Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

“It hooked me at the first page!” “Ripped from the headlines!” “I couldn’t put it down!”
Hey wait a minute. Isn’t this supposed to be a review of an economics book? It is, and for me all those exclamations are true. In spite of the fact that I usually think economics is opaque and boring, I found this book to be positively riveting.

Like a lot of people, I’m worried about what’s going on in today’s world. The Arab Spring never bloomed; Occupy Wall Street petered out; the upcoming US election seems mired in chaos. We’re supposed to have recovered from the 2008 recession, but most new jobs can’t pay the bills. Every year breaks a record for world’s hottest, but certain political and corporate leaders still deny the existence of man-made climate change. Our population is getting older, poorer, and deeper in debt. What to do about the rising number of immigrants threatens many nations. So when Diane Rehm interviewed Paul Mason about his book, I decided to buy it. I wanted to hear more about his take on why we’re in this situation and what we can do about it.

Mason begins by reviewing humankind’s turbulent economic history: feudalism, industrial capitalism, the rise and destruction of the labor movement, the booms and busts of neoliberalism, the phenomenon of today’s “precariat.” These are the stressed-out people forced to work two jobs, who have lost or will never get a pension, who are acutely aware of how monopolies, outsourcing, or their company moving overseas make his or her job extremely precarious. Many workers are expected to be “at work” on their smartphones even when traveling or at home, and—even worse—are forced to “live the dream of the firm they work for.” In spite of our rising productivity, it’s now clear that actual wages are in decline, except for the 1%.

Mason then takes a look at how capitalism evolved in the last 200 years. It was mind-expanding for me to see how economic systems evolve and change just like human beings do. Today’s capitalism, the author points out, is in its fifth great wave. It’s trembling on the edge of becoming something new: postcapitalism.

Why is this happening? The answer, basically, is because our planet has to meet several great challenges it never faced before: climate change, ageing, the information network, and massive immigration. Business as usual won’t be able to meet these challenges.

So what will? What does this new mutation of capitalism look like? Mason says we’re already seeing it through models like the non-profit Wikipedia, Creative Commons, and Open Source. These share a communal nature, “free to use, but impossible to grab, own, and exploit.” Because of the unprecedented availability of free information on the internet, people are able to form artisanal local businesses, publish e-books, join global communities, share videos, get the equivalent of a free college degree. Information, one of the most valuable commodities available to human beings, isn’t scare anymore, but free to all.

Like any great novel, this book builds and builds into an explosive climax. Using the nitty-gritty facts of history and economics, Mason reveals what postcapitalism can mean to us and our future.

There’s tons more in in this book that I can’t even begin to deal with here. Whenever I read a book I think I’m going to review, I jot down notes: what grabs me, what new thing I learn, how it coincides with what I’ve noticed in the world and why it bothers me or gives me hope. For this book, I took six pages of notes. It’s hard to review a book in which you struggle to assimilate a new idea when, on the next page, the author is already using the new idea as the foundation for yet another new idea.

This book isn’t an easy read, but boy is it an exhilarating ride! At the end—when we finally get the answer to the question “who’s going to save us?”—I actually yelled Yay!
--review by Veronica Dale, author of [[ASIN:B0199BD0E8 Blood Seed]],

In a nutshell, author's main idea is that capitalism is in danger because information technology has reduced the need for work, information goods and collaborative production like Wikipedia are challenging markets, and the current phase in Kondratiff's cycle has been disrupted. He therefore concludes that we are seeing a new order emerging which will mark the death of capitalism.

On its own, the book is a good read but it is not a new Das Kapital by any means. Many arguments are not substantiated well and require more scrutiny. For example, me writing this review is part of information collaboration but only because my livelihood is not dependent on it. Same goes for people collaborating to Wikipedia or Quora. If it was my livelihood, then it would be absorbed in the market like newspaper reviews. People collaborate and provide information online more as an enjoyable side activity. Taking it to the extreme and claiming it will lead to the end of capitalism is just like worrying about everybody turning into fishermen because some people spend summer time fishing.

Similarly, IT has reduced the need for work but for how many? The literature on Kondratieff's cycle is quite eccentric and raises more questions than it can answer. The labor theory of value is highly inapplicable in today's world because it neglects the role of entrepreneurs and managers. In every age there comes many books prophesying that the end of capitalism is nigh. But till now capitalism has defied even stalwarts like Marx and Schumpeter. The idea of postcapitalism as in this book at times seems very naive in treatment and sends reality check-o-meter buzzing in every chapter. But the book is certainly a pioneer in its area and I am looking forward to more contributions on this topic.

