An Overview of Paul Mason's "End of Capitalism"

Paul Mason, writing in The Guardian, UK, contemplates the possibility that we are living during a period that will see the end of capitalism. Mason argues that "info-capitalism" has created a new change-agent in history: the educated and connected human being.

Mason argues that value no longer comes exclusively from new products and processes, but also from making old products and processes intelligent. He argues that we, and our smart machines, are all nodes in a larger process -- that we are now one big information factory.

Mason sees this leading to a world of abundant information, non-hierarchical work and dissociation of work from wages.

Mason also argues that collaborative production is replacing leftist Utopian dreams of collectivism and rightist romanticism of individualism. He argues that network technology produces goods and services that only "work" when they are freely shared. In this sense the old economics, based on scarcity is incompatible with the new nature of production based on abundance of ideas and information -- thus throwing old economic pricing and valuing systems into chaos.

Mason's core argument is this: Information is physical. Software is a type of "machine". Storage and bandwidth and processing power are collapsing in price at exponential rates. We are surrounded by machines that cost nothing and could last forever. The information economy that we live in "will blow capitalism sky high", he says.

The post-capitalist project that he envisions is, indeed, a project and not a 5-year plan. Mason argues that the transition in society will not come about through protest movements or political parties, those, he argues, will not be necessary to bring the needed changes about once people realize intellectual property rights in a market economy inhibit the free production and distribution of ideas that boost physical production and lift the standard of living. 

The project will require, however, strategic support for technology and processes that will accelerate these developments.This transition, he argues, will not be the exclusive property of leftist politics -- it will have much broader support, but will be resisted by those who will attempt to maintain the status quo which, he says, is an impossibility in any case.