PostCapitalism

You live in a world where capitalism faces simultaneous crises: financial, ecological, technological, and political. In Postcapitalism, Paul Mason argues that these intersecting pressures mark not a temporary downturn but the opening of a new historical phase. Neoliberalism—the regime of deregulated markets, privatized services, and financial dominance—has exhausted its capacity to generate stable growth. The aftermath of the 2008 crash revealed structural fragility that can no longer be repaired by austerity or monetary tricks.

Mason’s thesis is bold: information technology is eroding the very mechanisms that keep capitalism functioning. As software drives marginal costs toward zero, profit signals fail, prices detach from value, and abundance replaces scarcity in key economic domains. At the same time, social dynamics—networked activists, open-source communities, and ecological awareness—create forces that point beyond capitalism. This book maps that transformation, explains the logic behind it, and proposes a concrete path for a humane transition.

Neoliberal Crisis and Its Dual Futures

Mason begins in the aftermath of 2008, where the failure of high finance cascaded into social impoverishment. He shows that the neoliberal elite pursued two defensive options: managed stagnation through austerity or geopolitical fragmentation through protectionism and authoritarianism. Examples such as Greece’s defeat by the European Central Bank and the rise of right-wing populism illustrate how democracy and market orthodoxy diverged. The choice, he warns, is not between capitalism and chaos but between clinging to a decaying system or inventing something new.

Long Waves and Adaptation Patterns

To situate this crisis historically, Mason integrates Nikolai Kondratieff’s theory of long waves—roughly fifty-year cycles of growth and restructuring. The current information wave, starting in the late twentieth century, has stalled because capital suppressed productivity-driven reform through wage stagnation and financialization rather than upgrading technology. Past waves—from steam through electrification—were stabilized by new social contracts and institutions; neoliberalism broke that adaptive rhythm. This suggests capitalism’s normal capacity for renewal is faltering.

Information as Disruptive Abundance

The core of Mason’s argument turns on information goods. Where nineteenth-century economics assumed scarcity, digital reproduction creates abundance. Data, software, and knowledge are non-rival: one person’s use does not diminish another’s. As copying costs approach zero, the price mechanism that allocates goods by scarcity collapses. This opens the possibility of free or low-cost production and undermines capitalism’s reliance on proprietary control. The contrast between free commons (Wikipedia, Linux) and monopolized ecosystems (Apple, Facebook) defines the current battle for the digital future.

Marx, Machines, and Value Collapse

Drawing on Marx’s Grundrisse, Mason revives the idea of the “general intellect”: collective knowledge embodied in machines and networks. Once production depends primarily on shared information rather than individual labour, the labour theory of value itself starts to unravel. Software-driven automation produces “free machines”—tools that transfer almost no labour-value per unit. As durable, self-replicating information systems spread, profit extraction loses its foundation. In such conditions, capital resorts to monopolies and data rents rather than production for exchange.

Political and Ecological Limits

Mason combines economic insight with ecological urgency. Unburnable carbon reserves, ageing populations, and demographic shocks expose the fragility of current valuation systems. Pension liabilities and energy dependence risk systemic default. Markets alone cannot navigate these crises; coordinated state action—what he calls “revolutionary reformism”—is required to avert collapse. Climate and demography become the hard boundaries of any credible transition strategy.

The Shape of a Postcapitalist Transition

Mason ends with “Project Zero”: a roadmap for building a society where zero-carbon energy, zero-priced essentials, and minimized necessary labour-time coexist with high human freedom. He envisions a “wiki-state” that nurtures cooperative projects, democratizes information, and re-regulates finance. Universal basic income, public data infrastructures, and open modeling platforms are tools for managing abundance without reverting to bureaucratic central planning. The goal is not utopia but a feasible evolution of institutions toward commons-based production.

Core Insight

Capitalism’s end will not arrive through crisis alone but through technological abundance and social collaboration that make its price system obsolete. The crucial task is managing the transition—politically, institutionally, and ecologically—before authoritarian stabilizations close the window of possibility.

When you finish Mason’s argument, you see a coherent story: every previous adaptation of capitalism relied on scarcity and wage labour; information technology creates abundance and distributed knowledge, breaking that logic. The choice is urgent—either protect the old system through repression and monopoly or use the new technological possibilities to construct an open, sustainable and democratic economy beyond capitalism.

Capitalism’s financial base transformed fundamentally after 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window. Mason explains that this shift from gold-backed money to state-issued fiat currency allowed central banks to create credit without physical limits. It enabled decades of apparent stability through debt expansion but ultimately produced chronic fragility. Instead of funding productive investment, profits flowed into speculation and asset bubbles.

