Paul Mason

If you discount China – which distorted the global figures by building hundreds of coal-fired power plants in the 2000s – the amount of generating capacity coming online from renewables outstripped that from fossil fuels in 2009.

The World Bank economist Branko Milanovic, surveying the huge and growing inequality in developing countries, calls this a ‘non-Marxian world’ in which location, not class, is responsible for two-thirds of all inequality.’

‘Ours is essentially a tragic age so we refuse to view it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins … We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.’23 D. H. Lawrence was describing the English aristocracy after 1918, its ideology shattered, retreating into a world of stately homes and archaic manners. But the description could apply equally well to the modern elite after the catastrophe of 2008: a financial aristocracy determined to go on living as if the threats outlined above are not real.

When a far-left party won the election in Greece, all the EU’s institutions attacked it as white blood cells attack a virus.

Faced with this situation, we need ‘revolutionary reformism’. Even to say the words out loud is to realize how deeply they challenge both sides of political reality. Say it to a social democrat in a suit and watch them wince; say it in an Occupy camp and watch the activists wince – for exactly opposite reasons.

So we need to inject into the environment and social justice movements things that have for twenty-five years seemed the sole property of the right: willpower, confidence and design.

Simon proposed that the arriving Martians would see three kinds of things in our economy: organizations, which would look like big green blobs; markets, which appear like thin red lines between the green blobs; and a set of blue lines within the organizations showing their internal hierarchy. No matter where they looked, said Simon, the Martians would see a system whose dominant colour was green. The message they sent home would say: this is a society primarily made up of organizations, not markets.1
It was a highly political point to make, in the year the triumph of the market was declared. Simon’s lifelong concern was to understand how organizations work. His paper has been used to demonstrate that, for all the rhetoric about free markets, the capitalist system is primarily made up of organizations that plan and allocate goods internally, in ways not directly driven by market forces.

In this chapter I will try to spell out what a large-scale postcapitalist project might involve. 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 labour time as close as possible to zero.

The solution is to test all proposals at small scale and model their macro-economic impact virtually many times over before we attempt them at a large scale.

A fourth principle should be: attack the problem from all angles. With the rise of networks, the capacity for meaningful action is no longer confined to states, corporations and political parties; individuals and temporary swarms of individuals can be just as powerful agents of change.
At present, the community of thinkers and activists around the peer-to-peer movement are heavily focused on experimental, small-scale projects – credit unions or co-ops, for example. When they think about the state, it is at the level of laws to protect and extend the peer-to-peer sector. With the exception of thinkers such as Michel Bauwens4 and McKenzie Wark5, few have bothered to ask what a whole new system of governance and regulation might look like in this new mode of production.
In response, we should broaden our thinking so that solutions can be found through a mixture of small-scale experiment, proven models that can be scaled up and top-down action by states.
So if the solution in finance is to create a diverse, socialized banking system, then setting up a credit union attacks the problem from one direction, outlawing certain forms of speculation attacks it from another, while changing our own financial behaviour attacks it from still another angle.