Something worth fighting for.

An essay on Paul Masons’s book, Postcapitalism: a guide to our future.

My earliest political memory is watching telly a day or two after Margaret Thatcher was elected. I was nine, at home in a village a few miles outside Derby. She’s in a fruit and veg market somewhere in England, ‘doing the shopping’ for the cameras, giving some produce the onceover while asking a few questions. The stallholder tells her the price of some spuds. “They’re expensive, aren’t they!” she says in that distinctive voice. Her myth, the grocer’s daughter, one even a nine year old could understand, balancing the household budget to balancing the nation’s finances, and back again. Common sense, isn’t it? Stands to reason.

Thirty-five years later, I’m sat at my desk in Brooklyn, New York, staring into space. How did we get here from there? Quibbling over the price of potatoes to $300 trillion of global debt. And, where are we going?

For the first few years after the financial crisis I was, as John Lanchester coined, a “kinda-sorta guy”. I kind of, sort of, understood the financial crisis, thinking it’ll probably work itself out, eventually. I remember saying that to my Mum when she told me she had a savings account at Northern Rock. Gradually, through reading writers like John Lanchester, this changed until one day I read, “vanilla mezzanine synthetic residential mortgage backed security credit default swap” without glazing over, and understood that quantitative easing is like paying for my dinner by writing $40 on a paper napkin. It felt simultaneously enlightening and profoundly disorientating.

Then Syriza landed the Greek election. I hadn’t been following Greek politics that closely, but I was curious, they were saying something clear and direct, in contrast to the standard technocratic obfuscation, and, they had won, in a world where the left acts like it wants to protest more than it wants power. The day after, I downloaded Yannis Varoufakis’s “Europe After the Minotaur”, it was free, (we’ll be coming back to that), then found myself reading his “Foundations of Economics”, (quite expensive, for a book), which I wish I’d had when I took my economics degree. By then I was hooked on Paul’s reporting from Greece, from his Twitter feed I discovered the straight-talking Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who writes for The Telegraph, not my natural home, and numerous other websites and blogs, but eventually that wasn’t enough and I was mainlining the Guardian’s rolling news feed direct from the Eurogroup negotiations.

This stretch of wide reading coincided with a pause, after ten years making ends meet mixing entrepreneurship and precarious, freelance self-unemployment in advertising, a sense of ennui had descended. Add in the previous ten as a salaried employee, twenty odd years total, as Weber warned becoming, ‘a little cog in the machine pathetically obsessed with becoming a bigger cog’, because as Mark Grief writes, ‘the allure of joining the powerful can feel superior to the satisfactions of being undeceived and critical (and struggling always from the margins)’.

For all the talk of ‘change’ and ‘making the world better’ in mainstream business, actually everyone wants to keep things pretty much as they are, everything’s been reduced to a cost/benefit analysis; single bottom line becomes triple bottom line, these are the measured interests you serve. Critical thinking and new ideas are effortlessly absorbed into keeping the corporate status quo, themes explored by Tom McCarthy in his despairing satire ‘Satin Island’. Who needs a satirical novel when you can be in a meeting where it’s proposed to the world’s largest manufacturer of household cleaning products they “send free cleaning supplies to Occupy Zuccotti Park”. It’s just another spectacle to co-opt.

Looking out of my window, telling myself I need to urgently figure out a plan, at the very least set a course, and I need some pointers. If any of this sounds remotely familiar to you, then it’s a good reason to read Paul Mason’s new book, “Postcapitalism: a guide to our future”.

In it we find the fundamentals we take for granted that holds society together, such as working for wages and paying for stuff, will be dissolved by technology. But, rather than leading to a dystopian collapse as we are prone to imagine, there is an opportunity to transition into an elevated, creative, socially just civilization.

Looking around at the state we are in this might sound hopelessly fanciful, but what’s compelling about the book is the disparate threads of intellectual thought, and market signals, that at its crux, describes a route out of scarcity to a world of abundance. The book calls for a systemic change, at the end of it you’re going to have to ask yourself do you carry on as you are, whether that’s in the margins, the mainstream, or in between. Or, do you become part of the change too.

