Journalist Paul Mason (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Mason_(journalist)#Books) has become familiar to us in recent months on TV news reports about the Greek debt crisis, and the possibility of Greece crashing out of the Eurozone. His open necked engaging style is delivered with a distinctive Lancashire accent. The author of four previous books on politics and economics, he now offers a substantial analysis of global economics in Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future.
This is a guide to the seismic economic changes in our era, and the possibility of building a more equal society. Over the past two and a half centuries, capitalism has undergone continual change – economic cycles that lurch from boom to bust – and has always emerged transformed and strengthened.
Surveying this turbulent history, Mason wonders whether today we are on the brink of a radical shift. He questions whether capitalism, the immensely complex system by which entire societies function, has reached its natural limits. At the heart of this change is information technology: a revolution that, as Mason shows, has the potential to reshape utterly our familiar notions of work, production and value; and to destroy an economy based on markets and private ownership. He contends that it is already doing so. Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swathes of economic life are changing. Goods and services that no longer respond to the dictates of neoliberalism are appearing, from parallel currencies and time banks, to cooperatives and self-managed online spaces. Vast numbers of people are changing their behaviour, discovering new forms of ownership, lending and doing business that are distinct from state-backed corporate capitalism.
Mason argues that, from the ashes of the recent financial crisis, we have the chance to create a more socially just and sustainable global economy. Moving beyond capitalism, he believes, is no longer a utopian dream. This is the first time in human history in which, equipped with an understanding of what is happening around us, we can predict and shape, rather than simply react to, economic forces.
For a precis of the arguments there is an article in The Guardian by the author himself available at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun
For the book enquire at your local library or consult http://www.amazon.co.uk/PostCapitalism-Guide-Future-Paul-Mason/dp/1846147387/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1437388760&sr=8-1&keywords=paul+mason for full bibliographic details
368 pages in Allen Lane
First published 2015
ISBN 978-1846147388
Paul Mason