Henryk Grossmann 2.0: a Critique of Paul Mason's

tripleC 14(1): 232-243, 2016 http://www.triple-c.at Henryk Grossmann 2.0: A Critique of Paul Mason’s Book “PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future” Christian Fuchs University of Westminster: Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI); West- minster Institute for Advanced Studies. London, UK, [email protected], http://fuchs.uti.at, http://www.westminster.ac.uk/camri, http://www.westminster.ac.uk/wias, @fuchschristian Abstract: This article reviews Paul Mason’s book “PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future”. It discuss- es Mason’s version of long wave theory, the book’s interpretation of Karl Marx, its analysis of the Grundrisse’s “Fragment on Machines”, and aspects of political struggles and societal change. The conclusion is that Paul Mason is digital Marxism’s Henryk Grossmann 2.0. Keywords: Paul Mason, post-capitalism, Karl Marx, digital media, digital Marxism, Internet Paul Mason: PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future. London: Allen Lane, 2015, 368 pages. ISBN 978-1-846-14738-8 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-141-97529-0 (paperback). 1. Introduction In 1857, Karl Marx (1857/1858, 161) described the emergence of “institutions […] whereby each individual can acquire information about the activity of all others” and can build “inter- connections”. So it seems like it was not Tim Berners Lee, but Karl Marx, who invented the World Wide Web (see Fuchs 2014a, 17)! What sounds like a description of the Internet, was in fact an analysis of the lists of current prices that were important information sources for the organisation of trade in the 19th century. Marx was not just a theorist of capitalism, but also one of communications (see Fuchs 2016d, 2009; De La Haye 1980) or what he termed the means of communication. It is therefore no surprise that not just the capitalist crisis, but also the rise of the Internet has led to an interest in Marx today. We have seen the emergence of what can be termed digital Marxism (see for example: Dyer-Witheford 1999, Fisher and Fuchs 2015; Fuchs 2014a, 2014c, 2015a; Fuchs and Mosco 2012, 2016; Huws 2003, 2014). The journalist Paul Mason tries to join the field of digital Marxism with a popular science book titled PostCapitalism. The work’s task is to show how information technology has creat- ed foundations of what Mason calls a post-capitalist economy. 2. Long Waves of Economic Development: Kondratieff, Schumpeter and Marx Paul Mason sees post-capitalism as a consequence of information technology: “Postcapital- ism is possible because of three impacts of the new technology in the past twenty-five years” (xv): 1) the blurring of boundaries between labour and free time, 2) the abundance of information, 3) collaborative digital peer production. “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” (xix). This analysis over- estimates information economy because capitalism is not just digital and informational capitalism, but at the same time financial capitalism, hyper-industrial, fossil fuel capitalism, mo- bilities capitalism, etc. (Fuchs 2014a, chapter 5). Mason argues for a long wave theory of crisis and capitalism that combines Kondratieff’s long wave theory (that assumes that capitalist development has the form of 50-year long cycles consisting of 25 years of economic upswing followed by 25 years of downswing) and Date of Publication: April 12, 2016 CC-BY-NC-ND: Creative Commons License, 2016. tripleC 14(1): 232-243, 2016 233 Marx’s theorem of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF). The fifth long wave’s “takeoff has stalled” (47) because of neoliberalism and information technology (48). “[F]irms use profits to pay dividends rather than to reinvest” (71). Factors enabling neoliberalism would have been “fiat money, financialisation, the doubling of the workforce, the global im- balances, including the deflationary effect of cheap labour, plus the cheapening of everything else as a result of information technology” (106). For Mason, the fourth cycle lasted from the late 1940s until 2008 (72) and was driven by “transistors, synthetic materials, mass consumer goods, factory automation, nuclear power and automatic calculation” (48). He argues that in contrast to Joseph Schumpeter’s assump- tions, innovations and the adoption of new technologies do not stem from entrepreneurial inventiveness, as Schumpeter argued, but from working class struggles that force capitalism to reinvent itself (75-76). The key technologies of the stalled fifth cycle would be “network technology, mobile communications, a truly global marketplace and information goods” (48). The combination of Kondratieff and Marx in a Marxist version of long-wave theory as al- ternative to Schumpeterianism is not new. Paul Mason completely ignores and does not seem to be aware of Ernest Mandel’s work, especially his book