I’ve been wrestling with it for over a week, often having to re-re-re-read a passage in Part 2 as the text bounces off the ossified economic conditioning instilled at childhood and reinforced every single day by the culture around us. Every time I’ve picked up the book, I’ve got another ‘a-ha’ moment out of it. It’s a bracing read because it ‘blows sky high’ many of the working assumptions in contemporary day-to-day business life. We’re too willing to accept mainstream supply and demand economics being presented as self-evident laws. We tend to take it as given the price we secure, and thus the profit we make, is determined by choices in an efficient marketplace. Perhaps not.

It’s a book that requires close reading, and one that’s asking the reader to make their own mind up and contribute. So it’s in this spirit that I write this essay, as a general reader riffing on themes in the book, not as a qualified reviewer but as a freelancer in the ‘precariat’, as someone who is going to have to figure out how to make a living through all this.

And most of all, I write this as someone who is fed up with glossed-over, business-as-usual corporate capitalism, from Amazon to Virgin, that, like water, has seeped into all facets of life its become almost impossible to avoid, even companies with more lofty ideals, about leaving it ‘better than they found it’, are often playing the game of exploitation, with a social conscience.

The central premise of the book is that ‘capitalism is a complex, adaptive system that that has reached the limits of its capacity to adapt’. What follows is a three-part book that explains why, and, offers a roadmap towards what can only be uncharted and uncertain territory, for which Paul proposes a way to negotiate.

The first hundred or so pages are a critique of neoliberalism, that’s to say, the economic system initiated by the governments of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in response to the collapse of Keynesianism in the mid-late ‘70’s. More than just criticism, it’s where you begin to understand how the contradictions within neoliberalism create the conditions for postcapitalism.

Why a hundred pages? Because like the economist Charles Kindleberger, who he quotes on the first page leading in, Paul takes a broad historical approach to understand how we got here. It’s a dive into the economic and social history of industrial capitalism, pin-pointing when and how industrial capitalism did create miraculous growth, and where it started to go off. It doesn’t let up, you get the feeling from the writing that he just wants to get it all out once and for all. Rattling along, from resurrecting dissident Soviet economists analysis of capitalism’s long wave cycles, to illustrating the role of the state in the post-war boom. From the oil crisis’s effect on industrial relations and innovation, to revealing the peculiar ouroborosian quality of contemporary credit-boom capitalism, and the subsequent irrationality of trying to fix market failures, with the market.

There’s a joke in Russia, referring to the old Soviet days, ‘everything they told us about communism was a lie, everything they told us about capitalism is true’. With this in mind Part 1 ends with a sequence of graphs, drawing on a range of financial data, (e.g. GDP, income, money supply, employment data, and more), that one can almost feel him slapping down on the table in quick succession, saying, ‘…and if you still don’t believe what I’ve written, look at these’, which, to my mind, are unequivocal and conclusively prove his main proposition, neoliberalism is ‘a busted model on life support’.

A set of these graphs in your back pocket could be handy, next time someone evokes the ‘trickle down effect’ pull out the comparison of average income in the U.S. between the top 1% and the rest of us, from circa 1980 to date, and ask, ‘after thirty-five years when do you anticipate it will kick in?’

Neoliberals quite rightly point out the stratospheric increase in GDP/person since 1950 but what they then omit to say is that, as Daniel Plainview said, ‘I drink your milkshake’.

Similarly with ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’, or, ‘life is like a box of cornflakes, shake it and the biggest flakes rise to the top’, (than’que, Boris..), pull out the graph from World Bank economist Branko Milanovic’s analysis of global income distribution. True, globalization has significantly increased, in percentage terms, the real incomes of the bottom two thirds of the world’s population. A Bangladeshi parent raising a family on subsistence farming, with all the risks of crop failure, malnutrition, disease and death is lifted into a steady job at a garment factory, paying 28 US cents an hour. But that U-shaped hole is everyone between the developing world and the super-rich, who have gained almost nothing from capitalism in the last twenty years.

Could neoliberalism be simply summed up as; some people will do very well out of this, an awful lot of people won’t, are you ok with that?

But could it all be coming to an end, the evidence Paul lays out in Part 1 strongly suggests capitalism’s extinction. You might think this all sounds a bit far fetched, but, there is nothing to suggest capitalism is permanent, it did after all emerge out of the ashes of feudalism. There is nothing to say it doesn’t have a beginning, a middle, and an end, except for those who have a vested interest in its continuation, and that we “keep calm and carry on”.

