Roger, I found this while looking for something else. It’s something I saved
and then forgot about. It’s speculative, but thought you, and perhaps others
here, might find some interest in it.
Evan
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122568/what-if-stalin-had-computers
What If Stalin Had Computers?
A new book contemplates the end of capitalism (again)—it's a nice story, but a
terrible plan
By Malcolm Harris @bigmeaninternet
When will capitalism end? It’s not a new idea, and even the capitalists suspect
it will happen. After all, every other mode of production has fallen, and
capitalism isn’t a steady-state system. It simply isn’t built to stay the same.
As firms incorporate new technologies, capacity increases per-capita, and jobs
change, so too does the nature of commodities and consumption. It happened with
the assembly line, and it’s happening again with information technology. In
1930, John Maynard Keynes famously predicted these trends would reduce
everyone’s daily toil to part-time by now, while Karl Marx thought the same
developments would compel workers to seize the whole system and abolish
wage-labor in general. But the system still lives.
If the history of postcapitalism so far is a repeating chorus asking “Are we
there yet?”, then the new book from Channel 4 economics editor Paul Mason,
Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, is a reassuring “Almost!” from the front
seat. Like a good co-pilot, Mason keeps his eyes on his indicators, and he has
the end in sight. Or at least on his graphs. How the transition might occur is
less important than that it must.
Marxist economics is not a vibrant field within the anglophone academy or
public sphere. Even Thomas Piketty’s best selling import, Capital in the
Twenty-First Century, didn’t take much more than a good title from the
communists. Mason is an oddity, as an economics commentator of some stature (at
least in the UK, where he has been an economics/business editor since 2001) who
believes that labor is the source of all value. He spends much of the first
half of Postcapitalismredeeming the work of heterodox Soviet economist Nikolai
Kondtratieff, whose model of 50-year four-phase market cycles is Mason’s
preferred historical gauge.
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The Kondtratieff wave explanation is an intuitive way to look at 200 years of
economic history: In Mason’s telling, industrial capitalism has completed four
cycles since 1790, driven by the interrelated processes of technological
innovation, global expansion, capital investment, and not least by labor
struggles. The story a cycle goes more or less like this: Capitalists
incorporate new productive technology, sharing the proceeds with workers;
profits slow and workers fight with their bosses as firms try to depress labor
costs; when capitalists can’t find any more savings, they’re forced to
incorporate new technology and start the cycle over. Despite its Soviet
origins, mainstream British and American economists have found the model useful
for describing how capitalism manages to persist.
The problem is we seem to have broken the cycle. Where workers should have been
able to leverage their power for higher living standards, capital instead
outsourced production, smashed unions, captured the regulators, and expanded
money supply by unpegging the dollar from gold. Mason calls this
counter-cyclical move “neoliberalism,” and it’s a helpful definition for a term
sometimes used carelessly to refer to anything bad and capitalist. Kondratieff
described a dance between capital and labor that was theoretically
sustainable—a heresy that did not go over well with Stalin, who felt that the
proletariat was only days from halting the waltz.
As it turned out, Stalin was wrong and capital broke up with labor, not the
other way around. Mason calls our current situation the “long, disrupted wave”:
The lights are on, and Kondratieff’s dance is over. This isn’t the only
relationship that’s broken; capitalist economics is incompatible with
information technology, Mason claims. As the supply of some commodities (like
music files) becomes infinite, price-setting becomes arbitrary and
unsustainable. How do you measure the amount of labor in replicable file? The
adaptable system of production that Kondratieff saw from the other side is
sinking. “The most highly educated generation in the history of the human race,
and the best connected,” Mason writes, “will not accept a future of high
inequality and stagnant growth.”
Postcapitalism really begins here, at the bargaining table with capital and
labor looking for a plan that will settle their differences once and for all.
If the world is headed for imminent ecological collapse, then to continue on
with our current capitalist mode of production is suicide. Maximizing actors
don’t kill themselves, so the operative question is what to do next. How can we
maintain people’s standards of living while socializing production, reducing
labor, saving the environment, and making the best use of new technology? Mason
has some ideas.
The book really comes into its own when Mason addresses the possibilities of
contemporary planning. He does not go as far as to endorse “cyber Stalinism”
but at the very least poses its thesis: What if the problem with the Soviet
Union was that it was too early? What if our computer processing power and
behavioral data are developed enough now that central planning could outperform
the market when it comes to the distribution of goods and services?
