The Postcapitalist Transition: Policy Implications for the Left

Abstract

The postcapitalism thesis asserts that open source and collaborative non-profit organisations represent a new, non-market sector in which the profit motive and monetary exchange no longer drive economic activity; in Marxist political economy terms, they are a new means for suppressing the law of value. Information technology has produced four systemic dysfunctions, limiting capitalism’s ability to function as a complex adaptive system: the zero marginal cost effect, the tendency to delink work from wages, positive network effects, and information asymmetries. In response, in addition to the traditional remedies of social democracy for a stagnant neoliberal economic model, left parties must adopt a programme of transition: aggressively breaking up technological monopolies; promoting universal basic income and basic service solutions; outlawing rent-seeking business models; and promoting data democracy.