The Great Transformation

We’re assailed by articles and books which tell us that the world is changing dramatically because of such technology as driverless cars, keyhole surgery, contraception and social media.

But, in a sense, this has been our story for the last century and more – although Karl Polyani may have been the first (in 1944) to analyse this closely in his classic The Great Transformation which analysed the power aspects behind the transition from feudalism to a market economy.

Other writers periodically try to anticipate what they consider to be significant social change but none perhaps greater than Peter Drucker, an Austrian born in 1909, best known for his management writing – indeed the father of management. His initial education was in Vienna but he graduated in Frankfurst (in International and Public Law), practising journalism in Hamburg and London before migrating to the US where he became a US citizen in 1943.

I have a theory that people who experience different worlds (geographical and/or intellectual) are able somehow to see the world differently - and are more creative. The theory is described here. Drucker went on to use his experience of being the first person to research management in General Motors to write first The New Society – anatomy of the industrial order (1950) and then to anticipate Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock” (1971) with The Age of Discontinuity – guidelines to our changing society (1968). In both cases he demonstrated amazing sociological insight – somehow sensing a change in the wind’s direction before it even happened. And he was probably the first person to use the phrase “post-capitalist” when he published (in 1993) Post Capitalist Society

Francis Fukuyama may have inherited his mantle when he published The Great Disruption (1999) – although Drucker lived a good age, dying in 2005. I’ve added him to the table you'll find in the 2020 post which I can't reproduce here because the blogpost people seem to have run out of editors and any table now overlaps into the right hand column! This post is best read in conjunction with A Short Note and annotated bibliography on CHANGE

Further Reading

https://asaduzaman.medium.com/summary-of-the-great-transformation-by-polanyi-c329541e8532

https://weapedagogy.wordpress.com/2017/12/27/resources-for-study-of-polanyis-great-transformation/

The Technology Trap C Frey 2019

What's in a Name??

 “Capitalism”…I started, but the barman hopped out of a pipkin

“Capitalism”, he countered…”That’s a flat and frothless word

I’m a good Labour man, but if I mentioned capitalism

My clientele would chew off their own ears

And spit them down the barmaid’s publicised cleavage”

“All right” I obliged “Don’t call it capitalism

Let’s call it Mattiboko the Mighty

……..

The poem finishes…

This was my fearless statement

“The Horror World can only be changed by the destruction of

Mattiboko the Mighty,

The Massimataxis Incoporated Supplement

And Gumbo Jumbo the Homely Obblestrog Spectacular”

Audience Reaction was quite encouraging

Adrian Mitchell “Come on Everybody Poems” 1953-2008

Some time ago I suggested that all references to words ending in “ism” or “ist” should be banned in discussions – on the basis that they had, these days, become mere insults and likely, as a result, to polarise rather than assist conversation.

It was a serious point I was making – brought home in the current American Democratic party debates for the Presidential nomination. One article suggests that Saunders, to distinguish himself from Warren, needs to clearly name his enemy….capitalism – although it’s not so long ago that Republicans were advised to stop using that particular term.

The Financial Crash of 2008 is still with us and has certainly made it easier to use the word (capitalism) which had been very much celebrated until the new millennium when it started to acquire its current negative connotation

In my youth, I was a Young Socialist ( a member of the Labour party’s youth wing) – but it was not a term I used of myself. I was a “social democrat”…a “Labourite” and very much opposed to the “Hard Left” on the fringes of the party who were always proud to label themselves “socialist”. Of course, if forced to choose between the two extremes, I would have to plump for “socialist” but was happy to occupy the middle ground – even if it meant accusations of being a “mugwump”

I’m currently trying to find a decent readable book to recommend to my readers about the shape of the “better system” we need to replace the offensive thing which currently rules our lives…..and realise how difficult it is to find a term for that “thing”. Paul Collier’s “Future of Capitalism” is one of the contenders – to which I devoted a series of posts last month. He’s very much a pragmatist; is happy to use the “C” word in his title but rarely (if at all) uses the “S” word.

Another contender is Jerry Mander’s The Capitalism Papers – Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System (2012) which I am now rereading for purposes of comparison (As you can also since the book can be read in full by tapping the title).

His opening chapter (pp8/9) tells the story of a friend who said to him “I hope you’re not going to use the “C” word!” which inspired me to this post a few years ago.

Mander goes on to make the important distinction between “Big Capitalism” (the multinationals) and small and medium-sized business – what others (like Geoff Mulgan) call “bad” and Good” Capitalism

I suddenly remembered that the famous playwright GB Shaw had written a book called The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism almost a hundred years ago – and wondered if it might tell me something.

I should warn you that, far from being a short, punchy pamphlet, it runs to more than 500 pages and that its contents sheet alone - normally 2 pages at most – runs to 33 pages. This because of the charming habit of giving the reader a synopsis of each chapter – and there are no fewer than 84 of them!

A modern journalist, in a mercifully short article, suggests some parallels with the post-crash world

But I want to persevere with my question – why do we have so much difficulty finding a word to describe a more sensible and acceptable system than the one which has had us by the throat for so long????

It’s a silly question I know – since the obvious term (“socialism”) has been maligned by the cleverest marketing of the corporate elites..…and that those who continue to use the term do so almost as a virility symbol….

The key question, therefore, is what term should be used to attract the support not only of the activists but of the huge numbers of others who are, very reluctantly, supporting the populist parties???  

