By Sean Farmelo

Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism is a timely contribution coming at a time when the European project is visibly cracking under its own economic mechanisms and migration caused by it’s own imperialism.  At a time where the last ditch attempt to save the climate by nation states is being obscured by the fog of war it’s important to look beyond geopolitical positioning to the fundamental nature of the capitalist engine as it sputters and coughs. Approaching us is a crisis of  proportions palpable to all.


What Mason has managed in this book is to delve deep into theories of crisis, and the Marxist cannon, to posit a break from capitalism as we know it. His claim is ultimately that the replicability of information now available through info tech is exponentially degrading capitalism’s power to exert the domination of work and money in society. If it holds true, it would rock the boat just as much as climate change will over the next half-century. What is clear though is that it isn’t just the way in which products, data or information are created which will rework society – but the way in which people to relate to each other, how they share things, organise and learn. In this review I will approach Mason’s arguments from the perspective of care – how will societies of the future organise the care work which can’t be automated or replicated, and do Mason’s proposals for postcapitalism take this into account fully?

Work: the source of value?

 

Postcapitalism begins with a long exposition on the nature of the capitalist system and theories used by economists and philosophers alike to interpret the rise and fall of capitalist progression, class struggle and technological advancements. The waves, or cycles are exhibited as the result of  a combination of new infrastructures: the canals, telegram and rail, roads, airplanes and now the rise of the networked economy using the Internet as it’s interface. With reference to Kondratiev, a Russian economist, Mason shows how the introduction of these technologies, their adoption and the social upheaval which accompanied them correlated with cycles in GDP and productivity levels. The introduction of new technologies and industrial strategies allow for the exploitation of fresh markets to ensure that profits can keep rising. If work needed to make a specific product is reduced, say by the automation of part of the production process, market pressure will cause its price to fall.  To prevent this decay, the opening up of new markets and financialisation (in caring, education or the global south), allows more products to be sold. In marxist terms, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in the production process is offset by technology unlocking new markets.

Central to this is the Labour Theory of Value,  first explicated by Adam Smith and Ricardo: that work which goes into the creation of products is the source of all value. However what wasn’t really fleshed out by these early economists, or even fully by Marx, is the extent to which the reproduction through unwaged work contributes to value in society. Most care work is unwaged, but ultimately is factored into the value of products, leading to extreme distortions in how working time is renumerated. Mason argues that replicability of files and data and universality goes beyond distortion and points to a resuscitation of value in networks instead of work.

Neoliberalism’s Unravelling

Mason points to the holes in the neoliberal project which he believes have been growing since the early years of the 21st century. City denizens being thrown out the doors, Lehman Brother in 2008 and the acres of abandoned properties in the American midwest are just the most obvious symptoms of the problems state managers and finance industries have faced. The neoliberal model of further financialising peoples lives alongside distributing and streamlining the production process to eradicate inefficiencies has further exposed the capitalist system to crisis.

What was a militant union movement coming out of the world wars drifted into a dependency on a hiked social wage and co-operation between workers and the state, “By the late 1970s, all the actors in the old Keynesian system – the organised worker, the paternalist manager, the welfare politician and the state-owned corporation boss – were locked together In a bid to save the failing economic system.” (p.206)

It is often claimed that the end of the mass workplace and ‘worker’ identity has been limited to the West whilst new working classes have blossomed in China and the Global South. Mason points to some interesting data with regards to the impact of LEAN production processes employed by the transnational production and logistics industries; “Every income layer (from two dollars a day to five times as much) contained the same percentage of industrial workers.. The factory in Nigeria is as stratified by skill and income as its sister factories in Cologne or Nashville.” (p.178)

Although there have been growing waves of wildcat strike in China, we are yet to see the resurgence of a working class identity like that of Western Europe in the 19th century. Whether that is because of the breakdown and outsourcing of production processes or because of the hegemony of financialisation and the notion that we need to pay off our own debts rather than band together and demand less of it is unclear. However as Mason put it – “any idea that globalization has simply transported the Fordist/Taylorist model to the global south is illusory.” We can’t roll back to old models of social strength when dealing with a networked capitalism. New models will need to be developed which operate co-operatively on distributed models– a sharing economy that has it’s basis in workers power and control rather than convenience and hedge fund backing.

