Session Two: Paul Mason on Postcapitalism

This week's text is the chapter 'The Rational Reason to Panic' from Paul Mason's book above.

Paul Mason’s book, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, is a good one. It sets out a dramatic need for change and the tangles we need to get out of. The challenges (and they are all linked) are:

1.     Debt
2.     Lack of Profit
3.     Aging population
4.     Disparity of wealth
5.     Climate Change

We could add microtechnologies or biotechnologies (as Slavoj Zizek does in Living in the End of Times) but Mason doesn’t. He has faith in these new technologies as a positive force that will escape by their very nature the forces of monopoly capitalism (Google/Apple etc) that are presently artificially constricting them. In the future, according to Mason, more stuff will be free and more work will be shared, and moreover everybody will get an automatic universal living wage so that they can afford to do this.

What a post capitalist world might look like in terms architecture is a matter of speculation; it's the stuff of the design studio, and Mason isn't particularly good at dealing with material things rather than information exchange, but the reason for looking at this text is that at least it immediately introduces an alternative to the views of Patrik Schumacher covered in the first session. In combination, they provide us with almost solid ground from which to move backwards.