March is my month of Marx. In Parts 1 and 2 we learned about Labour and Alienation, in Part
3 we looked at Cultural Marxism, and now we will look at the future, and go Beyond Capitalism!
But before we go into the future, we need to understand the past. Specifically, we need to tell the story
of 20th Century economics: the very condensed version, anyway. And the Marxist version, which is
occasionally controversial. And I'm afraid the closer we get to the present the harder
it's gonna be to avoid getting into politics.
Remember in Part 2 we talked about capitalism's safety measures against falling profits? Marx
thought that eventually the safety measures would fail and capitalism would collapse
into socialism. A lot of 20th Marxists believed that: not just Lenin, Stalin
and the Bolsheviks, but millions of workers all around the world. Try and understand just how important
this idea was to so many people, especially in the honeymoon period just after the Russian Revolution: unfair
economic systems were ending! And Capitalism would soon die!
Only it didn't. What the early 20th Century Marxists didn't foresee was that governments,
rather than allowing or causing capitalism to end, might do the exact opposite: suppress
the market and act to preserve profits. Countries began helping capitalists and "state monopoly
capitalism" was born. It exists to this day: the biggest example is when governments bail
out private companies that go bust, rather than allow them to die and someone else take their place in
the market. This move disoriented Marxists for decades and cast doubt on Marxism. The
only one who really saw it coming was Nikolai Bukharin, but at the time the inevitability
of capitalism's collapse was Stalin's party doctrine, so for suggesting that capitalism was adapting
rather than dying, Bukharin went to the wall.
And for a time, it worked. There was a post-war boom, fuelled by lots of things, but state
monopoly capitalism being one of them. But it wasn't stable: profits started to fall
again, as Marx had predicted. In 1973 there was an oil shock, and a stock market crash, things
were beginning to stall. Only this time, the legacy of socialism was that a lot of labourers were
organised into trade unions, who could be powerful and even sometimes violent organisations.
So the usual capitalist safety measures of cutting wages, laying people off, milking a little
more labour out of the workers suddenly wasn't so easy. And then along came a spider.
Some people - like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher - saw that organised labour had blocked
one of capitalism's safety valves, so they resolved to fix that. Trade unions were strictly
suppressed. Famously in Britain, Thatcher broke the miner's strike in '85: picketers
and police fought violently at the Battle of Orgreave, in Yorkshire, and even MI5 was
used against the union. For those of you who aren't British, this is still a very culturally
sensitive and significant event for us, especially in the North, my home.
How exactly you interpret that change will depend on your politics, but what's undeniable is that organised
labour declined hugely as an economic force. Neoliberal economics was born, and we live
under it today. Companies were free now to protect their profits using every capitalist safety measure in the
book to protect profits: they could cut wages, have increased globalisation, zero-hour contracts
- and the government would help with benefit cuts, corporate tax cuts, privatisation of public
services, and austerity. Financialization of the economy took off too. That means that more
and more profit is generated now not through employing labourers but through lending money: credit, loans,
investment banking - economies more and more rely on people being in debt
and speculation on that debt.
In 1989 Francis Fukuyama said that we had arrived at "the end of history." With the fall of
fascism and communism, liberal democracy (or at least the version of it that includes state
monopoly capitalism and neoliberalism) had won! It was the last political ideology standing. And Marx
was wrong: humanity wouldn't inevitably progress into communism. State-backed capitalism was
the final form of human government and Marxism was dead.
Or was it?
In his book "Postcapitalism," Paul Mason tells that story in much greater detail. But then
we get to the present, and we've still got problems. With all that reliance on debt,
when people can't pay the debts you get things like the 2008 financial crash ot the Greek
debt crisis. And Mason says that with ageing populations putting more strain on public services, the debt
is only going to get worse. He thinks that 2008 was a warning about neoliberalism, that
we have failed to listen to. And if we keep cutting public services and doubling down on austerity,
he says, when the next financial crash happens there'll be nothing left to cut.
