READ THIS BOOK: Postcapitalism by Paul Mason

 

Looking for an alternative to neoliberalism? Read this book. Have a hard time believing that the market can fix all of our problems? Read this book. British journalist Paul Mason gives a compelling history of capitalism's birth from feudalism and rise over the last few hundred years through four "long cycles" of development, and he sets the stage for what hopefully comes next, if we don't destroy ourselves first.

It's a bit of a tough book to read, not because it's written in a challenging way (Mason is a journalist, not an economist), but because it's brutally honest (and therefore pessimistic) about where we are, what our global condition is, and what the challenges are for capitalism in the years ahead (saving the environment, the aging population, the rise of population in the global south, and widespread human migration).

Mason's key thesis, and where the book begins, is that, as so many of the goods that we create and consume are now "abundant" not "scarce" (are digital, and can be copied for a marginal cost that approaches zero), that we are moving into a new economic reality, postcapitalism. Global conditions approaching the crisis point, with neoliberal capitalism unable to present a solution, is just the wake-up call that we need to look for something else, for what comes next.

I've been trying to read Thomas Piketty's landmark economics book Capital in the Twenty-First Century for a while now (and am still working on it!) but this book jumped in front of it in my queue, as it is far more digestible to a non-economist.

Something to note here: This is not about some dogmatic left versus right philosophical debate. This is about looking at the economic challenges the world faces, recognizing that the current neoliberal construction of capitalism has no solution for those challenges, and looking for another economic model that can help us work together to face the future. Mason doesn't have the whole answer, but he presents what he does have in the book's closing chapter. This book is about understanding where we are, the economic challenges we face as a civilization, and the promise that truly "abundant" goods presents for our future, and for what can come next for humanity.

And, interestingly, this is possibly the most pessimistic and optimistic book I know of... at the same time. The project of capitalism is in trouble, but if we look around, we can see the seeds of what comes next...