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 I see it, VRM could play a vital role in the info-rich utopia he
describes.