Postcapitalism presents a juxtaposition of dynamics, presenting both an evolutionary and revolutionary system of transition to the next stage of economic development. Paul Mason sees postcapitalism in the interstices of information technology and production techniques within globalised supply lines and just-in-time systems. In the same way that capitalism is a “complex, adaptive system”[1] that integrates and externalises differential technologies and production/consumption techniques and cultures, postcapitalism will exploit these externalities and reroute dynamics, developing an alternate complex adaptive system focused around axioms of abundant information and collaborative production.

The concept of a free labour market, or even markets freed from the grips of wage labour in some significant manner, is conceptualised in much left-libertarian thinking as the development of truly freed markets. Writers such as Kevin Carson[1] and Eugene Holland[2] posit a postcapitalist concept of markets that have distinctively non-Polanyian features (i.e. removing labour, money and land from circuits of exchange), instead having sets of independent producers engaging in voluntaryistic commerce along the lines of selling their wares on the market for simple profit. “In a society where most people own the roofs over their heads and can meet a major part of their subsistence needs through home production, workers who own the tools of their trade can afford to ride out periods of slow business, and to be somewhat choosy in waiting to contract out to the projects most suited to their preference”[3]. Throughout much of Feudal Europe such a conception held sway for long periods as much of the peasantry had access to lands and tools that allowed them to self-provision in a very simple division of labour. However even during this period it was subject to strong regulatory forces through forms of serfdom, land tenure and labour provisioning that limited peasant movement. While certainly not fully akin to capitalist wage labour, these shared obligations were contractual (in a loose sense) and required the limitation of full freedom as posited in left-libertarian ideologies.

In this essay I look into the constructed nature of central bank independence (CBI) as a socio-economic concept. CBI is presented as a major element of modern economic orthodoxy, seen as the natural progression of economic history where states become less powerful and the market alongside independent quasi-regulatory institutions become more powerful. However, looking at the developing ideational and political understandings that emplaced this neoliberal framework, we can see a political construction to CBI. CBI is part of a discourse that sees the economy as a rational entity, always moving toward equilibrium with states and the voting public being interfering actors who distort the market, and interprets crises as originating from these interfering actors. Thus we also see changes in the patterns of politics and voting (particularly in the UK and US) which show a move toward a new form of electoral public, represented by the median voter and an individuated consumer of politics rather than a politicised, partisan public. These shared political and ideational understandings form a wider epistemic community which constructs a socio-economic ideology that legitimates neoliberal economic governance and a narrowed dialogic democracy, providing a political basis through which CBI could be developed and legitimated. Continue reading →

This essay looks at the problems surrounding the organisation of resistance amongst home-based workers. It investigates a variety of home-based worker movements and activist groups that are developing resistance through multiple different logics. The major problem for organisation currently emanates from the amount of control held over home-based workers by a combination of patriarchal household control and corporate centralisation which contracts and subcontracts out to households, integrating them as flexible production units in wider neo-Fordist forms of production and exchange. From this reality many discursive narratives are produced that legitimate the position of home-based workers in global supply chains. They are seen as micro-entrepreneurs or as a form of Westernised worker, who are in need of legal representation and regulatory apparatuses that provide stability while maintaining degrees of risk and flexibility. This masks the degrees of precariatisation these labour forces face. Thus resistance that overly focuses on the identity of home-based workers as ‘workers’ is problematic as such identities are still integrable to globalised production processes and corporate control. Instead, looking toward new ethical/value systems that develop a wider household political economy, like certain movements are already beginning to do, can develop new infrastructures and means of resistance against these centralised forms of control. Continue reading →

The effective privatisation of social reproduction and the creation of mechanisms of debt and marketisation have meant that the burden of crises have been placed on those responsible for the reproduction of society: households and the families and women that inhabit them. “The privatisation of the economic crisis”[1] has led to the legitimation of structural adjustment programs, purposeful ‘deregulation’ and the smashing of social commons in favour of marketised systems. The welfare state, engendered as an imperfect form of commons, provided the means toward shared social reproduction between the family and the community, with the costs of childcare and healthcare offset by communalised subsidies. However, neoliberal doctrine has ended such a general system, pushing instead debt-based safety nets that have created a form of privatised Keynesianism, whereby consumer-debt instruments have overtaken communal provision. Continue reading →

Libertarians seem to believe that the semantic debate over capitalism is settled by the use of one term, corporatism. The highly complex nature of capital accumulation, based around different structures that involve both competitive and planned dynamics, is made simple by differentiating between corporatism, a bastardised form of crony capitalism where monopoly dominates and the state’s regulatory apparatuses are at their most coercive, and a pure capitalism, “a world of perfect competition among enterprises who are all market price takers (none has the power or size to shape markets), where no advertising enables producers to shape the desires of consumers, where all workers bargain individually for their wages, and so on”[1].

With changes in work and employment patterns in 21st century there has been a precariatisation of work, where employment contracts are de-securitised, low-pay dominates and there is an increasing individuation of work-life, alongside a blurring of work and leisure. Developments like the sharing economy and the move toward a self-employment in-name-only represent a significant economic reorganisation of work. While this precariatisation has certain elements that have become universalisable amongst developed and developing nations, this essay will focus primarily on workforces in the post-industrial West. Continue reading →

The gold standard regime in its international character existed from the late 19th century through to the First World War. As a system, the gold standard is generally conceived as a monetary system represented, directly or indirectly, by gold. While having elaborate systems of coinage and paper money surrounding it, the main element was that gold backed these forms of monetary media. This itself was subject more to belief than concrete reality though, as actual backing by gold was largely irrelevant. “For paper to represent gold, it must be regarded as equivalent to a given quantity and purity of gold. In general, this equivalence is achieved by “convertibility,” the commitment to exchange the notes for gold on demand”[1]. It was the belief in convertibility, rather than the reality of its being done. Such a system can be seen as integrated, with many flows and pathways, but with gold at its centre as the fulcrum of this regime. It was “a truly international system based on gold”[2]. Continue reading →

This essay argues that markets are an ideational construct, constructed through a milieu of ideologies, power structures and authority relations. Rather than modern markets being spontaneously ordered mechanisms that have evolved naturally from the progressions of history, they are in instead constitutions of power and ideas, acting as a semiotic mechanism for underlying socio-economic realities. In this sense, markets are viewed through a critical and constructivist lens, as constituted realities which are not static as they are in neoclassical models of the economy. Further, the underlying reality, that of capitalism in its historic and modern contexts, does not actually correspond to market mechanisms. Rather capitalist social relations are reliant on and dominated by state interventions and the hierarchies of firms, with markets playing a peripheral role. Thus, markets (in their ideational construction) and capitalism together constitute a conflictual dialectic, with the former subordinated to the power relations of the latter. Continue reading →

The modern economy is stuck in a major rut. Productivity gains have not matched wage inflation, and productivity itself is relatively stagnant, particularly in the UK. Job provision is being increasingly concentrated in low-pay sectors, with temporary work and part-time contracts creating a modern precariat of working class individuals, students and other members of a general lumpenproletariat. Mechanisation and technology gains are captured by capitalist interests through IP rights and state-funding of corporate research, meaning that increasingly people are not just being made precarious, but are simply losing their jobs as well as any state-support. Such an existence is both undesirable and extremely distressing. Rather than markets freeing entrepreneurial spirits and creating a class of Konkinite contractors, free from the vagaries of state-capitalism, they have been wrought by the demands of that system and have created what I’ve described. Continue reading →