Number vs capital

Journalist Paul Mason's theoretical work on the imminent collapse of capitalism

Paul Mason. Post-capitalism. M.: Ad Marginem, 2016.

Long story short: the Internet and robots will kill capitalism and build socialism. Moreover, they have already started doing this behind our backs - and they cannot be stopped.

Paul Mason is a British television economics journalist who has covered high-profile economic and political events in recent years, from the 2008 global financial crisis and the Occupy Wall Street protest movement to the Scottish independence referendum and last year's victory of the radical left-wing party SYRIZA in Greece. Just as importantly, he is a former member of the Trotskyist group Workers' Power and a self-described "radical social democrat." A writer for Huck Magazine points out a characteristic of Mason, who broke the Internet with a TV report about the Royal Bank of Scotland: the journalist literally vomits and rushes in front of the bank building, wondering why bankers are not brought to justice, despite numerous scandals and evidence of wrongdoing. For him, economics is not a high-brow armchair science occupied with abstract calculations, but a theoretical aid for those very 99% of the oppressed, allowing for closer economic equality and social justice. Therefore, Postcapitalism is partly an academic work, but at the same time a manifesto for alternative economics from an opponent of the neoliberal mainstream, and a guide to action from an activist, and, finally, as the title says, “a guide to our future.”

Mason at the very beginning refers to the paradox of the philosopher Fredric Jameson: it is easier for us to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But, firstly, capitalism - as an economic, political and cultural system - is not a law of nature predetermined once and for all, and secondly, we live in an era when it is time to accustom ourselves to think in larger categories: “It is absurd that we calmly observe that , as a forty-thousand-year system of gender oppression is disintegrating before our eyes, but at the same time we consider the abolition of a two-hundred-year-old economic system an unrealistic utopia.” Mason believes that the imminent abolition of capitalism is very likely for several reasons, here are the main ones.

The Internet and robots will kill capitalism and build socialism. Moreover, they have already started doing this behind our backs - and they cannot be stopped.

The basis of the thesis of “Post-Capitalism” is that right now one can observe the terminal states of the capitalist economy and the first shoots of the post-capitalist economy. Information technology destroys not only property rights, but also labor relations and the market pricing mechanism. Mason develops this hypothesis over several chapters with a detailed analysis of the theory of marginal utility and the labor theory of value (sometimes too detailed, but to the logical question of why devote half a book to the economic theories of past centuries, Mason answers without hesitation: “because they explain the donkey stubbornness of today's economic science"). According to the first, the value of a product is determined by how much the buyer is willing to pay for it; accordingly, there is no initial, “pre-market” value; in the second, the source of value is the amount of labor spent on the production of goods. According to Mason, only labor theory explains “information capitalism,” in which goods can be produced without the use of human labor. In the digital age, the market ceases to play a key role in pricing: unlike the price of a vinyl record, the 99 cents that The Beatles' track “Love Me Do” costs on iTunes does not factor in the dynamics of supply and demand. The classical capitalist economy is based on the scarcity of goods (as one of the apologists of the theory of marginal utility, Leon Walras, wrote, “there are no goods that can be increased without restrictions”), while digital information - one of the main goods of the 21st century - cannot in principle be scarce . The cost of a product that exists in unlimited quantity tends to zero, and with this value tending to zero, information infects everything it touches.

The price mechanism is collapsing not only online, but also offline - information technologies are becoming embedded in an increasing number of things, leveling out the costs of their production. The author refers to his own experience: when he worked at a machine-building plant in 1981, his colleagues were twenty-five low-skilled workers. Today, the robots and the remaining five employees produce as much in an hour as the previous twenty-five in a day. With the software that runs the plant, the situation is the same as with an iTunes track, Mason believes - reproducing industrial software once purchased and installed in itself does not cost anything. Yes, the cost of reproducing software comes down to the cost of the media or communication channel, but these costs are rapidly decreasing: information technologies are becoming cheaper exponentially. In ten years, the cost of printing a million transistors fell from one dollar to six cents, one megabit of high-speed connection - from one thousand dollars to twenty-three dollars.

Mason considers Marx himself to be his forerunner, referring to his rather obscure “Passage on Machines,” written in 1858. In this short text, the author of Capital describes an economy based on an “automatic system of machines” that can completely ensure the production cycle, leaving people only to “observe and protect from interference.” The main productive force in such an economy is the “general intelligence”, that is, the achievements of science and progress that ensure the productive power of machines. The knowledge locked inside machines is “social” in nature, that is, it exploits no one, but benefits and liberates everyone. And when the economy begins to depend primarily on knowledge, the confrontation between social relations and productive forces will “explode” the foundations of capitalism; “free development of individuals” will begin and communism will come. If we follow Mason's reasoning and apply this logic to today, it turns out that Google is, of course, a monopoly corporation - but, by making extensive use of "public" knowledge in the form of open source Linux, it anticipates non-capitalist forms of ownership and exchange. Mason triumphantly proclaims that what Marx predicted has finally begun to come true—here comes the Internet as a “general intelligence.” However, it is actually difficult to say what Marx meant by the “general intellect” in the mid-19th century in the wake of the construction of telegraph lines and railways, so the analysis of the “Fragment on Machines” in Post-Capitalism seems rather strained. Whatever one may say, we are talking about one early sketch, but in general Marx was not a techno-utopian and never believed that capitalism would die from machines, and not through class struggle, expropriation and other integral attributes of the communist revolution.

