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Open in TheBrain

Socialist/ pacifist

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OOPS SEE SOCIALISM -IST

MERRI OK

see also peace

see also DSA AOC

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AN 11 25

Ronald Reagan Republican and GOP strategist Frank Luntz says the word “capitalism” has become a dirty word that Republicans must avoid if they want to win election in the aftermath of Zohran Mamdani.

With communication strategist Luntz, winning elections is primarily about messaging, and the word ”capitalism” is no longer a winning message as billionaire “capitalists” accrue most of the wealth and leave Americans worrying about their rent and food pantries. Just recently, the Top 10 U.S. billionaires’ collective wealth grew by nearly $700 billion and analysts warned government policies are driving inequality to new heights.

“Is it fair that some people's children will be born billionaires without having to work a day in their life, while others will work two or three jobs just to put food on their table and a roof over their heads,” Luntz asked CNN anchor Michale Smerconish. “Second, is it fair that some schools have all the technology, all the resources, and others can't even afford books or chalk?”

“Why do I ask that? Because you can see it. You can visualize it,” said Luntz, who correctly predicted Tuesday’s off-year elections would “go badly” for the Republican Party. “And third, does everyone … who works hard and plays by the rules — shouldn’t they have a genuine shot at the American dream? These are the questions that you ask at the beginning to bring audiences over to you. And without asking those questions, you're cutting people out.”

“[Democratic socialist Sen.] Bernie Sanders is on Line 2 for you because he's finding this pretty convincing,” Smerconish responded, and then asked Luntz if the U.S. would “be properly cast as a democratic socialist nation” by 2050.

“It’s already happening,” said Luntz. “I work with young people all across the country. Under age 30, they prefer socialism to capitalism already. The 30s, they are about dead even. It's only when you get to be older 40 that you become more supportive [of capitalism].”

“We should be calling it ‘economic freedom,’ not capitalism, because capitalism is about CEOs,” Luntz added. “It's about billionaires, and it's about Wall Street. Economic freedom is about Main Street, about the workforce and about the opportunities for the future. And I want to give you one bit of language that whoever wins this wins the entire debate, whether it's capitalism or socialism.”

Whether or not they vote that way, Luntz advised Republicans to sell America as “a place for new ideas, better solutions and where good people thrive if we want to move forward as a country … and no one is left behind.”

“Whoever controls that language wins the debate,” he said.

“I think AOC, Mamdani and Bernie are all going to be clamoring for your services after the first part of our exchange,” said Smerconish — but Luntz jettisoned any notion that he stood behind the policies of the three politicians.

“They won’t get it,” Luntz said.

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REF PPL WORLD

NEW YORK—The Trump administration and its radical right foot-soldiers in the federal government and in the states are undertaking a comprehensive scheme to undermine future state and federal elections, in effect rigging the rolls to keep themselves in power no matter what the voters decide.

So far, other than the report itself, by the Brennan Center for Law and Justice at New York University, there’s been little—or little-noticed—response.

The comprehensive scheme is detailed in a combination of a Trump executive order on March 25 and the notorious SAVE Act, a GOP voter repression law that would disenfranchise at least 21 million people, most of them women—the voters most likely to oppose the Trump-right-wing-corporate agenda.

Detailed and footnoted protests were aired by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) to the GOP-run House Administration Committee and by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights—whose members include the AFL-CIO—to the GOP-run Senate Rules and Administration Committee.

And states have gone to court to try to block Trump, the Brennan Center adds.

“A president has no right to rewrite the country’s election rules or regulate federal elections on his own,” the center’s report says.

“As a federal court recently put it, ‘The Constitution vests none of these powers in the president.’ In issuing the order, the president claimed extraordinary unilateral authority to regulate federal elections and usurp the powers of Congress, the states, and the (U.S.) Elections Administration Commission, an independent, bipartisan federal agency.”

Protecting U.S. elections, at all levels, from partisan manipulation, is now and has been for more than a century, important to workers, union, and non-union.

One, as AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler often points out, is that the GOP Trump regime views organized labor as a key roadblock to its partisan and repressive agenda. And the best way to crush labor is to crush workers’ right to vote.

And, second, and just as important, restricting who can vote, and who cannot, centralizes power in the hands not just of Trump but of the corporate interests that back him and who turn a blind eye—or worse–to repression both at the workplace and at the ballot box.

After all, paraphrasing the late UAW President Walter Reuther, what is won at the bargaining table can be taken away by the stroke of a pen.

The elements in the right wing’s coordinated attempt to entrench itself in power go far beyond what Trump tried in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. Trump lost it to Democratic nominee Joe Biden, and knew it. But he tried to overturn the results in lawsuits and other intimidation in selected swing states—and went 0-for-62 in court cases.

When that failed, he turned to aiding and abetting the Jan. 6, 2021, Trumpite invasion, insurrection, and attempted coup d’etat at the U.S. Capitol.

But now the Trump right-wing playbook to undermine and rig coming elections is much more extensive and much more under the radar, the Brennan Center reports. It includes:

Leaves out one key tactic

The Brennan report leaves out one tactic of Trump, the MAGAites and the right-wing: Stacking state and local elections boards. An attempt occurred in Nevada, a swing state in 2020 and 2024. And after the four-member, evenly split Wayne County, Mich. (Detroit) elections board voted 3-1 to certify Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s margin there in 2020, Michigan MAGAites forced the Republican commissioner who voted for certification out of office.

