This link has been bookmarked by 354 people . It was first bookmarked on 17 Jul 2015, by Joshua Oakley.
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09 Jun 19
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31 May 16
Karl ComilingWithout us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era. At the heart of further change to come is information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy. The old ways will take a long while to disappear, but it’s time to be utopian…
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18 May 16
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16 May 16
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23 Apr 16
workshopvisuals"The power of imagination will become critical."
capitalism post-capitalism time banking cooperative unions workers higher education occupy economics creativity
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18 Apr 16
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12 Apr 16
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if a free market economy plus intellectual property leads to the “underutilisation of information”, then an economy based on the full utilisation of information cannot tolerate the free market or absolute intellectual property rights.
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nformation goods are freely replicable. Once a thing is made, it can be copied/pasted infinitely. A music track or the giant database you use to build an airliner has a production cost; but its cost of reproduction falls towards zero. Therefore, if the normal price mechanism of capitalism prevails over time, its price will fall towards zero, too.
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It suggests that, once knowledge becomes a productive force in its own right, outweighing the actual labour spent creating a machine, the big question becomes not one of “wages versus profits” but who controls what Marx called the “power of knowledge”.
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In an economy where machines do most of the work, the nature of the knowledge locked inside the machines must, he writes, be “social”.
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A machine that could be built for nothing would, he said, add no value at all to the production process and rapidly, over several accounting periods, reduce the price, profit and labour costs of everything else it touched.
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nformation is physical, and that software is a machine
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Collaborative production, using network technology to produce goods and services that only work when they are free, or shared, defines the route beyond the market system
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True, states can shut down Facebook, Twitter, even the entire internet and mobile network in times of crisis, paralysing the economy in the process. And they can store and monitor every kilobyte of information we produce. But they cannot reimpose the hierarchical, propaganda-driven and ignorant society of 50 years ago, except – as in China, North Korea or Iran – by opting out of key parts of modern life. It would be, as sociologist Manuel Castells put it, like trying to de-electrify a country.
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nfo-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being.
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The feudal model of agriculture collided, first, with environmental limits and then with a massive external shock – the Black Death. After that, there was a demographic shock: too few workers for the land, which raised their wages and made the old feudal obligation system impossible to enforce. The labour shortage also forced technological innovation. The new technologies that underpinned the rise of merchant capitalism were the ones that stimulated commerce (printing and accountancy), the creation of tradeable wealth (mining, the compass and fast ships) and productivity (mathematics and the scientific method).
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The modern day external shocks are clear: energy depletion, climate change, ageing populations and migration. They are altering the dynamics of capitalism and making it unworkable in the long term.
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As with virtual manufacturing, in the transition to postcapitalism the work done at the design stage can reduce mistakes in the implementation stage. And the design of the postcapitalist world, as with software, can be modular. Different people can work on it in different places, at different speeds, with relative autonomy from each other.
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31 Mar 16
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24 Mar 16
Riccardo SWithout us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era. At the heart of further change to come is information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy. The old ways will take a long while to disappear, but it’s time to be utopian
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23 Mar 16
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05 Mar 16
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information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy
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individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity; the hugely expanded workforce of the world looks like a “proletariat”, but no longer thinks or behaves as it once did
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three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years
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reduced the need for work
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blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages
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information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly.
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the spontaneous rise of collaborative production
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You only find this new economy if you look hard for it
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To mainstream economics such things seem barely to qualify as economic activity – but that’s the point
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the “sharing economy”
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but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and protected by a fundamental change in what governments do.
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A music track or the giant database you use to build an airliner has a production cost; but its cost of reproduction falls towards zero.
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24 Feb 16
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18 Feb 16
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– about technology, ownership and work.
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it was the strength of organised labour that forced entrepreneurs and corporations to stop trying to revive outdated business models through wage cuts, and to innovate their way to a new form of capitalism.
