Clear Bright Future: a Radical Defence of the Human Being by Paul Mason (Penguin £9.99.)
In Postcapitalism (reviewed in the September 2015 Socialist Standard) Paul Mason argued for what he called revolutionary reformism, a gradual transition to a supposedly new kind of social system. There would be a basic income for everyone, while essential goods and services would be made cheaper, with more and more of these becoming free. Yet there would still be money, markets, profits and banks, so it was hard to see how what he was proposing was really ‘post-capitalist’.
In his latest book Mason advocates a similar system, but he goes by a rather roundabout route to get to this proposal and then makes a detour at the end that promises very little. He looks at why people support Trump, a man who thinks facts are irrelevant. Racism and misogyny, he says, are the key factors driving white voters to Trump. We then get a discussion of many topics – including neoliberalism, the alt-right, post-humanism, trans-humanism, postmodernism – and various writers, such as Nietzsche, Arendt and Foucault.
Mason supports radical humanism, which means achieving freedom by transforming technology and society. Artificial intelligence should be placed under human control and made subject to an appropriate ethical code, and information technology (as argued in Postcapitalism) can be part of what makes economic abundance viable, as it creates goods that can be copied at minuscule cost. IT "makes Utopian Socialism possible: the appearance of islands of cooperative production for sharing, the massive reduction of hours worked and the expansion of human freedom and self-knowledge".
Two chapters are devoted to the views of Karl Marx, with both positive and negative comments. Marx suggested that humans can set themselves free by changing their social circumstances, which would involve abolishing private property. But he did not give an adequate account of women’s oppression or of reproductive labour as a specific form of exploitation. There is something in this critique, but no merit at all in the claim that Marx saw the revolution as "the blind actions of a single class", as it would in reality be the achievement of class-conscious workers (it is not clear, but it may be that Mason sees the working class as manual workers only). His vision is of the networked individual taking part in collective action, but this differs only in that it would now be far easier than just half a century ago for a revolutionary working class to communicate with each other and co-ordinate their activities.
Later comes a totally pointless chapter which argues that what passes for Marxism in China is nothing like the real thing. The book ends with a chapter on how to ‘live the anti-fascist life’ that is pretty vague and makes little connection to what has been said previously. More on the supposed ‘Utopian Socialism’ and how it could be a global system rather than just ‘islands’ would have been a more appropriate conclusion.
Paul Bennett
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