“Why do we conclude this represents a concerted strategy? Among other things, President Trump tried to do this before,” the Brennan Center points out. “He was the first president to try to overturn the results of a presidential election and used federal power to do so.

“Institutions and key officials blocked him. These internal checks, however, are now gone, and many public officials will likely carry out the president’s will.

“This campaign to undermine elections runs afoul of the U.S. Constitution. Only Congress and the states can set election rules. The executive branch, especially the Department of Justice (DOJ), is charged with enforcing federal laws. But neither the president nor the DOJ has the authority to set rules governing elections or to supervise” state elections procedures.

Yet Trump is trying just that. And, as CREW and the Brennan Center point out, the misnamed SAVE Act, a key goal of the House’s ruling right-wing Republicans, would aid and abet that campaign. Other specifics include:

Trump, in a March 25 executive order, and the GOP congressional majority, in the SAVE Act, say doing so would prevent “voter fraud,” which even Trump’s last Attorney General in his first term, Bill Barr, called non-existent. But “show your papers” mandates, using a citizenship document to even register to vote, “would undermine voting and disrupt election administration in multiple respects.”

Estimates are that the mandate, the SAVE Act, or both, would disenfranchise at least 21 million voters nationwide. Most of them would be women, whose names on their initial voter registrations are different from the name they now use.

There are also bans on unauthorized access to voting machines and equipment. The result of violating them is to toss the machines—and the votes they count—out. Tina Peters, former county clerk in rural “red” Mesa County, Colo., is now serving a 9-year term in prison for allowing Trumpite election deniers access to her county’s machines after the 2020 balloting. She was convicted last year.

That kind of retaliation could target both unions and their get-out-the-vote drives and groups such as the Poor People’s Campaign, which registers and mobilizes poor and low-wealth people—the very voters least likely to participate, but also the most likely to oppose the Trumpite, right-wing and corporate hegemony.

Reports likely targets

The Brennan Center reports likely targets for “law enforcement” type retaliation would include individual voters, election officials, “perceived political adversaries, and journalists.” The last two groups of targets have been GOP targets before: On Richard Nixon’s enemies list. Labor leaders—AFSCME President Jerry Wurf and UAW President Leonard Woodcock—were on it, too.

Trump’s FBI Director Kash Patel “stated ‘We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections–we’re going to come after you,’” the Brennan Center adds.

The Brennan Center reports three active task forces leading that retaliation: The Justice Department’s “Weaponization Working Group, the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office Election Integrity Task Force, and the Washington, D.C., Attorney’s Office Special Unit.

“The administration could abuse voter file access to claim fraud and erode public trust in elections,” the Brennan Center warns. “It could also pressure state officials to target groups of voters and carry out unwarranted voter purges. Any disclosure of sensitive personal information puts individuals and groups at risk of being intimidated or doxed. And mishandling voter file data could expose U.S. elections to political and foreign interference.”

“Criminal investigations and prosecutions would impose a severe personal and financial toll on election officials or nonprofit employees for simply doing their jobs to help keep elections free and fair. But beyond that, the harms that stem from targeting the officials and civil society groups that make our elections work are manifold,” the Brennan Center report says.

“Even if the administration never charges any officials, the threat alone of criminal investigation or prosecution will likely exacerbate the exodus of election officials. In 2024 33% of local election officials knew at least one colleague who resigned at least in part due to fear for their safety, of increased threats, or of intimidation; 21% stated they were unlikely to continue serving in their role for the 2026 midterms. In 2025, 59% of officials reported fear of political interference in their ability to do their jobs. And 46% were very or somewhat concerned about potential politically motivated investigations of themselves and their families.”

One solution: Sue for damages. The Brennan Center reports “federal and state law prohibit anyone, including federal officials, from intimidating voters and those, like election officials or civic engagement organizations, who assist or encourage them to vote. And though voters rarely do so, they are able to sue DOJ officials under anti-intimidation law in federal court.”

“The Constitution establishes a system of checks and balances to ensure free and fair elections. The power to regulate elections lies in the hands of states and Congress. Courts and advocates complement this system to uphold the Constitution and federal law,” the Brennan Center declares.

“U.S. election infrastructure leaves no room for the president to insert himself. Yet that is exactly what he purports to do.”

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an 12 24

According to **The World Happiness Report, the United States fell to #23 in terms of happiness earlier this year — way behind Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Iceland and other countries in Europe.

William S. Becker, a former U.S. Energy Department official who now serves as executive director for the Presidential Climate Action Project, lays out a variety of reasons for the United States' declining mental health in a biting op-ed published by The Hill on December 9.

Citing health care, education, inequality and other problems, Becker argues that the United States is failing its people miserably.

READ MORE:[Why Measles, Whooping Cough and worse could roar back under RFK's watch

"The U.S. is the among the wealthiest countries in the world per capita," Becker explains, "but the American people are not happy. The Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, but the founding documents do say we all have an equal right to pursue it."

Becker points to data from the World Happiness Report, noting that "Nordic nations dominate the top 10 list" in terms of happiness.

"The happiest countries have capitalist economies and democratic governments," Becker argues, "but they provide their people with essential tools for success — tools that American conservatives brand as 'socialist.' Universal health care is one. The United States is the only high-income nation without it."

