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 Part III

An all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction – indeed in some sense was the destruction – of a hierarchical society.

Emmanuel Goldstein, in George Orwell, Nineteen EightyFour1

8 On Transitions

It can be a shock to find out capitalism has not always existed. Economists present ‘the market’ as the natural state of humanity. TV documentaries recreate in fantastic detail the Egyptian pyramids or
Beijing under the emperors, but gloss over the totally different economic systems that built them. ‘They were just like us,’ dads confidently tell their kids as they wander around the Herculaneum exhibition in the British Museum – until confronted by the statue of Pan raping a goat, or the wall painting of a couple having a threesome with their slave.

When you realize that capitalism, once, did not exist
– either as an economy or a value system – a more shocking thought arises: it might not last for ever. If so, we have to get our heads around the concept of transitions, asking: what constitutes an economic system and how does one give way to another?


In the preceding chapters I’ve shown how the rise of information technology disrupted the basic institutions of capitalism: price, ownership and wages. I’ve argued that neoliberalism was a false dawn; that the post-2008 crisis is the product of flaws within the economic model which prevent the exploitation of new technologies, and the takeoff of a fifth long wave.

All this makes postcapitalism possible, but we have no model for the transition. Stalinism left us with a blueprint for disaster; the Occupy movement came up with some piecemeal good ideas; the so-called P2P
(peer-to-peer) movement has evolved collaborative models on a small scale; while environmentalists have developed pathways for the transition to a zerocarbon economy, but tend to see these as separate from the survival of capitalism.

So when it comes to planning the transition from one kind of economy to another, all we have is the experience of two very different events: the rise of capitalism and the collapse of the Soviet Union. In this chapter I will focus on what we can learn from them, and in the final part of the book I will try to apply these lessons to the design of a ‘project plan’ for moving the economy beyond capitalism.

Twenty-five years of neoliberalism have forced our thinking about change to become small. But if we are

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bold enough to imagine we can rescue the planet, we should also imagine rescuing ourselves from an economic system that doesn’t work. In fact, the imagination stage is critical.

A BOLSHEVIK ON MARS

In Alexander Bogdanov’s vintage sci-fi novel, Red Star
(1909), the hero – an organizer in the Russian
Bolshevik party – gets taken to Mars on a spaceship.
He finds the Martian factories modern and impressive but the most stunning thing is what he sees in the control room: a realtime display provides an hourly snapshot of labour shortages in every factory on the planet, together with a summary of sectors where there is a labour surplus. The aim is for workers to move voluntarily to where they are needed. Since there is no shortage of goods, demand is not measured. There is no money either: ‘Everyone takes whatever he needs, in whatever quantities he wants,’ explains the Martian guide. The workers, controlling but never touching giant pieces of machinery, also fascinate our earthling: ‘They seem to be inquisitive, learned observers who had no real part in what was going on around them … To an outsider the threads connecting the delicate brains of the men with the indestructible organs of the machines were subtle and invisible.’1

In Red Star, Bogdanov not only imagined how a


postcapitalist economy could work, he imagined what kind of person would be needed to make it possible
– information workers, their brains connected by something ‘subtle and invisible’. But by portraying the communist future, he was defying the conventions of his time: all wings of socialism were opposed to discussing castles in the air. But this was no mere whimsy.

Bogdanov, a medical doctor, was one of the twentytwo founder members of Bolshevism. He had been imprisoned, exiled, led the party in the Petrograd soviet, edited its newspaper, managed its funds and organized the raising of them – through bank robberies. It is Bogdanov we see playing chess with
Lenin in the famous photograph at the party’s training school on Capri in 1908.2 But within a year of that photo, Bogdanov would be expelled from Lenin’s party. He had formed an opposition to Lenin, based on disagreements that prefigured the tragedy that was about to unfold.

The 1905 revolution, said Bogdanov, showed that workers were not ready to run society. Because he thought postcapitalist society would have to be a knowledge society, any attempt to create it through blind revolutionary action could only bring to power a technocratic elite, he warned. To prevent this,
Bogdanov said, ‘a new proletarian culture must be disseminated among the masses, a proletarian

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science developed, a proletarian philosophy worked out’.3

All this was anathema to Lenin. Marxism had become a doctrine of imminent breakdown and revolution, where the workers would make the revolution happen despite the ideas and prejudices in their heads. Bogdanov also had the temerity to suggest that Marxism should adapt to new ways of thinking in science. He predicted that mental labour would replace manual labour; that all labour would become technological.
Once this happened, our understanding of the world would have to go beyond the dialectial methods of thinking Marx had inherited from philosophy. Science would replace philosophy, Bogdanov predicted; and we would come to see reality as connected ‘networks of experience’.
Separate sciences would become part of a ‘universal organisational science’ – the study of systems.

For becoming, effectively, the first systems theorist, and for his prescient warning about what might happen in Russia, Bogdanov was expelled – at a fractious meeting in Lenin’s Paris apartment in 1909.
Within months, his novel Red Star was published, and widely circulated among Russian workers. In the light of what actually happened under Stalinism, its treatment of the postcapitalist economy is farsighted.


In the novel, Martian communism is based on abundance: there is more than enough of everything.
Production takes place on the basis of realtime and transparent computation of demand. Consumption is free. It works because there is a mass psychology of cooperation among workers, based on their high education and the fact that their work is primarily mental. They shape-shift between male and female genders, remain calm and selfless in the face of stress and danger, and live an enriched emotional and cultural life.

Bogdanov’s outline of the back-story is also provocative:
 Mars
 was
 industrialized
 under
 capitalism; a struggle for control of industry began, followed by a revolution – largely peaceful because it was conducted by workers rather than peasants.
There had then been a 100-year-long transition period during which the need for work was progressively eroded, by shortening the compulsory working day from six hours to zero.

To anybody with a knowledge of orthodox Marxism, it is easy to read between the lines of Red Star.
Bogdanov was using the novel to outline a complete alternative to the ideas that would dominate the far left in the twentieth century.
He advocates technological maturity as the precondition for revolution, the peaceful overthrow of the capitalists by means of compromise and compensation, a focus

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on technology as a means to reduce labour to a minimum and a relentless insistence that it is humanity itself that has to be transformed, not just the economy. Furthermore, a major theme of Red Star is that postcapitalist society has to be sustainable for the planet. The Martians voluntarily commit suicide if they perceive there are too many of them for their planet to support. And as their natural resources fail, they begin an agonized debate about whether to colonize Earth.

If you are thinking: ‘What might Russia have become if Lenin had fallen under a tram on his way to the meeting where they expelled Bogdanov?’, you are not the first to do so. There is a whole literature of ‘what if?’ focused on Bogdanov – and rightly so. Though he could not imagine a computer, he had imagined the kind of communism that society based on mental labour, sustainability and networked thought might produce.

After 1909, Bogdanov retired from activism and spent ten years writing a pioneering book on systems theory. In the early years of the Soviet Union he formed a mass workers’ cultural organization – the
Proletkult – which was shut down after it became allied with an opposition group advocating workers’ control.4 He returned to medicine and died in 1928 after subjecting himself to an experimental blood transfusion.5


When they began to construct socialism by diktat in the 1930s, Soviet planners were fond of citing Red Star as their inspiration.6 But by then the facts and the utopia had diverged.

THE RUSSIAN NIGHTMARE

The Russian Revolution went wrong in stages. Under conditions of civil war, from 1918 to 1921, banks and major industries were nationalized, production was directed by commissars (with trade unions subject to military discipline), factory committees were banned and crops simply requisitioned from the peasants. As a result, output declined to 20 per cent of its pre-war level, famine spread through the countryside and the rouble collapsed; some companies resorted to barter and wages had to be paid in kind.

In March 1921, the USSR was forced to switch to a form of market socialism known as the ‘New
Economic Policy’. Letting the peasants keep and sell their crops revived the economy, but created two dangers that the beleaguered revolutionaries in
Russia had trouble understanding. First, it channelled money towards the better-off peasants, known in slang as ‘kulaks’, and gave the agricultural sector a de facto economic veto over the speed of industrial development – summarized in the slogan ‘Socialism at a snail’s pace’. Second, it solidified a privileged

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bureaucracy running factories, distribution organizations, the army, the secret police and government offices.

Against the rich peasants and the bureaucrats, the
Russian working class pressed for more democracy, for rapid industrialization through central planning and for a crackdown on speculators. Soon this threeway struggle in society was reflected within the
Communist Party itself.

A factional dispute broke out, between a left opposition led by Trotsky, arguing for more democracy and more planning; a pro-market wing led
 by
 Bukharin,
 who
 wanted
 to
 delay
 industrialization, telling the peasants
‘enrich yourselves’; and in the centre Stalin himself, defending the interests of the bureaucracy.

In November 1927, at a parade celebrating the anniversary of the revolution, around 20,000 supporters of the left-wing faction carried banners calling for the party to suppress the kulaks, speculators and bureaucrats. When several Moscow factories marched out to join them, the police attacked and street fighting followed.

