A Guide To Our Future
by Paul Mason
293 pages, Allen Lane
Review
by Pat Black
Out
of my comfort zone with this one, but that’s a good thing. I might have to do
some studying and make coherent notes. Maybe even learn new things. Never my
strong point, as anyone who ever taught me will tell you.
Postcapitalism: A
Guide To Our Future looks at our changing economic world with
its rapid advances in technology, and the places it could lead us.
The
book’s central theory: capitalism as we know it - scarcity of resources
controlling prices, the financial markets dominating all, “competition” in
business, private ownership of means of production and chasing profits for
shareholders… ah god, and all the rest of it - is kaput. We have to look at
different ways of living, different ways of producing, and different ways of
working. If at all.
Paul
Mason is the former economics editor of Channel 4 News. The son of a Lancashire
miner, he is one of the very few working class people to attain such a senior,
high-profile position on a national network – indeed I’m struggling to think of
another. Possibly Andrew Neil.
Mason
has the added rarity of being unashamedly left-wing, and again, I can’t think
of many others of that political stripe in such a position in the broadcasting
world. I’m happy to be corrected.
Mason’s
premise is based on Nikolai Kondratieff’s wave theory of economics. This tells
us that since the late 18th century, industrial economies have
experienced cycles of growth and decline, roughly every 50 years – 25 up, 25
down.
In
order to prevent the system collapsing completely during the troughs,
capitalist economies have invested in rapid technological advances which have
kick-started another upsurge in growth. New technology spearheads progress and
prosperity, but also leads to labour crises as jobs are outmoded and replaced
by machinery. On top of this, you get inevitable external shocks such as war or
natural disaster, some of which may be directly or indirectly attributable to
the effects of capitalism. One great example in the modern era is 9/11.
All
of these factors contribute to the downward curve on the wave, necessitating
new technologies and new ways of working, and thusly another 25 years of good
times; and so it goes on.
It’s
worth bearing in mind that poor old Kondratieff was executed by firing squad by
Uncle Joe in 1938, right around another downer period for the world economy
which brought us war. So he didn’t even have the satisfaction of seeing himself
proven correct on that one.
Following
this long wave pattern, right now, we’re heading for the bottom of the curve. The
latest Kondratieffian down-turn began in the early 1990s – tying in with the absolute
zenith of neoliberalism, you could argue. So, according to the theory, we’re
not too far away from a surge. Great! Happy days, Rodders. This time next year…
Except
this time, Mason argues, certain key elements of the current economic climate
have produced anomalies in the wave which have never been seen before. As
predicted, we have a new, rapidly expanding technology in the form of
information and data networks, passed at high speed along wires and across
space, straight onto our phones, tablets and laptops. But there is a mutative
effect in place.
Information
technology is changing our ideas of supply and demand, one of capitalism’s
fundamentals. For the first time in history, goods and services in the form of
knowledge, data and intellectual product can be reproduced at zero cost. The
crudest manifestation and best example of this phenomenon is copy and paste.
If
I send you a copy of my off-beat kaiju novel for a review on a free-to-read
book reviews site (cough), then there’s nothing stopping you copying and
pasting the entire text, sending it to everyone in your address book, and then
those people sending it to everyone they know, in turn. Leaving aside your
utility bill and the price of your device, no money whatsoever has changed
hands. Nobody got rich, and yet under this model, something has been created
which explodes the capitalist system: abundance without cost.
Knowledge,
Mason states, wants to be free. If your economy is based on knowledge, in the
form of data travelling along wires or through the airwaves or being bounced off
a satellite, there’s a problem.
This
has led to stagnation in the classic Kondratieff wave. We’ve got our
technological innovation. But the concomitant growth isn’t happening. It should
have done by now. Mason says we should be worried about this.
As
more and more elements of our lives are subsumed into the digital world - even
sex and dating, for crying out loud - with the employment-issue Godzilla of
automation lumbering over the brow of the hill, then capitalism is going to
have to look lively in order to live in the manner in which it has become
accustomed. A tipping point will be reached in terms of the haves and have-nots
of the world. I’d argue we’re on the brink as it stands.
To
take one example: the inevitability of safe, reliable driverless vehicles and
delivery services will completely destroy the livelihoods of millions of people
on low-to-middle incomes. In the past week, how many things have you had
delivered by parcel services? How many car, taxi, bus, plane and train journeys
have you taken?
With
the rise of the robots, Mason thinks that work, and the world of work, is going
to have to shift aside to allow humanity to live its life for the living,
rather than being enslaved to profiteers. But there are other pressing crises
which have weighed in on the stagnation of the Kondratieff wave. Climate change
is a big ‘un, of course. We might be chronically overdrawn on that score. I
hope Mother Nature is amenable to an individual voluntary arrangement.
On
top of that, there’s a rising, ageing population, and an impending financial
crisis related to pension provision big enough to completely crash most major
economies. Mason argues that there’s no avoiding this. The cynic in me says
there’ll be some avoiding it, alright, if our masters decide to cull us.
Then
there’s Mason’s contention that neoliberal policies have strangulated progress
among 99% of the working population. By constraining the working population
through austerity policies, our governments and captains of industry have
ensured this current crisis.
However
bad things could get, Paul Mason is an optimist. He lays out the groundworks
for how a world without the capitalist system could work. Sort out the
environment; have robots do most of the work, reducing the need for work; pay
everyone a basic income; with an abundance of supply of food and water, people
should basically be free to work at whatever they like, whether that’s writing
blogs, building houses, taking your clothes off for the boys, volunteering for
environmental research projects, or whatever you like. The global financial
system, of course, should be tightly regulated and socially responsible, with a
view towards humanity rather than the need for profits.
All
of this, he says, should be underpinned by the use of the single most
disruptive element in the world, which cuts through finance, art, politics,
military engagements, consumption and production – information networks.
With
all this freely available, easily collectible data in the world, Mason says it should
be used to model and predict human behaviour and socio-economic trends as never
before, the better to target human need with abundant resources. Effectively,
this is the kind of network Marx fantasised about, but which is now a reality.
This
is an extension of the modelling miracle Mason speaks about earlier in the
book. To take his example, if you have a new component for a jet aircraft, in
days gone by a lot of labour would have gone into testing that part and
perfecting it, and that’s before the business of practical tests in the real
world. But now, Mason says, everything can be modelled and even rigorously tested
in a virtual environment, with every potential outcome mapped and
mathematically watertight in a virtual landscape. Everything can be ship-shape
by the time the component actually appears in the physical world. You don’t
even have to use up basic resources like pen and pencil. This idea can be
extended to any concept, any product, any population, any trend, or any economic
system.
I
think… ah bollocks to what I think. I’ve just deleted 2,000 words of polemic,
and it felt good to do so. Trump, Brexit, big data, blah blah, off it goes, you
don’t need to hear it. I’ve nothing to add. Paul Mason wants to find workable
solutions to the world’s problems, based on the idea of the public good. I
guess that’s as much as we can hope for. He seems like a decent man.
God
knows what’s coming down the line. This was an interesting book. I’ve learned
something. Best recommendation I can give.
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