Becker continues, "Americans pay nearly four times as much for prescription drugs and higher costs for hospitalization and doctors than people in other developed countries. More than 27 million Americans still have no health insurance."

READ MORE:[Kansas Republican slams Louis DeJoy's USPS performance — to his face

The United States' health insurance crisis, Becker warns, will become even worse if the Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare, is overturned during President-elect Donald Trump's second term.

"As of March," Becker observes, "over 45 million Americans were enrolled in Obamacare. Trump tried to kill that option during his first term and says he has 'concepts' to replace it now. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 3.4 million Americans would lose health insurance without Obamacare."

Access to "quality education," according to Becker, also plays a major role in a country's mental wellbeing — and the U.S., he says, falls way beyond Scandinavian countries in that area.

Inequality, Becker adds, is also harming Americans' mental health.

Becker observes, "Income and wealth are more equitably distributed in happy countries such as Iceland, Denmark and Norway.… In 2017, Trump's tax cuts widened the wealth gap by skewing tax policy toward the rich…. Trump has promised to lower corporate taxes even more next year…. Meanwhile, America's middle class is shrinking while its lower class expands. Nearly 38 million Americans live in poverty.

READ MORE:['America will not be made great again': McConnell received ovation after 'swipe' at Trump

*William S. Becker's full op-ed for The Hill is available at this link.

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1119 aha why is okla the ctr of evil, what's the matter w/ kansas, but both oil state; 5 hr drive 366 mi dallas to wichita; all 3 stacked, kind of cohesive unit geographically; tx okl mate, panhandle.

https://www.kshs.org/publicat/history/2007winter_pratt.pdf

Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives

Won the Heart of America (2004) argues that leftwing politics once

were commonplace in the Sunflower State.1

It is an intriguing idea and serves as the point of departure for this historio-graphical essay on Kansas radicalism. In these pages "radicalism" refers to a leftwing

political position beyond that of liberalism, a position that often embraced

government ownership and socialism, seeking to control or abolish big

wealth and private economic concentration. Radicals were not a monolithic

group, as they frequently differed among themselves on objectives and tactics, and many of them sought to work within the ranks of broader, less

ideological groupings at particular times.

Groups in which Kansas radicals participated included the People's Party, Knights of Labor, Socialist

Party, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies), Nonpartisan

League, Communist Party, and mainstream unions such as the United Mine

Workers.

Kansas was probably the most radical state in the Union in the 1890s,

and leftwing efforts there continued for several decades. "For much of the

twentieth century," wrote Fred Whitehead, "the state of Kansas has suffered the reputation of being a conservative bastion, yet during the 1880s,

through the Populist movement of the following decade, and even until

the anti-radical repressions of World War I, it was a dramatic laboratory

of social experimentation, free thought, and wild political insurgency."2

In no other state were the Populists as successful at the ballot box, electing a

number of congressmen, two U.S. senators, and two governors, not to mention hundreds of other public officials, including the chief justice of the state supreme court. Prior to World War I, Kansas Socialists held picnics, turned out to hear party notables such as Eugene Debs and Kate Richards O’Hare, and, perhaps most important for their cause, published the Appeal to Reason, the single most successful leftwing newspaper in American history. The radical IWW was also quite active in the state during the second decade of the twentieth century, organizing thousands of harvest hands and oil field workers. But U.S. entry into World War I in 1917 marked the beginning of the end of Kansas radicalism. By the early 1920s, the Sunflower State was well on the way to becoming the conservative bastion to which Whitehead alludes. Never again would Kansas be identified in the public mind with leftwing politics. Thus, Kansas radicalism is largely a topic confined to the years between 1880 and 1920. That said, however, a closer look at the sources reveals leftwing sentiment and efforts before and after those years. For the remainder of this essay, I examine how historians have treated Kansas’s radical past,...

William C. Pratt is a professor of history at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and a member

of the Board of Trustees of the Nebraska State Historical Society. His current research focuses upon

the agrarian left in the Upper Midwest. In the spring of 2007, he was a senior Fulbright lecturer at the

University of Warsaw, Poland.

  1. Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004). The concept of a "lost world" introduced in the

title of the present article is borrowed from Robert McMath's "The Populist Southwest: A Lost

World," The Progressive 42 (December 1978): 53-55.

  1. Fred Whitehead, "The Kansas Response to the Haymarket Affair," ...

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/investors-consumers-and-workers-are-changing-capitalism-for-the-better-by-demanding-companies-behave-more-responsibly/

no lnx

Investors, consumers and workers are changing capitalism for the better by demanding companies behave more responsibly

Written by The Conversation July 27, 2019

Capitalism’s days may be numbered – at least judging by recent polls.

A majority of millennials reject the economic system, while 55% of women aged 18 to 54 say they prefer socialism. More Democrats now have a positive view of socialism than capitalism.

One problem interpreting numbers like these is that there are many definitions of capitalism and socialism. More to the point, people seem to be thinking of a specific form of capitalism that deems the sole purpose of companies is to increase stock prices and enrich investors. Known as shareholder capitalism, it’s been the guiding light of American business for more than four decades.

As a scholar of socially responsible companies, however, I cannot help but notice a shift in corporate behavior in recent years. A new kind of capitalism seems to be emerging, one in which companies value communities, the environment and workers just as much as profits.