Stalin expelled Trotsky and the leaders of the left and sent them into forced exile. Then, in one of those Uturns that Orwell would later parody in Nineteen


Eighty-Four, Stalin implemented the left’s programme
– but in a much more extreme form, with maximum violence and brutality. In 1928 it was Bukharin’s turn to be purged, together with the market-oriented right of the party. The kulaks, were ‘liquidated’ in a programme of forced collectivization of their farms.
Estimates vary, but a combination of famine and mass shootings in the countryside killed about 8 million people over three years.7

The scale of Stalin’s ambition in the first Five Year
Plan (1928–32) was captured in his statement: ‘We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us.’8

The official figures show a massive growth in output during the first Five Year Plan: the doubling of coal, steel and oil production; colossal infrastructure projects completed ahead of time. But, unlike in the sci-fi world of Red Star, planners faced two absolute impediments. The economy was still dominated by agriculture, and the technical base of the industrial sector was weak and had been undermined by ten years of chaos. Far from planning in a situation of abundance, Stalin imposed planning on a society with high levels of scarcity and a semi-feudal farming system. To make any kind of progress, he needed a brutal process of reallocation: from the countryside to industry, and from consumption to the sectors

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producing heavy machinery. The industrial targets were met, but at the cost of mass starvation, mass executions, slave labour conditions in many workplaces and, in the end, a further economic crisis.9

The USSR did not catch up with the West in ten years.
But by 1977 its GDP per head was 57 per cent of the
USA’s – which put it on a par with Italy. From 1928 until the early 1980s, the average growth in the
USSR, according to a CIA-commissioned survey, was
4.2 per cent. ‘This clearly qualifies as a sustained growth record,’ concluded analysts at the RAND
Corporation.10

But Soviet growth was never driven by productivity.
The RAND study found only a quarter of the USSR’s growth was driven by better technology, with the rest by rising inputs – of machinery, raw materials and energy. After 1970, there was no growth at all in productivity: if you needed double the number of nails produced, you built a new nail factory alongside the old one – productivity was off the agenda.

Economists call this ‘extensive growth’ – as opposed to the intensive growth that raises real wealth. In the medium term, a system based on extensive growth cannot survive. It is likely that, with flatlining productivity, the Soviet system would have collapsed at some point from its internal problems, even if it


had not been confronted with pressure from the
West in the 1980s.

One lesson – spelled out in advance by anarchists, agrarian socialists such as Kondratieff and dissident
Marxists like Bogdanov – was: ‘do not take power in a backward country’. A second lesson is: understand that planning is guesswork. As the economist Holland
Hunter showed by data-mining the Soviet numbers, the targets of the first Five Year Plan were never achievable without a 24 per cent slump in consumption.11 Soviet planners were flying blind: guessing at a target, erring on the upside to maintain pressure on their subordinates to deliver, and – when they failed – wasting huge amounts of effort trying to remedy the situation or cover it up. They refused to recognize that even transitional economies have objective laws: dynamics that work behind the backs of the economic players and confound their willpower. ‘It is impossible to study the Soviet economy taking causality as one’s axis,’ announced the party’s economics textbook in the mid-1920s.12 In the fantasy world of Stalinism, even cause and effect were irrelevant.

Because Soviet growth outstripped that of the West for a time, Keynesian economics remained in awe of the planned economy. It was the prophets of neoliberalism – Mises and Hayek – who had from the very beginning predicted its chaotic demise. If we

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want to design a project of transition towards postcapitalism today, we have to take the criticisms of Hayek and Mises seriously. They were, at their sharpest, not just critics of Soviet reality; they insisted that – even in a developed country – all forms of planning must fail.

THE CALCULATION DEBATE

It’s strange but true: the possibility of socialism was once a central tenet of mainstream economics.
Because the marginalists thought the market was the perfect expression of human rationality, they had no problem – as long as it was only a thought experiment – with the idea that an all-knowing state could achieve the same results as a perfect market.
‘Both systems are not different in form and they lead to the same point,’ wrote the Italian economist
Vilfredo Pareto in a celebrated textbook, ‘the result is extremely remarkable.’13

In 1908, his colleague Enrico Barone wrote a detailed account of how a socialist state could calculate the exact same outcomes that the market achieves blindly. Barone showed how it would be possible to discover, using linear equations, the most efficient forms of production, consumption and exchange. ‘It would be a tremendous – a gigantic – work … but it is not an impossibility,’ he wrote.14


This was an article of faith for marginalists: in theory, a perfect plan – made by a state with perfect knowledge and the ability to calculate in realtime – was as good as a perfect market.

But there was a catch. In the first place, just like the market, the state can’t calculate what’s needed in advance. So each year’s plan is in effect an experiment – and not on a small scale but on a very large one. The market could correct itself in realtime; the plan would take longer. A collectivist regime would be just as anarchic as the market, but on a bigger scale, according to Barone. And in practice the state can never have perfect knowledge, nor can it do the calculations fast enough, so the whole debate remained, literally, academic.

It was the upheaval of 1917–21 that made the issue of
‘socialist calculation’ a concrete question for economics. In 1919, Germany and Austria had begun their ill-fated ‘socialization’ drives, the early Soviet war economy was being hailed as a form of communism – and in the short-lived soviet republic of Bavaria they had seriously discussed trying to abolish money immediately. Planned economies were no longer a thought experiment, they were an imminent possibility, and being pursued with some fanaticism.

This was the context of Ludwig von Mises’s book

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Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth
(1920). The market, Mises said, acts as a calculating machine: people make choices, they buy and sell things at a given price, and the market works out whether their choices were correct. Over time, this ensures the most rational allocation of scarce resources. Once you remove private property and begin planning, the calculating machine breaks down: ‘Without economic calculation there can be no economy. Hence, in a socialist state wherein the pursuit of economic calculation is impossible, there can be – in our sense of the term – no economy whatsoever.’15

As to the far left’s determination to abolish money,
Mises explained that it did not matter. If you go on using money while overriding the market mechanism through planning, you reduce money’s ability to convey price signals. But if you abolish money, you abolish the measuring stick for supply and demand: distribution becomes inspired guesswork. ‘Thus,’ said
Mises,
‘in the socialist commonwealth every economic change becomes an undertaking whose success can be neither appraised in advance nor later retrospectively determined. There is only groping in the dark.’16

Mises targeted three critical weaknesses of planning in reality: a state can’t calculate as fast as a market can; a state can’t reward innovation; and when it


comes to distributing capital between major sectors then, without a finance system, this becomes unwieldy and haphazard. Mises predicted that as a result planning would lead to chaos, specifically to the overproduction of shoddy goods that nobody wanted. It would work for a while because the
‘memory’ of the appropriate prices would be imprinted on to the system, but once that memory faded, it would collapse in chaos. Because his predictions were proved right, by both the life and death of the Soviet economy, his book has become a hallowed text of the free-market right. But it was not hugely influential at the time.

Only in the 1930s, amid the Depression, fascism and the USSR’s second Five Year Plan, did the debate on socialist calculation take off. The USSR was inefficient for all the usual reasons cited, said Mises’s pupil Friedrich Hayek: no consumer choice, clunky allocation of resources, no reward for innovation. But on Mises’s main point – the inability of the state to calculate as well as the market – Hayek retreated. A socialist state could mirror the market effectively, as
Barone had said, provided that it had the right information. The problem was that it could never do the calculations fast enough.

Hayek’s collaborator, LSE professor Harold Robbins, complained that, to calculate the plan properly,
‘would necessitate the drawing up of millions of

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equations on the basis of millions of statistical data based on many more millions of individual computations. By the time the equations were solved, the information on which they were based would have become obsolete and they would need to be calculated anew.’17

This sparked a brisk exchange. The left-wing Polish economist Oskar Lange pointed out Hayek and
Robbins had effectively made a big concession to the left.18

Lange was part of a school of moderate socialists who rejected Marxism and believed socialism could be implemented using the principles of marginal utility theory. He showed that if you retain a consumer market, and leave people free to choose where they work, but plan the production of all goods, then the process of trial and error in a socialist economy is conceptually no different from the one that operates through prices. Instead of being signalled through price movements, the unmet needs of the economy are signalled through shortages and surplus goods.
The central supply board simply reorders production quotas in response.

Most independent observers thought Lange had proved his point. After the war, even the CIA’s expert on Soviet economics concluded: ‘Of course socialism can work … On this Lange certainly is convincing.’19


However, we need to revisit the calculation debate for a reason that should be obvious: technology is today eroding the price mechanism without the parallel rise of a planned economy.
And supercomputers plus big data are putting within reach the kind of realtime calculations Robbins thought were impossible. Robbins asked for a million, million, million. That is a petabyte, which just happens to be the unit we use to measure the performance of a supercomputer: petabytes of instructions per second. This has revived the idea among some leftists that ‘planning could work’ – if only you could solve the problem of calculation through technology. In fact, however, there is no calculation problem in a postcapitalist economy – for a reason that was suggested by Mises in 1920.

In the ‘calculation debate’ of the 1930s, both sides rejected the labour theory of value. Lange the socialist and Hayek the ultra-capitalist both believed that marginal utility was the only explanation of what creates value. So for both sides, the idea of a transition – in which a system based on scarcity gives way to one based on abundance – is unexplored territory. If capitalism and state socialism are just two different ways of allocating goods rationally until you reach equilibrium, the transition between them is merely a technical challenge, not a revolution.

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But as Mises had already pointed out, if the labour theory of value is correct, there is no calculation problem at all. The problems of allocating goods, deciding priorities and rewarding people who innovate can all be captured within a system based on labour values, because everything can be measured against the same yardstick. Socialism was possible, Mises admitted, but only if there was a
‘recognizable unit of value, which would permit of economic calculation in an economy where neither money nor exchange were present. And only labor can conceivably be considered as such.’20

Yet Mises dismissed the labour-theory for the standard reasons accepted in Vienna in the 1920s: it can’t be used to measure different skill levels, and it can’t be used to apply a market value to natural resources. Both these objections are easily overcome; they are in fact misunderstandings of Marx’s theory.
Marx clearly explained how high-skilled work can be measured as a multiple of low-skilled work – and that the labour value embodied in raw materials was simply the work it took to extract and transport them.

