Paul Mason

But the long-term prospects for capitalism are bleak. According to the OECD, growth in the developed world will be ‘weak’ for the next fifty years. Inequality will rise by 40 per cent. Even in the developing countries, the current dynamism will be exhausted by 2060.

Ditching neoliberalism is the easy part. There’s a growing consensus among protest movements, radical economists and radical political parties in Europe as to how you do it: suppress high finance, reverse austerity, invest in green energy and promote high-waged work.
But then what?
As the Greek experience demonstrates, any government that defies austerity will instantly clash with the global institutions that protect the 1 per cent. After the radical left party Syriza won the election in January 2015, the European Central Bank, whose job was to promote the stability of Greek banks, pulled the plug on those banks, triggering a €20 billion run on deposits. That forced the left-wing government to choose between bankruptcy and submission. You will find no minutes, no voting records, no explanation for what the ECB did. It was left to the right-wing German newspaper Stern to explain: they had ‘smashed’ Greece.3 It was done, symbolically, to reinforce the central message of neoliberalism that there is no alternative; that all routes away from capitalism end in the kind of disaster that befell the Soviet Union; and that a revolt against capitalism is a revolt against a natural and timeless order.

To replace neoliberalism we need something just as powerful and effective; not just a bright idea about how the world could work but a new, holistic model that can run itself and tangibly deliver a better outcome. It has to be based on micro-mechanisms, not diktats or policies; it has to work spontaneously.

Capitalism is more than just an economic structure or a set of laws and institutions. It is the whole system – social, economic, demographic, cultural, ideological – needed to make a developed society function through markets and private ownership. That includes companies, markets and states. But it also includes criminal gangs, secret power networks, miracle preachers in a Lagos slum, rogue analysts on Wall Street. Capitalism is the Primark factory that collapsed in Bangladesh and it is the rioting teenage girls at the opening of the Primark store in London, overexcited at the prospect of bargain clothes.

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 breaks through, reshaping the economy around new values, behaviours and norms. As with feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism’s demise will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started.

Postcapitalism is possible because of three impacts of the new technology in the past twenty-five years.
First, information technology has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages.
Second, information goods are corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies on a scale not seen in the past 200 years – yet these cannot last.
Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organizations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy. The biggest information product in the world – Wikipedia – is made by 27,000 volunteers, for free, abolishing the encyclopaedia business and depriving the advertising industry of an estimated $3 billion a year in revenue.

info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being.
As a result, in the years since 2008, we’ve seen the start of a new kind of uprising. Opposition movements have hit the streets determined to avoid the power structures and abuses that hierarchies bring, and to immunize themselves against the mistakes of the twentieth-century left.

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.

As I found on the banks of the River Dniestr, a dictatorship that provides cheap gas and a job for your son in the army can look better than a democracy that leaves you to freeze and starve.

For historians each event is unique. Economics, however, maintains that forces in society and nature behave in repetitive ways.
Charles Kindleberger