The purpose of business

Nearly 50 years ago, the economist Milton Friedman proclaimed that the sole purpose of a business is “to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.”

Within a decade, Friedman’s claim became accepted wisdom in corporate boardrooms. The era of “shareholder primacy capitalism” had begun.

One result has been remarkable growth in the stock market. But critics argue companies and the “shareholder value theory” are also complicit in exacerbating many economic, social and environmental problems, such as income inequality and climate change.

Milton Friedman won prizes for his research on consumption analysis and monetary history.

They also note that putting profits first actually harms shareholders in the long run by encouraging managers to take actions that may eventually reduce earnings.

The rebellion

Many consumers, workers and socially conscious investors have also noticed these shortcomings and increased pressure on corporations to change.

For starters, more Americans no longer find it acceptable for companies to exclusively seek profits. A 2017 poll found that 78% of U.S. consumers want businesses to pursue social justice issues, while 76% said they would refuse to buy a product if the business supported an issue contrary to their beliefs. Almost half the respondents said they had already boycotted a product for that reason.

Workers increasingly expect their employers to share their values. A 2016 study found that most Americans – particularly millennials – consider a company’s social and environmental commitments when deciding where to work. Most would also be willing to take a pay cut in order to work for a “responsible” company – and are demanding their current employers behave that way.

For example, workers at online furniture company Wayfair recently walked out when they learned it had sent beds to detention centers at the U.S.-Mexico border. More than 8,100 Amazon employees signed an open letter supporting a shareholder resolution urging the retailer to do more to address climate change.

Finally, investors are becoming more socially aware and putting more of their money behind businesses that behave in sustainable and responsive ways. At the beginning of 2018, portfolio managers held US$11.6 trillion in U.S. assets using environmental, social and governance criteria to guide their investments, up from $2.5 trillion in 2010.

Laurence Fink, founder and CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, summed up the growing sentiment when he said, “To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.”

The corporate response

Presumably realizing how important these constituencies are to their bottom lines, businesses are paying attention.

Dick’s Sporting Goods, Kroger, Walmart and L.L. Bean, for example, responded to growing concerns over mass shootings by restricting the sale of guns. Proctor and Gamble, a major sponsor for U.S. Soccer, expressed support for the quest of the women’s team for equal pay and donated $500,000 to help narrow the pay gap with men.

Airlines including American, United and Frontier refused to knowingly fly children separated from their parents at the border following outrage over the Trump administration’s policy. And even though Amazon shareholders rejected the worker-supported shareholder resolution described above, Amazon set stronger goals for reducing its carbon footprint after the resolution was introduced.

Unilever found that its ‘sustainable living’ brands such as Ben & Jerry’s are growing faster than its other products.

These actions have sometimes hurt the bottom line. The decision to restrict gun sales cost Dick’s Sporting Goods $150 million. Delta lost a $50 million tax break in Georgia after severing ties with the NRA.

But these and other companies didn’t back down. The CEO of Dick’s Sporting Goods explained that when something is “to the detriment of the public, you have to stand up.”

Companies are also setting tougher social and environmental goals for themselves and then reporting their successes and failures. Tesla, Unilever, Nike and Whole Foods are among nine companies with annual revenues of at least $1 billion that “have sustainability or social good at their core.”

In 2018, 86% of Standard & Poor’s 500 companies reported on their environmental, social and governance performance and achievements, up from less than 20% in 2011.

And companies have found that putting more emphasis on social justice can pay off. Unilever, for example, said in 2017 that its “sustainable living” brands, such as Ben & Jerry’s, Dove and Hellmann’s, are growing much faster than its other brands. Companies with the best scores on their sustainability reports generally perform better financially than those with lower scores.

The end of shareholder capitalism?

Skeptics can be forgiven for believing these corporate “changes” are not real or are simply public relations stunts designed to appeal to a new generation.

Businesses can, of course, say they will be responsible citizens while doing the opposite. Few sustainability reports in the United States are externally audited, and the companies are asking us to take them at their word.

Even if they are well-meaning, intentions are not enough to create systemic change. A 2017 study showed that many companies with climate change goals actually scaled back their ambitions over time as the reality clashed with their lofty goals.

But businesses can’t afford to ignore their customers’ wishes. Nor can they ignore their workers in a tight labor market. And if they disregard socially responsible investors, they risk both losing out on important investments and facing shareholder resolutions that force change.

The shareholder value doctrine is not dead, but we are beginning to see major cracks in its armor. And as long as investors, customers and employees continue to push for more responsible behavior, you should expect to see those cracks grow.The Conversation

Elizabeth Schmidt, Professor of Practice, Nonprofit Organizations; Social & Environmental Enterprises, University of Massachusetts Amherst

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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https://art19.com/shows/why-is-this-happening-with-chris-hayes

socialism primer

b sunkara

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booktv 519

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richard w primer history, new crit of cap'l

On this episode of Economic Update, Prof. Wolff begins with socialism’s history especially in the US: from being widely discussed up to 1945, then repressed in the Cold War, and now vigorously revived since 2008. He then examines socialism’s basic economic criticism of capitalism in the 20th century. And finally, he shows how and why the socialism emerging now is new and different. split over ussr model, splinte gp took name communist --> social democrat (scand) holland, portugal

With Richard D. Wolff.

https://kpfa.org/episode/economic-update-february-1-2019/

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https://kpfa.org/episode/economic-update-january-11-2019/

Updates on New York City council votes minimum wage for ride-hailing drivers (Uber, Lyft, etc.), Trump store is 85% goods made abroad, charter school teachers strike in Chicago, contradictions in US-China trade war, VW ends gas car production in favor of electric in evasion of need for mass transit. Interview Victor Wallis author of Red-Green Revolution: The Politics and Technology of Ecosocialism

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http://www.democracynow.org/2014/1/6/a_socialist_elected_in_seattle_kshama

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http://www.alternet.org/economy/every-treasured-progressive-reform-abolition-slavery-has-been-called-socialism

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ECONOMY

The End of Capitalism Has Begun

Without us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era.