And Mises’s work on calculation contains a second valuable insight: it is not trading between enterprises that is the true mediator of supply and demand in a market economy, it is the finance system – which puts a price on capital. This was a perceptive insight,


which has relevance today: if we want a postcapitalist economy, not only do we need something better than the market for distributing goods, we also need something better than the finance system for allocating capital.

TRANSITIONS HAVE THEIR OWN DYNAMICS

It was only the Russian left opposition – above all its leading economist Evgeny Preobrazhensky – which understood the centrality of the labour-theory to the transition. For them the goal of the transition was quite simply a rising supply of free, abundant things and the erosion of ‘necessary labour’ as the yardstick of exchange. As in Red Star, the early Soviet planners aimed to produce as much as possible so that work would be de-linked from wages and the ability to consume. In Marxist terms, this was understood as
‘abolishing the law of value’.

But the Russian left could only achieve this by promoting heavy industry and state control. By the early 1920s, there was a shortage of everything: to make consumer goods you needed heavy industry and electrification; to feed people you needed to industrialize agriculture.
So they urged the concentration of resources in the sectors that would become iconic in Soviet propaganda – power stations, steel works, big machinery. However, they showed great awareness that equilibrium was unlikely to be

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achieved, and that planning was likely to be anarchic.

In economic terms, the most important thing the
Russian Trotskyists left us was probably the idea that a transition phase generates its own dynamics; it is never just the fading of one system and the rise of another.

Trotsky argued that in the first phase of the Sovietstyle transition, both a private business and a consumer sector had to be maintained. It was hubris to suggest the plan could, at this stage, allocate better than the market in consumer goods. Plus, the rouble had to remain exchangeable on the world market. Furthermore, all plans were effectively hypotheses. ‘The plan,’ said Trotsky, ‘is checked and, to a considerable degree, realized through the market.’21

To make even the crudest adjustment requires realtime information feedback. But in a heavily bureaucratic society, where to dissent was to invite a one-way ticket to the gulag, such feedback was strangled. Hence Trotsky’s emphasis on reviving workplace democracy. You needed a rolling plan: a combination of plan and market, with money used as both a medium of exchange and store of value. And you needed workers’ democracy.

Money, said
Preobrazhensky, would function


normally in those sectors you could not plan, while in the planned sector of the economy, money would start to function as a technical accounting device.
And while the aim is for the plan to swamp the market, the market could be expected to constantly
‘pollute’ the plan.

In a memorable passage, whose relevance to the twenty-first century will be clear, Trotsky wrote:

If a universal mind existed … that could register simultaneously all the processes of nature and society, that could measure the dynamics of their motion, that could forecast the results of their interreactions – such a mind, of course, could a priori draw up a faultless and exhaustive economic plan, beginning with the number of acres of wheat down to the last button for a vest.22

The absence of such a ‘universal mind’, he said, requires instead the promotion of workers’ democracy – which had been abolished. Only if human beings, with freedom of speech, became the sensors and feedback mechanisms for the planning system could this crude calculating machine work.

Preobrazhensky, Trotsky and their collaborators were the last Marxists with any political power who conceived the transition in terms of labour value.
Preobrazhensky was executed in 1936 and Trotsky

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assassinated in 1940. But their ideas contain powerful implications for the world we face today.

Under neoliberalism, the market sector is immensely more complex than in the 1920s and 30s. The USA in
1933 was vastly different from Russia in 1933 – but they were much closer to each other than the
America of today is to the America of thirty years ago. Today’s consumer sector is not only much bigger, it is much more atomized. Production and consumption overlap – and the economy already includes information goods whose marginal production cost is zero. We also have Negri’s ‘social factory’ to contend with: a highly financialized and granular consumer society, in which what we buy has become a question of identity.

So lesson one is: the market sector is much more complex and therefore more difficult to replicate or improve on through planning.

Next, we have to consider the state sector. The modern state as a service provider is massive compared to any capitalist state in the 1930s.
Whether it spends its tax dollars on services from private companies or those provided by the state itself, the state pushes the true private economy – private companies producing for privately employed individuals – into a smaller space. In addition, the peer-to-peer economy is large, though not measured


in terms of profit and GDP. So lesson two is: any attempt to move beyond the market is going to start from a different place than it would have in the
1930s.

But we can learn from both the calculation debate and from the Russian left’s planning experts, if we know how to read them properly. Before that, however, we have to understand that, even with the best supercomputer and the biggest data farm, planning is not the primary route beyond capitalism.

ATTACK OF THE CYBER-STALINISTS

Over the past twenty years, Paul Cockshott and Allin
Cottrell – a computer scientist and an economics professor – have worked tirelessly on a problem we thought we didn’t have: how to plan an economy.
Though not well known, their work is rigorous and performs an invaluable service; it is a textbook outline of what we should not do.

Cockshott and Cottrell argue that improvements in computer power, together with the application of advanced maths and information theory removes, in principle, the Hayek/Robbins objection: that the planner can never have better realtime information than a market. What’s more, unlike the left in the calculation debate, they say the computer model we would need for planned production should use the

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labour theory of value, and not try to simulate the results of supply and demand.

This is a crucial departure from the work of Lange.
Cockshott and Cottrell understand that the labourtheory gives you a measuring stick against which both market interactions and non-market ones can be compared, and a way of calibrating the transition.
They see the planning process as similar to a modular computer program. It would collate the demands of consumers and producers; work out the cost and resources needed to meet them; formulate targets; calculate in advance the resource implications; check the feasibility of the plan; and then instruct producers and suppliers of services to hit the targets.23

But unlike the Russian left of the 1920s, Cockshott and Cottrell don’t see the plan as provisional, or something for the state sector alone to execute; it has to be drawn up and tested in detail, down to enterprise level and individual products.

Once you remove the market, they argue, there are no other signals for the boss of a factory, or care home, or coffee bar to rely on. They have to know exactly what they’re supposed to be producing.
Theirs, in other words, is the methodology for a completely prescriptive plan, as imagined (and ridiculed) by Trotsky in the 1930s.


Historically, of course, sophisticated planning at this level is something the Soviet Union never achieved: by the 1980s there were 24 million different products in the USSR but the entire planning apparatus could track the price and quantity of only 200,000 of them, and the actual central plan just 2,000. As a result, factories met the targets for the small number of goods they were supposed to make, and fulfilled all other requests chaotically or not at all.24

In Cockshott and Cottrell’s model, money exists in the form of ‘labour tokens’ which are paid to everybody according to the amount of labour they do, minus a flat tax to pay for state services. This allows for consumer choice. Where supply and demand for a product get out of kilter, the central planners adjust the price to achieve a short-term rebalancing. Then, over a longer period, they compare the prices commanded by a sector, or production unit, to the actual amount of labour it is doing. In the next round of the plan, they boost production in the areas where prices are higher than the labour used and cut them where lower. Planning is ‘iterative’; it is adjusted constantly. But it is not mere trial and error: Cockshott and Cottrell believe the inputs and outputs can be calculated in advance, and they propose a detailed algorithm to do so.

The computing challenge is, first, to calculate what

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the value of an hour’s labour should be. That is – how much work is going into each product, as listed on a giant spreadsheet. The researchers argue this is doable with a supercomputer, but only if it uses dataprocessing techniques that prioritize the most relevant information.

For Cockshott and Cottrell, working out the value of an hour’s labour is the hard part. The plan itself – the allocation of resources – is an easier calculation to do, because you do not run the program blind. You ask it feasible questions such as: how much of a product is going to be sold this year; how much of the various inputs do we normally use; what’s the seasonal variation, what’s the expected demand, how much should we order within the boundaries of past experience?
They conclude:
‘With modern computers, one could envisage computing an updated list of labor values daily and preparing a new perspective plan weekly – somewhat faster than a market economy is able to react.’25

In an ambitious application of these principles,
Cockshott and Cottrell proposed an outline for a planned economy in the European Union. They explained not just how you would calculate the plan, but also how you would have to restructure the economy to implement it. And it is here that the assumptions behind their methodology become clear: for all their dislike of what went wrong in the 1930s,


this is still a form of cyber-Stalinism.

In their model, the de-marketization of Europe would be driven not primarily by nationalization, but by reforming the monetary system so that money began to reflect labour value.26 Banknotes would be overprinted with a ‘labour time figure’, allowing people to see the mismatch between what they were being paid for their labour and what they were being charged for products. Over time, the authors expect people to choose products closer to their true value; consumer choice becomes a mechanism for squeezing profit out of the system. A law banning exploitation would allow workers to claim against excess profit-making; the final aim being to eradicate profit altogether. Banking would effectively cease to be a means of building up capital, which would be done by the state, using direct taxation. The finance industry would be wiped out.

The huge service Cockshott and Cottrell perform here is not the one they intend. They show that to fully plan an early-twenty-first-century developed economy, it would have to be stripped of its complexity, see finance removed completely, and have radical behavioural change enforced at the level of consumption, workplace democracy and investment.

Where the dynamism and innovation would come

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from is not addressed. Nor how the vastly enlarged cultural sector would come in. In fact, the researchers make a strong case that, because of its decreased complexity, a planned economy would need fewer calculations than a market one.

