One of the most consistent challenges I hear to the postcapitalist thesis can be summed up in a review my book received:
“The entire book hinges on one big assumption: at some point technology will allow us to conjure virtually anything out of thin air at zero cost.“I am sorry to rain on your parade, but this is not going to happen.“We live in the world of finite (and dwindling) resources and no amount of digital pixie dust is going to change that.”
The reviewer pretty much illustrates the exact reason I wrote the book (Speculations on Postcapitalism: How Digitalization Is Disrupting Everything We Know about Modern Civilization). The postcapitalist thesis is anything but magical. Digitalization is upon us and the laws of capitalism require adoption — those who do not adopt will not survive the capitalist world of business. Yet, as that adoption diffuses through the economy and society, capitalism will no longer be able to sustain itself, and therefore, we move into a new, postcapitalist era. The reviewer’s comment, however, indicates to me as a writer that I have not been clear enough in my presentation. So, let’s try to fix that.
It is true that the thesis rests on this assumption — digitalization will diffuse into every nook and cranny of the economy and social life, and as it does so, it brings with it certain inherent qualities that undermine the capitalist system — especially free or low-cost production of abundant goods and services.
The first part of this primary assumption is obvious — everything is going digital. It is going digital because digital is cheap and abundant, and therefore any actor in the capitalist system must move in this direction. It is called competition and is a basic hallmark of capitalism. Businesses must drive down prices, and digitalizing is the best way to do that. There is no choice.
Digitalization will occur in nearly every good and service imaginable, but it will take different forms. In some cases, products will become purely digital — books, music, and video are good examples. In other cases, they will be manufactured digitally through the use of robots — Adidas’ workless shoe factory is an example. For services, delivery and similar services will increase in the percentage of services provided by robots rather than humans. Granted, the digital provision of services is in its infancy at this time, but this change is coming as well.
Digitalization will also occur at the consumer level. 3D printing, countertop food production, and similar technologies are being developed and will become as essential to home life as refrigerators, dishwashers, and stoves are today. These home production technologies all require material inputs today, but for the same reasons as things go digital, the need for these inputs will decrease over time. Businesses must drive down costs, and the best way to do that is to decrease inputs to a process. Engineers will seek to increase energy as an input, since that can be renewable, abundant, and virtually free to consumers, and they will seek to decrease the material feedstocks required today.
But one part of this will not go away — the required digital plan. Home production technologies will require a plan to “print” or produce. Those will be digital and likely produced through open-source voluntary collaboration. That is, they will be free.
So, if you have a machine that can print just about anything using free digital plans, free renewable energy, and feedstock materials with rapidly shrinking costs, the total cost of production does, indeed, approach zero.
The whole point of the book and my thesis is that, unlike other utopian visions that seek to undermine capitalism, this is not a hope. It is a natural, predictable outcome of the internal logic of capitalism and how capitalists and capitalist markets behave. No one has to change anything for this outcome to occur — it really cannot go any other way. The logic determines the outcome. It comes from within the system itself.
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Anthony Signorelli
Ideas, insights, and imagination to help you live better in a worsening world. Topics include Men, #MeToo, and Masculinity; Postcapitalism; Climate Change; Digitalization and Cryptocurrency; Green Energy; Retirement and financial planning… basically everything that addresses making life better in this challenging time of history.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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