But should we? The financial conditions for another ’08 style crash have been reassembled, except this time there are ‘no more Q.E bullets left in the clip’. Here we are in 2015 and still no regulatory separation between high-street banking and casino banking. How is that? Even Nigel Lawson, interviewed on BBC radio a couple of weeks ago, was advocating it. Is there any other reason than financial vested interests own politics? The consequences of another financial crash are, in Paul’s words, “truly frightening”.

Part 1 ends with a question. What will emerge from this shattered dream? If the new economic system has to be built from what we have to hand, can it be capitalism?

Part 2, as creative departments of ad agencies the world over like to say, is where ‘the heavy lifting’ is done. Except unlike creative departments of ad agencies the world over, it destroys the basic law of economics, exposes the scale of the bargain we make every time we turn up to work, and establishes the factors that lead to a zero production cost society.

It starts with a story about the development of the turbofan to illustrate the rise of ‘informational goods’. We’ve come a long way from metal pressing to ‘growing’ metal crystals in the lab, from blueprints to CAD, from test flights to computer simulated stress tests. Which leads him to ask the multi-billion dollar question, ‘how much of the value lies in the materials used to make it, how much in the labour, and how much in the IT embedded?’

Drawing on the work of Peter Drucker, Paul Romer, and an extraordinarily prophetic Karl Marx, (but not the Marx you’re familiar with), Paul writes, we are witnessing information technology’s corrosion of the markets ability to form prices, which means ultimately the marketplace will dissolve.

How? Once information technology has been created, as Romer called it “the set of instructions”, production can be automated without labour, resulting in zero marginal costs and abundant, unlimited supply. More prosaically, the machine can just keep churning the stuff out indefinitely while we could be productively engaged in innumerable worthwhile activities; caring for family, reading the great novels, expressing your own creativity for its own sake, volunteering, playing sport, or just hanging out with friends. Whatever you wanted to do. This sounds appealing, but, the consequences are not only will wages disappear, so will profit, the very essence of capitalism will evaporate.

No work and free stuff? Sounds too good to be true! There’s been an imminent resource crisis since I was at primary school, and (cheap) energy is the primary driver of economic growth. Going forward couldn’t the rising price of finite raw materials upset the apple cart? I understand the current effects of “free”, in the context of music, publishing, entertainment, Wikipedia, open source, and so on, but looking around my apartment it’s difficult to immediately grasp in all the tangible stuff we consume or use every day, like food, the fridge, clothes, or transport.

Yes, we’re decades away from the world of wage-less work and free basic goods, but, what the book identifies are the catalysts around us that are setting the process in motion and we either act now, or we will be acted upon.

Before diving into the unknown I found it helpful to step back and think about some of the things I take for granted. When I buy something I assume the price reflects the cost of raw materials, energy, machinery and work needed to make it, plus some profit on top for the business owner. In a free market whether I choose to pay the price comes down to a complex negotiation between my needs, wants and desires, my values, and the persuasiveness of the marketing, I think. And it’s here that Paul would possibly want to interrupt and question my assumptions, I think it would be ringing his marginalist alarm bell.

For twenty years I’ve sat in meetings about marketing and advertising and often heard someone say words to the effect of, ‘the brand allows a product to trade at a premium in the marketplace’, ‘a brand creates more profit’, ‘a brand creates a monopoly of the mind’, to which everyone seems to agree.

These beliefs stem from Leon Walras’s theory of marginal utility, that price is determined by ‘usefulness and quantity nothing else’, and, that ‘value is the extra bit you want to buy, not the product’. Every so often this then gets repackaged into new jargon, for example, ‘branded utility’ got traction when apps were first emerging. Marginalists see profit as the reward for the usefulness, and I’d add, the seductiveness of the product they are selling.

Brand value from a marginalist’s perspective would be the ‘extra bit’, the story weaved around the product, or service, (or increasingly, product and service combined), that you identify with, and that says something about you to the outside world. The thing you want more than keeping the money in your pocket. There is one area advertisers don’t agree with marginalists, that consumers are always rational actors. We’re all highly susceptible to emotional string-pulling, as behavorial economists like to point out we don’t always make decisions in our best interests. (There’s a nuanced debate to be had about emotional responses being perfectly ‘rational’, but I think these are more non-market scenarios.)

