PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

Marginal simply means all the value is in the ‘extra bit’ you want to buy, not in the whole product. So the value of the last ecstasy tablet in the nightclub is higher than all the others.

Work is not just the measure of value but the motherlode from which profit is mined.

Now Marx drops a bombshell. In an economy where machines do most of the work, where human labour is really about supervising, mending and designing the machines, the nature of the knowledge locked inside the machines must, he writes, be ‘social’.

If the working class is able to resist wage cuts and attacks on the welfare system, the innovators are forced to search for new technologies and business models that can restore dynamism on the basis of higher wages – through innovation and higher productivity, not exploitation.

On some campuses you can already hear it: ‘China shows capitalism works better without democracy’ has become a standard talking point. The self-belief of the 1 per cent is in danger of ebbing away, to be replaced by a pure and undisguised oligarchy.
But there is good news.
The 99 per cent are coming to the rescue.
Postcapitalism will set you free.

They go to the elite colleges but the fancy names on the college hoodies – Harvard, Cambridge, MIT – mean nothing. You might as well just print Standard Neoliberal University. The Ivy League hoodie is simply a badge of entry to this tawdry world.

It is absurd that we are capable of witnessing a 40,000-year-old system of gender oppression begin to dissolve before our eyes and yet still seeing the abolition of a 200-year-old economic system as an unrealistic utopia.

One specific problem is how to record the experience of failure into persistent data that allows us to retrace our steps, amend them and roll out the lessons across the whole economy. Networks are bad at memory; they are designed so that memory and activity sit in two different parts of the machine. Hierarchies were good at remembering – so working out how to retain and process lessons will be critical. The solution may be as simple as adding a recording and storing function to all activities, from the coffee shop to the state.

We need to be unashamed utopians. The most effective entrepreneurs of early capitalism were exactly that, and so were all the pioneers of human liberation.

‘Work cannot become play,’ Marx wrote.11 But the atmosphere in the modern video game design workshop shows that play and work can alternate quite freely and produce results. Among guitars, sofas, pool tables covered in piles of discarded pizza boxes, there is of course still exploitation. But modular, target-driven work, with employees enjoying a high degree of autonomy, can be less alienating, more social, more enjoyable – and deliver better results.