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# PostCapitalism-_Paul-Mason_-_z-library.sk_-1lib.sk_-z-lib.sk_
> 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。
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Then came the dotcom crash. The spectacular fall of Nasdaq, beginning in April 2000, changed the perception of the generation that had struggled with dial-up modems and got rich. Following the disaster John Perry Barlow, a cyber-rights campaigner who’d lost 95 per cent of his money, drew the harsh conclusion: ‘The whole dot-com thing was an effort to use 19th and 20th century concepts of economy in an environment where they didn’t exist, and the internet essentially shrugged them off. This was an assault by an alien force that was repelled by the natural forces of the internet.’ And he pointed out where the debate might go next. ‘In the long term it’s going to be very good for the dot-communists.’29
A NEW MODE OF PRODUCTION?
In 2006 Yochai Benkler, then a law professor at Yale, concluded that the network economy was ‘a new mode of production emerging in the middle of the most advanced economies in the world’.30 Benkler had been trying to define a legal framework for Open Source publishing, known as the ‘Creative Commons’. In The Wealth of Networks, he described the economic forces that were undermining intellectual property, causing common ownership models and unmanaged production to spread.
First, he said, the rise of cheap physical computing power and communications networks had put the means of production of intellectual goods into the hands of many people. People can blog, they can make movies and distribute them, they can self-publish e-books – in some cases creating a million-strong audience before the traditional publishers even know the authors exist: ‘The result is that a good deal more that human beings value can now be done by individuals who interact with each other socially, as human beings and as social beings, rather than as market actors through the price system.’31
This, he argued, leads to the rise of non-market mechanisms: decentralized action by individuals, working through cooperative, voluntary forms of organization. It is producing new forms of ‘peer-to-peer’ economics, in which money is either absent or not the main measure of value.
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Wikipedia is the best example. Founded in 2001, the collaboratively written encyclopaedia has, at the time of writing, 26 million pages and 24 million people registered to contribute and edit – with about 12,000 people regularly editing and 140,000 people vaguely taking part.32
Wikipedia has 208 employees.33 The thousands who edit it do so for free. A user survey found 71 per cent of them do it because they like the idea of working for nothing, and 63 per cent because they believe information should be free.34 With 8.5 billion page views per month the Wikipedia site is the sixth most popular in the world – just above Amazon, the most successful e-commerce company on earth.35 By one estimate, if it were run as a commercial site, Wikipedia’s revenue could be \$2.8 billion a year.36
Yet Wikipedia makes no profit. And in doing so it makes it almost impossible for anybody else to make a profit in the same space. Furthermore, it is one of the most valuable learning resources ever invented and has (so far) defied all attempts to censor, subvert, troll or sabotage it, because the power of tens of millions of human eyeballs is greater than any government, stalker, interest group or saboteur can match.
The principle Wikipedia works on is the same the early Open Source programmers used on GNU and Linux, but applied to a mass consumer product. When we visit Amazon, and buy a camera or a book, our recorded choices help other users choose. In economics this is called a positive ‘externality’ – an unintended economic benefit.
With Amazon, it is the corporation that reaps most of the benefit, in the form of increased buying and selling power. With Wikipedia, there is only a human benefit: no kid ever again has to sit in a small town library, as I did, lost in a maze of mediocre and random knowledge, itself trapped for ever on sheets of paper that can never be updated or corrected without printing a completely new book.
Benkler draws out the economic lesson of a phenomenon like Wikipedia: that the network makes it possible to organize production in a decentralized and collaborative way, utilizing neither the market nor management hierarchy.
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Economists like to demonstrate the archaic nature of command planning with mind-games like ‘imagine the Soviet Union tried to create Starbucks’. Now, here’s a more intriguing game: imagine if Amazon, Toyota or Boeing tried to create Wikipedia.
Without collaborative production and Open Source there would be only two ways to do so: by using either the market or the command structures of a corporation. Since there are maybe 12,000 active writers and editors of Wikipedia, you could hire that number, and maybe get away with some of them being outworkers in the sweatshop economies of the world, controlled by a better-paid managerial layer in the American sun-belt. Then you could incentivize them to write the best possible encyclopaedia on the web. You would give them targets, bonuses, promote teamwork through quality circles, etc.
