Paul Mason’s book, PostCapitalism: A Guide To Our Future, has been hailed as one of this season’s must-read books for longer-term thinkers. Yet several people I consider to be natural readers of the book confess to me that they haven’t got around to it yet or even that they tried to read it but failed to get through it.
I myself started it in the early autumn, got only so far before the gloom of the book and the work frenzy of the autumn got the better of me, but I thought it my civic duty to pick the book up again over Christmas and do it justice. After all, I really wanted to like this book. I like Paul Mason; he’s clever, interesting, articulate, of the thoughtful left and he has great taste in soul music.
The book has a very broad scope, part economics, part sociology, part futurology; more the first than the last two. The central premise is that the global economy is moving beyond the continuous change that has epiomised capitalism over the last 200 years or so, transformationally moving to a new, post-capitalist model. Mason uses three main arguments to make his case.
Firstly, he sees the financial crisis of 2007/2008 as a key moment in economic cycles. Mason expounds at length on Kondratieff (Kondratiev) Waves – long economic cycles of c50 years duration, within which the more commonly considered shorter economic cycles themselves occur. He sees the crisis and the two additional factors/arguments (which I shall summarise in the “Machines” and “Demographics” subsections below), as evidence that the global economy won’t simply go into the next Kondratiev upswing but will have to change far more fundamentally than that.
This first aspect takes up the first 100 pages or so of the book and is a pretty tough read, especially for me, as I have always been very sceptical about economic cycles. You can always explain the past in terms of them, as long as you have enough excuses up your sleeve as to why any cycle, long or short lasted, say, 40% longer than “normal”, perhaps because of war, or was 40% shorter than “normal”, perhaps because a particularly whizzy technology disrupted the economy during that time. Economic cycles, to my mind, are hopeless for future prediction and decision making, which makes them fairly useless, full stop.
Still, there are some interesting passages in that first 100 pages, not least those adjectivally heavy passages on the financial crisis and its longer-term implications. Mason’s forward view is unmitigatedly bleak – “neoliberalism is broken”, fiat money, financialisation and information technology has turned capitalism into “a zombie system”.
The second part of the book is by far the most interesting part. Indeed you could be forgiven for reading just the second part and skimming the rest of the book.
Mason starts the second part with prophets of postcapitalism, in which he confesses that he borrowed the term from Peter Drucker’s 1993 book Post-Capitalist Society, which Mason then goes on to summarise. Drucker’s book was primarily about the emergence of the knowledge economy. Drucker’s thesis was that knowledge will replace capital, natural resources and labour as the key basic economic resource. He describes the result of that change as a post-capitalist society. To the extent that Mason ever really defines PostCapitalism, I think this is probably his definition of it. At Long Finance, we had a go at the question of information as a future store of value (or capital) in Malcolm Cooper’s seminal paper, In Search of the Eternal Coin.
Mason then goes on to link these Drucker-originated ideas with a relatively obscure piece of Marx called The Fragment On Machines from The Grundrisse, a work which was unpublished in Marx’s time and only saw the light of day in the 1970s. Marx’s idea, if you’ll allow me to deconstruct it to one sentence, is this: Machines might become increasingly sophisticated and valuable, to the extent that, eventually, the labour theory of value no longer holds because labour has no value – all the value of goods will be attributable to the machines. Mason makes a cogent case in this section and I am simplifying by boiling it down to Drucker and Marx; he also references interesting work by Paul Romer, Yochai Benkler and others on the network economy, the open source movement and the like.
However, I find Mason’s argument flawed in this section, possibly because I cheated; I have actually read several of Mason’s source documents, not least the Drucker (years ago when writing several pieces in the 1990s, precursors to this link on valuing information and re-skimmed for this blog piece), plus the Marx Fragment (in the last few months, when researching a futures piece on machine learning and professional work for the SAMI blog).
Mason reports quite faithfully on the Drucker – Chapter 5 of Mason’s PostCapitalism is probably the best chapter and provides a thoughtful update on Drucker’s 1993 thinking. However, the link with Marx’s Fragment troubles me for several reasons. Despite my giving the fragment a really thorough read as background for my piece on machine learning, I concluded from my reading of it that Marx was entirely thinking about manufacturing machines. While you might think about 3D printers in the context of the Fragment, I don’t believe that Marx had any concept of a services-dominated economy, let alone the knowledge-based economy that Drucker postulates in his notion of post-capitalist society. Marx today would surely recognise how different our commercial world is to the world he wrote about in mid Victorian times; he would doubtless opine on economics, society and the future in ways that would surprise us. I chose in the end not to reference the Fragment in my piece on machine learning – I saw it as a fascinating read but not relevant to a piece on the emerging information economy and society.
