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Mason, Paul, Postcapitalism, A Guide to Our Future, Allen Lane, UK, 2015.
Review by Brian Heatley, November 2015
Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism is an ambitious synthesis of a number of existing
arguments that collectively aim to show that ‘capitalism is a complex, adaptive
system which has reached the limits of its capacity to adapt,’ and which goes on to
sketch a Postcapitalist future.
Lost? Mason would have given a better clue as to what he was about if he had
called his book Post Capital. For then many would have understood its
intellectual heritage in Marx’s Capital. His aim is to tell us how capitalism will be
superseded. His method is that of Marx’s Theory of History; the idea that
changes in the technology of production lead to changes in the social way that
production and society is organised. So Mason tells us about the move from
rural agricultural technologies to urban industrial technologies. These changes
were the prime cause of the end of feudal social relations, based on land and a
promise of service in return for protection, and the beginning of capitalism, with
social relations based on the market and private ownership of the means of
production. As Marx succinctly put it ‘the hand-mill gives you society with the
feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.’
Mason’s case is that he has found the change in technology that will lead to a new
social and political system, postcapitalism. Plenty of airport books will tell you
that the personal computer, the smart phone, the internet and the coming
internet of things – the information economy – is changing the world. Mason
believes that it also heralds the end of capitalism. His basic point is an economic
one. The cost of reproducing information – whether a book, a piece of music, the
software that runs a complex airliner, or even the design of that airliner – is
effectively zero. I can just download it. Because of that, the dominant
relationship between people using that information will not be that of seller and
buyer. Why should anyone buy it if they can just copy it? Instead the
relationship will be one of sharing. And an economy based on sharing, not the
market and private ownership, will be quite different from capitalism.
Mason argues that we can see the beginnings of this sharing economy in open
source software and Wikipedia, which are produced outside the market and
shared. And following Marx’s idea of the role of the working class in creating
socialism, the group of people who will bring about this social change will be the
new class of educated connected individuals, participating in a new connected
non-hierarchical society.
Is Mason right? It is exhilarating to read a book so optimistic but also hardheaded about the future. However, I think he is wrong. Capitalism has
responded to information copying by both strengthening intellectual property
rights and creating information monopolies like Apple and Google. Open Source
software has not killed off its commercial competitors. More important, while
part of the economy is based on information, most of it is not. Essentials like
food and energy cannot be simply copied for nothing. And Mason is blind to the
fact that a large sharing economy already exists in the things that we (actually
mainly women) do for each other – cooking, washing, caring, housework – at
home, which has so far co-existed with capitalism.
So I doubt if educated networked individuals all busy creating and sharing
information are going to bring down capitalism. Mason has a penultimate
chapter on the environmental crisis, which looks very much like an afterthought.
Yet surely the change this crisis is likely to bring to our energy intensive
economy as cheap energy supplies decline, coupled with the effects of global
climate change on our food supply, is a far more fundamental technological
change than the information economy, and could well change the nature of
capitalism. But it is less attractive to contemplate than the benign effects of the
information economy, which marches with the dominant narrative of progress.
The ruin of the planet unfortunately does not.