In the wake of 2008, the possibility that capitalism may be in a permanent decline has started to become acceptable in mainstream economics. But the solutions proposed to address this situation amount to a kind of miserable, eternal life support: Thomas Piketty, for instance, imagines a global tax on wealth as a stay against the stagnation caused by otherwise unsustainable wealth inequality. Larry Summers, meanwhile, advocates engineering increased consumer demand as a way to prolong capital’s old age.
The English journalist Paul Mason’s recent book, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, by contrast, dares to imagine where we might go from here. Postcapitalism is built around two basic propositions about how capitalism works. First, Mason suggests, the history of capitalism is best understood as a history of adaptive mutations in which capitalist classes, faced with falling rates of profit, keep finding ways to buoy them back up, if only for a while. “There is,” he claims, “no final crisis of capitalism”. [...]
For Mason, in other words, capitalism’s own dynamism — its drive to require less labor — is its Achilles heel, since machines, unlike laborers, are impossible to exploit. They can be worn down, but never underpaid. Mason is aware of the material support required by an information infrastructure — he notes the “acres of air-conditioned server farm space” needed to keep it running — but he is insistent that this is secondary to the rise of information, which he views almost as if it were an evolutionary leap: “The real wonder of information is […] that it eradicates the need for labour on an incalculable scale.” [...]
Despite the vividness of this picture, however, all Mason has to offer as a counterweight is the sheer creativity of young people who “will no longer accept” such futures. He describes the social forces that will drive this youthful, non-class-based rebellion as a “granular, spontaneous micro-process, not a plan.” Postcapitalism is an extraordinary achievement of storytelling, fine-grained and schematic with equal success, critical of early 20th-century Marxism while insisting on the contemporary urgency of Marx’s thought, persuasive in its passion and its intellectual clarity alike. But it founders around the question of the power of education and technology to lead us past the horrors of 20th-century capitalism. On the one hand, Mason knows all too well that post-capitalist stories appeal to a mass readership because they erase or downplay the terrible struggles that have given us the technologies we prize. On the other hand, the concrete suggestions he makes in the book’s final chapter — a universal basic income, nationalizing banks, regulating finance — all leave untouched the problem that what counts as “money” under capital is produced by exploitation. The histories of social struggle Mason is so good at narrating disappear in these bland policy recommendations.
