Paul Mason: 'the end of capitalism has begun'

My first grumpy grunts:

'Postcapitalism' is just another variant of capitalism socialised, a phase in the technologically determined evolution of the commodity economy. The transformation is essentially an economic and not a social one. This is old skool economist orthodox marxist theory v2.0 "Hippy Hamster". But economic freedom hardly means freedom from the economy.

The whole story is premised on the old idea of humanity plagued by scarcity, where technology-induced abundance of material goods emerges as the savior.*

Social media may suffice instead of an immediate human community, and let's not even speak of a reconciliation with nature, the extension of community beyond the human.

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*) "Economics is defined in most textbooks as "the study of the allocation of scarce resources among alternative ends." Humans, it is said, have unlimited wants and limited means to satisfy these wants, so the inevitable result is scarcity. We cannot have everything we want, so we must choose what we would have. Every act of consumption is thus also an act of denial. The more we consume, the more we are deprived. In this dismal state of affairs, our job as economic beings is to allocate our limited incomes so as to get the greatest enjoyment possible from the relatively few things we are able to buy."
https://libcom.org/history/hunter-gatherers-mythology-market-john-gowdy

I see a blog post coming up in Joseph Kay's point-by-point comment... It is certainly worth it.

I would like to second the popular request of a Joseph Kay blog post on the topic.. come on, JK! The people have spoken!

What's that you said, JK, you're going to write a book on the topic?

Isnt the elephant in the room the fact that Mason is a celebrated author and successful journalist. His position in the division of labour lends itself to reform and the state, as if there were no state to protect his privileges then he'd just be a smo like everyone else

The liberal wing of the media tends to keep a few pet opponents on its roster just so it can point to them and say "dunno what Chomsky's on about, look at this guy we've hired to talk about Marx and stuff." Mason's basically in that zone.

He laid out his thesis a while ago,

https://youtu.be/s5teO3W4LrM

Hmm it is the critique of an "orthodox" technological determinist criticising an unorthodox technological determinist for heterodoxy though. Without seeing the technological deterrminist continuity that links Mason's previous incarnation as Workers Power journalist to his current Channel 4, etc, gigs. And which comes from the same source as Michael Roberts' view of FROP and objective crisis:

The great contradiction of capitalism is that, as the necessary labour time falls due to technical progress, it lowers the value of commodities and thus puts downward pressure on the profitability of production. And under capitalism, it is profit (surplus value) that matters, not more output (use value).

Zusammenbruchstheorie

Did this article come out around the last episode of Mr Robot? :)

Interesting article but I don't think access to information and new business models that use the title "sharing economy" is something that will lead to the withering away of the capitalist model.

If anything has the possibility of doing that I would go with technological advancement and immigration. World gets smaller and we realise we are all the same and our ability to reach a post scarcity worldwide situation happens it could lead to a withering away of capitalism.

However I would imagine withering away would be something we would see hundreds and hundreds of years in the future when we are 3d printing all our houses, all our transport runs on solar power and agricultural technology has made food production so advanced.

Andrew has orchestrated a reading group on this text here in Dublin. This Wednesday we covered section 1 (i,e, chapters 1-4). My comments on that section:

1. Problem of two voices. Voice 1 is an upgraded historical materialism 2.0 voice, based on a notion of geological time where all parts of the earth are always at the same level of development and the boundaries between different periods of development occur simultaneously on a global level like the geological K/T boundary. Voice 2 is a more global economic history one, which accepts, for instance, that for neoliberalism to be successful, it was necessary that parts of the OECD, like Germany and Japan, did not adopt that regime of accumulation, but instead stuck with a productivist Keynesian/Mercantile model. Another example being the characterisation of the 1930s Great Depression as being partially caused/aggravated by the eclipse of British imperial power in conjunction with the US's then lack of willingness to assume it's place.
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2. Not only are voices 1 & 2 not well joined or intersected, but they don't even complement each other, taken to its logical conclusion, the unilinear a-spatial stageism of voice 1 is in contradiction with the world systemic, combined and uneven development narrative of voice 2.
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3. A further problem with voice 1 - as a model or guide to political strategy - is that historical unilinearity implicitly creates a hierarchy between "modern" - i.e. closest to the future - and "backwards" - i.e. further away from the future. Implicitly then, progress towards the universal future must clearly come from those closest to it, not from the relatively "backwards" areas of the Middle East and North Africa or the Lacandon jungles of Southern Mexico. Therefore, arguably some of the most interesting phenomena of political alternatives to neoliberalism of recent times - the Zapatistas and Kurdish Democractic Autonomy - are the reactive struggles of backwards peoples and societies, doomed to irrelevance (or worse) by the relentless wheels of modernist progress.