If you raised your hand and said this in an American ECON100 class, you’d be
laughed out of the room, so Mason as prominent public employee deserves a lot
of credit for bringing it this far into the English-speaking mainstream. The
possible socialized uses of technology is an exciting can of worms. Using large
sets of behavior and population data, capitalist firms like Amazon and Google
have developed predictive capacities that would make Soviet cyberneticians weep
with joy. Capitalism says that the best use of this capacity is to sell people
stuff, but parts of this process are so socially unproductive and
unnecessary—we don’t just have clickbait sites, we have third-rate clickbait
sites—that it can’t possibly be the case.
“Imagine if Walmart or Tesco were prepared to publish their customer data
(suitably anonymized) for free,” Mason writes. “Society would benefit:
everybody from farmers to epidemiologists could mine the data, and make more
accurate decisions.” This is just the beginning; remaking productive machinery
in the collective interest means driving necessary labor down as far as
possible with data analytics and self-management. Why can’t a meatpacking
factory function like a web startup, with room for autonomy and achievement
targets instead of required hours? It’s fun to imagine how we could do better
than capitalism if we all decided to, especially if no one had to worry about
creating and maintaining false scarcity around info-tech goods.
The best existing example I can think of for the kind of efficiencies Mason
predicts is the difference between Netflix and Popcorn Time. Netflix is, of
course, the $28 billion media streaming company with over 2000 employees.
Popcorn Time is a legally shady alternative that streams media torrents over a
clean ad-less interface. It’s a functional and free alternative, what
economists would call a replacement good. Popcorn Time makes no money, and has
a staff of 20 around the world who volunteer their labor part-time. Netflix is
(as a streaming company) a near-total waste of time. Those 2000-plus workers
could be developing a nutritious Slurpee and designing a distribution
infrastructure. Or babysitting. Hell, they could be lowering the collective
labor burden enough so everyone has time to masturbate one extra time a year,
and it would still be more socially useful than charging rent for access to
digital content.
In Mason’s telling, postcapitalism involves an abundance of resources,
including free time. Without capitalism’s wastefulness, we can refashion the
world to allow human potential and creativity to blossom. It’s an enjoyable
thought experiment, but capitalists are not looking to make a deal. Given the
choice, I have no doubt that the ownership class will literally abandon the
planet Earth before they surrender capitalism. Bosses no longer negotiate with
organized labor if they can avoid it; they’d rather make a blanket offer to all
workers as individuals: Work and/or starve. Violence and coercion don’t play
much of a role in Postcapitalism, but that’s not true of capitalism. Huge,
advanced police forces ensure this is the deal whether people “accept” it (as
Mason says) or not.
Imaginative as it is, Postcapitalism is not a revolutionary book. As Malcolm X
observed very clearly of revolution after revolution: “What was it for? Land!
How did they get it? Bloodshed!” Capitalists understand this principle very
well, and their state proxies are well-armed. The vanguard movements of
postcapitalism that Mason identifies—the global occupy sequence, Brazilian
World Cup protesters, fracking blockaders—have all been forced out of whatever
territory they were able to take temporarily, and that’s with the authorities
exercising significant restraint relative to their capabilities. Since
postcapitalism doesn’t detail the “How?”, it doesn’t have to answer “How do we
kill that many cops?”
There’s a reason Marxists—even heterodox ones—don’t usually speculate on how to
arrange communism: Marx says not to. “Communism is for us not a state of
affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to
adjust itself,” he writes with Engels in The German Ideology. “We call
communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” Not
even Marx claimed to know what communism will look like, but he knew it would
have to destroy capitalism first.
It’s hard to follow Marx into his beautifully hopeful “will have been” idea of
history without thinking he’s doing some sword-in-the-stone prophecy, but he
nonetheless reveals important problems with postcapitalism. I cannot imagine
the real movement that could, in retrospect, validate Mason’s version of
history. The true qualities of capitalism, including the weak points where it
finally fails, will only be visible in the shadow of whatever social force
destroys it. The people Mason describes, at least as motivated and defined by
the historical factors he describes (education, connection, stagnant wages), do
not seem willing or able to confront the system at the necessary scale or with
the required intensity. To borrow a perspective from Marx, I do not believe
Mason’s theory of capitalism will have been the case.
The true story of capitalism, like all social forms, will be written in its
ashes. Until then, a theory of historical necessity and a couple bucks will get
you a cup of coffee. Mason criticizes leftists for being against things that
exist instead of for things that could be, but the position of the cart in
relation to the horse isn’t up for sensible debate. Postcapitalism is still one
revolution away.
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