PostCapitalism-_Paul-Mason_-_z-library.sk_-1lib.sk_-z-lib.sk_

If the rise of the networked economy is beginning to dissolve the law of value, planning has to be the adjunct of something more comprehensive.

André Gorz once wrote that the source of capitalism’s superiority to Soviet socialism was its ‘instability, its diversity … its complex multiform character, comparable to that of an ecosystem, which continually triggers new conflicts between partially autonomous forces that can neither be controlled nor placed once and for all in the service of a stable order’.²⁷

What we’re trying to build should be even more complex, more autonomous and more unstable.

But change from one economic system to another takes time. If the postcapitalism thesis is right, what we’re about to live through will be a lot more like the transition from feudalism to capitalism than the one the Soviet planners envisaged. It will be long; there will be confusion; and in the process the very concept of an ‘economic system’ will have to be redefined.

And that’s why, whenever I want to stop myself being too Marxist about the future, I think about Shakespeare.

BIG CHANGE: SHAKESPEARE VS MARX

If you could watch Shakespeare’s history plays back-to-back, starting with King John and ending with Henry VIII, it would at first sight seem like a Netflix drama series without a central plot: murders, wars and mayhem – all set within an apparently meaningless squabble between kings and dukes. But once you understand what a ‘mode of production’ is, the meaning becomes clear. What you are watching is the collapse of feudalism and the emergence of early capitalism.

The mode of production is one of the most powerful ideas to come out of Marxist economics. It influenced a wide range of historical thinkers, and has come to shape our view of the past. Its starting point is the question: what is the prevailing economic system based on?

Feudalism was a system based on obligation: peasants were obliged to hand part of their produce to the landowner and do military service for him; he in turn was obliged to provide the king with taxes, and supply an army on demand. In the England of Shakespeare’s history plays, however, the

mainspring of that system had broken down. By the time Richard III was slaughtering his rivals in real life, the power network based on obligation had been polluted by money: rents paid in money, military service paid for with money, wars fought with the aid of a cross-border banking network stretching to Florence and Amsterdam. Shakespeare’s kings and dukes killed each other because money had made all power based on obligation susceptible to being overthrown.

Shakespeare managed to get to the essence of it long before the words ‘feudalism’ and ‘capitalism’ were even invented. The signal difference between his history plays and the comedies and tragedies is that the latter depict the contemporary society his audience lived in. In the comedies and tragedies we are suddenly in a world of bankers, merchants, companies, mercenary soldiers and republics. The typical setting for these plays is a prosperous trading city, not a castle. The typical hero is a person whose greatness is essentially bourgeois and self-made, either through courage (Othello), humanist philosophy (Prospero) or knowledge of the law (Portia in The Merchant of Venice).

But Shakespeare had no clue about where this was going to lead. He saw what this new kind of economy was doing to the human character: empowering us with knowledge, yet leaving us susceptible to greed, passion, self-doubt and power-craziness on a new scale. But it would be another 150 years until merchant capitalism, based on trade, conquest and slavery, paved the way for industrial capitalism.

If you interrogate Shakespeare through his texts, and ask him: ‘what is between the past and the time you’re living in?’, the implicit answer is ‘ideas and behaviour’. Human beings value each other more; love is more important than family duty; human values like truth, scientific rigour and justice are worth dying for – far more so than hierarchy and honour.

Shakespeare is a great witness to the moment when one mode of production begins to falter and another begins to rise. But we also need Marx. In a materialist view of history, the difference between feudalism and early capitalism is not just ideas and behaviours. Changes in the social and economic system are critical. And at root, the change is driven by new technologies.

For Marx, a mode of production describes a set of economic relationships, laws and social traditions that form the underlying ‘normal of a society. In feudalism, the concept of lordly power and obligation pervaded everything. In capitalism, the equivalent force is the market, private property and wages. To understand a mode of production, another revealing question is: ‘what reproduces itself spontaneously?’ In feudalism, it is the concept of fealty and obligation; in capitalism, it is the market.

And here’s where the mode of production concept gets challenging: the changes are so huge that we are never comparing like with like. So when it comes to the economic system that replaces capitalism, we should not expect it to be based on something as purely economic as the market, nor on something as clearly coercive as feudal power.

For Marx, the modes of production concept led to a strict historical sequence: there are various pre-capitalist forms of society, where the rich get rich through legally authorized violence; then there is capitalism, where the rich get rich through technical innovation and the market; finally there is communism, where the whole of humanity gets richer because there is abundance instead of scarcity. That sequence is open to criticism from two angles. First, it can read like a quasi-mythology: human destiny looks preprogrammed to happen in three logical stages. Second, when used by historians looking backwards, it can lead to the application of simple labels to complex societies, or to imputing economic motives that simply didn’t exist.