By Paul Mason / The Guardian July 17, 2015

Print

275 COMMENTS

Retro style clenched fist held high in protest against grunge concrete wall background indicating revolution or aggression. Graffiti fist.

Photo Credit: Kunal Mehta

The red flags and marching songs of Syriza during the Greek crisis, plus the expectation that the banks would be nationalised, revived briefly a 20th-century dream: the forced destruction of the market from above. For much of the 20th century this was how the left conceived the first stage of an economy beyond capitalism. The force would be applied by the working class, either at the ballot box or on the barricades. The lever would be the state. The opportunity would come through frequent episodes of economic collapse.

Instead over the past 25 years it has been the left’s project that has collapsed. The market destroyed the plan; individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity; the hugely expanded workforce of the world looks like a “proletariat”, but no longer thinks or behaves as it once did.

If you lived through all this, and disliked capitalism, it was traumatic. But in the process technology has created a new route out, which the remnants of the old left – and all other forces influenced by it – have either to embrace or die. Capitalism, it turns out, will not be abolished by forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which will break through, reshaping the economy around new values and behaviours. I call this postcapitalism.

As with the end of feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism’s replacement by postcapitalism will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started.

Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all.

Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they cannot last. By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely.

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.

Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swaths of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm. Parallel currencies, time banks, cooperatives and self-managed spaces have proliferated, barely noticed by the economics profession, and often as a direct result of the shattering of the old structures in the post-2008 crisis.

You only find this new economy if you look hard for it. In Greece, when a grassroots NGO mapped the country’s food co-ops, alternative producers, parallel currencies and local exchange systems they found more than 70 substantive projects and hundreds of smaller initiatives ranging from squats to carpools to free kindergartens. To mainstream economics such things seem barely to qualify as economic activity – but that’s the point. They exist because they trade, however haltingly and inefficiently, in the currency of postcapitalism: free time, networked activity and free stuff. It seems a meagre and unofficial and even dangerous thing from which to craft an entire alternative to a global system, but so did money and credit in the age of Edward III.

New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: a whole business subculture has emerged over the past 10 years, which the media has dubbed the “sharing economy”. Buzzwords such as the “commons” and “peer-production” are thrown around, but few have bothered to ask what this development means for capitalism itself.

I believe it offers an escape route – but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and protected by a fundamental change in what governments do. And this must be driven by a change in our thinking – about technology, ownership and work. So that, when we create the elements of the new system, we can say to ourselves, and to others: “This is no longer simply my survival mechanism, my bolt hole from the neoliberal world; this is a new way of living in the process of formation.”

The 2008 crash wiped 13% off global production and 20% off global trade. Global growth became negative – on a scale where anything below +3% is counted as a recession. It produced, in the west, a depression phase longer than in 1929-33, and even now, amid a pallid recovery, has left mainstream economists terrified about the prospect of long-term stagnation. The aftershocks in Europe are tearing the continent apart.

The solutions have been austerity plus monetary excess. But they are not working. In the worst-hit countries, the pension system has been destroyed, the retirement age is being hiked to 70, and education is being privatised so that graduates now face a lifetime of high debt. Services are being dismantled and infrastructure projects put on hold.

Even now many people fail to grasp the true meaning of the word “austerity”. Austerity is not eight years of spending cuts, as in the UK, or even the social catastrophe inflicted on Greece. It means driving the wages, social wages and living standards in the west down for decades until they meet those of the middle class in China and India on the way up.

Meanwhile in the absence of any alternative model, the conditions for another crisis are being assembled. Real wages have fallen or remained stagnant in Japan, the southern Eurozone, the US and UK. The shadow banking system has been reassembled, and is now bigger than it was in 2008. New rules demanding banks hold more reserves have been watered down or delayed. Meanwhile, flushed with free money, the 1% has got richer.

Neoliberalism, then, has morphed into a system programmed to inflict recurrent catastrophic failures. Worse than that, it has broken the 200-year pattern of industrial capitalism wherein an economic crisis spurs new forms of technological innovation that benefit everybody.

That is because neoliberalism was the first economic model in 200 years the upswing of which was premised on the suppression of wages and smashing the social power and resilience of the working class. If we review the take-off periods studied by long-cycle theorists – the 1850s in Europe, the 1900s and 1950s across the globe – it was the strength of organised labour that forced entrepreneurs and corporations to stop trying to revive outdated business models through wage cuts, and to innovate their way to a new form of capitalism.

The result is that, in each upswing, we find a synthesis of automation, higher wages and higher-value consumption. Today there is no pressure from the workforce, and the technology at the centre of this innovation wave does not demand the creation of higher-consumer spending, or the re-employment of the old workforce in new jobs. Information is a machine for grinding the price of things lower and slashing the work time needed to support life on the planet.

