Paul Mason’s new book, Postcapitalism, is set to be published in the U.S. in early 2016, so some related work has been preceding it in North America, including a desultory London lecture published on Medium and an interview with Paul Kennedy of the CBC. I’m looking forward to reading the book, and I certainly think capitalism is in for a serious reconfiguration, but Mason is attempting to predict the product of an equation not yet completely written. Not an easy thing to do. Predict turbulence and you will almost always be right; foresee complete collapse and you’ll be wrong nearly every time.

An excerpt from the Kennedy interview:

Paul Kennedy:

Haven’t we heard this message before, that capitalism is failing?

Paul Mason:

Well, for 250 years we have had economists predicting the end of capitalism. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx all discussed the problem of capitalism’s self reproduction. How much longer can it go on reproducing itself?

Now, my idea is that it can go on reproducing itself for a long time, as long as it can adapt. So every time there is a downturn or any time a societal business model falls apart, what you usually get is a mixture of technological innovation and some changes in the structure of the economy and we’re off again.

Paul Kennedy:

So when did you get the idea that we had come to the end of the line?

Paul Mason: 

If you study the old uprisings — the 1840s in Britain, the 1890s, after the Second World War — what you always see is a synthesis of high-value work and high-value production.

The problem is that information technology makes that very difficult, I argue almost impossible, to do. Because information technology strips away value. Information technology allows us to produce things that could be and should be cheap or free.

And so we are not making, as the Victor record company did in 1910 or so, shellac records. We are making mp3 files, and it is very hard to make money out of them.

Paul Kennedy:

What I have been led to believe is that this new information revolution is going to free me up.

Paul Mason:

What has happened is that information allows work and wages to become delinked. It allows work and life to become blurred. We will answer emails from our boss at midnight.•