PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future
Cover of the first edition
|
|
| Author | Paul Mason |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Capitalism |
| Published | 2015 |
| Publisher | Allen Lane |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| ISBN | |
PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future is a 2015 book by British journalist and writer Paul Mason.
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, organised labour prevented capitalists from adapting to crises by reducing workers' wages. This forced capitalists to adapt more radically, through technological innovation. But 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