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# PostCapitalism-_Paul-Mason_-_z-library.sk_-1lib.sk_-z-lib.sk_
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Here’s how I think it could be solved.
The objective is to maintain complex, liquid markets in tradable instruments, while removing the possibility that there will ever be payback in monetary form (because the profit and ownership system disappears). One model could be what’s happened with carbon.
Though the creation of a carbon market has not achieved enough progress against climate change, it has not been useless. In future we might see all kinds of socially benign instruments traded – health outcomes, for example. If the state can create a market in carbon, it can create a market in anything else. It can use market forces for behaviour change, but ultimately there must come a time when it imbues these instruments – which effectively form a parallel currency – with greater purchasing power than actual money.
As people are dumping money – because the market sector is being replaced by collaborative production – it is possible that they will accept what is effectively ‘techno-scrip’ until the moment when a stateadministered bid/offer system for goods and services comes into being, as Bogdanov envisaged in Red Star.
In the short term, the intention is not to reduce complexity – as the money fundamentalists want – nor simply to stabilize banking, but to promote the most complex form of capitalist finance compatible with progressing the economy towards high automation, low work and abundant cheap or free goods and services.
With energy and banking socialized, the aim in the medium term would be to retain as extensive as possible a private sector in the non-financial world, and to keep it open to a diverse and innovative range of firms.
Neoliberalism, with its high tolerance for monopolies, has actually stifled innovation and complexity. If we break up the tech monopolies and the banks, we could create an active space for smaller companies to replace them and deliver – at last – on the unfulfilled promise of info-tech.
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The public sector could, if we wished, outsource functions to the private sector, provided that the latter is not allowed to compete through differential wages and conditions. One byproduct of promoting competition and diversity in the service sector is that, once you can’t relentlessly drive down wages, there would have to be a surge of technical innovation, the outcome of which would be to reduce the number of work hours needed across society overall.
And that leads us to what is probably the biggest structural change required to make postcapitalism happen: a universal basic income guaranteed by the state.
PAY EVERYONE A BASIC INCOME
The basic income, as a policy, is not that radical. Various pilot projects and designs have been touted, often by the right, sometimes by the centre-left, as a replacement for the dole with cheaper administration costs. But in the postcapitalist project, the purpose of the basic income is radical: it is (a) to formalize the separation of work and wages and (b) to subsidize the transition to a shorter working week, or day, or life. The effect would be to socialize the costs of automation.
The idea is simple: everybody of working age gets an unconditional basic income from the state, funded from taxation, and this replaces unemployment benefit. Other forms of needs-based welfare – such as family, disability or child payments – would still exist, but would be smaller top-ups to the basic income.
Why pay people just to exist? Because we need to radically accelerate technological progress. If as the Oxford Martin School study suggested, 47 per cent of all jobs in an advanced economy will be redundant due to automation, then the result under neoliberalism is going to be an enormously expanded precariat.
A basic income paid for out of taxes on the market economy gives people the chance to build positions in the non-market economy. It allows them to volunteer, set up co-ops, edit Wikipedia, learn how to use 3D design software, or just exist. It allows them to space out periods of work; make a late entry or early exit from working life; switch more easily into and out of high-intensity, stressful jobs. Its fiscal cost would be high: that’s why all attempts to enact the measure separately from an overall transition project are likely to fail, despite the growing number of academic papers and global congresses dedicated to it.9
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As a worked example, the UK’s benefits bill is £160 billion a year, of which maybe £30 billion is targeted at the disabled, pregnant, sick and so on. The poorest recipients are pensioners, who get about £6,000 a year as basic pension. To give 51 million adults £6,000 a year, as of right, would cost £306 billion – which is nearly twice the current welfare bill. This might be affordable if you abolished a range of tax exemptions and at the same time delivered cost-saving changes to other public spending, but it would represent a significant claim on resources.
A basic income says, in effect, there are too few work hours to go round, so we need to inject ‘liquidity’ into the mechanism that allocates them. The lawyer and the daycare worker both need to be able to exchange hours of work at full pay, for hours of free time paid for by the state.
Suppose, in the UK, we set the basic income at £6,000 and hike the minimum wage to £18,000. The advantages of working remain clear, but there are also advantages to be gained through not working: you can look after your kids, write poetry, go back to college, manage your chronic illness or peer-educate others like you.
Under this system, there would be no stigma attached to not working. The labour market would be stacked in favour of the high-paying job and the high-paying employer.
The universal basic income, then, is an antidote to what the anthropologist David Graeber calls ‘bullshit jobs’: the low-paid service jobs capitalism has managed to create over the past twenty-five years that pay little, demean the worker and probably don’t need to exist.10 But it’s only a transitional measure for the first stage of the postcapitalist project.
The ultimate aim is to reduce to a minimum the hours it takes to produce what humanity needs. Once this happens, the tax base in the market sector of the economy would be too small to pay for the basic income. Wages
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themselves would increasingly be either social – in the form of collectively provided services – or disappear.