There's an interesting critical review here of both Post-capitalism and Nick Dyer Witheford's Cyberproletariat:
http://review31.co.uk/essay/view/25/postcapitalist-futures

Thanks for posting that spacious. It's a slap in the face of Mason for sure.

Just finnished reading Paul Mason's book. It's certainly worth a read as it is well written and an easier read than others (see note below) on a similar theme correctly identifying several significant trends in the evolution of modern global capitalism including his particular focus on the interelationship between capitalist competition, class struggle and the increasing role of information technology which is starting to exacerbate other underlying tendencies towards increased social and economic crisis, even if he exagerates that impact in the short to medium term. More particularly I think he exagerates the radical potential of both the established and his more recently identified 'non-market' social and economic relationships, which whatever their value in imagining alternative futures, have continued to be absorbed into and contribute to the reproduction of the value system. I also agree with the main criticism made by Daniel Whittal in the above linked text regarding Mason's dismissal of the working class as the main agent of change to a post-capitalist future whilst acknowledging the changed composition of and divisions within the modern global working class.
It struck me that whilst Mason is keen to dismiss some of the traditional left scenarios of revolutionary change he associates with the forced march of Bolshevik Russia his road map to a post-capitalist future is little more than a rebranding of left social democracy - a kind of Cyber-trotskyism!
Note: There is a usefule review with my brief comment of Franco 'Bifo' Berardi's book 'After the Future' and Life-boat Communism elsewhere on this site.

The SPGB blog just recently posted an article about Mason by a member which you might think useful.

http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2015/10/paul-mason-and-socialism.html

Joseph,
Yes I do understand his argument about this on the back of Marx's 'fragment of the machines' and it is a genuine tendency, but he is more than optimistic here in terms of timescale and counteracting influences and I would see this tendency only one amongst others more imediate, that are moving capitalist contradictions towards historical crisis levels which of course still require an organised and conscious recognition and response by the global working class to move, not just to some ill-defined post-capitalism but to a global communism. Mason's Cyber-trotsyist road is still mired in a reliance on a co-operating nation state (presumably guided by Mason-style think-tanks) which is as likely as any other to contribute to the more inward looking anti-globalisation tendencies of the radical movements he otherwise looks to. By the way solar panels also need replacing at some point.

Also of relevance in this connection is the possibility that renewable energy cannot sustain a consumer society, and if so, what type of society could it sustain?

Just picking up on Rob Ray's earlier comment and some references on the AI thread to the 'Accelerationist Manifesto' I have had this lurking suspician (some might suspect paranoia) about a string of material emanating from leftist academia (also given wider coverage in the liberal media) that has gained respect in the wider anarchist and libertaran communist milieu as just the experimental cutting edge of an ideological accomodation to the latest phase of capitalism in the 'developed' sector of global capitalism, as I tried to suggest in this 'conversation with myself' on the back of this review here:
http://libcom.org/library/capitalist-realism-renewed

At the risk of a further bit of derailing.........
I'm not sure about the accuracy of Paul Mason's application in his analysis of Kondratieff's 'long cycles' but an application of some capitalist periodisation beyond a simple pre/post 1914 analysis and the significance of the current period in global capitalism is surely warranted. A different, if still rather deterministically inclined approach, with some overlaps can be found in these two pieces and my comments:
http://libcom.org/library/communism-has-not-yet-begun-claude-bitot and
http://libcom.org/library/investigation-supposedly-victorious-capitalism-claude-bitot

So also worth a read is a recent critical article from the CWO titled 'Post-capitalism via the internet (according to Paul Mason) - Dream or Reality?' My link doesn't work directly but available here: www.leftcom.org/en/articles

Is this Paul Mason, the Syriza supporter, or a different person with the same name?

Post-capitalism via the Internet (According to Paul Mason) – Dream or Reality?

This is my take on Mason's Postcapitalism.

The New World in Our Hearts – A Critical Engagement With Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism (Communism versus the Commanding Heights Part 2)

Flava O Flav's makes some valid criticism of Mason's approach to the state and some useful ideas about the libertarian communist potential of these new technologies but the CWO article seems to have got a better grip on the weaknesses in Mason's grasp of Marxist economic theory.

Debating against the SP's Peter Taffe, he asserts that 'most people want an area of self-control within the system/capitalism'.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36084970

It could be an off-the-cuff remark, but does he flesh this out in his book?

I have to say, I've been reading Mason's Guardian blogs, and is he getting increasingly social democratic?

I mean, he argues a "left-wing case" for nuclear weapons, that Sanders can "break" the power of US capitalism, and even offers advice to companies about changing working practices to avoid what he sees as a potential strike wave.

Has that always been there and I just missed it? I seems to remember thinking he was more radical when I was reading his stuff about it kicking off everywhere.