Mason’s modest proposals

At the end of the book there are a number of tentative proposals made which would attempt to advance the case for a just postcapitalism. The argument runs that postcapitalism is definitely happening because information sharing is already reworking society, but the problem lies in how this is pursued – will it be couchsurfing or the moneyification of sleeping spaces represented by AirB’n’B, hitchhiking or Uber, Academic paywalls or Wikipedia? Mason argues, quite rightly that some of the battles have already been won. Open source has become ubiqitous in many applications from Android OS to servers running on Linux. Likewise wikipedia can’t be financialised in it’s current form because of the networked model it pioneered, and the generalised assumption that knowledge is now a commons, a far step removed from the printed encylopedia. However what is clear is that there are a number of sharable apps which adopt a sort of cyborg exploitation using the power of social networks and data to repackage work with worse wages and conditions. Mason’s proposals focus firmly on transition not rupture, a key claim is that it will be a human transition, not economic pointing away from state socialism of the 20th century. To do this he argues we need to be able to use ‘big data’ to collaboratively model any economic changes taken on a mass scale, but also to trial them before implmentation worldwide. The problem of course is that huges swathes of data produced are kept locked under password and key by corporations who coordinate much of our daily lives. He also argues we have to suppress monopolies, because of their ability to resist prices falling to zero – particularly in the realm of data. The Itunes store stocks it’s shelves with infinitely replicable mp3 files yet still charges 99p a song as if it were HMV in the 90s. He suggests where it’s  pointless to break up monopolies, like Google, they should be democratised. This however is easier to write than it is for us to do!

Image: Press Gazette
Image: Press Gazette

Mason’s demands around monopolies, collaboration and the world of finance often skirt around the issue of the state and how to change it. He talks of the myth of the passive state: neoliberalism wasn’t a step on the way to an anarcho-capitalist Randian utopia, instead it’s been incessant trade deals, data protection laws and bailouts. But what Mason doesn’t delve into in this book, although he has in others (Die Working, Live Fighting), and in his journalism in Greece, is the aggressive nature of the state and capitalist corporations. It is important to lay out strategies which deal not just with info tech but property, factories, products and food. These are things which can and are protected on a daily basis by the state with the threat, or use of, physical and psychological violence.

It may be that the publishers were pushing him for space but these last chapters are littered with sentences which don’t do historical justice to the conditions in which oppression was overcome. He tells us, “It may sound radical to outlaw certain business models, but that’s what happened with slavery and with child labour,” (p.277), slightly glossing over the 100s of year of non legislative class struggle and daily resistance that inevitably lead to any legislative change of that nature. Perhaps it is best to have less reliance on legal systems and the state whilst forming strategies for postcapitalism and more focus on reworking the systems we use for interacting with each other on a daily basis.

Care

Automation is a subject which has animated discussion on the left recently. That we could oneday be living in a world where automation effectively removed work from the production process and services like cleaning or driving were done by robots, is exciting to dwell on. However the problem with much discourse on ‘Full Automation’ is one which often neglects to look at the unavoidable work which everyone does on a daily basis, mainly together and for each other. Even if we have automatic food production, house cleaning, clothes washing, we’ll still be caring for each other, providing emotional support or teaching each other.

Mason talks about the way in which there is an increasing occurrence of people ‘exchanging goods, labour and services but not through the market and not within typical organisations’ (p.265) as if these sorts of interactions are somehow novel. In fact the vast majority of interactions are carried out under this guise. You might be at work and making jokes with your colleagues or you might learn some Spanish on an app on your phone and try it out with your friends, these sorts of interactions might contribute ultimately to your ability to make it into work the next day but obviously their full value can never be represented in pounds and dollars. These sorts of interactions will persist in a postcapitalist society – and crucially, they predated it too. As Federici’s book ,Caliban and The Witch, documents, the battles which the mechanisms of capitalism had to fight to monetise a portion of our reproduction were long and bloody. Now, although capital has been put on a pedestal and having it or not is the depending factor in one’s ongoing existence, there are still many other potential systems working alongside it.

Automation isn’t a golden bullet – there was oppression before the rise of mercantile capitalism in organised religion and fealty. What it could do though is strengthen the arguments for moving away from a society premised on work, but not without acute resistance. If we are going to do this, and not let it slide to silicon valley and the finance sector to dictate postcapitalism we need to be developing a model for care work which aren’t mediated by market mechanisms. Within these models, a solidarity economy would need to be strong enough to feasibly take the place of the capital and production as the primary mode of interaction.