Is "Postcapitalism" On the Horizon?
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- Published on Tuesday, 18 October 2016 21:45
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1317 .... October 19, 2016
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Is "Postcapitalism" On the Horizon?
Andrew Jackson
Paul Mason is a leading British economic journalist, currently a columnist for The Guardian. He is also a long time left political activist. His new book, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. New York, 2015) is a challenging, sometimes obscure, sometimes brilliant, eminently worthwhile read, and an optimistic take that the left might, once again, be marching in tune with the forces of history.
Mason is, to say the least, highly original and idiosyncratic. His book is partly addressed to the orthodox Marxist left, endorses and builds upon the labour theory of value, takes seriously the possibility of a planned, non market economy, and pays tribute to the traditions of radical working-class socialism.... At the same time, he is emphatically non Leninist, sees networked knowledge workers as the key contemporary agents of social change, and draws heavily on pro capitalist thinkers from Schumpeter, to management theorist Peter Drucker, to contemporary cheerleaders for the supposedly transformative knowledge and network based new knowledge economy.
The argument begins with the crisis of contemporary neoliberalism dating back to the financial and global crisis of 2008. Together with many left economists, Mason envisages a dismal future of secular stagnation, ever more extreme income inequality, massive job losses due to technological change, unsustainably high levels of public and private debt, and chronic global trade imbalances. He argues that capitalism faces an acute impasse due to catastrophic climate change and pending massive defaults on debt.
Mason argues that capitalism has periodically radically mutated and morphed into new forms in response to crises, but that this is unlikely to recur given that political opposition to neoliberalism has been so weak due to the decline of the labour movement. Further, new technology and new relations of production this time around will not boost profits or revive investment. Neither a Schumpeterian style new wave of innovation nor a social democratic style fix are on the horizon of plausibility.
The most original part of his argument is that the info tech revolution and the emerging network information economy (the changing forces and social relations of production in Marxist terms) are not ultimately compatible with a capitalist economy, Capital is doomed to crisis, decline and decay since it increasingly cannot capture the value created by the emerging new knowledge economy.