--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "PostCapitalism-_Paul-Mason_-_z-library.sk_-1lib.sk_-z-lib.sk_" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "9780141975306" library_document_id: "bf1bb7d2-ff9c-474f-ac6b-fcb01cd4dbe7" source_sha256: "6a55beea77acb5638cc8bc6a0feb196c2d33d0507a43e95c5981085735009c21" pdf_physical_page_count: 351 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 70 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bf1bb7d2-ff9c-474f-ac6b-fcb01cd4dbe7?start=70&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bf1bb7d2-ff9c-474f-ac6b-fcb01cd4dbe7.md?start=70&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bf1bb7d2-ff9c-474f-ac6b-fcb01cd4dbe7.md?start=60&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bf1bb7d2-ff9c-474f-ac6b-fcb01cd4dbe7.md?start=80&limit=10" --- # 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。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=70 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED For the first eighty years of industrial capitalism, economists were pessimistic about its future. The classic economists – Smith, Say, Mill, Malthus and Ricardo – were haunted by doubts as to whether it would survive at all. The theme of their work was the limits to capital: the barriers to its expansion, the decline of profit, the fragility of stable growth. At the centre of their disputes was the idea that human labour is the source of value and determines the average price of things. This is known as the ‘labour theory of value’, and in chapter 6 I will explain in detail how it helps us map the transition from capitalism to a non-market economy. Marx spent his life trying to rectify flaws in the labour-theory, in order to explain the crises and breakdowns early capitalism had been plagued with. According to Marx, a fully fledged market economy creates inherent instability. For the first time in history, there is the possibility of crisis amid abundance. Things are made that cannot be bought or used – a situation that would have seemed crazy under feudalism or in the ancient world. Marx also recognized a tension in economics between what is real and what we assume is real. The market is a machine for reconciling the two. The real value of things is dictated by the quantity of work, machinery and raw materials used to make them – all measured in terms of labour value – but this can’t be calculated in advance. Nor can we see it, because the laws of economics work ‘behind the backs’ of everybody involved. This tension drives both the small corrections – as when the market stall has too much fruit at closing time – and the big ones, as when the US government is required to bail out Lehman Brothers. It means that when you study a crisis you have to look for what is wrong at a level deeper than the facts presented on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Marx argued that in fully fledged capitalism profits have a tendency to converge on the average. So managers – even as their minds tell them they are savagely competing with each other – actually create a discernible average rate of profit in each sector and in the whole economy, against which they set prices and judge performance. Then, via the finance system, they create an aggregate pool of profits into which investors can dip at WHAT MARX SAID … ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=71 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED fairly constant rates of return for any given level of risk. Though the finance sector was small when Marx wrote Capital, he grasped very clearly the way finance – in the form of interest – becomes the main mechanism for allocating capital rationally in response to average sectoral risks and rewards. He also realized that the ultimate source of profit is work; specifically, the extra value coerced out of employees by the unequal power relationships in the workplace. But there is an inbuilt tendency to replace labour with machinery, driven by the need to increase productivity. Since labour is the ultimate source of profit this will tend, as mechanization spreads across the whole economy, to erode the rate of profit. In a company, sector or whole economy where increasing proportions of capital are invested in machinery, raw materials and other non-labour inputs, you are reducing the scope for labour to generate profit. Marx called this ‘the most fundamental law of capitalism’. However, the system reacts to this threat spontaneously: it creates institutions and behaviours that counteract the tendency of the profit rate to fall. Investors switch to new markets where profits are higher; labour costs are driven down by cheapening consumer goods and food; managers search for new sources of cheap labour in foreign countries; or they produce machinery that costs less in labour-terms to make; or they move out of machine-intensive industries into labour-intensive ones; or they pursue market share (profit size) instead of margins (profit rate). Marx identified the rise of finance as a more strategic counter-tendency: a proportion of investors begin to accept interest – rather than the outright entrepreneurial profit that comes from setting up a company and operating it – as the normal reward for owning large amounts of money. Entrepreneurs will still take one-sided risks, as private capital and hedge funds do today, but large parts of the system are geared to survive on lowrisk, low-reward investments via the finance system – which Marx says allows capitalism to go on operating when profits are depressed. We must be crystal clear on this: for Marx, these counter-tendencies operate constantly. A crisis happens only when they become exhausted or break down.1 That is, when you run out of cheap labour, or new markets fail to appear, or the finance system can no longer safely hold all the capital that risk-averse investors are trying to store there. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=72 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED In summary, Marx argued that crisis is the pressure valve for the system as a whole. It is a normal feature of capitalism and a product of its technological dynamism. It can be seen, even from this basic outline, that Marx is modelling capitalism as a complex system. Even when it looks stable, capitalism is not in equilibrium: there is a spontaneous breakdown process counterbalanced by numerous spontaneous stabilizers. Crisis theory explains when and why these stabilizers stop working. Across the three volumes of Capital, Marx describes several forms of crisis. The first is an overproduction crisis, when too many commodities are chasing too little demand, leaving the profits generated in the production process unable to be realized by selling the goods. Marx also expected crises to emerge from the inefficient flow of capital between sectors: he lived through numerous crises where heavy industry had grown out of step with the consumer goods producing sector, leading to a recession until they rebalance. Then there is crisis triggered by the failure of the counteracting tendencies listed above, leading to a tangible collapse in the profit rate, an investment freeze, layoffs and falling GDP. Finally, in volume III of Capital, Marx describes how financial crisis happens: credit becomes massively overextended, and then speculation and crime drive it to unsustainable limits where the bust inevitably overcorrects the boom – pushing the economy into a multi-year depression. In one evocative sentence Marx anticipated the world of Enron, Bernie Madoff and the wealthy 1 per cent. The main function of credit, he wrote, is to develop exploitation ‘to the purest and most colossal form of gambling and swindling, and to reduce more and more the number of the few who exploit the social wealth’.2 In 2008 it was the parallels between the collapse of finance and the famous passage quoted above that provoked the articles claiming Marx was right. Today, as the financial crisis recedes but real incomes stagnate across the Western world, people are once more saying ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=73 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ‘Marx was right’ – this time on the problem of overproduction, where profits and growth rebound but the workers’ wages do not. However, Marx’s theory of crisis is incomplete. It contains logical flaws that took its supporters a long time to resolve, above all at the point where he tries to connect his abstract model to concrete reality. Furthermore, it is a product of its time: Marx could not take into account the major phenomena of the twentieth century – state capitalism, monopolies, complex financial markets and globalization. In order for Marx to be right – that is, as anything more than a prophet who said ‘crisis is normal’ – we have to make the theory both internally coherent and consistent with the evidence. We have to fine-tune it so that it includes the features common to complex adaptive systems which it has struggled with: openness, unpredictable response to danger, and long cycles (which lie somewhere between a normal crisis and the final collapse). But even when thus corrected, a theory of cyclical crisis is not enough when faced with the survival-level changes we are exploring in this book. In a famous line written in 1859, Marx predicted that ‘At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production … From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution.’3 But he never explained how the sporadic crises would – or could – create the conditions for the new system. It was left to his followers to fill that gap. After Marx died, his supporters assumed that overproduction crises could not be alleviated for long by finding or inventing new markets. ‘There is a limit to the extension of the markets,’ wrote the German socialist leader Karl Kautsky in 1892. ‘Today there are hardly any other markets to be opened.’4 They expected short-term crises to gather momentum and snowball into total collapse. By 1898, the Polish socialist Rosa Luxemburg was predicting that, once the system ran out of new markets to exploit, there would be ‘an explosion, a collapse, at which point we will play the role of the syndic [administrator] who liquidates a bankrupt company’.5 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=74 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Instead, as we know, the start of its third long cycle saw capitalism mutate. Its adaptive nature enabled it to create markets internally, even when the scramble for colonies reached a dead end. And it proved able to suppress aspects of the market for the sake of its own survival. The doom premonitions of the Marxist left in the 1890s were proved false. They would first have to live through a massive upswing of capitalism, then through chaos and collapse in the years 1914–21. The impact would disorientate left-wing economics for the best part of a century. CAPITALISM SUPPRESSES THE MARKET By 1900 the world economy was in the grip of major change. Technologies, business models, trade patterns and consumption habits had been evolving rapidly side by side. Now they were fused into a new kind of capitalism. What strikes us today is the audacity and speed of it all: steel replaces iron; electricity replaces gas; the telephone supersedes the telegraph; motion pictures and tabloid newspapers are launched; industrial output surges; spectacular steel-framed buildings appear in the capital cities of the world, and motor cars drive past them. At the time, however, business leaders took all this for granted. What concerned them was the relationship between large-scale companies and market forces. If possible, they concluded, market forces should be abolished. ‘Competition is industrial war,’ wrote James Logan, the boss of the US Envelope Company, in 1901. ‘Ignorant, unrestricted competition carried to its logical conclusion means death to some of the combatants and injury for all.’6 At the time, his company enjoyed near-total domination of the US market. At the same time Theodore Vail, the kingpin at Bell Telephone, warned that ‘all costs of aggressive, uncontrolled competition are eventually borne, directly or indirectly, by the public’.7 To relieve the public of such burdens, Vail himself would acquire every single telephone exchange in America. