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# PostCapitalism-_Paul-Mason_-_z-library.sk_-1lib.sk_-z-lib.sk_
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Early capitalism, when it forced people into factories, had to turn large parts of the non-market lifestyle into a serious crime: if you lost your job you were arrested as a vagrant; if you poached game, as your ancestors had always done, it became a hanging offence. The equivalent today would be not just to push commercialism into the deep pores of everyday life, but to make resisting it a crime. You would have to treat people kissing each other for free the way they treated poachers in the nineteenth century. It is impossible.
Therefore the real danger inherent in robotization is something bigger than mass unemployment, it is the exhaustion of capitalism’s 250-year-old tendency to create new markets where old ones are worn out.
And there’s yet another obstacle: property rights. To capture the externalities in an information-heavy economy, capital has to extend its ownership rights into new areas; it has to own our selfies, our playlists, not just our published academic papers but the research we did to write them. Yet the technology itself gives us the means to resist this, and makes it longterm impossible.
So what we have in reality is an info-capitalism struggling to exist.
We should be going through a third industrial revolution but it has stalled. Those who blame its failure on weak policy, poor investment strategy and overweening finance are mistaking symptoms for the disease. Those who continually try to impose collaborative legal norms on top of market structures are missing the point.
An economy based on information, with its tendency to zero-cost products and weak property rights, cannot be a capitalist economy.
The usefulness of the labour-theory is that it accounts for this: it allows us to use the same metric for market and non-market production in a way that the OECD’s economists could not. Crucially it enables us to design the transition process so that we know what we are trying to achieve: a world of free machines, zero-priced basic goods and minimum necessary labour time.
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The next question is: who is going to make it happen?
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Beautiful Troublemakers
In 1980, the French intellectual André Gorz announced that the working class was dead. It was permanently divided as a social group and culturally dispossessed, and its role as an agent of social progress was over.
The thought was spectacularly mistimed. Between then and now the global workforce has doubled in size. Offshoring, globalization and the entry of former communist countries into the world market have boosted the number of waged workers to above 3 billion.1 In the process, what it means to be a worker has changed. For about 150 years, the word ‘proletariat’ meant a predominantly white, male, manual labour force located in the developed world. Over the past thirty years it has become a multicoloured, majority-female workforce, centred in the global south.
Yet in one sense Gorz was right. In the same thirty years we’ve seen a slide in trade union membership, the decline of labour’s bargaining power in the developed world and a fall in wages as a share of GDP. This is the ultimate cause of the problem lamented by Thomas Piketty: the inability of workers to defend their share of the total product, and the rise in inequality.2
Alongside material weakness, the labour movement has suffered an ideological collapse – and one felt just as keenly in the factories of Nairobi and Shenzhen as in the rust-belt cities of Europe and America. The left’s political defeat after 1989 was so complete that, as the philosopher Fredric Jameson wrote, it became easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.3 Put more brutally, it had become impossible to imagine this working class – disorganized, in thrall to consumerism and individualism – overthrowing capitalism. The old sequence – mass strikes, barricades, soviets and working-class government – looks utopian in a world where the key ingredient, solidarity in the workplace, has gone AWOL.
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The optimists among the left countered that the defeats were just cyclical. It was plausible: the history of the labour movement does show clear patterns of formation and decomposition that map closely to the Kondratieff long cycles.
But they were wrong. This is a strategic change. Those who cling to the idea that the proletariat is the only force that can push society beyond capitalism are ignoring two key features of the modern world: that the route to postcapitalism is different; and that the agent of change has become, potentially, everyone on earth.
The new workforce – in the factories of Bangladesh and China – is being formed by a process just as harsh as the one workers in England went through 200 years ago. Who can forget the contract issued at Apple’s Foxconn plants in China, in 2010, forcing workers to sign a pledge not to commit suicide due to workplace stress?4
However, this time around, the process of industrialization is failing to blow away the social and ideological cobwebs of pre-industrial life. Ethnic rivalries, the village network, religious fundamentalism and organized crime are the obstacles labour organizers in the global south encounter constantly – and fail to overcome. And alongside these old problems there is a new phenomenon: what I’ve called the ‘expanded footprint of the individual’ and indeed the ability of networked people to maintain multiple identities.5
And though this new workforce of the global south was originally designated as peripheral in relation to the core workforce of Western capitalism twenty-five years ago, today it too is divided into core and periphery. When the ILO surveyed the workforce of the global south by income strata, it found that every income layer (from \$2 a day to five times as much) contained the same percentage of industrial workers, meaning the modern industrial sector includes both poor and precarious workers and also those with better status and higher incomes. The factory in Nigeria is as stratified by skill and income as its sister factories in Cologne or Nashville.
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The old labour movement thrived on cohesion. It flourished in local economies that were primarily industrial, and in communities with political traditions that could absorb and survive technological change. Neoliberalism has blown those communities apart in the developed nations and made them difficult to build in the world beyond.