What the postcapitalist would observe is advertisers do not understand how profit is generated, and, have reduced the psychology of purchasing to a balance between pleasure and pain, gains and losses, a highly individualistic view of the world. More bluntly mainstream advertising in theory and in practice is amoral. At least some people are honest enough to say it. According to Peter Theil in his book ‘Zero to One’, brands can be concerned with right and wrong, but only when a business is ‘successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence’. More often self-deception comes into play, for example, as part of their CSR initiatives a retailer might sponsor a kids after school program, which will be integrated into checkpoint displays, all the while subtly marketing to kids under the cloak of social responsibility.

I’ve jumped the gun, in terms of how the book is ordered, but I think it’s useful to consider going forward that the system we take as given is an ideology, not an immutable law. As Paul writes marginal utility theory is rooted in scarcity not abundance, and this is a fatal flaw in the emerging world of abundant informational goods, where the market cannot form prices, it cannot explain what’s happening.

So what is happening?

To find out this means taking a trip back to Karl Marx, but not the Marx of the class struggle. Ten years after writing the Communist Manifesto he turned his eyes to the productive power of machines and businesses natural inclination to increase profit through gains in productivity i.e. design and build better machines. In the long run it’s an easier route to profit than extending the working day or squeezing more out of your workforce.

Look at it this way, for all his grinning likeability, Jeff Bezos runs Amazon much like an austere 18th century mill owner, every minute of a warehouse operative’s working day fine tuned for maximum output and pushed to the limit, up to the point of resistance, which these (no union) days might come in the form of bad press, which will then be denied, usually by someone with a friendly face…Rather than participate in the charade, which makes everyone feel a bit crap, instead, invent robot packers and delivery drones that do away with human labour.

Current estimates suggest about half of all jobs could be automated. On the basis that my spending is someone else’s wages and their spending is someone else’s wages, and so on, if half of all jobs disappear and their wages with it, how can consumer capitalism continue? The business-as-usual answer is something along the lines of ‘capitalism’s extraordinary ability to innovate and adapt’. Right, but never at this scale.

Rather than trying to create jobs for half the workforce, which would be necessary to have a functioning economy for everyone, the alternative is create a model that frees us from the drudgery of the rat race and turns work into a mixture of market and non-market work that you want to do. Sound hopelessly utopian? It might, but consider the truly utopian stance is to think we can carry on as we are, refer back to Part 1, and expect it’ll work itself out, eventually.

How might the collapse of capitalism not lead to crisis? This hinges on basic goods and services becoming free, and the labour time this liberates transitioning to open, collaborative market and non-market activity. For goods to become free we’d have to remove the source of profit and the cost of inputs and raw materials.

Starting with labour and profit.

In the mainstream business world, in the day-to-day conversations, price is seen as something that established in the marketplace, an equilibrium reached as a function of fluctuations in supply, demand, competitive activity, effectiveness of the marketing etc. But there isn’t anything that explains the intrinsic price before the product is dropped into the market and haggled over. This is where the theory of labor value comes in useful.

At its simplest, it says the work needed to make something determines how much it is worth. Marx thought this was missing something crucial, and introduced the idea of ‘socially necessary hours’.

Imagine a salaried employee, let’s say a mid-level executive at Google. There’s a certain amount of things they need to get them to their desk every morning. Food, clothing, housing, transport, some leisure activities, pension, healthcare, kids college fund, and so on. You can express this as cash needed to meet their obligations, and their monthly salary will reflect it, assuming the economy is stable.

Put money to one side, another way of looking at it is labour hours, that is the labour hours it took from everyone else spread across society to produce all the stuff they needed to get them to work. Herein lies a problem; we know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

None of us actually know how many ‘socially necessary hours’ were necessary to get us to work last week, next week or this year. The only thing we know is it is significantly less than the amount of hours you ended up working, perhaps half. The difference between the two, the ‘surplus value of labor’ is ‘the motherlode from which all profit is mined’. If you’re lucky this is the bargain you get to make, a comfortable salary and the ‘security’ of a job, in exchange the employer takes all of the upside. We intuitively know this, why else would pretty much everyone I know be either freelance or entrepreneuring, but is there any escape? Freelance is the same model, without the security, and entrepreneuring offers a route out, depending on how it’s financed, who by, and the company ownership structure.

