Session Two: Paul Mason

Here we will discuss Paul Mason's book Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, and you are asked to read the chapter 'The Rational Reason to Panic'. 

You should be familiar with who Paul Mason is (he was economics editor of Channel 4) but given last week's reading, this can hardly be guaranteed, but perhaps you've looked his stuff up on YouTube.

The book is a good one. It sets out a dramatic need for change and the tangles we need to get out of. The challenges (and they are all linked) are:

1.     Debt

2.     Lack of Profit

3.     Aging population

4.     Disparity of wealth

5.     Climate Change

We could add microtechnologies or biotechnologies (as Slavoj Zizek does in Living in the End of Times) but Mason doesn’t. He has faith in these new technologies as a positive force that will escape by their very nature the forces of monopoly capitalism (Google/Apple etc) that are presently artificially constricting them. In the future, according to Mason, more stuff will be free and more work will be shared, and moreover everybody will get an automatic universal living wage so that they can afford to do this. 

If there is a glaring problem for architects in this analysis, it is that Mason doesn’t seem to consider the quality or materiality of things very much. It’s all very well to be able to exchange a recipe for monkfish free on the web, but it’s another thing getting hold of the fish, and to my mind, you can’t eat a recipe. Architects, when thinking about a house, know that it has to be built, their problem is where and for who and of what and by who and for how much (if everything isn’t free). It’s a material not a digital problem. Mason is constructing his thought around a process of ephemeralisation that so far has always worked against the sensibilities of the architect, or for that matter, chef.

Lesson for Dissertation No 2:

Since this text is quite dense, discussing processes that architectural students are rarely familiar with, I decided it would be a good idea to consider Mason's ideas only after we were sure we were familiar with the processes of capitalism itself before jumping to it's imminent demise. In doing this we highlighted some overall pressures and trajectories caused by the process of capitalism. Some of these, especially the overall squeeze on profit, were anticipated by Marx (although this is still debated). We can pin-point events in our everyday lives even now; the difficulties of running a second hand book shop in the age of eBay for instance. 

What Mason suggests is that it is technology itself that will render capitalism obsolete, that our own ingenuity will undermine it's capacity to function effectively. Popular opinion might render this as the 'death of the book', but my own reading of it would be eBay's squeeze on the marketplace. 

If we were to ask how many students of architecture have pondered such issues profit and long term sustainability of the architectural practice in a dissertation, the initial answer would be a big fat zero. However, there is precisely such interest in critique of traditional methods across the global south (the fate of nomadic tribes for instance) and of the architectural education system itself, that both subjects might fall in to this category. Also, the fate of the physical library, the high street and the marketplace, are all highly pertinent topics that can be elucidated by historical enquiry.