With its cost approaching zero, information infects everything it touches.

Mason’s utopianism is obvious; it’s not for nothing that he took one of the epigraphs from the planet’s main techno-evangelist, founder of the Wired technology magazine Kevin Kelly: “Today we are involved in a huge system that increases, expands, strengthens and stretches the relationships and connections between all beings and all objects.” . Behind this vague quote is a very specific belief - new technologies give rise not only to a new economy, but also to a new type of people. It would be possible to ignore this already rather hackneyed idea if techno-evangelists did not firmly believe that thanks to technology, new people are qualitatively better, smarter and more beautiful than the old ones. For Mason, this belief runs like a red thread throughout the book: a new generation, a digital one, a generation of millennials with a smartphone in their pocket, appeared, and immediately organized, with the help of microblogs, the Iranian Green Revolution, the barricades in Gezi, and the thirty thousand strike in Shenzhen. “Network movements prove that a new historical subject has emerged,” the author summarizes. He is a multidisciplinary polymath who applies “chaos theory to economics, genetics to archeology, or data analysis to social history.” And, of course, it shows unprecedented levels of civil anti-capitalist consolidation. And to become a cyber erudite, “it’s enough to have a basic education and a smartphone.”

This new historical subject performs in Mason the same functions as in Marx the working class (whose death is diagnosed in Post-Capitalism): “networked individuals set up tent camps in city squares, blocked fracking sites, organized punk prayers in Russian cathedrals, raised beer cans, defiantly challenging Islamism on the grass of Gezi Park,” and so on and so forth - the merits of the network individual are extremely great. Sooner or later, these people will so spread non-market types of production, in which goods are either free or have a much lower cost compared to market ones (from Wikipedia and Linux to Uber and various sectors of the sharing economy), that we will find ourselves in a radically different world, — and the transition will be as global as the replacement of feudalism with capitalism. Needless to say, a post-capitalist society will be environmentally and financially stable and will have a universal basic income.

Reading the praises of information technology and online individuals, you quickly realize that Paul Mason is the antipode of the Belarusian-American publicist Evgeniy Morozov, a sworn enemy of technological innovation, who has written several bestsellers with telling titles “The Network as an Illusion: The Dark Side of the Free Internet” and “Click Here to save everything." The latter is directed against “solutionism” - an ideology that views technology as a universal solution to any problem. Whatever Marx wrote about the “social” knowledge that makes machines work, we see that technology can be absolutely anti-social - just read the revelations of Edward Snowden or the news that the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs is purchasing software that collects personal data of social network users. There is no law that says China will become more democratic if every Chinese person gets the latest iPhone, which is exactly what Mason, a high-flying solutionist, is aiming for. It is no wonder that Morozov devoted a devastating review to “Postcapitalism” in The Guardian, noting that so far the information revolution does not lead to peace-loving social democracy, but to even harsher neoliberal capitalism. As an example, he cites Uber, which, on the one hand, simply did not bother to provide the necessary conditions for the transportation of passengers with disabilities, on the other hand, pursues such a personnel policy that the disenfranchised position of taxi drivers (a typical precariat) is worse than that of factory workers a century ago . And Uber’s increasing coefficients are a typical example of pricing of a product created at the intersection of neoliberalism and information technology; A similar situation, thanks to mechanisms for collecting user data, is widespread in online commerce. The technological innovations of Silicon Valley cannot be biased by the socialist project of the future, because Silicon Valley itself is the flesh of the market. Mason should have asked Bill Gates: would he like to live in a social democratic welfare state, is there a Marxist message embedded in Windows? He would have answered the same as he did to the economist Thomas Piketty, who wrote the bestseller “Capital in the 21st Century” and also calls for social democracy: “The book is good, but I will not pay the progressive tax you propose.”

There is no law that says China will become more democratic if every Chinese person has the latest iPhone.

Network mobilization is the same ambivalent phenomenon as technological innovation. There is no universal network generation - the intellectual, social, economic, cultural differences within the group are much greater than the unifying factor that all its representatives have been online since birth. In other words, Pussy Riot didn’t hold a punk prayer because they were online individuals, just as the Arab Spring didn’t start because Tunisians started Twitter accounts. For the political identity of the majority of digital citizens, the term “slacktivism” has long been coined, denoting solidarity that is expressed without rising from an office chair: signatures in online petitions, reposting statuses asking for help, threads in protest publics and other attributes of “activist” solutionism that has replaced traditional forms of political self-organization. According to the Pew Research Center, users aged 18 to 24 are the least likely to send appeals to government agencies and donate to civic initiatives, but they disseminate political news the most: as Morozov wrote, they simply “imitate their participation in public life, passing on civic responsibility down the chain.” to your friends on social networks." If this is the promised post-capitalist solidarity, then it is simply ridiculous in comparison with the trade union struggle of the 20th century.

Mason ends the book in the spirit of Zizek: the blind utopians are not the 99%, but the same 1% of the elite, hiding in their isolated little world from the post-capitalist reality knocking on the door. Žižek commonly compares the super-rich 1% to the Looney Tunes coyote who runs off a cliff into an abyss and continues running through the air for a while. But the network individual is still absolutely the same coyote, who has never had solid ground under his feet. However, you need to read “Postcapitalism” - if only to find out how Shakespeare’s “Henry VIII” helps explain the ins and outs of capitalism and who the cyber-Stalinists are.