- Source: Post-capitalism
- Source: PostCapitalism
Post-capitalism is in part a hypothetical state in which the economic systems of the world can no longer be described as forms of capitalism. Various individuals and political ideologies have speculated on what would define such a world. According to classical Marxist and social evolutionary theories, post-capitalist societies may come about as a result of spontaneous evolution as capitalism becomes obsolete. Others propose models to intentionally replace capitalism, most notably socialism, communism, anarchism, nationalism and degrowth.
History
In 1993, Peter Drucker outlined a possible evolution of capitalistic society in his book Post-Capitalist Society. This states that knowledge, rather than capital, land, or labor, is the new basis of wealth. The classes of a fully post-capitalist society are expected to be divided into knowledge workers or service workers, in contrast to the capitalists and proletarians of a capitalist society. Drucker estimated the transformation to post-capitalism would be completed in 2010–2020. Drucker also argued for rethinking the concept of intellectual property by creating a universal licensing system.
In 2015, according to Paul Mason, several factors — the rise of income inequality, repeating cycles of boom and bust, and capitalism's contributions to climate change — led economists, political thinkers and philosophers to start seriously considering how a post-capitalistic society would look and function. Post-capitalism is expected to be made possible with further advances in automation and information technology – both of which are effectively causing production costs to trend toward zero.
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams identify a crisis in capitalism's ability and willingness to employ all members of society, arguing that: "there is a growing population of people that are situated outside formal, waged work, with minimal welfare benefits, informal subsistence work, or by illegal means".
Variations
= Heritage check system
=Heritage check system is a socioeconomic plan that retains a market economy but removes fractional reserve lending power from banks and limits government printing of money to offset deflation. Money printed is used to buy materials to back the currency and pay for government programs in lieu of taxes, with the remainder to be split evenly among all citizens to stimulate the economy (termed a "heritage check", for which the system is named). The original author of the idea, Robert Heinlein, stated in his book For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs, that the system would be self-reinforcing and would eventually result in regular heritage checks able to provide a modest living for most citizens.
= Economic democracy
=Economic democracy is a socioeconomic philosophy that establishes democratic control of firms by their workers and social control of investment by a network of public banks.
= Participatory economy
=In his book Of the People, By the People: The Case for a Participatory Economy, Robin Hahnel describes a post-capitalist economy called the participatory economy.
Hahnel argues that a participatory economy will return empathy to our purchasing choices. Capitalism removes the knowledge of how and by whom a product was made: "When we eat a salad the market systematically deletes information about the migrant workers who picked it".
= Socialism
=Socialism often implies common ownership of companies and a planned economy, though as an inherently pluralistic ideology, it is argued whether either are essential features. In his book PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future, Paul Mason argues that centralized planning, even with the advanced technology of today, is unachievable.
In UK politics, strands of Corbynism and the Labour party have adopted this 'post-capitalist' tendency.
= Permaculture
=Permaculture is defined by its co-originator Bill Mollison as: "The conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive systems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems".
= PROUT
=Progressive utilization theory (PROUT) is a socioeconomic and political philosophy created by the Indian philosopher and spiritual leader Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar in 1959. PROUT includes the decentralization of the economy; economic democracy; development of cooperatives; provision of all working members of society with five basic needs: food, clothing, shelter, education, medical care; and systematic solution of environmental problems through technological development and limitation of consumption.
= Degrowth
=Degrowth aims to bring about a post-capitalist world through what Anitra Nelson describes as the reframing and recreation of economies so that they "respect the Earth’s limits in order to achieve socio-political equity and ecological sustainability.' They note that degrowth is "distinctive within sustainability and justice movements due to a unique emphasis on growth as a driver of unsustainabilities and inequities." As such "Degrowth argues for a radical reduction in production and consumption, greater citizen participation in politics, and more diversity, especially within ecological systems and landscapes, along with a flourishing of creativity, care, and commoning — using renewable energy and materials.
Degrowth and MMT
Modern monetary theory (MMT) could enhance the degrowth movement in transitioning to a "post-growth, post-capitalist economy", according to economic anthropologist Jason Hickel. Towards this end, he suggests that the power of "the government’s role as the issuer of currency" could be utilized to bring the economy back into balance with the natural world while at the same time reducing economic inequality by providing high quality universal basic services, implementing the rapid development of renewable energy infrastructure to completely phase out fossil fuels in a shorter period of time, and establishing a public job guarantee for 30 hours a week at a living wage doing decommodified, socially useful work in the public services sector, and also useful work in renewable energy development and ecosystem restoration. Hickel notes that providing a living wage at 30 hours a week also has the added benefit of shifting income from capital to labor. Furthermore, he adds that taxation can be used to "reduce demand in order to bring resource and energy use down to target levels," and specifically to reduce the purchasing power of the wealthy.
