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Essay

What Is Post-Capitalism?

September 7, 202610 min read

Post-capitalism is the claim that capitalism is being replaced by something else, and that the replacement has already started. It is a forecast about ownership, work and price. Ask five writers what it names and you get five answers. One means a knowledge economy, where the scarce input is what sits in a person’s head rather than what sits in a bank. Another means an information economy breaking down because goods that cost nothing to copy cannot carry a price. A third is a political programme built on automation and an unconditional income. A fourth comes out of ecological economics and wants growth to stop being the goal. They argue about different mechanisms, but every one of them is an argument about the machinery.

We do not use the word for what we are doing, and it gets attached to us often enough that it is worth saying why. We think capitalism stays, and keeps creating the wealth. Our concern sits one layer above the machinery, in the culture that decides which lives a society honors. Capitalism is the engine, and we want it running. Impactism is our name for the compass question.

So this essay is a definition, honestly given, of a term we decline. Read the strongest versions first. They deserve better than the caricature.

Drucker: the resource changes, the market does not

The word is older than its current fame. Peter Drucker published Post-Capitalist Society with HarperBusiness in 1993, and the catalogue description of that edition states his thesis in one line: “The primary resource in the post-capitalist society will be knowledge and the leading social groups will be ‘knowledge workers’” (Drucker 1993). The same record describes the shift he had in mind as one “from the Age of Capitalism and the Nation-State to a Knowledge Society and a Society of Organizations.”

Notice what that is and is not. Drucker was not forecasting the end of markets, prices or private firms. He was saying that the scarce input had moved. Land mattered most, then capital, then knowledge, which sits in a person’s head and walks out of the building at six. A great deal of later management thinking is downstream of that observation, and almost none of it required capitalism to end. This is the mild version of post-capitalism, and it is the one that has aged best, because it made a claim about inputs rather than about the system.

Mason: information corrodes the price

The loud version arrived in 2015. Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism argued that information technology is breaking capitalism from the inside, and he set out the argument in three moves in his own summary of the book:

“Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages” (Mason 2015).

“Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant.” Markets defend themselves by forming monopolies, he argued, and those monopolies are “a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely.”

“Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy. The biggest information product in the world — Wikipedia — is made by volunteers for free, abolishing the encyclopedia business.”

The second point is the interesting one, and it is a real observation rather than a slogan. A price is a signal about scarcity. A thing that can be copied a million times for nothing has no scarcity to signal. Anyone who has watched a software company spend more on lawyers than on engineers has seen the mechanism Mason is describing. The scarcity has to be manufactured, because it is not there in the good.

Srnicek and Williams: automate it and pay everyone

The same year, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams published Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work with Verso (Srnicek & Williams 2015). The book sets out a four-part programme: full automation of as much work as possible, a shorter working week with the remaining work spread more evenly, an unconditional income for everyone, and a direct attack on the work ethic itself. A review quoted on the publisher’s page reads it as a demand “for full automation and universal basic income from the world system.”

This is post-capitalism as a political project rather than a prediction. It is also the version that takes the last demand seriously, and that last demand is the one nearest to our own concern. If work stops being how a society organizes effort, something has to take over the job of saying what a person’s days are for. Srnicek and Williams name the problem and hand it to politics. We think it lands somewhere else, which is the argument of this whole site.

Degrowth: the growth imperative is the thing to leave

The fourth version comes from ecological economics, where post-capitalism and degrowth have grown into overlapping literatures. Benedikt Schmid’s review in Geography Compass describes a “lively transdisciplinary debate” exploring “alternative forms of organization beyond (economic) growth and (capital) accumulation, evolving around concepts such as degrowth and postcapitalism” (Schmid 2019).

Schmid also states, more plainly than most writing in this field, the bind the literature is in: “It is trapped between the double utopia of the current situation: While it is clearly an illusion that society can continue along the present trajectory, fundamental change beyond capitalism seems equally implausible.” That sentence is a reason to take the field seriously and a reason to handle it carefully. A scholar is saying, in a peer-reviewed venue, that both of his available futures look impossible.

What they share, and what none of them answers

Read the four together and the family resemblance is clear. Each is a claim about who owns what, who works, and how prices behave when one of those changes. Knowledge displaces capital in one account, copying breaks the price in another, machines take the work in a third, and in the fourth the growth target itself goes. All four are argued at the level of the machinery, with data on productivity, on marginal cost, on material throughput.

None of them tells you what a life is for once the machinery has changed. That is not a cheap shot. It is the same hole John Maynard Keynes left when he forecast a fifteen-hour week in 1930 and then admitted that the free time was the harder problem rather than the prize. We wrote about that gap at length in What Keynes Promised Us. A society that has solved production still has to answer what is worth doing, and no forecast about ownership answers it.

The scorecard, honestly

Mason’s essay is eleven years old. Some of it landed. Wikipedia is still there, still free, still made by volunteers, and the encyclopedia business is still gone. Open-source software runs the internet on the same non-monetary fuel. We have written about both at length, because together they are the closest thing anyone has to a working proof that people will do serious work for recognition rather than pay: The Economies We Already Run on Recognition.

The rest of the forecast has not landed. World GDP in current dollars was about $107.3 trillion in 2023, on the World Bank’s national accounts data (World Bank). The monetized market economy did not shrink while the information economy grew. It grew alongside it. The firms that own the copying machinery are among the largest that have ever existed. If capitalism is being corroded, the corrosion is very slow, and it is happening inside a structure that is bigger every year.

We say that plainly because a movement that needs capitalism to be collapsing has bet its case on a fact not in evidence. We have not made that bet.

Where we stand

Money is not going away, and neither are wealth differences. We assume both, permanently, and we build for a world where they hold.

What we want is narrower and, we think, more achievable. A society does not only run an economy. It also runs a culture: an informal, powerful, mostly unexamined agreement about which lives are admirable. That agreement currently points at money, and lately at attention, and it points there by default rather than by anyone’s decision. It can point somewhere else. Impactism is the argument that it should point at contribution, at the actual difference a life makes to other people.

That is a change in the compass, not in the engine. Nobody has to abolish anything. What it needs is enough people honoring a different thing, in public, in a form that cannot harden back into a price. Which is why the design rules are strict. Recognition is conferred by peers rather than issued by an authority. It stays plural across many communities instead of being summed into one global number, it decays instead of being banked, and it is never convertible into money. There is no central score, and nobody has to pass a test of purity.

What we are not claiming

No society has run this. There is no proof that a plural, decaying, non-convertible system of recognition can carry the weight we are asking it to carry, because nothing of the kind has been tried at scale. We are proposing a direction and marking it as a proposal.

Nor are we claiming the post-capitalist writers are wrong. Mason may turn out to be right about prices on a horizon longer than a decade. Srnicek and Williams may be right that automation forces the income question. Schmid’s double bind may resolve in a way nobody has guessed. Our disagreement is not with their forecasts. It is with the assumption underneath all four, which is that fixing the machinery is the whole task.

It is not. New owners of the machines would still leave the question of what a person is for. That question can be worked on now, with the ownership exactly where it stands, and without waiting for a system to fall.

Make impact, not money, the measure of a life.

Sources

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