But that’s the problem. In order for the plan to work, society in this project has to go back to being
‘plannable’. Workers interface with every aspect of
Cockshott and Cottrell’s plan via ‘their’ workplace – so what happens to the precarious worker with three jobs; or the single mum doing sex work on a web cam? They can’t exist. Likewise, the financial complexity that has come to characterize modern life has to disappear – and not gradually. There can be no credit cards in this world; no payday loans; probably a much-reduced e-commerce sector. And of course there are no network structures in this model and no peer-produced free stuff.

Though the researchers decry the dogmatic idiocy of
Soviet planning, their world view remains that of a hierarchical society, of physical products, of a simple system where the pace of change is slow. The model they’ve produced is the best demonstration yet of why any attempt to use state planning and market suppression as a route to postcapitalism is closed.

Fortunately, another route has opened up. To follow it we must exploit a granular, spontaneous microprocess, not a plan. Our solution must map comfortably on to a world of networks, info-goods, complexity and exponential change.

Of course, on the route to postcapitalism, we will have need of planning. Large parts of the capitalist world are effectively planned already – from urban design and construction projects through to the integrated supply chains of a large supermarket. It is the advance in processing power, the use of big data and the digital tracking of individual objects and components – using barcodes or RFID tags – that make this possible. That part of our project which requires planning would be well equipped because of this.


But the nature of modern society alters the problem.
In a complex, globalized society, where the worker is also the consumer of financial services and microservices from other workers, the plan cannot outdo the market unless there is a retreat from complexity and a return to hierarchy. A computerized plan, even if it measured everything against labour values, might tell the shoe industry to produce shoes, but it could not tell Beyoncé to produce a surprise album marketed only via social media, as she did in 2013.
Nor would the plan be concerned with the most interesting thing in our modern economy: free stuff.
Such a plan would see time spent curating a
Wikipedia page, or updating Linux, exactly the same


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way as the market sees it: wasteful and incalculable.

If the rise of the networked economy is beginning to dissolve the law of value, planning has to be the adjunct of something more comprehensive.

André Gorz once wrote that the source of capitalism’s superiority to Soviet socialism was its ‘instability, its diversity … its complex multiform character, comparable to that of an ecosystem, which continually triggers new conflicts between partially autonomous forces that can neither be controlled nor placed once and for all in the service of a stable order’.27

What we’re trying to build should be even more complex, more autonomous and more unstable.

But change from one economic system to another takes time. If the postcapitalism thesis is right, what we’re about to live through will be a lot more like the transition from feudalism to capitalism than the one the Soviet planners envisaged. It will be long; there will be confusion; and in the process the very concept of an ‘economic system’ will have to be redefined.

And that’s why, whenever I want to stop myself being too Marxist about the future, I think about
Shakespeare.


BIG CHANGE: SHAKESPEARE VS MARX

If you could watch Shakespeare’s history plays backto-back, starting with King John and ending with
Henry VIII, it would at first sight seem like a Netflix drama series without a central plot: murders, wars and mayhem – all set within an apparently meaningless squabble between kings and dukes. But once you understand what a ‘mode of production’ is, the meaning becomes clear. What you are watching is the collapse of feudalism and the emergence of early capitalism.

The mode of production is one of the most powerful ideas to come out of Marxist economics. It influenced a wide range of historical thinkers, and has come to shape our view of the past. Its starting point is the question: what is the prevailing economic system based on?

Feudalism was a system based on obligation: peasants were obliged to hand part of their produce to the landowner and do military service for him; he in turn was obliged to provide the king with taxes, and supply an army on demand. In the England of
Shakespeare’s history plays, however, the mainspring of that system had broken down. By the time Richard III was slaughtering his rivals in real life, the power network based on obligation had been polluted by money: rents paid in money, military

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service paid for with money, wars fought with the aid of a cross-border banking network stretching to
Florence and Amsterdam. Shakespeare’s kings and dukes killed each other because money had made all power based on obligation susceptible to being overthrown.

Shakespeare managed to get to the essence of it long before the words ‘feudalism’ and ‘capitalism’ were even invented. The signal difference between his history plays and the comedies and tragedies is that the latter depict the contemporary society his audience lived in. In the comedies and tragedies we are suddenly in a world of bankers, merchants, companies, mercenary soldiers and republics. The typical setting for these plays is a prosperous trading city, not a castle. The typical hero is a person whose greatness is essentially bourgeois and self-made, either through courage
(Othello), humanist philosophy (Prospero) or knowledge of the law
(Portia in The Merchant of Venice).

But Shakespeare had no clue about where this was going to lead. He saw what this new kind of economy was doing to the human character: empowering us with knowledge, yet leaving us susceptible to greed, passion, self-doubt and power-craziness on a new scale. But it would be another 150 years until merchant capitalism, based on trade, conquest and slavery, paved the way for industrial capitalism.


If you interrogate Shakespeare through his texts, and ask him: ‘what is between the past and the time you’re living in?’, the implicit answer is ‘ideas and behaviour’. Human beings value each other more; love is more important than family duty; human values like truth, scientific rigour and justice are worth dying for – far more so than hierarchy and honour.

Shakespeare is a great witness to the moment when one mode of production begins to falter and another begins to rise. But we also need Marx. In a materialist view of history, the difference between feudalism and early capitalism is not just ideas and behaviours.
Changes in the social and economic system are critical. And at root, the change is driven by new technologies.

For Marx, a mode of production describes a set of economic relationships, laws and social traditions that form the underlying ‘normal’ of a society. In feudalism, the concept of lordly power and obligation pervaded everything. In capitalism, the equivalent force is the market, private property and wages. To understand a mode of production, another revealing question is: ‘what reproduces itself spontaneously?’
In feudalism, it is the concept of fealty and obligation; in capitalism, it is the market.

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And here’s where the mode of production concept gets challenging: the changes are so huge that we are never comparing like with like. So when it comes to the economic system that replaces capitalism, we should not expect it to be based on something as purely economic as the market, nor on something as clearly coercive as feudal power.

For Marx, the modes of production concept led to a strict historical sequence: there are various precapitalist forms of society, where the rich get rich through legally authorized violence; then there is capitalism, where the rich get rich through technical innovation and the market; finally there is communism, where the whole of humanity gets richer because there is abundance instead of scarcity.
That sequence is open to criticism from two angles.
First, it can read like a quasi-mythology: human destiny looks pre-programmed to happen in three logical stages. Second, when used by historians looking backwards, it can lead to the application of simple labels to complex societies, or to imputing economic motives that simply didn’t exist.

But if we avoid the myth of inevitability and assert simply, ‘there must come a time when there is relative abundance, compared to the scarcity that has driven all previous economic models’, then Marx was only saying the same thing as Keynes said in the early 1930s: one day there will be enough goods to go

around and the economic problem will be solved. ‘For the first time since his creation,’ Keynes wrote, ‘man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares
… to live wisely and agreeably and well.’28


In fact, this three-phase view of world history is supported by data we now possess (and that Marx and Keynes didn’t) on population and GDP. Until around the year 1800, only Western Europe experienced a tangible rise in GDP per person, mainly after the conquest of the Americas; then, with the
Industrial Revolution, per person growth took off spectacularly in Europe and America until around
1950, when its rate of acceleration increased again.
Today, as the graph above shows, GDP per person rates are rising all across the world. The stage where all the lines go close to vertical is the one Keynes and
Marx allowed themselves to imagine – and so should we.29

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DRIVERS OF TRANSITION

What caused feudalism to collapse and capitalism to rise? Naturally that’s the subject of a gigantic historical debate. But if we think the transition to postcapitalism is going to be of a similar magnitude, then there are lessons to learn about the interplay between internal and external factors; the role of technology versus the importance of ideas; and why transitions are so hard to understand when you’re in the middle of them.

Armed with new knowledge, from geneticists and epidemiologists as well as social historians, we can list four probable causes for the end of feudalism.

Up to about 1300, feudal agriculture had been dynamic, raising GDP per head in Western Europe faster than anywhere else. But famines, beginning in the 1300s, signalled a decline in the efficiency of the feudal systems of land use: productivity could not keep up with population growth. Then, in 1345, the
English king Edward III defaulted on his country’s debts, wiping out the Florentine bankers who had lent him the money. Though containable, this was just one symptom of a general malaise, and a warning that crisis in one part of feudal Europe might spread to all parts.

In 1347 the Yersinia pestis bacillus hit Europe. By 1353,


the Black Death had killed at least a quarter of
Europe’s population.30 For those who lived through it, the experience was spiritually transformative – like witnessing the end of the world. Its economic impact was stark: the supply of labour collapsed. Suddenly farm workers, who had been the lowest of the low, could command higher wages.

Once the plague was over a surge of economic struggles broke out – peasant revolts in France and
England, worker rebellions in the key manufacturing towns of Ghent and Florence. Historians call this the
‘general crisis of feudalism’. Though the revolts failed, the economic balance was now tipped in favour of the urban worker and the peasant.
‘Agricultural rents collapsed after the Black Death and wages in the towns soared to two and even three times the levels they had held,’ according to historian
David Herlihy.31

With wool prices high, many landowners switched from crops to sheep pasture – and unlike wheat, wool was for trading, not consuming. The old tradition of peasants being forced to do military service was replaced increasingly by cash-based mercenary warfare. And with workers scarce, labour-saving devices began to be invented.

Basically, the rat that brought the Black Death into
Cadiz in 1347 triggered an external shock that helped

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to collapse an internally weakened system.

The second driver of change was the growth of banking. Banking had already become the sure-fire way to amass a fortune in the undocumented space between the official classes of feudalism: nobles, knights, gentry, clerks, etc. The Medicis created a transnational super-company in the fifteenth century, and the Fugger family of Augsburg overtook them once their influence declined.