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in order to put a value on data, neither the cost of gathering it, nor the market value or the future income from it could be adequately calculated.
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Then we began to understand intellectual property.
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: all mainstream economics proceeds from a condition of scarcity, yet the most dynamic force in our modern world is abundant and, as hippy genius Stewart Brand once put it, “wants to be free”.
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“granularity” to the postcapitalist project. That is, they can be the basis of a non-market system that replicates itself, which does not need to be created afresh every morning on the computer screen of a commissar.
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info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being.
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and thanks to the work of epidemiologists, geneticists and data analysts, we know a lot more about that transition than we did 50 years ago when it was “owned” by social science
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15 Feb 16
mnagarajaniasWithout us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era. At the heart of further change to come is information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy. The old ways will take a long while to disappear, but it’s time to be utopian…
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12 Feb 16
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07 Feb 16
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05 Feb 16
Jorge BarbaWithout us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era. At the heart of further change to come is information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy. The old ways will take a long while to disappear, but it’s time to be utopian
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11 Jan 16
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07 Jan 16
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05 Jan 16
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04 Jan 16
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02 Jan 16
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31 Dec 15
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30 Dec 15
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The equivalent of the new source of free wealth? It’s not exactly wealth: it’s the “externalities”
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– the free stuff and wellbeing generated by networked interaction. It is the rise of non-market production, of unownable information, of peer networks and unmanaged enterprises.
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The power of imagination will become critical
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modular
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Apostolos K.The end of capitalism has begun https://t.co/JKzR1Cn2Is
— Apostolos K. (@koutropoulos) December 30, 2015
The end of capitalism has begun (via @Pocket) #longreads https://t.co/uDWE7zpF0Y
— Apostolos K. (@koutropoulos) June 1, 2016
Without us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era. At the heart of further change to come is information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy. The old ways will take a long while to disappear, but it’s time to be utopian… -
29 Dec 15
occams razors"Even now many people fail to grasp the true meaning of the word “austerity”. Austerity is not eight years of spending cuts, as in the UK, or even the social catastrophe inflicted on Greece. It means driving the wages, social wages and living standards in the west down for decades until they meet those of the middle class in China and India on the way up."
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28 Dec 15
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Without us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era. At the heart of further change to come is information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy. The old ways will take a long while to disappear, but it’s time to be utopian
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26 Dec 15
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25 Nov 15
Ben ShapiroWithout us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era. At the heart of further change to come is information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy. The old ways will take a long while to disappear, but it’s time to be utopian
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23 Oct 15
Cindy Frewen"why should we not form a picture of the ideal life, built out of abundant information, non-hierarchical work and the dissociation of work from wages?"
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21 Oct 15
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11 Oct 15
Interesting view http://t.co/u9WH6TzoKh
alcohol use disorder alcoholism AUD aviation Aviation Family Fund Aviation Legal Aid chemical dependency DFEH discrimination DSM-4 DSM-5 EEOC FAA FAA's HIMS-program flying HIMS HIMS Pilots United HIMS related discrimination HIMS-program hu
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05 Oct 15
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By creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being.
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23 Sep 15
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21 Sep 15
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individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity; the hugely expanded workforce of the world looks like a “proletariat”, but no longer thinks or behaves as it once did.
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Capitalism, it turns out, will not be abolished by forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists,
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reshaping the economy around new values and behaviours. I call this postcapitalism.
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capitalism’s replacement
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will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being.
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three major changes information technology
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First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages.
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Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly.
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That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant.
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Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy.
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New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: a whole business subculture has emerged over the past 10 years, which the media has dubbed the “sharing economy”.
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I believe it offers an escape route – but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and protected by a fundamental change in what governments do.
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Neoliberalism, then, has morphed into a system programmed to inflict recurrent catastrophic failures. Worse than that, it has broken the 200-year pattern of industrial capitalism wherein an economic crisis spurs new forms of technological innovation that benefit everybody.
