marxist work is regarded as highly suspect. 'Mindsets set in ideological concrete rule the day', as Gaitskill once said. How true.
This is a book of utopian guesswork. Mason's prescriptions are very thin and very confused. He takes over 200 pages to get to his point. In those pages he tries to examine several major economic theories and in the process gets most wrong by distorting what they actually state. Yet another example of his sloppy research. Mason even thinks, as did Marx, that one day machines will do all the work while humans bask in the sun. It is a book replete with guff of this kind. Although come to think of it it is a pity robots don't drive our tube trains thereby avoiding gross disruption to our transport system and stress to thousands of commuters. They would also be cheaper than the £60,000 p.a. paid to newly qualified drivers. The union has made sure that the general public cannot apply for these jobs only carefully vetted underground workers can. You don't have to wonder why.
Many of us would not trust this author's predictions of the present let alone the future. He has Utopia on the brain. His recent rants while enjoying the Greek sunshine were deplorable but typical of a former member of the Trotskyist Workers Power Group. One day he and his followers will wake up to the fact that ever since 1789 the search for Eden has led to tyrannical repression. A diatribe of no merit whatsoever. The parable of the Gaderene Swine comes to mind.
This book should have been entitled: ' POSTMORTEM '.
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ByAmazon Customeron 10 March 2016
The Da Vinci Code meets Marxist economic thinking. Complete with ancient prophecies, secret texts and breathless illumination. Dire.
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ByTheLegeon 7 August 2015
Coming at you, thick and fast, no doubt sponsored by a litany of establishment sorts.
Door on the Left: Bureaucrats, Nannycrats, Central bankers, Central planners, Economists, Statists, Do-gooders, World-changers and Climate Alarmists (apologies to anyone I've left out of this illustrious group who collectively think the citizenry are as dumb as rocks and need to be 'guided' by higher intellectual powers)
Door on the Right: Free-thinkers, who value: Civil liberties, Personal Privacy, Economic Freedom, Free-markets, Sound Money ... and who abhor Imperialism, Crony-Socialism and the litany of people and organisations whose very survival hinges on being clamped firmly on the government teat.
But never fear, while socialism and failure are very well acquainted, I'm sure Mr Mason finally has the answer and the promised land is within reach.
Door on the Left: Bureaucrats, Nannycrats, Central bankers, Central planners, Economists, Statists, Do-gooders, World-changers and Climate Alarmists (apologies to anyone I've left out of this illustrious group who collectively think the citizenry are as dumb as rocks and need to be 'guided' by higher intellectual powers)
Door on the Right: Free-thinkers, who value: Civil liberties, Personal Privacy, Economic Freedom, Free-markets, Sound Money ... and who abhor Imperialism, Crony-Socialism and the litany of people and organisations whose very survival hinges on being clamped firmly on the government teat.
But never fear, while socialism and failure are very well acquainted, I'm sure Mr Mason finally has the answer and the promised land is within reach.
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