Banking does not just systematically inject credit into feudal society, it injects an alternative network of power and secrecy. The Fugger and Medici families wielded unofficial leverage over kings through business – even as their activities were seen as borderline un-Christian. Everyone involved connived in the creation of a subtextual form of capitalism within the officially feudal economy.

The third big driver of capitalism’s takeoff was the conquest and pillage of the Americas, beginning in
1503. This created a flow of money to non-aristocrats way in excess of anything generated internally by the market growing, organically, within late feudalism.
In a single load, the conquistadores stole 1.3 million ounces of gold from Peru. The huge amount of wealth imported into early modern Europe boosted market forces, craft manufacturing and banking. And it strengthened the power of monarchic states over the


old independent towns and the now impoverished dukes in their castles.

Finally, there was the printing press. Gutenberg put the first one to use in 1450. In the following fifty years 8 million books were printed – more than all the scribes of Christendom had managed to produce since Roman times. Elizabeth Eisenstein, the great social historian of printing, points out the revolutionary nature of the print-shop itself: it brought together scholars, priests, authors and metalworkers into a business environment that no other social situation within feudalism could have created.
Printed books established checkable knowledge and authorship. They fuelled the rise of
Protestantism, the scientific revolution and humanism. If the medieval cathedral was full of meaning – an encyclopaedia in stone – printing destroyed the need for it. Printing transformed the way human beings think.32 The philosopher Francis
Bacon wrote in 1620 that printing, gunpowder and the compass ‘have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world’.33

If we accept the four-factor account given above, the dissolution of feudalism is not primarily a technology story. It is a complex interplay between failing economics and outside shocks.
These new technologies would have been useless without a new way of thinking and the external disruptions that

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allowed new behaviours to flourish.

When we look at the possibility of transition beyond capitalism, we have to expect a similar complex interplay between technology, social struggle, ideas and external shocks. But our minds reel from the scale of it; just as they do when shown the size of our galaxy in the universe. We have a fatal tendency to push the dynamics of transition into simple categories and simple chains of cause and effect.

The classic Marxist explanation of what destroyed feudalism was ‘its contradictions’: the class struggle between peasant and nobility.34 For later materialist historians, however, the emphasis was on the failure and stagnation of the old system, giving rise to a
‘general crisis’. Perry Anderson, the New Left historian, drew an important general conclusion from this: that the key symptom of a mode of production transition is not the vigorous eruption of the new economic model. ‘On the contrary, the forces of production typically tend to stall and recede within the existent relations of production.’35

What are the other general lessons we might draw?

First, that different modes of production are structured around different things: feudalism was an economic system structured by customs and laws about obligation. Capitalism was structured by


something purely economic: the market. We can predict from this that postcapitalism – whose precondition is abundance – will not simply be a modified form of a complex market society. But we can only begin to grasp at positive visions of what it will be like.

I don’t mean this as a cop-out: the general economic parameters of a postcapitalist society by, for example, the year 2075 will be clear from the next chapter. But if such a society is structured around human liberation, not economics, unpredictable things will begin to shape it. Maybe, for instance, the most obvious thing to the Shakespeare of 2075 will be the total upheaval in gender relationships, or sexuality, or health. Maybe there will not even be any playwrights: maybe the very fabric of the media we use to tell stories will change – just as it did for
Shakespeare’s generation when the first public theatres were built.

Marxism, with its insistence on the proletariat as the driver of change, tended to ignore the question: how will humans have to change in order for postcapitalism to emerge? Yet if we study the transition from feudalism to capitalism it’s one of the most obvious issues.

Think of the difference between, say, Horatio in
Shakespeare’s Hamlet and a character like Daniel

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Doyce in Dickens’s Little Dorrit. Both are secondary characters for the hero to use as a sounding board, both carry around with them a characteristic obsession of their age: Horatio is obsessed with humanist philosophy, Doyce is obsessed with patenting his invention. There can be no character like Doyce in Shakespeare; at best he would get a bit part as a working-class comic figure. Yet, by the time
Dickens described Daniel Doyce, all his readers would have known somebody like him. Just as Shakespeare could not have imagined Doyce, so we too cannot imagine the kind of human beings society will produce once economics is no longer central to life.

Let’s restate what we know about the way the last transition happened and spell out the parallels.

The feudal model of agriculture collided first with environmental limits and then with a massive external shock – the Black Death. After that, there was a demographic shock: too few workers for the land, which raised their wages and made the old feudal obligation system impossible to enforce. The labour shortage also made technological innovation necessary. The new technologies that underpinned the rise of merchant capitalism were the ones that stimulated commerce (printing and accountancy), the creation of tradable wealth (mining, the compass and fast ships) and productivity (mathematics and the scientific method).


Present throughout the whole process is something that looks incidental to the old system – money and credit – but which is destined to become the basis of the new system. Many laws and customs are actually shaped around ignoring money; in high feudalism credit is seen as sinful. So when money and credit burst through the boundaries and create a market system, it feels like a revolution. Then, the new system gains further energy from the discovery of a virtually unlimited source of free wealth in the
Americas.

A combination of all these factors took a set of people who had been persecuted or marginalized under feudalism – humanists, scientists, craftsmen, lawyers, radical preachers and bohemian playwrights like
Shakespeare – and put them at the head of a social transformation. At key moments, though tentatively at first, the state switched from hindering the change to promoting it.

There won’t be exact parallels in the transition to postcapitalism but the rough parallels are there.

The thing that is corroding capitalism, barely rationalized by mainstream economics, is information. The equivalent of the printing press and the scientific method is information technology and its spillover into all other forms of technology, from

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genetics to healthcare to agriculture to the movies.

The modern equivalent of the long stagnation of late feudalism is the stalled fifth Kondratieff cycle, where instead of rapidly automating work out of existence, we are reduced to creating bullshit jobs on low pay, and many economies are stagnating.

The equivalent of the new source of free wealth? It’s not exactly wealth: it’s the externalities – the free stuff and wellbeing generated by networked interaction. It is the rise of non-market production, of un-ownable information, of peer networks and unmanaged enterprises. The internet, says French economist Yann Moulier-Boutang, is ‘both the ship and the ocean’ for the modern-day conquest of a new world. In fact, it is the ship, the compass, the ocean and the gold.

The modern-day external shocks are clear: energy depletion, climate change, ageing populations and migration. They are altering the dynamics of capitalism and making it unworkable in the long term. They have not yet had the same impact as the
Black Death – but any financial collapse could easily wreak havoc on the highly fragile urban societies we’ve created. As Katrina demonstrated in New
Orleans in 2005, it does not take the bubonic plague to destroy social order and functional infrastructure in a modern city.


Once you understand the transition in this way, the need is not for a supercomputed Five Year Plan, but for a gradual, iterative and modular project. Its aim should be to expand those technologies, business models and behaviours that dissolve market forces, eradicate the need for work and progress the world economy towards abundance. That is not to say we can’t take urgent action to mitigate risk, or address burning injustices. But it does mean that we have to understand the difference between strategic goals and short-term actions.

Our strategy should be to shape the outcome of the process that has begun spontaneously so that it becomes irreversible and delivers socially just outcomes as quickly as possible. This will involve a mixture of planning, state provision, markets and peer production. But space must also be left for the modern equivalents of Gutenberg and Columbus. And for the modern Shakespeare.

Most twentieth-century leftists believed that they did not have the luxury of a managed transition. It was an article of faith for them that nothing of the coming system could exist within the old one – though, as I’ve shown, the workers always held the desire to create an alternative life despite capitalism.
As a result, once the possibility of a Soviet-style transition disappeared, the modern left became

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preoccupied simply with opposing things: the privatization of healthcare, the reduction of union rights, fracking – the list goes on.

Today we have to relearn to do positive things: to build alternatives within the system; to use governmental power in a radical and disruptive way; and to focus all our actions towards the transition path – not the piecemeal defence of random elements of the old system.

The socialists of the early twentieth century were absolutely convinced that nothing preliminary was possible within the old system. ‘The socialist system,’
Preobrazhensky once insisted categorically, ‘cannot be built up molecularly within the world of capitalism.’36

The most courageous thing an adaptive left could do is to abandon that conviction. It is entirely possible to build the elements of the new system molecularly within the old. In the cooperatives, the credit unions, the peer-networks, the unmanaged enterprises and the parallel, subcultural economies, those elements already exist. We have to stop seeing them as quaint experiments; we have to promote them with regulation just as vigorous as that which capitalism used to drive the peasants off the land or destroy handicraft work in the eighteenth century.

Finally, we have to learn what’s urgent, and what’s important, and that sometimes they do not coincide.

If it were not for the external shocks facing us in the next fifty years, we could afford to take things slowly: the state, in a benign transition, would act as the main facilitator of change through regulation. But the enormity of the external shocks means some of the actions we take will have to be immediate, centralized and drastic.

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9 The Rational Case for Panic

Wherever I go, I ask questions about economics – and get answers about climate. In 2011 in the Philippines,
I met landless farmers living in rural slums. What had happened? ‘The typhoons,’ came the answer. ‘With more typhoons the rice doesn’t grow as well. There are not enough days of sunshine between planting and harvesting.’