But you could not produce anything as dynamic as Wikipedia. Getting a 12,000-strong corporation to produce 26 million pages of Wikipedia would be as pointless as the Soviet Union trying to create its own version of Starbucks. A 208-strong foundation would always do it better. And even if you could produce something just as good as Wikipedia, you would face a massive problem: Wikipedia itself, your major competitor, doing it all for free.
So maybe, instead of using a corporation to command Wikipedia into existence, you could try using market forces to trade it into existence. After all, doesn’t business school teach us the market is the most efficient system?
People would maybe pay small amounts of money for small chunks of knowledge, while being comfortable with the idea that the information rests in the public domain as free. Maybe the academics, amateurs and enthusiasts who write the pages would be glad to receive a small amount of money for each contribution.
This, in fact, is more like what actually happens – but it is not money the participants are exchanging. They are in effect exchanging gifts. And as anthropologists have long realized, the gift is only the physical symbol of something more intangible: call it goodwill, or happiness.
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Wikipedia, like Linux, is radical in two ways. First, in the communal nature of what is produced: it is free to use but impossible to grab, own and exploit. Second, in the collaborative nature of the production process: nobody in a central office decides what the pages should be about; Wikipedia’s employees simply regulate the standards of creation and editing, and defend the whole platform against erosion by property and management hierarchies.
Benkler defines this as ‘commons-based peer production’ – and the concept challenges the certainties of mainstream economics some more. Nothing has changed about humanity. It’s just that our human desire to make friends, build relationships based on mutual trust and obligation, fulfilling emotional and psychological needs, has spilled over into economic life.
At the precise moment in history when it became possible to produce stuff without the market or the firm, significant numbers of people started doing so.
In the first place, the cheapening of computer power and network access puts the ability to produce information goods into the hands of many people, not the few. Next, you need what Benkler calls ‘planned modularity’: that is, a task is broken up into chunks small enough for people to complete on their own and then submit the outcome to a wider network. A Wikipedia page is a perfect example: adding a snippet of info or deleting an erroneous one is a modular task that can be done from the top deck of a bus on a smartphone, or from a PC in the web café of a Manila slum.
For Benkler, then, cheap technology and modular forms of production have driven us towards non-market, collaborative work. It is not a fad, he argues, but ‘a sustainable pattern of human production’. Though he uses the words ‘new mode of production’ Benkler does not say that this is something different from capitalism. He argues instead that it will lead to a radically different and more sustainable form of capitalism. He predicts a redistribution of wealth and power from dominant firms and elites to a wider mixture of individuals, peer networks and businesses that can adapt to the new situation.
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The problem is, Benkler is describing the new forms of info-capitalism without describing their dynamics, which are necessarily contradictory.
Info-tech drives labour out of the production process, reduces the market price of commodities, destroys some profit models and produces a generation of consumers psychologically attuned to free stuff. But in the first full decade of its existence it has helped fuel a global crisis during which the poorest citizens of developed countries were reduced to scrambling through dumpsters, even as they eked out the last few cents of credit on their mobile phones.
Info-capitalism is real, but if we analyse the whole thing – the collision of neoliberal economics with network technology – we must conclude it is in crisis.
THE ECONOMICS OF FREE STUFF
In the late nineteenth century economists began to notice that not all the effects of capitalism could be understood through the act of buying and selling. Given most factories were by then surrounded by slag heaps, slums and stinking rivers, it was hard not to notice that capitalism has effects external to what is done in the marketplace. They called these ‘externalities’, and a debate began over how to account for them.
At first they focused on ‘bad’ externalities: if I buy coal-fired power from an energy supplier and it pollutes the air, that pollution is an externality. The solution to bad externalities is easy: you work out a way to allocate the cost to the buyer and seller. So with the dirty power station, for example, you impose a pollution tax.
However, there are also ‘good’ externalities – such as the lower hiring costs that arise when similar businesses cluster in the same neighbourhood. There is no need for a solution to good externalities, but they often show up as reduction in cost and activity.
