Post-Capitalism?

I read an intellectual piece in a magazine I am starting to look at more these days called n+1. The piece can be found here.

The author gives quick references to various capitalistic theories and offers some reflections. The biggest questions being where is the capitalistic cycle of replacing worker with machine and so the taking of worker's control; the elites benefiting from the creative uses of debt; and the trend to political socialism taking us in the future?

I thought some of the following quotes were interesting:

     All this[open source code, info capitalism], Mason imagines, offers a way out—as long as some (nearly impossible) political conditions are achieved. “Once firms are forbidden to set monopoly prices,” he suggests as a first step, “and a universal basic income is available . . . the market is actually the transmitter of the ‘zero marginal cost’ effect, which manifests as falling labor time across society.” In other words, he imagines antimonopoly laws becoming robust (in the absence of a populist movement), so that companies like Google lose their hegemony and networked indignados can take over production (in the absence of a labor movement), using Amazon-like tools of tracking to calculate societal needs, and produce everything for free (in the absence of anyone desiring to make money). All the problems of the world dissolve in a warm open-source bath! Capitalism loses on the playing fields of Valve Software.
      But the potential for this sort of mass liberation of everything isn’t a guarantee that it will ever take place: to refute the theory of a tendency toward “zero marginal costs,” one only need provide a single instance of its opposite. And Mason in fact provides several: to wit, Google, Facebook, and Apple, which have a near monopoly on search, social networking, and music. Even a company that begins from open-source models—GitHub—finds ways to make its operations profitable.

      The familiar cycle—workers continue to go into debt to make up for weak income; this debt is turned into lucrative financial instruments by downtown wizards; these instruments collapse when their basis is revealed to be valueless; eventually new instruments are founded on new kinds of debt—continually reasserts itself.

     The vision of the accelerationists breaks with an idea that has been with the left for generations: that work itself would be liberated and redeemed under socialism. Free time would become more abundant, but work, too, would become more joyous. Craftsmanship would alternate with leisure. The tribune of this idea has always been William Morris, who wrote that “art is man’s expression of his joy in labour.”

     Automation isn’t a neutral, inevitable part of capitalism. It comes about through the desire to break formal and informal systems of workers’ control—including unions—and replace them with managerially controlled and minutely surveilled systems of piecework. An entire political and legal infrastructure has been built up to make these so-called tendencies seem like the natural progression of capitalism, rather than the effects of fights—sometimes simple, sometimes violent—to deprive people of whatever sense of control they have over their work. 


All in all, I think a good question from the article was "what is the social vision appropriate for a jobless future?"  I don't feel in any way adequate to face these kind of economic questions but find it interesting to think about them and the desire to learn more.

Soli Deo gloria,
The Reader