He's a radical social democrat now:
https://medium.com/mosquito-ridge/mickeygate-the-truth-8145cf278b7a#.il406dp2j

The other day he was on the BBC talking about revolutionary politics with Peter Taaffe from the Socialist Party (SPEW). Surreal and a bit cringeworthy to be honest.

Chilli Sauce

I have to say, I've been reading Mason's Guardian blogs, and is he getting increasingly social democratic?

I mean, he argues a "left-wing case" for nuclear weapons, that Sanders can "break" the power of US capitalism, and even offers advice to companies about changing working practices to avoid what he sees as a potential strike wave.

Has that always been there and I just missed it? I seems to remember thinking he was more radical when I was reading his stuff about it kicking off everywhere.

I was wondering the same. I suppose working for the BBC there were restrictions on what political opinions he could express, and maybe to an extent this left his writing open to interpretation. I think I preferred it that way.

Thanks to wojtek for that link and Mason's straightforward admission and Chill's updates but we are treading water with this - see my earlier posts 18 and 23. Mason is not alone in efforts to present a more modern version of left social democracy adequate to recuperating the tender shoots of youthful rebellion in the internet age.

Paul Mason says technology has produced a new route out of capitalism. Apparently modern technology is going to make production so cheap that the material goods people consume will become available for all. That is all of us will be able to consume or use all the material goods we want and along the way profit taking from capitalism will wither away because it cannot control the new technology.

For what it's worth this sounds like deja vu. It sounds a lot like the situation Caesar found among the Germanic and the more remote Celtic nations of the first century BCE. There they had abundant goods which they shared freely and which required a minimum of effort to produce. Fruit grew on trees, vegetables grew in kitchen gardens, Animals fattened in enclosures or were hunted in woods and plains. Thus food and clothing were provided for. And for shelter, land and materials for housing were freely available.

Mind you, their wants were basic. Probably due to simple ignorance. Indeed some nations refused all contact with Roman traders – even going to the extent of using only their small weak native ponies rather than the new breeds of horses then being developped, much to the detriment of their cavalry.

Also, what's wrong with basic? In my twenties I lived in a house in rural Ireland without electricity or running water. We used rainwater for washing and walked every morning to the spring to collect two buckets of drinking water. Actually, those Celts in the first century had it good. They didn't have 60% of the population overweight, slumped in front of TV sets, brainwashed out of their minds.

But there was no happy ending to that idyllic or barbarous utopia of the first century. Aristocracies were even then on the rise in the Gallic and Germanic lands. First there were leaders and then the leaders required helpers and the helpers became servants and more servants were needed for bigger houses and a grander life style for the leaders, now called nobles. Soon, so many servants were needed that there was no longer an abundance and all the poor had to work longer hours to maintain the life style of the rich, and taskmasters were needed to maintain production.

Frankly I don't see why the same scenario should not be expected to develop in Paul Mason's utopia. If, that is, his proposed utopia were for real, which I don't for the moment accept.

What I do accept is that the word capitalism no longer describes the economic system in which we live. Ownership and power are not the same thing. On paper some people still own a whole lot of things, shares, properties, lands, businesses, copyrights and get a lot of money from them, but they don't control them. Contol is in the power of executives, managers, agents, administrators, senior civil servants, lawyers, accountants. With this power increasingly go obscenely fat salaries – dividends, profits, returns on capital go on falling while executive and higher professional incomes and bonuses keep on rising.

So the power of owners or capitalists is slipping away and contol is being administered by new authorities. However all is not clear sailing. This new authoritarian age is being actively opposed. Their new found wealth is coming under attack both from the envious remnants of the capitalist class and from from the middle classes which spawned the new authorities. Donald Trump in America attacks the gross salaries of top management while hacks in the normally subservient media expose fat cat pay.

My money, though, is on the new authorities. The whining of the capitalists will die away as they themselves die out and the media will be brought to heel by the new establishment. I do wish it weren't so. I wish we had hope. I wish I could say, “Come on lads. Let's start a campaign of fair shares for all. Fair pay for a fair day's work.”

Well, of course I just did say it. And whenever I get the chance in meetings or events I do go around spreading my anti-establishment bile bad-mouthing the obscene incomes of the new plutocrats. Maybe it will do some good.

One elephant in the room that nobody has commented on is the modern unbalanced economy. Historians talk about the unbalanced Victorian economy with 30% of the adult working population in domestic service and only 70% in production or essential services. Happy days. Now it's only 30% in production or essential services. The other 70% of us are in the equivalent of Victorian domestic services. Passing paper it's called. They use lots of job descriptions for it. Marketing, advertising, insurance, accountancy, legal actions, make-work education, elaborate taxation and benefit procedures. But it's still just passing paper. No goods are produced. No essential services are performed.