As a result, large parts of the business class have become neo-luddites. Faced with the possibility of creating gene-sequencing labs, they instead start coffee shops, nail bars and contract cleaning firms: the banking system, the planning system and late neoliberal culture reward above all the creator of low-value, long-hours jobs.

Innovation is happening but it has not, so far, triggered the fifth long upswing for capitalism that long-cycle theory would expect. The reasons lie in the specific nature of information technology.

We’re surrounded not just by intelligent machines but by a new layer of reality centred on information. Consider an airliner: a computer flies it; it has been designed, stress-tested and “virtually manufactured” millions of times; it is firing back real-time information to its manufacturers. On board are people squinting at screens connected, in some lucky countries, to the internet.

Seen from the ground it is the same white metal bird as in the James Bond era. But it is now both an intelligent machine and a node on a network. It has an information content and is adding “information value” as well as physical value to the world. On a packed business flight, when everyone’s peering at Excel or Powerpoint, the passenger cabin is best understood as an information factory.

But what is all this information worth? You won’t find an answer in the accounts: intellectual property is valued in modern accounting standards by guesswork. A study for the SAS Institute in 2013 found that, in order to put a value on data, neither the cost of gathering it, nor the market value or the future income from it could be adequately calculated. Only through a form of accounting that included non-economic benefits, and risks, could companies actually explain to their shareholders what their data was really worth. Something is broken in the logic we use to value the most important thing in the modern world.

The great technological advance of the early 21st century consists not only of new objects and processes, but of old ones made intelligent. The knowledge content of products is becoming more valuable than the physical things that are used to produce them. But it is a value measured as usefulness, not exchange or asset value. In the 1990s economists and technologists began to have the same thought at once: that this new role for information was creating a new, “third” kind of capitalism – as different from industrial capitalism as industrial capitalism was to the merchant and slave capitalism of the 17th and 18th centuries. But they have struggled to describe the dynamics of the new “cognitive” capitalism. And for a reason. Its dynamics are profoundly non-capitalist.

During and right after the second world war, economists viewed information simply as a “public good”. The US government even decreed that no profit should be made out of patents, only from the production process itself. Then we began to understand intellectual property. In 1962, Kenneth Arrow, the guru of mainstream economics, said that in a free market economy the purpose of inventing things is to create intellectual property rights. He noted: “precisely to the extent that it is successful there is an underutilisation of information.”

You can observe the truth of this in every e-business model ever constructed: monopolise and protect data, capture the free social data generated by user interaction, push commercial forces into areas of data production that were non-commercial before, mine the existing data for predictive value – always and everywhere ensuring nobody but the corporation can utilise the results.

If we restate Arrow’s principle in reverse, its revolutionary implications are obvious: if a free market economy plus intellectual property leads to the “underutilisation of information”, then an economy based on the full utilisation of information cannot tolerate the free market or absolute intellectual property rights. The business models of all our modern digital giants are designed to prevent the abundance of information.

Yet information is abundant. Information goods are freely replicable. Once a thing is made, it can be copied/pasted infinitely. A music track or the giant database you use to build an airliner has a production cost; but its cost of reproduction falls towards zero. Therefore, if the normal price mechanism of capitalism prevails over time, its price will fall towards zero, too.

For the past 25 years economics has been wrestling with this problem: all mainstream economics proceeds from a condition of scarcity, yet the most dynamic force in our modern world is abundant and, as hippy genius Stewart Brand once put it, “wants to be free”.

There is, alongside the world of monopolised information and surveillance created by corporations and governments, a different dynamic growing up around information: information as a social good, free at the point of use, incapable of being owned or exploited or priced. I’ve surveyed the attempts by economists and business gurus to build a framework to understand the dynamics of an economy based on abundant, socially-held information. But it was actually imagined by one 19th-century economist in the era of the telegraph and the steam engine. His name? Karl Marx.

The scene is Kentish Town, London, February 1858, sometime around 4am. Marx is a wanted man in Germany and is hard at work scribbling thought-experiments and notes-to-self. When they finally get to see what Marx is writing on this night, the left intellectuals of the 1960s will admit that it “challenges every serious interpretation of Marx yet conceived”. It is called “The Fragment on Machines”.

In the “Fragment” Marx imagines an economy in which the main role of machines is to produce, and the main role of people is to supervise them. He was clear that, in such an economy, the main productive force would be information. The productive power of such machines as the automated cotton-spinning machine, the telegraph and the steam locomotive did not depend on the amount of labour it took to produce them but on the state of social knowledge. Organisation and knowledge, in other words, made a bigger contribution to productive power than the work of making and running the machines.

Given what Marxism was to become – a theory of exploitation based on the theft of labour time – this is a revolutionary statement. It suggests that, once knowledge becomes a productive force in its own right, outweighing the actual labour spent creating a machine, the big question becomes not one of “wages versus profits” but who controls what Marx called the “power of knowledge”.

In an economy where machines do most of the work, the nature of the knowledge locked inside the machines must, he writes, be “social”. In a final late-night thought experiment Marx imagined the end point of this trajectory: the creation of an “ideal machine”, which lasts forever and costs nothing. A machine that could be built for nothing would, he said, add no value at all to the production process and rapidly, over several accounting periods, reduce the price, profit and labour costs of everything else it touched.