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That is because neoliberalism was the first economic model in 200 years the upswing of which was premised on the suppression of wages and smashing the social power and resilience of the working class.
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it was the strength of organised labour that forced entrepreneurs and corporations to stop trying to revive outdated business models through wage cuts, and to innovate their way to a new form of capitalism
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Today there is no pressure from the workforce, and the technology at the centre of this innovation wave does not demand the creation of higher-consumer spending, or the re‑employment of the old workforce in new jobs.
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neo-luddites
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the banking system, the planning system and late neoliberal culture reward above all the creator of low-value, long-hours jobs.
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The great technological advance of the early 21st century consists not only of new objects and processes, but of old ones made intelligent.
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The knowledge content of products is becoming more valuable than the physical things that are used to produce them.
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But it is a value measured as usefulness, not exchange or asset value.
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ndustrial capitalis
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third” kind of capitalism
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the merchant and slave capitalism
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But they have struggled to describe the dynamics of the new “cognitive” capitalism. And for a reason. Its dynamics are profoundly non-capitalist.
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information simply as a “public good”
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Then we began to understand intellectual property. In 1962,
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You can observe the truth of this in every e-business model ever constructed: monopolise and protect data, capture the free social data generated by user interaction, push commercial forces into areas of data production that were non-commercial before, mine the existing data for predictive value – always and everywhere ensuring nobody but the corporation can utilise the results.
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If we restate Arrow’s principle in reverse
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if a free market economy plus intellectual property leads to the “underutilisation of information”, then an economy based on the full utilisation of information cannot tolerate the free market or absolute intellectual property rights. The business models of all our modern digital giants are designed to prevent the abundance of information.
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all mainstream economics proceeds from a condition of scarcity, yet the most dynamic force in our modern world is abundant and, as hippy genius Stewart Brand once put it, “wants to be free”.
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I’ve surveyed the attempts by economists and business gurus to build a framework to understand the dynamics of an economy based on abundant, socially-held information. But it was actually imagined by
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The Fragment on Machines
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It suggests that, once knowledge becomes a productive force in its own righ
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the big question becomes
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who controls what Marx called the “power of knowledge”
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In an economy where machines do most of the work, the nature of the knowledge locked inside the machines must, he writes, be “social”.
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the end point of this trajectory: the creation of an “ideal machine”, which lasts forever and costs nothing.
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Once you understand that information is physical, and that software is a machine, and that storage, bandwidth and processing power are collapsing in price at exponential rates, the value of Marx’s thinking becomes clear. We are surrounded by machines that cost nothing and could, if we wanted them to, last forever.
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general intellect
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in which every upgrade benefits everybody.
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It will need the state to create the framework – just as it created the framework for factory labour, sound currencies and free trade in the early 19th century.
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“granularity”
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The transition will involve the state, the market and collaborative production beyond the market
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the entire project of the left, from protest groups to the mainstream social democratic and liberal parties, will have to be reconfigured.
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such ideas will no longer be the property of the left – but of a much wider movement, for which we will need new labels.
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In the old left project it was the industrial working class.
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Today the whole of society is a factory.
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Today it is the network – like the workshop 200 years ago – that they “cannot silence or disperse”.
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But they cannot reimpose the hierarchical, propaganda-driven and ignorant society of 50 years ago, except – as in China, North Korea or Iran – by opting out of key parts of modern life. It would be, as sociologist Manuel Castells put it, like trying to de-electrify a country.
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info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being.
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Feudalism
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Capitalism
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postcapitalism
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will not simply be a modified form of a complex market society.
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A combination of all these factors took a set of people who had been marginalised under feudalism – humanists, scientists, craftsmen, lawyers, radical preachers and bohemian playwrights such as Shakespeare – and put them at the head of a social transformation. At key moments, though tentatively at first, the state switched from hindering the change to promoting it.
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The equivalent of the printing press and the scientific method is information technology and its spillover into all other technologies, from genetics to healthcare to agriculture to the movies, where it is quickly reducing costs.