On the subsoil of precarious work, extreme poverty, migrant labour and slum conditions it has been impossible for anything that matches the collectivity and consciousness of the Western labour movement at its height to grow in the global south. Only where a national elite has an organized support base in the unions does it wield the same influence it enjoyed in the twentieth century: Argentina under the Kirchners, for example, or South Africa under the ANC. Meanwhile, in the developed world, though a core of trade union activists clings to the old methods and culture, a rising class of young, precarious workers finds – as in Athens in December 2008 – it is easier to squat buildings and riot than to join a union.
André Gorz, who was wrong on many things, was right about the reason why. Work – the defining activity of capitalism – is losing its centrality both to exploitation and resistance.
The rapid increase in productivity brought about by computers and automation, Gorz argued, has turned the sphere beyond work into the primary battleground. All utopias based on work are finished, he said, above all Marxism. In their place, there would have to be new utopias – fought for without the comfort blanket of historical certainty, and without the help of a class designated as the unconscious agent of salvation. It was a bleak, and slightly crazy message to hear as you linked arms on the picket lines of the 1980s. But Gorz’s insight can now be grounded in something more constructive than disillusion.
As we have seen, information technology expels labour from production, destroys pricing mechanisms and promotes non-market forms of exchange. Ultimately, it will erode the link between labour and value altogether.
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If so, then there is something about the current decline of organized labour that is not just cyclical or the product of defeat, but as historic as its rise 200 years ago. If capitalism must have a beginning, middle and end, so must the story of organized labour.
As in nature – and as in dialectical logic – the end is usually a moment of ‘sublation’, a concept that combines the simultaneous destruction of something and its survival as something else. Though it is not dead, the working class is living through a moment of sublation. It will survive in a form so different that it will probably feel like something else. As a historical subject, it is being replaced by a diverse, global population whose battlefield is all aspects of society – not just work – and whose lifestyle is not about solidarity but impermanence.
Those who first spotted such networked individuals mistook them for nihilists who could never effect change. On the contrary, I have argued (in Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere, 2012) that the new wave of struggles beginning in 2011 is a signal that this group does fight, and does embody similar and technologically determined values, wherever it takes to the streets.
If so, it becomes necessary to say something that many on the left will find painful: Marxism got it wrong about the working class. The proletariat was the closest thing to an enlightened, collective historical subject that human society has ever produced. But 200 years of experience show it was preoccupied with ‘living despite capitalism’, not overthrowing it.
The workers were forced into revolutionary action by social and political crises, often provoked by war and intolerable repression. On the rare occasions when they achieved power, they couldn’t stop it from being usurped by elites operating under a false flag. The Paris Commune of 1871, Barcelona in 1937, the Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions all demonstrate this.
The literature of the left is littered with excuses for this 200-year story of defeat: the state was too strong, the leadership too weak, the ‘labour aristocracy’ too influential, Stalinism murdered the revolutionaries and
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suppressed the truth. In the end, the excuses boil down to just two: bad conditions or bad leaders.
The labour movement created a breathing space for human values inside an inhuman system. It produced, out of the depths of squalor, makers of what we today call ‘beautiful trouble’: martyrs, autodidacts and secular saints. But far from being the unconscious bearers of socialism, the working class were conscious about what they wanted, and expressed it through their actions. They wanted a more survivable form of capitalism.
This was not the product of mental backwardness. It was an overt strategy based on something the Marxist tradition could never get its head around: the persistence of skill, autonomy and status in working-class life.
Once we have understood what really happened to work over the four long cycles of industrial capitalism, the significance of its transformation in the fifth cycle becomes clear. Info-tech makes the abolition of work possible. All that prevents it is the social structure we know as capitalism.
1771–1848: THE FACTORY AS BATTLEFIELD
The first real factory was built at Cromford, England in 1771. You can still see the stone pedestal where the first machine was set up. To any humanist, this dank stone hall should be hallowed ground. It is the place where social justice ceased to be a dream and could, for the first time in human history, be fought for as a possibility.
In the 1770s, the room would have been full of women and children, working amid thick dust from the cotton, forbidden to speak, tending complex spinning frames operated by adult men known as ‘spinners’. Everybody in the factory had been forced to learn the new culture of work: to follow the employer’s clock instead of the body clock; strict attention to the task; the non-negotiable nature of instructions and the need to risk serious injury for thirteen hours a day. Every other group in society had roots, cultures and traditions, but the factory workforce had none – it was new and unique. For the first thirty years, this allowed the system to be operated in a way that ruthlessly destroyed human life.
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But the workers fought back. They organized; they built a culture of selfeducation and, as soon as the upswing of the first long cycle faltered – in 1818–19 – they launched mass strikes that linked wage issues with issues of democracy, throwing Britain into a twenty-year political crisis, which would see repeated outbreaks of revolutionary violence.