Once you understand that information is physical, and that software is a machine, and that storage, bandwidth and processing power are collapsing in price at exponential rates, the value of Marx’s thinking becomes clear. We are surrounded by machines that cost nothing and could, if we wanted them to, last forever.

In these musings, not published until the mid-20th century, Marx imagined information coming to be stored and shared in something called a “general intellect” – which was the mind of everybody on Earth connected by social knowledge, in which every upgrade benefits everybody. In short, he had imagined something close to the information economy in which we live. And, he wrote, its existence would “blow capitalism sky high”.

With the terrain changed, the old path beyond capitalism imagined by the left of the 20th century is lost.

But a different path has opened up. Collaborative production, using network technology to produce goods and services that only work when they are free, or shared, defines the route beyond the market system. It will need the state to create the framework – just as it created the framework for factory labour, sound currencies and free trade in the early 19th century. The postcapitalist sector is likely to coexist with the market sector for decades, but major change is happening.

Networks restore “granularity” to the postcapitalist project. That is, they can be the basis of a non-market system that replicates itself, which does not need to be created afresh every morning on the computer screen of a commissar.

The transition will involve the state, the market and collaborative production beyond the market. But to make it happen, the entire project of the left, from protest groups to the mainstream social democratic and liberal parties, will have to be reconfigured. In fact, once people understand the logic of the postcapitalist transition, such ideas will no longer be the property of the left – but of a much wider movement, for which we will need new labels.

Who can make this happen? In the old left project it was the industrial working class. More than 200 years ago, the radical journalist John Thelwall warned the men who built the English factories that they had created a new and dangerous form of democracy: “Every large workshop and manufactory is a sort of political society, which no act of parliament can silence, and no magistrate disperse.”

Today the whole of society is a factory. We all participate in the creation and recreation of the brands, norms and institutions that surround us. At the same time the communication grids vital for everyday work and profit are buzzing with shared knowledge and discontent. Today it is the network – like the workshop 200 years ago – that they “cannot silence or disperse”.

True, states can shut down Facebook, Twitter, even the entire internet and mobile network in times of crisis, paralysing the economy in the process. And they can store and monitor every kilobyte of information we produce. But they cannot reimpose the hierarchical, propaganda-driven and ignorant society of 50 years ago, except – as in China, North Korea or Iran – by opting out of key parts of modern life. It would be, as sociologist Manuel Castells put it, like trying to de-electrify a country.

By creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being.

This will be more than just an economic transition. There are, of course, the parallel and urgent tasks of decarbonising the world and dealing with demographic and fiscal timebombs. But I’m concentrating on the economic transition triggered by information because, up to now, it has been sidelined. Peer-to-peer has become pigeonholed as a niche obsession for visionaries, while the “big boys” of leftwing economics get on with critiquing austerity.

In fact, on the ground in places such as Greece, resistance to austerity and the creation of “networks you can’t default on” – as one activist put it to me – go hand in hand. Above all, postcapitalism as a concept is about new forms of human behaviour that conventional economics would hardly recognise as relevant.

So how do we visualise the transition ahead? The only coherent parallel we have is the replacement of feudalism by capitalism – and thanks to the work of epidemiologists, geneticists and data analysts, we know a lot more about that transition than we did 50 years ago when it was “owned” by social science. The first thing we have to recognise is: different modes of production are structured around different things. Feudalism was an economic system structured by customs and laws about “obligation”. Capitalism was structured by something purely economic: the market. We can predict, from this, that postcapitalism – whose precondition is abundance – will not simply be a modified form of a complex market society. But we can only begin to grasp at a positive vision of what it will be like.

I don’t mean this as a way to avoid the question: the general economic parameters of a postcapitalist society by, for example, the year 2075, can be outlined. But if such a society is structured around human liberation, not economics, unpredictable things will begin to shape it.

For example, the most obvious thing to Shakespeare, writing in 1600, was that the market had called forth new kinds of behaviour and morality. By analogy, the most obvious “economic” thing to the Shakespeare of 2075 will be the total upheaval in gender relationships, or sexuality, or health. Perhaps there will not even be any playwrights: perhaps the very nature of the media we use to tell stories will change – just as it changed in Elizabethan London when the first public theatres were built.

Think of the difference between, say, Horatio in Hamlet and a character such as Daniel Doyce in Dickens’s Little Dorrit. Both carry around with them a characteristic obsession of their age – Horatio is obsessed with humanist philosophy; Doyce is obsessed with patenting his invention. There can be no character like Doyce in Shakespeare; he would, at best, get a bit part as a working-class comic figure. Yet, by the time Dickens described Doyce, most of his readers knew somebody like him. Just as Shakespeare could not have imagined Doyce, so we too cannot imagine the kind of human beings society will produce once economics is no longer central to life. But we can see their prefigurative forms in the lives of young people all over the world breaking down 20th-century barriers around sexuality, work, creativity and the self.

The feudal model of agriculture collided, first, with environmental limits and then with a massive external shock – the Black Death. After that, there was a demographic shock: too few workers for the land, which raised their wages and made the old feudal obligation system impossible to enforce. The labour shortage also forced technological innovation. The new technologies that underpinned the rise of merchant capitalism were the ones that stimulated commerce (printing and accountancy), the creation of tradeable wealth (mining, the compass and fast ships) and productivity (mathematics and the scientific method).