I will leave it to others who are more invested in seriously reviewing books to provide a summary and commentary of this work. I really enjoyed reading this book, but believe the title is a bit misleading. The substance of the book is about where we find ourselves now and how we got to this point; less about some future that is still largely unknowable. Mason's analysis and insights are what make this book amazing, and he has a gift for clearly explaining some pretty complicated issues (without dumbing anything down). The last chapter of the book is much less successful, which I kind of expected, given that nobody can really have their arms around a collective future that is contingent on so many significant variables. This is definitely worth your time to read, and I feel like I need to re-read this book in a couple of months to pick up what I missed on the first round.

Simply amazing how the author ties together cutting edge economic theory on technology with political thinking. This is not a book to be missed for modern thinkers. There might be many automatically critical of this work on an ideological level but I would implore you to put your politics aside, get it and read. The ideas in this book correspond to many of those found in Martin Ford's Book Rise of the Robot's as well as the work by MIT economists called The Second Machine Age. Specifically, one should pay attention to whether "information goods conflict fundamentally with market mechanism." I believe Mason is correct in asserting that they do.

This valuable book has already become one of a handful to mark my view of the world with a “before” and “after,” helping me connect some puzzling dots into a coherent cognitive map.

Paul Mason, whose writing has impressed me in the past with its insight, has done a terrific job pulling together various strands of information and ideas to make sense of our present historical moment. But I’ll warn you it is not a quick and breezy read. Some familiarity with history and economic philosophy (both classical and socialist) is almost a prerequisite.

I say “almost” because Mason is such a good writer that a lay reader should be able to follow the argument with a little effort. His real achievement is not in coming up with an original idea, but in putting lots of old ideas together in an original way.

A central question of the book is how to make sense of the economic crisis of 2008. Clearly the political world has been shaken off its axis by this question, in part by the unexpected rebirth of socialism as a live topic. Suddenly, a mere twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, people began re-reading Karl Marx in earnest.

The answer to the question implicates the main argument between old-line socialists and practically everyone else across the political spectrum: does capitalism tend toward crisis and eventual collapse, or does it tend toward equilibrium? Or to put it another way, is capitalism the end result of humanity’s economic development or is there a further stage?

Mason’s best move is his upgrade of the ideas of the socialist economist Nikolai Kondratieff, who was executed under Stalin in 1938. Kondratieff’s theory of “long waves,” describing roughly 50-year cycles of adaptive ups and downs in capitalism that encompass the short-term boom and bust cycles, was deemed incompatible with the Marxist-Leninist dogma that periodic crises were escalating into an imminent world-wide revolution.

Kondratieff’s theory sparked the interest of Western economists in the 1930s, then lapsed into relative obscurity until the economic boom of the 1950s-60s began to wane in the 1970s. Much has been written about why this waning happened, as the political repercussions have been enormous.

Wages and profits both stopped rising. In the U.S., disillusionment among workers weakened ties to the liberal Democratic program, and the business class fought back against taxes, regulations, unions and social welfare programs. The attack hit full force under President Ronald Reagan, as Democrats moved to the center to compete. We have been in a see-sawing stalemate between the two parties since then.

But as Mason points out, the post-war boom followed by a turning point in the 1970s also happens fits Kondratieff’s long wave theory. The last wave Kondratieff identified started in the 1890s and would have ended in the 1940s. This means a whole new economic configuration would arise in the 1940s and reach a turning point in the mid-’70s, leading to a new crisis and adaptation roughly twenty-five years later—sometime around the turn of the millennium.

Thus the spectacular crash 2008, followed by economic confusion and growing public anger.

The current crop of Presidential contenders can be arrayed along a spectrum of responses to the present situation. (This is my analysis, not Mason’s, who wrote his book before the race got started.) Most Republicans still dispense the Reagan prescription, while Hillary Clinton follows the Carter-Clinton track of a centrist accommodation with corporate America.

But hordes of voters are fed up with more of the same, and Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are the outsider candidates drawing on this frustration. Sanders, an avowed democratic socialist, wants to return to an FDR-style social democracy. Trump’s economic ideas are incoherent (to me, anyway), but he too articulates the desire to break free of the current stalemate for a whole different direction.

Mason, however, contends that we are exiting the last long wave and entering a new one, one in which the world economy is adapting into an entirely new shape. Only this one, he writes, is “postcapitalist,” as different from capitalism as capitalism was from feudalism.

The emerging economy is one of zero marginal cost products (costing next to nothing to produce), networked information technology, fully automated production, and a truly global marketplace. Mason reviews previous authors who have seen this emerging, the most recent of them being Jeremy Rifkin. (See my review of Rifkin’s book here.)