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=75 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Competition, argued the business magnates, brought chaos to production and depressed prices to the point where new technology could not be rolled out at a profit. The solutions were to be found at three levels: monopoly, price fixing and protected markets. The means to these ends were (i) mergers, fostered by aggressive new investment banks; (ii) the creation of cartels and ‘concerns’ to set prices; (iii) government-imposed restrictions on imported goods. The United States Steel Corporation was formed in 1901 out of 138 different companies, immediately controlling 60 per cent of the market. Meanwhile, Standard Oil had 90 per cent of the USA’s refining capacity, and used its power so ruthlessly that it forced railway companies to transport oil at a loss. Bell Telephone enjoyed a total telecoms monopoly until the mid-1890s, and regained it in 1909 when JP Morgan teamed up with Vail to buy up the competition. In Germany, where price-fixing cartels were politically encouraged and legally registered, their number more than doubled between 1901 and 1911.8 Just one of these cartels, the Rhine-Westphalia Coal Syndicate, involved sixty-seven companies, had the power to set 1400 different prices and controlled 95 per cent of the region’s energy market.9 To be absolutely clear, because it’s difficult to comprehend today, this was a system where supply and demand did not set prices: millionaires did. By 1915, two industrial giants dominated the German electrical sector; the chemical, mining and shipping industries likewise each had just two dominant players. In Japan the whole economy was dominated by six zaibatsu, conglomerates that had begun as trading companies but evolved into industrial empires, vertically integrated around mining, steel, shipping and weapons with a powerful banking operation at the centre. By 1909, for example, Mitsui produced at least 60 per cent of Japan’s electrical engineering output.10 To create these massive companies, finance was organized in a new way. In the USA, Britain and France, the stock market and investment banks drove the process. In 1890 there were ten industrial companies quoted on Wall Street; by 1897 more than 200.11 In Japan and Germany, where ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=76 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED industrial capitalism had been created ‘from above’ under authoritarian governments, finance was mobilized not so much through the stock market but via the banks, and even the state itself. Russia – the latecomer – would adopt a hybrid model, with much of its industry foreign-owned. The Anglo-Saxon model and the German-Japanese model, therefore, looked very different, and that would provoke a 100-year-long debate over which was best.\* But within each lay a variant of the same basic idea: finance took a controlling stake in industry, carving out monopoly positions where possible, suppressing market forces – and the state was directly allied to the whole project. The market had, in short, become organized. Now it had to be protected. Alongside the scramble for colonies, the great powers threw up numerous tariffs on external trade, explicitly designed to promote the interests of their companies. By 1913, for example, most industrial countries were protecting their domestic industries with double-digit import taxes on manufactured goods.12 The monopolies, in return, placed key personnel inside governments. The ideology of the state as a ‘nightwatchman’, standing aloof from economic life, was dead. The emergence of this new system was not crisis-free. In America, a mini-depression in 1893–7 accelerated the merger process; then in 1907 a financial crash corrected the over-valuation of stocks issued during the merger boom. Both Japan and Germany saw the process of concentration accelerated by short spasms of boom and bust in the 1890s. But if we take the whole period from around 1895 through to the First World War, progress outweighed crisis: the US economy doubled in size in the decade to 1910, while Canada’s trebled.13 Even in Europe, where the boost from labour migration was not as great, Italy’s economy grew by one third in these ten years and Germany’s by a quarter. This was the upswing of the third Kondratieff Wave. You can ‘read’ the results in the cityscapes of New York, Shanghai, Paris and Barcelona: the most enduring and beautiful public buildings – libraries, pubs, offices, even bath houses – are usually from the period between 1890 and 1914. The story they tell is clear: during the time we call the belle époque or the ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=77 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Progressive Era – a time of rapid growth, liberalization and cultural uplift – the world prospered not through the market but by the controlled suppression of it. Back then, this caused scant confusion for conservatives. The people it confused were the Marxists. CAPITALISM MUTATES The task of updating Marxist economics fell to a 33-year-old Austrian doctor called Rudolf Hilferding. Hilferding was a classic intellectual of the belle époque: while studying paediatric medicine in Vienna in the late 1890s he threw himself into the economics scene, which had a stellar cast. Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, the economics professor who had written a famous critique of Marx, hosted seminars at which Hilferding would tough it out with, among others, Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises – the founder of neoliberalism – and a Hungarian student, Jeno Varga, who would make his own spectacular impact later. In 1906 Hilferding quit medicine and moved to Berlin to teach economics at the training centre of the German socialist party, which formed the intellectual powerhouse of the global left. In 1910 Hilferding gave the fusion of bank and industrial capital a name: ‘Through this relationship … capital assumes the form of finance capital, its supreme and most abstract expression.’14 His book, Finance Capital, would become the reference point for all leftwing debates on the future of capitalism for a century. Hilferding was the first Marxist to understand the scale of capitalism’s mutation. What is more, in the new structure many of the permanent features looked exactly like those Marx had listed as counter-tendencies to the falling profit rate: the export of capital, the export, via migration, of surplus workers to whitecolonial settlements abroad, the pooling of profits via the stock market, the move away from entrepreneurship into rentier-style investing. The finance system, which in the previous century had functioned as a puny redistribution centre for business profit and an unreliable source of capital, now dominated and controlled the business world. The countertendencies to crisis had become synthesized into a new, more stable system. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=78 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Hilferding argued that this new structure could suppress cyclical crisis. Big firms and big banks could survive for long periods on low or zero profits. And investors would rather accept prolonged stagnation than see a sudden crisis destroy firms like Siemens, Bell or Mitsui. As a result, crisis periods under finance capitalism would be long and stagnant rather than sharp and traumatic. Banks would suppress speculation because they understood its destructive power. Cartels would suppress the operation of market forces – and therefore crisis – for major firms, dumping the losses on less powerful sectors of the economy. Small firms would bear the brunt of any recessions, hastening their acquisition by monopolies. For Hilferding, the forces of instability had not disappeared, but had been driven into a single sphere: the imbalance between the production and consumption-oriented sectors of the economy. He explicitly ruled out ‘under-consumption’ as a cause of crisis, pointing out that capitalism could always create new markets where old ones were exhausted, and thus go on expanding output. But the possibility remained that sectors would expand at different rates. Hence the need for state intervention to prevent such an imbalance. Hilferding’s book was a massively influential reality-check for the left. It dispensed with the thesis of the ‘snowballing crisis’ as the trigger for social change; it introduced concepts and terms that Marxism would share with mainstream economics. And it said – earlier than Schumpeter – that the main driver of innovation was now the big company using applied science, not the entrepreneur tinkering in his workshop.15 But Hilferding’s book steered left-wing economics into a dead end. Though he described finance capital as only the ‘latest stage’ of the system, the implication was that it would be the last. A system in which finance capital dominates, he wrote, is the ‘supreme and most abstract’ form of capitalism and it can go no further: The socializing function of finance capital facilitates enormously the task of overcoming capitalism. Once finance capital has brought the most important branches of production under its control, it is enough for society, through its conscious executive organ – the state conquered by the working class – to seize finance capital in order to gain immediate control of these branches of production. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=79 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Hilferding was a moderate socialist and would become more moderate as time went on. He believed capitalism would gradually evolve into socialism. His ideas, however, influenced reformists and revolutionaries alike. Both wings of the labour movement became wedded to the belief that socialism could be introduced by taking control of the state and the organized market. Finance capital was, as Lenin later put it, ‘moribund capitalism, capitalism in transition to socialism … already dying capitalism’.16 All that the socialists differed on was the kind of action needed to make it die. What’s important is that Hilferding not only tied socialism to a project of state-led transition, but also that he effectively ruled out any further mutation of capitalism beyond the model established in the 1900s. And his basic theory remained influential well into our lifetime. As late as the 1970s you could argue that, though capitalism had survived longer than expected, it was still essentially a state-directed, heavily monopolized and national system. Left-wing workers could rationally believe that a world of stateowned airlines, steel mills and auto companies was stage two of the progression: free markets -> monopoly -> socialism. This was the idea that died after 1989, with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the rise of globalization and the creation of the fragmentary, marketized and privatized economy we see today. The progression Hilferding imagined, which had implicitly guided socialism for eighty years, has been broken and indeed reversed. While it lasted, though, the doctrine of an inevitable linear transition – from Standard Oil to socialism – was all-powerful. THE LEFT’S NEED FOR CATASTROPHE By 1910, when Hilferding’s book came out, social-democracy was influential in every advanced country. Its acknowledged nerve-centre was Berlin, and the work of its German-speaking leaders would be translated and discussed in the factories of Chicago, the gold mines of New South Wales and clandestine cells aboard Russian battleships. But even as workers digested Hilferding’s message, something rang false. Mass strikes were in 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bf1bb7d2-ff9c-474f-ac6b-fcb01cd4dbe7.md?start=80&limit=10)