In Ningxia Province, China, walled off from the Gobi desert by barren mountains, I met sheep farmers who’d become reliant on chemical pellets as the grassland died around them. When, back in 2008, scientists trudged the mountains to find out what had happened to the 144 springs and mountain streams marked on the map, they reported: ‘With climate change and deterioriation of the environment, the southern mountainous areas have no springs and no mountain streams.’1

In New Orleans, in 2005, I watched the social order of an already fragile modern city, in the richest country in the world, disintegrate. The proximate cause was a hurricane; the underlying problem was the failure of the city’s infrastructure to deal with a change in weather patterns, and the inability of the povertystricken social and racial structure of the city to survive the blow.


There’s a pointless argument between economists and ecologists over which crisis is more important – the ecosphere or the economy? The materialist answer is that their fates are interlinked. We know the natural world only by interacting with it and transforming it: nature produced us that way. Even if, as some supporters of ‘deep ecology’ argue, the earth would be better off without us, it is to us that the task of saving it falls.

In the world of suits and climate summits, a complacent calm rules. The focus is on scenarios for
‘what will happen’, the climate catastrophe that awaits if we allow global temperatures to rise by more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. But in the edge-places of the world the catastrophe is happening already. If we listened to those whose lives are being destroyed by floods, deforestation and encroaching deserts, we would better understand what is coming: the total disruption of the world.

The IPCC’s fifth report, published in 2013, states unequivocally that the planet is warming. ‘Since the
1950s,’ say the world’s most respected climate scientists, ‘many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, [the] sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases

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have increased.’2 The IPCC is confident that this is primarily caused by human beings using carbon to fuel economic growth – so much so that in this report it upgraded from ‘likely’ to ‘very likely’ the probability of hotter temperatures, more frequent hot days and more frequent heatwaves being caused by humans. Scientists do not use such terms lightly; they are the equivalent of a qualitative increase in their degree of certainty.

Because our ecosystem is so complex, we can’t trace every disruption of the climate to a human cause with 100 per cent certainty. But we can, says the
IPCC, be fairly certain that extreme weather – hurricanes, floods, typhoons, droughts – will increase in the second half of the century.

In its 2014 update, the IPCC warned unequivocally: failure to stop the rise in carbon emissions would increase the likelihood of ‘severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems’. This, remember, is from a report by scientists. They do not sign off on words like ‘severe, pervasive and irreversible’ before weighing them carefully.

If you’re a mainstream economist, what’s coming will feel like an ‘exogenous shock’, an extra source of chaos within an already chaotic situation. For peasants in the Philippines, African-Americans in
Louisiana and the people of Ningxia Province, the


shock is already happening.

Climate policymakers and NGOs have produced numerous scenarios for what we need to do to stop it.
But while they model the earth as a complex system, they tend to model the economy as a simple machine, with inputs/outputs, an energy requirement and a rational controlling hand – the market. When they speak of ‘transition’, they mean the phased evolution of energy policy towards burning less carbon, using a modified market mechanism.

But the economy itself is complex; just like the weather during the hurricane season, it is prone to reactions that accelerate uncontrollably and to complex feedback loops. Like the climate, the economy moves through a mixture of long- and short-term cycles. But, as I have shown, these cycles lead to mutations and ultimately to breakdown over timescales of fifty to 500 years.

In this book, I’ve avoided ‘building in’ the climate crisis until now. I wanted to show how the clash between info-tech and market structures is, on its own, driving us towards an important turning point.
Even if the ecosphere was in a steady state, our technology would still be pushing us beyond capitalism.

But industrial capitalism has, in the space of 200

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years, made the climate 0.8 degrees Celsius hotter, and is certain to push it two degrees higher than the pre-industrial average by 2050. Any project to move beyond capitalism has to shape its priorities around the urgent challenge of climate change. Either we react in time and confront it in a relatively orderly way, or we don’t – and disaster follows.

It has become common to laugh at the absurdities of the climate-change deniers, but there is a rationality to their response. They know that climate science destroys their authority, their power and their economic world. In a way, they have grasped that if climate change is real, capitalism is finished.

The real absurdists are not the climate-change deniers, but the politicians and economists who believe that the existing market mechanisms can stop climate change, that the market must set the limits of climate action and that the market can be structured to deliver the biggest re-engineering project humanity has ever tried.

In January 2014, John Ashton, a career diplomat and formerly the
British government’s special representative on climate change, delivered the blunt truth to the 1 per cent: ‘The market left to itself will not reconfigure the energy system and transform the economy within a generation.’3


According to the International Energy Agency, even if all the announced emissions-reduction plans, all the carbon taxes and all the renewables targets are achieved – that is, if consumers don’t revolt against higher taxes, and the world does not de-globalize – then CO2 emissions will still rise by 20 per cent by
2035. Instead of limiting the warming of the earth to only a two-degree increase, the temperature will rise
3.6 degrees.4

Faced with a clear warning that a 4.5-billion-year-old planet is being destabilized, those in power decided that a 25-year-old economic doctrine held the solution. They resolved to incentivize lower carbon use by rationing it, taxing it and subsidizing the alternatives. Since the market is the ultimate expression of human rationality, they believed it would spur the correct allocation of resources to meet the target of the two-degree cap. It was pure ideology and it has been proved plain wrong.

To remain under the two-degree threshold, we – as a global population – must burn no more than 886 billion tonnes of carbon between the years 2000 and
2049 (according to the International Energy Agency).
But the global oil and gas companies have declared the existence of 2.8 trillion tonnes of carbon reserves, and their shares are valued as if those reserves are burnable. As the Carbon Tracker Initiative warned investors: ‘they need to understand that 60–80% of

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coal, oil and gas reserves of listed firms are unburnable’5 – that is, if we burn them, the atmosphere will warm to a catastrophic degree.

Yet rising energy prices are a market signal. They tell energy firms that it’s a good idea to invest in new and more expensive ways of finding carbon. In 2011, they invested
$674 billion on exploration and development of fossil fuels: tar sands, fracking and deep-sea oil deposits. Then, as global tensions increased, Saudi Arabia decided to collapse the price of oil, with the aim of destroying America’s new hydrocarbon industries, and in the process bankrupting Putin’s Russia.

This, too, acted as a market signal to American drivers: buy more cars and do more miles. Clearly, somewhere, the market as a signalling mechanism has gone wrong.

Look at it as an investment problem: either the global oil and gas companies are really worth much less than their share prices indicate, or nobody believes we’re going to cut our carbon use. The stock market valuations of the top 200 carbon burners totals $4 trillion; much of that could be lost if we persuade ourselves to stop burning carbon. This is not just scaremongering by excitable climate NGOs. In 2014 the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, warned the world’s insurance giants that if the twodegree target is significantly breached it would
‘threaten the viability of your business model’.6

The lesson is: a market-led strategy on climate change is utopian thinking.

What are the obstacles to a non-market-led strategy?
First, the lobbying power of the carbon burners.
Between 2003 and 2010, climate-denial lobby groups received $558 million from donors in the USA.
ExxonMobil and the ultra-conservative
Koch
Industries were major donors until 2007, when there was a tangible shift to funds channelled through anonymous
 third
 parties,
 under
 pressure
 of
 journalistic scrutiny.7 The outcome? The world spends an estimated $544 billion on subsidizing the fossil fuel industry.8


journalistic scrutiny.7 The outcome? The world spends an estimated $544 billion on subsidizing the fossil fuel industry.8

But that’s just the most obvious part of climate lunacy. After the failure to agree a global path to the two-degree target at the 2009 Copenhagen Summit, energy companies realigned their efforts in order to pressure national governments for specific outcomes, always with the aim to slow the introduction of carbon targets, or to exempt specific firms.

Yet strong, positive action can work. In Germany, the sudden shutdown in 2011 of the nuclear programme after Fukushima, combined with heavy investment in renewable energy, has done to the power utilities


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what any hard application of carbon targets would do to market forces. It has shattered them.

In the German system, wind, solar and other renewable generators get the first opportunity to supply energy. If there’s sun, and a healthy breeze, as there was on 16 June 2013, they can generate half of all demand. On that day, the gas and coal producers – who cannot easily adjust the output of their power stations, only switch them on and off – were forced to pay the German electricity grid €100 per megawatt to take unwanted electricity off their hands. The price of carbon energy had gone negative. As The Economist magazine put it: ‘For established utilities … this is a disaster … you cannot run a normal business, in which customers pay for services according to how much they consume, if prices go negative.’9

In many countries, energy policy is paralysed – not just by the lobbying power of oil and gas, but also by the difficulty of forcing behaviour change using market forces – eg. higher prices – rather than by undertaking a rational redesign of the whole system.

For the advocates of green capitalism, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine a nonmarket, low-carbon economy.

So we need to imagine better.


HOW TO AVERT CLIMATE DISASTER

Climate science tells us that, in order to keep the temperature rise to around two degrees, we need to halve the amount of CO2 we burn by 2050. The IEA spelled out the importance of the timing: ‘If emissions do not peak by around 2020 and decline steadily thereafter, achieving the needed 50% reduction by 2050 will become much more costly. In fact, the opportunity may be lost completely.’10 The later emissions peak, the harder it is to halve them.

In response, various campaigns and research units have designed scenarios to show technically how this
50 per cent reduction might be achieved. Though they all differ as to the mix of alternative energy types and the way they model energy efficiency, they have one thing in common: nearly all of these scenarios conclude that it will be cheaper in the long term to go low carbon, than not.

The IEA’s Blue Map Scenario, which halves CO2 emissions by 2050, sees the world spending $46 trillion more on energy investments than it would if nothing changed. But because the scenario involves burning less fuel, even by the most conservative estimate it still saves $8 trillion.