And remember in Part 2 we said that as long as destroying the environment is profitable
capitalism can't really stop itself? Mason thinks that for that reason unleashing the free market on
the energy sector was the wrong move. Climate change is bad news on its own, but it will
also exacerbate the refugee crisis over the coming decades, which compounds both social
and economic problems. Mason thinks that the invisible hand of the market is poised to give us all the invisible finger.
But there's something else too. Something surprisingly Marxist. As a kind of thought
experiment, Marx imagined what would happen if we could get a machine that took no labour to
build and which never ran down. The value of the product it made, he said, would slide towards
zero. If the machine contains no labour then it can't transfer any labour to the product,
and if it never wears down you never have to replace it, so the product contains less
and less labour, so its value shrinks.
Information, Mason says, is that perfect Marxist machine. Software is used in production more
and more, to design, model, test products virtually. It never
wears down, and you can copy it as many times as you like, at zero cost. Imagine a program that
controls the automated production of cars. It costs to make the computers to run the program
(although those costs are falling fast), but once you've got it you can copy
it as many times as you like and distribute it for free to every car factory in the world. You can replace the
program if you make an update but otherwise it'll keep going - and the value of cars will fall.
Mason calls this "the information effect," and of course it's not just restricted to
cars. You can incorporate information technology into producing just about anything, and although
you will still need the physical robotic arms to assemble the car, their value becomes dependent on the
software they run. And their value falls when you use information technology to make them.
That's the power of the information effect; you can make stuff that's very, very useful but
which contains almost zero labour, and therefore can't be part of a market system.
Capitalism is trying to hang on: it's using the state to uphold patent laws on software
that otherwise you could just copy and distribute for free; it's using planned obsolescence; it's using price monopolies on
things that otherwise have no distribution costs; it's taking things that normally wouldn't be valuable,
like your browsing history, and turning them into opportunities to generate revenue through targeted advertising;
it's creating what anthropologist David Graber called "bullshit jobs," jobs that don't really do any good
and could easily be automated, they just exist so that people will be working.
Like with the industrial revolution, Mason says that the potential
of the new technology to liberate people from working is being held back in the name of profit.
But Mason thinks this time capitalism's luck has run out. Information is creeping into the production
of just about everything and unless we smash all the computers it ain't going away anytime soon. And it's so
easy to get around the laws that protect patents on software. And as technology improves,
more and more jobs could be automated, which means finding bullshit jobs for more
and more people as they get more and more angry at the Alienation
state monopoly capitalism is bringing them. Mason thinks that capitalism's ability to adapt has finally run out,
and with the looming crises, the longer it hangs on the worse things are gonna get.
His proposed solution is Postcapitalism. The final
section of his book outlines his Project Zero: the move toward an economy where information
technology means that the production costs of everything are as close to zero as possible, where
labour time and the cost of living is therefore as close to zero as possible, and where we have
a zero carbon energy system. He says that "The ultimate aim is to reduce to a minimum the hours it
takes to produce what humanity needs." I'll leave you to explore the details of Project Zero
in his book, but I also wrote some things about it that you can find links to below.
But isn't this all, this whole series, just utopic? Isn't Marx Mad? Well, some people might say
that carrying on as we are and expecting everything to be alright is arguably even madder. And Mason
says, look at patriarchy. In the last century the liberation of women has begun:
there's a way to go, but he says "It is absurd that we are capable of witnessing a 40,000-year-old
system of gender oppression dissolve before our eyes and yet still seeing the abolition
of a 200-year-old economic system as an unrealistic utopia." Capitalism might seem as permanent
as the earth under your feet, but what Marx showed more than anything is that if you look
closely enough it is not carved in stone. So it's hard to know who's more crazy... Marx...
or everyone else.
That's the end of my month of Marx. You've learned about his ideas, their history and
potentially our future. I wanna say thank you to the LitCrit Guy for helping me with
the script for Part 1, if you don't follow him already go and do it, the man''s a freaking genius.
Thank you very much for watching, and for more philosophical videos from me every Friday,
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