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The modern equivalent of the long stagnation of late feudalism is the stalled take-off of the third industrial revolution, where instead of rapidly automating work out of existence, we are reduced to creating what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs” on low pay.
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he need is not for a supercomputed Five Year Plan – but a project, the aim of which should be to expand those technologies, business models and behaviours that dissolve market forces, socialise knowledge, eradicate the need for work and push the economy towards abundance.
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If I am right, the logical focus for supporters of postcapitalism is to build alternatives within the system; to use governmental power in a radical and disruptive way; and to direct all actions towards the transition – not the defence of random elements of the old system. We have to learn what’s urgent, and what’s important, and that sometimes they do not coincide.
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As with virtual manufacturing, in the transition to postcapitalism the work done at the design stage can reduce mistakes in the implementation stage. And the design of the postcapitalist world, as with software, can be modular.
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The main contradiction today is between the possibility of free, abundant goods and information; and a system of monopolies, banks and governments trying to keep things private, scarce and commercial. Everything comes down to the struggle between the network and the hierarchy: between old forms of society moulded around capitalism and new forms of society that prefigure what comes next.
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01 Sep 15
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27 Aug 15
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25 Aug 15
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24 Aug 15
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22 Aug 15
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21 Aug 15
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20 Aug 15
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derrickmasteryWithout us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era. At the heart of further change to come is information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy. The old ways will take a long while to disappear, but it’s time to be utopian
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19 Aug 15
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Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages.
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information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly.
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Neoliberalism, then, has morphed into a system programmed to inflict recurrent catastrophic failures.
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18 Aug 15
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12 Aug 15
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08 Aug 15
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07 Aug 15
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06 Aug 15
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Capitalism, it turns out, will not be abolished by forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which will break through, reshaping the economy around new values and behaviours
-
First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages.
-
Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly.
-
Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy.
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Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages.
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Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant.
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Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy.
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05 Aug 15
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04 Aug 15
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30 Jul 15
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29 Jul 15
fraser smithThe red flags and marching songs of Syriza during the Greek crisis, plus the expectation that the banks would be nationalised, revived briefly a 20th-century dream: the forced destruction of the market from above. The end of capitalism has begun | B…
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28 Jul 15
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During and right after the second world war, economists viewed information simply as a “public good”. The US government even decreed that no profit should be made out of patents, only from the production process itself. Then we began to understand intellectual property.
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You can observe the truth of this in every e-business model ever constructed: monopolise and protect data, capture the free social data generated by user interaction, push commercial forces into areas of data production that were non-commercial before, mine the existing data for predictive value – always and everywhere ensuring nobody but the corporation can utilise the results.
-
if a free market economy plus intellectual property leads to the “underutilisation of information”, then an economy based on the full utilisation of information cannot tolerate the free market or absolute intellectual property rights. The business models of all our modern digital giants are designed to prevent the abundance of informatio
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its price will fall towards zero
-
Once you understand that information is physical, and that software is a machine, and that storage, bandwidth and processing power are collapsing in price at exponential rates, the value of Marx’s thinking becomes clear. We are surrounded by machines that cost nothing and could, if we wanted them to, last forever.
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27 Jul 15
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Capitalism, it turns out, will not be abolished by forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which will break through, reshaping the economy around new values and behaviours. I call this postcapitalism
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three major changes information technology has brought
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First
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reduced the need for work
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loosened the relationship between work and wages
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automation
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will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all
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Second
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information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant.