So as a postcapitalist measure, the basic income is the first benefit in history whose success measure is that it shrinks to zero.
THE NETWORK UNLEASHED
In the socialist project, there was to be a long first stage in which the state had to suppress the market by force; the outcome was supposed to be a gradual reduction of the hours of work necessary to maintain and supply humanity. Then technological progress might begin to make some things at negligible cost or for free, and you could move to phase two: ‘communism’.
I am certain the workers of my grandmother’s generation cared more about phase one than phase two – and that was logical. In an economy based primarily on physical goods, the way to make houses cheaper was for the state to build them, own them and supply them at cheap rents. The cost was uniformity: you were forbidden to maintain the house yourself, or improve it, or even to paint the door a different colour. For my grandmother, who had lived in a stinking slum, being banned from painting the door was not a major concern.
In the postcapitalist project the task in the first phase is to deliver things just as tangible and life-changing as my grandma’s council house, with its garden and solid walls, was to her. To this end, a lot can be achieved by changing the relationship between power and information.
Info-capitalism is based on asymmetry: the global corporations get their market power from knowing more – more than their customers, suppliers and small competitors. The simple principle behind postcapitalism should be that the pursuit of information asymmetry is wrong – except when it comes to privacy, anonymity and security issues.
In addition, the aim should be to push information and automation into types of work where they are held back at present because cheap labour removes the need to innovate.
In a modern car factory there is a production line, and there are still workers with spanners and drills. But the production line is intelligently managing what the workers do; a computer screen tells them which spanner to use, a sensor warns them if they pick up the wrong one, and the action is recorded somewhere on a server.
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There is no reason other than exploitation why world-class techniques of automation cannot be applied, for example, to the labour of the sandwich factory or the meat-packing plant. In fact, it is only the availablity of cheap, unorganized labour, supported by in-work benefits, that permits these business models to exist. In many industries old disciplines of work – time, obedience, attendance, hierarchy – are enforced only because neoliberalism is suppressing innovation. But they are technologically unnecessary.
In information-based businesses, old style management begins to look archaic. Managing means organizing predictable resources – people, ideas and things – to produce a planned outcome. But many benign outcomes of network economies are unplanned. And the best human process for dealing with volatile outcomes is teamwork – which used to be called ‘cooperation’.
Let’s spell out what this means: cooperative, self-managed, nonhierarchical teams are the most technologically advanced form of work. Yet large parts of the workforce are trapped in a world of fines, discipline, violence and power hierarchies – simply because the existence of a cheap labour culture allows it to survive.
A crucial goal for the transition process would be to trigger a third managerial revolution: to enthuse managers, trade unions and industrial system designers about the possibilities inherent in a move to networked, modular, non-linear team work.
‘Work cannot become play,’ Marx wrote.11 But the atmosphere in the modern video game design workshop shows that play and work can alternate quite freely and produce results. Among guitars, sofas, pool tables covered in piles of discarded pizza boxes, there is of course still exploitation. But modular, target-driven work, with employees enjoying a high degree of autonomy, can be less alienating, more social, more enjoyable – and deliver better results.
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There is nothing other than our addiction to cheap labour and inefficiency that says a meat-packing operation cannot enjoy the same kind of unmanaged, modular work – where work is literally interspersed with play, and access to networked information is a right. One of the most telling signs that neoliberalism is a dead end is the hostility of many twenty-first century managers and most investors to the ideal of highly productive, fulfilling work. Managers in the pre-1914 era were obsessed with it.
As we pursue these goals, a general pattern is likely to emerge; the transition to postcapitalism is going to be driven by surprise discoveries made by groups of people working in teams, about what they can do to old processes by applying collaborative thinking and networks.
What we are looking for are rapid technological leaps that make things cheaper to produce and benefit the whole of society. The task of the decision-making nodes in a networked economy (from the central bank to a local housing co-op) is to understand the interplay between networks, hierarchies, organizations and markets; to model them in different states, to propose a change, monitor its effects and adjust their intentions accordingly.
But for all our attempts at rationality, this is not going to be a controlled process. The most valuable things that networks (and the individuals within them) can do is to disrupt everything above. Faced with group-think and convergence, either in the design stage of an economic project or in its execution, networks are a brilliant tool for allowing us not just to dissent, but to secede and start our own alternative.
We need to be unashamed utopians. The most effective entrepreneurs of early capitalism were exactly that, and so were all the pioneers of human liberation.
What is the end state? That is the wrong question. If you study the graph of GDP per head in chapter 8, it is horizontal for the whole of human history until the Industrial Revolution, then it takes off rapidly, and after 1945 it turns exponential in some countries. Postcapitalism is just a function of what happens when it goes completely vertical everywhere. It is a beginning state.
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Once exponential technological change cascades over from silicon chips to food, clothing, transport systems and healthcare, then the reproduction cost of labour-power is going to shrink dramatically. At this point, the economic problem that has defined human history will shrink or disappear. We will probably be preoccupied by problems of sustainability in economics and the interplay of competing patterns of human life beyond it.
