Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason review – engagingly written, but confused

Paul Mason’s vision of a post-capitalist world is rooted in a dated ideology and short on specifics

At a time when, despite the occasional hiccup, market forces appear to be triumphant everywhere, up pops Channel 4’s economics editor, Paul Mason, to predict that the end is nigh. Capitalism, says Mason, citing an obscure early 20th-century Russian economist, runs in approximately 50-year cycles or waves. The fourth wave came to a spectacular end with the financial crisis of 2008. We are now embarking on the fifth and final one, which, on past performance, is due to crash somewhere around 2050.

Mason, like Marx, believes that capitalism will collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions. These include unsustainable levels of debt on the part of both individuals and nations (“2008 was the tremor in advance of the earthquake”). In addition, the rise of information technology will corrode market mechanisms, erode property rights and destroy the relationship between wages, property and work. All this, plus burgeoning inequality, the inevitability of climate change and continued population growth, will open up the possibility of a brave new world. The alternative, warns the author, is chaos.

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