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business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information
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firms are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely
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goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy
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Third
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spontaneous rise of collaborative production
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currency of postcapitalism: free time, networked activity and free stuff
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New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts
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emerged over the past 10 years
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offers an escape route
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change in our thinking – about technology, ownership and work
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trade
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2008 crash
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global production
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depression
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recession
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aftershocks in Europe
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long-term stagnation
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hey are not working
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austerity plus monetary excess
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true meaning of the word “austerity”
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It means driving the wages, social wages and living standards in the west down for decades until they meet those of the middle class in China and India on the way up
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Neoliberalism, then, has morphed into a system programmed to inflict recurrent catastrophic failures
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Information is a machine for grinding the price of things lower and slashing the work time needed to support life on the planet
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large parts of the business class have become neo-luddites
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start coffee shops, nail bars and contract cleaning firms
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Innovation is happening but it has not, so far, triggered the fifth long upswing for capitalism that long-cycle theory would expect. The reasons lie in the specific nature of information technology.
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Something is broken in the logic we use to value the most important thing in the modern world
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The great technological advance of the early 21st century consists not only of new objects and processes, but of old ones made intelligent
-
the dynamics of the new “cognitive” capitalism
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are profoundly non-capitalist
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if a free market economy plus intellectual property leads to the “underutilisation of information”, then an economy based on the full utilisation of information cannot tolerate the free market or absolute intellectual property rights
-
modern digital giants
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designed to prevent the abundance of information
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business models
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Yet information is abundant
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different dynamic
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information as a social good, free at the point of use, incapable of being owned or exploited or priced
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Marx imagined
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something called a “general intellect
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In short, he had imagined something close to the information economy in which we live. And, he wrote, its existence would “blow capitalism sky high”.
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the old path beyond capitalism imagined by the left
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is lost
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a different path has opened up. Collaborative production, using network technology to produce goods and services that only work when they are free, or shared, defines the route beyond the market system
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info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being
-
postcapitalism – whose precondition is abundance – will not simply be a modified form of a complex market society
-
Today, the thing that is corroding capitalism
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is information
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the need is not for
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Once you understand the transition in this way
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the aim of which should be to expand those technologies, business models and behaviours that dissolve market forces, socialise knowledge, eradicate the need for work and push the economy towards abundance
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Plan – but a project
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the logical focus for supporters of postcapitalism is to build alternatives within the system
-
The main contradiction today is between the possibility of free, abundant goods and information; and a system of monopolies, banks and governments trying to keep things private, scarce and commercial
-
the struggle between the network and the hierarchy: between old forms of society moulded around capitalism and new forms of society that prefigure what comes next
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Is it utopian to believe we’re on the verge of an evolution beyond capitalism?
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why should we not form a picture of the ideal life, built out of abundant information, non-hierarchical work and the dissociation of work from wages?
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Jean-Christophe LatournerieThe red flags and marching songs of Syriza during the Greek crisis, plus the expectation that the banks would be nationalised, revived briefly a 20th-century dream: the forced destruction of the market from above.
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Jordan GoldmanThe red flags and marching songs of Syriza during the Greek crisis, plus the expectation that the banks would be nationalised, revived briefly a 20th-century dream: the forced destruction of the market from above.
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Astrofiammante .Without us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era. At the heart of further change to come is information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy. The old ways will take a long while to disappear, but it’s time to be utopian
Paul Mason postcapitalism sharing economy information economy
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26 Jul 15
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If I could summon one thing into existence for free it would be a global institution that modelled capitalism correctly: an open source model of the whole economy; official, grey and black. Every experiment run through it would enrich it; it would be open source and with as many datapoints as the most complex climate models.
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firecamalionWithout us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era. At the heart of further change to come is information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy. The old ways will take a long while to disappear, but it’s time to be utopian
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25 Jul 15
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24 Jul 15
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You can observe the truth of this in every e-business model ever constructed: monopolise and protect data, capture the free social data generated by user interaction, push commercial forces into areas of data production that were non-commercial before, mine the existing data for predictive value – always and everywhere ensuring nobody but the corporation can utilise the results.
-
-
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with the end of feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism’s replacement by postcapitalism will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started.
