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A march against government spending cuts in November 1979. ‘In the old days, a general strike would trigger the collapse of the capitalist system. Under the new plan, it’s IT plus climate change.’ Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images
A march against government spending cuts in November 1979. ‘In the old days, a general strike would trigger the collapse of the capitalist system. Under the new plan, it’s IT plus climate change.’ Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason review – engagingly written, but confused

This article is more than 8 years old
Paul Mason’s vision of a post-capitalist world is rooted in a dated ideology and short on specifics

At a time when, despite the occasional hiccup, market forces appear to be triumphant everywhere, up pops Channel 4’s economics editor, Paul Mason, to predict that the end is nigh. Capitalism, says Mason, citing an obscure early 20th-century Russian economist, runs in approximately 50-year cycles or waves. The fourth wave came to a spectacular end with the financial crisis of 2008. We are now embarking on the fifth and final one, which, on past performance, is due to crash somewhere around 2050.

Mason, like Marx, believes that capitalism will collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions. These include unsustainable levels of debt on the part of both individuals and nations (“2008 was the tremor in advance of the earthquake”). In addition, the rise of information technology will corrode market mechanisms, erode property rights and destroy the relationship between wages, property and work. All this, plus burgeoning inequality, the inevitability of climate change and continued population growth, will open up the possibility of a brave new world. The alternative, warns the author, is chaos.

Should we believe him? People have been predicting the end of capitalism for a long time. A leftwing Labour MP of my acquaintance once remarked to me that if in his youth (in the 1940s) anyone had suggested that capitalism would still be going strong 50 years later, he’d have thought they were bonkers. As Mason acknowledges, one should not underestimate the capacity of capitalism to adapt to new circumstances. The reason it has lasted so long is that it is dynamic. By contrast, the Soviet system died because it was incapable of adapting.

In the long run, however, it is not unreasonable to suppose that capitalism will finally disintegrate. No political or economic system lasts for ever. Nor is unreasonable that, in a world run by those with short-term agendas, someone is thinking about what is to be done in the long term.

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Where I part company with Mason is his prescriptions. They are remarkably thin, take no account of political realities and it takes an awful long time to get there. First, one has to plough through more than 200 pages of analysis in the course of which the author examines one by one the various economic theories advanced by 19th- and 20th-century political philosophers and various IT gurus.

Although Mason writes engagingly, the overall impact is confusion. Some of the language used implies that the author is reliving the simplistic politics of his youth. There are references to suppression of organised labour by the ruling elite without any acknowledgment that perhaps the unions (witness the industrial mayhem of the 1960s and 70s) brought some of this on themselves. By the 1980s, the point had been reached where most trade unionists no longer voted Labour. Surely the author must have noticed.

At no point on this long road are there any references to the impact of majority affluence on politics in the developed world. Nikolai Kondratieff (inventor of the wave theory of capitalism) occupies almost an entire column in the index. JK Galbraith and Tony Crosland do not merit a single mention. So familiar is the author with the lingua of Marx and the works of obscure Soviet economists that I began to wonder whether he wasted his formative years as an active member of one of the 57 varieties of Trotskyite sects.

When I reached page 200 with still no sign of the promised land, I Googled him. Sure enough, he was once a member of an outfit called Workers Power, one of many splinter groups from International Socialists or the Socialist Workers party as they are now known. Asked by a journalist if he was once a Trot, he replied with an evasiveness worthy of a Blairite candidate for the Labour leadership: “It says on Wikipedia that I was so it must be true.” He added: “What my politics are now is very complicated.”

We must not hold the sins of the author’s youth against him, but I regret to say that, although undoubtedly bright, erudite even, he still appears to be shackled to the remnants of a hopelessly impractical ideology. We have to wait until page 263, a chapter headed “Project Zero”, to discover what the author has in store for us.

First, the big picture. We must reduce carbon emissions, stabilise the financial system and “deliver high levels of material prosperity and wellbeing to the majority of people, primarily by prioritising information-rich technologies towards solving major social challenges such as ill-health, welfare dependency, sexual education and poor education”. Nothing much there that George Osborne couldn’t sign up to. Item four is a little trickier: “Gear technology towards the reduction of necessary work to promote the rapid transition towards an automated economy.”

So far, so good, but what about this? “Eventually, work becomes voluntary, basic commodities and public services are free and economic management becomes primarily an issue of energy and resources, not capital and labour.” Sound familiar? In the old days, there was going to be a general strike that would trigger the collapse of the capitalist system and usher in a workers’ paradise. Under the new plan it is ICT plus climate change.

Then, finally, the specifics. Item one (“one of the most radical – and necessary – measures”): create a global institute or network for simulating the long-term transition beyond capitalism. Yet another thinktank in which academics and other assorted blue-sky thinkers can talk to one another in impenetrable jargon. Oh, spare us, please.

Item two: public ownership of monopolies including the provision of water, energy, housing, transport, healthcare, telecoms, infrastructure and education “providing services at cost price”. Oh yes, and Apple and Google thrown in for good measure. Presumably this would have to be done without compensating shareholders, many of them pension funds. However desirable, I imagine there would be one or two political difficulties.

Item three: “socialise the financial system”. Simple as that. With one wave of Mr Mason’s Trotskyite wand, finance is “socialised”. And lastly, the piece de resistance, “pay everyone a basic wage”, say, £6,000 a year and hike the minimum wage to £18,000 a year. Likely cost £306bn, he writes, almost double the current welfare bill. To be paid for by abolishing “a range of tax exemptions” and “cost savings”. Or perhaps we could just get the banks to print some more money now that they’ve been “socialised”?

Scarcely a word about how we get from here to there. That, I suppose, will be left to the proposed thinktank to work out. Meantime, however, I suspect that not even my old friend Jeremy Corbyn will be venturing down this road.

Chris Mullin was a Labour MP from 1987-2010.

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future is published by Allen Lane (£16.99). Click here to buy it for £12.99

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