In any case, it seems to me confused and confusing to give Marx so much central space in a book called PostCapitalism. Drucker’s Post-Capitalist society is manifestly not socialist or Marxist – far from it – Drucker is really thinking about how corporates, organisations (and to some extent individual actors within those) might adapt to the changing commercial world. To be fair, Mason takes pains to explain that he does not see Marxist or socialist outcomes to his future world either, indeed he highlights flaws in pure Marxism and the notion of socialism on the road to communism, but you need to read deep past the headlines, wading through plenty more gloom to find those nuances. In short, neither Karl nor Groucho Marx would be happy with this book.
The final part of the book was very disappointing for me, despite the fact that it airs valid worries and that, in amongst the vague and unrealistic ideas, there are some good ideas buried too.
We get a short trawl of standard economic and ecological worries about severe demographic and climate change. Chapter 9’s title, “The Rational Case For Panic”, sets the tone. Still, Mason helpfully breaks his anxieties down into three main areas: financial markets, public spending and migration and discusses each with due concern.
The book tails off when it reaches the last, Chapter 10, “Project Zero”, which tries and (in my view) mostly fails to suggest solutions. Despite Mason’s earlier claim that his PostCapitalism is not Marxist or Socialist, he places undue confidence in governments, global institutions and economic models. Having berated humanity for lacking the imagination to visualise the emerging world order, he suggests that we can produce computer simulations to understand the economy as it really is and make reliable predictions... “just as happens with weather computers.” Really, Mr Mason? As reliable as weather computers’ medium term and long term predictions? Oh dear.
Mason talks about the Wiki state; acting more like the staff of Wikipedia than state socialism. Examples of this progressive attitude include state co-ordination/planning of infrastruture amd unilaterally writing off debts “in countries like Greece, where they are unpayable”. Socialising natural monopolies, letting market forces disappear and socialising the finance system follow on as naturally as night follows day. By this point, the Wiki state sounds more like good old-fashioned state socialism than collaborative wiki editing to me.
I do like the ideas around paying everyone a basic income, which I would take to mean simplifying the tax and benefits system such that everyone has a basic living stipend and that taxation works progressively the more income you earn and wealth you retain. I’m not sure that Mason gets to the bottom of how such simplifcation might work, but I applaud the basic ideas. That leads naturally to his ideas around information-based, non-hierarchical businesses and links neatly with Drucker’s similar ideas about organisations and the universally educated person. This thinking is not a million miles from the concluding thoughts Michael Mainelli and I put forward in The Price of Fish, suggesting that the consilience of ideas and disciplines is humanity’s best hope of tackling the really wicked problems we face.
My main problem with the negativity of PostCapitalism (in contrast with our more up-beat, I suggest realistic, position in The Price of Fish) is the inference that the wicked problems point only one way. It doesn’t seem to occur to Paul Mason that some of the problems he frets about can help mitigate the other problems. For example, he rightly identifies a huge amount of work required to deal with infrastructure issues, mass migrations and managing the adverse effects of climate change. Yet he sees the jobs that might be lost to robotics and artificial intelligence (accepting estimates of 40% plus in a generation or two) as an almost insurmountable problem, leaving us with little other than, to quote David Graeber, “bullshit jobs”.
While I can accept that the emerging changes will shift the production function markedly and lead to the obsolesence of many current jobs, I cannot accept that these changes will require transformation to an entirely new economic world order. In developed countries, in the last 100 years, capitalism has adapted to the loss of some 80% of jobs (the mostly rural ones) My grandparents probably could not have even imagined my job, nor the (non-bullshit) jobs that most of my friends and colleagues do today.
I don’t think it is my failure of imagination to envisage how the economy and society might adapt rather than require transformation; I think that failure of imagination is more Mason’s than mine. It is a weakness in left-leaning economists (I have had to work on this myself) to broaden ones mind to the idea that there is more to the economy, commerce or indeed what we now call capitalism than the stuff Marx knew about and talked about in Victorian times. The vast services industries and the emergence of information as a major component in commerce are two major examples of this.
Ultimately, I guess, I simply don’t agree that the problems Mason identifies and the possible solutions to those problems are so transformational that the entire world economic order must go through wholesale change. Only a very narrow definition of capitalism and post-capitalism rings true to me in this context; more the Drucker “organisational change” definition rather than the Mason “entire economic world order” definition.