So instead of looking for an end state, it’s more important to ask how we might deal with reverses – or escape a dead end.
One specific problem is how to record the experience of failure into persistent data that allows us to retrace our steps, amend them and roll out the lessons across the whole economy. Networks are bad at memory; they are designed so that memory and activity sit in two different parts of the machine. Hierarchies were good at remembering – so working out how to retain and process lessons will be critical. The solution may be as simple as adding a recording and storing function to all activities, from the coffee shop to the state. Neoliberalism, with its love of creative destruction, was happy to dispense with the memory function – from Tony Blair’s ‘sofa’ decision-making to the tearing up of old corporate structures, nobody wanted to leave a paper trail.
In the end, all we’re trying to do is move as much of human activity as possible into a phase where the labour that’s necessary to support very rich and complex human life on the planet falls, and the amount of free time grows. And in the process, the division between the two gets even more blurred.
IS THIS FOR REAL?
It’s easy to recoil from the scale of these proposals. To ask ourselves: can it really be that – on top of a fifty-year crisis – a 500-year change is under way? Can laws, markets and business models really evolve dramatically to match the potential of info-tech? And could it be true that we as puny individuals can have any real impact?
Yet, every day, a large part of humanity participates in a much bigger change, triggered by a different kind of technology: the contraceptive pill.
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We are living through the one-time and irreversible cancellation of male biological power. It’s causing major trauma: watch the Twitter and Facebook trolling of powerful women, the attempts by cults like GamerGate to get into their mindspace and destroy their mental health. But the advance towards liberation is happening.
It is absurd that we are capable of witnessing a 40,000-year-old system of gender oppression begin to dissolve before our eyes and yet still seeing the abolition of a 200-year-old economic system as an unrealistic utopia.
We lie at a moment of possibility: of a controlled transition beyond the free market, beyond carbon, beyond compulsory work.
What happens to the state? It probably gets less powerful over time – and in the end its functions are assumed by society. I’ve tried to make this a project usable both by people who see states as useful and those who don’t; you could model an anarchist version and a statist version and try them out. There is probably even a conservative version of postcapitalism, and good luck to it.
LIBERATE THE 1 PER CENT
What happens to the 1 per cent? They become poorer and therefore happier.
Because it’s tough being rich.
In Australia, you see the women of the 1 per cent jog from Bondi to Tamarama beach each morning, decked out in cheap lycra made expensive by the addition of – what else? – gold lettering. Their ideology tells them it is their uniqueness that has made them successful, yet they look and behave the same.
As the world turns, dawn-lit gyms halfway up the skyscrapers of Shanghai and Singapore see businessmen pound the treadmills in anticipation of a day spent in competition with people exactly like them. The bodyguarded rich of Central Asia begin another day of ripping off the world.
Above it all, in the first-class cabins of long-haul flights, drift the global elite, their faces composed into a routine frown over their laptops. They’re the living image of how the world is supposed to be: educated, tolerant,
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prosperous. Yet they are excluded from this great experiment in social communication that humanity is staging.
Just 8 per cent of American CEOs have a real Twitter account. Sure, an underling can run one for them, but because of rules on making financial statements, and because of cyber-security, the social media accounts of the powerful can never be real. When it comes to ideas, they can have any ideas they like as long as they conform to neoliberal doctrine: that the best people win because of their talent; that the market is the expression of rationality; that the workers of the developed world are too lazy; that taxing the rich is futile.
Convinced that only the smart succeed, they send their kids to expensive private schools to hone their individuality. But they come out the same: little versions of Milton Friedman and Christine Lagarde. They go to the elite colleges but the fancy names on the college hoodies – Harvard, Cambridge, MIT – mean nothing. You might as well just print Standard Neoliberal University. The Ivy League hoodie is simply a badge of entry to this tawdry world.
Beneath it all lies lingering doubt. Their self-belief tells them that capitalism is good because it is dynamic – but its dynamism is only really felt where there are plentiful supplies of cheap labour, repressed democracy – and where inequality is rising. To live in a world so separate, dominated by the myth of uniqueness but in reality so uniform, constantly worried you’re going to lose it all, is – I am not kidding – tough.
And to cap it all, they know how close it came to collapsing; how much of every single thing they still own was actually paid for by the state, which bailed them out.
Today, the ideology of being bourgeois in the Western world means social liberalism, a commitment to fine art, to democracy and the rule of law, giving to charity and hiding the power you wield beneath a studied personal restraint.
The danger is that as the crisis drags on the elite’s commitment to liberalism evaporates. The successful crooks and dictators of the emerging world have already bought influence and respectability: you can feel their power as you walk through the door of certain law firms, PR consultancies and even corporations.
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How long will it take before the culture of the Western elite swings towards emulating Putin and Xi Jinping? On some campuses you can already hear it: ‘China shows capitalism works better without democracy’ has become a standard talking point. The self-belief of the 1 per cent is in danger of ebbing away, to be replaced by a pure and undisguised oligarchy.
But there is good news.
The 99 per cent are coming to the rescue.
Postcapitalism will set you free.
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