Title taken from this fucking awful, rambling Guardian article.I'm not entirely sure
how to disagree with this article, because it's pretty much horse-shit. What can you say to "the postcapitalist era has begun" besides "No, it hasn't you batshit lunatic".
He claims that postcapitalism has been made possible by three factors in information technology:
- Technology has reduced the need for work, and decoupled wages from productivity. I used to think that automation would indeed usher in an economy where humans wouldn't need to work, but I'm pretty convinced now--after reading labour economists like David Autor--that this is a long way off.
- Information is corroding the markets ability to form prices.
- Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy. The biggest information product in the world – Wikipedia – is made by volunteers for free, abolishing the encyclopedia business and depriving the advertising industry of an estimated $3bn a year in revenue.
Words can't express just how much of that is fucking
nonsense. This is why I stay away from mainstream media sources;
this is why we shouldn't listen to non-economists on economics when they don't provide
fucking sources.
To take each point in turn: no, wages have not
significantly decoupled from productivity. This phenomenon is largely
overstated. This claim usually leads back to one EPI paper, which relies on a highly selective reading of the labour market which excludes almost half the work force and doesn't account for total compensation. When it comes to automation abolishing the need for human work? We'd probably need to reach a point where automated labour has an
absolute advantage over human labour, which would probably require general intelligence. The biggest problem for automation in the coming decades will be unequally distributed gains as some groups of workers are made more productive while others are not. Until this point, automated labour is a
complement to human labour, not a substitute.
Secondly, the idea that information is somehow hampering the economy's ability to form prices is just
shockingly incorrect. Incomplete information is probably one of the main reasons prices don't perfectly reach the equilibrium.
Thirdly, since when was Wikipedia anti-capitalist? Claiming Wikipedia is an example of a company which hasn't responded to the market is just ignorant; there is
huge demand for information and Wikipedia has provided it so effectively that it can essentially survive on a voluntary user fee. For some reason, however, he goes on to claim this:
Today, the thing that is corroding capitalism, barely rationalised by mainstream economics, is information. Most laws concerning information define the right of corporations to hoard it and the right of states to access it, irrespective of the human rights of citizens.
Who knew? You apparently have to work for Goldman Sachs to get information.
And, of course, there's this little gem:
The modern day external shocks are clear: energy depletion, climate change, ageing populations and migration. They are altering the dynamics of capitalism and making it unworkable in the long term.
No, those aren't examples of why capitalism isn't sustainable over the long-run. It's pretty easy to demonstrate that an omniscient, benevolent social planner would choose to
keep the market system which slight adjustments in pricing mechanisms rather than have another system, like a centrally planned economy, for instance.
Claiming these things makes capitalism unworkable just shows a distinct lack of understanding when it comes to the economy in question.
"The end of capitalism has begun"