Paul Mason - The end of capitalism has begun
Most 20th-century leftists believed that they did not have
the luxury of a managed transition: it was an article of faith for them that
nothing of the coming system could exist within the old one – though the
working class always attempted to create an alternative life within and
“despite” capitalism. As a result, once the possibility of a Soviet-style
transition disappeared, the modern left became preoccupied simply with opposing
things: the privatisation of healthcare, anti-union laws, fracking – the list
goes on.
If I am right, the logical focus for supporters of
postcapitalism is to build alternatives within the system; to use governmental
power in a radical and disruptive way; and to direct all actions towards the
transition – not the defence of random elements of the old system. We have to
learn what’s urgent, and what’s important, and that sometimes they do not
coincide.
The power of imagination will become critical. In an
information society, no thought, debate or dream is wasted – whether conceived
in a tent camp, prison cell or the table football space of a startup company.
Instead over the past 25 years it has been the left’s
project that has collapsed. The market destroyed the plan; individualism
replaced collectivism and solidarity; the hugely expanded workforce of the
world looks like a “proletariat”, but no longer thinks or behaves as it once
did.
If you lived through all this, and disliked capitalism, it
was traumatic. But in the process technology has created a new route out, which
the remnants of the old left – and all other forces influenced by it – have
either to embrace or die. Capitalism, it turns out, will not be abolished by
forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating something more
dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which
will break through, reshaping the economy around new values and behaviours. I
call this postcapitalism.
As with the end of feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism’s
replacement by postcapitalism will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped
by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started.
Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes
information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has
reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and
loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of
automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the
consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to
subsist but to provide a decent life for all.
Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to
form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while
information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies –
the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they
cannot last. By building business models and share valuations based on the
capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms are
constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of
humanity, which is to use ideas freely.
Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative
production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer
respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy. The biggest
information product in the world – Wikipedia – is
made by volunteers for free, abolishing the encyclopedia business and depriving
the advertising industry of an estimated $3bn a year in revenue.
Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market
system, whole swaths of economic life are beginning to move to a different
rhythm. Parallel currencies, time banks, cooperatives and self-managed spaces
have proliferated, barely noticed by the economics profession, and often as a
direct result of the shattering of the old structures in the post-2008 crisis.
You only find this new economy if you look hard for it. In
Greece, when a grassroots NGO mapped the country’s food co-ops, alternative
producers, parallel currencies and local exchange systems they found more than
70 substantive projects and hundreds of smaller initiatives ranging from squats
to carpools to free kindergartens. To mainstream economics such things seem
barely to qualify as economic activity – but that’s the point. They exist
because they trade, however haltingly and inefficiently, in the currency of
postcapitalism: free time, networked activity and free stuff. It seems a meagre
and unofficial and even dangerous thing from which to craft an entire
alternative to a global system, but so did money and credit in the age of
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