Well certainly not “The Third Way” – nor “Diem25”!!

It’s interesting that one of the American websites trying to develop an alternative is called The Next System……..

Paul Mason is by no means the only person who has taken to using the phrase “post-capitalism” but the phrase is no more than a gentle indication we are in a transition phase – it says nothing about where we SHOULD be going….

And few people realise that it was the father of management Peter Drucker who first wrote (in 1993) about The Post-Capitalist Society. I’ve just discovered the full book on the internet – so will have to refresh my memory on its contents but it certainly isn’t about socialism!

Post-Capitalism is here?

How might one read most beneficially a book which, from my google links, looks to be one of the most appreciated and reviewed of the past decade? 

Paul Mason’s Post Capitalism -   a  Guide to our Future came to my notice a year ago but it was only yesterday that I actually picked it off the shelves and started to read it.  

I was unable to apply my litmus test to it since it lacks a bibliography – but I knew enough about it to have confidence that it would repay my study – I had, after all, thoroughly enjoyed his Meltdown – the end of the age of greed (2009) and his earlier Live Working or Die Fighting – how the working class went global in 2007. 

This is someone, after all, who has combined an early career as a militant with a later one as both a print and television journalist – reporting on political and industrial struggles against capital…  

The early pages of reading (the opening “Neoliberalism is broken” chapter) produced my usual squiggles which indicate appreciation but my attention started to wander in the middle of the subsequent discussion of the Kondtratieff waves - despite the earlier nice little intellectual vignettes of people such as Marx, Rosa Luxembourg, Rudolf Hilferding and Jeno Varga. 

So I started to google for the reviews since these give me the questions which ensure that I am reading more closely. 

And I came across at least 30 quite long reviews of the book to which I will give links at the end of this post…..

Chris Mullin was a contrarian Labour MP who wrote a couple of amusing memoirs about his life in parliament and was therefore someone I felt would have some sympathy for Mason’s book but his review is a tough one – 

one has to plough through more than 200 pages of analysis in the course of which the author examines one by one the various economic theories advanced by 19th- and 20th-century political philosophers and various IT gurus….At no point on this long road are there any references to the impact of majority affluence on politics in the developed world. Nikolai Kondratieff (inventor of the wave theory of capitalism) occupies almost an entire column in the index. JK Galbraith and Tony Crosland do not merit a single mention….(Crosland actually has one!)
We have to wait until page 263, a chapter headed “Project Zero”, to discover what the author has in store for us.

Methinks that Mullin is a tad too impatient – analysis and diagnosis are important!

The first part of the book ends with a series of annotated graphs which Mason suggests best summarise the massive shifts in debt, performance and inequality which characterise the decades of the last "wave". I really had to concentrate to get the points being made in the graphs

 “Prophets of Postcapitalism” introduces the second section of the book (at page 109), paying tribute to the questions posed by the great Peter Drucker (then in his 90s) in his little 1993 book “The Post-Capitalist World” and to others who have understood the significance of the technological and social changes which have been shattering our worlds in recent decades eg Jeremy Rifkin, with his 2014 book The Zero Marginal Cost Society

It is at this stage that I needed one of these maps which identify the link between various intellectual schools – such as this one from the very useful Commons Transition website

In that context, this article from Open Democracy seemed to me to set the Mason book in an appropriate context

Anyway I am now half-way through the book but stuck in the section on the labour theory of value – whose relevance I am struggling to understand

For those with more patience, I came across at least 30 quite long reviews – in a few cases of more than 6 pages long…

- Ann Pettifor, for example, prepared a very thoughtful commentary on the book for a discussion she had with the author – suggesting, for example, “we are not the subject of impersonal forces but have human agency” and that capital gains (rather than rate of profit) is the main motive for owners…

- a long and rather pedantic Real-World Economics review focuses on the book’s main thesis about low marginal costs and the new sharing economy

- Prospect gave Mason an interview

- one academic devoted 50 pages to his analysis – in 3 separate The first part here,I can actually understand. The longer parts here and here I have to confess I find largely incomprehensible

One of the best reviews is one from an Australian green Senator and this one is good on some of the book’s contradictions

A sample of other reviews

very good, clear and focused one is here; a much more critical one here

a more sympathetic one from the Take Back the Economy people

http://www.counterfire.org/articles/book-reviews/18008-paul-mason-postcapitalism-a-guide-to-our-future

http://www.alternet.org/world/post-capitalism-utopia-bit-farce

http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2015/2008

http://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/paul-mason-post-capitalism-a-guide-to-the-future/

http://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2016-02-21/post-capitalism-via-the-internet-according-to-paul-mason-%E2%80%93-dream-or-reality

https://peopleandnature.wordpress.com/2016/04/04/from-the-russian-revolution-to-socialism-on-mars/

http://the7circles.uk/the-end-of-capitalism-postcapitalism-by-paul-mason/

https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/paul-tritschler/is-there-life-after-capitalism

https://www.fastcoexist.com/3056483/welcome-to-the-post-work-economy

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/owen-hatherley/one-click-at-a-time

http://socialistnetwork.org/book-review-mick-brooks-evaluates-paul-masons-postcapitalism-a-guide-to-our-future/

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/16/have-we-really-entered-the-age-of-post-capitalism/

https://www.popularresistance.org/post-capitalism-rise-of-the-collaborative-commons/

https://www.popularresistance.org/issues/