Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Successful modern co-ops, such as Mondragon in Spain, work because they have the support of local savings banks and because they’re complex structures – able to redeploy workers from one sector to another, or soften short-term underemployment through non-market perks for those laid off. Mondragon is no postcapitalist paradise, but it is the exception that illustrates the rule: if you look at a list of the top 300 co-ops in the world, many of them are simply mutual banks that resisted corporate ownership.

The strategic aim – shining in big letters from a PowerPoint projector in every public sector boardroom – would be to cheapen the cost of basic necessities, so that the total socially necessary labour time can fall and more stuff gets produced for free.

If, as suggested above, governments insisted that the results of state-funded research should be essentially free at the point of use – moving everything produced with public funding into the public sphere – the balance of intellectual property in the world would quickly tilt from private to common use.

A basic income paid for out of taxes on the market economy gives people the chance to build positions in the non-market economy. It allows them to volunteer, set up co-ops, edit Wikipedia, learn how to use 3D design software, or just exist.

‘Work cannot become play,’ Marx wrote.11 But the atmosphere in the modern video game design workshop shows that play and work can alternate quite freely and produce results. Among guitars, sofas, pool tables covered in piles of discarded pizza boxes, there is of course still exploitation. But modular, target-driven work, with employees enjoying a high degree of autonomy, can be less alienating, more social, more enjoyable – and deliver better results.

We need to be unashamed utopians. The most effective entrepreneurs of early capitalism were exactly that, and so were all the pioneers of human liberation.

One specific problem is how to record the experience of failure into persistent data that allows us to retrace our steps, amend them and roll out the lessons across the whole economy. Networks are bad at memory; they are designed so that memory and activity sit in two different parts of the machine. Hierarchies were good at remembering – so working out how to retain and process lessons will be critical. The solution may be as simple as adding a recording and storing function to all activities, from the coffee shop to the state.

It is absurd that we are capable of witnessing a 40,000-year-old system of gender oppression begin to dissolve before our eyes and yet still seeing the abolition of a 200-year-old economic system as an unrealistic utopia.

They go to the elite colleges but the fancy names on the college hoodies – Harvard, Cambridge, MIT – mean nothing. You might as well just print Standard Neoliberal University. The Ivy League hoodie is simply a badge of entry to this tawdry world.

On some campuses you can already hear it: ‘China shows capitalism works better without democracy’ has become a standard talking point. The self-belief of the 1 per cent is in danger of ebbing away, to be replaced by a pure and undisguised oligarchy.
But there is good news.
The 99 per cent are coming to the rescue.
Postcapitalism will set you free.