Technology as a driver of post-capitalism
= Automation
=Technological change that has driven unemployment has historically been due to 'mechanical-muscle' machines, which have reduced the need for human labor. Just as the use of horses for transport and other work was gradually made obsolete by the invention of the automobile, humans' jobs have also been affected throughout history. A modern example of this technological unemployment is the replacement of retail cashiers by self-service checkouts. The invention and development of 'mechanical-mind' processes or 'brain labor' is thought to threaten jobs at an unprecedented scale, with Oxford Professors Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne estimating that 47% of US jobs are at risk of automation.
= Information technology
=Post-capitalism is said to be possible due to major changes brought about by information technology in recent years. These changes have blurred the boundaries between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. Significantly, information is corroding the market's ability to form prices correctly. Information is abundant and information goods are freely replicable. Goods such as music, software or databases do have a production cost, but once made can be copied infinitely. If the normal price mechanism of capitalism prevails, then the price of any good which has essentially no cost of reproduction will fall towards zero. This lack of scarcity of those things is a problem in those models, which try to counter by developing monopolies in the form of giant tech companies to keep information scarce and commercial. But many significant commodities in the digital economy are now free and open-source, such as Linux, Firefox, Wikipedia and Open-source hardware.
See also
References
Further reading
Albert, Michael. Parecon: Life After Capitalism. London: Verso, 2003.
Ankerl, Guy C. Beyond Monopoly Capitalism and Monopoly Socialism: Distributive Justice in a Competitive Society. Cambridge MA: Schenkman, 1978.
The Associative Economy: Insights beyond the Welfare System and into Post-Capitalism.
Bell, Karen (2015). "Can the capitalist economic system deliver environmental justice?". Environmental Research Letters. 10 (12): 125017. Bibcode:2015ERL....10l5017B. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/10/12/125017. hdl:1983/5c7c9d17-dec3-4182-9d35-5efd75830ac8.
Benkler, Yochai (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-12577-1.
Blühdorn, Ingolfur (2017). "Post-capitalism, post-growth, post-consumerism? Eco-political hopes beyond sustainability". Global Discourse. 7 (1): 42–61. doi:10.1080/23269995.2017.1300415.
Bowels, Samuel; Carlin, Wendy (2021). "Shrinking capitalism: components of a new political economy paradigm". Oxford Review of Economic Policy. 37 (4): 794–810. doi:10.1093/oxrep/grab029.
Chatterton, Paul; Pusey, Andre (2020). "Beyond capitalist enclosure, commodification and alienation: Postcapitalist praxis as commons, social production and useful doing". Progress in Human Geography. 44 (1): 27–48. doi:10.1177/0309132518821173.
Delanty, Gerard (2019). "The future of capitalism: Trends, scenarios and prospects for the future". Journal of Classical Sociology. 19 (1): 10–26. doi:10.1177/1468795X18810569.
Frase, Peter (2016). Four futures: Life After Capitalism. London: Verso. ISBN 978-1781688137.
Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2006). A Postcapitalist Politics. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0816648047
Healy, Stephen (2020). "Alternative Economies". International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Second Edition): 111–117. doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-102295-5.10049-6. ISBN 9780081022962. S2CID 242718317.
Hickel, Jason (2019). "Is it possible to achieve a good life for all within planetary boundaries?". Third World Quarterly. 40 (1): 18–35. doi:10.1080/01436597.2018.1535895. S2CID 158894436.
Hickel, Jason (2020). Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. Penguin Random House. ISBN 9781785152498.
Longhurst, Noel; Avelino, Flor; Wittmayer, Julia; Weaver, Paul; Dumitru, Adina; Hielscher, Sabine; Cipolla, Carla; Afonso, Rita; Kunze, Iris; Elle, Morten (2016). "Experimenting with alternative economies: four emergent counter-narratives of urban economic development" (PDF). Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. 22: 69–74. Bibcode:2016COES...22...69L. doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2017.04.006. S2CID 59356888.
Mason, Paul (2015). PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future, London: Allen Lane. ISBN 9781846147388.
Monticelli, Lara (2018). "Embodying Alternatives to Capitalism in the 21st Century". tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society. 16 (2): 501–517. doi:10.31269/triplec.v16i2.1032.
Rifkin, Jeremy (2014). The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-1137278463
Shutt, Harry (2010). Beyond the Profits System: Possibilities for the Post-Capitalist Era. Zed Books. ISBN 978-1848134171.
Srnicek, Nick; Williams, Alex (2015). Inventing the future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. London: Verso. ISBN 978-1-7847-8096-8.
Steele, David Ramsay (1999). From Marx to Mises: Post-Capitalist Society and the Challenge of Economic Calculation. Open Court. ISBN 978-0875484495.
Wright, Erik O. Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso, 2010.
PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future is a 2015 book by British journalist and writer Paul Mason.
In the book, Mason discusses the existential threat posed to capitalism by the digital revolution. He argues that the digital revolution has the potential to reshape utterly our familiar notions of work, production and value; and to destroy an economy based on markets and private ownership. In fact, he contends, this is already happening. He points to parallel currencies, co-operatives, self-managed online spaces, and even Wikipedia as examples of what the postcapitalist future might look like. Mason argues that from the ashes of the financial crisis of 2007–2008, we have the chance to create a more socially just and sustainable global economy.
