[P2P-F] [NetworkedLabour] Hilary Wainwright reviews Paul Mason's latest book

Tue Oct 25 01:11:27 CEST 2016

I agree with both assessments of Brian and Paolo of
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/PostCapitalism;

for those interested, we have a manuscript available, co-written with
Vasilis Kostakis, with what we believe is a coherent and multi-modal
strategy for a transition towards post-capitalism.

Let me know if you want access to this google doc draft,

Michel

On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 4:37 PM, Paolo Gerbaudo <paolo.gerbaudo at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I agree with you Brian. I think Paul Mason's book is dangerously
> techno-optimistic, in line with a long tradition of thinking that sees in
> technology the conditions for human emancipation, overlooking the fact,
> that necessary conditions may not be necessarily sufficient conditions, and
> that there is no action without consciousness and organisation. I also
> profoundly disagree with Mason's idea that digital technology is
> intrinsically bound to de-centralise things. If anything digital technology
> has been highly centralising. Just look at Facebook, Google, and all the
> digital giants. De-centralisation in user experience has gone hand in hand
> with functional integration in massive systems of data-gathering and
> processing which can only be described as new economic and political
> centres.
>
> Best,
>
> Paolo
>
> On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 5:54 AM, Brian Holmes <
> bhcontinentaldrift at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> This succinct review gets at the whole question of "networked labor." As
>> Hillary Wainwright notes, the precarious networked laborers will not gain
>> political agency as a mere logical consequence of IT. Instead, agency has
>> to be created as a social process. "For this political dimension we need
>> a critical history of networked, movement ways of organising." That's the
>> crucial understatement of the whole neolieral period.
>>
>> When such a history of how people actually struggle is placed into
>> tension with well-argued normative concepts about why and for what we
>> should struggle, then it becomes possible to build towards an overcoming of
>> capitalism.
>>
>> Explanatory discourse is easy, especially in the retrospect that
>> academics love. Normative statements - I mean, about what society *ought*
>> to be, or what it ought to become - are risky yet necessary. Critical
>> histories that engage with actual struggles while maintaining the inquiry
>> into future possibilities are both potent and rare. My thanks to all who
>> have worked on such things.
>>
>> best, Brian
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Oct 23, 2016 at 4:25 AM, Orsan <orsan1234 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.redpepper.org.uk/postcapitalism-a-guide-to-our-fu
>>> ture-by-paul-mason/
>>> Hilary Wainwright <http://www.redpepper.org.uk/by/hilary-wainwright> reviews
>>> Paul Mason's latest book and questions how far information technology is
>>> leading us towards a post-capitalist economy
>>> October 2015
>>>
>>> [image: post-capitalism-mason]
>>>
>>> This is an important book whose ambitious scope stimulates thoughts on
>>> the big issues: through what means of adaption is capitalism surviving?
>>> What are their limits? Are signs of these limits appearing? Paul Mason
>>> connects his answers with proposals for new strategic thinking on the left.
>>> He suggests tendencies that produce a dynamic beyond capitalism. He
>>> attempts to sketch out how we might build on these tendencies to achieve an
>>> alternative to capitalism. It is a captivating but not wholly convincing
>>> read.
>>>
>>> Mason combines outrageously bold assertions with detailed empirical
>>> analyses of actually existing capitalism that undermine his own broad-brush
>>> assertions on how it could be. My central doubt concerns the agency or
>>> causal power he ascribes to information technology (IT). In his
>>> introductory chapter he asserts: ‘Information is different from every
>>> previous technology. As I will show, its spontaneous tendency is to
>>> dissolve markets, destroy ownership and break down the relationship between
>>> work and wages.’
>>>
>>> In his conclusion, he compares the impact of IT with that of
>>> contraception. We are ‘witnessing a 40,000-year-old system of male power
>>> begin to dissolve before our eyes as a result of change triggered by a
>>> different kind of technology: the contraceptive pill’. Indeed, it is his
>>> excited optimism about the trends associated with new IT towards sharing,
>>> the creation of non-monetary value and new forms of production that drives
>>> the book. His anticipation of his conclusion – ‘Information technology is