How Fiat Money Reshaped Growth

Under the gold standard, expansion was constrained by reserves; fiat money made expansion reflexive. Banks create money by lending; deregulation reduced required reserves and amplified leverage. Governments learned to bail out crises with quantitative easing (QE), printing trillions to restore solvency. This solved liquidity shortages but entrenched moral hazard: institutions survived not because they were efficient but because they were systemic.

Financialization and Its Social Cost

The neoliberal era turned banking into the core engine of growth. By the 2000s finance, insurance and real estate accounted for nearly a quarter of US GDP. Ordinary citizens became participants through mortgages and credit cards, turning households into micro-financial units. When the system crashed in 2008, QE and bailouts protected financial elites while erasing savings through negative interest rates and austerity. Cyprus’s 2013 crisis, where depositors lost uninsured funds, demonstrated that financial solvency now depends on political choices rather than sound economics.

Money as Social Trust

Mason pushes a sociological interpretation of money. In a world of fiat currency, value depends on collective belief in state and institutional credibility. When that trust erodes—through polarization, mispriced assets, or ecological stress—economic legitimacy itself collapses. Repo 105 at Lehman Brothers and the LIBOR scandal were not isolated scandals but signs of systemic self-deception. Once money becomes more psychological than physical, fragility deepens because promise replaces constraint.

You should see financialization not as an accidental flaw but as capitalism’s late-stage adaptation: credit creation compensating for weakening productivity growth. Yet this strategy now limits future options. Central banks used their power to sustain the illusion of stability; when the next shock arrives, few tools remain. Mason’s message is clear—financialization bought time but destroyed resilience.

You cannot understand capitalism’s geopolitical landscape without examining global imbalances. Mason connects the dots between chronic deficits in the US and surpluses in export powers like China and Germany. These flows sustained consumption and growth but masked dependence and inequality. The neoliberal order functioned because surplus countries recycled revenue into US debt, effectively outsourcing governance to markets.

The Fragile Architecture of Global Trade

From the 1990s onward, global cooperation lacked formal rules. Surplus countries gained control over deficit nations’ policies: Germany leveraged Eurozone debt crises to enforce austerity, while China accumulated $4 trillion in reserves as insurance against volatility. Deficit economies endured stagnant wages and shrinking welfare programs to maintain stability. The entire structure remained politically contingent—a balance sustained by faith in perpetual credit and globalization.

The Slow Disintegration

After 2008, cooperation weakened. Rising inequality projected by the OECD and nationalist responses to migration and trade undermine the mechanisms that kept markets integrated. Mason argues that the real threat is not another abrupt financial crash but a gradual “political exit”—major states pulling out of global consensus, turning to protectionism and currency manipulation. Such fragmentation could trigger wars or collapse multilateral institutions.

Essential Takeaway

Globalization’s strength was political consent, not economic inevitability. Without renewed multilateral design addressing inequality and legitimacy, the world risks de-globalization and authoritarian conflict.

In Mason’s analysis, global imbalances illustrate capitalism’s inability to reproduce cooperation. Surplus economies defend privilege; deficit economies endure social upheaval. Unless a new structure redistributes power and resources, the system will unravel into competing blocs—a replay of the 1930s on a digitized scale.

Digital technology transformed economics more radically than any industrial invention. Mason explains that once goods become information—software, code, media—the assumption of scarcity collapses. Marginalist economics, built by Jevons and Walras, cannot handle abundance. When copying costs approach zero, prices no longer reflect production costs but legal barriers and monopolistic ownership. The result is a system constantly defending artificial scarcity.

Zero Marginal Cost and Non-Rival Goods

Information goods are non-rival and durable: my use does not exclude yours. That property forces the economy to rely on exclusion mechanisms—copyright, patents, digital rights management—to maintain profitability. Piracy rates of popular media and the fall in data storage costs to mere cents demonstrate the extent of abundance. In such an environment, free digital goods proliferate while old pricing systems lose coherence.

Network Monopolies vs Commons

Network effects, described by Metcalfe’s law, amplify monopoly power. Platforms like Google and Facebook convert social interactions into proprietary data streams, enclosing the commons. Yet open-source movements and peer production projects—Linux, Wikipedia—teach us that collaborative systems can outperform market-based ones under certain conditions. These digital commons exemplify non-market coordination: voluntary contributions produce global infrastructure with negligible transaction cost.

Capitalism’s Contradiction in the Digital Era

The same technology that drives abundance also creates monopoly. To preserve profit, firms close ecosystems and extract rents from user behaviour. Mason calls this the central contradiction: capitalism depends on scarcity, but its most advanced technology erodes scarcity. That tension defines the next stage—either digital enclosure continues, turning abundance into surveillance capitalism, or societies build institutions that protect open collaboration and shared information.

In short, you live through a transition where information undermines the old price mechanism. Whether free or privatized, digital abundance is redefining the boundaries between market and commons—and with it, the meaning of value itself.