Marx and Engels, writing more than twenty years after the start of this movement, in the early 1840s, found in the working class a ready-made solution to a philosophical problem. The middle-class German left had become enthusiastic communists: they wanted a classless society, based on the absence of property, religion and total freedom from work. Suddenly, in the working class, Marx discovered a force that could make it happen.
Marx argued that it was the extreme negativity of the workers’ lives that gave them their historic destiny. The absence of property; the absence of craft, skill, religion and family life – and their complete alienation from respectable society – made the proletariat, in the Marxist schema, the bearer of a new social system. It would first achieve class consciousness, and then take power – to abolish property, end alienation from work and inaugurate communism.
A better summary of the proletariat’s relationship to destiny would be: it’s complicated.
Workers certainly became conscious of their collective interests. But then, even amid the grossly negative situation of the 1810s, they created something positive: not a ‘socialist consciousness’ but a revolutionary republican movement, imbued with the principles of learning, humanity and self-help.
In 1818, the cotton spinners of Manchester struck en masse. Then, during 1819, all over northern England, workers set up night schools and clubs, debated politics, elected delegates to town-wide committees and formed women’s groups. Out of these meetings, in the summer of 1819, they launched a mass movement for democracy: unofficial public gatherings to elect unofficial members of parliament. When 100,000 workers congregated at St Peter’s Field in Manchester on 16 August 1819, in defiance of the law, they were mown down by a cavalry charge.
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The Peterloo Massacre marked the true beginning of the industrial labour movement. It also prompted the first attempt to deal with social unrest through automation.
In theory, the majority of spinners had to be men because the spinning machine, known as a ‘mule’, needed a strong hand to pull and push an array of spindles back and forth, four times a minute. In practice, however, there were women strong enough to do this. The real purpose was social: it was easier to impose discipline in the factory through a layer of tough, betterpaid working-class men rather than deal direct with women and children.6
Once the skilled men had turned militant, by the early 1820s, however, the only solution was to automate them out of existence. In 1824, a ‘selfacting mule’ was patented, and soon thousands had been deployed. The employers announced that in future the machines would be run entirely by women and children, since ‘attendants have nothing to do but to watch its movements’.7
The exact opposite happened.
Male spinners staged repeated strikes after 1819 against the employment of women. They refused to train girls to do the jobs that gave access to higher skill, and insisted that their own sons be chosen. During the 1820s and 30s the minority of women who had kept hold of spinning jobs were driven from them; by the 1840s male domination was complete. And, as the historian Mary Friefeld has shown, the new machines did not abolish the need for high skill; they simply created a new technical skill to replace the old one: ‘One highly complex task had been substituted for another, while the quality control and mental oversight functions remained unchanged.’8
I’ve described this episode at length because it would be repeated many times over the next two centuries. The real history of work cannot be written as ‘economics plus technology’; it involves the interaction of technology with organizations created by workers, and it involves the creation of power relationships based on age, gender and ethnicity.
More specifically, this case study blows apart a cherished passage in Marx’s Capital – for Marx, writing in the 1850s, would use the self-acting mule as the main example of capitalism’s tendency to de-skill work to
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suppress the workforce. ‘Machinery,’ he wrote, ‘is the most powerful weapon for suppressing strikes … We would mention above all the selfacting mule …’9
We can trace the source of confusion to his collaborator, Frederick Engels. When Engels arrived in Manchester in 1842, the entire workforce of the city had been on general strike, and had been defeated. Aided by his working-class lover Mary Burns, the 22-year-old Engels toured factories, slums, and cotton exchanges to gather evidence for the first serious work of materialist sociology: The Condition of the Working Class in England.
As an anthropologist, Engels gets a lot right: the slum conditions, the near-total absence of religious belief and deference among the workers, their addiction to drink, opium and casual sex. What he gets wrong is the impact of the self-acting mule. He wrote:
Every improvement of machinery … transforms the work of full grown men into mere supervision which a feeble woman or a child can do quite as well and does for half or even one third the wages … grown men are constantly more and more supplanted, and not re-employed by the increase in manufacture.10
In his defence, Engels was drawing on evidence from radical spinners who, under conditions of downturn and defeat after the 1842 strike, were being thrown out of work. However, the long-term impact of automation was ultimately to reinforce the role of skilled male spinners and to increase their numbers.11 Numerous studies, above all by University of Massachussetts professor William Lazonick, show how skill, male dominance and an intricate power structure among male workers survived the onset of mechanization.12
So Marxism’s first contact with the organized working class led to a big misunderstanding, not just about skill but the kind of political consciousness it produces.
Marx argued that the workers would abolish property because they lacked property; abolish class stratification because they could not benefit from it – and they would do it without the need to build up an alternative economy within the old system.
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