Once you start looking for the mechanism you start to see it everywhere. Walk into a bar in Manhattan and you’ll see groups of friends glued to their phones, busy at work in the ‘social factory’ swiping left or right looking for a date, while donating surplus value to Tinder in the form of personal data.

The oft-cited flaw in the theory is it can’t account for skills. This essay is taking me more labour hours than I’d like and I know isn’t exactly up to Geoff Dyer’s standards. Marx would simply create a multiple to calculate higher skills. These, and other objections are dealt with in the book, you’ll have to make your own mind up.

I wouldn’t go as far to say all profit is theft, but I would suggest it is in our interests to try and understand more clearly what our ‘socially necessary hours’ are, in the bigger pyramid scheme of things. Interestingly, Paul points out one market signal that illuminates where employers are paying workers below their average labor value is when some of the inputs are provided for free. Which reminds me of the one time I had a ‘free lunch’ in Google’s canteen, it was very good. When I mentioned this to a friend she told me about a law firm that thoughtfully provided beds at the office, rather like the Chinese factories that provide dormitories for workers. All we need to complete the circle is Vice Media to film an expose.

So why do it? Why work in this way? Because we have to, if we want to eat. Some of this is a system of sticks and carrots from above. The workless are vilified and forced into low-wage jobs, while wealth creating entrepreneurs are given tax incentives and government loans. And some of this is created between ourselves in the ways too numerous to mention. Look at how we fetishize property, ‘getting on the ladder’, weighing ourselves down with a massive debt, the ‘dead pledge’, on an illiquid asset that requires a monthly cash payment, the real winners in this trade being the creditor and the employer. Sure, you get some equity at the end of it all, but is it worth the price you paid? Who’s getting all the upside?

So the point is this, regardless of the ‘fairness’ of the bargain between employee and employer, it is the source of profit and automation will remove it. What incentive will there be for the materially minded, capitalist entrepreneur? Will they also fade away?

Moving onto free machines.

When Marx realized capitalism will look to increase efficiency and productivity by building better machines, his far-sighted thinking carried him all the way through to perceiving the knowledge embedded in the ever improving machines, the sum total of all the public science, collective human ingenuity, experience, and flashes of individual brilliance, was, he wrote, ‘social’, a consequence of networks of relationships.

As Marx saw it the big question would not be the tension between wages and profits, but, who controls the power of this social knowledge, and that ultimately capitalism will collapse because it cannot exist alongside freely available shared knowledge. Unless of course capital finds ways to ring-fence it, that we collaborate in, Google, Spotify, Uber, Facebook et al.

Perhaps it’s a fair exchange, who notices the ads anyway? Except to be mildly irritated that they relate to a search I made earlier that’s no longer relevant. As a Google executive recently said, ‘you’re statistically more likely to have twins than click on an ad’, which is ironic considering their business model. What we do know is their valuation comes from capturing freely given data, generated by consumer behavior, so, for as long as there is consumer behavior that needs to be captured, they’re in business. What happens when basic goods are free? Are there brands? Is there any advertising?

Left to its own devices how might capitalism respond to the rise of info-tech? Monopolies will mine every facet of life for data, cartels will maintain artificial prices for raw materials, the rise of micro service markets and the ‘gig economy’. A world where every aspect of life will become commercialized. Imagine a world where liberated hipster couples upload professionally produced films of them having sex to a subscription website, marketed under the auspices of ‘making love not porn’, then think about that in the context of ‘surplus value of labour’.

Some people think this is a good thing. Peter Theil’s MBA lectures at Stanford teach budding tech entrepreneurs to create monopolies because they are, “the condition of every successful business”. He writes, “Apple’s monopoly profits from the iPhone were the reward for creating greater abundance, and not artificial scarcity”, that, “monopoly profits provide a powerful incentive to innovate” and, competition is a “relic of history”.

This is a somewhat partial reading of Apple’s success. As Marianna Mazzucato revealed each of the iPhones core technologies came from government-funded research. Their profits, to some extent, come from free riding on taxpayer’s creating the new market, which is ironic when you consider tech companies reputation, and Peter Thiel’s opinions, on sharing those rewards through paying corporation tax.

