Paul Mason
is an engaging writer but, now that I have finished his Post
Capitalism – a guide to our future, I have to admit to a feeling of great
disappointment.
The book
simply fails to live up to the promise of its subtitle. Indeed at least one
third of the book is actually devoted to writers and events of more than 100
years ago. Now I am someone who deeply respects the contribution which
long-dead writers and people made and which is too easily forgotten – but I do
draw the line at suggestions that we have something to learn from the travails
of the early soviets of the Russian revolution (p267).
And it is
nothing short of breath-taking that his reference to the potential of
cooperatives and social enterprise (which employ tens of millions workers
globally) dismisses them as “experimental and small-scale” and says that “with
the exception of thinkers such as Bauwens and Wark, few have bothered to ask
what a new system of governance and regulation might look like” (p 267).
This simply
does not begin to do justice to the extensive material which is available –
some of which can be seen in such posts as The
undermining of cooperation, No Excuse
for Apathy and Beacons of Hope
But I am
grateful to the book for drawing my attention to the writings of these
“thinkers” one of whom is the founder of the p2p
Foundation and the other the author of a famous Hacker’s
Manifesto. Although I don’t find their accounts coherent or easy to place
in the wider literature - they seem the scribbles of young geeks….
The other
text, however, which Mason references and of which I was also unaware, is much
more serious – it is Jeremy Rifkin’s 2014 book The
zero marginal cost society – the internet of things, the collaborative commons
and the eclipse of capitalism (the
link gives the google book). This does
seem a sustained examination of the phenomenon which, despite the title of Mason’s
book, he fails (in my view) to treat properly…..
Rifkin summarises
his thinking in this article and here
There is
also this review; this interview
and a long review from the Ken
Wilber integral school
Rifkin’s
book does, however, get a fairly severe mauling from the right - the left
– and others
in between