Mason adds much more to Rifkin’s description. He argues that class conflict is moving from the capitalist vs. proletariat division to a division between corporate-government hierarchies trying to stifle and exploit the new economy vs. a “precariat” of networked individuals with tenuous connections to a work identity.

The transition to this new stage can be expected to be as tumultuous and confusing as the transition from feudalism to capitalism, as old ways of living and thinking dissolve and new ways asset themselves. It will be facilitated by “external shocks,” which Mason expects to be some combination of climate change, aging populations, unsustainable public debt or mass migration.

Not content to explain and predict, he also offers the outlines of a political program for moving forward. These are based on dismantling the neo-liberalist project (privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, and government collaboration with big corporations) to work for “sustainable, collaborative, socially just outcomes.” Some key policies would be socializing finance, implementing a basic income for all, suppressing or socializing monopolies, and expanding collaborative work.

How exactly to gain power and achieve all this is not spelled out, but the book is so jam-packed with thought provoking ideas and information that this becomes a minor quibble. I find Mason’s analysis the best I’ve yet seen that fits the data and offers a path forward.

It’s up to all of us to carve that path.

--Alan F. Zundel

Mason’s ‘Postcapitalism’ is one of only three books I have ever read that represent a serious attempt to reimagine the global economy. The other two were written about a hundred years ago by a man who is deeply academically unfashionable, at least in this country, despite his extensive and rigorous academic credentials, namely Rudolf Steiner. I refer to ‘The Threefold Social Order’ and ‘World Economy’.

Like Steiner, Mason draws heavily on Marxist traditions. Steiner was far from being a Marxist, but shared Marx’s analysis of the problems capitalism presented. He differed with him on the solution.

Mason has read widely in Marxist economic theory, including Marx, Engels, Lenin, Bukharin and a number of others. He shows how the evolution of capitalism surprised almost all of these thinkers: they didn’t expect it to survive so long and in particular underestimated its adaptive power.

Mason argues that capitalism survived initially by turning into a form of state capitalism which largely controlled the market and socialised and protected the workforce. This started to break down when Nixon took the dollar out of the Bretton Woods agreement and all currencies then became flexible. From around that time it gradually became open season on irresponsible financial speculation, eventually to the extent that the global economy became a tissue of lies and guesswork.

Mason’s analysis of Marxism is presented alongside a look at Kondratieff who postulates fifty year cycles of growth and decline, which are to do with cycles of types of means of production which gradually run out of steam.

All this gradually culminates in the sterility of neoliberalism which Mason contrasts with a labour theory of value. Neoliberalism is basically interested in making money. It is interested in the market but not in the human lives that lay behind it, and it tells us that if we trust the market everything else will sort itself out. A theory of value based on labour suggests that the value of things should be based not on scarcity or manipulation but on the amount of money it costs to keep a family alive and in health, and how many hours a worker needs to put in to create something. In other words this theory of value starts with the human being.

If you look at the world today it is obvious the free market ideology is bankrupt but even those in public life who realise and perhaps acknowledge this are reluctant to disown it because they can’t conceive of an alternative.

Mason, having analysed socialism closely, postulates that human values can only be maintained by a system he calls postcapitalism, which can grow out of the development of the internet which offers the potential to reduce demands on labour because of the ways in which it can revolutionise design and production (the ‘Internet of Things’), and the development of the free economy as instanced by Open Source agreements and non-profit concerns like Wikipedia.

The last chapter or two look in some detail at the problems the world faces – migration, climate change and an ageing population – and suggest that there are ways of stimulating the cooperative economy but that also governments need to throw their weight around when it comes to regulating the financial world.

Many of Mason’s ideas echo Steiner’s, particularly his theory of value, his views about regulation of capital, and his critique of Marxism. Steiner of course is hard to take for many because of his spiritual views. However I would suggest a spirituality as hardheaded, rigorous and grounded in concrete reality as Steiner’s perhaps deserves further consideration, a hundred years old or not.

Finally Mason’s book is easy to read in one sense, ie in the language he uses, which is totally jargon free. Of course some of the concepts need some effort to grasp.

