by ROB LUCAS
IMAGE/Amazon
Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism is an ambitious book, spanning economic history and theory, the trajectory of socialism, diagnosis of the crisis-prone present and a strategic vision for the future. [1] It is also an unusual one, treating topics typically ceded to left antiquarians with a free spirit that aims to build a grandiose historical-theoretical construction out of insights from Mises and Marx, Luxemburg and Hayek, Preobrazhensky and Gorz. And a best-seller—a notable feat for a work that covers such ground; due in part, perhaps, to Mason’s high visibility as economics editor at the bbc and Channel 4. Born in Lancashire in 1960, the son of a lorry driver and a primary school headmistress, Mason claims to have become ‘a Marxist at 16, a Trotskyist at 19’. He studied music and politics at Sheffield, starting an academic career in music in the early 1980s before switching to journalism. By the time of the late-90s dot.com bubble he was deputy editor of Computer Weekly, then joined bbc Newsnight as business editor, his first broadcast discussing the economic fallout of the 11 September attacks. In 2013 he moved to Channel 4. In these posts he has become a household name in Britain, known for his ruffled pieces-to-camera from the frontline of global uprisings. But he has straddled the range of media from tv and radio to newspaper columns, blogs, with a prominent Twitter and Facebook presence, and a novel set in China’s Wild West. This year he went freelance to engage with the ‘space opening up where the left of social democracy meets the radical left, green and autonomist politics’, unbeholden to the constraints of mainstream media, and has been a prominent commentator on the uk’s successive crises. Mason’s political positions have been oddly ambidextrous: supportive of Corbyn, Occupy and student protests—yet also seeming to call for an upgrade of uk nuclear weapons against the threat of Russian submarines and for the bombing of Assad. If there is a systematic explanation for such eclecticism, he has not yet offered it.
Mason’s first book was Live Working or Die Fighting (2007), an engaging juxtaposition of episodes from the historic workers’ movement with scenes of contemporary class revolt: Peterloo in 1819 and Shenzhen in 2003; Paris in 1871 and Amukoko in 2005. The aim was to furnish alter-globo activists and the newly global working class with a sense of the sweep of the workers’ movement the first time around. Without undue optimism or any assumption of mere repetition, Mason nonetheless looked forward to a workers’ movement to come. In 2008 his reporting placed him outside Lehman Brothers as it collapsed, and he drew on such experiences in Meltdown (2009), again entwining journalism with a longer view. Tracking from Lehman to the beginnings of Eurozone turbulence, Mason dipped into the prehistory of the crisis in deregulation, neoliberal ideology and global imbalances. He identified information technology as the driving force behind the neoliberal moment, and as signalling a rupture in the regular cycles of capitalist growth—a technological theme that gained prominence in Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere (2012), which turned again to vivid portraits of social struggles, surveying the 2010–12 global explosion. Mason found his answers in the emergence of educated but disenfranchised youth, newly networked through technologies that enabled spontaneous, horizontal modes of organizing.
Postcapitalism develops these themes into a striking synthesis. Starting again from the collapse of Lehman, the argument is built through ten interlinked chapters, each raising a question for the next, moving from economic-historical panorama, through the effects of an ascendant ‘information’, to issues of transitions and programmes. What lay at the root of 2008? Neoliberalism’s internal contradictions—financialization and wage stagnation; a resulting rupture between lending and saving; global imbalances between import- and export-focused economies—all riding on a fiat currency premised upon the legitimacy of the us state, which enabled the Fed to generate ‘wave after wave of false signals from the future’. The situation has been stabilized by bailouts, zero interest rates and $12 trillion in quantitative easing, with the costs transferred to wage-earners. But since this model increases financial fragility, it has paved the way for the next crisis—without the possibility of comparable bailouts. Real wages are still falling, while the shadow-banking sector has grown, and debt is three times global gdp. Meanwhile, technology has enabled people to rebel and ‘opened whole areas of economic life to the possibility of collaboration and production beyond the market’.
How did this situation come about? Mason sets himself the task of locating it in ‘a picture of capitalism’s overall destiny’, drawing on the rough fifty-year waves that Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratieff perceived in the 1920s, from technological roll-outs through wars and revolutions to slowdowns, financialization and depression, and which he explained—echoing Marx—in terms of a cyclical need to renew infrastructures. There have, Mason thinks, been four so far: 1790–1848, 1848–mid-1890s, 1890s–1945 and late-1940s–2008, each involving a long upswing, a crisis and a downturn. Mason’s talent for synopsis is exemplified here in his sketch of debates around Kondratieff’s work. Trotsky argued that conjunctural, political factors were more important than economic ones in determining capitalism’s rhythms, and that the real curve to be understood was not waves within capitalist history, but the trajectory of capitalism as such. For the economist V. E. Bogdanov, the problem with Kondratieff’s theory was that it didn’t take account of interactions with the non-capitalist world; for Miron Nachimson, it was a challenge to the Bolshevik faith in capitalism’s imminent doom. Appropriated by Schumpeter and his followers, attacked by Samuelson, Kondratieff waves have been disputed since. Doubt was cast by the discovery that statistical smoothings of even random data produce wave patterns, but Mason appeals to research by Andrey Korotayev and Sergey Tsirel that finds them in unsmoothed gdp figures.
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