>>> leading us towards a post-capitalist economy’ – sums it up.
>>>
>>> Mason is right to stress the insufficiently understood importance of
>>> these developments, which he situates in a wider political economy. Yet
>>> when he goes on to analyse the forces at work in the capitalist world as it
>>> is, he describes forms of power that will not easily ‘dissolve’. He
>>> outlines, for example, ‘the creation of monopolies on information and the
>>> vigorous defence of intellectual property’. Drawing on his brilliant TV
>>> coverage of Greece, he identifies the determination and power of political
>>> elites to ensure that any transitional tendencies are definitively blocked.
>>> The power of IT and the collaboration it facilitates has been necessary to
>>> recent movements of rebellion but is not proving sufficient to bring down
>>> authoritarian regimes and transform society.
>>>
>>> While Mason is unconvincing in demonstrating a transition to a
>>> post-capitalist order, what does emerge from his book is that we are now on
>>> a contested terrain over what the changes he describes are moving towards.
>>> It is full of ambivalences and risks as well as opportunities for
>>> transformative politics. It is a terrain of strategic struggle that the
>>> left ignores at its peril and for which left organisations need to
>>> radically change.
>>>
>>> On the one hand are the distributed, peer-to-peer forms of production
>>> made possible by new information and communication technologies and
>>> especially commons-based peer-to-peer production in which value is created
>>> by ‘produsers’ in shared innovation commons. On the other hand, as we’ve
>>> seen with Microsoft, Facebook and Google, is capital’s economic power and
>>> will to monetise and appropriate the value created through this expanded
>>> connectivity.
>>>
>>> The notion of a contested terrain raises the question of agency. Mason
>>> addresses this, first negatively to insist that it is not the working class
>>> as we have known it, and then sociologically – describing the lifestyles of
>>> the young generation of precarious, highly connected, highly educated
>>> graduates. But he does not discuss their sources of power and possible
>>> strategies and organisational form in depth, beyond celebrating the idea of
>>> the network. For this political dimension we need a critical history of
>>> networked, movement ways of organising.
>>>
>>> Non-hierarchical, collaborative ways of organising pre-date information
>>> technology, though their recent growth has undoubtedly been facilitated by
>>> the newly available techno-political tools. In particular, the women’s
>>> liberation movement and other rebellions of the 1960s and 70s placed much
>>> emphasis on gathering and exchanging information and breaking open the
>>> secrecy of the dominant order. Their political concern was to identify the
>>> fundamental causes of why things were as the information revealed – and
>>> then to change them. This involved the collaborative production and
>>> dissemination of explanatory knowledge.
>>>
>>> The production of knowledge is a significant step beyond the exchange of
>>> information and requires more complex forms of organistion – for sustained
>>> debate, experiment, investigation and decision-making – than simply
>>> connectivity. Mason’s omission of the historical dimension of today’s
>>> networked culture leads him to confuse and conflate information with
>>> knowledge, and to use the two concepts interchangably. This means that he
>>> tends towards an almost technological conception of organisation. But once
>>> the production of knowledge becomes an issue, explaining what the
>>> information tells us and guiding our strategies for change, all kinds of
>>> difficult issues arise of building political organisations adequate to the
>>> kinds of power we face. These problems are not dissolved by IT any more
>>> than is capitalism – or, for that matter, is male power dissolved by the
>>> contraceptive pill.
>>>
>>> Paul Mason has certainly written a guide to our future but it is a guide
>>> with which we will want to critically discuss at every turn – exactly the
>>> preparation needed for the contested terrain in which we find ourselves.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Sent from my iPad
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> NetworkedLabour at lists.contrast.org
>>> http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour
>>>
>>>
>>
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>>
>
>
> --
> Paolo Gerbaudo
> Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society, King's College London
> my blog: tweetsandthestreets.org
> twitter: @paologerbaudo
> UK mobile: 00447432383579
> Egyptian mobile: 00201111052097
>
>
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>

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