Greenpeace, whose Energy Revolution Scenario is taken as a reference point in the wider industry

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debate, wants to achieve the target with no new nuclear power plants and less emphasis on carbon capture and storage, so that by 2050 85 per cent of all energy is produced from wind, wave, solar and biomass technologies. Even here, however, with much higher upfront investment costs and a bigger social change, the world saves money in the end.11 In all the scenarios where carbon burning is halved, there is a spin-off benefit because the transition creates new jobs. Building and maintaining machines to generate electricity from wave, wind and solar power is a more technologically advanced solution than burning gas or coal.

Saving the planet, then, is technologically feasible and economically rational, even when measured in cash terms. What stands in the way is the market.

This is not to say we have achieved nothing. If you discount China – which distorted the global figures by building hundreds of coal-fired power plants in the 2000s – the amount of generating capacity coming online from renewables outstripped that from fossil fuels in 2009. This is a clear signal that state intervention into the market – through financial incentives for renewables and targets for reduced carbon emissions – can work.

The problem is, first, that the market-led transition is too slow and too vulnerable to pressure from


consumers (who naturally want cheap energy) and from fossil-fuel producers. Secondly, as political pressure on governments rises, energy turns into geopolitics. Germany’s move against nuclear energy came at the cost of giving Russia the power to hold the German economy to ransom during the Ukraine crisis. America’s turn to fracking – in addition to its environmental impacts – altered the global balance of power so significantly that Saudi retaliation has in the space of a year collapsed the price of oil by more than half.

Seen against the rising geopolitical tensions, the prospects for a deal at the COP (Conference of
Parties) in Paris, in December 2015, do not look positive. More and more, the climate talks conducted in these conferences come to resemble the peace treaties that paved the way to the Second World War.

Meanwhile even radicals in the environmental movement are confused about markets. Greenpeace, for example, compares China with Europe as follows:
China’s determination to fuel economic growth with coal boosted emissions, while privatization in Europe and the USA drove their switch to gas, which is less harmful than coal. This they see as proof that a market achieves better carbon outcomes than centralized control.12

However, to meet the critical emissions targets we

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are going to have to use some centralized control.
Governments – at state and regional level – will need to take control, and probably ownership, of all big carbon producers. As the energy distribution grid becomes ‘smart’, using technology to predict and balance supply with demand, it makes sense for the grid to be a public resource.

If a state-influenced price mechanism can’t achieve the right mix of investment in renewables, nuclear energy and residual carbon burners, then it will have to be done using state ownership, direct control and targets. This is the ultimate conclusion we have to draw from John Ashton’s comments quoted above: if the market is not working then, given the urgency, state allocation must be tried.

Technically, if you use planning rather than market incentives, it will be easier to create a mix of ‘base load’ power generated by nuclear and cleaner carbon, with the rest coming from renewables: according to scenarios from Greenpeace to the IEA and other variants, that is what is needed to achieve the twodegree target.

The attempt to create a non-market economy and a low-carbon system are clearly interdependent. But while there are many routes to a postcapitalist economy, the potential variants of what we can do to address the climate emergency are limited.


There is, in short, a rational case for panic about climate change – and it is compounded when you consider the interrelatedness of climate and the other great uncontrolled variant: population.

A DEMOGRAPHIC TIMEBOMB

Being old was a privilege denied to most of our ancestors. If you take an urban history tour – whether in Manchester, Chicago or Shanghai – it’s worth remembering, as you peer into the old industrial dwellings, that the life expectancy of those who lived there was forty years or less.13 Go to a steel or mining town, from West Virginia to northern
China, and you will see forests of gravestones marking the deaths of working-class men in their fifties – not in the distant past but in the post-1945 era. In the early years of capitalism, it was unsanitary urban life that killed you. In the twentieth century, it was chronic industrial diseases, stress, bad food and pollution.

Now though, we have a new problem: demographic ageing. There are no activists to drop banners from buildings to protest against ageing, there are no ministries for ageing, no prestigious scientific panel or global negotiations. Yet it is potentially as big an external shock as climate change – and its impact will be much more immediately economic.

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The UN’s projections are not disputed. The world’s population, currently above 7 billion, will rise to 9.6 billion by 2050, with almost all growth occurring in the global south. By 2050, there will be more people in developing countries than there are people on earth right now. So the future story of humanity is mainly going to be told in cities like Manila, Lagos and Cairo.

Globally, the proportion of older people to those of working age will increase. In 1950, 5 per cent of the world’s population was over sixty-five; by the midtwenty-first century it will be 17 per cent. But it’s in the rich world where the problems of ageing will turn into a shock.

Here, the crucial problem is the age-dependency ratio: the number of retired people compared to the number of those of working age. In Europe and Japan, there are currently three workers for every one retired person. By 2050 the ratio will be one-for-one.
And though most developing countries will continue to have mainly young populations, China bucks the trend due to its one-child policy. By 2050 China will be the ‘oldest’ of the big economies in the world, with a projected median age of fifty-three.14

The growing age imbalance is irreversible. It’s not just caused by people living longer due to better


healthcare and higher incomes; the main driver of the imbalance is falling birth rates, as women gain control of their bodies through contraception, and as education, advances in human rights and urbanization give them greater independence.

The UBS economist George Magnus says rapidly ageing societies ‘present us with an existential threat to the social and economic models we built after
World War Two’.15
In the developed world, demographic change will create stress in three critical areas of economic life: financial markets, public spending and migration.

During the post-war boom, private, corporate and state-mandated pension schemes grew massively.
Though they sometimes included only a minority of the workforce, these schemes – in which savings deducted from wages were matched by company contributions and invested in the stock market – became the mainstay of the financial system. Before globalization, such schemes typically invested in their own country’s debt and in the shares of major companies on their national stock exchange, with a small portion allocated tactically to meet projected needs. With tax breaks on the profits, and mandatory membership in some countries, it was the ultimate form
 of
 what
 Marx
 had
 called
 ‘capitalist
 communism’.

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But in the age of fiat money things changed. The repeated use of interest rate cuts when growth slowed made investing in shares a one-way bet, continually hiking the value of the stock market. The result was that, even as the demographic problem loomed, fund managers calculated that the financial system would still meet its commitments. Some even declared the projections were so positive that it was safe for the employer to take a ‘contribution holiday’
– leaving only the workforce to put money in.

The first country into the boom-bust vortex was
Japan. The Nikkei 250 index of major companies trebled in value between 1985 and 1990. Then a crash began, and over the next ten years its value halved.

In the West, with above-average GDP growth in the late 1990s, stock markets surged again. The FTSE rose from 3000 in 1995 to peak at 6930 in December 1999.
America’s S&P 500 trebled in the same period;
Germany’s DAX index quadrupled. If you call up these indices’ long-term charts since 2000, you will see a picture of three spiky mountains with steep sides. In the space of fifteen years, share prices have twice gone through boom and bust, with the current recovery – even though fuelled by trillions of confected dollars – pushing them barely above where they peaked in 2000.

The dotcom crash was the wakeup call. Where they


could, companies scrambled to reduce their pension liabilities: transferring future pensioners to lower benefits, closing schemes to new workers – and sometimes going bust under the strain. In the search for higher returns on their investments, pension funds now diversified, pushing money into hedge funds, property, private equity and commodities. The aim in all cases was to make up the shortfall. We know the outcome. From the spectacular hedge fund implosions that started the credit freeze of August
2007 to the commodity price rises that triggered the
Arab Spring, these big institutional investors collectively became – sometimes unwittingly – crucial drivers of instability.

In the aftermath of the crash, the typical big pension fund invests 15 per cent of its money in alternatives to shares (ie. property or commodities) and lends more than 55 per cent of its money to governments in the form of bonds, which under quantitative easing pay zero or negative interest.

Overall, about $50 trillion is held in pension funds, insurance funds and public pension reserves across the OECD countries, well above their combined annual GDP. For all the reasons surveyed in chapter 1
– namely, a busted economic model on life support – the most recent survey describes the risk to that money as
‘high’ and pension liabilities as
‘increased’.16

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The problem is not the current position of this $50 trillion. The problem is that an ageing population means a smaller potential workforce, lower growth and lower output per head. Though the picture varies from one country to the next – with some smaller developed countries such as Norway extremely well provided for – the global situation is bleak: either the retired elderly must live on much less, or the financial system must deliver spectacular returns.
But to deliver spectacular returns it must become more global and take more risks. If more pension provision could be moved into the public sphere, paid for with taxation, the impact of this dilemma would be softened.
Instead, the opposite is happening.

The second area in which we are certain to face the stress of ageing populations is government debt. An ageing population boosts demand for spending on health, public pensions and long-term care. In 2010,
Standard
&
Poor’s calculated that unless governments across the world reined in public pension provision, their debts, by 2050, would sink the world.

Since then, governments have indeed slashed their pension liabilities: eligibility has been tightened, retirement ages raised and the link to inflation eroded in many countries. When, after this carnage


of obligations, S&P recalculated the potential damage, it found the median net debt of developed countries was projected to be 220 per cent of GDP by
2050, with the big developing countries running average debts of 130 per cent. Japan still tops the league in 2050, at 500 per cent (compared to 250 per cent now) and America will be looking at a debt pile three times the current $17 trillion.

In this projection, demographic ageing is set to make state finances unsustainable all across the developed world. S&P’s analysts predict that by 2050, even with pension cuts, 60 per cent of all countries in the world will have credit ratings below investment grade: it will be suicidal for anybody who does not want to risk losing their money to lend to them.

