PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

Marginal simply means all the value is in the ‘extra bit’ you want to buy, not in the whole product. So the value of the last ecstasy tablet in the nightclub is higher than all the others.

Work is not just the measure of value but the motherlode from which profit is mined.

Now Marx drops a bombshell. In an economy where machines do most of the work, where human labour is really about supervising, mending and designing the machines, the nature of the knowledge locked inside the machines must, he writes, be ‘social’.

If the working class is able to resist wage cuts and attacks on the welfare system, the innovators are forced to search for new technologies and business models that can restore dynamism on the basis of higher wages – through innovation and higher productivity, not exploitation.

Luxemburg had ignored the fact that new markets are formed in a complex way, interactively, and that they can be created not only in colonies but within national economies, local sectors, people’s homes and indeed inside their brains.

It dispensed with the thesis of the ‘snowballing crisis’ as the trigger for social change;

This was the upswing of the third Kondratieff Wave. You can ‘read’ the results in the cityscapes of New York, Shanghai, Paris and Barcelona: the most enduring and beautiful public buildings – libraries, pubs, offices, even bath houses – are usually from the period between 1890 and 1914. The story they tell is clear: during the time we call the belle époque or the Progressive Era – a time of rapid growth, liberalization and cultural uplift – the world prospered not through the market but by the controlled suppression of it.

Marx could not take into account the major phenomena of the twentieth century – state capitalism, monopolies, complex financial markets and globalization.

In a company, sector or whole economy where increasing proportions of capital are invested in machinery, raw materials and other non-labour inputs, you are reducing the scope for labour to generate profit. Marx called this ‘the most fundamental law of capitalism’.

‘He’s Back!’ shouted a headline in the London Times. The German publishers of Marx’s Capital reported a 300 per cent increase in sales after a government minister declared his ideas ‘not so bad’. Meanwhile in Japan, a manga version of Capital went viral. In France Nicolas Sarkozy was photographed leafing through the French edition of Marx’s masterpiece.