POSTCAPITALISM Where the Dominant Colour Is Rust

1 Introduction To find the river Dniestr we drive through cold Paul Mason woodlands, past decomposing flats and railyards POSTCAPITALISM where the dominant colour is rust. The freezing A Guide to Our Future water runs clear. It is so quiet that you can hear little pieces of concrete falling off the road bridge above, Contents as it slowly crumbles through neglect. Introduction The Dniestr is the geographic border between free- PART I market capitalism and whatever you want to call the 1 Neoliberalism is Broken system Vladimir Putin runs. It separates Moldova, a 2 Long Waves, Short Memories country in Eastern Europe, from a breakaway Russian 3 Was Marx Right? puppet state called Transnistria, controlled by the 4 The Long, Disrupted Wave mafia and secret police. PART II 5 The Prophets of Postcapitalism On the Moldovan side, elderly people squat on the 6 Towards the Free Machine pavements selling stuff they’ve grown or made: 7 Beautiful Troublemakers cheese, pastries, a few turnips. Young people are PART III scarce; one in four adults works abroad. Half the 8 On Transitions population earns less than $5 a day; one in ten lives in a poverty so extreme it can be measured on the 9 The Rational Case for Panic 1 10 Project Zero same scale as Africa’s. The country was born at the Notes start of the neoliberal era, with the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the entry of market forces – but many of the villagers I talk to would rather live in Putin’s police state than in the disgraceful penury of Moldova. This grey world of dirt roads and grim faces was produced by capitalism, not communism. And now capitalism is 2 already past its best. tension between nuclear superpowers, it has become a crisis of the global order. Moldova, of course, is not a typical European country. But it’s in these edge places of the world There are, on the face of it, only two ways it can end. that we can watch the economic tide receding – and In the first scenario, the global elite clings on, trace the causal links between stagnation, social imposing the cost of crisis on to workers, pensioners crisis, armed conflict and the erosion of democracy. and the poor over the next ten or twenty years. The The economic failure of the West is eroding belief in global order – as enforced by the IMF, World Bank values and institutions that we once thought were and World Trade Organisation – survives, but in a permanent. weakened form. The cost of saving globalization is borne by the ordinary people of the developed world. In the financial centres, behind plate glass, things But growth stagnates. can still look rosy. Since 2008, trillions of dollars of confected money have flowed through the banks, In the second scenario, the consensus breaks. Parties hedge funds, law firms and consultancies to keep the of the hard right and left come to power as ordinary global system functioning. people refuse to pay the price of austerity. Instead, states then try to impose the costs of the crisis on But the long-term prospects for capitalism are bleak. each other. Globalization falls apart, the global According to the OECD, growth in the developed institutions become powerless and in the process the world will be ‘weak’ for the next fifty years. conflicts that have burned these past twenty years – Inequality will rise by 40 per cent. Even in the drug wars, post-Soviet nationalism, jihadism, developing countries, the current dynamism will be uncontrolled migration and resistance to it – light a exhausted by 2060.2 The OECD’s economists were too fire at the centre of the system. In this scenario, lip- polite to say it, so let’s spell it out: for the developed service to international law evaporates; torture, world the best of capitalism is behind us, and for the censorship, arbitrary detention and mass rest it will be over in our lifetime. surveillance become the regular tools of statecraft. This is a variant of what happened in the 1930s and What started in 2008 as an economic crisis morphed there is no guarantee it cannot happen again. into a social crisis, leading to mass unrest; and now, as revolutions turn into civil wars, creating military In both scenarios, the serious impacts of climate 3 change, demographic ageing and population growth left to the right-wing German newspaper Stern to kick in around the year 2050. If we can’t create a explain: they had ‘smashed’ Greece.3 It was done, sustainable global order and restore economic symbolically, to reinforce the central message of dynamism, the decades after 2050 will be chaos. neoliberalism that there is no alternative; that all routes away from capitalism end in the kind of So I want to propose an alternative: first, we save disaster that befell the Soviet Union; and that a globalization by ditching neoliberalism; then we save revolt against capitalism is a revolt against a natural the planet – and rescue ourselves from turmoil and and timeless order. inequality – by moving beyond capitalism itself. The current crisis not only spells the end of the Ditching neoliberalism is the easy part. There’s a neoliberal model, it is a symptom of the longer-term growing consensus among protest movements, mismatch between market systems and an economy radical economists and radical political parties in based on information. The aim of this book is to Europe as to how you do it: suppress high finance, explain why replacing capitalism is no longer a reverse austerity, invest in green energy and utopian dream, how the basic forms of a promote high-waged work. postcapitalist economy can be found within the current system, and how they could be expanded But then what? rapidly. As the Greek experience demonstrates, any Neoliberalism is the doctrine of uncontrolled government that defies austerity will instantly clash markets: it says that the best route to prosperity is with the global institutions that protect the 1 per individuals pursuing their own self-interest, and the cent. After the radical left party Syriza won the market is the only way to express that self-interest. It election in January 2015, the European Central Bank, says the state should be small (except for its riot whose job was to promote the stability of Greek squad and secret police); that financial speculation is banks, pulled the plug on those banks, triggering a good; that inequality is good; that the natural state of €20 billion run on deposits. That forced the left-wing humankind is to be a bunch of ruthless individuals, government to choose between bankruptcy and competing with each other. submission. You will find no minutes, no voting records, no explanation for what the ECB did. It was Its prestige rests on tangible achievements: in the 4 past twenty-five years, neoliberalism has triggered became irrational: you borrow, you duck and dive the biggest surge in development the world has ever around the edges of the tax system, you stick to the seen, and it unleashed an exponential improvement pointless rules imposed at work. in core information technologies. But in the process, it has revived inequality to a state close to that of 100 And for decades the opponents of capitalism have years ago and has now triggered a survival-level revelled in their own incoherence. From the anti- event. globalization movement of the 1990s through to Occupy and beyond, the movement for social justice The civil war in Ukraine, which brought Russian has rejected the idea of a coherent programme in special forces to the banks of the Dniestr; the favour of ‘One No, Many Yes-es’. The incoherence is triumph of ISIS in Syria and Iraq; the rise of fascist logical, if you think the only alternative is what the parties in Europe; the paralysis of NATO as its twentieth century left called ‘socialism’. Why fight populations withhold consent for military for a big change if it’s only a regression – towards intervention – these are not problems separate from state control and economic nationalism, to the economic crisis. They are signs that the economies that work only if everyone behaves the neoliberal order has failed. same way or submits to a brutal hierarchy? In turn, the absence of a clear alternative explains why most Over the past two decades, millions of people have protest movements never win: in their hearts they resisted neoliberalism but in general the resistance don’t want to. There’s even a term for it in the failed. Beyond all the tactical mistakes, and the protest movement: ‘refusal to win’.4 repression, the reason is simple: free-market capitalism is a clear and powerful idea, while the To replace neoliberalism we need something just as forces opposing it looked like they were defending powerful and effective; not just a bright idea about something old, worse and incoherent. how the world could work but a new, holistic model that can run itself and tangibly deliver a better Among the 1 per cent, neoliberalism has the power of outcome. It has to be based on micro-mechanisms, a religion: the more you practise it, the better you not diktats or policies; it has to work spontaneously. feel – and the richer you become. Even among the In this book, I make the case that there is a clear poor, once the system was in full swing, to act in any alternative, that it can be global, and that it can other way but according to neoliberal strictures deliver a future substantially better than the one 5 capitalism will be offering by the mid-twenty-first barely recognizable to the generation that came century.

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