Mason revisits Marx not as dogma but as analytic tool. Marx’s crisis theory—falling profits due to rising capital intensity—explains why automation and mechanization destabilize capitalist value. But the modern twist lies in software-driven automation. Machines now embody social knowledge rather than labour; they cost almost nothing to reproduce. This dissolves the mechanism by which labour transfers value to commodities.

The Free Machine Thought Experiment

Imagine a machine that lasts indefinitely and is free to copy. Its labour input per product approaches zero, erasing value transfer. Marx noted that this possibility would undermine the basis of surplus value. Today’s software-controlled manufacturing approximates that model: each additional unit of code or design costs almost nothing, yet it powers factories that replace human skill. As shared protocols and open source spread, residual labour-value across goods declines.

General Intellect and Social Knowledge

The concept of “general intellect” captures this shift. Knowledge becomes the dominant productive force, integrated across society. In Mason’s view, contemporary production—digital design, algorithmic optimization, knowledge sharing—relies on collective learning that cannot be priced accurately. While capital tries to enclose and monetize it, the social character of knowledge leaks beyond corporate boundaries, creating zones of free collaboration.

Value Collapse and Political Implications

As labour-value collapses, capitalism’s metric for distribution erodes. Profit becomes speculative, based on monopoly estimation rather than production. This explains the instability of information capitalism and its dependence on platforms and data rents. Politically, Mason argues the left must avoid repeating Soviet-style command planning: transition requires institutions that support commons, regulate enclosure, and redefine work and welfare for an era of abundance.

The deeper point is philosophical: you are witnessing the moment when production becomes informational and collective. The labour theory of value becomes a model of systemic tension—between embodied labour and distributed intellect—that predicts why capitalism struggles to quantify the new economy.

Even if capitalism adapts economically, ecological and demographic boundaries fix its limits. Mason reminds you that the carbon budget for mid-century makes most fossil-fuel reserves financially unburnable, threatening trillions in asset valuations. As populations age and debts rise, social and financial systems lose sustainability. Climate and demography together generate systemic, not cyclical, crises—market mechanisms cannot manage them at required speed.

The Carbon Constraint

Carney’s warning at the Bank of England and Carbon Tracker’s analysis illustrate mispriced risk: energy firms value reserves that must remain unused to avoid 2°C warming. Renewable overcapacity already collapses conventional utility profits, as Germany’s experience shows. The transition to clean energy therefore demands coordinated investment planning, not spontaneous market adjustment.

Demography and Social Aging

The demographic side adds complexity. Advanced economies face shrinking worker-to-retiree ratios; pension systems and healthcare models fail under such strain. Migration pressures and populist politics intensify the challenge. S&P and IMF projections suggest escalating sovereign debt ratios and declining creditworthiness. Capitalism’s financial logic, optimized for youth and growth, cannot sustain long-term social aging without radical reform.

Strategic Conclusion

Markets left alone will not reconfigure energy or demographics fast enough. Coordinated public action—“revolutionary reformism”—is essential to stabilize climate and society while exploring postcapitalist alternatives.

You should read climate and demography as the hard brakes on the capitalist cycle. Profit cannot outrun physics or population dynamics; therefore systemic design, not cyclical policy, defines survival.

Mason concludes with a pragmatic vision called Project Zero. It is not utopia but a coordinated attempt to steer global systems toward zero-carbon energy, near-zero price for essentials, and minimal necessary labour-time. The strategy combines networked co-ops, socialized finance, and open information to build a mixed economy where non-market production grows organically.

Principles and Tools

The five guiding principles include open modeling (use agent-based simulations to preview interventions), ecological priority, human-centered change, multi-level attack (grassroots and institutional), and maximal openness of data. A “wiki-state” coordinates infrastructure—energy grids, housing, transport—without centralizing control. Finance becomes a public utility targeted at sustainability. Universal basic income decouples survival from employment, supporting retraining and peer collaboration as automation reduces wage labour.

Financial and Institutional Reform

Socialized banking and controlled debt write-downs mitigate the fragility inherited from neoliberalism. Public ownership of natural monopolies—water, energy, and communications—ensures low-cost social goods. Rather than abolish markets by decree, the goal is to displace them with commons where information and collaboration produce goods freely or cheaply. Open data and simulation institutes allow continuous coordination without bureaucratic rigidity.

Actionable Principle

Use state power to enable the commons, not control it. Build transparency and networked experimentation so democratic institutions evolve with technology rather than fight it.

You end Mason’s journey realizing that postcapitalism is less about overthrowing markets and more about engineering abundance to serve society. It demands courage and design: state frameworks that empower citizens to innovate, collaborate, and sustain the planet while pricing as a measure of scarcity fades away.