Even if jobs are automated and machines eventually become free, we are still left with the problem of energy and raw materials. What about all day-to-day essentials we have to actually make from materials; food, housing, transport, medicine? You can’t just copy and paste an organic potato, can you? The danger is you end up being the person standing next to Stephenson and his Rocket saying, “That’s all very well but it’s not the Japanese bullet train is it?”

Ten years ago, with a hotel client, I travelled to Richmond, Virginia to spend a day with pioneering eco architect Bill McDonough. We’d read “Cradle to Cradle” and were curious to hear more about his ideas for green buildings. At one point he mentioned a project he’d been working on for Ford, developing a car that at the end of its working life could be reused, by, as he put it at the time, “driven into a green chemistry bath, dissolving the machine to extract the raw materials, which would float off and collect in their relevant groups”. Hmmm, I thought at the time. Today The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, with a handful of the world’s largest corporations, and Bill, is pioneering the circular economy to make that regenerative vision a reality by redesigning supply chains and product lifecycles so that materials and resources are reused and never disposed.

Combine this with automation, renewable energy, 3-D printing, and the ‘internet of things’, where legacy infrastructure becomes ‘intelligent’, and I can begin to see how copy and paste reproduction could become a reality in the world of tangible products, thus driving the marginal costs of production to zero.

Ok, but how might info-tech work for food? That feels like a tougher problem because production is so labor intensive. The first question I have is are we maximizing the genetic potential of the seeds we already have? Put another way, are we maximizing the inherent information technology embedded and coded in by nature?

When I plant lettuce in my garden the packet estimates harvest to be around fifty to sixty days, that’s assuming I don’t harvest some young leaves, or suffer crop failure. Aerofarms hydroponics, operating out of a converted nightclub in New Jersey, claim a full crop cycle in sixteen days. Some of this is down to the intensity, climate controlled, pest-free perfection of the growing space, and, some of this is down to harnessing the data they collect from growing each crop and iterating.

In the 1980’s a remarkable French priest in Madagascar developed a simple system for improving the yield of rice on conventional, labor intensive, small farms. It involves planting, weeding, composting and irrigation techniques and timing. Yields quadrupled, and since then the system for rice intensification has spread to the major rice producing countries in the global south, with around 10 million farmers adopting it. On average, yield per hectare is about 40% higher than conventionally grown rice i.e. intensive, with synthetic chemicals and higher water use. Famously, one rice farmer in India pulled in a world record of 22.4 tons per hectare, much to China’s chagrin. While no micro chips were involved it is still an example of analog, collaborative, open source thinking. How could these labour saving and input reducing techniques, and others like them, become part of what Marx called ‘the general intellect’.

I write this as a precursor GMO crops, because there is something to be said about doing better with the materials at hand.

Farming is in crisis. This isn’t some possible catastrophic breakdown; this is an industry that to date has eroded 50% of the planets topsoil, since the end of WW2. Without topsoil there is no life on the planet. Supporters of industrial agriculture say no other system can deliver the yields necessary to feed nine billion people, even taking into account ecocidal chemicals and habitat destruction. Advocates like Mark Lynas think crop yields per acre are in good shape, critics like Jeremy Grantham think they’re declining and coupled with population growth we are going to starve.

Personally I think there is, to borrow a phrase of Paul’s, a “rational case for panic”. He thinks it’s for global warming, I think it’s for food and farming.

I believe there is a case to be made for GM crops, on three conditions. First, the technology is completely removed from the monopolist private sphere to a non-market system, funded and regulated by government agencies, with oversight. Second, there is a comprehensive independent review on the risks, and not some “billions of meals with GM food have been eaten” flimflam that proves nothing, other than GMO’s are not immediately poisonous. And third, if safe, GM technology should be free at point of use.

GM crops might be safe, but I don’t trust the same corporation who told me pesticides were safe to now be telling me GMO’s are safe, oh, and by the way it also means we can cut back on those nasty pesticides. GMO corporations and lobbyists have been so utterly incompetent at communicating the potential benefits of GM seeds, and obfuscating on the risks, that they’ve irrevocably lost the trust of the population.

But there some studies worth considering, Rothamstead research facility in the UK, and the Cornell University/Bangladeshi government run BtBrinjal trials. There are good reasons and circumstances where GM crops would make sense if conventional methods are failing i.e. drought resistance plants. I’d like to find out, just not from vested interests.