But if we avoid the myth of inevitability and assert simply, ‘there must come a time when there is relative abundance, compared to the scarcity that has driven all previous economic models’, then Marx was only saying the same thing as Keynes said in the early 1930s: one day there will be enough goods to go around and the economic problem will be solved. ‘For the first time since his creation,’ Keynes wrote, ‘man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares … to live wisely and agreeably and well.’²⁸

is the one Keynes and Marx allowed themselves to imagine – and so should we.²⁹

DRIVERS OF TRANSITION

What caused feudalism to collapse and capitalism to rise? Naturally that’s the subject of a gigantic historical debate. But if we think the transition to postcapitalism is going to be of a similar magnitude, then there are lessons to learn about the interplay between internal and external factors; the role of technology versus the importance of ideas; and why transitions are so hard to understand when you’re in the middle of them.

Armed with new knowledge, from geneticists and epidemiologists as well as social historians, we can list four probable causes for the end of feudalism.

Up to about 1300, feudal agriculture had been dynamic, raising GDP per head in Western Europe faster than anywhere else. But famines, beginning in the 1300s, signalled a decline in the efficiency of the feudal systems of land use: productivity could not keep up with population growth. Then, in 1345, the English king Edward III defaulted on his country’s debts, wiping out the Florentine bankers who had lent him the money. Though containable, this was just one symptom of a general malaise, and a warning that crisis in one part of feudal Europe might spread to all parts.

In 1347 the Yersinia pestis bacillus hit Europe. By 1353, the Black Death had killed at least a quarter of Europe’s population.³⁰ For those who lived through it, the experience was spiritually transformative – like witnessing the end of the world. Its economic impact was stark: the supply of labour collapsed. Suddenly farm workers, who had been the lowest of the low, could command higher wages.

Once the plague was over a surge of economic struggles broke out – peasant revolts in France and England, worker rebellions in the key manufacturing towns of Ghent and Florence. Historians call this the ‘general crisis of feudalism’. Though the revolts failed, the economic balance was now tipped in favour of the urban worker and the peasant.

‘Agricultural rents collapsed after the Black Death and wages in the towns soared to two and even three times the levels they had held,’ according to historian David Herlihy.³¹

With wool prices high, many landowners switched from crops to sheep pasture – and unlike wheat, wool was for trading, not consuming. The old tradition of peasants being forced to do military service was replaced increasingly by cash-based mercenary warfare. And with workers scarce, labour-saving devices began to be invented.

Basically, the rat that brought the Black Death into Cadiz in 1347 triggered an external shock that helped to collapse an internally weakened system.

The second driver of change was the growth of banking. Banking had already become the sure-fire way to amass a fortune in the undocumented space between the official classes of feudalism: nobles, knights, gentry, clerks, etc. The Medicis created a transnational super-company in the fifteenth century, and the Fugger family of Augsburg overtook them once their influence declined.

Banking does not just systematically inject credit into feudal society, it injects an alternative network of power and secrecy. The Fugger and Medici families wielded unofficial leverage over kings through business – even as their activities were seen as borderline un-Christian. Everyone involved connived in the creation of a subtextual form of capitalism within the officially feudal economy.

The third big driver of capitalism’s takeoff was the conquest and pillage of the Americas, beginning in 1503. This created a flow of money to nonaristocrats way in excess of anything generated internally by the market growing, organically, within late feudalism. In a single load, the conquistadores stole 1.3 million ounces of gold from Peru. The huge amount of wealth imported into early modern Europe boosted market forces, craft manufacturing and banking. And it strengthened the power of monarchic states over the old independent towns and the now impoverished dukes in their castles.

Finally, there was the printing press. Gutenberg put the first one to use in 1450. In the following fifty years 8 million books were printed – more than all the scribes of Christendom had managed to produce since Roman times. Elizabeth Eisenstein, the great social historian of printing, points out the revolutionary nature of the print-shop itself: it brought together scholars, priests, authors and metalworkers into a business environment that no other social situation within feudalism could have created. Printed books established checkable knowledge and authorship. They fuelled the rise of Protestantism, the scientific revolution and humanism. If the medieval cathedral was full of meaning – an encyclopaedia in stone – printing destroyed the need for it. Printing transformed the way human beings think.³² The philosopher Francis Bacon wrote in 1620 that printing, gunpowder and the compass ‘have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world’.³³

If we accept the four-factor account given above, the dissolution of feudalism is not primarily a technology story. It is a complex interplay between failing economics and outside shocks. These new technologies would have been useless without a new way of thinking and the external disruptions that allowed new behaviours to flourish.

When we look at the possibility of transition beyond capitalism, we have to expect a similar complex interplay between technology, social struggle, ideas and external shocks. But our minds reel from the scale of it; just as they do when shown the size of our galaxy in the universe. We have a fatal tendency to push the dynamics of transition into simple categories and simple chains of cause and effect.

The classic Marxist explanation of what destroyed feudalism was ‘its contradictions’: the class struggle between peasant and nobility.³⁴ For later materialist historians, however, the emphasis was on the failure and stagnation of the old system, giving rise to a ‘general crisis’. Perry Anderson, the New Left historian, drew an important general conclusion from this: that the key symptom of a mode of production transition is not the vigorous eruption of the new economic model. ‘On the contrary, the forces of production typically tend to stall and recede within the existent relations of production.’³⁵

What are the other general lessons we might draw?