-
I believe it offers an escape route – but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and protected by a fundamental change in what governments do. And this must be driven by a change in our thinking – about technology, ownership and work. So that, when we create the elements of the new system, we can say to ourselves, and to others: “This is no longer simply my survival mechanism, my bolt hole from the neoliberal world; this is a new way o
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Marx imagined information coming to be stored and shared in something called a “general intellect” – which was the mind of everybody on Earth connected by social knowledge, in which every upgrade benefits everybody. In short, he had imagined something close to the information economy in which we live. And, he wrote, its existence would “blow capitalism sky high”.
...
With the terrain changed, the old path beyond capitalism imagined by the left of the 20th century is lost.
-
But a different path has opened up. Collaborative production, using network technology to produce goods and services that only work when they are free, or shared, defines the route beyond the market system.
-
creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being.
...
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Feudalism was an economic system structured by customs and laws about “obligation”. Capitalism was structured by something purely economic: the market. We can predict, from this, that postcapitalism – whose precondition is abundance – will not simply be a modified form of a complex market society. But we can only begin to grasp at a positive vision of what it will be like.
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I don’t mean this as a way to avoid the question: the general economic parameters of a postcapitalist society by, for example, the year 2075, can be outlined. But if such a society is structured around human liberation, not economics, unpredictable things will begin to shape it.
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Just as Shakespeare could not have imagined Doyce, so we too cannot imagine the kind of human beings society will produce once economics is no longer central to life. But we can see their prefigurative forms in the lives of young people all over the world bre
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The modern equivalent of the long stagnation of late feudalism is the stalled take-off of the third industrial revolution, where instead of rapidly automating work out of existence, we are reduced to creating what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs” on low pay. And many economies are stagnating.
The equivalent of the new source of free wealth? It’s not exactly wealth: it’s the “externalities” – the free stuff and wellbeing generated by networked interaction. It is the rise of non-market production, of unownable information, of peer networks and unmanaged enterprises. The internet, French economist Yann Moulier-Boutang says, is “both the ship and the ocean” when it comes to the modern equivalent of the discovery of the new world. In fact, it is the ship, the compass, the ocean and the gold.
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Once you understand the transition in this way, the need is not for a supercomputed Five Year Plan – but a project, the aim of which should be to expand those technologies, business models and behaviours that dissolve market forces, socialise knowledge, eradicate the need for work and push the economy towards abundance. I call it Project Zero – because its aims are a zero-carbon-energy system; the production of machines, products and services with zero marginal costs; and the reduction of necessary work time as close as possible to zero.
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If I am right, the logical focus for supporters of postcapitalism is to build alternatives within the system; to use governmental power in a radical and disruptive way; and to direct all actions towards the transition – not the defence of random elements of the old system. We have to learn what’s urgent, and what’s important, and that sometimes they do not coincide.
-
If I could summon one thing into existence for free it would be a global institution that modelled capitalism correctly: an open source model of the whole economy; official, grey and black. Every experiment run through it would enrich it; it would be open source and with as many datapoints as the most complex climate models.
-
The main contradiction today is between the possibility of free, abundant goods and information; and a system of monopolies, banks and governments trying to keep things private, scarce and commercial. Everything comes down to the struggle between the network and the hierarchy: between old forms of society moulded around capitalism and new forms of society that prefigure what comes next.
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It is the elites – cut off in their dark-limo world – whose project looks as forlorn as that of the millennial sects of the 19th century. The democracy of riot squads, corrupt politicians, magnate-controlled newspapers and the surveillance state looks as phoney and fragile as East Germany did 30 years ago.
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why should we not form a picture of the ideal life, built out of abundant information, non-hierarchical work and the dissociation of work from wages?
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Capitalism, it turns out, will not be abolished by forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which will break through, reshaping the economy around new values and behaviours. I call this postcapitalism.
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will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started
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First, it has reduced the need for work,
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not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all.
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Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant.
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Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy.