But in an information economy, the externalities become the major issue. In the old world, economists categorized information as a ‘public good’: the costs of science, for example, were borne by society – so everybody benefited. But in the 1960s economists began to understand information as a commodity. In 1962, Kenneth Arrow, the guru of mainstream economics, said that in a free-market economy, the purpose of inventing things is to create intellectual property rights. ‘Precisely to the extent that it is successful there is an under-utilisation of information.’37
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If you think about it this way, the purpose of patenting the advanced HIV drug Darunavir can only be to keep its price at \$1095 a year, which is, as Médecins sans Frontières put it, ‘prohibitively expensive’. The information exists to place millions of people on this advanced HIV treatment, but thanks to the patent it is underutilized. Conversely, because India famously prevented pharmaceutical companies slapping twenty-year patents on other advanced HIV treatments, their cost has slumped since the year 2000, and the information on how to make them has been utilized.
In an economy where information is everywhere, so are externalities. If we survey the giants of info-capitalism, almost the whole of their business model is about capturing good external side-effects.
Amazon works, for example, by offering to sell you things based on your previous choices – information you provided for free and could not choose to withhold. The whole business model is based on the one-sided capture of externalities by Amazon. It works for supermarkets too: by aggregating their customer data and preventing its utilization by everybody else, big supermarkets such as Walmart or Tesco gain a huge commercial advantage.
Now imagine Walmart or Tesco were prepared to publish their customer data (suitably anonymized) for free. Society would benefit: everybody from farmers to epidemiologists could mine the data, and make more accurate decisions; individual customers could see at a glance whether they’d been making rational or irrational shopping decisions. But the supermarkets would lose market advantage; their ability to manipulate consumer behaviour using price points, sell-by dates and two-for-one deals would be reduced. The whole point of their vast e-commerce systems is that customer data is, as Arrow would put it, ‘underutilized’.
If we restate Arrow’s observation in a different way, its revolutionary implications are obvious: if a free-market economy with intellectual property leads to the underutilization of information, then an economy based on the full utilization of information cannot have a free market or absolute intellectual property rights. And this is just another way of saying what Benkler and Drucker understood: that info-tech undermines something fundamental about the way capitalism works.
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But what does it create in its place? For the term ‘postcapitalism’ to be meaningful, you would have to describe exactly how network technology triggers a transition to something else, and what the dynamics of a postcapitalist world would look like.
None of the writers I’ve surveyed above achieves that – and for a reason: none of them is working with a fully rounded theory of capitalism itself. But what if somebody did anticipate the information-driven fall of capitalism? What if someone had clearly predicted that the ability to create prices would dissolve if information became collectively distributed and embodied in machines? We would probably be hailing that person’s work as visionary. Actually there is such a person. His name is Karl Marx.
THE GENERAL INTELLECT
The scene is Kentish Town, London, February 1858, sometime around 4 a.m. Marx is still a wanted man in Germany and has spent ten years becoming increasingly depressed about the prospects for revolution. But now Wall Street has crashed, there are bank failures across Europe and he is scrambling to finish a long-promised book on economics. ‘I’m working like a madman right through the night’ he confides, ‘so that I’ll at least have the outlines clear before the deluge. 38
Marx’s resources are limited. He has a pass to the British Library, giving him access to the latest data. By day he writes articles in English for the New York Tribune. By night he is filling eight notebooks with near-illegible scrawl in German: free-flowing observations, thought experiments and notes-to-self.
The notebooks, known collectively as the Grundrisse (which translates as ‘The Outline’), will be saved, but not read, by Engels. They will be stored in the HQ of the German social-democratic party until the Soviet Union buys them in the 1920s. They will not be read in Western Europe until the
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late 1960s, and in English not until 1973. When they finally get to see what Marx is writing on this cold night in 1858, scholars will admit that it ‘challenges every serious interpretation of Marx yet conceived’.39 It is called the Fragment on Machines.
The Fragment on Machines starts with the observation that as large-scale industry develops it changes the relationship between worker and machine. In early industry, there was a man, a tool worked by hand and a product. Now instead of a tool, the worker: ‘inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor.’40
Marx had imagined an economy in which the main role of machines was to produce, and the main role of people was to supervise them. He was clear that in such an economy the main productive force would be information. The productive power of machines like the ‘self-acting’ cotton-spinning machine, the telegraph and the steam locomotive was ‘out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production’.41
Organization and knowledge, in other words, made a bigger contribution to productive power than the labour of making and running the machines.
