The Generation of Digital Austerity Rises: On Paul Mason's Postcapitalism

The Generation of Digital Austerity Rises: On Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism Matteo Pasquinelli The wave form of economy is the ‘hyper-object’ that Paul Mason tries to capture in his book Postcapitalism. Mason follows the motley curves of capitalism’s history like a philosophical rollercoaster, though without bypassing the frontlines of global conflicts which he often covered in his faculty as reporter for Channel 4. This futural book is vertiginously anchored to history, opening with a reality check in the most surreal country: on the banks of river Dniestr, looking both sides, “between the free-market capitalism and whatever you want to call the system Vladimir Putin runs”. From the limbo of Transnistria, the carriage accrues momentum, before a zero-gravity plummet into the steep abstractions of casino capitalism and the history of the radical left that we all seem to have forgotten. Few authors have managed to carve such a robust synthesis of the present. Specifically, Mason’s argument is centred on the role of information technologies behind the 2008 economic crisis, recapitulating the development of the 20th century in this way. Mason paints a red line connecting the young workers in the internet cafés of the Manila slums with the theory of economic cycles by the Russian Marxist economist Nikolai Kondratieff (who was executed by firing squad on Stalin’s order in 1938). Thanks to Kondratieff’s cycles of technological innovation, the current stagnation is explained as an effect of the zero-cost regime engendered by information commodities and cognitive labour. How to couple labour and technology into one diagram? “The wave-form is beautiful” (p. 31) writes Mason introducing Kondratieff. The book is generous of historical accounts, that Mason is keen to collect according to four main economic cycles. Each cycle is associated to specific technological innovations: each cycle peaks and crashes, followed by economic depression with related social conflicts (p. 47). Mason recognizes labour as the source of value, but technology emerges as the main catalyser and amplifier of such economic waves that keep on peaking and collapsing. The four cycles are identified as follows: the first factory systems with steam-powered machinery (1790-1848); the age of railways, telegraph and oceangoing steamers (1848-1895); the introduction of scientific management, electric engineering and telephone (1895-1945); the age of transistors, synthetic materials, factory automation and digital computers (1945-2008). Periodization is always tricky and not surprisingly Kondratieff’s theoretical clockwork seems to break after the fourth wave: for it cannot quite explain the “long disrupted wave” (p. 79) whose symptoms of stagnation started already to manifest in the 1990s. Like surfers in the off season, capitalists are left waiting for the missing fifth wave. Mason says that his thesis is not new: already Marx in the Grundrisse had envisioned the crisis of capitalism due to the role of ‘general scientific knowledge’ embedded into machinery as fixed capital, in front of which labour value would increasingly become marginal. Yet Mason remains one of the few to stress the devalorisation effect of information technologies behind the current stagnation. Central is the idea of disruption, which Mason translates from the entrepreneurial lexicon into the agenda of political transformation. Evident is the shift from the positions of anticapitalism to the program of postcapitalism, from struggle to planning, from labour organisation to technology organisation. The book hits the sore point of a historical riddle for which nobody has a clear solution: the issue of the reappropriation of technology or reappropriation of fixed capital, as Antonio Negri phrase it. The following is one of the most visionary passages, that captures the controversial transformation of traditional subjectivities into a benevolent cybernetic apparatus. The Internet of Things will complete a vast social ‘machine’. Its analytical power alone could optimize resources on a scale that significantly reduces the use of carbon, raw materials and labour. Making the energy grid, the road network and the tax system ‘intelligent’ are just the most obvious things on the task list. But the power of this emerging vast machine does not lie solely in its ability to monitor and feed back. By socializing knowledge, it also has the power to amplify the results of collective action. (p. 268) Mason does acknowledge “the prophets of postcapitalism” and the generation of “beautiful troublemakers” (p. 109, 177), the social struggles and radical thinkers that anticipated such theses: from Alexander Bogdanov to the Italian Autonomia, from André Gorz to the hacker movement. Mason recomposes the family album of the European left avoiding sectarianism: no need to play one political school against the other (as youngsters still do imitating orthodoxies established in Paris forty years ago) but to open new bridges between different archipelagos. In which state of affairs is the book falling? The idea of injecting complexity, long-period analysis, infrastructure planning, basic income and a bit of technological Prometheanism into the agenda of the Left is also addressed by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in their book Inventing the Future. Mason has the merit of providing a more realistic monetary framework for the program of ‘fully automated luxury communism’ (as Aaron Bastani once phrased it). The issue of labour automation brings the same question to old and new generations in fact. Whose robots? If the ownership of ‘fixed capital’—that is of machinery, infrastructures, platforms, automata and artificial intelligence too—is not resolved, full automation in large companies and basic income without welfare services will mean a further accumulation of capital and inequalities. Mason’s position appears to be closer to the North-American debate (and even to the New Economy language at times), where technopolitics is addressed as grassroots and large-scale cooperativism (see the primer by Trebor Scholz after the successful conference Platform Cooperativism organised at The New School in 2015). Was life (and politics) different in the pre-digital world? Not really. As also McKenzie Wark reminds in his book Molecular Red, in 1908 the Russian revolutionary and novelist Alexander Bogdanov imagined a scenario of telematic computation and cooperation without having seen a single computer. The hero—an organizer in the Russian Bolshevik party—gets taken to Mars on a spaceship. He finds the Martian factories modern and impressive but the most stunning thing is what he sees in the control room: a realtime display provides an hourly snapshot of labour shortages in every factory on the planet, together with a summary of sectors where there is a labour surplus. The aim is for workers to move voluntarily to where they are needed. Since there is no shortage of goods, demand is not measured. There is no money either. (p. 218) According to Mason, Bogdanov prophesised the age of information workers that are connected by something “subtle and invisible”. Today Mason for sure captures a generation that recognizes itself as a casualty of both the austerity regime and the digital economy. We could call it the generation of digital austerity that witnessed the promise of the internet turned into an apparatus of financial speculation and, on the other hand, of mass surveillance. It is the global precariat left behind by the dot-com crash and turned into an army of baristas holding a PhD, that support Assange and Snowden, Podemos and Syriza (also Yanis Varoufakis’ DiEM movement seems oriented at merging both social blocs). Mason’s final proposal is called Project Zero: “because its aims are a zerocarbon energy system; the production of machines, products and services with zero marginal costs; and the reduction of necessary labour time as close as possible to zero” (p. 266). He suggests to first run “an open, accurate and comprehensive computer simulation of the current economic reality”, to engineer the state form (a sort of wiki-State), to promote collaborative business models (like the Mondragon co-op in Spain), to suppress monopolies, to nationalize the central bank and socialize finance, to pay everyone a basic income. The emphasis on cooperatives, sustainable business models, coworking and the maker movement is strong. Mason envisions an exit from capitalism that requires a robust political engineering. Will the generation of digital austerity be able to build the Great Machine, to transform the power of the digital code into a new progressive legal code, to transform cognitive labour into new visionary political institutions? This is a new dialectics of constituted and constituent power, in which a normative power seems to be finally recognized also to technology, global infrastructures and platforms rather than only to political institutions. Will technopolitics change the old normative game? For Mason it already does. Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (London: Allen Lane, 2015). Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London: Verso, 2015). Trebor Scholz, Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy (New York: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2016). McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (London: Verso, 2015).