First, that different modes of production are structured around different things: feudalism was an economic system structured by customs and laws about obligation. Capitalism was structured by something purely economic: the market. We can predict from this that postcapitalism – whose precondition is abundance – will not simply be a modified form of a complex market society. But we can only begin to grasp at positive visions of what it will be like.

I don’t mean this as a cop-out: the general economic parameters of a postcapitalist society by, for example, the year 2075 will be clear from the next chapter. But if such a society is structured around human liberation, not economics, unpredictable things will begin to shape it. Maybe, for instance, the most obvious thing to the Shakespeare of 2075 will be the total upheaval in gender relationships, or sexuality, or health. Maybe there will not even be any playwrights: maybe the very fabric of the media we use to tell stories will change – just as it did for Shakespeare’s generation when the first public theatres were built.

Marxism, with its insistence on the proletariat as the driver of change, tended to ignore the question: how will humans have to change in order for postcapitalism to emerge? Yet if we study the transition from feudalism to capitalism it’s one of the most obvious issues.

Think of the difference between, say, Horatio in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and a character like Daniel Doyce in Dickens’s Little Dorrit. Both are secondary characters for the hero to use as a sounding board, both carry around with them a characteristic obsession of their age: Horatio is obsessed with humanist philosophy, Doyce is obsessed with patenting his invention. There can be no character like Doyce in Shakespeare; at best he would get a bit part as a working-class comic figure. Yet, by the time Dickens described Daniel Doyce, all his readers would have known somebody like him. Just as Shakespeare could not have imagined Doyce, so we too cannot imagine the kind of human beings society will produce once economics is no longer central to life.

Let’s restate what we know about the way the last transition happened and spell out the parallels.

The feudal model of agriculture collided first with environmental limits and then with a massive external shock – the Black Death. After that, there was a demographic shock: too few workers for the land, which raised their wages and made the old feudal obligation system impossible to enforce. The labour shortage also made technological innovation necessary. The new technologies that underpinned the rise of merchant capitalism were the ones that stimulated commerce (printing and accountancy), the creation of tradable wealth (mining, the compass and fast ships) and productivity (mathematics and the scientific method).

Present throughout the whole process is something that looks incidental to the old system – money and credit – but which is destined to become the basis of the new system. Many laws and customs are actually shaped around ignoring money; in high feudalism credit is seen as sinful. So when money and credit burst through the boundaries and create a market system, it feels like a revolution. Then, the new system gains further energy from the discovery of a virtually unlimited source of free wealth in the Americas.

A combination of all these factors took a set of people who had been persecuted or marginalized under feudalism – humanists, scientists, craftsmen, lawyers, radical preachers and bohemian playwrights like Shakespeare – and put them at the head of a social transformation. At key moments, though tentatively at first, the state switched from hindering the change to promoting it.

There won’t be exact parallels in the transition to postcapitalism but the rough parallels are there.

The thing that is corroding capitalism, barely rationalized by mainstream economics, is information. The equivalent of the printing press and the scientific method is information technology and its spillover into all other forms of technology, from genetics to healthcare to agriculture to the movies.

The modern equivalent of the long stagnation of late feudalism is the stalled fifth Kondratieff cycle, where instead of rapidly automating work out of existence, we are reduced to creating bullshit jobs on low pay, and many economies are stagnating.

The equivalent of the new source of free wealth? It’s not exactly wealth: it’s the externalities – the free stuff and wellbeing generated by networked interaction. It is the rise of non-market production, of un-ownable information, of peer networks and unmanaged enterprises. The internet, says French economist Yann Moulier-Boutang, is ‘both the ship and the ocean’ for the modern-day conquest of a new world. In fact, it is the ship, the compass, the ocean and the gold.

The modern-day external shocks are clear: energy depletion, climate change, ageing populations and migration. They are altering the dynamics of capitalism and making it unworkable in the long term. They have not yet had the same impact as the Black Death – but any financial collapse could easily wreak havoc on the highly fragile urban societies we’ve created. As Katrina demonstrated in New Orleans in 2005, it does not take the bubonic plague to destroy social order and functional infrastructure in a modern city.

Once you understand the transition in this way, the need is not for a supercomputed Five Year Plan, but for a gradual, iterative and modular project. Its aim should be to expand those technologies, business models and behaviours that dissolve market forces, eradicate the need for work and progress the world economy towards abundance. That is not to say we can’t take urgent action to mitigate risk, or address burning injustices. But it does mean that we have to understand the difference between strategic goals and short-term actions.

Our strategy should be to shape the outcome of the process that has begun spontaneously so that it becomes irreversible and delivers socially just outcomes as quickly as possible. This will involve a mixture of planning, state provision, markets and peer production. But space must also be left for the modern equivalents of Gutenberg and Columbus. And for the modern Shakespeare.

Most twentieth-century leftists believed that they did not have the luxury of a managed transition. It was an article of faith for them that nothing of the coming system could exist within the old one – though, as I’ve shown, the workers always held the desire to create an alternative life despite capitalism. As a result, once the possibility of a Soviet-style transition