Given what Marxism was to become – a theory of exploitation based on the theft of labour time – this is a revolutionary statement. It suggests that – once knowledge becomes a productive force in its own right, vastly outweighing the actual labour spent creating a machine – the big question becomes not wages versus profits but who controls the ‘power of knowledge’.
Now Marx drops a bombshell. In an economy where machines do most of the work, where human labour is really about supervising, mending and designing the machines, the nature of the knowledge locked inside the machines must, he writes, be ‘social’.
Let’s use a modern example. If, today, a software developer uses a programming language to write code linking a web page to a database, then she is clearly working with social knowledge. I’m not talking specifically here about Open Source programming, just an ordinary commercial software project. Every layer of the process has been created by sharing information, pooling it, tweaking the code and the interfaces.
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The programmer herself doesn’t own the code she’s working on, obviously. But equally the company employing her can’t own more than a fraction of it. It can legally patent every piece of code she outputs. It can even force her to sign an agreement that what she writes in her spare time belongs to them – but the code will still contain thousands of bits of previous code written by other people that cannot be patented.
Plus, the knowledge it took to produce the code is still in the programmer’s brain. She can, if market conditions allow, move to a different workplace and execute the same solution, should it be required. With information, part of the product remains with the worker in a way it did not during the industrial era.
It is the same for the tool she’s using: the programming language. It has been developed by tens of thousands of people contributing their knowledge and experience. If she downloads the latest update, it is sure to contain changes based on lessons learned by everyone else using it.
On top of that, the consumer data – the record left by each interaction with the website – may be wholly owned by a company. Yet it is socially produced: I send you a link, you click on it, or retweet it to 10,000 followers.
Marx couldn’t imagine a web server. However, he could observe the telegraph system. By 1858 the telegraph, running alongside the world’s railway lines and terminating at every railway station and business HQ, was the most important piece of infrastructure in the world. Britain alone boasted a network with 1,178 nodes outside London, and hundreds more linking the City, Parliament and the London docks.42
Telegraph operators were highly skilled but, as with the software programmer, the knowledge needed to work an electric key was insignificant alongside the knowledge embodied in the vast, cross-border machine they were actually supervising.
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The memoirs of telegraph operators show clearly the social nature of the technology. Rule number one was that you could send information only as fast as the person on the other end could receive it. But in the complex telegraph systems, where rooms full of senders and receivers negotiated use of the crowded line capacity with far distant operators, ‘handling egos was as much a part of an operator’s work as handling a telegraph key. Considerate, helpful operators made work easier; domineering, cavalier, or self-righteous ones made work more difficult.’43 Their work was social, the knowledge embodied in the machine was social.
In the Fragment on Machines, these two ideas – that the driving force of production is knowledge, and that knowledge stored in machines is social – led Marx to the following conclusions.
First, in a heavily mechanized capitalism, boosting productivity through better knowledge is a much more attractive source of profit than extending the working day, or speeding up labour: longer days consume more energy, speed-ups hit the limits of human dexterity and stamina. But a knowledge solution is cheap and limitless.
Second, Marx argued, knowledge-driven capitalism cannot support a price mechanism whereby the value of something is dictated by the value of the inputs needed to produce it. It is impossible to properly value inputs when they come in the form of social knowledge. Knowledge-driven production tends towards the unlimited creation of wealth, independent of the labour expended. But the normal capitalist system is based on prices determined by input costs, and assumes all inputs come in limited supply.
For Marx, knowledge-based capitalism creates a contradiction – between the ‘forces of production’ and the ‘social relations’. These form ‘the material conditions to blow [capitalism’s] foundation sky-high’. Furthermore, capitalism of this type is forced to develop the intellectual power of the worker. It will tend to reduce working hours (or halt their extension), leaving time for workers to develop artistic and scientific talents outside work, which become essential to the economic model itself. Finally Marx throws in a new concept, which appears nowhere else – before or after – in his entire writings: ‘the general intellect’. When we measure the
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