To most humans there is no incentive to question the system they are living in, business runs as usual and there is a general tendency to keep the status quo. The definition of ‘system’ in this case encompasses plenty of different layers: the global political system, national political systems, globalized financial markets, national currencies and currency unions, societies and their cultures. The system in most parts of Western Europe and Northern America is referred to as neoliberalism by the author Paul Mason. According to him, neoliberalism is a form of capitalism that evolved during the 1970s and is based on free markets and economic agents acting on behalf of self-interest. Paul Mason is a journalist who radically questions the survival of neoliberalism and calls for a new era that is about to emerge: postcapitalism. In his book, he attempts to provide a pathway out of neoliberalism into postcapitalism basing his argumentation on significant left-wing political theories. This review will investigate the central issue addressed by the author, the way he addresses it and whether he addresses the issue in a successful, scientific way. Firstly, a summary will provide the reader with the line of thought of his main ideas. Secondly, Mason’s structure, plausibility, way of argumentation, and readability will be evaluated. Lastly, a conclusion will cover the main points addressed in this review and present a general judgment on Mason’s work.

Paul Mason is a Biritish journalist who published his first book ‘Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global’ in 2007. Mason calls himself a “radical social democrat who favors the creation of a peer-to-peer sector (open source etc.) alongside the market and the state” but claims that he is not a revolutionary Marxist. In 2016, he published “Postcapitalism: A guide to our future” which can be divided into three parts, containing ten chapters in total. The structure is built up as followed: Negative description of the state of the current system (neoliberalism) and an introduction to cycle theory, a review of relevant political theory, final outlook. In the first part, Mason starts off with negatively critiquing neoliberalism, our current form of capitalism: According to him we live in a global system where money’s value is based on expectations, ratings and political incidents – where the working class is becoming less and less wealthy but the upper class becomes insanely rich. He comes up with "four things that at first allowed neoliberalism to flourish but then destroyed it” (p. 9). The most important issues mentioned here are fiat money, financialization and IT. Firstly, he defines fiat money as “money out of nothing” (p. 9) which started in 1971 when Nixon abolished the gold standard. Since then, the dollar was just a currency, a paper and not anymore convertible into a real, valuable physical good. Generally, he reviews Basel I-III and criticizes that money can be made - or rather printed - out of nothing and thus banks can give out money that they do not actually possess. The second big issue is “financialization of everything” (p. 11): there is debt everywhere. According to Mason, the people belonging to lower social classes work very hard but have to take on debt, which they actually cannot repay.

Subsequently, he introduces Kondratieff’s cycle theory, which is utilized as a main concept throughout this book. Kondratieff’s theory, originated in 1926, states that economic periods come in the form of fifty-year-cycles, starting with 25 years of strong growth followed by 25 years of economic decline with a final crisis that ends the cycle. While scholars and economists are discussing whether we are still in the fifth cycle, which started around 1971 with information technology, or already in the sixth cycle, Mason is sure that we are stuck in the fifth cycle (Neoliberalism). Why should that be the case? In his opinion, the first four cycles were accompanied by large labor forces who were increasingly organized and therefore able to extract sufficient proceeds of production to fuel the cycle. However, he claims that neoliberalism took away labor’s power so that the fifth cycle cannot take off. Furthermore, the rise of information goods also has a negative impact on the normal cycle flow. He claims that markets will lose their importance because even more goods will become free because of zero-cost production. As reported by Kondratieff
(1926), there are four main characteristics leading to a new cycle: Potential for further exploitation of an innovation is exhausted, high level of excess financial capital, period of severe recession, social institutional transformations. In my opinion, these criteria are met to a certain degree since we had a global financial crisis starting 2009 and we do experience social tensions (migrant crisis, booming populist parties in Europe, Trump in America) and institutional transformations (problems in the EU with Greece, Brexit). However, when considering cloud computing, artificial intelligence and biotechnology one definitely cannot state that IT and knowledge has reaped off the full potential of innovation already.
Throughout his book, the author does not just explain a certain economic theory or provide insights into his research but mainly presents his personal opinion, often in an almost aggressive form. Paul Mason does utilize scientific terminology when arguing and describing processes, societies and systems but still maintains a clear, understandable language. His strong aversion towards banks, consultants, rating agencies and several political groups is openly demonstrated at numerous points. Additionally, he uses metaphors and graphs to make his book more vivid in order to obtain the attention of the reader. For example, when explaining Kondratieff’s cycle theory, he uses the notion of waves as a picture to enhance the attention and comprehension of the reader. Likewise, mason maintains a clear and logical structure (current system, theoretical foundations, outlook and goals) and creates overarching transitions, for example ending the first part with an indication of where we will search for the perfect solution to our current system.