Late Capitalism (Mandel 1975; for a discussion, see: Fuchs 2016d, 151-152, 211). Mandel argued that there are long waves in the development of the rate of profit and that the 4th long wave’s downswing was initiated around 1967. Like Mandel, also Mason assumes that the tendency of the rate of profit to fall drives long waves that last fifty years: “The tendency of the rate of profit to fall, interacting constantly with the counter-tendencies, is a much better explanation of what drives the fifty-year cycle than the one Kondratieff gave” (p. 77). Mandel wrote in his 1972 PhD dissertation Late Capitalism: “The history of capitalism on the international plane thus appears not only as a succession of cyclical movements every 7 or 10 years, but also as a succession of longer pe- riods, of approximately 50 years. […] An economic upswing is possible only with a ris- ing rate of profit, which in its turn creates the conditions for a fresh extension of the market and an accentuation of the upswing. At a certain point in this development, however, the increased organic composition of capital and the limit to the number of commodities that can be sold to the ‘final consumers’ must both lower the rate of profit and also induce a relative contraction of the market. These contradictions then spill over into a crisis of over-production. The falling rate of profit leads to a curtailment of investments which turns the downswing into a depression” (Mandel 1975, 120, 439). Mason like Kondratieff, Schumpeter and Mandel assumes that “fifty-year cycles are the long- term rhythm of the profit system” (77). But Mason’s own claims contradict this metaphysical assumption that the wave-length is fixed to 50 years: He in other places in the book argues that the fourth wave was 60 years long (72). Given that capitalism is a complex, dynamic, open system (Fuchs 2004, 2008b, 2002), the deterministic assumption that there are long waves that last 50 years is simply not feasible (for a more detailed version of this argument, see: Fuchs 2016d, 150-159). Other than neo-Schumpeterians such as Christopher Freeman and Carolta Perez, Mason rejects the assumption that the information technology paradigm is resulting in a new long wave with sustained growth. The reason why he does so is however not scepticism of deterministic, undialectical and instrumental logic, but another form of determinism: Paul Mason assumes, as we will see, that information technology has to result in the breakdown of capitalism. 3. Karl Marx “Marx could not take into account the major phenomena of the twentieth century – state capitalism, monopolies, complex financial markets and globalization” (54). Obviously Marx did not live in the 20th century. But he was a very anticipatory thinker and, other than Mason claims, indeed very well understood globalisation, monopolies, and finance. Already in the CC-BY-NC-ND: Creative Commons License, 2016. 234 Christian Fuchs Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels pointed out the connection of capitalism, globalisation and technology, arguing for example that capitalism “has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry. […] [Capital] must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere” (Marx and Engels 1848, 486, 487). Eric Hobsbawm (2011, 112) argues in this context that today we can because of new communications and a new round of globalisation “see the force of the Manifesto’s predictions more clearly than the generations between us and its publication”. It is also simply not true that Marx did not see capitalism’s monopoly tendency. This tendency is a key aspect of what Marx in Capital Volume 1 calls the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation. This tendency involves the “centralization of capitals” because of the “immanent laws of capitalist production itself” so that one “capitalist always strikes down many others” (Marx 1867, 929). Marx also saw the speculative dimension and crisis tendency of financial capital in his analysis of what he termed fictitious capital in Capital Volume 3. He spoke of finance as “an entire system of swindling and cheating with respect to the pro- motion of companies, issues of shares and share dealings” (Marx 1894, 569). Against Paul Mason, we have to stress that Marx anticipated many of 20th century capitalism’s development tendencies. Capitalism develops dialectically through crises that result in sublations (what Hegel called “Aufhebung” in German) that bring about the emergence of relatively unpredictable changes. Crises are bifurcation points that destabilise the system. Marx’s theory itself is dialectical and historical, which means that it formulates the basic foundational structures and tendencies of capitalism, but needs to be adapted and sublated for the analysis and critique of the political economy of every specific phase of capitalist development.

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