Synopsis
Section 1 draws particularly on the ideas of Nikolai Kondratiev, alongside Karl Marx, Rudolf Hilferding, Rosa Luxemburg, and Joseph Schumpeter. Mason notes the cyclical crises in capitalist economies, epitomised by the 2008 financial crisis, and seeks to understand them in terms of Kondratiev's 'wave theory': industrial economies tend to experience wave-like cycles of roughly 25 years' growth followed by 25 years' decline ending in crises that foreshadow the next period of growth (c. 1780–1848, 1848–90s, 1890s–1945, late 1940s–2008).
Mason argues that in earlier cycles, capitalists were prevented from adapting to crises by reducing workers' wages because of organised labour. This forced capitalists to adapt more radically, through technological innovation. The defeat of organised labour associated with the rise of neoliberalism around 1979 has enabled the extension of the stagnating fourth wave: "instead of being forced to innovate their way out of the crisis using technology, as during the late stage of all three previous cycles, the 1 per cent simply imposed penury and atomization on the working class" (p. 93).
Section 2 builds on Marx's Fragment on Machines, supporting the labour theory of value over the marginal utility theory, and drawing particularly on Jeremy Rifkin's The Zero Marginal Cost Society, Peter Drucker's Post-Capitalist Society, and the work of Paul Romer. As Marx speculated, many commodities, such as software, music, and designs for objects to be reproduced by machines, can now be reproduced at virtually no cost (i.e. zero marginal cost). These developments render economic theories predicated on scarcity increasingly irrelevant. Moreover, significant commodities in the digital economy are free and open-source (FOSS) and non-capitalist, such as Linux, Firefox, and Wikipedia.
As the information economy grows and human labour is replaced, the need for work should diminish. "Today, the main contradiction in modern capitalism is between the possibility of free, abundant socially produced goods, and a system of monopolies, banks and governments struggling to maintain control over power and information. That is, everything is pervaded by a fight between network and hierarchy" (p. 144).
Mason traces how neoliberal policies have successfully undermined working-class solidarity by, for example, promoting labour mobility and constraining unions. In addition he sees a new form of resistance emerging among "networked individuals".
Section 3 sketches a road-map to a utopian post-capitalist global society, harnessing zero-marginal-cost production, and seeking to avoid the failings of twentieth-century Communism and capitalism. A key reference point is Alexander Bogdanov's 1908 novel Red Star. The section articulates "five principles of transition", all envisaged operating through non-hierarchical social networks:
To use massive amounts of real data to understand, model, and test ideas for social change so that they fit observable trends in human behaviour.
Ecological sustainability.
Ensuring that a transition to post-capitalism is not conceptualised simply in economic terms, but in wider human terms.
To address problems with diverse approaches, rather than attempting monolithic solutions.
Maximise the power of information.
Key goals are:
Rapidly reduce carbon emissions to stay below 2 °C warming by 2050.
Stabilise and socialise the global finance system.
Prioritise information-rich technologies to deliver material prosperity and solve social challenges such as ill health and welfare dependency.
Gear technology towards minimising necessary work, until work becomes voluntary and economic management can focus on energy and resources rather than capital and labour.
Suggested means to achieve this include:
Model policies thoroughly using abundant data before implementing them.
Tackle public debt, not through neoliberal privatisation and austerity, but partly by closing down offshore banking and by holding interest rates below inflation rates.
Promote (partly through state support/regulations) collaborative/co-operative/non-profit forms of work and creative commons production, rather than highly unequal, autocratic and/or rent-seeking business models.
Break up monopolies or, where this is impractical, socialise them.
Socialise the finance system (via a transitional phase of re-regulating the finance sector).
Pay everyone a basic income.
Reception
The political scientist David Runciman praised the book in The Guardian, writing that as "a slice of futurology this book is no better than its many, equally speculative rivals. But as a spark to the imagination, with frequent x-ray flashes of insight into the way we live now, it is hard to beat. In that sense, Mason is a worthy successor to Marx".
Adam Booth, writing for Marxist.com, wrote that "despite its limitations, PostCapitalism is an extremely useful read for anyone who wants a thorough and revealing insight into the contradictions of capitalism and how they are manifested today in this era of information and the internet."
In the Financial Times, Gillian Tett wrote "Even if you love the current capitalist system, it would be a mistake to ignore the book. For Mason weaves together varied intellectual threads to produce a fascinating set of ideas" but criticised the writing as being "sometimes infused with such anger that it feels irritatingly shrill".
PostCapitalism was also reviewed in The Independent, The Irish Times, the Daily Telegraph and The Times.
References
External links
Paul Mason, 'The End of Capitalism has Begun', The Guardian, 17 July 2015. Excerpts from the book.
The Sharing Economy, the Future of Jobs, and “PostCapitalism” - part three marxists.com: Which way forward: postcapitalism or socialism?
Detailed summary