Paul Mason’s postcapitalism is such an important theory not only because it attempts a theoretical framework for this reality, but also, crucially, because it identifies a new source of proactive political agency. Mason accepts that the pathway to postcapitlism is not just an economic transition but a human transition. Humans have to come together, fight for their rights and funds they need to survive. His theory is not that much economic – it rather seems like a political ideology. This political ideology might ask the right questions but does definitely not come up with fully rational answers. What Mason proposes does sound like a good base idea: suppress monopolies and socialize the financial systems, make education free and write off debt to stop austerity in Southern Europe. However, is such a transition possible in our society, which has strong structural inertia and is that strongly embedded in the status quo? Nevertheless, “Postcapitlism: A guide to future”, written by Paul Mason, is definitely worth reading for people who have an interest in crisis theory, the global economy and the history of political theory. Furthermore, it should be beneficiary for all politicians and economists to read this book. Even if these people have completely different political opinions, they should at least be exposed to and think about Mason’s views.

This is a thought provoking book about the ways that the economy is changing. Naturally, it's difficult to understand transitions while they are happening, but Mason helps us to see it through at least his lens. Even if the reader were disposed against the abundant history and economic theory here, there is enough intriguing information here to glean. “There is a growing body of evidence that info tech, far from creating a new and stable form of capitalism, is dissolving it: corroding market mechanisms, eroding property rights and destroying the old relationship between wages, work and profit” (p. 112). Mason argues that we need to figure out exactly how this occurs and "what might happen if this tendency was being promoted instead of restrained; and what social group has the interest to make the transition happen" (p. 144). As other reviewers have noted, Mason is rather heavy on Marx and Kondratieff, but he is still quite readable and provides idea-toys for the reader to consider.

The issue of postcapitalism has to be seen from two angles: the inherent dynamic, if any, of a system moving beyond itself, and the choice/decision of those in the system to change or abolish it completely. In the final analysis it is a speculative guess that the current system stuck in its neo-liberal dystopia has the seeds for a transition to something else. We should remain wary of such claims because while they can offer insights into the dynamics of capitalism we can more safely predict that if the system tends to transcend itself those who stand to profit will reestablish it.
The book nonetheless contains much to reckon with and is refreshingly eclectic in a spread of ideas which may or may not amount to confirmation of thesis. At the end however we seem to return to postcapitalism done the old fashioned way, a revolution, which is a choice/decision to operate not according to economic deterministic logic, but the logic of values set in advance to create a system where people are not subjected to the oblivion chosen for them by gangs of thugs called 'capitalists', and their organ grinder's monkey, the economist.
Economists specialize in looking past values to what a system does, and how it will undergo noble intentions, but we are arriving at the point where the whole game has to perform according to those values or be judged obsolete. We have burnt out a whole planet in the name of capitalism's 'successes', but must notice that after all of that the system now trends toward the abolition of middle classes. To say nothing of the imminent climate crisis.
Still, the cogency of the author's many speculative 'wild goose chases' might be useful for leftists if they can hope to ride the momentum of the system itself toward the phase of 'post...'.

Looking for an alternative to neoliberalism? Read this book. Have a hard time believing that the market can fix all of our problems? Read this book. British journalist Paul Mason gives a compelling history of capitalism's birth from feudalism and rise over the last few hundred years through four "long cycles" of development, and he sets the stage for what hopefully comes next, if we don't destroy ourselves first.

It's a bit of a tough book to read, not because it's written in a challenging way (Mason is a journalist, not an economist), but because it's brutally honest (and therefore pessimistic) about where we are, what our global condition is, and what the challenges are for capitalism in the years ahead (saving the environment, the aging population, the rise of population in the global south, and widespread human migration).

Mason's key thesis, and where the book begins, is that, as so many of the goods that we create and consume are now "abundant" not "scarce" (are digital, and can be copied for a marginal cost that approaches zero), that we are moving into a new economic reality, postcapitalism. Global conditions approaching the crisis point, with neoliberal capitalism unable to present a solution, is just the wake-up call that we need to look for something else, for what comes next.

I've been trying to read Thomas Piketty's landmark economics book Capital in the Twenty-First Century for a while now (and am still working on it!) but this book jumped in front of it in my queue, as it is far more digestible to a non-economist.

Something to note here: This is not about some dogmatic left versus right philosophical debate. This is about looking at the economic challenges the world faces, recognizing that the current neoliberal construction of capitalism has no solution for those challenges, and looking for another economic model that can help us work together to face the future. Mason doesn't have the whole answer, but he presents what he does have in the book's closing chapter. This book is about understanding where we are, the economic challenges we face as a civilization, and the promise that truly "abundant" goods presents for our future, and for what can come next for humanity.

And, interestingly, this is possibly the most pessimistic and optimistic book I know of... at the same time. The project of capitalism is in trouble, but if we look around, we can see the seeds of what comes next...