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

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to my editor at Penguin, Thomas Penn, and to copy-editors Shan Vahidy and Bela Cunha. Thanks also to my agent Matthew Hamilton, Andrew Kidd before him and the team at Aitken Alexander. The following people and organizations gave me a platform to present early versions of this work, and interrogated it: Pat Kane at NESTA FutureFest; Mike Haynes at Wolverhampton University; Robert Brenner at the Centre for Social Theory and Comparative History, UCLA; Marianne Maeckelbergh and Brandon Jourdan at the Global Uprisings! Conference in Amsterdam, 2013; and Opera North, Leeds. Thanks specifically to Aaron Bastani, Eleanor Saitta, Quinn Norton, Molly Crabapple, Laurie Penny, Antonis Vradis and Dimitris Dalakoglou, Ewa Jasciewicz, Emma Dowling, Steve Keen, Arthur Bough and Syd Carson of Morson Group, who have contributed to my thinking about the subjects in this book. Thanks also to my editor at Channel 4 News, Ben De Pear, who gave me a month’s unpaid leave to finish the first draft; to Channel 4 for giving me the headspace to write it; and to Malik Meer, the editor of the Guardian’s G2, who gave me column inches to try out some of these ideas in print. Finally thanks to my wife, Jane Bruton, without whose support, love and brilliance this book would not be possible.

THE BEGINNING

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Penguin
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First published 2015

Copyright © Paul Mason, 2015

Cover design: Keenan

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-141-97530-6

\* It is complicated by the fact that the US model evolved after 1911, away from outright monopolies towards a system of regulated competition between big industrial firms, with the real monopoly power concentrated on Wall Street and the newly created Fed. This generated a lot of antimonopoly bluster from the American right, clouding the fact that throughout the whole period under consideration, monopolies were the norm in the USA.

It’s normal for economists to compare prices to inflation; if you do, the price of this and many other metals is fairly constant over the post-1989 period, and even declines. However, in long-cycle analysis we want to see inflation and deflation, not factor it out.

\* They show that the alleged logical inconsistencies in Marx’s calculations disappear once you understand this process takes place over time, not simultaneously as if in a single column of a spreadsheet.

\* One aspect of Marx’s theory is counterintuitive. Surely increased productivity must increase the ‘quality’ of the labour? Almost all new machines and workplace reorganizations bring new qualities to our work. But insisting that the value of the labour remains unchanged by productivity gains is just a way of saying that it is machines, management technique, and knowledge that bring the productivity gain, not a change in the quality of labour itself. They become a ‘force multiplier’ for human labour, which remains the same basic thing.

\* Labour, Jevons mused, is probably a mixture of pleasure and pain, but the fear of a bigger pain – hunger – drives us to work each day.

\* Marx writes: ‘Suppose a capitalist invests \$1000, including \$200 on machinery, and makes \$50 a year. In four years the machine is paid for and thereafter, in value terms, it is as if the capital is only worth \$800.’