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London
Sunday Times
Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason
Dominic Lawson
I confess to an initial despondency on being asked to review this book by Paul Mason. The author is better known as the former BBC Newsnight economics editor who warned us night after night that George Osborne’s policies were incompatible with economic growth. More recently he has been the Channel 4 man on the Greek crisis, who wildly accused centre-right opponents of the Syriza regime of being “Nazi collaborators”. In other words, Mason is someone I wouldn’t trust in his analysis of the present, let alone the future. Yet his latest diatribe against capitalism has the intellectual rigour lacking in recent works by other fashionable critics, such as Owen Jones and (obviously) Russell Brand. This is a serious yet lucid attempt at a fundamental analysis of the 21st-century economic model — and he admits that what he calls (ad infinitum) “neo-liberalism” has done vastly more for the developing world than any previous system. His big argument is that this system carries the seeds of its own destruction, because it has created the information age, in which so much of what we want can be produced at zero cost, thus ruling out the need for profit. Bye-bye capitalism. For Mason, the company that shows the way forward is Wikipedia: “The biggest information product in the world —Wikipedia — is made by 27,000 volunteers for free...If it were run as a commercial site, Wikipedia’s revenue could be $2.8bn a year. Yet Wikipedia makes no profit. And in doing so it makes it almost impossible for anybody else to make a profit in the same space.” Here are some points Mason does not consider. The 27,000 volunteers can act in this way because they are part of the traditional economic model: they are paid for other labour and curate Wikipedia in their spare time (I am obliged to one of their number who has added the fact in Mason’s own Wikipedia entry, that the author is a former member of the Trotskyist Workers’ Power group). Second, the “unclaimed profit” of $2.8bn is utterly insignificant set against the real profits made in the conventional online economy. Third, there is nothing remotely new in the idea of information being free. Mason writes lovingly of Karl Marx doing his endless years of research in the British Library. But old Karl, like all the other users of that information source, did not pay a penny. And capitalism continued. Mason, as a good ex-Trot, is no admirer of the Stalinist version of Marxism in action. He understands just why critics of socialism such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek were absolutely correct in their forecast that centralised economic planning without markets would lead to disaster. Yet Mason remains a self-confessed promoter of “Utopianism”, as if he hadn’t realised that all such programmes from the French revolution onwards lead to ruthless repression of the allegedly antisocial forces (including the family unit). In his vision, there would be a deliberate policy of engineering high inflation in order to wipe out the real value of all debts to the wicked investors. As he admits: “To be brutally clear, this would reduce the value of assets in pension funds and thus the material wealth of the middle classes and the old.” Good luck with getting that one past the electorate. The real problem for Mason, and others of his persuasion, is their conflict with human nature. Thus he writes: “The third principle I want to insist on is: the transition is not just about economics. It will have to be a human transition.” How much blood has been spilt in this cause — all in the name of progress, of course.
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