Paul Mason's got a new book out, and there's an extract/summary in the Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun
Paul Mason wrote:
The main contradiction today is between the possibility of free, abundant goods and information; and a system of monopolies, banks and governments trying to keep things private, scarce and commercial. Everything comes down to the struggle between the network and the hierarchy: between old forms of society moulded around capitalism and new forms of society that prefigure what comes next.
Seen a lot of praise and a lot of criticism on social media. Here's what I wrote on Facebook:
1. The claim that elements that could form a possible post-capitalist mode of production already exist is more defensible than the stronger claim they those elements are already combining and that the superseding of capitalism is already under way.
2. The marginal cost of 'information' may approach zero, but the infrastructure cost is paid in poisonous assembly, high energy demands, and toxic waste dumped on the racialised poor. Dyer-Witheford's Cyber-proletariat at least acknowledges this, though without necessarily 'solving' its implications for cyber-communism.
3. One solution to the above is 'cradle to cradle' design, and one barrier to that (aside from it not always lowering costs) has been refusal of supply chains to share information on components, processes etc due to commercial confidentiality. This would suggest ecological production is incompatible with competitive private ownership, in line with Mason's argument, but imho without resolving the toxic waste aspect tech-utopia is premised on neocolonialism.
4. As usual with these pieces, there's no mention of care (except a suggestion that trying to stop the privatisation of healthcare is picking the wrong battle?). The post-capitalist purpose of labour saving technology might be to share and degender, deracialise caring, domestic, and reproductive labour but that isn't an automatic consequence and shouldn't be an afterthought.
5. The stark opposition between network and hierarchy doesn't really work (indeed a graph of a classic hierarchy looks like a 'network' because it is a form of one). Networks can certainly be capitalist, and hierarchies can be anti-capitalist (if not communist). Nick Srnicek's 'the command of the plan must be married to the improvised order of the network' seems a more productive way to think about this. We need distributed improvisation and formal collective deliberation at varying scales, though the 'command' of the latter is not necessarily a hierarchy in any conventional sense (e.g. could be direct democratic mandated federalism thrashing out binding greenhouse gas limits or something).
6. The mechanisms of non-informational peer-production need to be elaborated. Not necessarily in the guardian piece but in the book. The von Mises/Hayek arguments against socialist calculation can be countered imho but aren't trivial. Iirc von Mises limited his criticism to 'higher order' goods (raw materials and means of production), conceding consumer goods could be distributed rationally on a non-monetary basis. But unspecified 'algorithms' isn't a satisfactory answer, since part of Hayek's argument is that the necessary information is *created* in market transactions. I'm reading up on this and will write something in future.
7. The insistence that the state will play a role is either trivially true, or wishful thinking, given the very public humiliation of Syriza. If everything comes down to the opposition between the network and the hierarchy, why would we expect the state to side with the network?
8. Also see Harsha Walia's comment here: https://www.facebook.com/harsha.walia/posts/10153532282379337?pnref=story