The battleground in agriculture is one sign of a broader trend, to quote directly from the book.

The technological direction of this revolution is at odds with its social direction. Technologically, we are headed for zero-priced goods, unmeasurable work, an exponential take off in productivity and the extensive automation of physical processes. Socially we are trapped in a world of monopolies, inefficiency, the ruins of a finance dominated free market and a proliferation of ‘bullshit jobs’.

Today the main contradiction in modern capitalism is between the possibility of free, abundant socially produced goods, and a system of monopolies, banks and governments struggling to maintain control over power and information. That is, everything is pervaded by a fight between network and hierarchy.

The third and final part of the book concerns the transition to postcapitalism, as he calls it project zero.

He writes we need something better than the market to allocate goods and something better than the finance system to allocate capital and measure value between the market and non-market sectors. Unfortunately the only experience we have is the disaster of communism and the rise of capitalism to its present state.

It ranges from things you’d expect such as regulating rent seeking info-tech monopolies, to the more unexpected, such as stabilizing the financial system while promoting complex tradable instruments that progress the economy to high automation, low work and abundant cheap or free goods and services.

Thinking through the detail, to what it might mean as someone who’s got to figure out how to make a living within this change, is the next stage. The area of project zero that caught my imagination most was the modeling and the signals we send.

My assumption has been economic modeling is a sophisticated dark art where geeks at the central banks take masses of data and perform feats of high-level mathematics to guide the nation through economic uncertainty. Actually, it turns out our weather predicting models are like this, but relatively speaking, our economic modeling has more in common with a friends’ grandfather farmer, who predicted it would rain the next day if he saw one of his dogs eating some grass.

So there is a huge and fascinating open source project going begging, to collect real economic activity in real time, analyze billions of bits of data, and from this be able to model new outcomes before executing them in the real world.

We would for instance see the true cost of production for an iPhone and it’s retail price.

We would know exactly where and how the surplus value of labour is being mined. We might decide to pay the retail price, or not. A keen eyed entrepreneur might develop a non-exploitative smart phone to compete with Apple. It’s impossible to say how much of Apple’s profits come from the mental monopoly it creates through its brand, but Mason puts his finger on it by pointing out how high-information-content goods’ value is dependent on socially produced ideas, the brand, and that we willingly collude in it. They only exist for as long as we believe in them, that makes them fragile.

For me, this idea of transparent modeling, fused with propagating an understanding of the postcapitalist phenomenon. Referencing Weber’s belief that capitalism was driven by the spirit of a ‘new attitude’, I think this touches on an area I felt was unexplored in the book and feels to me like a important part of the process.

In the 1990’s psychologist Shalom Schwartz pioneered some social psychology research into cultural values, the core finding is the split between ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ values.

Intrinsic values are:

Affiliation — to have satisfying relationships

Self-acceptance — to feel competent and autonomous

Community feeling — to participate in socially creative projects

Benevolence — preserving and enhancing the welfare of others

Universalism — tolerance and understanding, welfare for all people and nature

Extrinsic values are:

Conformity — to fit in

Image — how one is perceived by others, body, looks, clothing etc.

$ success — materially successful compared to others

Achievement — personal success according to social standards

Power — status and prestige

Consumer capitalism is driven by, and drives, extrinsic values. They’re inherent in all of us, and, the more they’re triggered the more entrenched and automatic they become. The challenge to postcapitalist’s will be persuasively communicating a ‘new attitude’ with intrinsic values, and one that can compete with the old ideas. That will require some huge leaps of imagination and creativity. Where conventional brands sell us visions of paradise but don’t sell anything that actually might help anyone get there, postcapitalist marketing, if that’s the right term, would be rooted in goods, services and experiences that actually do what they say. It will challenge what we’ve all silently agreed “aspiration” to mean. It won’t be enough to simply state the ‘social good’ or explain their virtues. How to communicate this with charm, sophistication, wit, self-deprecation, intensity — through emotions — so that it can compete with extrinsically driven values is the imaginative challenge, and something this book has got me thinking about.

So, for this reader, Paul’s book marks a turning point. In it he describes a project that is worth working towards, that the most effective pioneers of capitalism were also ‘unashamed utopians’. So there’s the choice; a shuffling foot soldier in the neoliberal project, or, a life working towards something beyond yourself.