By Noel Ignatiev
A former student sent me a link to an article in The Guardian (U.S. Edition) of July 17 by Paul Mason called “The End of Capitalism Has Begun.” (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun?CMP=share_btn_fb)
The student asked me for my response. I went through the article and picked out key quotes:
“The
coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social
infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the
amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life
for all.
“We’re seeing the spontaneous rise
of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are
appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the
managerial hierarchy.
“Parallel currencies, time
banks, cooperatives and self-managed spaces have proliferated, barely
noticed by the economics profession, and often as a direct result of the
shattering of the old structures in the post-2008 crisis.
“They
exist because they trade, however haltingly and inefficiently, in the
currency of postcapitalism: free time, networked activity and free
stuff.
“New forms of ownership, new forms of
lending, new legal contracts: a whole business subculture has emerged
over the past 10 years, which the media has dubbed the “sharing
economy”. Buzzwords such as the “commons” and “peer-production” are
thrown around, but few have bothered to ask what this development means
for capitalism itself.
“I believe it offers an
escape route – but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured,
promoted and protected by a fundamental change in what governments do.”
Then I gave my response:
“What governments do…” Ah, there’s the rub.
Let’s
try it. I’ll fix dinner tonight, you bring the wine. What’s that, you
have no wine? Oh well, I was going to serve chicken, but I had no
chicken and no money for one. Why didn’t I help myself to one from the
store? I tried, but the guard there wouldn’t let me. I offered to come
in and sweep the floor in return for a chicken, but they told me they
had a machine, one of those robot vacuums, that does that. How about
you, why no wine? Ah, the wine store also wanted money, and you had
none. I see. Well, then, I guess we will do without dinner tonight. How
about tomorrow?
Karl Marx had a good idea, and he
laid it out in “The Fragment on Machines” referred to by the writer.
Sounds like communism to me. I was trying to explain to a fellow worker
how it would work. He said communism sounded like a good idea, but he
didn’t see how we could ever have that under capitalism.
The student liked what I said.