What will follow the authoritarian age? Authoritarianism bears an eerie resemblance to feudalism. Perhaps historical dialectics are circular. Will the next age be village communes?

https://medium.com/mosquito-ridge/remain-and-renegotiate-how-to-stop-the-brexit-bandwagon-fae8dda7e97e#.1rpgvixa6

Any thoughts?

wojtek, This linked item might be better on one of the other EU referendum discussion threads as it has only a thin connection to this one on the 'Paul Mason is a Social Democrat' point. As it stand this looks like a beefed up version of what Corbyn and other nominally pro-EU labour lefties are saying. It's more campaign presentation than substance as these reforms (even if not all bad) are taken together just 'pie in the sky' as far as as being a practical proposition. They certainly don't represent any way of dealing with the underlying causes of the present economic crisis of the system that is global rather than something resolvable within the confines of UK politics.

Sorry spikymike :) the main eu referendum thread was locked.

Haven't seen anything from Paul Mason worth a read recently but this book is still worthy of discussion. I see that Manchester spgb are hosting a discussion of it on the 28th January 2017 which might be an opportunity to have another look at this. For anyone going along I'd recommend the earlier part of this discussion thread and reading the three texts linked in Posts 11, 27 and 28 above.
That spgb meeting is advertised here: www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/event/paul-mason-and-postcapitalism-manchester-2pm

Spikymike

Haven't seen anything from Paul Mason worth a read recently but this book is still worthy of discussion. I see that Manchester spgb are hosting a discussion of it on the 28th January 2017 which might be an opportunity to have another look at this. For anyone going along I'd recommend the earlier part of this discussion thread and reading the three texts linked in Posts 11, 27 and 28 above.
That spgb meeting is advertised here: www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/event/paul-mason-and-postcapitalism-manchester-2pm

I'd recommend RL's article on Paul Mason's Postcapitalism in NLR - https://newleftreview.org/II/100/rob-lucas-the-free-machine

Yes the NLR article was very useful. Don't know how I forgot about this much earlier very short comment already in the library: http://libcom.org/library/artificial-scarcity-world-overproduction-escape-isnt Sander ahead of the game again it seems.
And despite it's possibly misleading title the first part of this blog is very relevant to this discussion as well providing some much needed balance to some of the current extremes of interpretation amongst radicals:
http://libcom.org/blog/soldering-report-working-3d-printer-manufacturing-plant-london-24032017

Just want to put in my 2 cents.

Capitalism now is really mostly just a system of Capitalists competing over rents, rents paid for by a less and less profitable productive economy and a shrinking monetized demand, working People have less and less disposable Income. Nower days if you want to be profitable you either get into marketing, i.e. renting out attention, or you get into something like property or Finance. Most of the New Technology industries coming out, are really brought into Capitalism through marketing rents, advertisements; I don't see that lasting.

much of what is called the "sharing economy" is again, just a system of rent seeking, only making the working class provide their own Capital.

If Capitalism continues I basically see it going to less and less People fighting over amassing wealth through rent seeking, and a growing portion of the population left either excluded from the economy, or fighting to get the crumbs.

I'm all for these New non-market Projects, I think non-market thinking, and non market relationships are the key to get out of Capitalism ... but I think the big questions need to be addressed, Food, clothing, shelter, Healthcare and so on ... So much of Capitalism nowerdays is based on property, and the growing squeeze on workers to pay more in rents, forcing them to become self-entreprenoirs, i.e. sell themselves to the rent seekers NOT only as workers but ALSO as entreprenoirs or tiny Capitalists,

I don't know the answer, but I am funny supporting of anything that builds communities outside the market.

https://inews.co.uk/opinion/jeremy-corbyns-ideas-have-become-mainstream-even-george-osborne-is-quoting-marx/amp/
I don't understand what the korea reference is specifically about. I don't think he is promoting the very long hours spent in education and work...

I imagine the Korea reference is directly related to this plan:

Paul Mason

Is this strategy designed to allow the populations of the developed world to capture more of the growth projected over the next 5-15 years, if necessary at the cost of China, India and Brazil having to find new ways to break out of the middle income trap? Would it, in other words, flatten out and reverse the trends captured in Branko Milanovic’s famous “elephant graph” over the next two decades?

For me the answer is yes. This is a programme to save democracy, democratic institutions and values in the developed world by reversing the 30-year policy of enriching the bottom 60% and the top 1% of the world’s population.

It is a programme to deliver growth and prosperity in Wigan, Newport and Kirkcaldy – if necessary at the price of not delivering them to Shenzhen, Bombay and Dubai.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/neweconomics/kind-capitalism-possible-left-build/

As long as Corbyn doesn't give state money to pop music and strangle any semblance of a domestic metal scene.