Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future Hardcover – February 9, 2016

“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 Blood Seed,

A very insightful tour through capitalisms various incarnations as it fought its way to stay ahead of labours push for a fair share of the cake. However, the brave new world of information technology, with its vast store of virtually free information, is making it harder and harder for capitalism to create and sustain new "business models". Are we heading into a world where the cost of producing, through use of robotics in combination with information technology will continue on a downward trajectory and if so will this mean that in order to sustain outlets for products and services capitalism will have to think the unthinkable and allow an unconditional income for all which is not tied to work? Paul explores all this stuff in an interesting, informative and entertaining way.

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

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.