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Parallel currencies, time banks, cooperatives and self-managed spaces have proliferated, barely noticed by the economics profession, and often as a direct result of the shattering of the old structures in the post-2008 crisis.
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To mainstream economics such things seem barely to qualify as economic activity – but that’s the point.
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a whole business subculture has emerged over the past 10 years, which the media has dubbed the “sharing economy”.
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I believe it offers an escape route – but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and protected by a fundamental change in what governments do. And this must be driven by a change in our thinking – about technology, ownership and work. So that, when we create the elements of the new system, we can say to ourselves, and to others: “This is no longer simply my survival mechanism, my bolt hole from the neoliberal world; this is a new way of living in the process of formation.”
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we too cannot imagine the kind of human beings society will produce once economics is no longer central to life. B
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The modern day external shocks are clear: energy depletion, climate change, ageing populations and migration. They are altering the dynamics of capitalism and making it unworkable in the long term.
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as we saw in New Orleans in 2005, it does not take the bubonic plague to destroy social order and functional infrastructure in a financially complex and impoverished society.
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the logical focus for supporters of postcapitalism is to build alternatives within the system; to use governmental power in a radical and disruptive way; and to direct all actions towards the transition – not the defence of random elements of the old system. We have to learn what’s urgent, and what’s important, and that sometimes they do not coincide.
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The main contradiction today is between the possibility of free, abundant goods and information; and a system of monopolies, banks and governments trying to keep things private, scarce and commercial.
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Why do we, then, find it so hard to imagine economic freedom?
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But why should we not form a picture of the ideal life, built out of abundant information, non-hierarchical work and the dissociation of work from wages?
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Millions of people are beginning to realise they have been sold a dream at odds with what reality can deliver. Their response is anger – and retreat towards national forms of capitalism that can only tear the world apart. W
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grassroots NGO mapped the country’s food co-ops, alternative producers, parallel currencies and local exchange systems they found more than 70 substantive projects and hundreds of smaller initiatives ranging from squats to carpools to free kindergartens.
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the currency of postcapitalism: free time, networked activity and free stuff
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nformation is a machine for grinding the price of things lower and slashing the work time needed to support life on the planet.
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The knowledge content of products is becoming more valuable than the physical things that are used to produce them.
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You can observe the truth of this in every e-business model ever constructed: monopolise and protect data, capture the free social data generated by user interaction, push commercial forces into areas of data production that were non-commercial before, mine the existing data for predictive value – always and everywhere ensuring nobody but the corporation can utilise the results.
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The business models of all our modern digital giants are designed to prevent the abundance of information.
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big question becomes not one of “wages versus profits” but who controls what Marx called the “power of knowledge”
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Marx imagined information coming to be stored and shared in something called a “general intellect” – which was the mind of everybody on Earth connected by social knowledge, in which every upgrade benefits everybody
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they cannot reimpose the hierarchical, propaganda-driven and ignorant society of 50 years ago
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It would be, as sociologist Manuel Castells put it, like trying to de-electrify a country.
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We can predict, from this, that postcapitalism – whose precondition is abundance – will not simply be a modified form of a complex market society. But we can only begin to grasp at a positive vision of what it will be like.
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the thing that is corroding capitalism, barely rationalised by mainstream economics, is information.
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Most laws concerning information define the right of corporations to hoard it and the right of states to access it, irrespective of the human rights of citizens.
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the logical focus for supporters of postcapitalism is to build alternatives within the system; to use governmental power in a radical and disruptive way; and to direct all actions towards the transition – not the defence of random elements of the old system. We have to learn what’s urgent, and what’s important, and that sometimes they do not coincide.
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23 Jul 15
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Robert ParkerPostcapitalism: Starts a bit slow, but includes some fascinating history (Marx on the future of intelligent machines) http://t.co/cLJEFYFOQe
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notthis bodyAn excellent article by Paul Mason, author of Postcapitalism. A new world is indeed emerging and the heart of this... http://t.co/qpJ5GZgCf8
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