PostCapitalism summary

Fiat money and financialization have caused serious problems in the current capitalist system, but there are two other major factors contributing to the downfall of neoliberalism.

The first of these is global imbalances, or the differences between a given country’s imports and exports of goods, services and investments. The main deficit countries, namely the United States and most of Europe, have to import more than they can export. The countries with a significant surplus are Germany, the Arab oil producers, China, Japan and most of Asia.

Have you ever heard of Nikolai Kondratieff? He was a major figure in twentieth-century economics.

Kondratieff spent eight years as a political prisoner in Moscow and was executed in 1938, all because he proposed that, instead of collapsing in crises, capitalism adapts and changes according to the present circumstances.

In the 1990s, the rise of personal computers and information sharing started to change dramatically. People developed buzzwords like knowledge economy, cognitive capitalism and info-capitalism, concepts that had no place in the capitalist world.

The idea of “information technology” completely goes against the way supply and demand function in a capitalist economy. Our economy is becoming increasingly based on information products like software, ebooks, online news articles and songs on iTunes.

According to capitalist theory, if everyone can listen to music online for free, it shouldn’t have any value. However, Karl Marx developed another theory that can account for the value of online music.

The value of information goods like online music can be measured using Marx’s labor theory. Marx’s labor theory states that a commodity’s value is determined by the number of socially necessary hours to produce it. “Socially necessary” hours aren’t merely the number of hours a person works, but the average amount of labor time needed to produce the good.

Before capitalism, Western society had feudalism. How did one transform into the other?

The transition from feudalism to capitalism was lengthy and complex. In feudalism, which flourished from the ninth to the fifteenth century, lords granted their land to vassals for a fee.

You can think of the advancement toward a postcapitalist society as a collaborative project, like Wikipedia. The goals of the postcapitalist project would be the eradication of carbon emissions, a market of products with no cost of production and close to zero labor time. What role would the state play in moving toward this?

First, the state could reform the market to make it favor sustainable, collaborative and socially just projects. It could provide tax incentives for solar panels or local energy systems, for example.

The key message in this book:

Capitalism has ruled the world for the past two hundred years, but its end is now in sight. Thanks to the Internet and new technologies, our economy is increasingly based on information goods that aren’t governed by the laws of supply and demand. That, combined with major shifts like global warming and migration, will force states to start moving toward postcapitalism.