Are you panicking rationally yet? The scariest bit is coming up.

More than 50 per cent of all private pension money is currently invested in government debt. Furthermore, typically two-fifths of it is in foreign debt. No matter how safe a company pension fund looks now, if 60 per cent of all countries’ bonds become junk – so that to lend to them becomes a crazy proposition – the private pension system will not survive.

Meanwhile, the social impact of the measures taken to date, says S&P, ‘has already put the relationship

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between the state and the electorate under strain and severely tested social cohesion’.17 All over the world, states have ripped up the last part of the implicit deal they made with their citizens during the post-war boom: that either the market or the state would provide a decent living for those in their old age. The impact of this broken promise will be felt over decades, not years. When governments claim they’ve stabilized their finances by raising the retirement age, or de-linking pensions to inflation, it is like congratulating yourself on buying a diet plan.
The pain comes in the implementation.

The end result, as IMF economists put it, is ‘unlikely to be socially and politically sustainable’.18

We have not yet considered the impact of migration.
In 2013 I travelled to Morocco and Greece to hear the stories of migrants trying to move, illegally, to
Europe. From Morocco, they were attempting to scale a three-metre-high razor wire fence into the Spanish enclave of Melilla; in Greece, they were enduring months of homelessness as they stalked the ferry ports in search of a ride to northern Europe. The insecurity of their daily lives made them prey to extortion, assault, sexual violence and extreme poverty. At the moment of attempted crossing they often risked death.

I asked them why, in the face of these hostile transit


routes and the racism they would find in Europe, they were prepared to persist in trying to cross for months or years on end. They were incredulous: it was a stupid question. Compared to the lives they had left behind in the countries they came from, living on a concrete floor in a Tangier slum, or sleeping five to a room in a clandestine bunk-house in Marseilles was unequivocally better.

What I saw that summer, though, was nothing compared to what is coming. By 2050, there will be
1.2 billion more people of working age in the world than today – most of them living in the kind of circumstances those migrants were fleeing.

In Oujda, Morocco, I met two bricklayers from Niger in their early twenties, squatting on open ground, living on handouts from a mosque. Niger is a country so underdeveloped that you do not often meet its inhabitants on the roadsides of the world. When I talked to them, and looked at the UN’s projections for their country, the scale of what’s coming became clear.

By 2050, the population of Niger will have grown from its current 18 million to 69 million. Chad, the country they’d come through, will see its population treble, to 33 million. Afghanistan, whose troubles have sent its citizens into the people-trafficking systems that criss-cross Greece, Turkey and Libya,

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will rise from 30 to 56 million.

A stunning half of all the projected population growth between now and 2050 will take place in just eight countries, six of which are in sub-Saharan
Africa (Nigeria, Tanzania, Congo, Ethiopia, Uganda,
Niger, plus India and the USA).19 To find jobs, people from the population-boom countries will migrate to the cities; the land, as we’ve seen, is already under stress from climate change. In the cities, many will join the world’s slum-dwelling population, which already stands at a billion – and increasing numbers will attempt illegal migration to the rich world.20

The World Bank economist Branko Milanovic, surveying the huge and growing inequality in developing countries, calls this a ‘non-Marxian world’ in which location, not class, is responsible for two-thirds of all inequality.’21 His conclusion: ‘either poor countries will become richer or poor people will migrate to rich countries’.

But for poor countries to become richer, they must break out of the so-called ‘middle-income trap’ – where countries typically develop to a certain point and then stall; both because they have to compete with the old imperial powers and because their corrupt elites strangle the emergence of functional modern institutions. Only thirteen countries out of
100 labelled ‘middle-income’ in 1960 had become


high-income by 2012. These were mainly the Asian
Tigers, led by South Korea, which ignored the development regime imposed by the global system and relentlessly built up their own industry and infrastructure with nationalist economic policies.

As George Magnus of UBS writes, the obstacles are more than economic: ‘It gets progressively more difficult to raise income per head once you are a middle income country, and … doing so is not about drawing lines from spreadsheets, but about the economic benefits generated by continuously evolving, inclusive institutions.’22 But the countries where population growth is biggest are the countries with the most corrupt and inefficient institutions.

If climate change, demographic ageing and a jobsdrought in the developing world were not interacting with a stagnant, fragile economic model, the problems might be solved separately. But they are.
And the result is likely to place the whole global system under strain, and puts democracy itself in danger.

A GLOBAL ELITE IN DENIAL

‘Ours is essentially a tragic age so we refuse to view it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins … We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.’23 D. H. Lawrence was

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describing the English aristocracy after 1918, its ideology shattered, retreating into a world of stately homes and archaic manners. But the description could apply equally well to the modern elite after the catastrophe of
2008: a financial aristocracy determined to go on living as if the threats outlined above are not real.

In the late twentieth century, a generation of entrepreneurs, politicians, energy barons and bankers grew up in what felt like a friction-free world. Over the previous century or so, their predecessors had to watch a finely crafted order disintegrate, together with its illusions. From
Imperial France in 1871 right through to the fall of
Vietnam and the collapse of communism, the first lesson of statecraft for those born before 1980 was: bad stuff happens; events can overwhelm you.

By the year 2000 it felt different. It might not have been the ‘end of history’, but to the generation that built the neoliberal order it seemed as though history had at the very least become controllable. Every financial crisis could be met with monetary expansion, every terror threat obliterated with a drone
 strike.
 The
 labour
 movement
 as
 an
 independent variable in politics had been suppressed.

The psychological byproduct in the minds of the


policy elite was the idea that there are no impossible situations; there are always choices, even if some of them turn out to be tough ones. There is always a solution, and it is usually the market.

But these external shocks should be the alarm call.
Climate change does not present us with a choice of market or non-market routes to meeting carbon targets. It mandates either the orderly replacement of market economics or its disorderly collapse in abrupt phases. Ageing populations run the risk of tanking the world’s financial markets, and some countries will have to wage a social war on their own citizens just to stay solvent. If that happens it will make what happened in Greece after 2010 look like just a few bad summers.

In the poorest countries, the combined impact of population growth, institutional corruption, skewed development and climate effects will create, for certain, tens of millions of landless poor people whose most logical choice will be to migrate.

You can see the defensive reflexes already in the developed West: the razor wire and the push-backs at the Spanish African enclave of Melilla; the violation of law by the Australian navy as it deals with migrant boats from Indonesia; America’s breakneck charge into fracking in order to become energy selfsufficient; Russia and Canada’s rival preparations to

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deploy military forces in the Arctic; China’s determination to monopolize the Rare Earth metals vital to modern electronics. The common themes of these responses are withdrawal from multilateral collaboration and attempted self-sufficiency.

We have come to see the danger to globalization as economic nationalism, where the population of one or more advanced economy cannot take austerity and forces its political class – as in the 1930s – to pursue a
‘beggar thy neighbour’ solution to the crisis. But the external shocks create a dimension of instability beyond pure economic rivalry. The pursuit of energy self-sufficiency is creating regionalized global energy markets. Russia’s diplomatic standoff with the West over Ukraine and its continued threat to deprive
Europe of gas will, even if it does not blow up, lead
Europe to seek its own self-sufficiency.

Meanwhile, the balkanization of the global energy market is mirrored by a similar process on the internet.

Already nearly one in five human beings has to put up with having their information filtered through the farcical controls erected by the Chinese communists. A politician is arrested for corruption?
Naturally his name disappears from search engines.
If that name happens to rhyme with the word for instant noodles (as was the case with Zhou Yongkang


in 2014), the word for noodles disappears too, and so does the most popular noodle brand.24

Now the internet stands in danger of further fragmentation, as states react to the revelations of mass cyber-surveillance by the American National
Security Agency. In addition, 2014 saw several governments, including Turkey and Russia, try to suppress dissent by forcing internet companies to register as entities under their domestic legal systems, opening them up to formal and informal political censorship.

So the first phase of the breakup of the global system is manifest through the breakup of information and the breakup of energy. But state-level fragmentation is on the agenda too.

I covered first-hand the Scottish independence referendum of 2014. Contrary to media myths, this was not a nationalist surge but a left-inclined plebeian movement. Handed the opportunity to break away from a neoliberal state committed to austerity for the next decade, the Scottish people came very close to doing so and breaking up the world’s oldest capitalist economy in the proces. As the Spanish political system enters crisis, the momentum for Catalan independence may gather (it is stemmed currently by the sudden rise of Podemos).
And we are just one political accident away from the

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collapse of the EU project itself. When a far-left party won the election in Greece, all the EU’s institutions attacked it as white blood cells attack a virus. At the time of writing, the Greek crisis is in full swing – but it will look like small fry if, as is entirely possible, the far right comes to power in France.

In Beijing, Washington and Brussels, the next five years are likely to see the old rulers try one last time to make the old system work. But the longer we go on without calling an end to neoliberalism, the more its contingent crises will begin to collide and merge with the strategic ones I’ve outlined here.

On its own, the rise of info-capitalism would have offered a range of outcomes. You could – just – imagine a stagnant Western economy kept alive with high debt, bailed-out banks and printed money, were it not for the demographic crisis. You could – without climate change – imagine a postcapitalist transition path led by the gradual, spontaneous rise of nonmarket exchange and peer-production alongside a system faltering under its internal contradictions.
More Wikipedias, more Linux, more generic drugs and public science, the gradual adoption of Open
Source forms of work – and maybe a legislative curb on the info-monopolies. This is the airport book scenario for postcapitalism: a good idea, implemented in a crisis-free environment, at a pace determined by ourselves.