Present throughout the whole process was something that looks incidental to the old system – money and credit – but which was actually destined to become the basis of the new system. In feudalism, many laws and customs were actually shaped around ignoring money; credit was, in high feudalism, seen as sinful. So when money and credit burst through the boundaries to create a market system, it felt like a revolution. Then, what gave the new system its energy was the discovery of a virtually unlimited source of free wealth in the Americas.

A combination of all these factors took a set of people who had been marginalised under feudalism – humanists, scientists, craftsmen, lawyers, radical preachers and bohemian playwrights such as Shakespeare – and put them at the head of a social transformation. At key moments, though tentatively at first, the state switched from hindering the change to promoting it.

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. The equivalent of the printing press and the scientific method is information technology and its spillover into all other technologies, from genetics to healthcare to agriculture to the movies, where it is quickly reducing costs.

The modern equivalent of the long stagnation of late feudalism is the stalled take-off of the third industrial revolution, where instead of rapidly automating work out of existence, we are reduced to creating what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs” on low pay. And many economies are stagnating.

The equivalent of the new source of free wealth? It’s not exactly wealth: it’s the “externalities” – the free stuff and wellbeing generated by networked interaction. It is the rise of non-market production, of unownable information, of peer networks and unmanaged enterprises. The internet, French economist Yann Moulier-Boutang says, is “both the ship and the ocean” when it comes to the modern equivalent of the discovery of the new world. In fact, it is the ship, the compass, the ocean and the gold.

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. They have not yet had the same impact as the Black Death – but as we saw in New Orleans in 2005, it does not take the bubonic plague to destroy social order and functional infrastructure in a financially complex and impoverished society.

Once you understand the transition in this way, the need is not for a supercomputed Five Year Plan – but a project, the aim of which should be to expand those technologies, business models and behaviours that dissolve market forces, socialise knowledge, eradicate the need for work and push the economy towards abundance. I call it Project Zero – because its aims are a zero-carbon-energy system; the production of machines, products and services with zero marginal costs; and the reduction of necessary work time as close as possible to zero.

Most 20th-century leftists believed that they did not have the luxury of a managed transition: it was an article of faith for them that nothing of the coming system could exist within the old one – though the working class always attempted to create an alternative life within and “despite” capitalism. As a result, once the possibility of a Soviet-style transition disappeared, the modern left became preoccupied simply with opposing things: the privatisation of healthcare, anti-union laws, fracking – the list goes on.

If I am right, the logical focus for supporters of postcapitalism is to build alternatives within the system; to use governmental power in a radical and disruptive way; and to direct all actions towards the transition – not the defence of random elements of the old system. We have to learn what’s urgent, and what’s important, and that sometimes they do not coincide.

The power of imagination will become critical. In an information society, no thought, debate or dream is wasted – whether conceived in a tent camp, prison cell or the table football space of a startup company.

As with virtual manufacturing, in the transition to postcapitalism the work done at the design stage can reduce mistakes in the implementation stage. And the design of the postcapitalist world, as with software, can be modular. Different people can work on it in different places, at different speeds, with relative autonomy from each other. If I could summon one thing into existence for free it would be a global institution that modelled capitalism correctly: an open source model of the whole economy; official, grey and black. Every experiment run through it would enrich it; it would be open source and with as many datapoints as the most complex climate models.

The main contradiction today is between the possibility of free, abundant goods and information; and a system of monopolies, banks and governments trying to keep things private, scarce and commercial. Everything comes down to the struggle between the network and the hierarchy: between old forms of society moulded around capitalism and new forms of society that prefigure what comes next.

Is it utopian to believe we’re on the verge of an evolution beyond capitalism? We live in a world in which gay men and women can marry, and in which contraception has, within the space of 50 years, made the average working-class woman freer than the craziest libertine of the Bloomsbury era. Why do we, then, find it so hard to imagine economic freedom?

It is the elites – cut off in their dark-limo world – whose project looks as forlorn as that of the millennial sects of the 19th century. The democracy of riot squads, corrupt politicians, magnate-controlled newspapers and the surveillance state looks as phoney and fragile as East Germany did 30 years ago.

All readings of human history have to allow for the possibility of a negative outcome. It haunts us in the zombie movie, the disaster movie, in the post-apocalytic wasteland of films such as The Road or Elysium. But why should we not form a picture of the ideal life, built out of abundant information, non-hierarchical work and the dissociation of work from wages?

Millions of people are beginning to realise they have been sold a dream at odds with what reality can deliver. Their response is anger – and retreat towards national forms of capitalism that can only tear the world apart. Watching these emerge, from the pro-Grexit left factions in Syriza to the Front National and the isolationism of the American right has been like watching the nightmares we had during the Lehman Brothers crisis come true.

We need more than just a bunch of utopian dreams and small-scale horizontal projects. We need a project based on reason, evidence and testable designs, that cuts with the grain of history and is sustainable by the planet. And we need to get on with it.

Postcapitalism is published by Allen Lane on 30 July. Paul Mason will be asking whether capitalism has had its day at a sold-out Guardian Live event on 22 July. Let us know your thoughts beforehand at theguardian.com/membership.

Paul Mason is economics editor of Channel 4 News. Follow him @paulmasonnews.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/end-capitalism-has-begun

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